bar where he was ordering, still turned in her direction so he could observe her at his leisure. She seemed to be all red hair and long legs. He caught sight of her and obviously had to make an effort to keep his mouth shut.
“Hello. Aren’t you Dan Conroy?” she said, plucking the name out of thin air while fixing him with her brilliant green-blue eyes.
“Whoa,” muttered one of his friends from the table nearby, and was shushed.
He smiled slowly, because he knew this was a line and because he could hardly believe his luck. “Billy,” he said.
“Oh, sorry,” she said. “Now I come to look at you, of course, you’re older. Dan is in his final year of school.”
He apparently decided at that point to brazen it out. “Like me, then,” he said, looking a challenge at her. She didn’t miss a beat. They had a short conversation about the horrors of A levels and the ridiculous amount of study required as a prerequisite to pursue his chosen career which, he felt, owed nothing to mathematics, physics or chemistry. His drinks acquired, he asked her to join them.
“Only for a minute,” she said. “My friends are waiting for their drinks.” She was introduced to his goggling friends and exchanged a few pleasantries. Billy was by far the most sophisticated of the three young men.
“I love the rings,” she said, inspecting the collection of silver on his right hand as an excuse to take his hand in hers, running her fingers along his palm as she did so, and leaning close enough for him to be aware of her perfume. Although he obviously hadn’t shaved that day, he had applied after-shave anyway. Linda was quite familiar with male toiletries, and noted that it was a brand favoured by older young men. At an unconscious level, those primitive structures of Linda’s brain concerned with reproduction interpreted this as a sign of maturity which over-rode any remaining reservations she may have felt.
His friends goggled some more. He had to breathe deeply and think of England to avoid an unbecoming state of arousal. Linda, smiling benignly but watching his expression closely, was in no doubt as to the effect she was having on him. She released his hand, into which she had surreptitiously pressed her card, and then she left him in this state and returned to her friends.
She was an unscrupulous minx, apparently.
“Well,” said Caroline, writhing as usual with envy of Linda, and never one to miss the opportunity to state the bleeding obvious. “That looked like you were coming on to a little boy for a minute, but I’m sure looks can be deceiving.”
“Yeah,” added Skye, lasciviously, “although he is a very, very sexy little boy, isn’t he, Linda?”
Caroline snorted a little, and was not to be discouraged. “You can’t be serious, Linda. For god’s sake. I mean how old is the dear little thing anyway?”
“How old does he look?” asked Linda.
“About twenty or twenty-one,” ventured Skye.
“Then that’s how old he is,” said Linda, and refused to continue talking about it. Later that night she thought about it and felt a little slutty, trampy or harlotty. Or to be exact, she felt like a paedophile. Then her husband came home and made inept and somewhat repulsive love to her, and she felt less guilty about her plans for the young man.
* * *
Billy left it a day or two, perhaps to avoid looking over-eager. “Hi, Linda,” he said. His manner was probably more worldly than he felt. “It’s Billy.”
“Billy!” she said with delight. ‘I was hoping you’d phone. Can we meet? Can you come around to my place on Wednesday? That’s my day off. I have something I’d like to discuss with you.”
He wasn’t absolutely certain that she meant what he hoped she meant, but he turned up as planned. After the minimum of social chit-chat, and to remove any doubt about what she meant, she reached up and kissed him thoroughly. No point in beating around the bush. He responded enthusiastically. Now that was something he was able to do very well, and she felt encouraged. The first time they made love took place as soon as they could get to the bedroom and tear off their clothes. She admitted he was beautifully groomed – no one-day growth in evidence this time – and smelled lovely: soap, cologne and toothpaste, but his bedroom skills left much to be desired.
Linda was happy to combine sex and tutorials, so threw herself wholeheartedly into the task of turning Billy into a lover of formidable finesse. And, of course, the wonderful thing about young men is that although they may come too soon at times, they are ready to begin again really quickly. Furthermore, when they have had their fill of coming, they tend to go, leaving one in peace.
Refining these skills on Wednesday afternoons, and any other time they could manage, kept them busy at their debauchery for six months, until the traumatic day of the dive through the window, when Billy escaped her husband’s ire, but Linda did not. Ben walked into the bedroom just as she finished stuffing Billy’s things under the mattress, and leapt back into bed, feigning a life-threatening illness – a heart attack or seizure probably wasn’t far from the truth.
He had the infernal cheek to pull back the bedclothes and actually, actually sniff. What a classless thing to do! Where are all the gentlemen these days, she asked herself, where are the men who, finding their wife in bed with another man, say “I’m frightfully sorry, carry on”2 and leave the room, shutting the door behind them, only bringing up the matter, apologetically, at some convenient time down the track over a gin and tonic. Even blasting off the erring spouse’s head with a shotgun would be classier than all this searching and sniffing.
2 Although, as Dave Allen used to say, “and if you can, that’s sophistication!”
Not Ben. He continued ratting around in the bed linen until he found not one but two used condoms and hurled them at her. Then he roughed her up a bit, pushing at her as he bawled her out. “Bloody whore!” he bellowed. “I knew you were up to something. Do you know how embarrassing this is, to be warned by my Senior Specialist that my wife is being unfaithful.” Now how could Thompson possibly have known? she thought, somewhere between being scared and getting angry.
“Get out, you fucking pox-infested tart!” he screamed. “Pack your things and move out. You are not spending another night under this roof!”
Linda shot out of the bed, propelled by her own fury. Naked and magnificent – Richard would have approved of the spectacle – she roughed him up in her turn, poking him hard with her finger in the middle of his chest and causing him to step back involuntarily. “You get out!” she shouted, thoroughly incensed, with eyes flashing, boobies jiggling in agitation and hair swinging dramatically. “Go on, get the fuck out! This is not just your house and I am not moving out. And if embarrassed is all you feel, then you don’t deserve me. And by the way, I may be a whore but you are a boring, boring man with as much sexual finesse as an epileptic hamster, and if I’m pox-infested, then so are you, hah!”
And so, in polite hostility, they shared the house, spending a few jolly sessions at their respective lawyers to sort out the legal issues. After inserting huge sums of money on a regular basis into their lawyers – which funded said lawyers’ holidays, tessellated tile bathroom renovations and a Harley – Linda and Ben eventually sold up and each found a place of their own. Linda quit her job and took a holiday; divorce followed with a relieved look on its face and, eventually, things settled.
Linda
