manage to make sex seem dirty,” he said. He folded the newspaper and
dropped it to the floor.
She lowered her skirt and said: “Sometimes I just get the hots.” He
smiled knowingly, and let his eyes roam her body. She was about fifty,
and very slender, with small, pointed breasts. Her aging complexion was
saved by a deep suntan which she nourished all winter under an
ultraviolet lamp. Her hair was black, straight, and well cut; and the
gray hairs which appeared from time to time were swiftly obliterated in
an expensive Knightsbridge salon.
She wore a cream-colored outfit: very elegant, very expensive, and very
English. He ran his hand up the inside of her thigh, under the perfectly
tailored skirt. With intimate insolence his fingers probed between her
buttocks. He wondered whether any one would believe that the demure wife
of the Hon. Derek Hamilton went around with no panties on just so that
Felix Laski could feel her arse any time he wanted to.
She wriggled pleasurably, then moved slightly away and sat down beside
him on the couch where, during the last few months, she had fulfilled
some of his weirdest sexual fantasies.
He had intended Mrs. Hamilton to be a minor character in his grand
scenario, but she had turned out to be a very enjoyable bonus.
He had met her at a garden party. The hosts were friends of the
Hamiltons’, not of his; but he got an invitation by pretending a
financial fancy for the host’s company, a light-engineering group.
It was a hot day in July. The women wore summer dresses and the men,
linen jackets; Laski had a white suit. With his tall, distinguished
figure and faintly foreign looks, he cut quite a dash, and he knew it.
There was croquet for the older guests, tennis for the young people, and
a pool for the children.
The hosts provided endless champagne and strawberries with cream. Laski
had done his homework on the host–even his pretenses were thorough–and
he knew they could hardly afford it. Yet he had been invited
reluctantly, and only because he had more or less asked Why should a
couple who were short of money give a pointless party for people they
did not need? English society baffled him. Oh, he knew its rules, and
understood their logic; but he would never know why people played the
game.
The psychology of middle-aged women was something he understood much
more profoundly.
He took Ellen Hamilton’s hand with just a hint of a bow, and saw a
twinkle in her eye. That, and the fact that her husband was gross while
she remained beautiful, was enough to tell him that she would respond to
flirtation. A woman like her was sure to spend a great deal of time
wondering whether she could still excite a man’s lust. She might also be
wondering whether she would ever know sexual pleasure again.
Laski proceeded to play the European charmer like an outrageous old ham.
He fetched chairs for her, summoned waiters to top up her glass, and
touched her discreetly but frequently: her hand, her arm, her shoulders,
her hip. There was no point in subtlety, he felt: if she wanted to be
seduced, might as well give the message of his availability as clearly
as possible; and if she did not want to be seduced, nothing he could do
would change her mind.
When she had finished her strawberries–he ate none: to refuse
mouth-watering food was a mark of class–he began to guide her away from
the house. They moved from group to group, lingering where the
conversation interested them, passing on quickly from social gossip.
She introduced him to several people, and he was able to introduce her
to two stockbrokers he knew slightly.
They watched the children splashing around, and Laski said in her ear:
“Did you bring your bikini?”
She giggled. They sat in the shade of a mature oak and looked at the
tennis players, who were boringly professional. They walked along a
gravel path which wound through a small landscaped wood; and when they
were out of sight, he took her face in his hands and kissed her. She