How Was It For You?

by Carmen Reid

  ‘Oh yes, well. I don’t think that makes me a threat to the mighty Murray berry just yet, does it?’ Dave, glancing down, embarrassed by this.

  ‘Well, I’ll be very interested to see how it goes,’ Lachlan replied.‘If you can work out how to grow a respectable crop of nice-looking fruit without using any fertilizer, any weedkiller, any mould inhibitor or any insecticide, you just let me know. Because I’d be more than interested.’ But it was too teasing to be a serious offer.

  ‘Lachy,’ Rosie warned, and turned to smile at Dave.‘He’s been arguing with Harry for years about this stuff, but I’ve told him not to start with you.’

  ‘I won’t be expecting anything like the yield you get.’ Dave stood his ground.

  ‘No, if you get any berries at all, they’ll be small and mouldy.’

  ‘Not like your juicy big synthetically enhanced ones, eh, Lachlan?’ Harry waded into the debate now.‘Let’s face it, you’re never out of those fields. Spraying them day and night with one thing and another. Gas-flashing them in their punnets.’

  ‘Steady on now.’ Lachlan leaned back in his chair, Pamela straining to keep her eyes from his lap.‘Everything I use is tried and tested.’

  ‘Yeah, and how do they test it? Feed it to children for a decade and see if they develop anything nasty?’ Dave asked, deciding that this meant so much to him, he wasn’t even going to put up with a bit of dinner party banter and especially not from a man who was attracting so much attention from his wife. She’d turned in her chair, seemed hardly able to take her eyes off Lachlan.

  ‘My children eat my fruit all summer long and so do Harry’s. If we had any concerns, we wouldn’t let them,’ Lachlan was bristling back.

  ‘OK, boys, that’s enough.’ Ingrid rushed in to restore peace.‘Harry, fill everyone’s glass up again and then we’ll have a game.’

  Games? Pamela wondered. Was this all going to be a bit more 1970s than she’d imagined? . . . Car keys in a basket? What was to come?

  Turned out it was Charades to start with and Harry announced the teams: ‘Pamela and Lachy, Ingrid with Dave, and me and Rosie first . . . we’ll show you.’

  And they certainly did, with something so complicated and obscure, Pamela didn’t get it even when the answer was explained. But then, breath coming in anxious little gasps, she was about to go out of the room alone with him and have to talk about films, books, TV programmes and how to enact them. She hated Charades, loathed it, could feel heart palpitations setting in. This was far worse than anything she’d experienced as a teenager; even being asked to dance by the guy you really, really fancied had nothing on this.

  ‘Pamela and Lachlan,’ Harry announced and there was no choice. She got up and followed him uncertainly into the hallway, where he turned to face her with the kind of smile which made her think, well hello, maybe this wasn’t going to be so hard after all.

  ‘I hate this game,’ she said.

  ‘Yup.’ The smile hadn’t left his face: slow, sunny, lazy, knowing.‘I’d rather open a few more beers and shoot the breeze. But that’s Harry.’

  Shoot the breeze? She’d fallen for a countryside cowboy . . . an outback ranch-hand.

  ‘What’s your favourite TV programme?’ he was asking her.

  ‘Er . . . um . . . Sex and the City,’ she blurted out.

  ‘Well . . .’ he began as she cringed with embarrassment, yeah, they were really going to be able to act that out.‘Might be fun to do, but I don’t know if my wife would like it.’

  She could feel a blush so red and burning spreading across her face that she thought he was going to comment on it.

  ‘The wine has gone straight to my head,’ she said, but where else does that amount ever go?

  ‘OK.’ He was straightening up, leaning off the wall.‘Let’s get this over with, then we can sit back down, you with another wine, me with a beer and see if we can avoid playing anything else until Truth or Dare comes up.’

  ‘Truth or Dare?!’

  ‘That’s usually interesting . . .’ and he was looking straight at her, the playful smile hadn’t left his lips.

  ‘High Noon,’ Pamela said firmly, taking the outback cowboy in hand.‘You do “high”, I’ll do “noon” . . . point to my watch and so on . . . How hard can it be? Just think of the beer.’

  ‘OK.’

  Lachlan had barely reached up to demonstrate ‘high’ before Harry got it. Thank God, Pamela thought, sinking gratefully back into her chair. This had never happened to her at a dinner party before. Game playing! The horror, the horror. After dinner in London, people either drank more, took drugs or went home. What was this? At least she was drunk. Dave was trying to act out Dancing with Wolves, stone-cold sober with an extremely giggly Rosie. Dancing with Wolves? Had the man no shame?

  ‘You settling in?’ Lachlan asked quietly, turning from the Charade pantomime in front of them.

  ‘A bit. Not sure . . . not really used to it,’ she confided.‘It’ll be better when I’m working here, I hope.’

  ‘Took me a while too,’ he said.‘In fact, I pretty much hate the place, hate the weather, but it’s home.’

  She smiled, felt she had an ally.

  He’d been right: it was Truth or Dare next, and Pamela found herself, even more fuzzy with drink now, unravelling a little paper ball and reading out the words: ‘If you were alone in a foreign country would you consider having an affair? And in which country?’ to more blushing and hoots of laughter.

  ‘No,’ blush, blush, she said valiantly.

  ‘But in which country?’ Harry shouted.

  ‘Spain,’ her thick tongue managed.

  More laughter.‘She’s thought about it,’ he replied to this.‘Definitely.’

  Pamela looked up and met Dave’s sober eye. She was so swirly with wine now, she couldn’t remember if she had a reason to blush or not. It was so long ago, so far away . . . such a dreamlike haze.

  Not like the burning hot distraction sitting right next to her.

  The next round, hardly surprisingly, she chose ‘dare’ and was commanded by the terrifying scrap of paper to ‘cut a lock of hair from the person on your right’.

  ‘Oh my God,’ was Lachlan’s response to this.‘Not my hair, no way.’

  Rosie, flush-faced with laughter, urged her on: ‘As much as you can . . . cut as much as you can.’

  Ingrid brought out scissors and Pamela found herself undoing the band at the back of Lachlan’s neck, letting the warm curls tumble out and she was allowed, had a legitimate reason for putting her hand into them, for running a finger along the nape of his neck, watching his shoulders squeeze slightly together as she did so, to pull out the smallest strand and crop it close.

  When she held the hair up for everyone to see, there was applause, a groan from Lachlan, and she laid it out of sight on the table, determined to tuck it into her bag to take away with her later.

  Suddenly the background music stopped, the lights went out. The house was in total darkness.

  ‘Oh bugger,’ was Harry’s response.‘That’s the second time this week, they need to get to the bottom of this. Privatised electricity bollocks.’

  Candles and a torch were located quickly and the party continued in low light. More wine, more wine . . . how else to explain what happened next? Harry, torch in hand, suggested Hide and Seek in the dark. The run of the house, downstairs only; the seekers had a torch. Lachlan caught hold of her hand, steered her to the sitting room and pulled her down behind the sofa with him.

  As the beam of Harry and Rosie’s torch lit up the wall, and the four hiders all tried to stifle giggles and be perfectly quiet, Pamela felt the electrifying effect of Lachlan’s hand moving to her waist and then when she didn’t push it away, under her jumper to her bare stomach and up into her bra.

  The most delirious, delicious teenageness to this, groping in the dark, behind a sofa, when you really weren’t supposed to . . . She thought she might have a heart attack, wondered if he would be able to feel anyt
hing other than her hammering heartbeat.

  And then the torchlight hovered above them, his hand was pulled back and it was over.

  ‘Found you!’ Harry shouted out, games master gone insane, stirring them on to wilder and wilder antics, until Dave looked at his watch, pointed out the time. In just a few hours, he would have cows to feed, veg to pick. He scraped his wife up from the sofa cushions and dragged her home.

  Well, that’s how it must have been. Nothing seemed to be very clear in her mind after those rough, warm fingertips on her breasts. Feeling in the dark for her nipples.

  Nothing was very clear at all.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  SUNDAY IN THE Murray household followed a fairly well-worn routine. In the morning, Lachlan, if he wasn’t busy on the farm, took the children out – to the fields, to the beach, up to the woodlands, even out riding their bikes and trikes madly up and down the big shed if it was pouring with rain. While they were out, Rosie caught up with the housework – washing, ironing, hoovering, changing beds, mopping floors – but she raced through it, possessed, because if she finished early, she could lie flat, horizontal, feet up on the sofa (alone! Entirely undisturbed!) reading the Sunday papers and eating a satisfying dose of rubbish from the children’s sweet box before they all returned and she had to get up, make lunch, get back on the go again.

  Very odd things were in the sweet box today, the remainder of party bags prised out of their hands to stop them gorging to the point of actually puking: nuclear purple parma violets, those disgusting pink and yellow chewy lollies, an infestation of tiny white mice, liquorice chews which had been in there, untouched, for months, very poor quality chocolate money, it might actually be forged chocolate money . . . Still, she scooped up a big handful and put the haul into her sweat top pocket where she could work happily through it for the next . . . at least thirty-five minutes or so.

  In the afternoon, they would go to visit her father in the nursing home he’d moved into just over a year ago. He rarely recognized them now and although she was used to it, didn’t expect anything else, it still made her feel like crying, but they all kept up chirpy chat and she liked to think that the children’s visits were enjoyed by the other residents even if her father didn’t seem to take much in.

  Before he’d got too ill, he’d lived in the farmhouse with them and she hadn’t realized what a restricting presence he’d been in her life, until he’d moved out. Then, all of a sudden there had been space, freedom, to let the children run, shriek, laugh, jump on the sofa, skateboard down the hall. She and Lachlan had made love on the kitchen floor not because it was a great place – but because they could.

  The house needed all sorts of redecoration and attention – carpets were worn and threadbare, the walls faded, paintwork ragged, kitchen cupboards coming off their hinges – but it wasn’t theirs, might never be, so Lachlan stayed her hand, insisted the money remain in the bank . . . for now. But it was a bore keeping a manky old house clean, letting her children grow up in this dingy, uninspired brownness. Rosie was going to rebel, was planning her rebellion. Maybe the money from the cottage rentals could be diverted . . .

  Sunday evening was taken up with supper, bathtime, a lengthy bedtime with telly, hot milk, too many stories and lights finally out at 8 p.m. Then Lachlan and Rosie would crash together on the sofa drinking second, even reckless third large glasses of wine and chat, maybe watch a film. Afterwards came bedtime, and sometimes, even sex.

  Rosie was conscious throughout the video watching tonight that sex was definitely on the agenda. There had been no sex for weeks, Lachlan had commented on it several times, and although he was engrossed in the film, he was massaging her feet in a way that suggested it was on his mind . . . he hadn’t forgotten about her.

  It wasn’t that she didn’t love him – she did – it wasn’t that she didn’t fancy him – she really did – it was just that these feelings were locked up in some part of her that she had almost forgotten how to access. She had no daily use for them. She had a daily use for tidying skills, organizational skills, negotiating skills, racing against the clock skills, caring skills, nurturing skills – but the whole realm of indulging, spoiling, seducing, being seduced, she’d forgotten. She didn’t think she had any need of it any more. She didn’t seem to be missing it. That was the strange thing. She didn’t wake up in the morning and notice any loss. And when they had sex, it was as if she was starting about three miles behind Lachlan and never got the chance to catch up. By the end of it, she would feel warm, dreamy, glowing, just beginning to enjoy herself, while her husband would fall fast asleep in an exhausted, exhilarated puddle beside her.

  She did it for him, really . . . and she was too tired to do it for him very often.

  ‘I’m going to have a shower,’ he announced as the end credits began to roll.‘What about you? Are you ready for bed?’ Oh, the nuances in these questions and answers.

  She gave a slightly forced yawn.‘Yup,’ she said through it.‘I’ll just finish the washing up.’

  ‘Don’t do that,’ he coaxed.‘I’ll do it later.’

  ‘No you won’t’ – a little irritated now – ‘I don’t want to be faced with it tomorrow morning.’

  He just nodded and headed out of the room to his shower. She went to the kitchen to bang and scrub pots, mood steadily disintegrating.

  She waited until she could hear Lachlan coming out of the bathroom, then after a lengthy check of her children, patting covers down, pushing hair out of faces, wriggling feet back into bed, she went in to wash and brush her teeth.

  When she got to the bedroom, the lights were low, he had been at the lavender oil with a heavy hand and was waiting in bed, naked, clean and warm, with an expectant smile.

  ‘Are you wooing me?’ she teased, pulling off her thick navy sweater and unbuckling her jeans to let them fall in a heap at her feet.

  She turned away from him, thinking that the sensible white pants and soft-cup, machine washable and slightly too big bra might not be exactly what he wanted to see right now. She registered her own jumble of feelings: she was tired, she didn’t really want this rigmarole, which threatened to end in an uncomfortable row, and yet she wanted him to love her, to find her attractive, sexy even.

  ‘I’m tired,’ she told him again, pulling off her underwear and buttoning herself into a pair of rather shapeless floral pyjamas.

  ‘Come here,’ was his reply to this.‘I’ll massage your shoulders.’

  It was a loaded offer. Lachlan’s massages were expected to lead to something a lot more intimate, but he was an expert massager. The thought of his heavy hands kneading out the kinks all across her neck, shoulders and back was too delicious to resist.

  She went to the bed and, sliding off her top again, lay down on her front and let him begin.

  He’d been a dedicated sportsman before he moved to England and settled down with her and he took massages very seriously.

  First of all, oil was warmed in his hands, then he began up at the very top of her neck, long strokes, long, warm strokes, down the neck, out over her shoulders, gliding, rolling away the tension. Then tiny firm circles over and over again, bringing her blood to the surface, making her tingle with heat. A thumb on either side of her spine, he wiggled the knots and lumps out until she could feel the gaps between her discs expand. With full, flat palms he moved over the rest of her back, oiling, smoothing out.

  Rosie could feel her head sink into the softness of the pillow, deep lungfuls of lavender slowing her breathing down. This was gorgeous, why didn’t they do this every night? Somehow, in just a little minute, she would rouse her leaden limbs and give him a massage back. In just a little minute . . . just lower, just let him finish the small of her back . . . ahhh.

  Lachlan felt her unwinding beneath his hands, saw her breathing ease into long breaths sinking down to the bottom of her chest and sighing slowly out again. She was dangerously close to sleep, poor old, worn-out Rosie.

  He pulled down her
pyjama bottoms and put his face against the place where her back stopped and buttocks began. He blew against it, then planted something between a slow kiss and a lick, blew on it again.

  He could hear her make a murmur . . . he wasn’t sure if it was protest or encouragement. He placed the slow kisses all over her buttocks, moved down the backs of her legs.

  ‘Can I?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m tired,’ came from the depths of the pillow.

  ‘Please . . . Pleeeease . . .’ he wheedled.‘I’ll be quick!’

  ‘Oh great!’ Still from the pillow.

  He went back to the kissing, rolled her over onto her back and kissed her stomach, kissed her breasts, grappled playfully with her to push her hand away, so he could kiss her down there . . . and when she let him, knew the game was won . . . the seduction of his wife was still possible . . . and so very nice . . . so very satisfying.

  But he was fighting the inner voice which whispered that it was just a little boring . . . the same . . . the inner voice urging him on to another tiny taste of recklessness.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  BLACK SATIN CORD threaded all the way to the top of silver-edged eyelets and pulled tight, very tight into a bow. Pamela looked at the effect in the mirror: waist cinched in with the boning, white hips below, bare, propped-up breasts, spilling out on top, framed with a tight black shoulder strap. It came with suspender straps and called for sheer black stockings, high patent heels and a black leather cap . . . maybe even a whip. It was too much. Way too much.

  She had come into this shop, a very upmarket but – no disguising it – kinky underwear shop, looking for she knew not what. Something to ease the burn. Or maybe express the burn.

  The work on Lachlan and Rosie’s cottages had started mid-May, and now Pamela had been there almost every day for over a month, busy, busy with the sander, the steamer, with a rotating team of workmen, but all the time thinking about him, needing excuses to call him, to bring him over to discuss exaggerated ‘hiccups’, ‘problems’ and decisions.