Fifty-Minute Hour

by Wendy Perriam

  ‘Couldn’t you have asked your secretary to send you up a snack?’

  ‘I could, if she’d been there. She’s off with what she calls a “virus” – which probably means a hangover.’

  ‘Or oysters?’ Mary crouched by James’s stool, one naked arm reaching back behind her to the tray.

  ‘Oysters?’

  ‘Yes. Open your mouth.’

  James opened it, half swallowed, choked the oyster back again, plugged the void with whisky. ‘I’m sorry, Mary, but if there’s one thing I can’t face, and especially not tonight, it’s oysters. The last time I had oysters was at that damn-fool pricey restaurant the Crawshaws took us to, and I went down with salmonella. You can’t have forgotten, surely? I was ill for two whole weeks.’

  ‘No, I …’ Mary’s voice was faltering. Of course she hadn’t forgotten. She’d bought the tinned ones specially, as far less of a health risk, and also easier to serve. James was an impatient man, hated anything in shells, or with fiddly bones or skins, or even things like artichokes or grapefruit, which required a lot of effort for rather mean returns. At least four different sex-books had recommended oysters. They were not only aphrodisiac, but apparently symbolic of the womb, represented the creative force of female sexuality. Yet James had spat his out, flung it to the dog. Even Horatio had spurned it, just sniffed and walked away. But then Horatio was replete with Beef and Rabbit Chum, whereas James was clearly ravenous. Yet all the books had warned against a heavy meal, or even a conventional one. ‘Feed your lover titbits from your hand, or even mouth. Slice and peel a passion fruit, pass it from your lips his.’ The passion fruit was ready in the fridge, dipped in wine, and chilling, to provide a double thrill. It was James himself who clearly wasn’t ready – or only for his normal solid supper.

  ‘Look, if you don’t feel up to cooking, Mary, I’ll scramble us some eggs, but I’ll have to have some light. It’s like the Black Hole of Calcutta.’ James plunged towards the light-switch, gazed around the kitchen, now lit by ruthless strip lights. A tiger-print travel rug was draped across the lilo they’d bought in Tenerife, and laid between the cooker and the fridge. The saucepan rack had disappeared – in its place a vase of scarlet ostrich feather’s and an ornate incense-burner. ‘What have you done in here, Mary? How can I cook eggs when I can’t even find a saucepan? And where’s the toaster gone?’ He swung round the other way, stared in disbelief. ‘What in God’s name is our bedding doing on the kitchen table? Has that leak got worse upstairs?’ He blew out the last candles, snuffed the incense wick, returned the kettle to its socket on the work-top. ‘Mary, we’re going out – now I’ll phone and book a table while you go and put your clothes on.’

  ‘The steak for you, Mary?’

  ‘No, I think I’ll have the scallops.’

  ‘But you’re having prawns to start with.’

  ‘Yes, I know.’ Mary shook her napkin out, sipped her sparkling wine. She couldn’t seem to move away from shellfish. They symbolised fertility, the life-force, and scallops in particular were a sign of sexual passion, the two half-shells bonded close like lovers. She doubted they’d get round to love tonight. James still seemed tense and harassed, still fixated on the crises at his firm. When he’d come upstairs to change his shirt, she’d tried to hold him close, say she understood, whisper to him teasingly that if only he’d allow her, she could distract him from his problems, help him to relax. He’d seemed actually embarrassed, had backed away, suspicious, even hostile. Men were so perverse. All her married life he’d complained that she was tepid. Yet now she was on heat, his own flame had blown right out, as if he somehow needed her reluctance to fuel him, turn him on. It seemed totally irrational him spending all that money on her sessions with John-Paul, so she’d respond to him with passion, yet once he got that passion, rushing to defuse it. He’d left her in the bedroom as if she were dangerous high-explosive, sought refuge in his study. She had changed, alone and mortified, into boring woolly tights, a high-necked ‘wifely’ dress, and they’d driven to Pierre’s in silence, both of them resentful that they were going out at all.

  She loved the restaurant normally – its soft pink lights, pink napkins, the grave and formal waiters who made dinner like a sacrament, the mingled heady smells of garlic, sizzling butter and cigars. But tonight she felt restless and on edge, slighted, almost cheated, found it hard to concentrate on James’s monologue.

  ‘Well, I agreed to use their new integrated software package for all our commission accounts, though I must admit I had my doubts, right from the beginning. And I was absolutely right, Mary. They’ve buggered up the printers, and all our invoices are coming out as statements.’

  ‘Gosh! How awful, James.’ Mary tried to keep her mind on integrated software, but it had somehow moved to Bryan. She had still not quite recovered from Saturday’s debacle. It had been the feast of the Immaculate Conception and she’d gone to Mass that morning, begged Our Lady’s help for him, tried explaining to the Blessed Virgin that she was giving up her church work for the more vital task of providing tea and sympathy for AIDS victims. In the middle of her prayers, she had found herself thinking of what Bryan did in bed – yes, with other men – all the shameful three-D details while she was actually kneeling in St Anthony’s about to listen to a sermon on virginity and sinlessness.

  Then, later on, when he turned up at her house all sluiced and starched and scrubbed, yet still looking rather vulgar in a cheapo chainstore suit and see-through nylon shirt which James would have given to a jumble sale, she’d imagined him stark naked – heaving on the floor with another man, his ‘partner’ – a shadowy figure, with the body of Frank Bruno and the face of her own precious Jon. She’d been so appalled, her normal conversation had totally dried up and she’d sat there mouthing platitudes, while poor Bryan himself seemed equally self-conscious, the pair of them tongue-tied with embarrassment. She had tried to pray, right there in the sitting-room, plead for instant help, but how could she beg succour from the Immaculate Heart of Mary when her own mind was like a sewer?

  James was attacking his bread roll, tearing at the fragments as if they were his enemies at work. ‘And then we had more trouble with Morton Cardigan. They can’t agree the balances, and they’re blaming me, of course.’

  ‘James, your soup is getting cold, dear.’

  James stared down at his bowl, jabbed it with his spoon, removed the parsley garnish to the safety of his side-plate.

  Mary smiled encouragement. ‘It looks lovely, doesn’t it?’

  ‘What’s that white stuff on the top?’

  ‘Just a swirl of cream.’

  ‘I’m not meant to look at cream – not with my cholesterol levels.’

  ‘Just once won’t hurt you, darling. It is our anniversary.’ Mary bit into a prawn, imagined it a penis, a tiny tiny penis – the sort you chose to learn things on, advanced skills like fellatio which still frightened her to death. That’s what homosexuals did – she’d read it in the books – did with little boys. The minute Bryan walked in he’d been gawping at her sons, lustful eyes tracking to their photographs, lingering on their young and naked flesh. Pity and revulsion wrestled in her breast. His AIDS must be quite frighteningly advanced, what with the dizzy spells and the fact he couldn’t eat at first, then couldn’t seem to stop, and him begging her to save his life and letting out that frightful scream when the pain got too intense, and finally rushing off into the night because she’d mentioned John-Paul’s name. John or Paul must be his lover’s name, the one who had infected him, repaid his love with death. Or maybe even both of them. If Bryan were the promiscuous type, he might have a John as well as Paul. Both were common names (except when they were hyphened, which made them rare and special).

  ‘I tried to get a temp from personnel. At three p.m. some bloody useless girl shows up who doesn’t know our system from a wheelbarrow. And she smoked, made all the …’

  Mary glanced up at the handsome man sitting on her right. He was smoking, too, drawing on hi
s cigarette very deeply and intensely, the way John-Paul often did. The tables in the restaurant were crammed so close together she could smell his aftershave, see the dark haze of almost-stubble shadowing his chin. He was the foreign-looking type with a tough and virile beard, unlike James, whose facial hair appeared to be dwindling with his scalp hair, as if both had lost their youthful thrust and vigour.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ the man said softly, smiling at his girlfriend – a fat and rather vulgar blonde, whose daring yard of cleavage displayed a rhinestone pendant which spelt ‘Love’. She was doing all the talking, he answering with yeses, but such assured and ardent yeses, they seemed far more than monosyllables, seemed charged with passion, import. Mary dragged her eyes away, returned her mind to James.

  ‘Some wine for you now, darling?’

  ‘No, thanks. I’ll stick with whisky.’

  ‘What, with soup?’

  ‘I don’t like the soup. It’s fishy.’

  ‘It’s watercress and leek, James. It said so on the menu, underneath the French.’

  ‘Well, either their translator’s duff, or their chef doesn’t know a dogfish from a leek.’

  ‘Dogfish?’ Mary had a sudden startling vision of Horatio with fins. Strange the dog had fawned on Bryan like that. Could dogs be gay as well? ‘Would you like some prawns instead, dear? There’s more than I can eat here.’

  ‘Yes, please.’

  Mary jumped. The man next door had spoken, but to his companion, not to her. She glanced at him again, drawn by his resemblance to John-Paul – not just the darkly foreign looks and the sensual way he smoked, but the same dramatic bone structure, and long-lashed deep-set eyes. He was younger than John-Paul, in fact, with a thicker broader body, but that was mostly hidden by the table. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, yes.’ The yeses were staccato now, emphatic, almost solemn, the voice itself powerful but low-keyed. He suddenly turned his head towards her, distracted by her scrutiny, caught her eye and held it. She feared he was annoyed. She’d been rudely staring, eavesdropping, deserved to be reproved. Instead, he smiled – a lazy and indulgent smile, which started with his mouth and spread up to his eyes, eyes which narrowed slightly, challenging and teasing, daring her to meet his gaze, not falter, look away.

  He looked away himself, at last, turned back to his pudding with a self-deprecating shrug. She took refuge in her wine. She had drunk too much already, but she found this man disturbing – the way he courted his crème brûlée, piercing through the brittle crust of sugar on the top, then toying, almost playing with the cream. Would John-Paul eat like that, with such teasing sensuous zest? She knew he liked his food (despite the rebuff of the mince pies), had once watched him eat a tiny square of fudge, astonished by the fervour with which he bit into the cube, devouring it with relish and solemnity, as if it were the Host. She presumed he’d only turned to sweets to cut down on his smoking, provide him with some substitute (as James had done himself, chomping on mint humbugs while still craving nicotine). But all the same, it had seemed extraordinarily intimate, him eating right in front of her, as if he had allowed her to participate in some private, almost dangerous ritual, withheld from other patients. She had found herself licking her own lips, tasting sweetness on her tongue, sucking out stray flecks of fudge from the secret slavering crannies of her mouth.

  She shifted both her body and the angle of her chair, so that the man was less distractingly in view. ‘So what did Crawshaw finally decide, then?’ she asked James dutifully, tried to listen to his answer, and not the seductive ‘yes’ throbbing from her right. She took another gulp of wine, felt strangely hot and tingling, as if all the chafing-dishes in the restaurant had been lit beneath her body, their gases turned up high. The room was trembling slightly, its colours smudged and running, the crimson velvet curtains blushing into tablecloths, the still-lifes on the crowded walls not still at all, but bulging from their frames.

  ‘Yes,’ the man laughed. ‘You bet!’ She just had to move her chair back, watch him touch the woman’s cheek, his slim artistic: fingers haloed with gold nicotine. She drained her glass, could feel those burning fingers on her own cheek, hear the fervent yeses in her ear. They weren’t wasted on that prattling freckled fatty, but addressed to her – in bed – wearing nothing but her perfume and diamonds in both nipples, and whispered by John-Paul himself, also wildly naked. ‘Yes,’ he said, impassionedly, as he traced the diamonds’ carats with his tongue. He hadn’t spurned her oysters and champagne, had been enchanted by the candles, enraptured by her playsuit, had gladly snuggled down with her on the transformed kitchen table, lips meeting vibrant lips …

  ‘I finally lost patience, Mary, marched up to R. B. and said, “Roland, either you change that cretin of a programmer, or I’ll go up there myself and throttle him bare-handed.” And d’you know what Roland said …?’

  ‘Yes,’ she breathed, John-Paul breathed. She stuffed a prawn whole into her mouth, practising her tongue-bath, allowing her own tongue to lick and lap the tepid trembling mollusc, turn it into John-Paul’s tongue, make it move and writhe. She licked her lips, scooped a swirl of sauce from his mouth into hers. ‘Yes,’ he kept on saying, approvingly, insistently, as she sucked the three last naked prawns slowly in and down.

  ‘Mary, I thought you said you had more than you could eat there? If you don’t stop soon, you’ll be scraping the pattern off the plate.’

  She blushed, glanced up at James, surprised to see blue eyes and greying hair, though neither was in focus, quite. ‘Sorry, darling. I am feeling rather hungry.’

  ‘Well, if you’d only put your fork down, they might bring us our main course. We’ve been here a whole hour now and I’m still waiting for my steak. I need something safe and solid they can’t ruin.’

  She leant back in her chair while the waiters fussed with plates, brought steak and scallops, vegetables and salads, three mustards and the pepper mill, a different wine, fresh glasses. At last, they were alone again – John-Paul and her alone-relaxing on the silvered grass just beyond the greenhouse. They were so close now they were two scallops in a shell, face to face, chest to chest, thigh to…

  ‘Would you believe it, Mary, this steak tastes fishy, too. And they’ve hardly even cooked it. I said rare, not raw and cold. The place is really going downhill. Give any restaurant a Michelin star and it just lies down and dies.’

  She was lying down herself, her body open, naked, the whole sky wild with Michelin stars, the moon a golden scallop-shell, smiling in the darkness – Aphrodite’s emblem, or so all the books had said. ‘Yes,’ John-Paul agreed, in his thrilling potent voice. ‘Aphrodite, goddess of love.’ ‘Yes,’ he said again, as she forked in her first mouthful, eager tongue exploring the pink folds. The taste was strange, exciting, the texture soft yet firm. She crammed in several more, almost retching as her throat was stretched.

  ‘Mary, really! What’s got into you? You’re eating like a pig.’

  She hardly heard her husband, filled her mouth still more, let the juices dribble down her throat, allowed her lips to squeeze and suck, then used her teeth, gently, very gently – remembered what she’d read.

  ‘Yes!’ A near-crescendo as the white sauce hit her taste buds, an unusual and exotic taste, slightly salty, even brackish. Mustn’t spit it out – all the books agreed on that. She swallowed, wiped her mouth, eyes half-closed to savour it, relish the last drop.

  ‘More!’ she clamoured, glancing up, reaching for the vegetables, the tiny heads of sweetcorn, the mangetout, cooked al dente.

  ‘More?’ James laid his own fork down, swilled out his mouth with whisky. ‘You can’t still be hungry, surely?’

  ‘Yes,’ she thrilled. ‘Oh, yes.’

  Chapter Twenty Five

  I was born again yesterday, at lunch-time. The birth was very easy. I just slipped from John-Paul’s uterus into the womb of his consulting-room, felt very little difference – the same dark warmth, the same safe and rounded walls, the same rhythmic tick-tick of his heartbeat. I think he na
med me Lazarus. ‘For this my son was dead, and is alive.’

  I was dead three days, in fact; three dark days when he was lying with Beata. Then he summoned me to life again, gave me new appointments – not two-ten, but lunch-time. Lunch-time’s very special, the only hour he’s free from seven in the morning to ten o’clock at night; the only hour he doesn’t see his patients. It’s his time for food and resting, his one and only chance to phone family or friends. Yet he’s given all that up, made me his own family, given me his breathing-space, his Sabbath. He said it was just temporary, a way out of a crisis until he could arrange some different sessions, but maybe he’ll continue it, perhaps even come to need me. He also said he had to go away, talked about some Christmas break, a month he’d be in Rome. He must have meant next year. He wouldn’t leave his new-born son, not so soon, so cruelly.

  The lunch-times were a present, like the love-feast. Yes, he killed the fatted calf for me, did it very quietly without knives or blood or fuss. He didn’t overwhelm me with recriminations, questions, didn’t even mention my docked hair – just understood I had to be a son. I felt loved and very honoured. No one else was fêted – the ring eased on their finger, the silk robe round their body, the seat of honour reclining on the couch. The elder son was griping that it simply wasn’t just; he’d never shirked his duty or wasted money on loose living, yet no one killed the fatted calf for him. His voice was deep and throaty like Beata’s, but John-Paul took no notice, had ears for me alone.

  He’s listening now, with that careful rapt attention which makes my every word seem precious – even all my silent words, or just my sighs and shiftings. I prefer to lie in silence, need all my concentration to focus on his name. Everyone and everything is thrumming it, repeating it – pipes beneath the pavements, dark and secret sewers, twanging power-lines, live electric cables. Police cars blare it as they siren past the tower; distant jet-planes throb it as they arc above the clouds, writing it in vapour-trails across the churning sky. Whole oceans thrash and pound it as they slam in on the strand. Lions roar it across Africa, and it catches fire immediately, scorches half the continent. It’s engraved into the hard face of the moon.