by Janet Tanner
It had happened, she supposed, because she had had two glasses of wine and very little to eat. But it had been so strong, so unexpected, so exciting! I’d almost forgotten it was possible to feel like that, Maggie thought – and thanked her lucky stars that she had managed to conceal it.
But the warmth of the memory was seductive; though she knew she was foolish to do so, she hugged it to her as she drifted towards sleep, and there was a tiny smile somewhere at the back of her mind.
She woke next morning with a blinding migraine.
They descended on her from time to time, headaches that felt as if a hot steel screw was being driven into her temple, and spreading out into a pounding skullcap of pain, flashing lights before the eyes and a nausea rising from the pit of her stomach. Sometimes they lasted for days, sometimes, if she was lucky, the worst of it was over in a matter of hours.
Maggie groaned. Oh God, she hated days like this – and especially when she had so much planned. It would have to be put off, all of it; she wouldn’t be safe to drive – she could barely think – and even if she did manage to keep going she would probably be sick. Really, the only possible course of action was to take some of her tablets, bury her head beneath the covers and hope it would go away or at least improve enough for her to be able to keep her dinner-party date with Dinah tonight.
With a supreme effort Maggie swung her legs to the floor. As she stood up, the steel screw twisted in her temple and the pounding at the base of her skull worsened. She groped her way to the bathroom and found her pills – thank heavens she had remembered to pack them. Then she remembered that her mother was expecting her to call. Well, it couldn’t be helped. She couldn’t, simply couldn’t, face talking to Dulcie now.
Maggie let her tablets dissolve in a tumbler of water, swallowed them with distaste, and crawled back to bed.
Chapter Eight
‘Darling,’ said the statuesque redhead, curling her body languorously around the man’s. ‘ There is nothing in the whole world like making love in the afternoon. Don’t you agree?’
Steve Lomax ran his hand over her breast, full and thrusting even in a reclining position, and down over her stomach, still slightly sticky from the closeness and the exertions of a few minutes ago.
‘I’ve always liked first thing in the morning best myself.’
She laughed softly. ‘I’m afraid that mornings are absolutely out as far as I am concerned. Mornings I have to wake up in bed beside my husband. If I wasn’t there he would be most upset.’
‘I’ll bet he would, lucky bastard!’ Steve said, but he knew the score. The fact that they woke up in bed together did not mean they would go on to make love together – and even if it did, he had no intention of allowing himself to be jealous. Mornings might be his preferred time but he was perfectly happy to settle for a hotel room after a delicious lunch and a couple of glasses of Courvoisier. Good food, good drink and a good woman – it was an unbeatable combination. After the hardship of years on a North Sea oil rig it seemed like heaven. Besides, waking up too often beside the same woman would smack of permanence and that was not something he wanted, certainly not now, possibly not ever. Being free and single was much more his style. Especially when there were women like Jayne Peters-Browne for the taking.
He turned his head slightly on the pillow and glanced along at her bright-red hair tousled from the rough and tumble yet still looking glamorous with her make-up more or less intact. Some women he had slept with looked terrible afterwards, flushed and crumpled, with mascara smudges beneath their eyes and all their lipstick gone – most of it on to him. Occasionally he had been moved to wonder what it was that had got him into bed with them in the first place. But not Jayne – not yet anyway. He always looked at her and wanted to make love to her again. She might have been Dinah’s find as a designer; she was certainly his find as a lover! Desire moved his body again and he reached for her, pulling her on top of him and groaning with pleasure as she straddled him, taking him deep inside her with her knees drawn up on either side of his narrow hips.
‘Little witch!’ he murmured as she raised and lowered her body in an ever-changing rhythm.
She did not answer, simply parted those perfect red lips in a voracious smile and bent her head over his, kissing and biting at his mouth with a passion that was even more arousing than the movement of her body.
Steve closed his eyes and let the tide of delicious sensation that was part intense pleasure, part almost pain, take him over.
This was living! He wouldn’t go back to the cold, backbreaking, celibate hell of the oil rig if it was the last place on earth.
Thank God – and of course, thanks to Dinah – he had absolutely no need to.
Jayne Peters-Browne looked down at the handsome face, twisted in the throes of passion, and felt alive with a sense of power and triumph. She wasn’t aroused herself this time; for her, multiple orgasm had always been something to read about in Cosmopolitan, never a reality, but she didn’t care. She had already had her fun for the day – Steve was a marvellous lover (though not quite as good as he imagined – what man was?) – but this … this was even better. Now, instead of being at the mercy of her own needs and desires, she was in complete control, and the knowledge of it was pure, sweet exhilaration.
For as long as she could remember, Jayne had craved power, but for years it had eluded her.
She had been born plain Jane Sweeney, the only daughter of a colliery undermanager in the Nottingham coalfields, and her father’s position had placed her in a state of limbo. To the other children who lived near the Coal Board-owned house which they occupied as one of the perks of her father’s job she was ‘the boss’s daughter’, removed from them because her father was in a position to hire, fire, or generally make life miserable for their fathers, and by the fact that her house was much bigger and more impressive than theirs. But when her parents, in an effort to live up to what they thought of as their status in the community, sent her to ‘private school’ she did not fit in there either. Money was tight – her father was not particularly well paid, and the fees for Jane and her two brothers’ schooling crippled him – so there was never anything over for the extras the other, more affluent girls, took for granted. Jane could not ride – and for most of them the Pony Club was the centre of their social universe. Her accent was all wrong. Her family had retained many of the habits of the working class from which they had risen – her father had been an ordinary collier and a deputy before studying for, and gaining, his undermanager’s ticket. Worst of all, she was fat.
Unfair though it may seem, being overweight is one of the worst crimes a child can commit in the eyes of his peers. Fat children are different enough to be the butt of jokes and name-calling as bad if not worse than anything brought before the race relations or sex discrimination boards. Fat children are not often good at games. Fat children look ridiculous in the latest fashion craze – always supposing they can find it in their size.
Jane was not only plump, she was also tall for her age. Because her brothers were always hungry the family were used to ‘filling’ meals – dumplings and pies with suet crusts, steamed puddings dripping with jam or treacle, apple pies that were more pastry than fruit. At eleven Jane was five feet five inches tall and could match her years with her weight in stones; by the time she was thirteen and her breasts had begun to sprout she was three inches taller and had put on another stone.
To make matters worse, her mother, in an effort to save money, made most of her clothes. Given Jane’s size this could have been an advantage, but since Mrs Sweeney had very little idea of what was fashionable for a young teenager in the early seventies it was a disaster. Jane looked a frump and felt a freak. She walked with a stoop to minimise her height and tried without success to hide her large hands and feet (which she frequently fell over).
Jane had a dream – that one day from the fat ugly duckling she now was a swan would emerge. She would not only be beautiful, she would be successful. And n
o one would ever laugh at her or ostracise her again.
Around the time of her fifteenth birthday a new art teacher came to Jane’s school. She was called Miss Makim and she was quite different to any of the other members of staff and indeed to anyone Jane had ever known. Miss Makim had been a ‘hippy’ in the heady days of the Swinging Sixties and she had hardly changed since then. Her long hair was tied back in a bunch at the nape of her neck and she wore little or no make-up. She dressed in cheesecloth blouses, long wrap-around Indian cotton skirts and wooden-soled health sandals that clopped loudly on the woodblock school corridors. As an artist she believed in freedom of expression, as a teacher she was totally lacking in discipline, as a woman she personified all the easy-going warmth and enthusiasm of the ‘make love not war’ generation.
Miss Makim saw at once the enormous talent Jane possessed which others had failed to notice – because it was difficult to associate anything beautiful with Jane – and which was being allowed to wilt away for lack of nurturing. She encouraged her to explore and expand and as the talent began to blossom under her tutelage she found herself wanting to help the shy, awkward girl to blossom in other areas too.
‘You must believe in yourself,’ she told Jane. ‘ You have a great deal to give. Everyone does.’
‘No one wants you when you’re fat,’ Jane said.
‘That’s nonsense. It’s what’s inside that counts.’
‘Nobody ever seems to want to bother to find out what’s inside me.’
‘Perhaps because you give the impression that you yourself don’t think it would be worth their effort. Other people tend to take us at our own valuation, you know. And you are very defensive about yourself. But if it’s being fat that makes you self-conscious, well, you don’t have to be fat.’
‘I can’t help it,’ Jane said. ‘Mum says I’ve got a large frame.’
‘But there’s no need for it to be quite so well covered,’ Miss Makim said bluntly.
They were in the kitchen of her cottage; she had invited Jane over to practice her sketching, which she needed to speed up in order to make the best possible showing in the still life or life drawing in the A-level examination, which Miss Makim was determined she should take when the time came. Now, with a morning’s tuition behind them, it was time for lunch.
‘What do you eat?’ Miss Makim asked.
Jane told her and Miss Makim listened in disbelief.
‘All that? Good heavens! Why don’t you have muesli or fruit for breakfast instead of fried bread and bacon? And so much starch and sugar is very bad for you.’
‘What do you eat?’ Jane asked, looking enviously at Miss Makim’s willowy figure.
‘Well, I’m a vegetarian, of course, so I have lots of pulses and fresh fruit and vegetables.’
‘Pulses?’ Jane repeated, mystified.
‘Beans and things.’
‘Baked beans?’
‘Dried ones, mostly. There’s a lot of sugar in the tinned varieties,’ Miss Makim said severely. ‘ Look, I’ve got a hominy pie in the fridge. We’ll have that for lunch with a nice crisp salad and you can tell me what you think of it.’
Jane quite liked it but she wasn’t sure she would want to live on it all the time – or if her mother would allow her to!
‘Change your eating habits and you will lose weight,’ Miss Makim told her. ‘Provided of course that you also absolutely give up snacking on biscuits and chocolate bars.’
Jane flushed. She knew she was guilty of comfort eating.
‘If you can get down to a size fourteen you will be able to wear jeans as the others do and you’ll feel much better for it,’ Miss Makim told her. ‘And if you could squeeze off the extra to reach a size twelve or even a ten, you would be stunning. With your height you’d be of model proportions.’
Her positive attitude fired Jane with enthusiasm. She went home determined to lose weight. But it was an uphill battle. Bad enough to feel hungry all the time, bad enough to have to be strong when she would have died for a chocolate bar or bag of crisps, ten thousand times worse when it was not only herself she had to fight but her mother as well.
‘For goodness’ sake eat up and forget about this slimming nonsense,’ Mary Sweeney would say, slamming a plate of chips and battered fish, running with grease, on the table in front of her. ‘You’ll feel faint if you go out on an empty stomach.’
‘But I want to lose weight!’
‘Whatever for? You’re fine as you are. Some of these girls look as if they haven’t had a proper meal in their life.’
Jane would sigh at the hopelessness of it, pile her food on to her brothers’ plates when her mother’s back was turned, and go to her room to nibble the Limmits biscuits she bad bought with her pocket money. Whether she would have had the necessary willpower to stick to her diet for long enough to make any difference if she had not had any extra incentive is doubtful. But she did have an incentive. She had fallen in love.
His name was Graham Toohey. His father was the new manager of one of the other collieries, he was blond and handsome, and he had ‘palled up’ with Jane’s brother, Martin, who, at sixteen, was just the same age. The boys were always together, swimming, going to the cinema and (though their parents did not know it) to the pub. Jane was sure they met girls there and her heart ached with envy.
So far Jane’s record with boys had not been impressive. At discos she was usually left hiding in a corner because nobody ever asked her to dance and she was much too self-conscious to carry on jigging all alone when the boys came and broke up the group of girls. Nobody had asked her out. Nobody had kissed her, though at Christmas she sometimes lurked under the mistletoe in the hope that someone might try. She had never received a Valentine’s card, and she thought that if one with her name on it did drop on the mat it would only be someone playing a joke. She listened enviously when the other girls boasted of their conquests, but she never heard the juiciest bits because they were only related in whispers to the members of the in-crowd and Jane was not one of them. But now she was filled with fierce determination. Somehow she was going to get Graham Toohey.
To begin with she kept out of his way, determined not to spoil her chances by moving before she was ready. As the weight came off, determined not by a pair of scales, which her mother refused to have in the house, but by the way her old clothes were beginning to hang on her, Jane plucked up the courage to shop for a pair of jeans as Miss Makim had suggested. She chose a unisex shop in town and had to try them on in a cubicle with a swinging stable door – rather embarrassing since at her height far too much of her was visible over the top of the door. But she persevered, buying not only the jeans but also a cheesecloth shirt similar to the ones Miss Makim wore and which would fall loose outside the jeans to hide the remaining bulges. She then visited Boots the Chemists and purchased a dark kohl eyeliner, some pale lipstick and a pair of enormous gypsy earrings.
At home she put it all on and paraded in front of the mirror. Not bad – but still not quite right. The Kohl pencil had gone on wrong and made her look as if she hadn’t slept for a week instead of achieving the sultry, smoky effect she had hoped for, and her hair looked old-fashioned.
I ought to be a redhead, Jane thought. If I were a redhead Graham would be sure to notice me.
She walked down to the corner chemist and bought a rinse labelled ‘Rich Chestnut’. Then she spent the afternoon in the bathroom, waiting for the colour to take on her normally light-mouse hair and trying to get the stains from under her nails.
When she washed out the rinse the effect was startling but it suited her, emphasising the paleness of her skin and complementing her blue-green eyes. She changed her usual side parting for a centre one, and this too suited her, making her face look oval and interesting instead of moon-like. Full of excitement at her own daring she put on the new jeans and shirt and went downstairs.
Her mother was furious. She told Jane she looked like a tart, which was untrue – she looked more like a Botticelli p
ainting, ripe and luscious – and demanded that Jane return to her normal hair colour immediately. Jane refused, lying that the colour was permanent – it was not, though it would last through six washes, according to the leaflet that had been in the box. But her father smiled in a way that almost signified approval and said: ‘You look awright to me, lass.’
Jane smiled back at him and was rewarded with a wink.
Graham and Martin were out somewhere on their bicycles. Her heart pounding with the momentousness of it, Jane went into the garden and positioned herself on the lawn to wait for them. She took a magazine with her – Cosmopolitan, which she had bought in town and was keeping well out of her mother’s way in case she should see the glaringly suggestive copy emblazoned on the cover: ‘How Well Endowed Is Your Man?’ ‘Does Semen Make You Fat?’ and ‘ How to Find Your G-Spot’. Jane doubted her mother would know what a G-spot was – she herself certainly had not until she had read the article – but the other titles were less ambiguous and a little shocking. Jane could not wait to read them and she quite fancied the boys seeing her with the magazine – a good ‘prop’ to go with her new image.
When she heard the click of the gate she wanted to run and hide. Instead, gathering all her courage, she arranged herself in model pose, chin in hand. The pose also managed to stretch the thin cheesecloth enticingly around her still-ample breasts, but Jane was unaware of this.
Graham leaned on the handlebars of his bicycle and whistled.
‘Hello, Gorgeous!’
After that he always called her ‘Gorgeous’ and the thrill of it never palled.
‘What do you mean, Gorgeous? That’s my sister!’ Martin said, adding rudely: ‘What the hell have you done to your hair?’
Jane ignored the jibe. She got up and walked towards them. The tightness of her jeans gave her an undulating gait.
