Barefoot in the Dark

by Lynne Barrett-Lee

  Jack thought that half the population had been describing the other half of the population pretty much like that since time began. Slugs and snails. That was it. Slugs and snails and puppy dogs’ tails. Danny was right. It was depressing.

  ‘I’m sure she doesn’t mean it. I mean, I’m sure she did at the time, but it’s just words. That’s all. Said in the heat of the moment. And, well, she’s not long had a baby, has she? Women go off sex when they have babies. It’s their hormones. They can’t help it.’ So Lydia had told him, at any rate. Some pretty potent hormones, in her case. They’d lasted the best part of a year.

  He wished he knew Julie better. They’d never socialised much as couples. Since it became clear there were to be no further little Valentines, Lydia didn’t like being around women with more babies than she had. All he really knew of Julie was that she seemed a quiet, fairly unremarkable woman, who got on, rather stoically, with the business of bringing up her family. But you never did know with most people.

  ‘So,’ he said. ‘What are you going to do?’

  Danny opened the can and foam surged over the top. ‘Kip here. If that’s all right. Till she’s calmed down a bit.’

  Jack thought of something. ‘Hang on. What about next Saturday?’ Their youngest, Fergus, was about to be baptised. And Jack was to be godfather. Which scared him a little, moved though he was to have been asked.

  ‘What about next Saturday?’

  ‘Isn’t it the christening next Saturday?’

  Danny scowled. ‘Next Saturday week. In theory.’ He slurped noisily at the overspill and stared at the carpet.

  ‘It will be OK, mate,’ Jack told him. ‘You’ll see. These things blow over. You’ll sort it.’

  The words were empty platitudes. He didn’t know any such thing to be true. But he hoped it, hoped it more sincerely than Danny knew. He gave him a reassuring squeeze on his forearm.

  ‘You’ll sort it,’ he said again. ‘And in the meantime you can have Ollie’s bed. She knows where you are, and –’

  ‘No she doesn’t.’

  ‘Haven’t you rung her?’

  ‘No, I fucking haven’t.’

  ‘Shouldn’t you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Don’t you think –’

  ‘No. She can ring me on my mobile if she wants me.’ He upended the can to his lips and walked back into the living room, shoulders drooped. ‘Where were you, anyway? I’ve been trying to get you all evening.’

  Jack followed him. ‘I was out having dinner.’

  ‘Really? With who?’

  Jack hesitated a second. ‘Allegra.’

  Danny turned around, looking suddenly animated. ‘What – Staunton?’ Jack nodded. Danny rolled his eyes. ‘Tsk! You lucky bugger. Now there’s someone I wouldn’t kick out of bed. There’s someone –’ he waggled the can towards Jack, ‘who definitely wouldn’t call a man a disgusting pig. Why can’t all women be like that? Any joy?’

  Jack, all the while that Danny had been talking, had been readying himself for this question. He could, of course, not have mentioned Allegra at all. He hadn’t at work. He could easily have made something up. But what was the point? Half the BBC had been at the bloody restaurant. It would be all over the office by Monday.

  ‘Joy?’ he asked, to give himself a moment.

  Danny gave him what his mother would have described as an old-fashioned look. Though it might have been a leer. ‘Matey-boy, you don’t take Allegra Staunton out to dinner without having at least a small hope of there being a shag on the menu somewhere.’

  ‘I guess not.’ He felt very tired, all of a sudden. It was all too much stress. Too much stress and manoeuvring.

  Danny raised his eyebrows. ‘So?’

  ‘So, no,’ he replied. ‘No joy.’

  It had mainly – no, wholly – been the fault of Allegra’s vibrator. The anxiety had already been present, to be sure, but up until she’d bought that wretched thing out, he’d thought, or at least hoped, he could ride it. But not then. After that it had become almost blackly comic. She’d do whatever he fancied with it, she’d told him. Whatever he liked. And then she’d started twerbling on about prostates or something, and how nice he might find it if she… He’d had to go then. Had to dress and just go.

  Funny he should be sitting here talking to Danny about sex and pornography. He’d always thought he’d rather enjoy watching a woman doing things to herself. But did he? As for her other idea… God. There was so much sexual stuff that he’d taken for granted while it was all safely hypothetical – that he’d be up for a threesome, that if Liz Hurley walked into the studio and offered him her body he’d have her up against a wall in a flash, that wife-swapping between interested parties was something he wouldn’t absolutely rule out – but now it all seemed risible. Ridiculous and stupid and risible. He didn’t really want any of those things – it was just years of conditioning and blokey banter and pub lore. All he actually wanted right now was someone to love him and cherish him. Someone to help him make dinner, choose a new rug with him, stroll in the woods with him. Someone to love. Which meant his penis – that most cruelly treacherous part of his anatomy – was not actually capable of directing him anywhere he really wanted to go.

  Which was why it had failed him this evening.

  ‘Bloody women, eh?’ said Danny now. He added a tut, and Jack realised he was saying it off the back of an erroneous assumption. That Danny thought it must have been Allegra and not him who had bought the evening to an unconsummated close. This struck him as sad. Even sadder than Julie finding his porn stash. It had obviously not occurred to Danny that it might be Jack. Never occurred to him that Jack wouldn’t have been able to perform. Or if it had crossed Danny’s mind, it would not be acknowledged and therefore would not be discussed. Which, when you thought about it, Jack decided with painful clarity, was the really sad thing about men.

  ‘Bloody women,’ he agreed, grateful to collude in this falsehood nevertheless. ‘I’ll go sort the bed out for you, mate.’

  Lying sleepless in his own bed at three-thirty in the morning, Jack felt as wretched as he thought it was possible to feel. More wretched, he realised, than he had at any point during or after the divorce. At that time, though it was often pretty grisly, there had at least begun to blossom in him a keen sense of relief. They would not need to keep up the pretence any more. They could communicate at last in a currency other than one of denial and simmering resentment. And as for afterwards – well, after the divorce, there had been the future to look forward to, hadn’t there? Thoughts of a different and better life. Women. Attraction. Affection. He’d felt liberated. Liberated from Lydia’s expectations of him. Free to pursue his real goals – goals that had all but been quashed with her. His coaching, his writing. The real things he loved. Sure he’d be poorer, but as he had always wanted and needed money far less than Lydia had, it didn’t worry him unduly. Another relief. Their financial personalities were perhaps even less well matched than their sexual ones, and his lack of financial ambition had irritated her, he knew. Funny, then, that this TV opportunity should come along now. Funny that after years of steady-state salary and the quiet brown-envelope anxiety of the freelancer, he would perhaps be better off now than at any point in his life. He could tell by her expression the last time he had seen her – and told her – that she thought he had actually planned things this way.

  What he hadn’t expected, all this time down the line, was that something so commonplace, so unremarkable, so ordinary as not being able to hang on to an erection, should affect him so profoundly. What exactly had happened there? He imagined himself as a participant in a quietly earnest documentary, where men with shadowed faces talked candidly (though anonymously, naturally) about the shame and indignity of their potency problems, intercut with cameos from patient, understanding wives. Was this him now? Was this the next step? This shift from the animal to the essentially cerebral? There was no doubt that it had been his brain which had damned him. ‘Overr
uled, OK, penis? Overruled, I say!’ And his penis, the wimp, had obeyed.

  But that was the thing about sex. He’d spent most of his life working so damn bloody hard to try and get some. As a teenager (and a reasonably good-looking one – if only he’d realised it then) he had had no shortage of girls to go out with. Trouble was, the ones he wanted to go out with were generally of the ‘kiss on the first date, bra on the third or fourth, knickers after four months (if you were lucky), and sorry, but that’s your lot’ variety. And they’d only touch him on the outside of his trousers, which always struck him as wildly unfair.

  University had been better – he was a classic late-developer – but after losing his virginity while too drunk to notice (ironically, no erection difficulties in those days – it would never go down) and having no more than three unremarkable encounters with girls he felt bad about screwing, he’d met Lydia, who was at that time doing anthropology and whose passionate debating style and breadth of knowledge about indigenous populations and global politics and apartheid had somehow led him to reach the mistaken conclusion that this fiery, committed and intelligent girl just had to be the one for him. (Two years after her degree she had swapped the dungarees and spiky rhetoric for a job as a marketing assistant at a cruise line, the fire in her belly all gone. But where?)

  In any event, sex after that had been on a steadily downward trajectory. Twice a day for six months, twice a week for six months, and then they’d somehow slipped into the routine of him wanting sex and cajoling her to have it, with varying degrees of participation and success. Jack wondered if Lydia was experiencing a sexual renaissance with the man who should have been on the divorce papers.

  Was that his problem? Was he so conditioned to sex being something he had to work hard at getting that when offered to him freely by a woman with her own sexual agenda, his brain couldn’t cope? But how could that be? Hope Shepherd (damn her) had been all over him, hadn’t she? And his reproductive equipment had been truly joyous to behold – unstoppable, rampant, efficient, enduring – moreover, he recalled with some regret (damn her, damn him – how had he screwed that one up so completely?) – it had barely stopped twitching at the memory all week.

  Well, it had certainly stopped twitching now. That had been all about her. So wild and passionate, but so feminine with it. So self-conscious. So tender. So sweet. Not that he wanted to dominate anyone, but her incredulity that he should awaken such behaviour in her had been the greatest aphrodisiac of all. Because it made him feel strong. Made him feel like a man.

  Jack sat up and rubbed at his eyes with his palms. That was it, wasn’t it? Yes, Allegra was beautiful. Yes, she was sexy. Yes, she was all those things that inhabit male fantasies, and more. But she had made him feel emasculated. With her slick, film star home, that made him feel poor and her seem so powerful; with her self-assurance, her ease, her practised hands on his body; ‘I know what you need… ’ It made him cringe to recall it. He knew what she needed too, but he couldn’t supply it. Not for all her sex toys, her candles, her velvet-smooth, almost hairless body. Everything about her was so perfectly, artfully, libidinously arranged. There was nothing he could give her but his raw masculinity. And that one thing, that unremarkable constant, his maleness, had shrunk back, inadequate. Recoiled.

  He drank some water then lay back against the pillows, tucking his laced hands behind his head. He had always taken his male state for granted. That he would pursue a woman (oh ho, hypothesise, why don’t you, Jack?) and if she responded – as, well… well, Hope Shepherd had – that was the thing that governed the process. Gave it momentum. With Allegra he had felt like a rabbit caught in headlamps. Scrutinised. Assessed. Not masculine at all. Biology had more hold on humanity, he decided, than sophisticated people sometimes gave it credit for.

  Basic biology. He thought about the second time he had made love to Hope Shepherd. A little on the bed and a great deal on the floor. He remembered how he’d tugged a pillow from the bed and tucked it behind her head so she wouldn’t bang it against the bedside table leg. He recalled the exact contours of her face as she’d smiled up at him and mouthed the words ‘thank you’. Thinking this caused his own biology to respond now, gloriously, and quite without direction. He considered the phenomenon, the autonomy of the process, even as he lay there and surrendered himself to its images and sensations, at four a.m., in the dark, with the rain lashing down outside. Here was her face now. And here was her body. Basic biology. QED.

  Damn her. Damn her, he thought.

  Chapter 20

  Damn Jack Valentine, thought Hope. Damn him. It really was high time she stopped mooning over him and started taking charge of her life. It was getting on for six and she hadn’t even showered yet, and she really did not want to go to Paul and Suze’s pot luck party. Tom did not want to go to Paul and Suze’s pot luck party. Chloe did not want to go to Paul and Suze’s pot luck party. Truth be known, Paul and Suze probably didn’t even want them to go to Paul and Suze’s pot luck party. Yet what was she doing right now? Cancelling? No, she was standing in her kitchen, still damp and sweaty from her run with Simon, cutting small resistant vegetable items into amusing shapes with a sharp knife. And that, she thought irritably, should have been another New Year’s resolution. Never say ‘anything I can do to help?’ to a person who keeps an itinerary in her knickers.

  Her mother, naturally, was very much looking forward to Paul and Suze’s pot luck party, and had been saying so at roughly five-minute intervals, in order, Hope suspected, to ‘jolly her along’. Which was because, when she had arrived mid-afternoon, she had been bearing news.

  ‘Hmm,’ she’d said, in that way she had that seemed to indicate she’d already started the conversation some minutes before she’d actually arrived. ‘You’ve had words then?’

  Hope, who hadn’t had the slightest idea who or what she was talking about, had raised her eyebrows in enquiry.

  ‘You and Suze,’ her mother had elaborated. ‘She sounded terribly upset.’

  Hope was entirely mystified by this, but also suddenly alert. The conjunction of the words ‘Suze’ and ‘upset’ in one sentence was too daunting a prospect to ignore.

  ‘First I’ve heard of it,’ she’d said. ‘What about?’

  ‘About the casseroles, of course. You know, you really could give her a little more credit, Hope. She’s always been very kind to you. It’s very hurtful. I had her on the phone in tears.’

  A sliver of recall wormed its way into Hope’s mind. ‘Hang on. Hang on just one minute, Mother. Words? What ‘words’ do you refer to, precisely?’

  Her mother had fastened her eye on Hope then, the better to gauge her reaction. ‘Now don’t let’s go getting all uppity, dear. I only thought I’d mention it.’

  Right. Things were beginning to make sense. ‘Oh, I’m with you,’ she said with elaborate emphasis. ‘Casseroles, eh? Well, if we’re talking about the casseroles I think we’re talking about, the only words I exchanged were entirely non-combative. Something – let me see – along the lines of her saying “I’ve made another couple of casseroles for you”, and me saying “thanks ever so, Suze, but you know, I’d feel awful taking them from you, because Tom and Chloe don’t actually like puy lentils or borlotti beans – or whatever pulse it was she’d put in them – and it seems such a shame for them to go to waste”. And then –’ she could feel the colour rising in her cheeks, ‘yes, I remember. Her saying – no, sniffing – something along the lines of, “well if you’d told me that, I could have made them something else, couldn’t I?” And me saying – let me get this right – yes, that was it. That as I hadn’t known she’d been busy making more casseroles for us, I was hardly in a position to do that, was I? And that, grateful as I was for her thoughtfulness, perhaps it was high time I started making my own casseroles, instead of putting her to so much bother. I think she answered that by saying – no, sniffing again – “well, if that’s how you feel… ” in that conversation-stopping way she’s so good at. So yes. OK
. Words. But hers. Not mine.’ She glared at her mother. ‘OK?’

  ‘But –’

  ‘And as far as I’m concerned I should have done it months ago. I’ve spent way too much of the last couple of years meekly letting her tell me how to run my life. Oh, yes! I missed a bit! Yes. She also pointed out that she’d only put the pulses in because she wanted to make sure they were getting a balanced diet. Bloody cheek! Frankly, Mother, with the day I’d had, she’s lucky I didn’t punch her.’

  There was a brief, and clearly digestatory, silence. ‘Oh.’

  Hope planted a hand on each hip. ‘Quite. Well now, aren’t we going to have a lovely time this evening? In fact, tell you what? How about I just don’t go?’

  Hope’s mother looked horrified.

  ‘You can’t do that! Then she’d know I told you! She specifically asked me not to say anything!’

  ‘But you did.’

  Hope’s mother looked stricken. ‘Please, Hope. You know how sensitive she is. She would hate to think she’d upset you.’

  ‘Yeah, right, Mum.’

  ‘No really.’ She’d stood in the hall all the while, still in her coat. But she took it off now, with an air of maternal resignation.’ Look, I know she can get on your nerves at times. I know she can seem a bit, well, overbearing and bossy. But she doesn’t mean anything by it. It’s just her way. She’s not like that underneath. She means well, really she does. Don’t be too hard on her, love. Come on.’

  ‘Hard on her?’ Hope spluttered. ‘Me? Hard on her? Mother, are we talking about the same person?’

  Her mother tutted. ‘I just think you could be a little more charitable towards her, that’s all.’

  ‘Oh, you do, do you? Well thanks for the character reference.’

  Her mother looked defiant. ‘Now you’re just being silly.’

  ‘I am not being silly! God, you sound like her now!’ Hope grimaced. ‘You really have no idea, do you? There’s hardly a week goes by when she’s not bustling in, telling me what to do, pointing out my failings as a mother – not to mention as a wife – chipping away all the time at my self-esteem. Have you any idea how that feels? Have you? We’re not all as perfect as she is, OK? We know. We don’t need reminding. Perhaps she’d like to spend some time thinking about that.’