Charlie might rise late on Mondays, but he always made up for it by working hard. He poured himself a second cup of coffee, and pulled out an old shirt and pair of jeans, because he knew the day would be messy, and then cleaned house, or at least the ground floor, hoovering from front door to back, through hallway, drawingroom, diningroom and kitchen to the conservatory at the back, because he could not abide working against an untidy background. Then he looked at Jennifer’s list. The stove was still in the Volvo, but he managed to move it by first taking out every detachable part, and then manhandling it to the back edge and lifting it out. It made a pig of a weight, and an almost intolerable strain on his muscles, so that for a moment he stood panting in the sunshine and was sure he had pulled something. But after a moment his body creaked back into place, and he was able to fetch a wheelbarrow, manoeuvre it aboard, and wheel it around the side of the house, moving it to a shed behind the garage where he kept tools and polishes and work in progress.
He checked the stove carefully. One leg was a little wonky, but he just had to tighten a screw. Then a power sander took off the rust, and he began to blacken all the metal using a graphite paste mixed with a little water. The work was messy, because the paste blackened everything that it touched, but it dried quickly, and he used a damp cloth to clean off the enamel, and a soft brush to shine up generally. He stood back to admire his handiwork. The stove shone in the sun, looking absolutely magnificent, and a counter in Charlie’s mind began to ratchet up a possible selling price. Now it looked expensive, and he knew he had done a good job.
He looked at his watch. Time for lunch. Both his shirt and jeans were now pretty filthy, so he left them at the conservatory door to pad barefoot in his underpants to a lavatory cum shower room tacked on to the end. The conservatory stretched acros the back of the house, and served as diningroom and sittingroom in summer and winter garden from autumn to spring, with a tall banana plant in one corner, though no bananas, and a dwarf lemon tree bearing sweet scented blossoms, that fruited from time to time into tiny green fruit.
He stepped free from his pants, and stood waiting for the shower to run hot with a strange feeling of freedom. Not many men can stand naked in the sunshine in the middle of British suburbia – well, perhaps a couple of levels up from suburbia – at lunchtime on a Monday. He owed nothing to anyone, and ranked as his own master. Jennifer might try bossing him about as much as she liked, but he was already adept at turning a deaf ear, and sex was now her only purchase. Perhaps someone might come along to replace her. Charlie was not a particularly vain man, but he still entertained hopes.
He stepped into the shower, sluicing away rust and graphite paste, twisting and turning in the hot water, and felt like a hero. He had done a good job, and he would make himself a tasty salad for lunch, dotting it with some cheese and maybe some shreds of French ham, eat out in the garden, and take a break before returning to work. He dried himself and padded into the kitchen in his underpants, feeling increasingly peckish.
Suddenly he realised that the telephone was ringing. Strange, because customers invariably called the shop during working hours. Perhaps Jennifer had some kind of a problem. He picked the phone up reluctantly. He would insist on having lunch before running errands.
‘Is that Mr. Tindal?’ The voice was a woman’s, warm and appealing.
Charlie mumbled a cautious assent, wondering who on earth the speaker might be. The voice matched none that he could recall.
‘My name’s Bella. We met at the Stag Hotel, your wife came to give a lecture on buying furniture in France.’
A light flickered in Charlie’s mind. He remembered vaguely sitting for more than an hour on the edge of an uncomfortable chair, listening to Jennifer lecturing about her hunting forays, and telling a motley audience of dreary middle aged women in sensible dresses and boring middleaged men in business suits how clever she was. She had put on a good show, and made travelling to France, with her husband at the driving wheel – here a gracious smile in Charlie’s direction - sound really quite exciting. Afterwards the gathering had broken up to sip cheap white wine and nibble at canapes, and Charlie had chatted with a couple or two. He had even found one rather tempting woman on her own, but Jennifer had chased her away.
‘You gave me a card.’
Charlie wondered whether it might the same woman. He scrabbled in his mind to summon up a picture. The woman had been slim, dark, perhaps in her mid-forties. He decided to try some cautious flattery. ‘You must have charmed me.’
‘You seemed rather sweet.’
He beamed, cranking his memory up into overtime. He had given the woman one of Jennifer’s business cards, with an invitation to call him were she ever to need advice on buying or selling antiques. ‘I try my best to be helpful.’
‘I could do with some help.’ The woman’s voice was suddenly serious: harsh and even bitter. ‘My husband has done a runner to South Africa with his secretary, leaving me to clear up the mess.’
‘Mess?’
‘Our home. He had one of the dotcoms, and cleaned up. Then he moved his capital offshore.’ Now her bitterness sharpened to a knife edge. ‘Apparently they both planned it carefully. She was just turned twenty, less than half his age, the leggy, beauty queen type. She promised him children.’
Charlie stood listening in bewilderment He was having a dream conversation, but dreams are never real. ‘How awful.’
‘No, it was the best thing he could do. He was a bastard, gay Lothario, that sort of thing.’ The woman sounded taut, as though fighting to control herself. ‘But he couldn’t take it all, and he couldn’t take the house, or the contents, or the house in France.’
Charlie’s heart missed a beat. ‘France?’
‘I’ve got to downsize.’ Suddenly the voice gained strength to become hard and businesslike. ‘I’m all on my own, I’ve got two houses filled with bits and pieces, I want to turn some of them into cash whilst I make up my mind what to do next. You know about buying and selling things, and you looked honest when we talked together.’ The voice paused, and the pause was an invitation.
Charlie tried to stammer something coherent. He knew now that he was not dreaming: he was standing in his underpants holding a telephone. But everything was so dreamlike.
‘I thought you might like to come and have a spot of lunch, help me sort my mind out, and work up some sort of sales strategy.’
Suddenly Charlie felt like leaping into the air with excitement. He gathered his breath, feeling as though he had shed ten years. ‘I’d love to.’ Now he was excited, and thrilled, and ready to dance with joy. ‘I can’t think of anything nicer.’
‘Good.’ The woman sounded pleased. ‘How about Friday at twelve-thirty?’
She gave him an address on a road midway between Gerrards Cross and Seer Green, in an area of comfortably large houses, and then she was gone. Charlie replaced his telephone and began to pirouette around in a circle of possibilities, probabilities and unimaginable thrills. He had a date, with someone who plainly thought him pretty much of a good thing, and was attractive into the bargain. What might transpire? Might anything transpire? Something tugged insistently at his stomach, and he remembered that he was hungry, but now hunger was secondary. He padded back into the kitchen, heading for the refrigerator, and his mind swirled with questions, and hopes, and suppositions. Should he tell Jennifer? Should he keep the call a secret? Might lunch develop into some more intimate encounter? Oh, bliss. Somebody wanted him. Somebody might even desire him, and reckon him as a man again, rather than as a chauffeur, interpreter and haggler rolled into one.
He began to rummage in the refrigerator, transferring bits and pieces to a plate, choosing with care, his mind whirling all the while. First a bed of torn lettuce leaves, then some cold ham, with a couple of tomatoes and a red pepper chopped up to make a bright red central focal point, some chopped shallots, and a scattering of broken up bits of feta cheese. The plate looked good. He thought of opening a bottle of bordeaux to celebrate the call, but chose a French beer instead – less alcohol, less heady. He wondered how his caller would make lunch for him. He wondered whether their chance meeting might blossom. He set his salad and beer on a tray, and padded into the garden. The Tindal home backed onto an open field that played home to a handful of horses. He could eat in his underpants, without a care in the world.
He worked on through the afternoon, back in his dirty shirt and jeans, stripping the covers off the two chairs brought back from Courrieres and taking tacks out of several more, working deftly as he burrowed tacks free, and then polished up Jennifer’s diningroom set, and his mind held nothing but a voice as he worked, and a dream, building endlessly changing castles in the air.
Time passed, and the sun began to diminish, but he worked on in a daze. It was Monday, and he had a date for Friday, and he felt in a turmoil. He worked on, until he heard Jennifer’s car crunch on the gravel in front of the house, and knew that he had done a good day’s work. But he also decided to be circumspect.
Jennifer came round the corner of the house in the very best of humours. She had lunched well, and sold a few more bits and pieces through the afternoon, and was still savouring Freddie’s words, though common sense had cooled her a little since walking back from the Bull. She thought she would probably not mention either rescuing Freddie, nor lunching with him. Some things could very easily be misunderstood.
She stopped short as she reached the shed behind the Tindal’s garage. Charlie had positioned the stove where it would shine to best advantage, and it was magnificent in the late afternoon sun. She saw that he had also stripped the two French chairs, and polished up her oak set, and she felt a pang of guilt, for it was plain that he had worked hard whilst she had been flirting.
Perhaps he deserved a reward. She thought of Freddie, and wondered whether she might be able to merge husband and partner so that she could have both at the same time: taking Freddie in her mind whilst Charlie was taking her body, overlaying and intermingling each to build intercourse into a dream, and transform a dream into intercourse. She smiled a smile that Charlie had not seen for a good long while.
‘You’ve done well, Charlie.’
Charlie stared at her, his mind filled with a dark-haired woman. Jennifer was flagging a pathway leading to their bedroom, and would take him along a road into fantasy. He wiped his hands on a cloth. ‘I’d better go and have a shower.’
Jennifer giggled. ‘I’ll turn down the bed.’
Charlie was already shedding his shirt and jeans as he reached the conservatory. But the warm telephone voice filled his mind as he turned and swirled under the hot shower, and he had a vision of lying with a slim, dark woman, with hair curling on her shoulders, enjoying sexual pleasures wholly beyond the bounds of marriage.
For sex, in the Tindal household, had lately grown wholly into a matter of permissions. Once Charlie had been young and vigorous, and Jennifer had been curious. They had explored all manner of positions together, from the conventional to the athletic, and Jennifer had enjoyed sitting astride Charlie and facing him in an exchange that she always controlled. Then she had bought herself a black pvc catsuit, and pranced around their bedroom with a dogwhip that some customer had brought into the shop. But whilst she was prepared to give Charlie quite a hiding, she had never let him reciprocate, and prancing had barely lasted half an hour. They had also tried anal sex a few times, and oral sex, though Jennifer had rapidly discarded one as unnatural, and the other as unhygienic. But now coition was a matter of well-practised and closely controlled routine.
Charlie had to settle first in bed, lying supine, with a total ban on touching, because Jennifer argued that she needed to gain momentum. Then she might stroke him a little, just to bring him to erection, and then, when she judged him sufficiently swollen, she would allow him to insert himself, lying to one side of her with his leg between hers, so that she could hold him in tight against herself in the event of him climaxing ahead of her. Then he was allowed to fondle her nipples. But he had to take care not to hurt her, and also had to end his caresses the moment she cried out, and from then on bring himself to fulfilment as soon as as he could, because Jennifer disliked continuing intercourse once she had taken her fill of engagement.
Charlie generally thought their encounters a very biased, one-sided form of exercise. But sex is sex, when all is said and done, and a climax is always a climax. So he performed his marital duties punctiliously, but substituted the darkhaired woman for Jennifer when they came together, whilst Jennifer superimposed Freddie, and in their imaginary replacements they both drew some satisfaction from their experience, though perhaps not as much as they might have wished.
Afterwards, when the heat had fled from their bodies, they lay silent, both exploring their dreams. Charlie decided not to mention his lunch date. Maybe later, possibly over dinner, or possibly in the morning, or possibly at breakfast on Friday.
He slept a little, and then woke, and was hungry again. Jennifer prodded him drowsily. ‘What’s for dinner?’
Charlie scratched himself. He had minced pork in the refrigerator, and a big can of flageolet beans. He decided to make meat balls with grated garlic and lemon juice and a few crushed cloves, roll them in oatmeal and beaten egg ahead of frying them, heat up the flageolets with a good dollop of butter, and serve on a bed of fluffy basmati rice.
Jennifer murmured approvingly as he sketched his menu, and prodded him again, rather harder this time. ‘You make them sound delicious.’
It was time for him to get up. He cooked, sipping at a glass of dry white Bordeaux, and sampling his rice from to time, because the other elements of dinner were plain and simple, but rice must always be just right. Jennifer laid the table in the conservatory, and set out cheese for a second course, and then they were eating, and the meatballs were tasty, and the rice was just the way it should be, and dinner floated away in the cosiness of a shared bottle of wine, followed by a second, and afterwards, when they were both slightly tight, toying with oatmeal biscuits and cheese, Jennifer told him about selling her French potty table. But she did not mention lunching with Freddie.
However Charlie was rather less circumspect. A bottle of wine combined with talk of buying and selling antiques unbuttoned his tongue,. He felt like asserting himself, and bragging a little, and he let his lunch date slip out.
‘This woman called me. She wants to sell up, and asked me to lunch.’
Jennifer had drunk a fair bit, but was immediately watchful. ‘How nice. Where is she?’
‘Seer Green.’ Charlie made his voice deliberately vague.
‘Do you want me to go with you?’ Jennifer regarded herself as an expert, and believed that Charlie should always be supervised.
‘I’m invited to lunch.’ Charlie’s tone made it clear that expected to fare better alone.
‘Big house?’
Charlie nodded non-committally.
‘Where did she find you?’
Charlie refilled his glass. Now he felt like gloating a little. ‘At the Stag Hotel.’
Jennifer frowned. She also remembered her lecture, and recovering Charlie from a slim dark woman in a dark green silk dress. ‘She must have fancied you.’
Charlie beamed. But Jennifer was not pleased. Charlie was a support function, based at home, and she was not accustomed to him venturing out on his own. ‘Are you sure you can handle her?’
He grinned, and the wine gave him strength. ‘You’ll be in the shop. I’ll get a free lunch.’
Jennifer’s mouth tightened into a thin disapproving line. She wondered whether Charlie might have a hidden agenda, but she could not do much about it. She made up her mind to marshal her thoughts in the morning, when she felt less fuzzy.