Chapter 4

No more long perambulations were planned that week; but there was definitely a better atmosphere in the house. After that one evening of cake, it was back to a sparse tea, which left the gate open for toast later; for once a growing lad like Simon was happy to be slightly hungry when his aunt went to bed, he looked forward to the later tete-a-tete.

They had talked about what he was planning to do at Oxford, and she had envied him the opportunities he got as a boy. She didn’t resent them, just wished that she had those chances too, but it was never going to happen. Higher education for women was pointless; you don’t need a degree to make babies ... or become a companion. Still, she enjoyed their chats, and enjoyed that he liked the parts of her body he was allowed to see (and she knew enough to suspect that he filled in some of the details he couldn’t see – in fact he was more curious than knowledgable). For his part, he found a willing and intelligent listener. She even challenged him on occasions with logic that he found tested him.

Thursday dawned bright and clear and so a walk down to the beach promenade was planned with the bath chair. Going down, the biggest risk was that it would run away, but this was a modern version, so the wicker seat on wheels also had brakes. Whether they would hold on their own was always a source of worry and Simon had once suggested he sit in it to see. The problem was that, once in, even a fit healthy person would have difficulties getting out in a hurry. It was simply not built for rapid ingress and exit; it was built to transport a non-ambulatory person comfortably. Simon’s offer was not taken up, they would rely on the brakes and the two young people not to let it go on the way down. “We can’t have you plummeting to your doom ... I’d have to pay for the gravestone!” Even dark humour seemed to have been awakened.

At the bottom, they moved along the promenade; this time Great Aunt Jo seemed to positively relish the crowds. The tide was in, so the bathing huts were not too far away. “Pull over here, oh look, there are people swimming. Susan, wouldn’t you like to try it? I think I’m passed such exercises, oh but once..., but we shall have to see won’t we?” They watched, and then went to Sanfredi’s for coffee “Oh, and shall we try an ice again? It was such an interesting taste.” Possibly Sanfredi’s cafe offered safer ice cream, or at least safer dishes to eat it from. They stayed an hour and only then noticed the crowds thinning and the clouds building. “My, my, it looks like rain after all. We must get back!” So keen to leave was she that she nearly forgot to pay. She noted that rather than remind her, Simon was already reaching for his own meagre funds. Yes, he was a good boy for sure; though perhaps a little weak. He should have reminded her, she told him. “Women will take advantage, otherwise, mark my words.” Then they headed for the slope up. “No, we should take the short, steep route. Oh but it is too steep. No, the long way. I’m sure it will hold off long enough.”

The rain did not cooperate. By the time they reached the bottom of the long drag up, it was drizzling. Within another two hundred yards, it was raining hard. Simon pushed, and Susan held the sun parasol over her companion to try and shield her, but it wasn’t too successful. They all got wetter and wetter, but Simon and Susan were worst hit, which suited them well since they were sure they could cope better than the old lady. At the top of the hill, a shaft of light lit up the sky out to sea, followed by a clap of thunder. The old lady gave a scream and encouraged them to hurry. She had never liked lightning, she was somehow convinced that it would target her. As the storm edged closer over the sea, it was truly a wild and wonderful sight, for those who wanted to see it. For the people who were scared of such feats of nature, the impending doom getting closer and closer continued to terrify.

When they reached Horizon, Acacia Avenue, Emmie Smith was waiting with the door open. “Come in, come in, whatever were you thinking being out in this? Why you should have got a cab back.” But there were none to be had. Cook all but carried the wet old lady up the steps, assisted by Susan, whilst Simon took the chair round to the back and stowed it safely away, getting even wetter as a result.

When he entered the house, he was told that Great Aunt Jo had gone straight to bed with three hot water bottles and a stoked up fire in her room. She would take her soup there. “Miss Ainable has gone up to change out of her wet things too. I suggest you do the same. I’ve made up the fire in the drawing room and I’ll put out the soup and bread there, you two can toast up early and warm through. I told Miss Ainable that this is exceptional and she might as well just put her dressing gown on now. Miss Barker agreed. Now, you go up and bring me your wet things and I’ll put them in the kitchen to dry.” She never referred to Miss Withers-Ainable by her full surname, apparently thinking that one name was good enough for anybody.

Simon returned with his wet clothes soon after and descended to the kitchen where Emmie was laying out the other two sets of clothes. “Okay now, get along, no need for you to be ogling young Miss Ainable’s unmentionables. Go on, off you go. I’ll say good night.”

It was six of the clock, and he was in his pyjamas (an innovation – jacket and trousers for the bed instead of a night shirt!) and dressing gown. In the front reception room, called the Drawing Room, though it was no longer used for withdrawing as it might have been in the past, Susan waited slightly shyly dressed similarly in nightware since it made no sense to redress simply to undress again later. One somewhat radical action that Great Aunt Jo had taken was to use this front room as part of her normal life. Simon’s parents still had a room used for special occasions, which seemed peculiarly wasteful of a perfectly good room. Josephine Barker had long decided that the room with the best view might as well be used daily.

The two young people ate their soup and then clustered around the fire as their new tradition demanded to make their toast. They told themselves that there was no impropriety; they were as if brother and sister and therefore nothing could be said to be unsavoury in any way in the young lady’s dressing gown being open to the waist as she sat and her nightdress rising just a little further up her legs – occasionally revealing her knees when she shifted position. They told themselves that the more clearly defined rise and fall of the woman’s upper torso, raising and dropping the two mounds that nestled under less clothing than usual, was nothing more than nature. They told themselves that the view of the young man’s sleep attire when his dressing gown tie loosened as if it had a mind of its own was simply the same as if he was in his usual woollen suit. They told themselves all this, and knew from the flutterings in their stomachs that they were attempting and failing to delude themselves. There was something truly delicious for Simon in being in the same room as a lady dressed for bed; and there was something similarly exciting for Susan in being in a room with an attractive young man; she was aware of the effect she had on him, which was delightful in itself, but she was also aware that she herself felt the frisson of sexuality in seeing the man, in knowing that beneath that (admittedly thick and unattractive cotton) trouser and jacket combination was a naked body.

The fascination for Susan was in knowing what his ‘equipment’ might look like. She had visited the museum in Newborough on occasion and elsewhere in the past long ago with her mother, where reproductions of the Greek nude statues were on display. In all of these, the male appendage had been removed and replaced with a fig leaf of stone. It was as if the very sight of a male penis and genitals might cause women to swoon. A group of nuns had once visited a museum near Susan’s home town at the same time as she was there with her mother and one had quietly made the wholly inappopriate remark in Susan’s hearing that “The real reason is the Greeks were much better endowed than the men now and they are all jealous.” Inappropriate, but definitely amusing. Were nuns allowed a sense of humour, she had wondered.

The fascination for Simon was the normal male desire to see women in their natural state, or to get closer to that view. At school he had seen the postcards from Paris that one of his friends had obtained through an elder brother – that particular friend had been injudicious in allowing them to be discovered and was lucky not to be expelled; the result had been a severe beating and a lecture from the headmaster which spoke a lot and said very little. So he knew what a woman looked like, but also that a man would or should only ever see his wife in that state, and even then it might not be quite polite. The natural result of this conflict of emotions was that his pyjama trousers started to be stretched at the front, and he made sterling efforts to hide this with retying his dressing gown – too late. Susan had seen what was happening and was appalled and delighted in equal measure. Appalled in that she might at any moment be assailed and forced upon by a rampant and desperate man – she knew enough of Simon Peters to knowthat would not happen, but a girl can have such dreams. Delighted because it confirmed that she was a desirable quantity. She did not know that any female dressed as she was, any female from twelve to sixty at least, would have caused the same reaction on a boy with active hormones.

Susan took up the toasting fork, speared a piece of bread and leant forward to toast it. She was unaware of the view this gave Simon; a view of her dressing gown sliding sideways and revealing her behind covered only by the nightdress, a view that showed the declivity between her two rounded upper ends to her legs (he had no word that seemed appropriate). Then at the other end, the view was of shadows cast from the light of the fire shining through her nightdress. No actual body form was directly visible, but the shadows were clearly of those glories of a young woman. He was brutally aware that he could do nothing to prevent his manly response except try and create folds of dressing gown to hide it.

Up in her room, Josephine Barker was having the strangest dream. She was no virgin, she had had a couple of flings when she was younger but then had opted to avoid the chains of marriage. That she had had no offers might have helped in her resolve, but overall, she was not sorry to have no need of a man to tell her when she should spend her own money. In her dream, she was watching two people making love in her house. The peculiar aspect was that one might have expected these two people to be the young people currently sharing with her. In fact, one of them was herself. She was watching her own body being used in ways that, in her waking hours, she would have barely said she knew were possible. The other peculiar aspect was that she could not identify the other person; she could not even identify the gender of this person clearly. At one moment it seemed he was a male, he had a striking relationship to her own father, at another, she was being made love to by a woman of striking beauty; a woman whom she thought she nearly recognised but who transmogrified into a man again. She woke perspiring heavily, but not with the expected shock and horror that such a dream might have brought an respectable old lady. She found the knowledge that she could still bring up erotically charged fantasies quite reassuring, even if they were only in her subconscious. She tried to return to the dream, but of course that would require much stronger control on her dream states than she ever possessed.