Chapter 1

"Have I made love for the last time?"

That was the question Dave was asking himself as he sat in his armchair gazing into the crackling fire. The glass of whisky sat untouched beside him as his mind hunted back and forth through the memories of the last 25 years. The silver wedding cards were still lined up on the mantelpiece, their messages of congratulation picked out in silver ink, reflecting the firelight.

Dave didn't need to look inside them; he had read the messages yesterday, read them out aloud at the anniversary party. The assembled family and friends had laughed at the funny ones, smiled at the sincere ones and he thought he had seen a tear or two at some of the more heartfelt messages.

Twenty-five years was a milestone, one few of their contemporaries had reached. A bitter half smile flickered across his lips. Two hundred, even one hundred years ago, it would have been a milestone because so many people died at such a comparatively young age. Nowadays the scourge of death had been replaced by easy divorce, not so final but the effect was the same in terms of making a silver wedding a rare event, something to celebrate.

He didn't feel very celebratory tonight though. The initial cause of his thoughts lay on his lap, another card, one that had arrived today. He picked it up and read it again, the jokey calculation on the front,

"25 years = 1300 weeks"

"1300 weeks = 9100 days"

"9100 days = 9100 nights"

He flipped the card open to reveal the joke, a series of cartoons of two stick people in a variety of sexual positions and the punch line,

"That's time to have tried them all."

The bitter smile was back again as he ran his eyes along the lines of stick figures,

"Yes, yes, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, yes, no..."

His mind reran the little calculation that had been his first response on opening the card and came up with the same depressing answer, something like eight and a half thousand nights without sex.

Things had started out so differently, when they first started going out with each other opportunities had been limited and too precious to waste. They had made love outdoors, in the car, upstairs at parties if a bedroom was free, sometimes in the bathroom if the bedrooms were all occupied. Every opportunity had been taken however risky. He remembered one memorable night when Lynn had given him a blowjob while they were parked on the driveway of her parent's house.

When they moved in together things had picked up for a while, not as much as he would have liked though. Where they had taken every opportunity before, now the opportunity was always there the sense of urgency had gone. He had tried, complimented her, done his best to be a modern supportive husband, encouraged her career, and done his share of the housework, all the things that women always said they wanted in their men. Most of all he had never pressed her for sex, the idea was repugnant to him. His view was that making love was a partnership, a mingling of joint desire, mutual pleasure. Not something that should be seen as a chore, a duty, something that one partner did FOR the other. Not that he was above trying to ensure that Lynn was in the mood, he had learnt the things that relaxed her put her in a receptive frame of mind. Sometimes they worked, sometimes they didn't.

About this point in their relationship they had decided to take the big step and get married. Announcing it to the families and planning dates and stuff went ok, then his parents threw a spanner in the works by suddenly getting a divorce. The extra stress meant they postponed the wedding for a year while the dust settled.

Gradually over the first few months they had settled into a routine of sorts, nothing quite as rigid as "its Saturday night lets fuck," but not all that far short of it in reality. Of course, the usual ups and downs of relationships and Lynn's female cycle conspired to make it perhaps two Saturdays out of five or thereabouts.

As the wedding approached Lynn seemed under more and more pressure and the sex slipped to once a month or so. Dave still found it difficult to initiate things, he was a big man, well aware that he was physically intimidating and like many big men over compensated by being as non assertive as he could.

A log slipped in the fire sending a shower of sparks crackling up the chimney, Dave's thoughts were derailed for a moment as he stood up to and wielded the poker, rearranging the logs. Sitting back down he took a drink from the long forgotten whisky and picked up his train of thought again.

Their sex life received a brief fillip from the honeymoon but swiftly returned to what had become the norm. Dave had tried all the tricks he could think of, tried to show Lynn that he still though of her as an attractive, desirable woman.

He had bought her sexy underwear; she asked if he thought that she was not sexy enough without it. There was no way to win that one and Dave knew it.

He bought magazines and suggested they read them together in bed, she just laughed at the stories claiming they were all made up.

He got hold of a blue movie, she cracked up laughing and made comments about the girl's nail polish.

He tried getting her drunk and spent half the night holding her hair back while she was being sick.

The once a month had imperceptibly become once every other month. The first time Dave realised it had been ten weeks since they last made love he had tried to discuss it with her. Lynn had been defensive and they had been unable to resolve anything. After that he began to notice that she tensed up any time he put his arms around her. The kiss he got when he dropped her off to work became a peck on the cheek. Her wardrobe filled up with trouser suits for work and slacks for home. Dave hated them; he was a leg man and greatly preferred women to wear skirts. Of course being a "new" man he could never say that to Lynn.

The years slipped by, both of them busy building careers, paying the mortgage, doing the house up. They had been celebrating their sixth wedding anniversary with a nice dinner out when Lynn dropped her bombshell,

"It's time we thought about having kids."

They discussed it over the next month or so, working out finances, planning for childcare and Lynn's return to work before taking the big step and ceremonially flushing Lynn's last pack of pills down the toilet.

All the books said it could take months for Lynn's cycle to get back to normal, they had rather planned on two to three months but Lynn missed her very first period. Dave had endured a little bit of light-hearted ribbing about being a crack shot, for a while Lynn had referred to him as "dead eye Dick."

Hormones are strange and wonderful things, the first six months of Lynn's pregnancy saw them making love two, three, sometimes five or six times a week. They started taking Sunday afternoon drives in the country together as her belly swelled. More often than not they would end up making love on a blanket in the woods, a field, on the beach.

The last three months were not so good, Lynn had a series of problems with high blood pressure, several times she was hospitalised for a few days. The birth itself was a nightmare; Lynn was overdue so the doctors decided to induce her. She went into labour at eight in the morning, by eleven she was hooked up to monitors and machines. At five in the afternoon the delivery suite that they had expected to be occupied by just the two of them and a midwife contained three doctors, an anaesthetist, two midwives and an impressive array of medical equipment. Dave found himself being led away as they prepared for an emergency caesarean.

When he had been called back in, he found Lynn unconscious from the anaesthetic and their son sleeping in a small cot. The doctor told him not to expect Lynn to wake up until the following day and advised him to go home and get some sleep. He had followed that advice and it had turned out to be the worst mistake of his life.

On his return to the hospital the following day he had found Lynn's room, she was still connected to a couple of IV tubes and there was no sign of the baby. He had asked what was going on and discovered that Lynn had awakened earlier than expected, found herself alone, no baby and no husband. She had leapt to the conclusion that the baby had died and that he had left her. Her reaction had been so bad that they had had to sedate her again.

That had led to severe postnatal depression; Lynn had therapy for years in the course of which some long buried memories of being sexually abused as a child had surfaced. Fortunately Lynn had never revealed the identity of her abuser to Dave, he knew without a shadow of a doubt that if she had the man would have died, painfully and slowly within hours.

Lynn was on anti-depressants for the next ten years; Dave had found himself having to do more of the caring for their son, more stuff around the house but had willingly shouldered the extra responsibilities.

One of the anti depressant drugs had had a number of side effects, one was that Lynn became extremely horny, for a few months their sex life had been as good as during the early months of Lynn's pregnancy. Unfortunately the other side effects led to her medication being changed and soon the once every couple of months routine returned.

The complications following Lynn's caesarean and the onset of her depression had thrown all their plans for her return to work into disarray. Not only that but their childcare costs ended up being far higher than anticipated. The financial stress had been intense for a couple of years but they had made it through in the end. Unfortunately the extra stress had also impacted their sex life, Dave found himself reminded of an old joke,

There was a lecture at the town hall from a renowned sex therapist. He began by asking the audience,

"Hands up everyone who has sex once a week."

A few hands went up.

"Once a month?"

A lot more hands went up.

"Once a year?"

A man at the back jumped up and down shouting,