Chapter 12: bloody selfish

When I got back to my office I buzzed Fran and asked her to come and see me. She arrived promptly and shut the door. "I know what this is about," she said as she took a chair, "and you can save your breath. I've made up my mind, James, and nothing you could say will change it." Then she looked more closely at my face and her manner softened abruptly. "James, you poor darling, you look so upset. What's the matter?"

"Fran," I said, too apprehensive and ashamed to look her in the eye but determined to go through with my plan, "I have a terrible confession to make."

And I made it. I told her everything.

Well, I need to qualify that statement slightly. Uncle Albert's name for his little project was a joke she would definitely not have appreciated, while Connie and Kylie featured only as "this girl I know" and "this other girl", and I was far too ashamed to admit how I had spent my lunch break, but otherwise I held nothing back. She followed the story carefully, at first with sympathy as I described Albert's death, then with pleasure (she tried to disguise it but I knew her too well) as I recounted my row with Wendy; but as the tale went on she shifted first to puzzlement and finally to a kind of wry contempt.

"So," she said scornfully when I had finished, "let me see if I've got this straight. You've taken a magic potion that means women can't resist you, and once you've been to bed with them they adore you so much they'll do anything you say. Is that right?"

"Well," I said, rather deflated by this brutally succinct summing-up of the traumatic events of the last week, "I don't think magic has anything to do with it. But otherwise, yes, I suppose that's it."

"Oh, James," she sighed, "I appreciate your loyalty to Wendy and everything but if you wanted to put me off with some story wouldn't it have been a lot simpler to tell me she was dying of cancer or something?"

I groaned inwardly. She was right. It was an excellent suggestion and would have been well worth trying; it might at least have bought me a little time. I suppose recent events had been so vividly real to me that I had forgotten how incredible they would seem to anyone else.

Fran was settling nicely into "scoff" mode. "I suppose I ought to be flattered in a way, if what I said has [she paused for an instant to find the telling word] discombobulated you so much that you'd invent a cock-and-bull story like this. And to think I was afraid that you'd just shrug off what I said this morning; you must have had such a lot of women after you over the years, it might be water off a duck's back to you. But James, darling, no matter how much a shock it was when I told you how I felt, surely you never thought you could fob me off with such a farrago of nonsense? I'd sooner believe you'd been abducted by aliens. In fact," she went on sarcastically, relishing my discomfiture, "that was it, wasn't it darling? Nasty bug-eyed aliens did some experiment on you to make you irresistible. Come on, darling; you can tell me."

Her air of half-amused disdain was getting on my nerves. I had not, I thought bitterly, worked myself up to an agonising confession, baring my soul, so to speak, to try to save hers, only to be laughed at like this.

"Well," I said crossly, "there's something I can tell you. You've talked about loving me and marrying me but you haven't said anything about fucking me."

I had chosen the word for its shock value; she had never heard such language from me before. And I knew too, as her jaw dropped, that I had touched a raw nerve. I drove home my advantage.

"That's it, isn't it, Fran? You've put it all in terms of love and marriage but that's not what you've really been thinking about for the last week, is it?"

By now poor Fran was blushing so deeply that her face was almost the same colour as her hair. She had been brought up in a tiny Scottish village where everyone went to church and talking frankly about sex was simply not the done thing. She looked down at her shoes so that her hair fell across her face. From behind this protective screen a hesitant voice emerged, meek and ashamed.

"Yes, James. It's true. I — I've had these dreams. Every night. I've never had dreams like that before. And you were in them all. They — they were wonderful. You were wonderful. And in the day, I kept thinking about you, and the dreams, and —" she broke off and looked up, still very red in the face and apparently on the verge of tears. "And I just want you so much, James, more than I've ever wanted anything."

I jumped to my feet and went to her. She stood up and almost fell into my arms and I felt sobs shaking her body. Finally she composed herself a little and sank back into the chair, drying her eyes while her face slowly returned to its normal colour.

"But James, darling," she protested, "I admit you've seen through me but you still don't expect me to believe this absurd story about Uncle Albert's potion."

I decided to put the ball in her court. "Well, Fran, you tell me. What proof would you accept?"

"Oh, very clever," she said, her spirit returning by the minute. "Push it back at me. All right, then," she challenged, "do it in front of me. Call some woman in here and put your whammy on her."

I could see this was not intended seriously but even so the idea appalled me. Was my life not complicated enough? "Fran, I can't do that," I replied.

She was triumphant. "Ah! At least now you're admitting it!"

"I can't turn some poor woman's life upside-down just to prove a point to you," I insisted. "I've caused enough trouble as it is."

She gave an impatient snort. "I can't believe I'm having this conversation," she said. "It's ridiculous. Let me know when you're ready to talk sense."

She made to get up but I stopped her with a gesture. I wanted to have this out there and then.

"Fran, wait. I won't 'put my whammy' on a new woman for you but I can show you one I've already 'whammied'." Fran looked at me blankly.

"You know 'this girl I know'?" I went on. "The first one I told you about?" Fran nodded speechlessly. "Well, you know her too," I told her. "She works here. It's Connie."

"Connie?" Fran looked stunned.

"I'll ask her to join us," I said, moving to the door.

"But it's well after four," Fran replied. "She'll be long gone." (Fran, who took her work extremely seriously, had given me her views more than once about "that lazy, flighty girrl".)

"I don't think so," I answered. I looked out into the main office. Connie was still busily and apparently contentedly attending to routine office duties. I called her and she dropped her papers and hurried to my office.

"Oh, James, I —" she began delightedly, then broke off as she saw we were not alone. "Hello, Fran," she said shortly. Fran, being ineligible for flirtation and resistant to girlish chatter, had always been a bit of a problem for Connie.

"Connie," I said, giving her a seat, "please tell Fran what's been going on."

Connie looked at Fran, then helplessly at me. She silently mouthed "Us?" at me.

"It's all right," I assured her. "Just tell her."

Connie's account was slightly nervous and hesitant to start with but she soon warmed to her theme. I contributed very little, intervening only to move her on at certain points, notably when she started to wax lyrical about what the sex had been like. Fran listened to her story speechless and open-mouthed. "It's been so amazing," Connie concluded. "I'm so lucky to have found a man like James. I didn't know what happiness was before." Her tale told, she ignored Fran and sat back, gazing adoringly at me.

Shock, confusion, and dismay contended on poor Fran's face.

"You two," she muttered eventually, more to herself than out loud. I thought for a second she was distressed at the thought that Connie and I had enjoyed sex together but then she said, still very hesitantly, "You two — you — you could have agreed this story between yourselves."

But I could see she was clutching at straws. I pointed out the absurdity of her suggestion. "Oh, we concocted all this, did we Fran? And when do you think we did that? After we spoke this morning I went straight out for lunch, remember? And Connie I presume ate here."

"Never left the building," confirmed Connie.

"I saw you," said Fran dully. "You were sitting quietly in the corner by yourself staring into space. I thought it was odd because you're usually so gregarious and loud." Even in her confused state Fran realised this was rather a pointed comment to someone she did not really get on with. "Sorry," she added, "no offence."

"None taken," said Connie. "I was daydreaming of my lovely James." (Next day she told me she had wondered what "gregarious" meant but realised it was not the time to ask.)

"And when I got back," I resumed, "I went straight into that wretched meeting of Brian's and I buzzed you as soon as I escaped. So when did we hatch this little plan?" At this point, I regret to say, I took the opportunity to repay poor Fran for the sarcasm she had inflicted on me. "Did I perhaps foresee what you were going to say to me this morning and prearrange with Connie what I wanted her to say?"

Fran had no reply. She simply sat there looking from one of us to the other. Connie, I could see, was bursting to ask me what all this was about, but I motioned her to keep quiet. Remembering what I had told Fran about the effect on women once sex had taken place, I decided to offer yet further proof. "Connie," I said, "tell Fran what you would do for me."

"Oh, Fran," she sighed happily. "I'd do anything for James, anything he wanted."

"Connie, stand up," I said rudely. Instantly she jumped to her feet. "Stand on one leg. Put your left index finger in your right ear. Stick your tongue out at Fran." As these orders met with immediate and unquestioning compliance, Fran's look of bewildered horror intensified. As the final clincher I tried to think of something as un-Connie-like as possible. "Hum the national anthem".

She did it. I took pity and stopped her after the first couple of bars. I could see I had made my point. "Sorry, Connie," I apologised. "I hope I'll never ask you to do anything so silly again, but I had to make Fran understand how things are."

"That's all right, James. You know there's nothing I wouldn't do for you."

"Well," I suggested, making a more sensible and reasonable demand this time, "in that case perhaps you'd better go to the cooler and get Fran a glass of water, I think she needs it."

While Connie was gone poor Fran opened and closed her mouth once or twice but no words escaped her. Connie returned with the water and I thanked her and asked her to go back to work.

Fran took a sip. It seemed to settle her slightly.

"So it's true," she finally whispered. "You did it. The way I feel about you — you did it." There was a note of anger in her voice now.

"Not on purpose," I replied. "I had no idea it was happening. I never meant it."

She ignored me. "What should I do? What can I do? Should I go to a doctor? Or the police? Yes, what do you think of that, James? Shouldn't I go to the police?"

When I had been planning this conversation during Brian's meeting I had stupidly failed to anticipate Fran's scepticism, but I had foreseen that she would be angry and might even think I was such a menace to pure womanhood that I needed to be dealt with somehow by the authorities. And maybe, I had thought, she would be right. I had no idea what the police would make of it but I had decided to leave it to her.

"All right, Fran," I said quietly. "If you think that's for the best I'm not going to argue. And maybe the doctors will find some antidote to the serum."

There followed an immense pause. Once or twice Fran opened her mouth to speak, then changed her mind. Feeling that my fate was in her hands, I patiently awaited her decision. Gradually, her anxious expression faded into something altogether different, as if she were trying to deal with the problem by distancing herself from it and thinking about it more abstractly. When she finally spoke her air was one of calm reflection.