Chapter 24: Whatever you want

Wasting no time I told the twins, who were disappointed but instantly compliant, to get dressed and catch a train back to Cambridge. They were a little consoled when I told them I should be glad to see them in London this coming Saturday. Then I rang Wendy and told her what I had decided and that I should be late home. After this there was nothing for it but to take the now naked Fran, Connie and Gabby to bed and fuck the daylights out of them.

Then I returned to the sitting room and got down to business. First I rang Yvonne, for whom I had special plans. After that I drew out the list of girls and telephone numbers that Wendy had kindly typed out the night before and worked my way through, again getting an almost immediate reply each time. I told each girl to clear her diary for the end of the following week; I would give further details, I promised, nearer the time. The overwhelming response was one of relief to have a definite date; waiting for the intervening ten days would be agony, they told me in their various ways, but at least now they knew when they would be seeing me. One girl, Felicity, had a distressing weeping fit in which she sobbed that she had been terrified since we spoke the night before that I might never contact her again. She kept apologising for being so silly and would pull herself together for a moment only to break down again. She sounded frighteningly vulnerable and utterly helpless in the face of what I had done to her.

Felicity's tears had brought on a severe attack of conscience and when I got to the end of the list I rang her back to tell her again that we should see each other soon and to say how sorry I was to have caused her such upset. This attempt at reassurance served only to set her off again. "Oh, no, James, it's not your fault," she wailed. "It's only me being silly. It's just that I can't believe how lucky I am to have found you and if, if..." she paused to summon the strength to continue, "if anything bad happened and I couldn't see you, everything would just be so empty and pointless and the idea of it scares me so much I can't think straight and I just well up and —"

Fitting action to words she broke down again. I looked helplessly at Fran, who had emerged from the bedroom half-way through my telephone marathon wearing nothing but a blissed-out smile and the customary accessory of cum dripping down her legs. With a vacantly happy expression she had watched me make my calls but now, as I attempted to console Felicity, she began to look more concerned.

By the time I had managed to stem Felicity's tears and get her off the phone I felt the need to unburden myself to Fran.

"Poor girl," I said. "I know you could only hear one end of that, but..."

"I got the gist," she said. "Remember, I've got some inkling how she feels. It's awful, James, you've no idea how bad it is. For days I couldn't think about anything except how much I loved you and needed you."

It was only when she uttered these words that I realised with dismay and remorse that in my absorption with my own concerns I had not given a thought to the way my poor Fran must have suffered between her initial exposure to FUCK and our confrontation in the office a full six days later.

"Fran, I'm so sorry," I said guiltily. "You must have been so miserable and confused."

She looked surprised. "Confused, yes, you're right about that, but not miserable," she replied. "At least, not at first. To begin with I thought it was just a mix-up." And so Fran told me her tale.

As I briefed her on the report that day in the office she had been surprised to find that her natural sympathy for my bereavement grew into an unaccountable and almost irresistible urge to throw her arms around me and cover me in kisses. But after I had removed my distracting physical presence she found it easier to concentrate on work and made some solid progress on the report. Once she returned to the flat, however, she could not get me off her mind. Thinking she must be overtired, she skipped supper and was in bed by nine-thirty, early even for her.

"But that was when things got really strange," she went on. "I had this dream that you and I were making amazing love. I'd never known anything like it; the feelings were far stronger than they'd ever been with a real boy, and in the end the climax was just shattering and I found myself awake in bed, covered in sweat and with this wonderful uplifted feeling. I just lay there for ages, savouring it and thinking how glad I was that Gabby was at Manlio's because I was sure I must have called out your name and it would have been hard to explain."

"But didn't it trouble you," I asked, "that of all the men you could have dreamt about, you chose me?"

She hesitated. "Well, I —" she began, then thought better of it. "Why do you say that?" she asked eventually.

"Fran, look at me," I replied, rather irritated at having to spell out the obvious. "I'm twice your age, I'm carrying far too much weight and hardly any hair, and on top of everything I'm married. Do you really think I'm a likely candidate for a sexy dream?"

Fran spoke slowly in reply, choosing her words with obvious deliberation. "At the time, as I lay there that night, you seemed the handsomest and most desirable man in the world. It was only the next morning, as I remembered how wonderful it had been and wished I had someone I could tell about it, that it even crossed my mind that a confidante would be surprised at my choice of dream lover. So, yes, then I did puzzle over why most women wouldn't find you as sexy as I did, just as I couldn't see why it had taken me so long to notice it." Having said this, she sighed with relief as if not having fancied me from the start were some shameful secret she had had to steel herself to own up to.

"How did you account for it, then?"

She smiled. "With a bit of amateur psychoanalysis," she said. "I thought, first of all, it's natural that a young woman should want a man, and second, it's also natural that a lovely kind man like James should be on my mind when he's suffered a family tragedy and needs my help. So, I thought, these two perfectly natural things must have got somehow jumbled up in my brain. But really, they're quite separate so I'll deal with them separately and everything will be all right. So when I got to work I got busy with the report and when I had a break I rang Gabby and told her I'd changed my mind about that blind date."

This was news to me. "Blind date?"

"Yes. An old friend of Manlio's from Spain is a journalist and he'd just come to work in his paper's London office. Gabby and Manlio were taking him out for a meal and she asked me to make up the foursome. She kept telling me he was single so it was obvious what she had in mind, but I felt awkward about it so I said no. But once I'd decided that the dream was nature's way of telling me I needed a boyfriend, I thought, 'Why not?' and I agreed to join them on the Friday night.

"Things weren't too bad when I was in the office because although I kept thinking about you it just spurred me on to keep working on the report. 'He's relying on me, ' I told myself. I kept drifting off into little fantasies about what you'd say when you got back to the office — would you give me a thank-you peck on the cheek? — and I tried to work out what I might say or do in response, silly schoolgirlish stuff like that. But then I'd tell myself how disappointed you'd be if I didn't finish the report, and that would mean there'd be no chance of the thank-you peck, so I'd buckle down. So the office was bearable, but at the flat on Thursday evening I didn't know where to put myself. Gabby was at Manlio's again so there was no one to distract me and in the end I just sat there thinking how lovely you were until it was time to go to bed.

"And James, darling, that was the night you just blew me away. As soon as I dozed off I had a dream that started where the night before had left off, and all night through I had one amazing dream after another. I'd never imagined that sex could be like that. In the end I hardly knew whether I was asleep or awake or whether you were real or my imagination. I'm still not sure how much sleep I got but in the morning I felt fantastic and I had a smile on my face that wouldn't go away; at the office people kept asking me what I was looking so cheerful about.

"I kept telling myself that you were happily married to Wendy and wouldn't be interested in me and that the whole thing was some kind of delayed schoolgirl crush and that I shouldn't feel bad about it because that evening I'd meet this man Jose and he'd be so attractive I'd get you out of my system and everything would be straightened out."

"But he turned out to be geeky and weedy?" I hazarded.

"Oh, no, not at all. He was lovely. He was very good-looking in a Spanish sort of way, with beautiful piercing eyes and he was sharp and funny and I could see he really liked me."

"Sounds like perfect boyfriend material," I retorted with a touch of petulance that, in all the circumstances, was wholly uncalled-for.

"Exactly," she agreed, "which is why it really worried me that no matter how hard I tried I couldn't muster the least interest. I even let him kiss me in the hope that it would start some sort of response but not a flicker: I just wished it were you. In the end I made some excuse and left them at the restaurant and went home. I put off going to bed as long as I could because I knew what would happen and I was right: it was just like the night before, maybe even more so.

"By this time I was getting really worried, and to make matters worse it was a Saturday so I had no work to distract me. I remembered that back home I used to go for long walks if something was bothering me; I'd never tried it in London but I thought it had to be better than staying cooped up in the flat so off I went.

"I didn't have any plan. I just headed off randomly and kept away from main roads as much as I could and finally I found myself in this big park with people wandering about enjoying the sun so I sat down and watched them for a bit.

"You know, back home it always puzzled me when I heard anyone say that you're never so much alone as when you're surrounded by people but it's true, isn't it, darling? I mean, there I was, in one of the biggest cities on earth with people all around me getting on with their lives and paying me no attention at all. It seemed like I was on a different planet to everybody else. I'd never felt so lost and isolated in my life. When someone suddenly said 'Hello' to me I nearly fell off the seat, it was such a shock.