She pressed her advantage eagerly. ‘How about tomorrow morning?’
‘All right.’
‘I’ll see you after church. Say twelve noon?’
‘All right,’ said Boy.
As Woody was walking Bella home through Hyde Park, to a friend’s flat in South Kensington, she kissed him.
He had not done this since Joanne died. At first he froze. He liked Bella a lot: she was the smartest girl he had met since Joanne. And the way she had clung to him while they were slow-dancing had let him know he could kiss her if he wanted to. All the same he had been holding back. He kept thinking about Joanne.
Then Bella took the initiative.
She opened her mouth and he tasted her tongue, but that only made him think of Joanne kissing him that way. It was only two and a half years since she had died.
His brain was forming words of polite rejection when his body took over. He was suddenly consumed with desire. He began to kiss her back hungrily.
She responded eagerly to his excess of passion. She took both his hands and put them on her breasts, which were large and soft. He groaned helplessly.
It was dark and he could hardly see but he realized, by the half-smothered sounds coming from the surrounding vegetation, that there were numerous couples doing similar things nearby.
She pressed her body against his, and he knew she could feel his erection. He was so excited he felt he would ejaculate any second. She seemed as madly aroused as he was. He felt her unbuttoning his pants with frantic fingers. Her hands were cool on his hot penis. She eased it out of his clothing, then, to his surprise and delight, she knelt down. As soon as her lips closed over the head, he spurted uncontrollably into her mouth. She sucked and licked feverishly as he did so.
When the climax was over she continued to kiss it until it softened. Then she gently put it away and stood up.
‘That was exciting,’ she whispered. ‘Thank you.’
He had been about to thank her. Instead, he put his arms around her and pulled her close. He felt so grateful to her that he could have wept. He had not realized how badly he needed a woman’s affection tonight. Some kind of shadow had been lifted from him. ‘I can’t tell you . . .’ he began, but he could not find words to explain how much it meant to him.
‘Then don’t,’ she said. ‘I know, anyway. I could feel it.’ They walked to her building. At the door he said: ‘Can we—’ She put a finger on his lips to silence him. ‘Go and win the war,’ she said.
Then she went inside.
When Daisy went to a Sunday service, which was not often, she now avoided the elite churches of the West End, whose congregations had snubbed her, and instead caught the Tube to Aldgate and attended the Calvary Gospel Hall. The doctrinal differences were wide, but they did not matter to her. The singing was better in the East End.
She and Lloyd arrived separately. People in Aldgate knew who she was, and they liked having a rogue aristocrat sitting on one of their cheap seats; but it would have been pushing their tolerance too far for a married-and-separated woman to walk in on the arm of her paramour. Ethel’s brother Billy had said: ‘Jesus did not condemn the adulteress, but he did tell her to sin no more.’
During the service she thought about Boy. Had he really meant last night’s conciliatory words, or were they just the softness of the drunken moment? Boy had even shaken hands with Lloyd as he left. Surely that meant forgiveness? But she told herself not to let her hopes rise. Boy was the most completely self-absorbed person she had ever known, worse than his father or her brother Greg.
After church Daisy often went to Eth Leckwith’s house for Sunday dinner, but today she left Lloyd to his family and hurried away.
She returned to the West End and knocked on the door of her husband’s house in Mayfair. The butler showed her into the morning room.
Boy came in shouting. ‘What the hell is this?’ he roared, and he threw a newspaper at her.
She had seen him in this mood plenty of times, and she was not afraid of him. Only once had he raised a hand to strike her. She had seized a heavy candlestick and threatened to bop him.’ It had not happened again.
Though not scared, she was disappointed. He had been in such a good mood last night. But perhaps he might still listen to reason.
‘What has happened to displease you?’ she said calmly.
‘Look at that bloody paper.’
She bent and picked it up. It was today’s edition of the
LUCKY LADDIE WORTH 28 COAL MINERS
