I have to admit our sexual experiments were funny to me at first. There’s not a lot of sexual pleasure to be got from hopping shouting around your bedroom having failed to wallop your wife’s bottom and whacked your own leg instead. I had no instinct for it. Eventually though I was able to play the cruel Sir Charles with reasonable skill. A bit like faking an orgasm.
Ever since we’d been together Jenny had a fantasy about me watching one of my friends fuck her. There were a thousand scenarios in her little head and scarcely one in mine. I think I used up all my stories while I was working. I didn’t dream either. I needed a rest from tale spinning at the end of the day. But I did my best. I hated to disappoint her.
I had an idea of the scenario she planned one evening when Rex turned up holding a bottle of Algerian red in one hand and his dripping cap and overcoat in the other, beaming. “Hi!” A wild giggle at his own physical discomfort. Charming. On his best and happiest behaviour. He embraced us in his soft gigantic arms. He had some meetings with Universal Features and wanted to stay for a bit. I thought the evening was to be a celebration of our reborn friendship. Jenny was all over him, flirting like a fag hag, bringing Rex out all atwitter. So we dined. While I washed up, she whispered in his ear.
It turned out Jenny loved threesomes but mostly with her looking on frigging herself blind while waiting to get fucked by the least exhausted bloke. Mostly that was me, as Rex jerked off. That image is no more appealing to me than to you. After three or four nights and days of this, I realised that Rex was getting most of his buzz from knowing Chick had no suspicion of what he was up to.
Of course, to add to his own wicked relish Rex told Chick what he’d done with us. He had to. He never could resist a good story, particularly if he was telling it. Our few nights of passionless sex had become a means of manipulating Chick. This time Chick cut us.
Inevitably Jenny and I grew further apart as our games got more fantastic. Rex had already been through all that with Chick in Paris. Real-life fantasies are distractions for a working writer. Years before Rex told me that himself. “It’s as bad as going to law. The story starts to take over. Like falling in love. All sentimentality and melodrama. The scenarios are repetitive, conventional. All they offer are the comforts of genre.” He was right. Sex games are more boring than an Agatha Christie novel.
Anyway Jenny, despite our investment in special clothing and sex aids, wasn’t getting a big enough buzz out of my efforts. It’s like horror movies or superhero comics, you either stop and give them a rest or you have to keep heightening the action. Even if the games didn’t bore me, our widening circle of acquaintances did. I wasn’t finding enough time alone. Individuals, couples, whole fucking communes got involved. If they gave me a good paragraph or two, I wouldn’t have minded so much, but there was an infantile sameness about their scenarios. Jenny and I were driven further apart by what the courts call intimacy. I tried to get to see Rex and Chick on their own, desperately needing to find out how they had rescued themselves from the crack of the crop, the smell of damp leather, the spell of repetition. Did you just grow out of it? Sometimes Jenny seemed to be flagging until some fresh variation on a familiar theme perked her up again. She was a natural addict. I’ve never been seriously addicted to anything. So I started trying to get her off the habit. It didn’t work. She made excuses, started doing stuff in secret. I hate ambiguity in my day-to-day life. There’s enough in my work. A writer needs routines and certainties. What can I say? As well as losing real intimacy with old friends, I lost it with Jenny. In a half-arsed attempt to restore our earlier closeness, she told me some of her new adventures. Then I got hooked for a while. I started pumping her for more revelations. She owed me that, I decided. They added nothing but did become pretty chilling. The seduction of underage girls. Things my friends liked to do. It amazed me how so many women took the odd rape for granted. Too many secrets revealed. Friendships frayed. Rex came back in the picture. I moved out.
I took my kids, whom I’d been missing anyway, on a long trip round the USA. It made us feel better. To my relief we grew back together. Feeling my old self I got home, bought a short lease on a little flat in Fulham, just when Notting Hill turned into a gentrified suburb. I saw enough of Jenny to know it was thoroughly over. I didn’t like what she’d done to herself. She’d dyed her hair bright blond and her brown eyes had a vaguely dazed, mirrorlike quality, as if they only reflected and no longer saw anything. She’d lost her sense of humour, too, and was into various odd relationships, still searching for the good life. When I shifted the last of my stuff she made a halfhearted attempt to patch things up. She wanted to have a baby, she said, and get back into our old domestic routine. Even while she proposed this deal, a bloke I vaguely knew was sleeping upstairs in what had been our bed, where once, like Proust, I’d done most of my writing. From being a place of concentration in which I conceived stories it had become a place of distraction, where real stories died. I said she could keep the place. All she had to do was pay the mortgage.
“But I love you.” She wept. She made an awkward attempt to remind me of the old days. “I love just lying in your arms at night while you tell me a story.”
I was sad. “It’s too late, Jenny.” Those stories were over.
I went up to Windermere, phoned Rex and Chick, but Chick was frosty. Did I know I had almost broken them up? I apologized. I said how much I regretted what had happened. Rex, just as distant and haughty, put the phone down on me. I saw them in Kendal once or twice and in Grasmere. They wouldn’t speak to me. Once, over his shoulder, Rex gave me the most peculiar leer. Did he wish we were still deceiving Chick? It made me shudder. Was something wrong with him?
Of course I longed to be back with Helena but she’d settled down with a jolly Scottish chef and was doing her best work. Why would she want to change that?
Even though our pillow talk inspired a couple of shorts, I really hated having been part of Jenny’s daisy chain. Some of those people I never wanted to see again, others I needed distance from; I wasn’t ready to see Charlie Ratz or Jonny Fowler yet. Pete was still missing in France, presumed dead. I gave up any interest in
Later at the bar Rex told me Chick blamed me for the infamous “seduction.” At that idea we continued to laugh for the rest of the day, until the next, when Chick turned up, glaring when he saw us, and Lucinda, nearly six feet herself, took him in hand as well. “It’s all over,” she said. “If you’re going to blame anyone, blame that poor, barmy bitch Jenny. She got you all involved in her folly and now look at you.” And when Chick grumbled that Rex was still seeing Jenny, which surprised me, Lu said: “Well, she’s poison as far as I can tell, and he doesn’t need her now he has Mike back.” Chick teared up then. He told her I was the best friend Rex had ever had but I had betrayed them both. Which again I admitted. And the following weekend Lu and I went up and stayed with them. On our way home she said: “You two could make Jeremiah roll about on the floor laughing himself sick.”
I didn’t know why Rex went on seeing Jenny, unless he simply enjoyed wounding Chick. He still had that cruel streak in him. Chick and I talked about it. Chick thought it had to be directed at him, too. He guessed Jenny was a substitute for me, especially when Rex dropped Jenny so soon after we were reconciled. She still phoned him.
I saw Jenny myself a few times after that. She seemed more her old self in some ways. She’d had twins and was living with her mother in Worthing, on the Sussex coast. She had the washed-out look of so many single mothers, said she was happy, if poor, and even suggested my “sexual conservatism” had dulled me down. Next time I bumped into her in Kensington High Street she was again pale, overpainted, dyed up. She looked as if all the vitality had been sucked from her. I thought she was doing junk. Her eyes were back to blank. Was she living in London? Did she have someone? She laughed and looked even more devitalized. “None of your business,” she said. I couldn’t argue with that.
Of course, I was curious to know what she and Rex had been up to. I guessed she hadn’t accepted that he’d dropped her. At a party in Brighton a year or two later she looked worse than ever, clinging to Rupert Herbert, one of those new Low Tories on the
