The story she had told the girl was completely true. The only lie (or was it a lie? How could Jean be sure?) being that its ending was not quite as she saw the climax in reality. Monique was expendable… wasn't she? Or was it, after all, Michael who could be dispensed with once she and Monique had their relationship properly established.
For a brief, giddy moment, Jean had the sensation that all this was nothing but a day-dream — a sheer fantasy. It couldn't be real! She couldn't be propositioning this sweet young girl as if she were a completely amoral libertine! In a moment she would sit up in bed and the day would begin again… It must be a dream, it must be!
And then Monique asked if this really was the only way they could be sure of continuing together, and Jean heard herself saying: “Yes, it is, darling” and she knew that it really was happening. It really was! She wanted suddenly to pull back from the machinations she'd set in motion, terribly afraid of their ultimate consequences. It wasn't too late — she could easily tell Monique that she'd just been teasing, that the whole thing was nothing but a silly joke…
“All right, then', Monique's voice came clear and decisively to her ear. “You're not really asking so very much of me, Jean, are you? And I told you before that I'd do anything for you, didn't I? It's a small price to pay for your love, my darling — to have to share you and give myself to Michael… I'll do it!”
Jean could scarcely believe her ears. Monique was actually saying that she'd go through with her plan! Then it was all real, after all — not a dream, not a fantastic wish conjured from her imagination.
She hugged the girl more tightly to her body. “Oh, my darling; my precious!” she cried. “You won't regret it — I promise you, you won't regret it. I'll do everything I can to make you happy, I swear I will!”
To her surprise, Jean realised that she was crying again. Tears of relief and gladness were streaming from her eyes, making Monique's cheek wet and salty. The girl must care so very deeply for her, Jean thought with wonderment. She must love her with a greater intensity at this moment than Jean herself had felt in her entire life to agree such an outlandish proposal.
They fell back onto the bed together, Monique's body covering Jean's. Jean smoothed the girl's short hair tenderly, still overwhelmed by the strength of Monique's love for her.
If only Michael felt so passionately towards her. If only he cared a tenth as much for her as this precious, beautiful young girl!
Jean sighed with self-pity, then realised that in a relatively short time — once she had succeeded in re- opening his eyes to her sexual attraction — her husband might be as demonstrative to her as Monique. She closed her eyes, savouring the blissful thought. That would be worth everything, she mused. All the anxiety, all the unhappiness of the past years.
She let her eyes close, content for the time being merely to hold Monique's warm flesh against her own. There would be plenty of time for them to continue their love-making. All the time in the world…
PART TWO. Michael
1
He pressed his foot down on the accelerator, sending the car in a fierce forward thrust down the dual carriageway. The 30 m.p.h. speed limit ended here, and Michael shifted into top gear and let the Vauxhall's speedometer creep up steadily to the 65 mark.
The green verge and the evenly spaced trees flashed past, the flatness of the surrounding countryside blurring into a meaningless frozen landscape. He kept his eyes on the straight grey road ahead — watching as the bonnet of the car greedily swallowed up the tarmac.
Michael Cameron was a large man; but his muscular body, kept in shape by regular exercise and his twice weekly tennis workouts, still retained the angular lines and the even distribution of weight of his youth. His eyes were brown, his face — now twisted into a dark scowl — normally expressed the calm, cool confidence of a man who has found his niche in life and is contented with it.
The lines of middle age were prematurely showing on his forehead and around his rather full and sensuous lips. He was a man who had trained himself neither to feel or reveal emotion: he dealt with crises in his business and domestic life with calm, methodical deliberation, scarcely ever allowing himself to weaken and display signs of involvement with his associates.
In the environment of his office and in the close, inbred atmosphere of his club, he was recognised as an almost too typical example of the English businessman. Moderately successful, assured of a comfortable pension at the end of his working life, commuting by car each day from his semi-detached Surrey house to the firm of London stockbrokers in which he held a fairly responsible position; married with a quietly spoken daughter who lived most of the year in a reasonably-priced boarding school…
People scarcely gave him a second glance. With his rolled-up umbrella, his anonymous pin-striped suit and his dark bowler, Michael Cameron merged into his surroundings like a lizard which is coloured a desert-grey protect it from its enemies. He was outwardly the very epitome of placid, humdrum respectability.
But lately there had been a gradual change in his personality, a shift in his outlook on life. It was still scarcely apparent to his business colleagues, though people who knew him on a social level had remarked upon his abruptness, his frequent bad temper — and his highly changeable moods.
The simple reason for Michael's discontent was that he had reached the age of 35. In itself, the fact meant nothing. He still had many years of relative youth left to him; he had an assured, safe future ahead — and outwardly he had every reason to be satisfied with his life.
And yet the thought had struck him a few months ago that none of his secret dreams and ambitions as a boy had been realised. None of them. He had settled for an unimaginative, pedantic existence: burying himself in a small country town, letting his life revolve around church fetes, visits to the repertory company, whist drives and all the other narrow, time-consuming activities of the half-asleep minds around him.
That was the crux of the matter: he, too, had been half-asleep all these years, Michael saw. Doing all the “right” things like getting married and working hard at a boring and increasingly tedious job. For twenty years he had spent his life like a man in a dream, while the promises he had made to himself as a youth lay forgotten in the recesses of his mind: slumbering while he wasted his good years, his vital years…
He had wanted to travel, to write, to meet exciting and creative people. He had meant to learn several languages, extend his awareness of the world.
Bitterly, Michael took the car out to the centre of the highway and overtook a lorry. As he passed it and drew back into the nearside lane, a mad urge came over him to brake suddenly, to let the lorry smash into his car and put an end to his self-pity.
His hands were damp — he gripped the steering wheel tightly, forcing his foot to remain on the accelerator. A bead of sweat trickled from his forehead into the corner of one eye and Michael blinked it away, hating himself for being so cowardly an indecisive.
The moment had passed. The moment when he might have taken the quick way out of his misery was gone — perhaps never to return. Because, as his tension slowly evaporated, Michael realised how childish and neurotic he was to think of suicide. Killing himself was the very last resort — and he hadn't yet exhausted all the possibilities of redeeming his life. Not yet.
His affair with Shirley had proved a failure, but so what? There were plenty of other women who would be willing enough to become his mistress. And he might still be able to bring himself to leave Jean…
Michael was forced to smile wryly as he reflected once more that good old sex was at the bottom of it all. The deep, ancient biological urge to fornicate! That was the root of his problem. Give him the opportunity to fuck without remorse, without guilt — and he knew that his salvation would be in sight.
Because sex represented freedom to him. Freedom to prove himself, freedom to show the world that he was an individual, a cut above the mediocre level of his snobbish, insipid neighbours. And yet, for reasons he didn't understand, Jean was unable to fulfil his need in this direction. It may have been simply that she was his lawful wife; there was no element of surprise, of titivation in their relationship. There never had been, Michael recalled. From the very first, Jean and he had been the most perfunctory of lovers — rather wooden, unimaginative in their
