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MENOMADNESS (extract)
 Approaching fifty, May Duggan was taken aback by her vigorous sexual response. At a time of her life when most other women bowed to the inevitability of warm flushes and waning libido, by some strange quirk of nature May seemed to have been given an additional blast of hormones. She became prey to sexual fantasy. It took very little to set her off. A fleeting glimpse of a young cadet’s cheeky little buttocks encased in tight pants was enough to feed her lust for a week, by which time some other eroticism became fuel for her lascivious imagination. She was a woman of Brunhildan proportions – breasts, belly and buttocks formed after the fashion of a more voluptuous age. Her own milky reflection dimly seen in the pocked mirror over the washstand was an add incitement. She began to explore her body in a way previously foreign to her. Sometimes it was the plush feeling of her inner thigh, which mesmerised her. She would stroke her satiny flank, imagining how it would feel to a lover’s hand. With fluctuating hormone levels, her breasts became tender and bursting as overripe mangoes. Palpating her nipples lazily, she would stare down at them, livid and erect, and wish it were anatomically possible for her to taste them as her husband and children had. It was as if a fire had ignited in her bloodstream. She accepted that her metabolism was disturbed. She waited for it to right itself.
She took to wearing lighter garments and impulsively flinging wide the windows. But, as the weeks passed, she became so highly charged that even the rub of cotton against her flesh was a sensuous delight. One particularly humid night in June, while her husband lay, an inert lump, in their featherbed, she restlessly threw back the covers and stole out to the wooded slopes behind their house, avid for the cool currents of air on her bare skin. The thought of discovery heightened her excitement and she quivered expectantly, naked except for a pair of wellington boots. Sounds distorted by the night startled her. A wood pigeon rising with clashing wings form its perch, the jeering call of a nighthawk from the topmost tree. On hearing voices nearby, she stealthily made her way between the boles of trees, always within earshot of her unseen companions. She shadowed them to the outer perimeters of the sylvan mass and crouched, hidden by an overhanging fern, as they passed close by. She felt the ground tremble beneath their tramping feet, heard the staccato snapping of twigs grow faint as they drew further away. Careless of encounter, she openly travelled home by the main track, a pale blob in boots, an ageing wood nymph. She crooned a song. Her hormones were in riot.
THE HOUSE (extract)
‘Only two thousand pounds for a house like that,’ my mother would say, casting a vengeful look at Father lost to the world in a book, ‘But we couldn’t afford it, so your father said. It’s all I’ve ever heard since the day I married him.’
And my father, wincing as the familiar words cut through to his subconscious, would slink lower in his armchair and fix his eyes more determinedly on the printed page. With a sigh, I would take up a book myself in defence although I knew the gesture to be futile. Once mother was in the toils of her house demon it was impossible for anyone to remain uninvolved for long.
Ever since I could remember the house had been a bone of contention between my parents. As a small child, hearing mother’s continual references to this house, it seemed to me it was the house she never had, the house of her dreams, the one that was almost in her grasp and in which we would all be living now ‘if it wasn’t for your father!’
Over the years we became all too familiar with this refrain. Father, she insisted, had held her back just as he had done on so many other occasions in the past when she had tried to make something better of their lives. From her we got the impression that life in those far-off days had been a series of wonderful missed opportunities because of him. ‘He had no vision,’ she told us often, ‘God bless the man, but he could never see beyond the nose on his face.’ She, on the other hand, she claimed, had an innate ability to recognise the vast potential of any given situation and the courage to follow through. The house was a once-in-a-lifetime chance the pair of them had missed.
All of us knew the story by heart.
The house had belonged to an old schoolfriend of mother’s, Nan Morrissey, who finding herself suddenly widowed was forced to sell and offered it out of friendship to mother for a mere two thousand pounds. ‘Only two thousand!’ mother would cry despairingly, and her disappointment, keen as ever after all this time, became ours, for although none of us could have been very old at the time and had no recollection of ever actually being in the house, she painted such a vivid, heart-stirring image of what might have been that we experienced the same sense of loss every time. I have often thought since that no children of our first parents could have felt more cheated on learning about the Garden of Eden than we did in those days on hearing about that house.
Top Girl (extract)
Selena held up her favourite suit against her and wondered if she could possibly wear it one more time. One last time, she corrected herself, before her swelling figure proclaimed to the world her undoubted pregnancy. She was at the stage when she could still fasten her skirts before midday but, by evening, her stomach asserted its right to blossom independently. It had become a game of mix’n match. Extending her skirts with pins and bridging the gap with blouson tops. Fortunately the prevailing fashion was with her. The layered look was in. Even figure-conscious teenagers had adopted it. Yes, she thought, I will wear my favourite suit today, regardless of consequences. All too soon she would be one of that vast, invisible army of pregnant women, dependent on acts of kindness from total strangers, ignored by men and pandered to by husbands. And not only that, the thought continued, one of the vast army of the unemployed.
But even if her condition, when discovered, had not carried with it the threat of dismissal she had no wish to don maternity wear before time. All sail and no ballast, she told herself, like women ten weeks pregnant with barely discernible bumps rushing into sensible shoes and voluminous dresses, near-sightedly trodding ground as though childbirth was imminent. If only, she thought, someone would design intelligent outfits for mothers-to-be rather than winsome smocked garments more suited to corpulent infants. Surely pregnancy did not have to signify an end to good taste. She sighed at the thought of being condemned for the next five months to a wardrobe of floppy bows and page-boy collars. Her figure was gone, she thought, not her mind.
It could only happen in Nerja (extract)
Three girls away on holiday together worked out better than two, especially when one was disappearing off all the time as Millie was. In the beginning her friends Carol and Sandy put it down to being away from home and parental supervision but were soon attributing it instead to the magical atmosphere of the Spanish place they were staying in, to the languid impulses inspired by the hot Andelusian sun. Both had to admit its power was working on them too, at times making them act in an uninhibited, even irresponsible fashion so very different to their usual more moderate behaviour.
False Alarm
Miss Simpson’s house was set on three-quarters of an acre; a fortress surrounded by neat rows of semi-detached houses. Her family had originally owned all the land for miles about but over the years they had gradually sold it off, bit by bit, until now her house was the only one of its kind. With all the new houses springing up around her she was like a rock that has been submerged a long time and is suddenly covered in barnacles. She was accustomed to being alone and had no need of anyone. Now all this was beginning to change.
Despite her advancing years Flora Simpson was a woman who looked and was youthful. Out in all weathers, clad in loose-fitting slacks and white sneakers, the red of her Arran cardigan could be glimpsed like some exotic Nomadic bloom amidst the foliage, or blossoming suddenly at the top of a ladder hooked somewhat precariously to the gutters of the house. She had her own set of plumbing rods, something was always getting stuck in the drains for she was a good cook but a careless housekeeper. She took pride in never having to call in outside help, delighted in tackling what was regarded as the preserves of the experts. Nothing seemed beyond her. Then one afternoon while she was down the garden building a bonfire with the help of the neighbouring Rooney boys, her house was robbed and vandalised.
Among life’s big traumas Flora rated the burglary as the most disturbing since she had come across her father slumped dead in the rockery, his face pressed deep in the grape hyacinths. She had doubted she would ever get over the shock. Twenty years later the break-in relegated it to a less acute place on her emotional register. Overnight, she aged, began to doubt what formerly she had accepted unquestioningly.
The Mask
‘Well, I think it’s worth pursuing,’ Michael said stubbornly as he climbed into the big London taxi after Claire, and pulled the door shut. ‘After all, you have nothing to lose,’ he persisted, annoyed by her silence.
Claire sat apart from her husband with a slightly haunted expression on her flushed face. Stripped of all glamour with her hair scraped severely on top of her head and not even a fringe to soften the effect, the rash on her skin appeared angrier, more obvious than ever.
In the wake of a chronic skin disorder only the area about her ears remained untouched, startling white and unscarred by contrast. It was as though she took perverse satisfaction in looking her plainest, Michael thought, frowning at her profile.
As the taxi moved up Harley Street into the mainstream of early afternoon traffic, he said bitterly, ‘I would have thought you’d jump at this opportunity. From all the specialist says this new cosmetic sounds right up your alley.’
‘I would really like more time to think about it,’ Claire said, feeling she’d had enough handling for one afternoon, wanted nothing more now than to put behind her all that time spent in the specialist’s consulting room, enduring without complaint the probing and poking and endless questions. No wonder she was reluctant to commit herself to any more of it, she told herself, even if it was in her own best interests.
‘Time is exactly what we don’t have.’ She heard again that note of exasperation in his voice. ‘Have you forgotten our flight leaves at five?’ He was, she realised, very often exasperated with her these days.
‘Well, let him,’ she thought resentfully. For months he had been going on at her to visit a Harley Street skin specialist and now that she had done so, here he was again trying to bully her into doing something else about her face. In their eight years of marriage it seemed to Claire that her husband was always trying to impress his will on her, make her decisions for her.
‘They say it covers any blemish no matter how appalling,’ he gave a passable imitation of the specialist’s nasal tones then resumed his own voice. ‘Look, I just don’t get it, darling,’ he frowned. ‘We hear about this marvellous cosmetic especially designed for your sort of complaint and you say you want more time to think about it! I’ll never understand you. Anyone else would jump at the chance.’ He sighed in martyred fashion, and began drumming an impatient tattoo on the armrest.
‘Okay, maybe it’s worth a try,’ the words were finally dragged from her.
‘I should jolly well think so. You’re not exactly an oil painting these days, you know.’ Then with that added touch of cruelty she had noticed in him of late, ‘In fact you look bloody awful, if you want to know.’
Claire glared savagely at the taxi roof trying desperately to prevent the wounded tears from spilling over. Useless to say to herself, ‘I don’t care,’ or ‘What does it matter what he thinks?’ As always Michael’s criticism attacked the very structure of her femininity, mortally cracking the already thin layer of self-deception which was so vital to her survival. Increasingly, these days she found her self-image under siege, crumbling with each downgrading remark he made. ‘It’s a wonder he can bear to touch me,’ she thought in an agony of self-abasement, and it came to her now with astonishing relevance that on the infrequent occasions they made love these days, it was always in darkness.
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