Alice Hartley‘s Happiness. Philippa Gregory

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      ‘Miranda!’ Charles said through clogged lips.

      It was enough! It would have been enough for any woman of spirit. Alice slid over to the window and raised the lower half. She tumbled Charles’s clothes out into the darkened garden. The book by his bedside, the bedside reading lamp. She was sorry that the bedside table was too big, but the rug beneath the bed rolled up and tumbled out easily. Each one of the drawers from the chest of drawers fitted lengthwise as if they had been specifically designed to fling from windows into the silent night.

      Charles in the bed was far away. Michael in the van was dozing with weariness, waking only once to gaze upwards, bemused, as a bedside lamp and three drawers fell lightly through the moonlight to smash into the flowerbeds of the front garden. Only Alice, with a peaceful, satisfied smile on her face, knew that the spare bedroom was as derelict and bare as the rest of the house which Charles had once called home.

      She crept downstairs again and closed the front door softly behind her, then she hitched up her flowing skirts and climbed into the driver’s cab beside Michael.

      He came to with a start. ‘Where can I take you, Mrs Hartley?’ he asked.

      Alice lay back and closed her eyes. ‘Let’s go to your place,’ she said silkily. ‘I want to know you, Michael. I want to plunge into your deepest essences.’

      

      Michael was not precisely a virgin. He had, for instance, been to bed with three girls. One in the third term of his first year when the combination of hot sun and unexpectedly potent lager had numbed Michael’s nerves and her resistance; one in the first term of his second year after the excitement of a dress rehearsal of Measure for Measure; and one in the second term because she was new to the Theatre Players and mistook him for someone important. On each occasion Michael had suffered from that common scourge of young Englishmen which is caused by insufficient action and excessive imagination. The ladies, of course, had suffered also.

      Weeks, indeed months of celibacy had not quietened Michael’s over-active libido and from the moment he had seen Mrs Hartley’s white knee, white thigh and dark (but surely it couldn’t have been?) he had been in a state of sexual arousal so extreme that he had found the strength to hold his end of the wardrobe when Alice had dropped hers. When he learned he was to take her and the furniture to some unknown destination he was in a fever of lust. Not that he desired to do anything with, or to, Alice Hartley.

      Oh no.

      Michael was desperate to get back to his own bed to enjoy the thought of that white knee, white thigh and darker, darker, darker – perhaps it really was!

      But when Alice leaned back and shut her eyes and asked to go to his place, Michael lost all desire and nearly fainted with fear.

      His bedsitting-room was in a purpose-built student hall of residence not far from the stripped shell which had once been the Hartleys’ house. Michael drove with manic concentration, partly because he was afraid of the height and weight of the vehicle and the way Professor Hartley’s furniture shifted when they went around corners; but also because driving helped him to keep his imagination from the question of what Mrs Hartley meant by wanting to plunge into his deepest essences. At her age, she surely couldn’t mean…but perhaps she did?

      Michael eased the van to a standstill and switched off the engine. The big vehicle shuddered. Alice lifted her head and opened her dark eyes.

      ‘Take me,’ she said.

      Michael wound down the window, furiously rotating the handle in error for the door handle. Alice smiled mysteriously, the smile of a woman who is flowing with deeper forces than any mere man could comprehend. She opened the door her side and dropped down to the ground. After a moment’s thought she reached inside the cab and pulled out the djellaba and college scarf so despised by the abandoned Professor. Wrapping the djellaba around her head and the scarf around her mouth she followed Michael up the echoing well of stairs, down the fluorescent-lit corridors to the doorway to his room, and inside.

      ‘It’s not much,’ Michael started nervously, indicating the cramped single bed and the small desk. On the narrow window-sill stood a lone carton of date-expired milk and a solitary pot of decaying yoghurt.

      ‘Do you have music?’ Alice asked. Her voice was slurred, deeper. She seemed taller.

      Michael gave a little whimper of apprehension and fell back on the bed, pressing, as he did, the play button on his little cassette player. The tinny sound of folk music filled the silent room and once again, for the second time that evening, Alice rotated slowly in the sensuous steps of the Dance of the Seven Veils.

      But what a change in the attention of the audience!

      Michael was transfixed, his mouth wide open, the round lenses of his glasses misting up as his little panting breaths condensed on the glass. Alice, casting a languorous sideways glance over her shoulder, saw the colour drain from his face, and then saw him flush pink as a rose as she tossed aside another multicoloured scarf to lie in a heap in the corner.

      Michael gulped. Nothing like this had ever happened in his life before. He had never even heard of anything like this ever happening to anyone before. He had never even read about it in books ever.

      He did not know it was the Dance of the Seven Veils – if pressed for a name he would have thought it was the Dance of the One Hundred and Forty-Two Veils, as Alice Hartley spun around faster and faster, and scarves flew from her as if torn away by centrifugal force, until she was dancing in the centre of his room surrounded by a hailstorm of rainbow silks, wearing nothing but her kaftan which she slowly undid at the neck and let drop and drop and drop over her grand white shoulders, her jogging warm breasts, her rounded belly, her proud broad hips, and her dark…her dark…her dark – it really was!

      Michael Coulter pitched head first into his pillow and let out a despairing wail: ‘Oh God! Too soon again!’

      A younger woman (or one with somewhere else to go) might have flounced from the room; but Alice did not flounce.

      A woman with higher expectations would have been angry; but Alice had been married for years and was inured to sexual disappointment.

      She excavated Michael’s tearful face from his pillow, she stripped him, as efficient as an old-fashioned ward sister before the NHS reforms. She laid him on his back, spread-eagled and spent, and then with two skilled hands she plunged up to her elbows into his essences.

      Alice Hartley had a small peculiarity – which Michael, despite his dazed and delirious state, could not help noticing. She seemed to have some especial use for his essences; for just when he arrived once more at crisis point, she arranged matters in such a way that The Phallus (which Michael knew familiarly as ‘Blinkie’) was between her encouraging hands, and then she retreated to the corner where his little basin stood, her hands cupped before her as if she were transferring a rare and precious tropical fish from one tank to another. Then Michael heard the noise of her briskly slapping cream into her face and neck.

      Michael was a third-year student in the English Literature department – naturally his reading was superficial and scanty. He had no idea that semen is said to be a remarkably efficacious anti-wrinkle cream. He had no idea that one reason for Alice’s loudly expressed delight was that she thought she had found an inexhaustible supply.

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