Timothy Lea's Complete Confessions. Timothy Lea

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СКАЧАТЬ style="font-size:15px;">      Back to the old man again. I don’t have to be able to do the Times crossword to get the message that he is not looming very large in her legend at the moment. It would be nice to think that this probably spelled out a big welcome for my hand testing her knicker elastic but that might not be true either. I have often found that women who rabbit on like maniacs about how wonderful their husbands are become the first to ask you if you would like to see their new counterpanes. This is because they feel guilty about their adulterous desires and don’t want to commit the additional sin of blaming their innocent husbands for them. Similarly, the women who bitch about their husbands are really making them scapegoats for their own lack of guts in not having an affair. “If my husband wasn’t so pathetically jealous and old-fashioned,” they grumble to themselves, “I could have a whale of a time.” The fact is that they are usually dyed-in-the-wool Puritans who would pass out if you tweaked their suspenders coming out of a ‘War on Want’ lunch.

      Fascinating lot of old cobblers, isn’t it? No? Oh, well, I don’t blame you if you disagree with me. Any theory you have about women is unlikely to be provable in more than one case. Anyway, there we are, with Mrs. Dent flashing her tits at me and throwing in a bit of thigh for good measure and me wondering what is the best method of getting my hands on both of them. I am also wondering just how much driving Mrs. D. expects to fit into an hour’s session. I don’t mind watching the East wind turn every blade of grass on the Cromingham golf course into a hunchback, but I feel I should be doing a bit more for my money.

      “Is this what you usually do when you’re having a lesson?” I say.

      “It depends on the instructor,” she says, looking at me like Lauren Bacall used to look at Humphrey Bogart. I wait for her to eject a meaningful puff of smoke in my direction, and sure enough she does.

      “You mean that some are more easy going than others?”

      “You could put it like that. I prefer to say that some are more imaginative than others.”

      “What do you mean?” It’s always worth while asking women that when you don’t know what to say next.

      “John Williams knows that there is more to playing golf than hitting a golf ball four hundred yards. Do you know that if there’s a hint of sun, you can lie in the bottom of that bunker by the seventeenth green in a bikini?”

      “Fascinating, but what’s that got to do with learning to drive?”

      “What’s learning to drive got to do with learning to drive?” She laughs hollowly. “I came out here with my husband once when he was flogging his way round with one of his clients. You could smell him three holes away. Scared stiff that he wouldn’t put up a good show. Wanting not to appear wanting.” She laughs again. “I watched him digging a hole in the bottom of that bunker with the sweat dripping off him and his expression getting more and more racked. And do you know? Just where he was flapping away I had been lying a few days earlier with my lover. Ironic, isn’t it? I started laughing out loud and that made him furious. We had quite a row about it.”

      “What did the client do?”

      “He didn’t mind. I’m having lunch with him tomorrow.”

      “Sandwiches at the seventeenth?”

      “No. He’s staying at a hotel. You sound as if you don’t approve.”

      “I’m jealous.”

      “There’s no need to be.”

      She turns towards me and reaches up an arm to pat my cheek. That’s it! I don’t have to have a crystal ball to know what she is thinking. I bend down and kiss her and her tongue comes out like one of those curled up squeaker things that kids blow at Christmas time. At the same time her hand goes down to my fly so fast it might be tied to the top of my zipper with a piece of elastic. She is the quickest worker since God made the world without breaking into double time. I hardly have time to breathe in through the nose before her practised fingers have poured over the side of my jockey briefs like Attila the Hun and she is rummaging away like a champion shop lifter who has got her hand caught down the side of the deep freeze cabinet. Not that there is much frozen goods being displayed. That kind of thing brings me on faster than a Derby winner and I’m giving her a bit of the same before the first appreciative murmur has escaped from her throat.

      “It’s a bit cramped in here, isn’t it?” she says.

      “Yeah! I used to have a pantechnicon but I fell behind with the payments. Let’s go back to your place.”

      “I daren’t do that. I’ve got too many nosey neighbours. What about you?”

      “No dice. I’ve got the same kind of problem.” I can just see Mrs. Bendon’s face if I rolled up with this one. She would do her nut. “Come on my lap,” I murmur, helpfully.

      “I don’t like that. I can only come when I’m lying flat out.” She’s honest, isn’t she? Germaine Greer herself could not be more direct. “There’s a bunker at the fifteenth,” she goes on. “Let’s go there.”

      “Not the sixteenth?”

      “It has sentimental memories for me.”

      I would not have suspected that she was the romantic type, but there you are. As an alternative to my usual chores as an instructor a length on the links seems very attractive—but in mid-November?

      “It’s going to be a bit parky out there, isn’t it?” I say nervously.

      “I’ve already told you. Once you get out of the wind it’s alright. Look, there’s even a bit of sunshine.”

      She is right, too. A few perished shafts are breaking through the blanket of grey that has hung over my head ever since I left Liverpool Street Station.

      “O.K. Let’s give it a whirl.”

      “You needn’t sound so enthusiastic. I know some fellows who’d stay all night in an open lifeboat for a chance to hold my hand.”

      “I can believe it,” I lie enthusiastically. I mean, really! Twice round the boating pool whilst you finished your cheese sandwich would be more like it. Some women get delusions of grandeur about what they are trying to give away. At least a whore has the guts to put a price on her goodies. As my old schoolmaster used to say: you don’t have to like capitalism but at least it separates the professionals from the amateurs.

      Anyway, off we go across the golf course with me trying to look at my watch without her noticing and hoping that we will be able to squeeze a happy memory out of the fifteenth. I reckon she must have played every hole on the course in her day because she does not deviate by an inch but pushes through the bracken and brings us out a long-distance spit from a neat little circle of grass with a flag in the middle of it.

      “Where do we go from here?” I ask, but she is already scrambling up the side of a low mound and beckoning for me to follow. When I get there, I can see that we are perched on the edge of a deep sand trap and she squeezes my arm ferociously, presumably intending to suggest the pleasure to come. Down we go and she leans back against the wall of the bunker and gazes at me expectantly. I have to confess that out of the wind it is almost bearable, though I don’t go a bundle on the old Woodbine packets and the used french letter I can see out of the corner of my eye.

      “You see,” she says. “It’s quite СКАЧАТЬ