The Englishman

chapter 36

I WAKE ON A DEEP, INDRAWN BREATH. Ten inches away from my face is a naked male arm, crooked against a naked male chest. The shock of recognition seeps through my body like hot treacle, sluggishly.

I cannot move. If this is post-coital languor, it has merged fatally with my general state of exhaustion. My limbs, absurdly, feel like leaden sponges, my eyelids are swollen with passion, and I think also tears; my brain is a ball of soggy cotton wool.

“Hey,” whispers the man who has done this. “Fancy seeing you here.”

With a supreme effort I arch my back to peer up into his face, although I can hardly keep my eyes open enough to see. What I do see is a quiet, intent smile, and I know that my swollen eyes are smiling back.

“Hey.” My voice breaks on a croak. Even my vocal cords are mush.

His cheek rests against the back of his hand, pushed between his face and the pillow. “Good morning.”

I groan and burrow underneath the warm, fragrant cover. The night is over. My body doesn’t want the night to be over.

“Can’t get up…f*cked me into a pulp.”

His chuckle erupts against me; he seems to be much more awake than I am. Wondering where he gets his energy, I surrender myself to the heaviness that drags at my limbs. Briar Rose. That’s what the Brothers Grimm called the princess in the folk tale who pricked her finger on a spindle and slept for a hundred years until a prince came to kiss her back to life. I could sleep for a hundred years and then some, and a prince and a prick certainly have something to do with it.

“Stay where you are,” he whispers against my ear. “I’ll take the dogs out.”

We spend the day getting to know each other, in bed and out of bed. And in between, we talk. I tell him everything I know about Selena, and he agrees that Hornberger most definitely knew about Selena’s anorexia.

“I told you he enjoys their emotional torment. Go on, off you run!” We are out walking the dogs, and once away from the lakeside path, he takes them off their leashes and they charge into the snowy mush like children. “I found out that Amanda was having an affair one evening when I picked her up at her office. He’d been there, with her, and he knew I’d be there in a few minutes. She was…sucking him off, and he came all over her face, her hair, her blouse. When I turned up, she was in such a state of hysteria that I thought at first she’d been assaulted.”

“But—you said she didn’t give head!”

He shrugs. “Maybe he has a nicer cock than I.”

I look up at him, and I can see that he is flippant rather than hurt.

“She did, eventually, try to explain. I think it’s a combination of factors.” That sounds too coolly analytical even to Giles, and he pulls a face at himself. “She felt bad because she knew that I was disappointed that she didn’t like oral sex, or any kind of sex, really, for most of our marriage. I sound like an obsessive, don’t I? It’s not that. Really, it was more about the way this reflected our whole relationship. Polite. We were always so polite to each other. Friends, at first, but emotionally so cautious, and physically…so wrong for each other. Nick clocked from the start what her weaknesses were, and he liked her to give him quick blowjobs in her office. Just to humiliate her and intensify the disgust she felt for herself. So, to put it another way: a girl with issues about her body, about conforming to expectations, a girl brought up to be hard on herself, will find in Nick the perfect self-harming tool.”

“Are you thinking of Selena or of Amanda?”

“Both.”

I am watching his profile, wondering about the wisdom of getting involved with a man who is still so emotionally involved with his wife. Ex-wife. Perhaps it is a good thing, then, that I am not actually getting involved with Giles.

He glances down at me and smiles.

“You look worried. Don’t be. I’m only trying to explain. I do need it to make some sort of sense, and I’ve never had to explain it to someone I care about.”

That is the closest either of us comes to a declaration. We do not talk about our dead-end situation again. There is nothing more to say. We need to be together, we can’t be together, and that is all.

“But what are we going to do about Selena?” I return to the topic later that day when I am chopping vegetables in Giles’s kitchen. Neither of us was hungry enough for breakfast; I even declined the coffee he offered me because my heart was still racing with the excitement of it all. The excitement of being here.

“Some hot chocolate, then?”

“Oh, yes! Would you laugh at me?”

He came over to kiss me. “Only in a good way.”

By teatime, after two hours outside in the woods, I am ready for some food. I am on chopping duty while Giles beats eggs and heats up the pan. Everything he does is delightful to me, and I want to savor every moment of this experience, but I must be careful not to slip into the melancholy of remembering it while it is still happening.

“Right—a few minutes under the grill, and grub’s up!”

“Giles…”

“Hm?” He turns round, and I step between his woolly feet, push up his sweater, and duck my head under it.

“I’m sad!” My voice is muffled by cotton and skin, and I’m not sure he heard me, because he doesn’t respond, only hugs me. Then he leads me over to a chair, sits down in it, and pulls me onto his lap. I wrap my arms around his neck and press my face into the fragrant nook below his ear.

“You’ll feel better for some food,” he says after a while. “Let’s eat, and then I’ll see what I can do to console you.”

It takes us about fifteen minutes to have a slice of frittata each and a glass of water. Then I look up from my plate and see him looking at me.

“Done,” I say softly. Underneath the table my foot is feeling for his; a quarter of an hour without touching is already too long.

“Not yet, you aren’t.” He grins and marches me over to the sofa in the living room.

His elbows on either side of my arms, he rests his chest against my crotch—the contact makes me gasp with a sudden flare of electricity—and covers my breasts with his hands.

“One of the reasons I thought you wouldn’t like me is that I’ve got small tits,” I say, a little meekly.

Giles, who was in the process of leaning in to suck one nipple peeping through the grid of his fingers, groans and drops his head so that his forehead rests in my mini-cleavage.

“Well, because Amanda’s got these huge knockers!” I try to justify my neurosis.

“I don’t even know any Amanda.”

“Hers are—”

“When I married her, they weren’t.”

“What? But—so—they’re fake?”

He lifts his head and looks down at me with a mixture of resignation and sarcastic humor. “No, they’re real. Real silicone.”

“So you don’t like—”

“What I don’t like—sorry to be brusque here, Anna, but it’s a sensitive subject! What I don’t like is women who obsess about their boobs! And what makes me incandescently angry is women who insist on having their perfectly fine and healthy boobs cut open to have a blob of insulating material stuffed in there!”

“No kidding. It does make you angry.”

He laughs, unwillingly. “Yeah, it does.”

“You’re really very sweet, Giles.” I arch myself against him, my legs spread wide. I lift them and wrap them around his back to pull him closer.

“No, I’m not,” he contradicts me. “I had some of the worst fights of my life about this topic.”

I wait to see whether he will say more. I have lost all interest in Amanda Saunders’ knockers, but I am very curious about Giles’s buttons.

“I suppose it was a clash of two neuroses,” he says at last. “It was frustrating for me not to get through to her at all. She kept telling me that it was her body and she could do with it what she wanted, but what she didn’t understand, or didn’t want to understand, was that by hating her tits, she made me feel that she also hated what I did to them. That sounds terrible.”

“No, I think I know what you mean. The wife’s anxiety was about her appearance and the husband’s was about his performance. Nothing surprising there, really.”

Hell is being married to the wrong person. Or maybe Giles is simply too screwed up to be in a close intimate relationship with a woman without overpowering her with unrealistic expectations. On the other hand, after a couple of encounters with Amanda, I see that a man might have a tough time of it with her in his bed. And Giles took the plunge and is evidently making an effort to understand why he drowned, while I never had the guts to do more than dip my toe in.

“Well, I love what you do to my boobs,” I announce sheepishly.

“Oh, you do, do you?” He wriggles out of his clothes and pulls my legs on either side of his ribcage. My arms are full of a strange, tall, naked man, and my legs, and my heart, and—

“Please. Giles, please…”

“Hmmmm?”

“Come into me—”

“Ah.”

He raises his head, and we realize in the same second that the condoms are still in the bedroom cupboard.

I say what no woman should say in a situation like this.

“Well, of course I had a full medical before they let me sign my contract.”

“I had one when I came back from England.”

“Needed one, did you?” I ask, jealous, turn my head and bite into the inside of his arm. “And how many women have you had since then?”

“Only one.”

Damn him! And damn her!

“And did you have unprotected sex with her?” I ask politely.

“Only once.”

“What?”

“In the observatory, you silly girl! You know this! You were there!”

“Oh.” I can feel my ears turning red. “That’s true…how reckless.”

“Can I trust you?” he asks me seriously.

“Yes!”

“Then let me come into you.”

And suddenly I’m frightened. He straightens up, on his knees in front of the sofa, and my hands go to his wrists—to hold onto him, to steady myself, not to stop him, although I’m so frightened that I stop breathing. It is an eternity since I’ve been so close to a man—have I ever been so close to a man?—and now here it is, here he is. So lovely, with his hair falling across his forehead. So lovely, and so grave. He looks up from the few inches of space between us.

“Breathe…”

The sound that comes from my chest is something between a laugh and a sob; I grab his wrists more tightly, painfully, I think, but he is beyond feeling my fingers when we are both staring down at the engorged arch of his flesh; how smooth and soft and vulnerable it looks, especially the head, unhooded now, naked to my gaze, and naked to my own dark, secret flesh.

“You’re tense.” His voice is worried, reluctant.

My chest is rising and falling fast now, but my fingers let go of him.

“Yes…I’m frightened.”

The corners of his gray-dappled eyes crease as a tiny light of amusement flickers in them. Self-irony. At the drop of a hat, at the erection of a penis, he is ready to distance himself from himself, look on, and sneer.

“I’m frightened, too.” He doesn’t say that ironically at all.

I wriggle higher up onto the sofa so that I can rest my head against the back and my heels on the edge of the seat.

“He isn’t.” I smile, nodding at the alert, eager animal that rises from its nest of grizzled hair. It twitches, and a few drops of transparent liquid run down the shaft. That makes me smile even more; I like that he likes being looked at.

“No, because he can’t see beyond the tip of his…nose.”

That makes me giggle, and him, too, but he doesn’t want to be distracted now. He clasps my hands, our fingers interlock, and he cautiously nuzzles the tip of his cock into my hot, expectant flesh. Slowly. Cautiously. Just the tip. Moves his hips in slow, short, probing thrusts, and his schlong glances up from its aim, wetting its belly in my sopping folds. I grip his fingers harder and it dips down, dips its head deep, slides slow and deep into me. Deep, and slow, at first, but I’m gone already; I gulp air into the tiniest vessel of my lungs—and then the noise is deafening. The dogs, snoring to our quiet exchanges, are up and join in the chorus of human voices. I don’t know that I screamed, but I must have done; my throat feels tight with need, and Giles is shouting at the dogs to be quiet, but of course that doesn’t help at all.

“Oh, don’t shout!” I gasp, between tears and laughter. “They’re just preventing murder in their pack!”

Andrew, tail wagging, comes up to us and sniffs at the skin of my belly, which sends me into another fit of giggles.

“Back off, Andrew! This one’s mine!”

Andrew sits on his hind legs but woofs with indignation.

“That’s right! I’m top dog here, and this one—this one’s my bitch, so—stop yapping! And you—” He glares down at me, very hot and bothered. “And you, stop laughing!”

“Yes, but—”

“Hold on. Hold on to me!”

One arm clamped around my waist, the other hand under my butt, he lifts me up and strides over to the open kitchen door. Giggling, I wrap every available limb around his body, although he’s still so hard inside me that I could balance on his cock alone.

“In there! Go on, in!” The dogs bustle into the kitchen, and he slams the door behind them. “And now, Professor Lieberman…” I feel the warm wall of the chimney against my back. “Oh, God…I should have had you against my office door yesterday night!”

“Why didn’t you?”

“You wanted to go home.”

“I thought you wanted to get rid of me.”

His hands clench underneath my ass. He closes his eyes and groans.





“Giles.”

“Mmhm.”

“Where’s the file?”

“Termagant! Will you stop nagging me about the file? I have it safe.”

“Here? Or at the department?”

“Safe.”

“No, you have to listen to me!”

I climb onto his lap and look into his eyes. His face dissolves in front of me.

“Sweetheart, what’s this?” He leans forward and kisses the tears off my cheeks.

“We have to hand it in, Giles. I feel awful, hiding it. Like an accomplice.”

“You’re not hiding it. I am.”

“But why do you want to shield Hornberger from justice? I-don’t-un-der-stand!” With my palms pressing down on his shoulders, I stress each syllable.

“I rather thought I was shielding you from gossip,” Giles observes, not visibly impressed by my vehemence.

I sink back onto his thighs and rest my forehead against his chest. For a whole minute I stay like that, struggling to muster the courage to say what I want to say.

“If it just concerned me, I’d hand it in.” My voice is muffled by the skin of his belly.

“You haven’t thought that through.”

“Look, Giles!” I sit up so he can see how serious I am. “You can think and think, but wrong will remain wrong and it’s wrong to protect Hornberger!”

“It’s more important to me to protect you than to turn him in.”

“And to protect yourself.” Because there is a subtext to this topic that we have so far carefully avoided.

“That does not weigh with me.”

“Doesn’t it?” Maybe the time has come to have this out. I climb off his lap and huddle up on the other side of the sofa. “My ‘reputation’ can hardly be more important to you than it is to me.”

“Can’t it?” he echoes me flippantly, and I can tell he is going to be difficult about this. “But I’m a gentleman.”

“There is nothing gentlemanly about not allowing me to make my own decisions!”

“You haven’t got all the facts.” Suddenly he is not flippant at all.

“Then give me the facts!” I explode. “Heavens, Giles! Talk to me!”

He looks away from me, into the fire, and for a few moments I really think he isn’t going to answer.

“When Nick turned up in the observatory…that time,” he finally says, still not looking at me, “he had his phone with him.”

I wait for him to say more, and then it clicks. My hand, when I raise it to my forehead, is ice-cold. That, or I have a temperature again.

“There’s a picture? He took a picture of us?”

Now Giles looks at me, and I understand how much of his ironic grin is about feeling helpless.