Don't You Want Me? (7 page)

‘Gosh,’ I say, breathing in sharply. Great: the single man is uniquely positioned to make me feel physically lacking.

‘Not that you need a tummy tuck,’ says William Cooper smoothly, having a good old look at my abdomen. ‘Not yet, anyway. Very pleased to meet you.’ He raises his eyes until they come to rest on my chest, at which point he looks up and gives me rather a sexy smile.

Hello, I think to myself.
Hel-lo
.

William Cooper has a velvety voice and is ridiculously handsome (does he do work on himself? I must ask him) if slightly overgroomed: his skin is tight, polished,
absolutely porelessly clear in a way that you don’t see much in men of his age, which is roughly late forties-ish, at a guess (nattering lighting in here, though). His very white teeth shine in the half-dark, as do his fingernails (manicured?). His hair is black, and, peering closer, I see he has blue eyes: I always love that combination. I never quite know what to make of his kind of look: it is, aesthetically speaking, quite overwhelming, but there is a plastic quality to it that somehow doesn’t look human. Still, there’s no denying he’s foxy.

‘And I’m Tree,’ says a woman, coming up to join us. Ah, this I know: this is familiar, a species I immediately recognize. Tree has long, straggly hair, very expensively cut and streaked though you wouldn’t know it, held off her hard, make-up-free, not especially youthful (or indeed intelligent) face with glittery little clips. She is thin to the point of looking simian, and is wearing the
dernier cri
in bohemian chic – to you and me, a nondescript rag, to Tree, £800 worth of fabulous clothing. She has toe rings and, I expect, a couple of tattoos. I know she must live just off the Portobello Road in a five-storey house, must have a trust fund and a very rich husband, must do something ‘creative’ and – we’ll see at dinner – must suffer from an unusually cruel number of allergies.

‘I love your shoes,’ Tree says sweetly. Her accent is perfect Estuary. ‘Well wicked.’

‘Thanks. I’ve had them ages.’

‘Raffia,’ she says. ‘Beautiful. Natural, you know.’ Tree stretches. ‘I’m knackered, actually. Went for a swim before coming out and it’s made me sleepy.’

‘Porchester Baths?’ I venture, wanting to test out my theory.

‘Nah, at home,’ Tree shrugs. Bingo! She has a swimming pool in her garden.

‘What do you do, Tree?’ I ask.

‘I’m training to be a music therapist,’ she says, looking more animated now.

‘What’s that?’

‘You work with, like, really damaged people, and heal them through the beauty of music. I have a drum.’

‘That’s nice,’ I say, hoping not to sound sarcastic. ‘What kind of drum?’

‘It’s, like, a drum of wisdom and peace?’ Tree explains. ‘With beads. Abba Babu gave it to me.’ Seeing me look blank, she adds, ‘That’s my guru. I go to an ashram for three months a year. India is such a spiritual place, don’t you think?’

‘I don’t know. I’ve only been once. I really loved the shops.’

‘It has feathers.’

‘The guru or the ashram?’

‘No, the drum.’

‘Mmm,’ I say, rather lost for words.

The low hum of conversation is interrupted by the late arrival of a woman so very masculine that you wouldn’t be overly astonished to find that she did, in fact, have a penis. She is very tall, somehow broad in the beam without being in any way overweight, and her appearance is striking: she is wearing mannish black trousers and a mannish, but rather beautiful, black cashmere sweater over a pristine white shirt. Boots on her feet; six or seven thick, plain silver rings on her long, elegant fingers, and cropped grey hair that is slicked back to reveal flat, neat ears and a pair of cheekbones that would be the envy of women half her
age: she herself must be somewhere in her mid-sixties. She has the palest blue eyes and an intelligent, take-no-prisoners face.

‘Ah, Barbara, darling,’ says Isabella, jumping up. ‘So delighted you could join us.’

‘Good evening, Isabella,’ Barbara says in a sixty-a-day voice. ‘Delighted to be here. Does me good to get out of the house every now and then,’ she adds, turning to me and smiling. She smells of Guerlain Vetiver, one of the loveliest men’s scents in the world. ‘I sometimes feel my limbs are in danger of atrophying.’

‘What nonsense, Barbara – you’re hardly ever in,’ Isabella says, affectionately patting her arm. ‘You’re a social whirl. Have a drink,’ she adds, racing off to find one of her pitchers of cocktails.

‘I’m Stella,’ I tell Barbara.

‘No surname? Then I’m Barbara.’ She gives me a bold, frank look – right in the eyes, bang bang. ‘Come and sit by me. I don’t like standing when I don’t have my stick.’

We walk over to the sofa and sit side by side. ‘Who are these people?’ Barbara asks.

‘I don’t really know any of them. He’s a plastic surgeon.’ I point at Cooper.

‘Oh, yes, I know him – William Cooper. Raised my sister’s jowls last year; she rather fell in love with him. Do you know, I think he may have had a fling with Isabella.’

‘Really? How fascinating. When? I wonder whether she had anything done.’ Good of Isabella to pass him on, I suppose. Is that what women
do
now? Probably: we’re always hearing about how there aren’t enough men to go round.

‘Anything done? I should hope not. Ghastly business,
plastic surgery. So many women of my generation had their faces ruined. Lumps, you know, suddenly appearing
years
afterwards.’

‘Eeeoo.’ I make a face. ‘Anyway, next to him is a woman called Tree who is training to be a music therapist.’ Barbara looks over and smiles so knowingly at me that I grin back. ‘And then the couple by the mantelpiece,’ I continue. ‘I don’t know what they do, but he seems very jolly.’

‘And she less so?’

‘Yes.’

‘And then dear Isabella. My god-daughter, you know.’

‘I didn’t actually. How nice. Do you have children of your own?’

‘No, my dear,’ smiles Barbara. ‘What about you?’

‘One, a little girl. Eighteen months. Her name’s Honey.’

‘What a sweet name.’

‘Isn’t it? She’s a sweet little girl.’

‘And what do you and Honey do all day?’

‘Not much, actually. Well, I do the odd bit of translating now and again, but mainly we’re at home in Primrose Hill. Her father and I are separated.’ Blissfully, Barbara spares me the platitudes – the so sorrys, how sads, oh dear what happeneds that I never have any replies to.

‘
I
live in Hampstead,’ Barbara says instead. ‘We could get together sometimes. Do you walk?’

‘Yes – unless it’s absolutely pouring, I try to take Honey to the playground once a day, and then for a trot around the park.’

‘We could walk together, if you liked. I’m rather slow, I’m afraid.’

‘I’d love that,’ I say, meaning it.

I’m pretty sure Barbara is a lesbian, which is really
neither here nor there except for the fact that I think I must give off gay vibes myself, because lesbians absolutely always make a beeline for me. This occasionally leads me to wonder whether I am, in fact, batting for the wrong team: if every single lesbian I’ve ever met has looked at me in the manner of like recognizing like,
perhaps they know something I don’t
. On the other hand, Barbara is a very old lesbian, and if I were to start exploring the notion of sexual fluidity, I’d rather do it with someone my own age. More to the point, I can’t imagine what sex would be like without a flesh-and-blood penis being involved. Slurpy, I suppose, like glutting on oysters. I groan quietly to myself: try as I might, I really can’t fancy the idea of hot lezzo action much at all. But surely it must have something to recommend it if so many people practise it? Very confusing. Perhaps the slurping is optional. And people’s breasts
are
interesting, I remember from the showers at school: some girls had that thing where the combination of two nipples and one tummy-button made a perfect sort of face – huge, rather boggly eyes (the nipples), small nose (the TB), furry triangular mouth (the pubis) – which used to fascinate me. But the fact remains: fascination or not, I didn’t yearn to get close to the faces, or to grope them.

Tree comes over to speak to Barbara, and I fall into a sort of reverie. William Cooper: what’s the story there? Why is he still single? Is he a professional escorter of women – an older, sadder, more humourless Frank? Or perhaps, also like Frank, he is a master of his craft, a shagging supremo, and generously spreads himself around to aid womankind. I am feeling quite sexually desperate, actually, and although I wouldn’t normally go for the smoothie plastic surgeon option, I am not quite myself at
the moment. Besides, he
is
incredibly handsome, even if he doesn’t look entirely human. And at least he has a penis. I imagine. It must be terribly pale in comparison to his face, unless he rubs bottles of St Tropez tan into it.

Why am I thinking these things? What is the
matter
with me? Sexual frustration is a terrible thing.

William Cooper does not rub fake tan into his proud member, it turns out. I know, because I saw it.

I was seated next to him at dinner. Cooper, it quickly became clear, was very much on for it: what started off as mildly flirtatious banter, of the kind you might have with your husband’s half-gaga great-uncle, turned into something rather fuller on as the evening progressed and the claret flowed. I went along with it: everyone enjoys being flirted with, and I haven’t had anyone flirt with me for ages. Not exactly subtle, though, Mr Cooper’s flirting, consisting as it did of
double entendres
, compliments addressed to my bosoms and much flashing of his weirdly white teeth. Funnily, the harder he flirted, the more I found myself flirting back (the wine helped, as did his face). His technique may have been unspeakably naff, but in the half-light, he really looked pretty sexy.

And then it was pudding: a cheese plate, passion fruit crême brulée and imported figs. I’d turned to my left to speak to George Bigsby (I was right about Tree: absolutely
riddled
with allergies to wheat, dairy, fish and alcohol, poor thing) when I felt my calf being stroked by somebody’s foot – somebody’s cashmere-sock-clad foot, by the feel of things. I stared at George, who stared back somewhat blankly, and then turned my head to my right. William Cooper winked, and carried on stroking. The stroking was
oddly vigorous – like having a good rubdown – rather than sensual, but none the worse for it. Looking around the table, I noticed that everyone was deep in conversation. I turned back to William to say something – I wasn’t quite sure what – but one look at his face left me (and this is quite a rare occurrence) absolutely speechless. Cooper was performing cunnilingus on a fig.

He held the hapless fruit, which he had split open, with two tanned, square hands, its flesh glowing pinkly in the candlelight. Then, turning his body to enable him to maintain eye contact with me at all times, he proceeded to – well, to
eat it out
, with his pink tongue, which he’d made rigid and pointy: slow, languorous licks up and down and then, horribly, faster, more insistent, probing licks aimed at the centre of the vagina-fig: pressure applied to, as it were, the fig-clitoris. At this point, he half-closed his eyes and (I swear) murmured a throaty ‘Aaah’, his tongue moving faster and faster until, presumably, he felt the fig had come. The whole performance took about a minute and a half, and when I looked around the table again, no one seemed to have noticed, amazingly.

I was
astonished
. A-s-t-o-n-i-s-h-e-d. As you would be. I mean, good grief. And then I was astonished further when Cooper wiped his mouth, licked his lips and whispered in my ear, Are you wet?’, using, I thought, rather a complacent tone of voice. It took me a few seconds to compose myself, and then I managed to say, ‘Bone dry, actually. Dry as a bone, which is coincidentally the name of an Australian type of coat.’ This was pretty much true, although I have to confess, shamefully (and yes, I was – I am – ashamed), to having felt a slight, a
tiny
twinge during his ludicrous figgery. Not that I’d admit it to him in a million
years, hence my – I hoped – off-putting reply. But instead of looking down shamefacedly and muttering, ‘I don’t know what came over me’ (to which the correct answer would have been ‘A fig, mate’), Cooper smiled in rather a pleased way, winked again, and put his hand on my thigh under the table.

Now obviously there comes a time when a girl has to make decisions, and clearly this was one of those times. What to do? I’d seldom found anything as profoundly ridiculous as the fig display – thank God we didn’t have oysters, or mussels, or clams, or he’d have probably tongued those as well, making some ghastly remark about them ‘tasting of the sea’ – but, on the other hand, beggars etc. Not that I think of myself as a beggar, quite, but this definitely constituted an offer, and offers have been thin on the ground in my neck of the woods. (Still, what a thing to do: I couldn’t – can’t – conceive of a situation where I’d be out at dinner and get it into my head that it would be a really terrific idea to impress the man next to me by cheerfully fellating a sausage. Imagine if you got it all the way in and choked a bit and had to be rescued by your hosts, the head, as it were, of the sausage peering helplessly out of your parted lips.)

So,
que faire
? I was given a few minutes’ respite by Emma, on Cooper’s left, asking him whether it was really true that liposuction was bad for you, and during these minutes I am sorry to say that I decided, Yes. I decided that since I was practically rusty from lack of sexual use, I’d give Cooper a go. Why not? He was remarkably good-looking, he clearly had the horn, he had quite a long tongue and I never needed to see him again, so who cared if his seduction techniques involved violating fruits? The more
I thought about it – fortifying myself with another couple of glasses of wine – the more it seemed to me that Cooper coitus was really rather a good idea: the perfect way of easing myself back in the saddle, as it were – a neat, no-nonsense solution to my problem. I’d go somewhere with him after dinner, have a quickie, prove to myself that I was still capable of having sex, perhaps an orgasm, and go home. Perfect. It was about time I slept with someone who wasn’t Dom, and got on with my life. Once the decision was made, I began rather looking forward to it.