The Penultimate Chance Saloon (12 page)

Kirstie's clothes were off, and she was under the duvet, whither he crept, with some relief, to join her. For this encounter, he was really glad he had made the transition to boxer shorts.

He looked deeply into her eyes, then realised he still had his glasses on. Deciding clear vision must be sacrificed to avoid the laughable image of a bespectacled naked man, he took them off. He wished Kirstie too had glasses to take off, so that she'd only get a fuzzy outline of his ageing body.

‘Have you got one with you?' she asked suddenly.

‘Er, I'm sorry ... what?' This confused him. Basic sex – the kind of sex they were about to indulge in – surely didn't need any props?

‘A condom.'

‘Ah.'

Do you have one with you?'

Erm ... no, actually.'

When he considered the matter, it was remarkable that the question had not arisen before. There were enough earnest newspaper articles and television documentaries about safe sex. Primary school children seemed to be taught condom use before they were taught their alphabet. And all this earnest advice repetitiously pointed out the condoms were not just mandatory for their contraceptive properties, but also as a means of avoiding infection.

And yet not one of the women with whom Bill Stratton had made love during his post-Andrea flowering had mentioned the word condom. None of them had been at risk of pregnancy, but equally none of them knew his sexual history. The first post-AIDS panic seemed to have died down. The fierce questioning about previous partners which had happened then, when a potential lover virtually had to get planning permission for each sexual encounter, seemed to have become less urgent. Certainly none of the women with whom Bill had conjoined recently had mentioned the idea of his taking a medical before congress. Or of wearing a condom.

Probably a generational thing, he decided. For his contemporaries, condoms still had wartime connotations. They were ‘Johnnies' or ‘French letters', devices to protect our brave but randy boys from disease-ridden foreign whores. For the original post-pill generation, they were slightly distasteful. People whose first experiences had happened in the sixties didn't like the idea of having their sex shrink-wrapped.

The average heterosexual of his generation, Bill concluded, was extremely irresponsible about safe sex.

Kirstie's questioning did prompt another thought in him, though. She regarded him as a procreational threat. He couldn't remember when he'd last seen himself in that role. In the very early days of his marriage he'd entertained the possibility of Andrea becoming pregnant, but since then sex for Bill had been totally separate from the idea of reproduction.

Good heavens, he still had within him the capacity to become a father! He'd read somewhere that the sperm men produced declined in quality as they got older, but it still worked. Charlie Chaplin, Saul Bellow, Des O'Connor ... there were a whole lot of men who had become fathers at very advanced ages. Hmm. When Bill reflected on those names, he decided it was not a club that he particularly wanted to join.

‘It's all right,' said Kirstie resignedly. ‘I've got some.'

The readiness with which she found the packet in her bedside drawer showed how well equipped she was for life as a single woman in the early part of the twenty-first century. Deftly, she popped a latex circle out of its foil and placed it on top of the unit. ‘For when we need it,' she said, and leant forward to kiss him.

The kissing was again very pleasant and gentle. So was the caressing. With a slight feeling of guilt towards his other post-Andrea women, Bill couldn't be unaware of the superior skin quality he was now touching. He began to understand why so many men worshipped at the shrine of the younger woman.

During what he hoped would turn out to be foreplay, Bill couldn't prevent his eyes from wandering to the shelf above the bed. Eeyore looked down at him disapprovingly. He didn't let himself be put off by that. Eeyore disapproved of everything. In the Eeyore catalogue of unacceptable behaviour, making love to a girl less than half one's age was no more reprehensible than Kanga losing Roo, or Tigger bouncing. Bill still wished he was looking, though, at E.H. Shepherd's definitive images, rather than these winsome Disneyfied travesties.

The purposeful movement of Kirstie's hands distracted him from nostalgia. ‘I think maybe we need that protection now,' she said.

This was a new challenge. Though Bill Stratton was familiar with the concept, he had never actually put a condom on. And of course the important thing about putting a condom on is that there has to be something for it to be put on, and he found that, the nearer the point of putting it on came, the less there was to put it on.

Panic began to flicker in his brain. Remarkably, in his recent glut of sex, the one thing he hadn't encountered had been personal malfunction. Oh God, and it has to happen now, when I'm with a younger woman, a woman who spends her life surrounded by her contemporaries, men who go through life in a permanent state of semi-arousal. All the jokes he'd ever heard about old men not being able to get it up stampeded into his mind.

But Kirstie proved a surprisingly sympathetic and generous sex therapist. From what she said, this was by no means the first time she had encountered such a problem. As vigour returned to him, a marginal sense of superiority came with it. Maybe young men of Kirstie's age weren't such stallions, after all.

After the initial hiccup, everything proceeded smoothly. Bill Stratton's first sex with a condom definitely felt different, a bit remote even, but it was perfectly satisfactory. And Kirstie's responses seemed to suggest she got something out of the experience too.

After a mumbled ‘Thank you', Bill lay in silence beside her, his mind full of the automatic masculine post-coital question. How soon can I leave? Books of etiquette are sadly inadequate in defining the recommended time-lapse between an act of intercourse and the first ‘Oh, well, I'd better be on my way.'

But here too Kirstie surprised him. And anticipated him. With a brisk look at her watch and a ‘Got to be at work in the morning', she made it quite clear that Bill's cue to get dressed had arrived.

There was no resentment or edge in her tone, just practicality. She put on a bathrobe and he quickly dressed. As he did so, he found his mind focusing on Kirstie's motivations. Was this how all of her sex life was conducted? Was it all quick pick-ups and goodbyes? Wham-bang-thank-you-sirs? And, most of all, why had she picked him? He'd been quite willing to go along with the scenario, but everything that had happened had been on her initiative.

Politely, she led him out through the sitting room.

‘That was really nice,' he said. ‘Thank you.'

His words sounded pretty flat, but they would be reinforced the next day by an Interflora bouquet with a note reading, ‘...and, by way of contrast, thank you for an unforgettable experience.'

‘That's all right,' said Kirstie. ‘I've never had an old man before.'

As he looked at the figurine-loaded shelves of her sitting room, Bill Stratton knew exactly where he fitted into the scheme of things.

And he decided that in future he'd stick to women nearer his own age.

... and, by way of contrast,

a recent survey in Canada has revealed

that thirteen per cent of married couples

had stopped having sex because they

couldn't think of anyone else to think

about while they were doing it.

Bill would have been lying if he said all the sex was good. But it was all sex. Sex that was his due. Sex that he should have had in his twenties, when he had instead been putting everything into a marriage which ultimately had turned out to be worthless. ‘Saving it for marriage' had been his mother's strong recommendation, but she had failed to warn him that investments can go down as well as up.

Meeting so many women – albeit on a superficial level – prompted Bill to think a lot about gender differences. He kept coming back to the same question. How different are women? And he kept coming back to the same answer. Bloody different. Any man who aspires to spend time with them had better recognise that early on.

First, there were the simple biological differences. Particularly, that strange business of menstruation. Which, remarkably, women don't find that strange. They make much less of a fuss about menstruation than men do. Men continue to find it bizarre, imagining how they would feel if their bodies were invaded in that way on a monthly basis. Whereas women behave as if it were ... well, natural. But, with the women who shared Bill Stratton's sexual encounters, that was no longer a problem. The menopause had sorted it all out, and Bill found that in many ways a relief. He had quite enough to think about without unpicking the chronology of menstrual cycles. He remembered back to the days of his marriage when an entire weekend's plans could be dashed on a Friday night by the rustle of a cardboard box heard from the lavatory.

Also, he felt the menopause put men and women back on an equal footing, like when they were children. Basically, men have never understood menstruation, and never will. They spend the major part of their lives when they're dealing with women, thinking, ‘Oh, I shouldn't upset her. She has/has just had/might be about to have ... her period.' And they feel guilty. At least, Bill reckoned, the menopause restores a vaguely level playing field.

Must be odd, though, having that happen to you. Though, in one sense, women are luckier than men. They have the menopause as a sort of early warning system. (‘Hello, dear, just a reminder that you're well into the second half of your life.') Nothing like that for the chaps. For men death is a total surprise. No signposts in the masculine life between puberty and senility.

Oh dear, and there were so many gender issues Bill Stratton didn't reckon he'd ever get the hang of. For instance, the fact that the end of menstruation didn't spell the end of female difference. The divide between the way men and women thought seemed to increase with age rather than diminish. Women's priorities remained totally at odds with those of men. For instance, women seem able to summon up infinite interest in relationships
per se.
Anyone's relationship. Relationships in the abstract. Whereas the only relationships men are interested in are their own. If the world were peopled only by men, one thing that would vanish pretty quickly would be Romantic Fiction. For that to work, the reader has to give a toss who ends up with whom. And men just don't.

Men's and women's fantasies too follow totally divergent paths. The trouble with men's fantasies is they're all so unrealistic. Most of them involve playing for England in some sport for which you never had much aptitude, and for which you're now far too fat and beat-up to be a contender. Whereas women's fantasies ... encompass the possible. The romantically possible. It is just possible that you'd go to Greece and meet some stud so naif and pissed that he'd think you're attractive. It is just possible that, after a divorce, you might find your true self by pressing olives in Tuscany.

Unlikely, but still possible.

And that's before you even open the can of worms labelled ‘Sexual Fantasies'.

What are women's sexual fantasies about? One thing's for sure, Bill Stratton concluded. I bet they involve a lot more talking than men's sexual fantasies do.

But women's fantasies are really no odder than the realities of their lives. Although in his sexual encounters he'd always tried to keep conversation on a light-hearted level, Bill had inevitably heard a lot about other people's relationships. Everyone has baggage. And everyone over sixty has so much baggage that if they had to pay the excess, it would bankrupt them.

Not having children of his own to bring to the conversation, Bill managed to avoid the bulk of his women's whingeing about their offspring, but there was no such easy escape from the whingeing about the men in their lives. His sexual partners, almost by definition, were not in warm and totally fulfilling relationships. Most were divorced or separated. And, though they all said they didn't want to talk about their past and previous partners, very few of them could carry that intention through.

So Bill did hear rather more than he might have wished about ex-husbands and lovers. Though none were accused of actual domestic violence, the men, it has to be said, didn't get a very good press.

After the first few diatribes, Bill could quickly have filled in the blanks himself. The men had all started off all right, but they had changed. In many cases it was marriage itself which had changed them. Before the wedding they had been generous, loving, caring, but the minute the rings were on their wives' fingers, they were transformed. The mild-mannered Dr Jekyll was gone for ever, and the domestic tyranny of Mr Hyde prevailed. (The fact that so many of the women seemed to have endured bad relationships for such a long time reminded Bill of what Andrea had said about their own marriage. But surely he'd never been as thoughtless as the husbands these women described? Had he?) The effect getting married had had on these former husbands had been devastating. They had instantly become jealous, possessive and controlling. They had become watchful of their wives' every activity, and deeply resentful of any attempts they made to set up social or commercial ventures that didn't involve their husbands. The men had become acutely critical of their wives' appearance and home-making skills. Their sole aim in life seemed to have become the total undermining of their wives' confidence.

Bill heard the litany so many times, and the details tallied so exactly in each case, that after a while an irresistible fantasy developed in his mind.

His sexual partners were not talking about different husbands. For each of them, it had been the same one. That was what must have happened – all divorced women had been married to the same man.