The Penultimate Chance Saloon (27 page)

Nor are there any rules for what constitutes perfect sex. There is no manual available listing the required positions, no phrase book spelling out the required words. Perfect sex is instinctive; it is a happy coincidence of two complementary instincts, which will only be recognised by those who have been fortunate enough to experience it.

And perfect sex is almost always recognised on a first encounter. The sex on that first encounter may not be perfect – how often is sex on a first encounter perfect? – but it holds the potential for perfection.

Of course perfect sex has nothing to do with what the participants look like. Most members of the human race are, viewed objectively, pretty ugly. But that doesn't mean that nobody's going to love them. And an ongoing love, which is the best sort – though not achieved by everyone – is surely not going to be put off by the odd wrinkle, stretchmark or blue spider's web of veins. Skin's still skin, and nothing will ever replace the warm feel of it.

And in perfect sex, skin recognises skin. The excitement of the new is mixed with a feeling of ancient, atavistic familiarity. Two bodies cease to be awkward assemblages of limbs and imperfections. Their responses join forces with the mutual – and sole – aim of bestowing pleasure.

The minds meld too. Inhibitions, prohibitions, anxieties, vanities, suspicions and jealousies melt away in the sheer glee of two bodies. Perfect sex is very simple. Nothing has ever felt so natural. And it holds at bay the fear of death. During perfect sex, the participants are going to live for ever.

Time stops.

As it stopped for Bill and Carolyn the first time they made love.

... and, by way of contrast,

a catwalk model in Nigeria has

successfully sued a tabloid

newspaper for describing her as thin.

Nothing could have been more casual. Even though the whole premise of the BWOC – and Bill's tenuous claim to ‘journalistic integrity' – had been blown out of the water, he had seen no reason to close the office down. There was still demand for ‘by way of contrast' lines as newspaper fillers from all over the world, and the fact that they were mostly spurious inventions by Jason didn't seem to matter. All jokes undergo metamorphosis as they are disseminated. The ‘me' to whom ‘a funny thing happened' is never the comedian telling the joke. He's heard it from someone else, who heard it from someone else, who ... and so on down an endless corridor of reflecting and distorting mirrors.

Even the jokes that start from true stories get embroidered and customised in the telling. The phrasing can always be improved, the word order adjusted to get the pay-off at the end. After all that treatment, who really cares whether the story started off as real life or was the fabrication of a skilled scriptwriter?

Bill Stratton certainly didn't.

The other reason he was unwilling to close down the BWOC operation was that the business gave him a legitimate reason to keep seeing Carolyn. Except for an awareness of her obvious sexuality', he wouldn't have said that he particularly fancied her. Her wonderful, voluptuous curves seemed perhaps too rich, a Black Forest
Gâteau
of a body. But he enjoyed sharing the cocoon of her presence, that shelter of Radio 2, cigarette smoke, sweet tea and biscuits.

He'd dropped in to the BWOC office one morning, some three months after the Virginia Fairbrother debacle. (He and Ginnie had talked on the phone the day after, and agreed they were both looking forward to the next time they met. Neither mentioned the sex. And, in spite of occasional short calls, their diaries hadn't yet found mutual windows to arrange another dinner at another newly-opened restaurant. But, of course, as they kept saying, they would soon.)

The morning he went to see Carolyn, Bill Stratton was feeling his age. In spite of its gleaming veneers, the face that had looked out of the shaving mirror that morning was the face of his father on his deathbed. Life was ticking on. Sal kept the
pas
and after-dinner speaking bookings coming in, but there was a sameness to everything Bill did. Soon he would have to decide whether his remaining years would spiral slowly downwards doing more of the same; or whether he still had in him the potential for one more change or adventure. He really was in the Penultimate Chance Saloon.

Maybe it was this feeling of doom that made him behave differently that morning. After the usual combative banter with Carolyn, realising it was about time he should be on his way, and seeing the day stretching endlessly ahead of him, he had said – before he had time to think about what he w as saying, ‘Do you fancy slipping out for a bit of lunch?'

Not one of his repertoire of posh restaurants. Just a grubby pub round the corner. They ate Steak and Guinness pie. He drank pints of bitter. Carolyn ordered something the very idea of which repelled him; Bailey's Irish Cream. Bailey's, and Steak and Guinness Pie! But that's what she wanted, and that's what he ordered for her.

If asked afterwards, Bill couldn't have said exactly what they talked about over that smoky lunch. Certainly nothing to do with BWOC. And he certainly didn't try to entertain her with any ‘by way of contrast' lines. Of all the women in the world, Carolyn was never going to be seduced by those. She already knew every one of them. So Bill's enduring conversational defence was totally dismantled. He had to talk about himself.

All he could remember of their conversation was that it felt entirely natural.

Neither could remember which one of them had suggested going back to his flat.

But that too had felt entirely natural.

... and, by way of contrast,

a Manchester travel company

are advertising September discounts

on their Greek villas, all complete

with swimming pool and a car thrown in.

They were on loungers beside the pool, frying slowly in the Greek sun. The bar was only a few metres away, but the effort of going to get a cool beer was insuperable. Never mind, the waiter would do his rounds in a moment.

Bill knew he should really put on some more suntan lotion, but that again seemed too much like hard work.

The block of the hotel towered above them. Soon they'd drift into the taverna area for lunch. That night they'd booked for a ‘Greek Evening' in the restaurant, audience participation dancing, smashing plates, the lot.

The hotel was a complete ‘tourist trap', and Bill Stratton loved it.

He loved Carolyn too. The body beside his was perhaps too bulky to wear a bikini, but who actually cared? He loved every contour of it.

Andrea had always said that Carolyn had ‘an obvious sexuality'. But what the hell was wrong with the obvious?

They'd been together nearly six months. Though precisely who'd made the first move was confused in their memories, they were both ecstatic that it had happened.

At first Bill had escorted her to restaurants and then back to bed in Pimlico, but Carolyn wanted more than that. Confining the scenes of his encounters to restaurants and bedrooms, making choices from one menu or the other, had always kept Bill at a distance from the women he was with. Carolyn wanted a relationship that encroached into other rooms. Champagne was all very well, but daily life was sustained by cups of tea. Carolyn craved a degree of domesticity.

And Bill was unable to refuse her anything she wanted. After two months, she had moved into the Pimlico flat. When they got back from their fortnight on Corfu, they would actively start looking for somewhere bigger.

Till then, they would enjoy the sun and the idleness and the love-making. Bill still kept asking himself how he could have known Carolyn for so long and not realised how stunning she would be in bed. She enjoyed their intimacy at least as much as he did. The previous night she had promised that they would ‘go on making love like this until the Zimmer frames get in the way too much.'

And the night before that, when too many post-prandial Greek brandies had taken their toll on his performance, she had said, ‘Just have a cuddle. It'll come back.'

Never had impotence felt so intimate.

Now he was with Carolyn, Bill Stratton had reached a kind of maturity at the end of his second adolescence. He was happier than he'd ever dared expect he might be.

There were a few clouds on his horizon, but only small ones. Having seen Andrea's diminished state in hospital, he worried about Carolyn's smoking. But she'd maintained the habit since her early teens and showed no signs of giving up. If he ever raised the subject, he got a strong response about it being her life and up to her what she did with it. So now he never raised the subject.

But the anxiety remained.

He was also aware of his own age, more aches and twinges every day when he got up, his white hair thinning, and the knowledge that he'd be lucky to have twenty more years. But there was a peaceful inevitability about it. Bill Stratton smiled a lot, flashing his crooked smile of veneered teeth.

The lives of worthy heroes have worthy resolutions, but less admirable men can also make journeys towards self-knowledge. Though they're lesser journeys, they still count. And Bill Stratton had made such a journey.

And what had he learnt from it? Well, one thing. Something that a man with more sense of his own importance might have dignified with the title ‘Bill Stratton's Law of Relationships'. Very simple, really. ‘If the sex doesn't work, get out.' The idea that bad sex will eventually transmute into good sex is – like that other recurrent belief in gender negotiations, that a woman can change a man – entirely fallacious.

He leant across in his lounger towards Carolyn. Her eyes, which had been closed, sensed his scrutiny and opened, their familiar blueness deeper from the reflection of the Greek sky.

‘I just wanted to say,' Bill murmured, ‘that I've never felt closer to another human being.'

‘It's mutual,' her husky, cigarette-roughened voice replied.

‘I want us to be together forever.'

‘Mutual too.'

He felt an urge to say more, a recurrent urge which always wanted to say the same thing. He was divorced and, as if to reinforce his lack of commitments, his ex-wife was dead. Carolyn, he had soon established, was long divorced from Jason's father. They were two grown-ups without ties, who wanted to spend the rest of their lives together. There was a strong logic about what he should say next, and he knew he had in his power the ability to make Carolyn very happy.

He leant across and kissed her, soft responsive lips.

Bill Stratton had witnessed enough mushy films to know what was expected of him at this point. He felt the words once again forming on his lips, Will you marry me? That's what he should say.

But then he stopped and thought. He thought of all the times through his life when he'd done what he should. It was the ‘should' imperative that had made him marry Andrea, and had kept him faithful to her for so long. A different ‘should' had fuelled his burst of late-onset promiscuity – the feeling he was having all the women he should have had much earlier. And now that in Carolyn he'd got the one woman he wanted and the woman he wanted to spend the rest of his life with, he felt a surging sense of freedom. And as to the thought of marrying her, he felt a gleeful, childish, instinctive response:

Why should I?