Annie Robinson opens the door. She’s wearing a yellow dress and her hair is pinned up in a messy, casual way that probably took her an hour to achieve. I feel the coolness of her lips on mine and can almost taste the brightness of her lipstick.
‘You came.’
‘What did you expect?’
‘I just thought you might find an excuse.’
‘Why?’
‘I can be rather pushy. I wasn’t always, but when you’re pushing forty and you’re a notch below Bambi in the beauty stakes, you either grab your chances or languish in boredom listening to your girlfriends talk about Botox injections or their latest diet.’
Her voice tails off. She pours me a glass of wine. Her glass is almost empty. She refills it.
‘When I get nervous I talk too much - I’m doing it already.’
‘You’re being charming.’
‘I should just be indifferent. Men find indifference sexy.’
Annie looks at me for confirmation, but I don’t know how to answer her.
‘It’s true,’ she says. ‘Why do twenty-five men in a bar always chat up the single prettiest woman when the odds of success are so poor and she’s probably not going to want to go home with any of them? Meanwhile every other single woman in the bar is wondering what they have to do to get some attention.’
Annie lives in a listed Georgian terrace converted into six flats and backing on to the old Kent and Avon Canal in Bath. Her flat is on the ground floor and has a walled garden with trellises and a small patio dotted with terracotta pots.
After giving me a tour of the garden, she points to the sofa and we sit, sipping wine. In the next breath she puts her arms around my neck and pushes her stomach against my thigh, kissing me urgently, wetly. Next thing she’s pressing my hand between her thighs, grinding her crotch against my knuckles and I’m reacting like a man dying of thirst who has crawled a hundred miles across a desert just to be here.
The kiss continues as Annie pulls me up. Standing and kicking off her shoes, she edges me towards the bedroom. Breathlessly, we topple backwards on to her bed and she lands on top of me with a grunt.
‘Ow!’
‘What?’
‘Your elbow.’
‘Sorry.’
Annie slips her fingers beneath the elastic of her knickers, pushing them over her thighs. I try to negotiate the zipper of her dress.
‘My hair! It’s caught! Don’t move.’
She sits up on my thighs, reaching behind her to loosen the zip.
‘It’s jammed.’
‘I’m sorry.’
She laughs. ‘We’re hopeless.’
‘It looks a lot easier in the movies.’
‘Maybe we should start again.’
‘I’ll just use your bathroom.’
Rolling off the bed, I escape for a moment, feeling the cold tiles through my socks. The bathroom is nicely renovated, with a wall-to-ceiling mirror. There are shelves of shampoos, pastes, powders and moisturisers, which she appears to be stockpiling.
I study myself in the mirror. My mouth is smudged with her lipstick. How long has it been? Two years without sex: more of a drought than a dry spell. I’ve crossed the Sahara. I’ve forgotten how to drink.
She’ll be under the covers now, waiting for me, which is depressing rather than exciting. I look at my penis and wish it were bigger. I wish it would boss me around more often and stop me rationalising things.
I’m not a perfect human being. I know more about feelings than I do about the physical world. It’s easier for me to understand passion than to experience it.
Annie has brought another bottle of wine and glasses to the bedroom. She’s also wearing lingerie, lying self-consciously, trying to show herself to best effect. I take off my clothes and lie down next to her. She doesn’t let my doubts linger, taking my hand and pulling me next to her. Her tongue moves against my teeth.
Then she straddles me, squeezing me between her thighs, her breasts against my chest. I run my hand down her back and trace a finger over her curves. She lifts her hips, wanting me to touch her, but I glide my finger away moving higher and then drifting lower again.
‘Don’t tease me,’ she whispers, her voice vibrating.
I let my fingers sweep across her mound and she traps my hand beneath her, grinding her pelvis against my knuckles. Her lips are pressed to my ear, whispering what she wants.
I feel a familiar stirring. You don’t forget. It’s like falling off a bike or falling off a cliff or falling for someone. Even so, my lack of practice is quickly apparent. And I mean quickly.
Annie doesn’t mind. We have all night, she says. The next time is slower, more deliberate, less urgent, better, and for just a moment all the loneliness and thoughts of Julianne leave my memory and the only sound in the room is the squeak of bedsprings under our weight and the gentle slap of Annie’s stomach against mine. I cry out involuntarily, more like a woman than a man, lost in the smell of her hair and the beating of her heart.
I leave Annie sleeping, breathing softly. All men hope to do that. She looks like a child curled up in the disordered bed, one arm covering her eyes. There is a tiny mole on her shoulder blade; her upper lip more prominent than the lower; her eyebrows are shaped; she makes a soft humming noise as she sleeps and the soft swell of her stomach is strikingly feminine.
Creeping through the house, dressing quietly, I let myself out. It’s an odd feeling, having slept with someone other than Julianne, to have touched and tasted another human being. I don’t know what I feel. Relief. Guilt. Happiness. Loss.
I still have Julianne’s car. Her travelling make-up bag is in the pocket of the door and I imagine I can almost smell her shampoo on the headrest.
In between the sex, Annie had told me about her divorce and how her husband and his lawyer had stitched her up, crying poor and hiding assets.
‘I was married for six years and four months and couldn’t get pregnant,’ she told me. ‘We tried. My husband had an affair with his secretary, which sounds so boring when I say it - like a cliché. That’s my life - a cliché.’
‘I’m sure that’s not true,’ I said.
I wanted to ask her about Gordon Ellis. Annie knew about Ray Hegarty’s allegations. She conducted the internal investigation, yet she didn’t react when I mentioned Gordon and Sienna. Was it natural caution, or confidentiality, or was she protecting a colleague?
Another bottle of wine was opened. Annie drank most of it. She apologised for being so maudlin. ‘I don’t know why I’m telling you all this, spilling my secrets.’
‘You don’t have to explain.’
‘Really? Are you sure?’
I wasn’t sure but I said yes and Annie continued, wanting to tell me everything; to share her secrets, funny stories and her bad decisions. It should have been intimate. It felt more like a therapy session.
I once had a patient who believed that the clock ran faster for her than anyone else. She was a university student and she was convinced that her exam time was concertinaed and that ‘her clock’ would speed up, giving her less time, which is why she could never finish.
The same clock ran slower for other people, she said. Annie acted like that. The world had conspired against her and she wanted me to know that it wasn’t her fault.