Come on. No! No correlation.’
‘At our age, we all have history,’ Alice tried a different tack.
‘This isn’t history!’ Thea objected. ‘A week ago is not history!’
‘The thing I’m sure about,’ said Alice, trying to sound balanced and credible, ‘is that he’s not doing this to hurt you. OK? Can you hear that? Saul wouldn’t do anything to hurt you. You are the love of his life and I think that you do know that. Whatever he’s doing, whatever he pays for, it is a weird, upsetting, dark predilection – but on paper he’s a wonderful boyfriend. You’ve never doubted him, you’ve never loved or been loved so deeply, so entirely. So, can you live with it?’
‘Turn a blind eye?’ Thea was staggered. ‘Ignore the fact that the man I honour with my sexual fidelity fucks whores in his lunch hour?’ Alice looked down at the table. ‘What would you do, Alice,’ Thea asked her levelly, just then thinking that Saul wasn’t so much dark as the devil incarnate, ‘if this was you? If you found out that Mark pays for sex?’
They looked at each other and tears sprang to both sets of eyes. They both knew that Mark simply wouldn’t.
‘I hate him, I hate him, I hate him,’ Thea sobbed.
‘The thing is,’ Alice said carefully, ‘I think you really want to hate him but I don’t think you ever can.’
‘I never want to see him again.’
‘The thing is,’ said Alice, ‘at some point you’re simply going to have to.’
‘Hullo, babes.’ Peter Glass was waiting in reception, halfway through the Evening Standard when Thea arrived back late from her lunch with Alice. Thea was not in the mood to be called babes. Just then she hated the male species without exception.
‘How are you, Peter?’ Thea asked perfunctorily, as she led the way to her room.
Do you pay for sex, Peter Glass? Is it a toss-up between one kind of massage and another? Did I win or lose today, hey?
‘I’m the usual, babes. You know, stressed, overworked,’ he laughed. ‘It’s my sodding lower back today, Thea. The pain is going down my leg – I’m hobbling, it hurts to drive even the Beemer.’
‘OK,’ Thea said, skimming through her notes on his last visit, ‘down to your boxer shorts and onto the bed, please.’ In the calm of her room, with something to absorb her, she was soon grateful to Peter for bringing her his aches and pains. For an hour she could take her mind off what irked her and concentrate instead on alleviating someone else’s discomfort. It was something she knew how to do. Placing her hands on Peter’s back, Thea began to rock his pelvis rhythmically to and fro.
‘How are you, babes?’ Peter asked, his voice suddenly softer as his body began to unwind under Thea’s guidance. ‘How’s it going? All signed and sealed on the new place? Have you exchanged on yours?’
Thea stopped rocking and for the first time in her career, entirely took her hands away from a client’s body mid-massage. Peter felt the chill and isolation and lifted his head, twisting round to look at her. She looked very puzzled. ‘Are you all right?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ she said, though she didn’t look it. ‘Peter, is it possible for the vendor to unexchange a contract?’
‘Revoke?’ he balked as if the crime was so heinous as to be virtually unheard of. Thea shrugged. ‘Fucking hell, Thea,’ he said, returning his head to the hole in the massage bed, ‘you’ll be sued to within a pound of their entire deposit – they just changed the law to prevent misdemeanours like that.’
‘I thought so,’ Thea said with forced jollity.
‘Cold feet?’ Peter asked.
‘Nah,’ Thea faked her nonchalance, ‘I was just wondering.’
She said no more. She rubbed some more ointment between her palms and effleuraged Peter’s back with long, smooth strokes. When he wasn’t groaning in appreciation and sighing with relief, he was filling her in on the details of his life, professional and personal. He’d pranged the Beemer, he’d chucked the girlfriend, bedded her best mate to make her jealous but since started dating a teacher.
‘Not my usual type, Thea,’ he marvelled, ‘she’s a bit older than me and not what I’d call a “stunner”. But she’s a great girl and she makes me laugh out loud.’
Thea hooked her fingers around the lateral fibres of Peter’s latissimus dorsi, lifting and pulling medially. It silenced him for a while and then he started a rant against a rival estate agent. She set about some deep tissue work where he didn’t realize he needed it and for the time being, she managed to massage away the stress his adversaries had heaped around his neck and shoulders.
He has a good physique.
Not really my type.
But objectively, he’s in good shape.
But I wouldn’t say he does it for me.
Thea trails her fingertips lightly up and down Peter’s spine. Up and down. And then down some more. Down until she’s reached the dimples above his buttocks. Just relax. Just relax. She leaves one hand there and takes her other to his right leg. She strokes up his hamstring and then down. And again. Then, with both hands she starts to massage his legs lightly. Up and down and up some more. She slides her hands around and travels along Peter’s inner thighs. And up and down her hands go. This is not massage. This is not ambiguity. This is caressing. She feels nothing. It’s easy to trace the hemline of his boxer shorts suggestively with her fingertips.
Peter has gone from being deeply relaxed and utterly motionless to springing up from the table, his face striated with embarrassment. For the first time in his life, he’s at a loss for what to say. So he scrabbles into his clothes instead and starts wittering on about Christ is that the time, dear God he has clients waiting.
‘I’d better go – thanks for the, er. I feel fine.’
Thea had intended to cancel Gabriel Sewell. She wanted to finish early; she’d had a dreadful headache since Peter’s session and it could be a valid excuse not to see Saul for yet another night, to cancel Pilates and just go home, go home and curl up and not do any packing. But her afternoon had been back to back with other people’s backache and, at five to four, she went downstairs and found Mr Sewell already there, expressionless as usual.
‘Come on, Mr Sewell,’ she said, with negligible charm or enthusiasm. He followed her up. ‘How have you been?’ she asked him cursorily, while helping herself to a long drink of mineral water.
‘Not too bad, actually,’ Gabriel Sewell replied, thinking he’d like a glass of water too, ‘still blocked to the right. But the pain is substantially better.’
For the first time in her career, Thea wasn’t remotely interested in her client despite his physical improvement being a direct credit to her. ‘Look to the left,’ she told him, ‘and to the right. And to the left again, please. And to the right once more.’
‘It’s no longer what I’d term pain,’ Gabriel defined, ‘it’s more discomfort.’
Well, if it’s only discomfort, Mr Sewell, I wish you’d cancelled your appointment and waited another week.
‘Down to your underwear and onto your stomach, please,’ Thea said with scant interest. Perhaps she’d just give him thirty minutes and charge him half the fee.
Thea