kept waiting on the front steps?’
‘I’m sorry . . Mattie began, and then with a flutter of relief she realised that the boy wasn’t interested in anything except getting back to his bed.
He bolted the door behind them and disappeared. John took a key from a row of wooden pigeonholes and held it up for Mattie to see. ‘Number thirteen. Not a difficult one to remember, luckily.’
She followed him in silence. The hotel smelt pungently of air freshener and boiled vegetables, and then they passed the bar and the hoppy stink of beer was momentarily dominant. Mattie thought of the travelling salesmen congregated in there in the empty evenings. Past the bar they negotiated a flight of stairs, and reached John’s room. After several stabs with the key he found the door and opened it. Mattie looked back down the bare hallway, and then she followed John Douglas into room number thirteen. The ceiling light was very high up, a fringed and bobbled shade pendent in a grey, shadowy space. The room seemed full of shiny brown furniture, ranks of unmatching wardrobes and glass-topped dressing tables. The double bed had shiny wooden head- and footboards, and a green candlewick cover. The curtains were faded green velour and the carpet was a third shade of green.
Mattie wondered, Am I going to do this, here?
John Douglas took off his overcoat, and put his hat and scarf on one of the dressing tables.
‘Excuse me a minute,’ he muttered. He went out of the room, and Mattie heard the clank and flush of a lavatory. She stood motionless, still in her thin coat, waiting. John came back and closed the door. He came to her, and with his big hands began to undo her buttons. When he saw her bare shoulders he was breathing heavily, with his mouth open. He touched the scattered golden freckles with his fingers.
Mattie felt nothing, except the cold air of the room on her skin.
With a sudden blundering movement John pushed her backwards on to the bed. He fell on top of her, squashing her with his weight. Experimentally, Mattie reached up and put her arms around his neck. He kissed her face and told her, puzzled, ‘You taste of salt.’
The wind had blown the sea-spray into her face.
He licked her cheek gently. There was tenderness in it, and it touched her. She turned her head to find his mouth, but he had drawn back a little. He was lying with his eyes closed, and she listened to his breathing. It was a moment or two before she realised that he had fallen asleep.
Mattie looked up at the tiny light above them. Even the feeble speck of it seemed to hurt her eyes, and she realised that she was exhausted. Slowly and gently, inching herself sideways, she extricated herself from John Douglas’s heavy limbs. She went across to the bathroom and washed herself in cold water, then crept back into the bedroom. John hadn’t moved. He looked like a big, crestfallen child. Mattie struggled to pull off his trousers and jacket, and he grunted and pitched away from her. Under his clothes he was wearing long underwear, his big hands and feet protruding from the ribbed cuffs of it. She felt hot with her efforts, and with sadness, and with the burgundy fuming in her head.
Mattie half undressed herself and pulled the covers up over both of them. The weight of him in the bed beside her felt strange, but it comforted her. She fell asleep at once.
When she woke up again it was daylight. She frowned at the tall rectangle of light in front of her, and then it resolved itself into a window, with thin sunshine filtering through greyish net curtains. There were green velour curtains framing the net. She remembered, and turned under the bedcovers to look for him.
The bed was empty, although the pillows on the other side were dented and creased. He had been here, then.
Not a dream.
The room was empty too, for all the lowering, shiny furniture. Mattie drew her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them. She lay and listened to the sounds of doors opening and closing, distant hoovering, a car passing outside. She was thirsty and her head felt muzzy.
The door opened. John came in and closed it with a gentle click, before he looked and saw that she was awake. He stood at the side of the bed, peering down at her. Then he sat down heavily on his own side. He was wearing a startling, red paisley dressing gown.
‘I’m sorry,’ he offered at last. ‘That wasn’t a very attractive display, was it? I don’t often drink like that, although it may surprise you to hear it. Can’t afford it, for one thing. And when I did I used to be able to hold it. But I’m an old man now. Failing in every direction.’
Mattie broke into his monologue. ‘Fifty-four isn’t old. Not if you don’t let it be.’
She remembered how he had looked last night, in his underclothes. She felt pain for both of them, but John laughed. He was snorting a little, running his fingers through his hair so that it lay back flat, like a badger’s. He stood up again and walked restlessly around the room, then stopped at the window to stare through the mist of grey net towards the sea.
In a low voice he asked her, ‘Do you want to try again?’
Mattie tried to blot out the room and its depressing furnishings, and the dusty, heavy green folds of fabric shrouding them.
The room didn’t matter. They were here, that was all.
She was troubled more by the sense that nothing else mattered, either. Whether John Douglas made love to her against this shiny wooden headboard, or not. It wouldn’t make any difference. It wouldn’t be a cataclysmic moment, not like in the stories. Except that there had been that moment of tenderness last night. That stayed with her, like warmth and wetness still on her cheek.
Afterwards she had undressed him and he had been vulnerable.
In the restaurant’s sickly warmth, with the wine in her head, she had wanted to come here to his bedroom. This morning she only knew that she liked John Douglas, rumpled and hung-over in his cherry-coloured dressing gown. Liking unclouded by longing or lust.
Mattie thought fleetingly of Julia’s aviator. With his broad back and strong arms and blond head, his potency like a spell cast over Julia. Mattie’s mouth curved. She didn’t long for Josh Flood either.
What difference, then?
Without speaking she lifted her bare arm from the musty shelter of the blankets and held it out to him.
He came to her quickly, pulling at the paisley cloth. He was naked underneath it and Mattie saw white corded flesh and thickly matted grey hair. Then he was beside her, on top of her, his tongue in her hair and in her ears and in her mouth. He pulled at the layer of clothes she had slept in and she helped him where she could, wriggling awkwardly beneath him. He hoisted himself up so that he could see her.
‘Oh God, you’ve got a beautiful body.’
He seized her breasts, kneading and squeezing and bumping them, and then taking them in his mouth with the nipples between his teeth. Mattie lay perfectly still and let him do what he wanted to her. For a moment everything seemed simple. He just does it, she thought with relief. But it wasn’t enough.
‘Hold me,’ he ordered her. He fixed her fist over himself. She felt thin, shiny skin stretched perilously tight over hard flesh. Mattie moved her hand tentatively up and down, wanting to do it right for him. He hissed hotly in her ear, ‘Hold it tighter. And do it hard, like this.’ His hand pumped with hers, big, long strokes that he thrust into.
Is that right? she wanted to ask. Is that right?
His fingers tweaked at her, rubbing and probing. ‘You like, that don’t you?’
‘Yes.’ Her breath came in a suffocating gasp, and she felt him smile.
‘Good. Yes. There’s nothing bloody like it.’
Mattie felt nothing. She had never felt anything with the boys outside the dance halls, or in the back row of the cinema, either.
Suddenly John pulled the pillows down from behind their heads. He thrust them under Mattie’s hips, lifting her into the air. She felt stripped and exposed