As a lover? Well, obviously not as energetic and inexhaustible as Jeremy.
And though Tony was in good shape for his age, I was a little put out first
time to see what fifty -four years could do to a body. He was sitting on the
edge of the bed, bending to remove a sock. His poor naked foot looked like a
worn-out old shoe. I saw folds of flesh in improbable places, even under his
arms. How strange, that in my surprise, quickly suppressed, it didn’t occur to
me that I was looking at my own future. I was twenty-one. What I took to be
the norm – taut, smooth, supple – was the transient special case of youth. To
me, the old were a separate species, like sparrows or foxes. And now, what I
would give to be fifty -four again! The body’s largest organ bears the brunt –
the old no longer fit their skin. It hangs off them, off us, like a room-forgrowth school blazer.
Or py jamas. And in a certain light, though it may have
been the bedroom curtains, Tony had a yellowish look, like an old paperback,
one in which you could read of various misfortunes – of over-eating, scars
from knee and appendicitis operations, of a dog bite, a rock-climbing accident
and a childhood disaster with a breakfast fry ing pan which had left him bereft
of a patch of pubic hair. There was a white four-inch scar to the right of his
chest reaching towards his neck, whose history he would never explain. But if
he was slightly … foxed, and resembled at times my frayed old teddy back
home in the cathedral close, he was also a worldly, a gentlemanly lover. His
sty le was courtly. I warmed to the way he undressed me, and draped my
clothes over his forearm, like a swimming-pool attendant, and the way he
sometimes wanted me to sit astride his face – as new to me as rugola salad,
that one.
I also had reservations. He could be hasty, impatient to get on to the next
thing – the passions of his life were drinking and talking. Later, I sometimes
thought he was selfish, definitely old school, racing towards his own moment,
which he alway s gained with a wheezy shout. And too obsessed by my
breasts, which were lovely then, I’m sure, but it didn’t feel right to have a
man the Bishop’s age fixated in a near infantile way, virtually nursing there
with a strange whimpering sound. He was one of those Englishmen wrenched
aged seven from Mummy and driven into numbing boarding-school exile.
They never acknowledge the damage, these poor fellows, they just live it.
But these were minor complaints. It was all new, an adventure that proved
my own maturity. A knowing, older man doted on me. I forgave him
every thing. And I loved those soft-cushioned lips. He kissed beautifully.
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