A Wayward Game (2 page)

I break off at
last, and sit back on my heels, glancing up at him. He looks
magnificent, shining with sweat and gasping with pleasure, with his
arms bound and a blindfold covering his eyes. I need him; I need to
feel him beside me and inside me.

“Yes,” I say,
and my voice sounds husky. “Yes, I think you’re ready now.”

I slip out of
my kimono, and it makes a soft rustling sound as it falls to the
floor. Then I go over to the table, and take a condom. I rip open
the packet, and roll the rubber sheath down over his cock. He
sighs, and I straddle him, facing him, putting my hands on his
shoulders as I lower my body onto his. Our faces are very close
together; I can feel his breath on my skin, see beads of sweat
prickling his forehead and upper lip. His cock presses against my
inner thigh, hard and insistent. I want to draw this moment out to
infinity, but at the same time I want release.

I lift my hips
and feel him pushing against the entrance to my body. I pause for a
moment, and then bring my hips down, and he slides inside me, deep
down, filling me. I draw back, and push down again, and again. The
sensation of being filled and stretched is glorious, heartbreaking,
and suddenly I am as much a slave to sensation as he is. I wrap my
arms around his neck, rest my cheek against his temple, and inhale
the scent of his body, his hair, his sweat. I drive harder, harder,
against him, and feel his body strain to meet mine. He gasps and
moans, and his lips brush against the delicate skin just below my
ear. This tiny touch is all that is needed to drive me over the
edge, and I thrust my body down onto his, so that he is deep inside
me, up to the hilt. His entire body tenses and then jolts as he
lets out a wild cry; and I hear a note of triumph in that cry, as
the darkness that pressed in upon him earlier is dispersed, leaving
only an endless and empty light.

Tired, he
sleeps. I leave him curled up on the bed, adrift on a sea of
peaceful slumber, and wrap my kimono around my body. I creep out of
the room, and make my way to the living room. Sliding doors lead
out onto a small, enclosed roof terrace, and I open them and step
outside. The sounds of cars, trains and raised voices drift up to
meet me, and London opens up before my eyes, bleached and dusty
beneath the glaring June sun. It’s nearly eight o’clock in the
evening, but it’s almost as hot as midday. I stare out over the
rooftops of Spitalfields and across into the City, where London’s
monuments to commerce glimmer in the evening sun. I think of Neil,
and what we have done, and are doing, in this place.

I often think
that Neil has no business being involved in this lifestyle. He is
not an innocent, by any means – a career in law enforcement has
left him with a deeper knowledge of the world’s evils than most –
but he is no cynical hedonist or heartless adventurer. His
appearance, in fact, betrays what he is. His features are rather
rugged, and marked by the faint lines of time and worry. His
intensely blue eyes look out over the world with a penetrating gaze
that some people might find rather intimidating; it is as if they
want to sound every secret and understand every nuance that the
world and the human heart contain. His hair is brown, and cut in a
short, conventional style. He is on the cusp of middle age, and his
physical size and strength, combined with his sharp intelligence,
once made a career in policing seem like an obvious choice.

He joined the
Metropolitan Police fresh out of university, on a fast-track
graduate scheme. His motives, he has confessed to me, were simple:
he had to do some kind of job, and policing seemed as promising a
career path as any. It also had an aura of glamour and excitement
that appealed to him; the TV schedules are, after all, packed full
of police and detective dramas. This uninspired decision made, he
surprised himself by finding that he not only enjoyed his work, but
was rather good at it. He has never been an ambitious man, exactly,
but he has worked hard, and has earned several promotions. He
enjoys his job without allowing it to take over his life, and
retains a simple, almost boyish, faith in the concept of justice.
If he has any doubts about the police force, or the wider
Establishment that it serves, he does not give voice to them. He
cultivates an air of brisk practicality in his daily life, and yet
he is, in essence, a dreamer: an admirer of impossible ideals, a
romantic who has never quite been able to reconcile himself to a
world in which romance has died.

Romanticism, of
course, is rarely visible at first sight. If you walked past Neil
in the street, you would probably take him for a middle-aged,
middle-class, married man. In this instance, you would be
correct.

Neil’s wife is
utterly different to him – or so I gather, at least, from what he
has told me about her. A City financier, she has more than made up
for his fundamental lack of drive. Fiercely ambitious and utterly
focussed, her character is at odds with Neil’s gentler, less
insistent personality. Little wonder, I suppose, that their
marriage is on the rocks. Realists and idealists rarely make ideal
partners, in my experience. Both being convinced of the rightness
of their approach, they soon become impatient with what they
perceive to be the other’s failings – a failure of resolve or
reason, according to the realist, and a failure of the imagination,
according to the idealist.

It was not
always so. At the outset, Neil once told me, their very differences
made them irresistible to each other. She saw him, perhaps, as a
representative of the romanticism she had never understood, yet
still craved. He, attracted even then to powerful and dominant
women, adored her vigour, drive and decisiveness. For a few years,
that was enough. They revelled in the variations they discovered in
each other, seeing there unimagined worlds and undreamt-of
possibilities. Gradually, though, reality – heavy, grey and
inescapable – began to slide into place. They rarely spoke. They
seemed not to understand each other. The traits that had once
enthralled began to irritate. But by then, of course, there was no
turning back. By then, they had a young daughter, and another on
the way, and a house in the suburbs, and the entire life that they
had created and could not envisage being without.

“And so we
plodded on for years,” Neil once told me. “We couldn’t bring
ourselves to admit that we’d made a mistake, even though I think we
both knew it on some level. And, you know, love doesn’t just die;
it fades so slowly and inexorably that you don’t even notice. Then
one night – God, I remember it perfectly, even now – we had a row,
and it all came out into the open. We ended up staying up all
night, talking – about the past, the future, everything. We finally
admitted that something was wrong, but we still didn’t have a clue
what we could do about it. If I close my eyes, I’m there again:
sitting on the sofa in our living room, listening to the clock
ticking in the hallway, listening to us both saying things we’d
never dared to say before. It was one of those moments when you
know that everything has changed, and you can never go back to how
things were.”

The next week,
he moved out and went to live in a small rented flat near the
Archway tube station. They didn’t necessarily see this as a
permanent change; the idea was that they’d try to live apart and
see what happened. It would give them time to think things over and
come to a decision – or so they thought, at least. Twelve months
later, and six months into the affair that has distracted him, Neil
remains as uncertain as ever. So, uncharacteristically, does his
wife. I think she must love him, at least to some extent, and this
makes me feel no more charitably toward her.

The messy
business of divorce is made messier still when there are children
involved. Children are the perpetual victims, forever condemned to
be dragged through the mud that their elders have churned up. Neil
knows this all too well, given the harrowing cases of child abuse
and neglect that he has dealt with in a professional capacity. His
own children, of course, are spared such brutality, but he wonders
whether he is, unintentionally, only inflicting other, more subtle,
cruelties on them.

“I just don’t
know what to do for the best,” he told me once. “Will they be
better off living with unhappily married parents, or being shunted
from one house to another until they grow up and can get away and
make their own lives? Who can say which of those options is
better?”

Marital
tensions notwithstanding, I think that Neil has a good relationship
with his children – insofar, that is, as two teenagers could be
said to have a good relationship with anyone. He speaks of them
sometimes. Their names are Karen and Amy: soft, conventional names
that speak of ordinariness and simplicity. He talks to them several
times a week by telephone, spends every other weekend with them,
and tries to take an interest in their lives, their schoolwork, and
their incomprehensible and short-lived passions for singers and
film stars. During the school holidays he takes them away on trips
to the coast or abroad.

These facts
read like someone’s biography, but they tell little of the real
story. Beyond this handful of truths, I actually know little of his
life. I resent this hidden part of his existence because I cannot
share it, and cannot compete with it. No matter how much distance
has crept between Neil and his wife, she is still his wife. He may
no longer live in the same household as his daughters, but they
remain his primary concern. The intricacies of his job are largely
unknown to me. All of these things are as permanent, as solid and
comforting, as the ground beneath his feet, and every bit as
homely. I, on the other hand, am as gaudy and alluring, and
ultimately as transient, as a rainbow or shooting star. And so I
torture and restrain and pleasure him, because in the end that is
the only thing that I, and I alone, can give.

The games we
play are deceptive, though. While they are happening, nothing could
be more real: what, after all, could be more true and certain than
pleasure or pain? But they are as ephemeral as a wave on the shore,
and as inconsequential. The memory they leave behind is but a ghost
of the thing itself. Pain and pleasure, existing so thoroughly in
the moment in which they are experienced, force one to live in that
moment; when the moment is over, they are dead. I have never left a
permanent mark on his body, and I fear that I will never leave a
permanent mark on his heart.

I turn away
from the burning, choking city and catch sight of my face reflected
in the window pane. It is a strained, haunted face, with panicky
eyes and a mouth that seems forever poised to ask a question. It is
frightened and uncertain, not at all like the face of a Domina. Yet
that is how Neil thinks of me: as his Mistress, his tormenter, his
shameful and pleasurable secret, as fleeting as the sensations I
bring.

For him, I am
sure, the things that we do together in these stolen hours have
nothing to do with love. We have never even mentioned the word.
After so much time it should not be hard for me to accept this
fact, but it is. It is more difficult than I ever believed
possible.

Today is June
16th. For the family and friends of Diane Meath-Jones, it is the
darkest day of the year. Later today, close relatives will go to a
local church to light candles and pray for her. It will not be a
memorial service, exactly; they cannot even be sure that she is
actually dead. But eight years after she apparently vanished off
the face of the earth, what other outcome could they reasonably
hope for?

To have a clear
overview of this extraordinary case, we might do well to start at
the beginning.

Eight years
ago, Diane – Honours Graduate in History and French, Research
Assistant for a well-known broadcaster – had a seemingly charmed
life. She was young, just twenty-five years old, and pretty. She
had money, and a successful career ahead of her. In her personal
life, too, she seemed blessed. She had, for just over a year, been
in a relationship with a City Headhunter and Oxford graduate called
James Sallow. She was, in addition, six months pregnant, and had
recently moved into her boyfriend’s comfortable home in Greenwich,
an ultra-modern open-plan apartment on the tenth floor of an
exclusive riverside development. On clear days, she could look out
of her windows and see as far as the distant hills of
Hertfordshire; at night, she could see the lights of London spread
out before her like a dream.

So far, this
seems like another version of the lifestyle that is sold to us in a
million advertisements, TV programmes, and magazine articles. Diane
seemed to embody wealth, career, youth, beauty, family and love:
all the things that we are conditioned to respect and taught to
crave. What happened next, perhaps, is a salutary lesson in not
being deceived by appearances. One warm day in mid-June the perfect
structure of Diane’s life was shattered, leaving nothing but misery
and a lingering question mark.

This, as far as
anyone knows, is what happened.

Late on the
evening of Sunday June 15th, Diane and James Sallow returned to
London after a weekend spent in a rented holiday cottage in Dorset.
Arriving at their Greenwich home, they had a light meal before
going to bed. The next morning, at about eight o’clock, Sallow said
goodbye to Diane before leaving for work. She mentioned to him, in
passing, that she was going to take their dog for a walk in
Bucklock Wood, a wooded area on the easternmost fringes of London.
He told her to be careful, left the flat, and headed off to his
office in the City.

Shortly
afterwards, Diane made her way down to the underground garage
beneath the apartment complex and collected her car, a black Lexus
sedan, which Sallow had given to her for her last birthday. She
drove out to Bucklock Wood, with the dog, a blond Labrador called
Goldie, on the back seat. The traffic was heavy that morning, and
it probably took her a while to get clear of London’s clogged
arterial roads, but shortly before ten o’clock she arrived, and
left her car on the irregular patch of gravel that served as a car
park.