Don't You Want Me? (8 page)

Barbara and I exchanged phone numbers over coffee in the drawing room, and then I looked at my watch and started making noises about baby-sitters. ‘Could you call me a cab?’ I asked Isabella.

‘Which way are you going?’ William Cooper asked, on cue.

‘Primrose Hill.’

‘I’ll drop you off,’ he said.

‘Yes, do,’ said Isabella with tremendous unsubtlety.

‘I’ll do that.’

‘It’s not much of a detour. We can’t have Mrs Midhurst going home on her own.’

‘Quite,’ said Cooper.

I thanked Isabella – pausing briefly to wonder whether it was the done thing to say, ‘Thanks so much for organizing a rogering for me’ – said goodbye to the assembled crowd – Tree pressed her phone number on me too – and got my coat (‘Get your coat, you’ve pulled,’ I giggled to myself, knowing by now that I’d had too much to drink). William’s coat was a navy-blue number with a velvet collar, of the
kind favoured by small nanny-accompanied children in Kensington Gardens.

His car was parked just outside the house: a black Jeep with leather seats. Once he’d opened the door, we sat in the particularly harsh, unforgiving light for half a minute, during which time I realized that his tanned face – what is it with me and men with orange issues? – came out of a bottle, and that his hair was most probably dyed. Both these observations were sobering. But only a little bit.

‘Well,’ said William, once the light had gone out, giving me a wolfish grin, his teeth glinting in the dark, quite sexily: there’s something about oddly sharp incisors that gives me the horn.

‘Hmm,’ I said, thinking. Obviously, we couldn’t go to my house: it’d be like soiling your own nest. Well, not
soiling
, quite, but it wouldn’t necessarily enrich my home environment, either, to be reminded of William lying there, all bare, every time I looked at my cosy bed.

‘Would you like a nightcap?’ William asked, turning the key in the ignition.

‘Yes,’ I replied.

‘Your place or mine?’ he asked smoothly, flashing his teeth again.

‘Yours.’ I smiled back.

‘Good,’ said William, squeezing my knee. ‘Very good. It’s not far.’

It suddenly occurred to me that Dr William here might, for all I knew, be a murderer, or a wild perv, or anything else at all. He might perfectly well take me back to his flat and tie me up and, I don’t know, torture me with electrodes, and keep me in a box, and feed me cat food. Sure, I’d met him in respectable circumstances, and doctors
aren’t usually loony types –
but on the other hand, Dr Crippen
. I decided to quickly text Frank, so that at least one person would know where I was.

‘What are you doing?’ William asked.

‘Just letting my house-mate know I may be back late.’

‘You certainly will,’ William leered. He licked his lips and squeezed my knee again, getting my upper thigh instead: either he thought I had freakishly short legs or he was revving up. ‘Good. Why don’t you just ring her?’

‘Him, actually. This is faster.’

‘What are you saying?’

‘Oh. Er, just “Back later” really, so he doesn’t worry.’ Which was a lie: I’d typed
Hv plld dr fr sx bck 2 am ltst or rng 999
before pressing ‘Send’. I’ve never quite got the gist of text messages. They all remind me of that ad there used to be on the Underground years ago:
If u cn rd ths msg, u cn bcm a scrtry & gt a gd jb
. Which made me think for years that secretaries were a bt hlf wttd.

‘All done?’ asked William.

‘Yes. Now I’m ready to check out your bedside manner, Doctor. I have a terrible ache in my, you know, lower regions.’

William looked exceedingly pleased by this, and stroked my thigh.

‘Mmm,’ I added. ‘Ow. I can’t wait. Will you wear your stethoscope?’

‘Would you like that?’ William husked, pulling off the Euston Road into Marylebone High Street.

‘I’d rather like a full exam,’ I said, slightly revving up myself. I suddenly had a thought. ‘But not including rectal, obviously. No bottom action at all, in fact.’

‘What?’ said William, swerving to avoid a Fiat Punto. ‘What did you say?’

‘I dislike anal sex,’ I explained. ‘I’m just letting you know early. Being helpful. To avoid disappointment. I do hope you’re
not
disappointed?’

‘Er, no. No,’ he said. ‘That’s, er, quite all right. Here we are, then,’ he added, pulling up outside a Victorian mansion block.

Cooper, predictably, lived in a shag-pad, though the shag-pad was so Seventies that I had to ask him how old he was (the reply, conclusively, was ‘old enough to show you a good time’). There were black leather shag-sofas all over the living room, and recessed shag-lighting, and long, tufty shag-pile, and one entire wall was made up of smoky shag-mirrors.

‘Got any Barry White?’ I asked, which was supposed to be a joke.

‘Of course,’ William Cooper said smoothly and somewhat solemnly.

‘Baby,’ I growled, in my deepest voice, and then laughed to myself because my Bazza impersonation is so eerily exact.

Cooper, who had his back to me, fiddling about with the Bang (ha!) & Olufsen, seemed surprised by my sound.

‘Here we are,’ he said, turning around and giving me a strange look. ‘
The Greatest Hits
.’

It happened very quickly after that. On came Barry, down went the lights, off came his coat, and mine. And then – oh no, oh
no
– he started to dance. He danced a snaky, writhy little dance, and as if this weren’t bad enough, he started untying his Turnbull & Asser tie, thrusting all
the while, not quite in tune with the music. His clenched fists were down by his swivelling hips, pumping in and out like a choo-choo train. I constantly ask myself whether prowess on the dance floor is indicative of prowess in the sack; if so, then I was clearly in for a bit of a spasticated ride. I was just standing there, watching the display with mounting dismay and wondering whether I ought just to go home, when he spoke.

‘Come here,’ said Dr Cooper, his voice sounding all hoarse. ‘You make me hot.’

‘OK,’ I said, unnecessarily, moving forward. ‘Do you, um, want me to dance too?’

‘Yeah,’ said Cooper, pushing his face into my neck and – eeeuww – licking it. ‘Dance with me, hot lady.’

You know when you really, really want to laugh, but you’re not allowed to, and how the forbiddenness makes it so much worse? It was like that. I wanted to snort, to honk, to
bray
with laughter, to lie on the floor and clutch my stomach and
howl
, but I didn’t. I also really, really wanted a shag – and I know how bad it looks, or at least how mysterious, but you’ve got to trust me: there was something inexplicably sexy about him. He had a nice body, even if it was writhing about all over the place malcoordinatedly. So I danced.

Eventually – quite quickly, really – I was dancing with his hand in my pants. This was when he turned me around and moved behind me, so that we were both facing the wall of mirrors. I’ve never had a great desire to watch myself bobbing about half-naked to Barry White, so I shut my eyes, which of course William interpreted as a sign of deepest ecstasy.

‘Do I make you come?’ his voice whispered wetly into
my ear, followed by an odd sort of whinnying noise: he sounded like Austin Powers crossed with a pony, and like the kind of man who spells ‘come’ c-u-m.

‘Mmm,’ I said, because, really, what can you say without sounding rude? ‘Not yet, actually.’ Which
did
sound rude, so I added, sounding to myself strangely like a dowager duchess, ‘But I’m, er, I’m sure you will. Soon, you know. Later.’

‘I’m gonna make you come so hard,’ Cooper stated, very categorical. ‘Harder than you’ve ever come before.’ He made the strange whinnying noise again: ‘Neeiiiigh.’

‘Jolly good,’ I said uncharacteristically. All that whinnying reminded me of Thelwell ponies, and I’d adapted my language accordingly, obviously. ‘Shall we, er?’ I asked, gesturing to what I imagined to be the bedroom.

‘You can’t wait, can you? You
can’t wait
,’ Cooper said, looking pleased. He stared at himself in the mirror, one hand quickly reaching up to push his hair back. ‘You dirty girl.’

‘Quite. Shall we go?’ I said, because really we had to, before I lost my nerve or started laughing dementedly.

‘Dirty, dirty girl,’ he repeated. And then he led me by the hand to the bedroom, doing his weird dancing all the while.

I’m not going to go into too much detail here. On the plus side: the sheets may have been satin, but the ceiling was not mirrored, which was a bonus. Dr Cooper had rather a large penis, ditto. He was very athletic, though still in his oddly plastic way: I was reminded of contorting an Action Man into unlikely positions. He knew a couple of neat tricks. He left my bot alone, as decreed. I had one small orgasm. Mustn’t grumble, really, since that was pretty much what I came for.

On the other hand, I’m not really the mustn’t grumble type. So, on the minus side: when we were in the bedroom and I was getting undressed, he crawled all over the bed and roared like a tiger. Yes, really: raaah. And then he talked
non-stop
. I don’t mind a bit of commentary, but this gave me ear-ache – not helped by the fact that the vocabulary used was, as I’ve already mentioned, on the Austin Powers side. Also, I think that if you’re going to go down the dirty-talking route, it helps to have an almost unintelligibly rough accent – council-house Glaswegian, say, just to pick an entirely random example. Dr Cooper’s upper-middle-class cadences didn’t really sit comfortably with the language he was using, and after a little while I became tired of the way he said ‘pooseh’ and ‘cork’. I think Dr Cooper dyes his chest hair, too, because when we’d finished there was a strange, dark grey sheen
to my breast. He must immerse himself completely in a bath of dye. And his penis was stubbornly untanned; ghostly, glimmering palely in the darkness, looking somehow both blind and albino.

Once the deed was done, I waited ten minutes or so and then started getting ready to leave. All sorts of thoughts were whizzing round my head: 1) how I don’t think being on top is really
at all
an option after the age of thirty-five, as everything sags forwards horribly; 2) how it was surprisingly unsurprising to have sex again; 3) how perhaps I should have saved myself for someone I found less ridiculous; 4) how I did exactly the right thing – he may have been slightly ridiculous, but it was a perfectly decent shag; 5) how I really hate it when men lie there not taking the condom off afterwards, so that their penis looks all small and wrinkly and like it’s wearing a poor-quality, cheaply transparent anorak.

‘How was that, baby?’ Cooper said as I struggled into my pants.

‘Great,’ I said, looking for my tights in the dark. ‘Very nice. Thank you.’

‘Where are you going?’ he asked. ‘Don’t you want – ’ he licked his lips, which shone like mucus in the darkness – ‘don’t you want … more? Huh? Huh? More, you dirty girl.’

‘Not really, William. I have to get home. I have to get my daughter up in a few hours.’ Mentioning Honey made me feel grubby, somehow, unmaternal, slappery. I continued to gather my things, which were scattered all over the floor.

‘Nurse,’ said Cooper. ‘Nurse?’

‘What?’ Why was he speaking without verbs? ‘No, actually, I mainly bottle-fed. Anyway – thank you for, you know,
having me
, ha ha, and, er, see you.’

‘Nurse, Mrs Midhurst is ready for her exam now,’ Cooper leered, addressing his imaginary colleague. ‘The full physical, I think.’ He whinnied again, his hand fumbling horribly under the sheet.

Oh, stupid, stupid
moron
me. Why did I mention playing doctors? Suddenly, the idea filled me with something not a million miles away from disgust.

‘I’ll just get my instruments,’ Cooper continued, getting out of bed now, still addressing the invisible attendant.

‘I really have to go,’ I said, standing up and following him out of the bedroom. ‘But it was very nice to meet you. No, really,’ I had to add, as he started rustling about in his doctor’s case and re-emerged triumphantly clutching a stethoscope and a pair of latex gloves. ‘I
really
, really have to go. So, um, goodbye.’

‘Come by next week for your examination,’ Cooper said, standing by the door naked except for the pair of rubber gloves, which he’d snapped on. ‘I’ll ring to confirm,’ he winked.

‘Bye,’ I said, and ran all the way down the stairs.

‘Raaaa,’ he called at my back. ‘Raaaaaaah!’

Standing in Marylebone High Street looking for a black cab, I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, so I did both.

‘Well?’ says Frank, the following morning. ‘I thought I’d let you lie in. Mary’s here and she’s taken Honey to the zoo, by the way. Some special owl thing, apparently. What happened?’

‘You got her up? That’s incredibly kind of you.’ I haven’t
had a hangover for months, and also – though this may be psychosomatic – my pelvis hurts slightly: I feel like I should be walking with my legs in the shape of a Y.

‘No problem. Anyway, so?’

‘Hang on, I’m just making myself some tea. Was everything OK last night?’

‘Absolutely fine. She went to bed at seven thirty and she didn’t budge. I read her two
Angelina Ballerina
stories. She really loves them, doesn’t she?’

‘Yes, more than life itself. I looked in on her when I came in, about two-ish.’

‘I didn’t hear you. Come on, Stella, for God’s sake:
so
? What happened? Who’s the doctor? Some sexy locum?’

‘Oh, Frank.’

‘You look knackered, actually.’

‘Shagged out,’ we both say at the same time.

‘Not quite sexy locum,’ I explain. ‘A sexy-ish plastic surgeon. Name of Cooper. Was at Isabella’s. Dyes his hair and has very white teeth. Also, orange skin.’

‘Stella!’ Frank says, half-horrified, half-thinking I’m making it up. ‘You went to bed with an orange plastic surgeon? Tell me you’re joking, love.’

‘Alas, Frank. No. I’m not.’ I take a sip of tea. All my head feels hot. ‘He roared like this: raaah,’ I tell Frank.

‘What?’

‘Naked. On the bed. He roared. Raah. Also satin sheets, natch. Chocolate brown.’