A Little Bit on the Side (36 page)

Dear God, thought Jack, once again taken aback at the uninhibited way in which they thought and spoke about their activities, she might just as well be describing the lost wax process, she’s that bloody cool about it.

‘And now, unless you’ve anything you want to clarify with Marilyn, I think I should show you around our little love nest’

‘Always very happy to oblige with anything Mr Manning,’ teased Marilyn. ‘You only have to ask.’

‘Most generous of you,’ he replied, at last feeling a little more at ease. ‘It’s an offer which in other circumstances I might find it difficult to refuse, but for the present I must say no.’

‘Then now I must sadly leave you in the very capable hands of Marilita, and return to town,’ said Marilyn. ‘And perhaps we will meet again in those other circumstances some time. I’m sure we’d both enjoy that … And you’re so right Marilita: he’s a lovely man.’

Her final words, a blatant stage whisper ostensibly to Marilita, were primarily, and very obviously, for Jack’s benefit.

‘I’ll see you out,’ said Marilita, walking with her to the hall, where Jack could hear them talking softly.

Jack had been called many things in the course of his career, but ‘lovely man’ was a first. What on earth was it that appealed to these libidinous ladies? The fact that he didn’t ‘come on’ at them, as Josie chose to put it? Well that certainly hadn’t worked with Kate, quite the reverse in fact. It was all very puzzling.

As he waited for Marilita to return he wandered round the room looking at the paintings and prints that she favoured, and generally doing what investigators do when they are left alone with the opportunity: nosing around where he shouldn’t. His interest was quite superficial, however, until he noticed a Guildhall appointments book alongside the telephone on a side table.

His resistance to temptation was short-lived. At first he contented himself with a quick peek inside, but then intrigued he picked it up, and looked through the pages in more detail: few morning assignations, he noted, many afternoon, but mostly evening and some even overnight. How on earth did that work out for the married ones? Astonished at the few names that he saw that he recognised, he was still methodically working his way through the book several minutes later when Marilita returned, and saw him with it in his hands.

‘Mr Manning. You should be ashamed of yourself!’

He ignored the reproof, and returned to the book.

‘These,’ he said. ‘All of these? T Bayley, that would be Bayley Jnr from the solicitors, I suppose. T W Ever-shed, presumably the managing director of Eversheds Ltd. Major Thompson from out at Barton Hill. I could go on. You’ve really have got admirers from the great and … the good I was going to say, but perhaps not.

But my apologies. I shouldn’t have peeked. No part of my brief. All instantly forgotten.’

‘You’ll excuse me Mr Manning if I say that this seems to me to be a rather strange sort of income tax investigation.’

‘Mrs Davenport, it’s been strange to me from the outset, and it gets stranger by the minute, so please carry on as you intended before Marilyn left us.’

From the hall she led him up to the galleried landing on the first floor, off which there were four rooms, and a staircase leading to the top floor.

‘We do have two attic rooms,’ she said. ‘But as the four on this floor are usually quite sufficient for us, we very rarely have occasion to use them, so unless you particularly want to look up there we’ll just keep to this floor.’

‘This floor will be fine.’

She opened the first door inviting Jack to enter, and then followed him, closing it after her. As she did so the curtains were slowly drawn across the windows, and the room darkened, only to be discreetly illuminated again by some carefully concealed lighting that left most of its space in shadow, but the bed and the simple chaise longue at its feet clearly, almost dramatically lit. And as the light softly strengthened, Jack heard the sound of a small orchestra and a warm, female voice singing. He recognised the melody at once, although he had never before heard the words in an English translation.

‘We do our very best to be discerning and imaginative for our gentlemen Mr Manning. What do you think of it?’

‘Very artistic,’ said Jack, who had indeed been impressed. He’d no idea that covert, extra-marital sex, as it was for most of the men and some of the women, could be conducted in such style. No hugger-mugger, wham bang thank you m’am encounters here. All very creative and to be conducted at leisure. Those thoughts he kept to himself, but continued, ‘I’m interested in the choice of music. Do you know it in the original German?’

‘Oh no Mr Manning: I’d always thought it was English. Maurice first played it to me from an old LP, and I had it copied to tape.’

Her voice had a note of nostalgia in it, and Jack was surprised to find himself quite touched at the thought of Noddy Davenport romancing his young Greek bride to the strains
of Im Chambre Séparée.

It struck a nostalgic note too for Jack, who’d first heard it with Kate in the early years of their marriage, on one of many visits to a little bed and breakfast establishment they used when they went to the Edinburgh festival. With only three double bedrooms, it was small enough to give the landlady Mrs Johnson enough time to indulge her favourite occupation, sitting down with her guests and talking politics over breakfast to the sound of her favourite pieces on an old record player.

On the last day of their visit she had confided to them that she only accepted return visits from those couples whose political views she found to be in accord with her own. As these could best be described as a robust, if slightly eccentric, form of socialism, return bookings would inevitably have been limited. Jack and Kate, however, found themselves amongst them, and it would have been during breakfast on the second visit when Mrs Johnson paused (a very rare event) in the middle of her fulminations against Macmillan’s pay pause policy so that they could better listen to the recording. ‘Schwarzkopf,’ she said. ‘The ultimate song of seduction.’ They went out and bought a copy immediately after breakfast. It was one of the few records Kate took with her when she left.

‘No, no, not English. It’s from an old German operetta, said Jack. ‘And I once knew a lady who said it was the ultimate song of seduction.’

‘What a lovely thought. I’ll tell the other ladies,’ said Marilita. ‘But we have quite a range to suit the varying tastes of our gentlemen.’

As she spoke she pressed another button, and as the curtains slowly opened again Jack’s ears were assaulted with the less than haunting sound of a light tenor wrapping his tonsils round a thousand and one grace notes to the strains of
Unchained Melody.

‘The Righteous Brothers,’ she murmured.

‘I suppose so,’ said Jack.

And as you can see, now that it’s quite light, it’s all very stylish and comfortable. Nice buttoned armchair for the gentleman, built-in wardrobe for the costumes, best linen on the bed, tasteful prints on the walls and always fresh flowers on the side table. Each room also has its own ensuite shower, although putting those in did tend to make it a little cramped and intimate, but nobody seems to mind that.’

Tasteful and nice, just the right words for it, thought Jack. It looked indeed to be the very essence of comfortable, conventional, middle class domesticity, which in the circumstances did seem rather odd.

‘We have one other room just like this one as you can see,’ said Marilita, moving on to the landing, and throwing open its door. ‘But the next one along has been fitted out with a little more imagination and flair for those chaps who like that sort of thing.’

Once again Jack was impressed at the way Marilita had grasped even the subtlest conventions in her use of English. It would of course be ‘chaps’, who were not quite gentlemen, who liked ‘that sort of thing’. Both types were busy screwing away while the little lady sat quietly at home of course, but the distinction still carried weight. And then, remembering the married ladies of Eastgate Villa, it struck him that perhaps the little lady might be hard at it too. In adjoining rooms perhaps, providing all the elements of a good French farce.

‘That’s a very intriguing smile Mr Manning,’ said Marilita. ‘Can you share the joke with me?’

‘Oh just a private thought, nothing special.’

Unlike the unadorned door of the room they had just left, the door at which she now stopped was graced with a porcelain plaque embossed with a coloured portrait that was quite unambiguously that of the god Pri-apus. Even so Marilita made such a point of drawing it to his attention, that Jack was left with the feeling that she might now be out to test his capacity to remain unembarrassed.

‘We call this room our cabinet of curiosities. It’s the god Priapus on the door, of course. From the fresco in the House of the Vettii as you may know.’

She opened the door, led him into a darkened room and using a dimmer switch, slowly turned up the light to reveal what Jack would subsequently describe to Jimmy (while keeping his source completely anonymous) as a regular treasure trove of erotic curiosities.

‘I really can’t take any credit for this room myself,’ said Marilita. ‘The furniture, furnishings and colour scheme are all down to Marilyn, everything else you see, the prints, pictures and the little curiosities, are on long-term loan from a gentleman who is a collector and aficionado of this sort of thing, and would rather have it on display for our other friends than locked away at home, as it apparently was for many years.’

In contrast to the bright and tasteful pastel shades and crisp cream linen that lent an air of domestic innocence to the room Jack had just left, the furnishings and decor here were heavy with sexual innuendo. The walls were hung with soft, velvet flocked wallpaper in a deep crimson that was replicated in the heavy drapes at the window. The bed was clearly dressed for pleasure not for rest, with thin sheets of striped silk that gleamed now deep blue, now purple as Marilita brushed her hand across the surface with a smile. At its head matching pillows with a handsome old-gold trim were piled high, offering all the comfort and support that the most passionate of couplings might require.

At its foot a sofa and footstool stood out in a brighter more vibrant crimson, as though demanding more particular attention. Across bed, sofa and floor deep, yielding scatter cushions were strewn, and overall hung the exciting, seductive fragrance of some subtle, but sensual perfume.

On the wall facing the bed, in front of a floor to ceiling mirror, the god Priapus made his second appearance: this time in the form of a generous and equally unambiguous statue.

‘Quarter life-size I am told, at least in most respects,’ said Marilita. ‘He was only a minor god you know, although you wouldn’t think it to look at him would you? Protector of livestock, fruit and plants: and so the Greeks used to keep a statue of him in their gardens, and give him a little stroke as they passed by, to propitiate him, if you understand me.’

She smiled innocently at Jack, who did indeed understand her very well, but by now was well beyond showing any sign of embarrassment, and beginning seriously to question Marilita’s antecedents. Where on earth had Noddy found her? Strutting the beat in Piraeus with the other poutanaki? Or had she sprung sui generis from the nubile loins of Aphrodite, and just dropped into his lap. Despairing of making any further sense of her, he directed his attention to one of the many prints that covered the walls.

‘It’s not a room I use much you know. My gentlemen never seem to need to be encouraged by this sort of thing I believe though that … Mr X shall we call him again, did leave some sort of guide to his collection for those who might be interested.’

She opened a drawer to a side table, and soon turned to Jack again with a piece of card in her hand.

‘Ah yes, here we have it. Now you must be looking at …’ she glanced down through the list on the card, ‘Yes it says here Four Japanese Shunga Prints, Edo period. Oh aren’t they delicate? I wonder when that was. And next there’s
The Kiss,
by Klimt of course: now that’s beautiful isn’t it Mr Manning, bold, bright and discreet, yet so erotic.’

As Jack said nothing, but moved on to another of the prints on the wall, she continued to read from the list.
‘Two Erotic Engravings by Thomas Rowlandson:

The Curious Wanton
and
The Pasha

Four Erotic Lithographs: Paul Avril

Two Aubrey Beardsley ink drawings: scenes from
Lysistrata

Now there’s a woman after my own heart Mr Manning. Maurice took me to see the play at the Herod Atticus before we were married. He was mad about ancient Greece you know: took me all over the place before we came back. But to continue we also have

Six C19 Erotic Lithographs: France, possibly Achille Deveria

The Sleepers:
Gustave Courbet

Four prints of erotic frescos: House of the Vettii (Pompeii)

Now I saw those on holiday with Maurice. They’re all a little faded, but still very evocative.

Erotic art of Khajuraho: six fine art prints

Now I don’t remember those. Where are they?’

She moved along the wall until she came to a stop in front of a cluster of six small prints, which she stopped to examine more closely.

‘Oh my goodness,’ she exclaimed. ‘That really is quite remarkably uninhibited, but I don’t think any of our ladies would care to engage in that.’

Jack found it impossible not to respond to that, and had in any case long since decided on the outcome of his unusual investigation, and was now quite content just to enjoy the experience. He wandered along, and looked over her shoulder to study the print that had so engrossed her.

‘Mrs Davenport,’ he said. ‘I don’t think the issue is whether they would care to engage in it. Looking at the physical attitudes of the participants, I doubt very seri-ously whether they could.’