Father of the Man (27 page)

“Enjoy yourself. It’s later than you think.”

“Yes…it must be getting on for ten.” The fact that she had made a little joke and that for one whole minute now, possibly two, she’d allowed him to stand there with his arms about her—though, admittedly, without her showing much responsiveness—encouraged him to hope she might be softening.

“How about it, then? Let’s do some dirty dancing.” (Now there, by all accounts, was a mover. Patrick Swayzee. In the mould of John Travolta. It was a film he’d really like to see. And it occurred to him that he had never used his own talent for dancing as a form of foreplay. Why hadn’t he? What
was
the matter with him?)

“Oh, Ephraim, don’t be so—” Then she did pull away.

“So what?”

“You can’t just switch it on and off like that. Whenever you feel like it. So completely heedless of how anyone else may feel.”

“I was only joking,” he said.

“Yes—well. You were only joking; I’m only going off to bed. And I’ll leave you to turn out the lights.”

She stopped for a moment at the door.

“Ephraim? Tomorrow’s going to be special, isn’t it? Very special. Please remind me why.”

In other words, he thought,
you’re not going to spoil things, are you, by anger or sullenness, resentment or jealousy
? But he hoped he was big enough not to blame her for sensing some of his underlying feelings and aiming to provide a gentle, non-explicit warning. It was clumsy rather than gentle but he wasn’t going to take offence.

He even managed a laugh. “As though you need to be reminded!”

“Oh, it’s Oscar, isn’t it? Yes, of course.”

He stayed downstairs for the next twenty minutes, flicking through the following week’s
Radio Times
to see what films they had lined up. (In other words, would he be missing much if he did slip off to London?) He also spent about five minutes crouching in front of Polly’s basket, scratching her on the head and underneath her jaw, repeatedly tickling her on the tummy. Whenever he stopped she rolled back into a sitting position to nudge him into more affection. He put his arms about her neck and drew her to him in the kind of hug she didn’t normally receive from him; only sometimes from the children. Then he stood up and—not forgetting the water, nor the remainder of the wine, nor the two chilled goblets optimistically prepared—said God bless and went upstairs.

Jean was already in bed, reading.

“You look pretty,” he said. He liked her with her hair loose, framing her face, soft against the pillow.

“Thank you.”

“As my Aunt Julia used to say…you’ve got a birthday.”

“Thank her.”

This, again, was faintly promising.

“I bought something today,” he said.

“Did you?” But she still kept her eyes fixed upon her book. Tenaciously. “And what was that? I hope it wasn’t anything for me.”
Because I’m really not in any mood for appreciating presents
was the clearly unspoken rider.
And for having to say thank you
.

“Only indirectly,” he replied. “In fact, it’s something that will make you laugh.” Which wasn’t what he meant; not in the slightest.
Something that will turn you on
. That’s how he would have put it.

“Oh, yes?”

“I’m wearing it. Watch closely.”

Then at last she did look up—though with an air of resignation, even of barely contained impatience. Rather than focus on him, however, her eye was caught by the tray which he’d set down on a table, with the wine on it. “Why’ve you brought that up?”

“Why do you think?” he said, momentarily diverted from the more important item that he had to show. “Because I’m not taking no for an answer. Because I’m hoping that—like I was pressing for downstairs—we can now celebrate,
properly
celebrate, the end of all depression…along with, as we did at supper, tomorrow’s triumphal return of our prodigal son!” If she wanted to quibble about any of the words he used, she could certainly question ‘triumphal’, although he was sure that this was how it would appear. “I thought, too, that we might use it as a love potion.” He grinned at her, roguishly.

Or such was his intention.

“Well, none for me,” she said. “I’ve just cleaned my teeth—and I’ve taken half a sleeping pill. What’s this thing I’m meant to be looking at? I thought you mentioned—”

“Ah…Abracadabra! Now as I say—watch closely.” (She might always change her mind about the wine, he thought.)

He undid the buttons of his shirt, with a provocative glance and a swaying of the hips, as if embarking on a seven-veil exercise himself. Which indeed he was. “Ten pounds to the first contestant who manages to spot it!”

“Ephraim, I’m sleepy,” she said. “I want to read my book. Either just tell me or don’t.”

“And when I say, ladies, the first contestant who manages to spot it, I am
not
referring to the size of my dick. Although, madam, if you thought I was, you might be getting warm. Warmer than you realize.”

By this time he had his shirt off—he wore no undervest—and was unfastening his jeans quicker than he’d meant to.

“Any second now, you lovely audience—we’re very nearly there!”

But he had forgotten he still had his shoes on. Any pretension to ease and suppleness of movement had to be abandoned. He sat down on the edge of the bed and yanked them off without undoing them. His trousers swiftly followed; were likewise flung to the floor. Socks, too. He stood up in just his boxer shorts.

“Your patience, ladies and gentlemen…is about to be rewarded.”

He inched down one side of the shorts; then pulled it up again. Jean continued to lie there with her back supported by her pillows and wore the same longsuffering expression.

Now finally he went into his dance. There was satisfaction to be had—even elation and excitement—from improvising below his breath a jazzy accompaniment which his feet could nimbly follow and his body swing in time to. He thought about Swayzee; almost forgot about Jean. When he looked to check on her reaction, she was yawning and glancing at her watch.

He had a hard-on. If this wouldn’t do it nothing would. He peeled off his shorts with the fluidity and style (he told himself) which had earlier been missing.

“Tarr-ah!” He gave a showman’s flourish, like the master of ceremonies in the centre of the circus ring; and regretted the lack of a top hat he could sweep down to the floor.

But his bow didn’t do anything to interfere with the erection. His cock looked enormous—even from above. The leather strap was biting into it and lent an added touch of the machismo he’d originally envisaged.

He didn’t know, however, if Jean was going to be impressed or disgusted or amused by it. He remembered the time when he had twirled her pink umbrella, also with a full and—well, depending on your viewpoint—quite obscene erection.

“My God!” she said. “What’s that?”

“What I was telling you about. It’s called a cock ring.”

But even as he said it his cock began to soften.

“It’s an erection-maintainer. I should have got one,” he remarked, “a very long time ago,” putting his hand on the strap as if to straighten it, hoping that the pressure of his fingers would restore the tautness.

“Where on earth did you get it?”

“Sex shop near the station.”

“How much?”

“Three pounds.”

“You spent three pounds…on
that
?”

“It’ll be worth it if it works.” His cock had shrunk now nearly to its normal size. “Even if it doesn’t I still think it’s—well, I don’t know—I think it’s sort of sexy.”

“I think it’s sort of pathetic.”

“Pathetic?” he asked.

“Sad,” she explained. “I think it’s just so sad.”

There was a pause.

“I’m going to brush my teeth,” he said.

“I’m going to read my book.” She called: “And what’s that bottle of wine doing on the table? Where did that bottle of wine come from?”

He didn’t take it off—the ring; kept it on as a measure of defiance; ran down to the floor below, taking the stairs two at a time as he did so, watched his penis swing with the momentum. He peed with it on, stirring up a froth in the water (“Do men really have to pee right in the centre of the bowl?”), cleaned his teeth with it on, and, standing well back from the small mirror above the basin, sucking in his stomach muscles and practising all sorts of supposedly seductive poses and gyrations, brought himself off with it on. The experience was one of almost total joylessness.

As he swilled the semen out of the basin his penis once again contracted. The strap was plainly useless.

He still kept it on, though. To have taken it off would have seemed like the final—but
final
—admission of defeat.

All he needed now was for Jean, with supremely ironic perversity, to reach out for him in bed. “I’m sorry, love. You’re right. Please come and fuck me.”

Some hope, however.

He spent a largely sleepless night.

In the morning he got up at six—even a little before that. It was unlikely Oscar would arrive for about another twelve hours (unlikely Abby, this weekend, would arrive at all) but he didn’t mean to take chances. Besides…the sooner he got off, the less time in which to waver; and if he could pack without even waking Jean, then that would obviously be best. One thing he knew at any rate: she wouldn’t hear the bath water. From the point of view of cleanliness a bath mightn’t be essential—often he would have a quick, over-all wash just standing at the basin—but from the point of view of symbolism it was imperative. Total immersion. Baptism. The only way to set out upon a journey that really mattered; perhaps the last momentous journey of his life.

Perhaps the first?

In the bath he quoted something he had learnt at school.

“‘There is a tide in the affairs of men,

Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;

Omitted, all the voyage of their life

Is bound in shallows and in miseries.

On such a full sea are we now afloat,

And we must take the current when it serves,

Or lose our ventures.’”

The fact that he could remember it so easily, word for word, after forty years, more than forty years—without one single hesitation, nor, so far as he knew, one single mistake—seemed an excellent omen. When the time arrived for him to feel nervous and become less sure that he was doing the right thing (as he was aware would inevitably happen; he was a realist; even now tendrils of lonesomeness and insecurity were beginning to entwine around his gut) he would simply repeat those half-dozen lines quite calmly and think about the classroom in which he’d first stood up and recited them.

Prep school. Lymington Road. West Hampstead.

Where his mother had stood at the front door and rang the bell, in 1945, in time for her appointment with the head. The school had long since been converted into flats but he would go again to gaze at the place on those dull red tiles where his mother had once stood. He felt sure they wouldn’t have been changed. The front door, too, would look the same. The house itself would. It would be one of his myriad places of pilgrimage.

He had probably learnt it with ease—that passage from Shakespeare; one of the homeworks you scarcely had to bother with. He’d probably understood it, as well, and shot his hand up to answer all the questions. He’d been looked upon as bright at Warwick House; quite possibly the brightest. Nice-looking. Good-natured. Helpful. Full of fun.

Teacher’s pet.

(The way that Mr Dallas, sixty-five-ish, silver-haired, nicotine-fingered, unsteady on his feet—childless—the way he’d used to take him on his lap would these days, of course, be regarded with extreme suspicion, but there had never been the least trace of any funny business…Ephraim was sure of that.)

He remembered many things about Warwick House: the fact that he’d always been amongst the top—academically, athletically—a prefect (for the whole of his last year, school captain) but popular with it, courted, looked up to, even literally looked up to, since until he had reached twelve or thirteen he had actually been tall for his age. A hero out of Talbot Baines Reed…or perhaps Malcolm Saville; the only time he’d ever won prizes—unless you counted the medals he’d got for his dancing, the cup for his jiu-jitsu, when he was about eighteen. He remembered a story he’d had printed in the school magazine, a story which Mr Dallas had encouraged him, shortly before the end of Ephraim’s final term, to send off to the
Evening Standard
. (It had been sent back, with a rejection slip, on the last day of the holiday.) He returned to Lymington Road during his first week at the Grammar—where he was finding it unexpectedly difficult to settle down; and indeed he never particularly shone there, in that far less intimate atmosphere—to discover that Mr Dallas was ill and, for the moment, asleep. When Ephraim went back again, a few days later, the headmaster had died. Mrs Dallas had asked if he’d like to see the body, an invitation he somewhat awkwardly declined but she had perfectly well understood and had told him to pick out a volume from her husband’s bookcase, as a memento; he’d chosen
Quentin Durward
. At the end of that Christmas term the school disbanded. For some reason he’d lost touch with all his friends there. Quite frequently in recent years, however, he had thought about putting an advert in the papers or phoning in to some radio show that dealt in such matters, and trying to organize a reunion, the beginning perhaps of an old boys’ association. But although the notion had often tempted him he’d somehow kept putting it off.

Of course, it wasn’t too late. Maybe now, in this new life of his, he would finally get round to doing something about it.

A time for making resolutions. A fresh set of resolutions.

He got out of his bath and as he dried examined himself in the mirror. He bet that few of the boys from Warwick House would look as good as he did. If he joined a health club and lost half a stone or so he still had the kind of figure that many men his age, or even men a good deal younger, would envy him. (He held his head up. His throat was
not
growing crepey.)

He put on his cock ring.

Just his knowledge of its presence would assuredly give him confidence; would remind him to move gracefully and to hold himself well. (Walk tall, walk tall, and look the world right in the eye. That’s what my mother said to me, when I was just knee-high…) He whistled as he shaved. My God, he would walk tall.