Rosie O'Dell (48 page)

Thirty-five minutes stretched out on a rack before I heard Sian’s knock-knock
and my door opening. I stood up to greet her as she slipped into the room. She
was in her bathrobe and her bare feet. Her face looked freshly scrubbed and her
hair was still damp. “Sorry I took so long,” she said. “I was in the bath. I
practically died with joy when I saw your note. I couldn’t take the time to
dress.” We kissed. Fresh toothpaste was on her breath. She moved her right foot
up my right leg and rubbed her sole high on my inner
thigh.
“Brr, my feet are cold. Tomsy, fetch us a pair of your woolliest socks,
please.”

“You don’t seem to be hungover at all,” I said, going to my drawer and pulling
out a pair of hiking socks. “You look great.”

“A little hazy, that’s all,” she said. “But I held back and made you drink the
lion’s share so that I could take advantage of you. After you left I was sorry
I’d copped out. I was thinking of coming over again, but I fell asleep before I
could act.”

“I was too out of it anyway. But this morning in my bath, I felt like—
whoo!”

She sat down on the floor to put on the socks. “You know, all this is
threatening to throw a spanner into the works,” she said. “You were determined
to stay good for your Rosie O’Dell while you were here, and before I came down
to London I took the firm decision to remain celibate till I finished here.” She
placed her left ankle on her right knee and brushed off the sole of her foot,
exposing her entire thigh under her robe and giving me a glimpse of glossy pubic
hair before she pulled the garment tighter over her legs. The view had been so
patently designed for my benefit that I loved her. In one pulse I became
erect.

“I’m writing her this morning to say it’s over.”

Sian smiled at me and nodded. “That’s best.” Then her eyes dropped. “Cor
blimey.” Her smile widened as she stared brazenly at my crotch. “Whotcha got
there, mite?”

“I appear to be in a rather excitable state.”

“
Moi aussi
.” She pulled on the other sock with her foot in the air,
heedless of the bathrobe falling away, and hopped to her feet. She pressed her
hips on mine, grinding against my erection. “The very sight of you turns me
right on.” She took my hand and placed my fingers between her legs. “See? Oh
cracky
! You wouldn’t have any condoms about the place? No. And I went
off the pill when I took my vow of chastity. I’d go round to the chemist, but I
don’t think it’s open yet. Never mind, we’ll simply have to make do for now.”
She undid my belt and pulled down my trousers and underwear and took my penis in
both hands for a moment and kissed it. Then she slipped her robe off, folded it,
and placed it on the floor between us, and knelt upon it. Naked except for the
woolly socks, looking up at me with irises that looked black instead of brown
because her pupils were so dilated, breasts pressed against my legs, the fingers
of one hand around the base of my penis and my scrotum, the other hand gripping
my buttock, Sian rather skilfully blew me.

Twenty minutes later I sat at my desk composing a letter to
Rosie and visualizing Sian as I’d stood over her, feeling somewhat sheepish
until she changed my mood to heroic with, “I never had an orgasm doing that
before.” Now I was waiting for her return. She had just left to get dressed,
grab her anti-preggers prescription, nip round to the chemist with it, and pick
up, to tide us over till the pills kicked in, she’d said, a couple dozen French
safes.

Even more aroused now than before Sian’s fellation, I wrote in my letter to
Rosie that I was considering joining the university excursion up the Nile over
the Christmas break. It seemed a waste to be all the way over here and not take
advantage of such a good opportunity to expand my horizons. Hence I would not be
returning home till next June. That being the case, I didn’t feel that I was
being fair to require of her—of either of us, really—over so long a period of
time, the absolute fidelity normally associated with a formally engaged couple.
Therefore I wished to free her to form relationships of a perhaps affectionate
nature with other persons. That would be a good test of our own relationship,
and if we both felt the same way about each other in June, after this separation
of a year, then we would have profited from the freedom we had accorded each
other. I wished to convey to her every success in her studies, and I looked
forward to hearing from her at her convenience. I signed off with “All the very
best,” in place of my usual “All my love.” Folding the letter, I congratulated
myself on breaking it to her gently.

I prepared the envelope and placed it on the corner of my desk to be mailed the
next time I went out. Into my mind came second thoughts about what I was doing.
But I didn’t want any second thoughts. If I didn’t mail it now it might lie
around haunting me, unmailed for days. I picked up the envelope, took off out
the door, ran to the mailbox, and dropped it in. I was double-timing back when I
saw Sian hurrying down the sidewalk from the opposite direction. We met in front
of our building, slightly breathless, big cheerful smiles on our glowing
faces.

“Did you post your…?” she asked, glancing the way I’d come.

“The knot is severed.”

She put an arm around my waist and pulled her other hand out of her jacket
pocket to flash a small tinsel packet in her palm. “We’re all set now, guv,”
she whispered out of the side of her mouth, giving me a squeeze. “Come into my
parlour for strawberries and cream.”

“
LONG DISTANCE FOR YOU
from Canada,
ducks,” Sian poked her head into my room to say. “A female. I think it must be
your little friend.”

I went down the hall to the communal phone, hoping Sian was wrong and that the
female was my mother. “Hi, love,” said Rosie. “I got your letter and I think
your idea of a trip to Egypt over Christmas is great. Those cabins on the boat
would be doubles, wouldn’t they? Because I’d love to go with you.” Not a word
out of her about freeing ourselves for affection with others.

Sian had just finished making the arrangements for two double cabins, one for
Morton and me and one for his girlfriend and Sian, the big heterosexual
switcheroo to take place clandestinely the first night on board. I missed a beat
before replying, “Gosh, Rosie, they won’t allow unmarried couples, especially an
underage male and female, to share a cabin, so that would mean paying for two
cabins, which would be expensive for you all the way from there.”

“I could manage it, I’m sure, if both of us wanted to. Mother has a buyer for
the big house. It would be wonderful for us to get together like that.”

“I’m sure that all the cabins are fully booked by now.”

“Could you find out? Perhaps there are dropouts.”

“The trip is only for students of the three universities.”

“Are you sure, Tom? Can’t a student bring a friend or—”

“I believe it to be the case. Of that I am morally certain.”

“Morally
certain. That’s an interesting choice of words. Are you seeing
someone else?”

“Well, I… naturally I have developed some friend—”

“Was that her who answered the phone?”

“Who, Sian? She has digs here in this building, yes, and she has become a
pretty good friend, yes.”

“She has a nice voice. Sian, yes, she is very pretty.”

Dad must have shown her the photograph I’d taken of Morton and Sian and then
sent him as a laugh because of his mistake over Sian’s name. “Dad,” I’d written
on the back, “see if you can figure out which one is Sian and which one is
Morton.”

“That picture was a joke between Dad and me, Rosie.”

“Yes, he showed it to me as part of the joke. But on a serious note, Tom, we
have been away from each other for six months and we are only
human. It’s natural that we’ll have attractions and temptations. But I think
we should be very careful before we destroy forever the marvellous love we have
between us. I should come over there for Christmas and we should be together for
a while under pleasant circumstances away from here.”

“I’ve pretty well decided I’m going on that Nile trip.”

“I’m getting the message, Tom. But for your sake and mine, let’s make sure,
before we end something good for the rest of our lives, that it’s what you
really want to do. Are you going on the trip with someone special?”

That one back there in the goddamned colonies was starting to get right on my
nerves. “Someone special. Gosh, there’s a bunch of us going. I guess they’re all
special.”

“Okay. Go on that trip, by all means. But give me the date when you’ll be back
in London, and I’ll come over to see you then. We owe ourselves a face-to-face
decision on our future relationship before either of us does something
permanently irrevocable, rather than merely very hurtful, as this is now.”

How come I’d never noticed before what a pest she was? “Rosie, listen. I’m
going on the trip with another woman.”

“I understand, Tom. I don’t just mean that I heard what you said, I’m saying I
understand what you have gone through with me and why you would want to do this.
What I am suggesting to you, imploring of you, as a woman who loves you more
than life itself and who believes that, beneath everything that’s happening to
you now, you feel the same about me, is that we not destroy that love, my
darling. Let us renew it and…”

Destroy what? Renew what? What the hell was the silly broad nattering on about?
I lost it. “Rosie, I’ve been having sex with another woman here ever since I
wrote you that last letter, and I’m extremely fond of her. And now I’d like to
say good—”

“Oh, Tom, I wish you’d had the guts to tell me how you were thinking last
spring when you ran away from here like a—no, wait, I didn’t mean that. I know
you have been very courageous to go through… It’s just that I’ve been afraid all
these months—I’m very upset at the thought of losing you. I love you very much
and I think you still—”

“Well, you should mean it, Rosie. Because that is exactly what I did. I
couldn’t wait to get away last spring. I didn’t run away, I galloped away from
all that crap at full tilt and I’m delighted to be away from it now. If I ever
go back there again it will be a fucking miracle, so I think we should just say
goodbye now, because it is over.”

“Oh, Tom. This is so sad. It is breaking my heart in two. We
loved each other so much.”

“Goodbye, Rosie,” I said, before realizing I was speaking into a dead
receiver. Well, that was over with at last. Now everyone could get on with their
lives sensibly for a change. I could barely hang up the receiver, I was shaking
so much.

Walking back to my room I saw that Sian’s door was ajar. She pulled it open as
I passed and said, “That sounded a bit tense. Hadn’t you made everything clear
to the poor maiden?”

“Apparently not. But it’s clear now, I hope.”

“Oh, it is now, lover, by the sound of that. When are you coming over
here?”

“In a little while. I have to finish an essay outline.”

“Don’t be long,” Sian murmured. “I am very turned on right now.” In keeping
with the pattern of three times a day we’d established since we’d begun a week
ago, this would top off today’s schedule with our third copulation. I had a
flashback to the fatigue I’d experienced in grade eleven after a
triathlon.

An hour later, though, I slipped into Sian’s bed and ranged my hands all over
her body as eagerly as the first time. Sian surprised me. She stopped my hands
and held them in hers. “There’s something I must tell you first,” she
said.

I kissed her and said, “I’m better at scintillating pillow talk after rather
than before,” and tried to free my hands.

She tightened her grip. “No, now, please, Tom. I told you I’d been proposed to
by a man. Well, that was a little white lie. In fact, he was a married man with
a wife and child, and his proposal consisted of telling me he would leave his
wife for me. I only had to say the word. On that, I finally left him, and came
here.”

“I thought it was strange your sister gave you that bottle of cognac on the
breakup of your engagement. She gave it to you because you got yourself out of a
mess. Well, that’s a forgivable little fib.” I lifted a leg across hers, stirred
by her confession.

“I’m not finished. This afternoon, he was waiting for me outside the door. He’d
come down from Cardiff to London, he said, to beg me to resume our relationship.
‘Forget it, Gareth, ’ I said. ‘You’re wasting your time. We’ve been through all
that ad nauseam.’ ‘But I’ve moved out, ’ says he. ‘I’ve left my wife and child
for you.’ You could have knocked me over with a
feather. ‘What
did you do that for at this stage, you idiot?’ I said. ‘My life has moved on
from us. You’re a figure from ancient history.’”