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‘She says to tell you she will call you from the flat in the Ritz late tonight, and to make sure you can afford the Rothko. If need be she will go partners in it with you, but only under duress, and you are to remember that the family Dürer cost only fifty pounds.’ They both laughed. The Dürer portrait had been in the family since 1512. Lady Mary never failed to remind Charles of what a good buy it had been, always ignoring the year in which an ancestor had purchased it. The story was told every time he was about to buy anything.

The lift door opened and Amy, Charles’s farewell kiss still lingering on her lips, stepped out on to the ground floor of the hotel. Her attention was caught by a very pretty girl who was just finishing a call on one of the house phones. Amy watched her hurriedly put down the receiver and rush towards the lift. She was young and mischievous-looking, a sparkle of expectation in her eyes. She was bound for an assignation, no doubt sexual.

Something instinctively told Amy she was the girl Charles had discreetly called from the bedroom. Amy was well aware of his sexual appetites and that he sated them with sensual ladies who understood love had nothing to do with their liaisons. It didn’t bother her; she knew she could change his having other women if she wanted to. She didn’t. Normally she was indifferent to his personal life when it didn’t include her, but this time she was somehow curious, as if she wanted to confirm what she already knew: that he was sexually
active and satisfied without her. And there was something else. If truth be told, that last kiss … had she not felt sexual stirrings? Slight as they may have been, yes, she conceded, possibly.

She was several yards away from the lift but turned to see, as the doors closed, that the girl was the only person in it. Amy walked back and watched the needle on the indicator above the lift move until it stopped at number three, Charles’s floor. In spite of herself, she felt a pang of jealousy. She recognised it and despised such an emotion so put it out of her mind and heart. One day she would have to let Charles go forever. But that she would think about another day. She was still too high on art and having had such a lovely day.

She was just walking down the steps to the front entrance of the hotel. Seeing Peter Smith and his family had been part of her joyful day, she remembered. On impulse she turned and walked back to the concierge’s desk. She asked for a piece of notepaper and a pen and wrote down her name, address and telephone number. Amy smiled at the concierge and asked him to have it delivered to Mr Peter Smith, then hurried from the hotel to her car.

She slipped behind the wheel of the Lagonda and tied her white silk scarf round her head. Then she and Mr Craven went through their usual parting dialogue.

‘You’ll just about miss the afternoon traffic, Miss Ross.’

‘Just about. The car looks wonderfully clean. I’ll bring it in one day early enough for a proper waxing and polishing.’

‘And the top, miss? Before winter, might I suggest?’

‘Yes, before winter.’

Amy tried to tip the doorman who always told her the same thing. ‘It’s taken care of, miss.’ He was not a man to pass up a tip, that was after all his livelihood, but so was obeying orders and staying on the good side of Sir Charles who had instructed him not to take money from Miss Ross.

Amy smiled at several people about to enter the hotel who stopped to look admiringly at the Lagonda. A Japanese tourist snapped a picture of it. That set her off. She switched on the ignition and put the car in gear. Mr Craven stepped into the road to hold up the traffic while she pulled into the stream heading towards Bond Street. She was on her way home.

Charles and Tiffany Marsdon had an arrangement. They called each other for sex and fun, that was it. Uncomplicated and very satisfying. They liked each other enormously but loved other people. Sex was the way their relationship started and that was the way they meant it to continue. They were discreet but not secretive.

Charles was unimaginably sexy and decadent, the most experienced man she had had since her first lover. She had become a lady of sexual delights for him as well. The Honourable Tiffany Marsdon had been a thirteen-year-old upper-class beauty, an innocent flirt who teased men with her looks and happy-go-lucky charm. Inevitably she had been seduced by a much older man,
a friend of her family, who had then taken her under his wing. It was he who had introduced her to the wonders and sublimity of exciting intercourse, unconventional sex and its many manifestations. He had addicted her to sex and when, after several years of their being together in an on-and-off relationship that afforded her many boyfriends as well, he was through with her, he was clever enough to suggest Charles as his replacement, causing neither Tiffany nor himself any pain or scandal. No hearts had been broken, hers merely corrupted.

The changeover quite suited Tiffany who had understood the difference between carnal love, which she and her first lover had had for each other, and real love, something she had now found with a young doctor. It was mutual. The doctor was sexually besotted with Tiffany but had not nearly such a strong libido as she did, nor was he aware of just how strong hers actually was.

Charles was the solution to Tiffany’s sexual drive; she was an admirable solution to his. For the moment they suited each other and probably would long after the doctor returned from a visit to India. Only then they would be even more discreet than they were being now. There was less need, for the doctor was working in a hospital in Bombay for a year. He and Tiffany had decided they would seek a future together on his return if they still felt about each other as they had when they parted.

Charles opened the door and Tiffany walked into his
arms. He swept her off her feet and carried her to the sofa next to the fireplace. He closed his eyes and held his breath for a moment, so thrilled was he by the feel of her fingers wrapped round him. She hadn’t bothered even to open his belt, merely slipped her hand under it. She felt a shiver of excitement just to have that not quite flaccid flesh in her hand. Tiffany adored a man’s body, the scent, taste and feel of his sex, and all things erotic – Charles’s body and sexuality most especially.

With her free hand she opened his belt and unzipped his trousers. The sound of the zip shattered the silence of the room, focusing their sexual desire. He sprang to life in her hands. Rock hard, he throbbed for her. He slid his hand under her skirt and tore away the patch of white silk between her legs. She gasped, and once again, when he thrust eager and searching fingers deep inside her.

‘You’re bad. God, are you bad!’

He laughed. ‘You’re delicious, warm and moist, slippery as satin.’

They were gazing into each other’s eyes. Lust had taken them over. Nothing in the world mattered for them but the erotic: coming, the taste of each other. They wanted the beat of their sexual embrace. Their hearts and minds were racing towards the pleasure they would give each other, that it seemed no one else in this world could or would give them.

He sat down on the settee with her still in his arms and swung his feet on to the sofa. She placed pillows behind his head and shoulders, and slipped round until
she was on top of him. She went to her knees, straddled him, then raised herself while taking him in her hands and directing him until his handsome large knob was where she wanted it. He could wait no longer. He took over and, hands on her waist, with one hard push impaled her on his pulsating member. They were breathless with excitement as she rose up and down on him while tearing off his clothes. She wanted him naked, every inch of his flesh exposed for her to do with as she wanted.

It was no different for him. He disposed of her dress as quickly as possible, had her naked except for bone-coloured stockings with black lacy tops that clung high up on her thighs. Her nipples were hard and erect; her long blonde hair silky and sensuous. Her body, the way she moved on him, seemed to taunt him, as did her blue eyes. He knew that challenge; she wanted him to take her, dissolve her into pools of come. She wanted the entire gamut of sex: ruthless, hard, tender, loving, depraved. Tiffany would endure all things for the sexual oblivion they were seeking together. He quite loved her for that. They had been there many times together, just as he and Amy had once.

Naked and luscious, Tiffany arched her back and rode him. He placed his mouth on her nipples, first one, then the other, and sucked hard. She writhed with the pleasure of exquisite sensations.

He whispered, ‘Tiffany, Tiffany,’ and his heart beat, Amy, Amy.

He was voracious for her and every penetration was
exquisitely deep and tight. He kept the pace of his penetrations even as she came in long and powerful orgasms. Breathlessly she told him in a voice filled with lust and barely above a whisper, ‘You’re wonderful – we’re wonderful. The sex is the best, always better when you have seen her, want her, and use me. You’re having sex with me but beating her out of your system. That’s why you’re so bad.
We’re
so bad, and so good together. We know what we are and are not to each other. Bad doesn’t matter to us, only adds to the lust we share and the joy of sex together. I want your come, Charles, all you want to give me. You will find no rejection here.’

This time they came together in a long and exquisite orgasm where he pulled on her blonde hair and bit hard into her nipple until he drew a droplet of blood. Simultaneously they let go and called out shamelessly in their lust for life.

Amy drove into the garage, a tumbledown building whose uneven stone-tiled roof was hardly visible for the shiny green ivy that had taken it over as it had the rest of the building. A rambling bush and a small tree were growing where one section of the ridge had collapsed. The garage, more a work of art and flora, had been braced from the inside so many times it had about it more the look of an architectural installation than a covered space. This collapsing shack was home to the Lagonda, and was kept immaculately clean. In some ways Amy did pamper her car. Its shelter was heated in winter, had lights, and unbelievably an old carpet on the floor which Doreen,
the woman who did, vacuumed once a month. Amy’s friends and neighbours took this extravagance as acceptable eccentricity – the norm for the English though unusual for an American.

After taking the torch from the glove compartment and snapping it on, Amy cut the lights and made her way down the path towards the boat house. The timer switch on the lamps in the library had taken over and the soft warm glow seen through the windows was welcoming. The evenings were drawing in early and she had arrived home at the time of day when dusk was reluctant to give way to night. It lingered, and was unusually beautiful: the blue haze tinged with pink from a setting sun, a pearly translucent mist that hovered, the silhouette of shrubs, and the house, dark and brooding in that light but warm and glowing inside. It seemed a perfect ending to the pleasurable day she had spent with Charles.

On entering the house she went directly to the fireplace and put a match to the well-laid fire. Then to the kitchen to put the kettle on, and next to the drinks table in the drawing-room to pour herself a small measure of malt. She drank it down in one swallow. The bite of it in her mouth felt good, warmed her at once, and she shrugged off the chill she had felt in the last few miles of her drive from the city in the open car. Yes, these autumn days demanded warmer clothes riding in an open car. Winter was not far off.

Amy was still feeling exhilarated by her afternoon in London. It seemed a little fanciful but she simply could
not shake off the presentiment that something had changed for her during their afternoon together. She could almost have said for them. How? When? Why? All unanswerable questions but she had some good guesses. Was it seeing the Rothko again? Being dazzled by the power of its greatness? Peter Smith? Had seeing him triggered something in her? Or had it been a reminder of being young and discovering sex and the endless pleasure it can be with someone who loves and adores you? Someone who is guileless and good, simple and sweet, yet wild and passionate as Peter had once been.

Yes, maybe it had to do with seeing him again because after that unexpected encounter, and visiting the Rothko, for a moment there with Charles, in his suite, when he had caressed her breasts, she was aroused as she had not been for a very long time. And it was still with her, that desire for all things sexual with a man, something she’d thought over for her for ever.

Could it be that it had never been over for her? That this celibate life she had been living these last few years was nothing more than a hiatus because there had not been the right man to give herself to? That she had wanted more than great sex with Charles, or any of the other would-be lovers she had hovering round her, and was stubbornly waiting for it to come along? She wanted sex with a man she could love with great passion, a full heart, as she had very nearly done once with Peter Smith – until she dumped him, coldly, ruthlessly, when she fell in love with Jarret.

What tricks the subconscious can play on one! To
dream of Jarret and have Peter appear. Peter, Rothko, Jarret … they represented the past, a time in her life that was high, bright and beautiful, and yet a time that ended for her in the depths of darkness and despair. Aloneness such as she had never known. She could hardly bear to remember those times nor how she had lived through them. She had been healed by time and success, real love from several good men. Now it was as if that time had happened to someone else.

She felt enormously pleased that she had left the note for Peter. Whether he called or not, she knew it had been the right thing to do. Amy thought of him and his family, the thrill of having a daughter making her debut at Covent Garden, no matter how small the role. She was happy for him. And Charles? Inescapably he came to mind too – having sex with the beautiful young girl she had seen in the lift. How inevitable that he should have women like her, how lucky the girl was to have such a lover. And how right Amy was to have arranged things so that she might never suffer the humiliation of being set aside for a younger woman.