Read Online The Facts of Life by Patrick Gale - Free Book Online

turned, hands behind her back, shoulders rounded. Her eyes shone with anger. He had never seen her like this. He slid a hand into his pocket to mask his erection.
    ‘Kiss me,’ she said. ‘Right here.’
    As he walked over, she glanced down at his trouser fly.
    ‘Never mind that,’ she said.
    Obediently he took his hand from his pocket and cupped her face in his palms. He kissed her slowly, his hips pressing hers. She kissed the side of his neck. He buried his nose into her hair.
    ‘Let’s go upstairs,’ she said. ‘We can lie down up there.’
    ‘The concert,’ he mumbled, as he led the way. ‘We should get there in time to get good seats. The acoustic’s so bad in St Francis.’
    ‘Never mind the acoustic,’ she said, as they reached the little room where the poetry and plays were shelved. ‘Kiss me.’
    He held her against a bookcase, kissing her again, caressing her breasts. She was wearing what Miriam and his mother would have called a courting dress, a pale blue thing with buttons, that unfastened easily from the front. It was a garment whose name he had not understood till recently. Since he had met Sally, he had started to look more closely at women in the street and behind shop counters, noticing their clothes. He was becoming an expert on fastenings. He slid with her to the dusty floor, clumsily tearing off his jacket and shirt. He rubbed his cheek against her petticoat, feeling the firm material of her bra beneath its whispering smoothness. Taken unawares, he had no condoms with him. Instead, she pleasured him with her hands, running cold fingers around his buttocks and balls, rubbing at his penis with untender haste. When he slid an uncertain hand inside her knickers she froze for a while and stopped touching him, such was her concentration on her pleasure. He came in three spasmodic splashes across her thighs and the floorboards. They chuckled as he wiped up the mess with pages torn from an undistinguished edition of Matthew Arnold.
    The bells struck again in St Francis and he remembered the concert.
    ‘Forget the concert,’ she sighed, kissing his nose, making him lie down again. ‘No more concerts. Not for a while. Take me dancing.’
    ‘Dancing?’
    ‘You’d think I’d suggested some impossible sexual feat!’ she said.
    ‘But I can’t dance.’
    ‘Believe me, you’ve got a sense of rhythm and two strongish arms; you can dance.’
    ‘Where?’
    ‘There’s a charity do on at the Empire Rooms, for the Red Cross or something. The nurses were talking about it. There’s a band from London. It might be fun.’
    They went to a great gaudy room rank with saxophones and shandy, hair oil and a cocktail of cheap scents, and he found he could dance. He could not move like the men from the local air force base, perhaps, or the arrogant young shopboys, who manipulated their women like so many sides of beef, but he did better than walking round the room and turning at the corners – the charge Miriam had always levelled at him.
    So began what he came to see as Sally’s half of their mutual seduction. He had paraded for her the jewels of his weighty cultural education – paintings, polyphony, symphonic rapture and harmonic introspection. Now she showed him different riches, ones she had discovered by instinct. She began to talk more of her mother than of Dr Pertwee. ‘Mum says this,’ she would say, or ‘My mother always says that …’, and he detected the unfolding of an interior power struggle.
    She taught him dance steps, the names of band leaders and the ingredients of lethal, highly coloured drinks. His ears were opened to the intoxicating qualities of dance music. As he went about his business in the shop, he found the melodies to enviably simple love songs circling his mind, at once banal and beautiful in their frankness of purpose.
    He and Sally began to take trips, to the north coast, to London, to Brighton, and stay in hotels, posing, unconvincingly, as husband and wife with the