My footsteps squeaked in the bright cold snow as I tramped up her track, between the fences. The only other marks were the tyre treads from where she had driven out. The sun was no more than a red disc in a mauve-grey sky. Everything was still and silent but for the sound of my footsteps and breathing. Not even the rooks cackled above the beech trees, nor did the rooster call from Fat Mary’s yard. It had been a heavy fall, covering the patch of sprouts to the left of her door so they looked like dwarfs or munchkins. It lay thick on the thatch of her roof though a thin wisp of white smoke rose from the one stove-pipe chimney. Icicles hung by the wall and from the eaves of her outbuildings. I was cold, desperately cold — a raincoat, a jacket and shoes instead of sandals, were the only concessions to winter that we were allowed. We even remained in short trousers. Of course, clothes rationing was still in force.
Inside the porch I reached up to the ledge that ran along the side just where the plank roof met the trellis sides and yes, there it was. Suddenly I realized that part of me had hoped all along that it would not be there. You know how they say ‘his heart was in his mouth’? Mine was. And my knees had turned to jelly. Almost I hoped the key, black, six inches long, would not work, or jam, or something. But no, it turned, quite smoothly, no problem. And yes, the door did creak, indeed, resisted for a moment before its corner squealed across stone flags.
The first thing that hit me was the warmth, and the second was the smell. The first was welcome. I was not so sure about the second. It was a heavy concoction of different things, though predominant at first was pork fat, sour, heavy, insistent. It seemed to be in everything. Indeed on almost all the surfaces there was a hazy greasy slime, yellowish in colour, that seemed to be the essence of cooked or rendered pig. But it was undercut by other odours — baking, cooked greens, hot metal, tom cat, all almost as bad, but lavender, stored apples, and warm old age as well, breathed out from the ancient dark furniture. There was no electricity of course, but Fat Mary had left an oil lamp on the large kitchen table — turned low, but to eyes coming out of the encroaching winter gloom, bright enough.
The one room was divided by a beam in the ceiling with heavy brown velvet curtains hanging from it, left three-quarters open. The first room was kitchen and living-room combined. Against the end wall beneath the stove-pipe a full kitchen range whose fire glowed behind the ventilation flues in its door was set back in a big alcove that once must have been a fireplace, with another huge black old beam as its mantle. The tick of its ancient clock was marked by a cut-out boat set in the dial in which stood a cowled Death. His scythe swung back and forth with each double tick-tock.
On either side of the range there were cupboards and shelves, and more shelves along the back wall, with a dresser too. Impossible to take in all that I could see, but what stood out were huge greasy jars containing bottled or pickled pig trotters, and, in the largest, a pig’s head — boned so it looked like a deflated football. Yet it had eyelashes, and sight seemed to gleam through the dark slits between its lids.
Backing away I found myself in the bedroom which was almost filled by the hugest bed I had ever seen, together with a massive wardrobe, a chest of drawers, and a full length mirror on a swivel, its glass clouded and blackened where the silvering had dropped away. But it was the bed that I could not take my eyes off. It must have been six feet by six feet at least, piled with blankets, old eiderdowns and grey sheets with a heap of pillows and bolsters against the wall at the far end. Above it, clinging to the rough-cast wall beneath a ceiling of planks, swathes of blackened cobwebs hung like the tied-back drapes of a Princess’s bed.
I did, still do, suffer from severe arachnophobia.
At that moment I heard the noise of her motor.
She knew I was there of course — first the footprints in the snow, going one way only, then of course the door, closed as I had left it, yes, but with the big key still in the key-hole. I heard the door slam, the meow of the cat, the crunch of her galoshes in the snow. And suddenly I was faced with a question which had loomed like a thundercloud on the horizon, but which I had refused to face, ever since I had left the school buildings: What was I there for? Why had I come? To see her. To see her with no clothes on, as I had seen her in the summer. And?
There was only one place to go. I dived on to the bed and burrowed my way in like a worm burrowing into sand, in amongst those heavy quilts, damp but warm sheets, mountainous bolsters. At this point I should say I was small for my age and very thin and I fancy that before she was properly in I was invisible. I could hear her moving about, putting down bags and so forth, and presently I lifted a corner of the foetid mound I was under and managed to peep out.
She had already turned up the wick of the lamp and lit a couple of candles too. She had her back to me, was in front of a wall mirror to the side of the range, drawing a long hat pin out of her hat and hair. As she lifted the hat off her head her hair tumbled down to the shoulders of her rubberized mackintosh. She set hat and pin to one side on a dresser then filled a kettle from a tall jug, enamelled iron, the enamel chipped, and set it on the hob.
‘I know you’re there,’ she said. Of course she did. ‘In the bed are you? I’ll be with you presently.’ And slowly, deliberately, she began to undress.
First the rubberized mackintosh, then a long tartan scarf. Next the tweed jacket, then a moth-damaged woolly that had once been purple. She released the bottom of her blouse from the skirt band, undid the buttons, shrugged out of it. I could now see her massive freckled shoulders criss-crossed with straps and some of her back above a voluminous slip or petticoat. Reaching behind those sausage-like fingers neatly unhooked and unbuttoned (no zips) the fastenings of her skirt. She stepped out of it, then shrugged and pushed at the straps of the slip (which was made of some shiny material, satin perhaps, though stained and grubby) and stepped out of that. She was now clad only in a flesh coloured corset, bloomers, and thick stockings whose tops disappeared beneath the bloomers.
The kettle boiled, she reached up for a tin caddy, made tea. She poured out two mugfuls, topped them up with condensed milk from an already opened tin, and added a good slurp of brown cooking brandy to each. She carried them towards the bed and put them down on the chest of drawers then, with one swift movement pulled back the covers and looked down at me.
‘You might,’ she said, ‘have taken your shoes off.’
I was shivering, not with cold but fright.
‘Here. Drink this.’
It should have been foul, but it was very sweet. The brandy fumes made my head swim even before I tasted it.
‘Drink it all’
I did as I was told.
‘Take your clothes off.’
I removed the coats and shoes, then she pushed me on to my back. Her fingers danced like elephants over my shirt and trouser buttons. Finally she unthreaded my belt and put it to one side.
‘What a thin little shrimp you are!’
Did she mean all of me or just my not fully mature prick?
And that was all she said. From then on she just grunted or sighed as she pushed me about, got me into the positions she wanted, so she could play out what I soon realized was her fantasy, not mine.
When I was naked, and clutching my genitals out of terrible embarrassment, she pulled me into the middle of the bed, turned me on to my back with my head in the middle of the bed but facing into the room, then heaped the heavy odoriferous covers over me so I was in a heavy black cave of damp warmth. A moment or two later she crawled in at the far end and I could feel her burrowing over me, on hands and knees, her hands on either side of my body moving up towards my head, her knees following her hands. She too was naked now and I could feel the huge softness of her flesh, her great swinging breasts, the floppy folds of her stomach, then the rich farmy odours of her lower parts as they all travelled up over me in the dark until my head was between her knees and then her shins.