"Please!"
"No, ma'am."
"Conrad, you simply cannot start things up like this and then drop them. It's the second time in five minutes."
"I don't want to be a medical bore," he said.
"You're not being a bore. These things are fascinating. Come on! Tell! Don't be mean."
It was pleasant to be sitting there feeling moderately high on two big martinis, and making easy talk with this graceful man, this quiet, comfortable, graceful person. He was not being coy. Far from it. He was simply being his normal scrupulous self.
"Is it something shocking?" she asked.
"No. You couldn't call it that."
"Then go ahead."
He picked up the packet of cigarettes lying in front of her, and studied the label. "The point is this," he said. "If you inhale menthol, you absorb it into the bloodstream. And that isn't good, Anna. It does things to you. It has certain very definite effects upon the central nervous system. Doctors still prescribe it occasionally."
"I know that," she said. "Nose-drops and inhalations."
"That's one of its minor uses. Do you know the other?"
"You rub it on the chest when you have a cold."
"You can if you like, but it wouldn't help."
"You put it in ointment and it heals cracked lips."
"That's camphor."
"So it is."
He waited for her to have another guess.
"Go ahead and tell me," she said.
"It may surprise you a bit."
"I'm ready to be surprised."
"Menthol," Conrad said, "is a well-known anti-aphrodisiac."
"A what?"
"It suppresses sexual desire."
"Conrad, you're making these things up."
"I swear to you I'm not." uses it?"
"Very few people nowadays. It has too strong a flavour. Saltpetre is much better."
"Ah yes. I know about saltpetre."
"What do you know about saltpetre?"
"They give it to prisoners," Anna said. "They sprinkle it on their cornflakes every morning to keep them quiet."
"They also use it in cigarettes," Conrad said.
"You mean prisoners' cigarettes?"
"I mean all cigarettes."
"That's nonsense."
"Is it?"
"Of course it is."
"Why do you say that?"
"Nobody would stand for it," she said.
"They stand for cancer."
"That's quite different, Conrad. How do you know they put saltpetre in cigarettes?"
"Have you never wondered," he said, "what makes a cigarette go on burning when you lay it in the ashtray? Tobacco doesn't burn of its own accord. Any pipe smoker will tell you that."
"They use special chemicals," she said.
"Exactly; they use saltpetre."
"Does saltpetre burn?"
"Sure it burns. It used to be one of the prime ingredients of old-fashioned gunpowder. Fuses, too. It makes very good fuses. That cigarette of yours is a first-rate slow-burning fuse, is it not?"
Ann looked at her cigarette. Though she hadn't drawn on it for a couple of minutes, it was still smouldering away and the smoke was curling upward from the tip in a slim blue-grey spiral.
"So this has menthol in it and saltpetre?" she said.
"Absolutely."
"And they're both anti-aphrodisiacs?"
"Yes. You're getting a double dose."
"It's ridiculous, Conrad. It's too little to make any difference."
He smiled but didn't answer this.
"There's not enough there to inhibit a cockroach," she said.
"That's what you think, Anna. How many do you smoke a day?"
"About thirty."
"Well," he said, "I guess it's none of my business." He paused, and then he added, "But you and I would be a lot better off today if it was."
"Was what?"
"My business."
"Conrad, what do you mean?"
"I'm simply saying that if you, once upon a time, hadn't suddenly decided to drop me, none of this misery would have happened to either of us. We'd still be happily married to each other."
His face had suddenly taken on a queer sharp look.
"Drop you?"
"It was quite a shock, Anna."
"Oh dear," she said, "but everybody drops everybody else at that age, don't they?"
"I wouldn't know," Conrad said.
"You're not cross with me still, are you, for doing that?"
"Cross!" he said. "Good God, Anna! Cross is what children get when they lose a toy! I lost a wife!"
She stared at him, speechless.
"Tell me," he went on, "didn't you have any idea how I felt at the time?"
"But Conrad, we were so young."
"It destroyed me, Anna. It just about destroyed me."
"But how… "How what?"
"How, if it meant so much, could you turn right around and get engaged to somebody else a few weeks later?"
"Have you never heard of the rebound?" he asked.
She nodded, gazing at him in dismay.
"I was wildly in love with you, Anna."
She didn't answer.
"I'm sorry," he said. "That was a silly outburst. Please forgive me."
There was a long silence.
Conrad was leaning back in his chair, studying her from a distance. She took another cigarette from the pack, and lit it, Then she blew out the match and placed it carefully in the ashtray. When she glanced up again, he was still watching her. There was an intent, far look in his eyes.
"What are you thinking about?" she asked.
He didn't answer.
"Conrad," she said, "do you still hate me for doing what I did?"
"Hate you?"
"Yes, hate me. I have a queer feeling that you do. I'm sure you do, even after all these years."
"Anna," he said.
"Yes, Conrad?"
He hitched his chair closer to the table, and leaned forward. "Did it ever cross your mind.
He stopped.
She waited.
He was looking so intensely earnest all of a sudden that she leaned forward herself.
"Did what cross my mind?" she asked.
"The fact that you and I…that both of us have a bit of unfinished business."
She stared at him.
He looked back at her, his eyes as bright as two stars. "Don't be shocked," he said, "please."
"Shocked?"
"You look as though I'd just asked you to jump out of the window with me."
The room was full of people now, and it was very noisy. It was like being at a cocktail party. You had to shout to be heard.
Conrad's eyes waited on her, impatient, eager.
"I'd like another martini," she said.
"Must you?"
"Yes," she said, "I must."
In her whole life, she had been made love to by only one man-her husband, Ed.
And it had always been wonderful.
Three thousand times?
She thought more. Probably a good deal more. Who counts?
Assuming, though, for the sake of argument, that the exact figure (for there has to be an exact figure) was three thousand six hundred and eighty and knowing that every single time it happened it was an act of pure, passionate, authentic lovemaking between the same man and the same woman then how in heaven's name could an entirely new man, an unloved stranger, hope to come in suddenly on the three thousand, six hundred and eighty-first time and be even halfway acceptable?
He'd be a trespasser.
All the memories would come rushing back. She would be lying there suffocated by memories.
She had raised this very point with Dr Jacobs during one of her sessions a few months back, and old Jacobs had said, "There will be no nonsense about memories, my dear Mrs Cooper. I wish you would forget that. Only the present will exist."
"But how do I get there?" she had said. "How can I summon up enough nerve suddenly to go upstairs to a bedroom and take off my clothes in front of a new man, a stranger, in cold blood…?"
"Cold blood!" he had cried. "Good God, woman, it'll be boiling hot!" And later he had said, "Do at any rate try to believe me, Mrs Cooper, when I tell you that any woman who has been deprived of sexual congress after more than twenty years of practice of uncommonly frequent practice in your case, if I understand you correctly-any woman in those circumstances is going to suffer continually from severe psychological disturbances until the routine is reestablished. You are feeling a lot better, I know that, but it is my duty to inform you that you are by no means back to normal… To Conrad, Anna said, "This isn't by any chance a therapeutic suggestion, is it?"