erect
handcuffs
stretch
unzip
fishnet
tights
protruding
take off
suck
cleavage
juices
rubber
striptease
Mazola
smooth
nipple
stroking
pink
mount
lick
moist
leather
thighs
parted
probing
tongue
tender
back
arching
moaning
softly
Oh God
Yes
please
don’t stop
Yes
∗
I left the contents of the tray unwashed in the kitchen, then went back to my desk and read through this list again. It filled me with apprehension. Ever since my conversation with Patrick, I had been determined to show him that I could write about sex as well as anybody, that it wasn’t a subject I would shy away from in my book about the Winshaws. And the situation I’d chosen to describe had presented itself without much difficulty. When meeting Findlay at the Narcissus Gallery, I’d happened to overhear some gossip about how Roddy Winshaw had once seduced a young painter he’d invited up to Yorkshire for the weekend, and since I knew nothing of the circumstances, and had decided that, for the purposes of this book, the boundary between fiction and reality was no longer one which I was interested in observing, the incident seemed to form an ideal starting point. But I’d been working on it, now, for more than four nights, and it was perfectly obvious that I was getting nowhere.
To be honest, I had little experience in this area. My knowledge of sexually explicit books and films was small. Despite all those years of relying on the television for sexual stimuli, I retained, amazingly enough, a fundamental aversion to pornography (an aversion probably based on principle, if you cared to look back into the distant past). In even the tackiest of the films which I bought, rented or taped from the television, there was usually a vestige of artistic justification for the couplings and disrobings which would rapidly become my main focus of interest. And in fact I had only once been to the cinema to see a pornographic film. It was in the mid 1970s, during the final grisly stages of my marriage to Verity. For several months our sex life had been dying a slow, lingering death, and in our mutual panic we decided that a visit to a nearby cinema specializing in blue movies might provide something in the way of resuscitation. Sadly, we were out of luck. The film we’d chosen had attracted a certain amount of attention in our evening newspaper because, although made by a London production company, it had been shot entirely on location in Birmingham itself. As a result it was enormously popular with the locals, and the rest of the audience consisted mainly of middle-aged couples – some of whom had obviously seen it several times before – who would have an annoying tendency to interrupt, for example, a scene of back-seat oral sex with remarks like, ‘This is the bit where you can see our Tracy’s Morris Minor going past outside’, or ‘Doesn’t the chiropodist’s look better now they’ve given it a lick of paint?’ Verity and I left the cinema without feeling noticeably aroused and spent the rest of the evening, I seem to remember, rearranging the holiday snaps from our recent trip to the Scilly Isles.
Shaking this memory off, I returned to the blank sheets of paper in front of me and tried to bring my mind into focus. It was no easy task, for we were only five days away from Christmas, and tomorrow Fiona was supposed to be going back to the hospital for the results of her tests. I’d agreed to keep her company, and we were both apprehensive about it. On top of that, I’d had an alarming phone call earlier that day – from Mrs Tonks, of all people. It seemed there had been another break-in: not at the office, this time, but at Mr McGanny’s house in St John’s Wood. The burglar had managed to force entry into his safe and several private documents had been stolen. They included letters from Tabitha Winshaw and, for some reason, statements of the firm’s accounts for the tax year 1981/82. Even more bizarrely, a number of photographs had been removed from one of Mr McGanny’s family albums. She asked me if I could throw any light on this. Naturally I couldn’t, and so the only effects of our conversation were to leave the mystery more clouded than ever and to make it even harder for me to concentrate on my work.
After a few minutes I put my list of key words to one side: it had proved inhibiting rather than helpful, and the only way to break the deadlock, I decided, was to go for complete spontaneity. I should write down whatever came into my head, and worry about the details later. So I fetched a bottle of white wine from the kitchen, poured myself a tumbler-full and wrote my first sentence.
She followed him into the bedroom
That was a good start. Nothing too complicated there. I took a sip of wine and rubbed my hands. Perhaps this wasn’t going to be as difficult as I’d thought. Now maybe just a couple of sentences to describe the bedroom, and then we would be getting somewhere.
It was a
It was a what, though? I didn’t want to go for anything elaborate at this stage, bogging the reader down in prolix descriptions. A single carefully chosen epithet ought to do the trick. How about –
It was a large room
No: much too boring. It was a sumptuous room? Too cliched. A charming room? Too twee. It was a large, charming, sumptuous room. It was charmingly sumptuous. It was largely charming. To be honest, I didn’t give a shit what kind of room it was. Neither would my readers, in all probability. Best to skip all that stuff and keep things moving.
He pulled her roughly towards the bed
That wouldn’t do. I didn’t want to make it sound like rape.
He pulled her gently towards the bed
Too wimpish.
He drew her towards the bed
He sat down on the bed and drew her roughly towards him
‘Won’t you sit down?’ he said, and pointed in the rough direction of the bed
He looked in the rough direction of the bed, and raised a provocative eyebrow
A suggestive eyebrow
He raised one of his eyebrows
He raised both of his eyebrows