CHAPTER EIGHT

"Had a busy day at the office?" Mrs Evans asked her husband, as he entered the kitchen minus his bowler hat and leather briefcase.

"Not really," he replied, going up to and giving her a perfunctory peck on the cheek, as per custom. "Pretty quiet, in the main." He briefly glanced round the kitchen, before asking her what was for dinner?

"Boiled bacon, potatoes, and carrots," she replied. "Can't you smell it?"

"I've got a blocked nose actually," he informed her. "Must have caught another damn cold."

Mrs Evans made an effort to appear sympathetic, but, privately, she was disgusted with him and fearful of catching his germs. She'd had enough colds for one year and didn't relish the prospect of catching yet another! Indeed, now that she had it in mind to send a letter to Matthew Pearce, arranging to visit him again the following week, a new cold was the last thing she wanted! How would he feel if she went to him snivelling or all blocked-up with her husband's stinking germs? Not particularly amorous, she thought. So, feigning concern for the food, she swiftly turned away from Thomas Evans and proceeded to apply a fork to the potatoes, gently prodding them through the turbulent water in which they were fiercely simmering.

Mr Evans took a seat at the kitchen table and then vigorously blew his nose. "At least I haven't lost my appetite," he remarked at length.

"Dinner will be ready in about five minutes," Mrs Evans announced, with her back still turned on him.

There was a strained silence before Mr Evans next ventured to open his mouth, saying: "You might be interested to learn that I discovered a crumpled, lipstick-smeared paper tissue in our bedroom this morning."

"Oh?" Mrs Evans carried on prodding individual potatoes as though the fact of this discovery was nothing out-of-the-ordinary, although she felt anything but comfortable at the mention of it.

"Found it in the bottom of our blue wardrobe while looking for my best shoes there," he went on. "It must have fallen out of a pocket or something."

Mrs Evans recalled that she had transferred the paper tissue in question from her handbag to the side pocket of one of her dresses, the green one, shortly after arriving back from London a few days previously. The pocket must have had a hole in it! Either that or the tissue had not been safely deposited there and subsequent buffetings of the dress by both herself and her husband, who kept some of his suits in the same wardrobe, had dislodged it from its precarious perch, causing it to tumble to the bottom shelf.

"Since you were asleep at the time, I didn't care to make a fuss," Mr Evans continued calmly. "But I picked the tissue up, all the same, and put it in my trouser pocket. I have it here now."

Mrs Evans turned around in manifest disbelief, as her husband dangled the said item between the forefinger and thumb of his right hand. She was on the point of reaching out and snatching it from him, when a sudden realization of the fact it was the very same tissue upon which he had just blown his snotty nose made her hesitate and then recoil in disgust. She stared at it speechlessly.

"What puzzles me about this rather soiled item," Mr Evans remarked, "is that you don't usually use red lipstick these days, and that when you do very occasionally use any you don't wipe it off on a paper tissue, like this, but wash it off. And you certainly don't make a point of hiding such crumpled items in wardrobes."

"I wasn't hiding it!" Mrs Evans protested. "I had simply forgotten to throw it away."

"What, after you had used it to wipe lipstick off someone else's face?" Mr Evans conjectured sarcastically.

Mrs Evans had begun to blush as brightly as the lipstick in question. "No, of c-course not," she stammered. "I must have used it on myself, some m-months ago, and then put it into the p-pocket of the dress I was w-wearing at the time."

"Which strikes me as being singularly uncharacteristic of your habits," Mr Evans declared in a brusque manner. "Besides, a tissue directly used on your lips would surely have more lipstick on it than this one does. And the lipstick wouldn't be so faint or widely diffused." He paused for effect a moment, then continued: "Now if you had used it some time ago, you would surely have discovered it, in the meantime, and thrown it away, since you don't keep all that many dresses in that particular wardrobe, and those you do keep there are in fairly regular use."

Mrs Evans was beginning to feel insulted. "Are you suggesting I'm a liar?" she shouted.

"I'm not suggesting anything of the kind, my dear," her husband calmly responded. "I'm merely intrigued by the discovery of this item. Intrigued by that and by one or two other things, including what appears to be a noticeable change in your behaviour recently, as though you had other and better things to think about."

"Such as?"

"Oh, that's not for me to say, is it?" Mr Evans retorted. "I'd rather you told me."

Mrs Evans' blush had attained to such a blistering peak by now that she was obliged to turn back to the oven in order to hide her emotions from him as best she could. "I've nothing to tell you," she confessed.

"I must say, I am surprised to hear that," Mr Evans resumed, his tone quietly confident, "especially after the impressions I formed of your attitude towards that artist-fellow whom Gwendolyn brought here recently."

"I don't know what you're talking about," Mrs Evans declared.

"Ah well, perhaps I was mistaken," Mr Evans conceded sceptically. "Only it seemed to me that you took rather a fancy to him, even to the point of sitting next to him in the garden while Gwendolyn was on the phone that evening. I was observing you through the sitting-room's rear windows a good deal of the time, wondering what the hell you could be talking about."

"Mostly about modern art, if you must know," Mrs Evans confessed.

Mr Evans fidgeted nervously on his chair. "Is that so?" he remarked almost offhandedly. "Well, the artist was evidently gratified by your company and not as tongue-tied as with Gwendolyn. Prior to your appearance they hardly said a word to each other, you know. One got the impression they were bored with themselves. But when you arrived on the scene, my word, what a difference came over the fellow! How delighted he seemed to be, having you instead of Gwendolyn beside him!"

"I think you're imagining things," Mrs Evans opined, bending over the carrots with fork unsteadily in hand.

"I rather doubt it," Mr Evans countered. "After all, my eyes don't usually deceive me, no more, for that matter, than do my ears, which were well aware of the fact that you were very polite and hospitable towards him at dinner. Far more so than you usually are towards strangers. And you found him handsome too, if I remember your first impressions correctly. Better-looking than Gwendolyn’s previous boyfriends."

Mrs Evans sighed in exasperation. "I can't see how that can have anything to do with it, since one would have to be blind to doubt his good-looks," she objected.

"Yet not so blind to doubt his sanity, if his theories on art and religious evolution were anything to judge by!" Mr Evans responded with a sarcastic relish that belied his ill-health. "Why, the man's cracked, positively cracked! All that nonsense about transcendental meditation and abstract art, the Holy Ghost and ultimate truth - it didn't even begin to make sense to me! If that's the kind of enlightenment Gwendolyn is getting herself involved with, then I have to say I feel sorry for her! She ought to know better than to bring a pathetic little wimp like that into the house. Indeed, she oughtn't to have replied to his letter in the first place, since he was virtually a complete stranger to her.... Writing to someone he hadn't seen in over four years, and then only very briefly and for the first time - what's that if not a clear indication of how cracked he is? D'you think any man in his right mind would have done such a thing? No, really, I'm both surprised and disappointed at Gwendolyn for having taken an interest in him! She ought to have ignored his letter and left him to his abstract doodles, the little fairy! Had she not fallen out with her previous boyfriend, a couple of weeks before, I expect she would have ignored it. Unfortunately for her, she was at a loose-end at the time.... Yet that colleague from her school, Mark bloody Taber or something, was much more sensible and of her type, the way I saw it. Not one of these eccentric avant-garde types anyway - bloody stuck-up Nazi subjectivists who resent the fact that photography has left them in the petty-bourgeois lurch and that they aren't really as contemporary or progressive as they like to imagine.... A pity he couldn't have made it up again, and thus prevented her from making a damn fool of herself with this artist character. After all, she's likely to gain more from a kindred spirit like Mark than ever she will from this trumped-up transcendentalist, or whatever he calls himself. At least Taber's down-to-earth and of a decently solid middle-class background. You know where you stand with him. But the artist?" Again he blew his nose, to Mrs Evans' renewed distress and further disgust, on the lipstick-smeared tissue and, getting up from the table, deposited it in the plastic rubbish-bin with a sigh of relief. Then he returned to his place and poured himself a glass of mineral water. "No, I didn't like him one little bit. His transcendentalism, or whatever he called it, strikes me as nothing more than a figment of his perverted imagination. And his art, assuming he wasn't bluffing us about it, strikes me as constituting a mode of degeneracy and charlatanism. Not really art at all but anti-art - bogus, decadent, puerile, and feeble, like most of it tends to be these days! However, since you spent so much time in compassionate discussion with him, I expect you have different opinions."

Mrs Evans frowned severely and, turning sharply around, glared ferociously at her husband a moment. "What if I do, is that any damn business of yours?" she cried.

"Not particularly," conceded Mr Evans, who was slightly taken-aback by her anger. "Though it might have some bearing on your strange behaviour these past four or five days. It might even have some bearing on the paper tissue I had the ill-fortune to chance upon this morning. After all, if you're not altogether opposed to his art, I can't see that you need be opposed to certain other things about him, least of all his capacities as a lover. I mean, he's likely to be more virile than me, despite his art."

"You don't know what you're saying!" Mrs Evans weakly protested.

"Well, maybe that's because I haven't got all the facts and can only go on conjecture," Mr Evans declared. "Of course, I'm well aware that you went to London, early Wednesday morning last week, to pay cousin Stephanie a visit and see her baby. But I can't be sure if that's all you did."

"What are you trying to insinuate?" Mrs Evans exclaimed, turning completely away from the oven in order to look her husband squarely in the face.

"Well, through having phoned Stephanie from the office today, I'm aware that you only spent the morning with her, since you apparently had to dash off, shortly before lunch, to attend to what she described to me as some 'pressing business'," Mr Evans revealed.

Mrs Evans felt a lump in her throat and a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach at the mention of this. "You phoned Stephanie this morning?" she gasped.

"This afternoon actually, after I had earlier deliberated over the possibility of your paying a visit to someone whose face needed wiping," Mr Evans calmly corrected. "And she obligingly informed me that you spent only a couple of hours with her. Now since you didn't arrive back here till gone eight o'clock, you must have done something with yourself in the meantime - either paid a visit to someone else or walked around the West End all afternoon or ... attended to some 'pressing business'."

Mrs Evans flushed deeply. She wondered why she had said such a thing to Stephanie at the time. Was it because she felt guilty about what she had actually arranged to do and was secretly afraid that her cousin would be offended by her premature departure, if she didn't endow it with some more cogent excuse than merely wanting to look around town? Not surprisingly, Stephanie had been delighted to see her again, after over five months, and keen to make her visit as pleasant as possible, which, of course, it had been, especially since the baby - a boy of six weeks - was such a treasure to behold. But ironically, what with the exciting prospect of seeing Matthew Pearce in the afternoon, her visit had not been as pleasurable as it might otherwise have been, and it wasn't altogether impossible that Stephanie had noticed a slight impatience on her part which made it seem necessary for her to invent a cogent excuse in the form of pressing business. However, whether or not Stephanie had been offended by her premature departure shortly before lunch, the fact remained that she hadn't inquired into its motive, which, in view of Thomas Evans' current suspicions, was probably just as well! Yet it didn't exactly make life any easier for her at present. An explanation was still required and, against the surge of embarrassment which had overcome her, Mrs Evans struggled to find one.

"As a matter of fact I went along to Gwendolyn’s school to watch her preparing things for the new term," she blurted out, forced, on the spur-of-the-moment, to grasp at the first seemingly credible straw of an excuse that floated to the turbulent surface of her hard-pressed mind. It sounded false and ridiculous, but she couldn't think of anything better, in the circumstances.

Mr Evans raised an eyebrow in a show of ironic surprise. "And you call that 'pressing business'?" he sneered.

"No, not exactly," Mrs Evans conceded. "But it just so happens that I'd been invited by Gwendolyn to visit her while in London anyway, so it was like a kind of obligation to me, especially as I hadn't seen her school before. I ought perhaps to have told you of her invitation while she was here. But as I didn't think you'd be interested, I kept it to myself. In point of fact I was quite impressed by the place, as also by her new flat, which is situated conveniently close by. You'd be surprised how spacious it is."

"Really?" Mr Evans responded thoughtfully, with a vague nod. "And presumably that's where you saw the artist again and had recourse to the use of a paper tissue on his face?"

"Yes, I mean no, of course not!" Mrs Evans replied. "Gwendolyn and I were alone together throughout the entire time." Once again she regretted her words, of having been obliged to improvise such a flimsy excuse. If Thomas Evans were to contact Gwendolyn and ask her what had been going on on the afternoon in question, it would be exposed for the blatant lie it was. Fortunately, the chances of him telephoning her were pretty slight, since he was partly deaf in his right ear and generally averse to making phone calls to people out of the blue, especially to soft speakers like his daughter, so, short of visiting her in person, his most likely approach would be to write to her. Yet that didn't make matters a great deal better either, especially if he got it into his suspicious head to write to her straightaway, before Mrs Evans could do anything to influence her daughter against him.

Really, it was very foolish to drag Gwendolyn into it, particularly as she would almost certainly become suspicious if her father started asking awkward questions and intimated that an affair was secretly going on between Matthew and her mother. It was hardly likely that she would prove the most reliable of allies, under the circumstances! But, alas, no other idea vaguely corresponding to the pitiful excuse of 'pressing business' had presented itself to Deirdre Evans' beleaguered imagination, so it was now a question of sticking to one's guns and hoping for the best, hoping, in other words, that Thomas Evans wouldn't contact Gwendolyn in due course. And, needless to say, it was no less necessary to hope that Gwendolyn wouldn't get it into her capricious head to phone home, over the next few days, for the sake of a chat or in order to find out how her father, with his persistently poor health, was faring. It was, of course, to be hoped that he wouldn't be at home or available for comment if, by any chance, she did so.

However, the reality of his presence in their house at present was no easy matter for Mrs Evans to live with, especially as she felt that her excuses weren't really passing muster with him. On the contrary, her embarrassment, coupled to the nervous and, at times, angry tone of her voice, had the effect of making her feel exposed and unconvincing. She felt that he could see through her to the lie beneath. But she couldn't go back on it, not after all she had said. Besides, she couldn't have told him the truth at the beginning even if she had wanted to; for it would have led to her being disgraced to an extent beyond anything she had ever known. And not only with regard to him but in the eyes of Gwendolyn as well, who would almost certainly get to hear about it in due course. No, better to risk anything than that, even if one had to lie oneself red in the face!

Oh, what a mistake it had been not to throw the used tissue away, but to have held-on to it as a kind of memento of her conquest! Had she not been so infatuated with Matthew Pearce, she would never have allowed herself to attach such sentimental value to it in the first place. Yet because it had touched his face and bore the marks of her love, she had chosen to hang-on to it, like a young adolescent in the first flush of romantic passion. Now, of all her regrets, this was the worst, the one she could least countenance. The tissue ought never to have found its way into her handbag, let alone the blue wardrobe! It ought to have been deposited in Matthew's wastepaper basket. But where the self-recriminations ended, the sentimentality began. And with that came the suffering, not least of all in relation to the fact that he, Thomas Evans, had blown his snotty nose on it! Blown his dirty nose on her love, he who had been unable to inspire so much as a genuine kiss from her in over ten years! Really, she could have killed the bastard! No doubt, his impudence had achieved something by way of exposing her feelings for Matthew. He must have relished the fact!

But at that moment Mr Evans had other things to relish, including the impending prospect of his evening meal, which Mrs Evans was making a gallant effort, in spite of her nerves, to transfer from the various saucepans to his plate. "I'll have a double helping of bacon while you're at it," he requested, momentarily discarding his air of outraged innocence. "And one or two extra potatoes."

Obediently his wife added an extra sliver of boiled bacon to the plate and another potato, before placing his dinner in front of him. Then she returned to the oven and, having turned it off, put lids on the saucepans.

"Aren't you going to eat anything yourself?" asked Mr Evans, visibly surprised. For, normally, his wife sat down to dinner with him.

"Not now."

Mr Evans looked genuinely concerned, almost worried. "Have I taken away your appetite, then?" he said.

"For the time being, yes, you damn-well have!" cried Mrs Evans, who briefly flashed him a defiant look and then continued to busy herself about the oven, applying a damp cloth to the stains there. She was well-nigh convulsed with hatred towards him, hatred for all the humiliations he had forced upon her, both today and in the past. A tear welled-up in her left eye and slowly slid down her cheek. Then another, followed by one in her right eye. She turned away from the oven and mumbled some quick barely audible excuse. She couldn't stand his hostile, mocking proximity any longer. Blindly, she dashed out of the kitchen and ran upstairs, heading for their bedroom.

Once there, she locked the door behind her, threw herself down on the bed, and sobbed like a child, wept out the bitterness that had welled-up inside her during her ordeal downstairs. Her tears were like poison to taste, bitter with pain. Not for years had she cried like this, out of a deep-seated loathing for her legal oppressor and the fate he had so callously inflicted upon her. What if she had been unfaithful to him, was that a crime under the circumstances of his inability to satisfy her, to bring her true knowledge of her womanhood? Did his ill-health mean she would have to continuously suffer as well, to rot away in sexual deprivation? Hadn't she suffered enough from it already? God, what a nerve he had, to interrogate her like she was some kind of wayward adolescent who needed correcting! What if he had noticed a change in her since her return from London - wasn't that a change for the better, a consequence of the fact that she had experienced a new lease-of-life through Matthew Pearce, been brought back from the dead and given fresh strength, hope, and courage for the future? To think he begrudged her what little satisfaction she could find elsewhere, as though she should always be a member of the sick-house in which he bad-temperedly languished, a hired nurse with no right to a life of her own - really, his selfishness could go no further! One was indeed unfortunate to be married to such a pig!

Raising herself from the pillows onto which she had plunged her tear-drenched face, Mrs Evans unlocked the bottom drawer of her bedside locker and extracted from it the novel she was currently reading. Since her eyes were too dimmed by tears for her to see clearly, it was necessary for her to make an attempt to dry them before opening the book and taking from between its pages the letter she had written, during the morning, to Matthew. Unfolding it, she slowly and not without physical difficulty began to read:-

Dearest Matthew

Just a short letter to thank you for the warm hospitality you showed me last Wednesday. I was indeed grateful for the opportunity to view your paintings and sculptures at first-hand, and, although not properly qualified to judge in such matters, I am of the opinion that they are a credit to your powers of imagination and invention. Of the sculptures, I particularly admired the small white dove I had the pleasure to examine closely, whilst your painting of 'ultimate reality', with its centripetal essence, made a profounder impression on me than anything else I saw on canvas that day. I can still see it before me as I write, which doubtless speaks highly of its clarity, or perhaps I should say memorability?

Anyway, it wasn't so much your work which gave me most pleasure in the long-run as - need I say? - you yourself, what with that pleasantly mundane body of yours, a pleasure which is still to some extent with me whenever I think of you. Had you actually taught me to meditate, as for a while I feared you might, I would never have known the sweet thrill of your love, nor the peace that comes from satisfied desire. I am sincerely glad I persuaded you to abandon your transcendentalism for a while. It seemed to me that you needed a reprieve from its ascetic demands on you.

But don't be angry with me now, I beg you! I'm not quite the enemy of the spirit that you might take me for, even if I may now appear a shade more mundane in your estimation than you would like. I am not entirely devoid of spiritual aspirations, despite my matrimonial alliance to a rather unprepossessing materialist in the ungainly form of Mr Thomas Evans! No, if you'll allow me to say so, I'm still interested in learning to meditate, in continuing the lesson we were nobly embarked upon prior to the intrusion of the senses in such a delightfully subtle fashion.

Consequently I would appreciate an opportunity to visit you again in the near future - possibly next week or the week after, if you aren't otherwise engaged. My best days are always Wednesdays and Thursdays, though, should either of these prove inconvenient for you, I can always arrange to visit your studio some alternative weekday, the middle of the morning as well as early afternoon. I hope such a request won't strike you as in any degree importunate or unreasonable, bearing in mind the fact that you're obviously a busy man. But as we got on so well on Wednesday, I can't see why we shouldn't get on still better, if you follow me, in future - provided I can learn to meditate properly and we both keep a cool head about it.

So if you're prepared to see me again, would you please pen me a brief reply, addressing the letter to me personally.... On second thoughts, why bother to reply at all? Why not simply allow me to assume that a Wednesday or, failing that, Thursday afternoon visit will be acceptable to you anyway, and that, if not, you'll let me know by return post. That way no-one but me will be any the wiser, least of all my husband. After all, I would rather avoid arousing his suspicions, as I'm sure you can appreciate.

So, until next week or the following one, I look forward to not hearing from you, but to seeing you in your true light.

Yours sincerely

Deirdre Evans.

Having read the letter, she refolded and returned it to its hiding place. Already, no more than five hours after putting pen to paper in such thoughtful fashion, it was out-of-date, certainly as far as the reference to her husband's assumed ignorance of their affair was concerned! Indeed, it had been out-of-date in that respect even while she wrote it, since he had discovered the paper tissue earlier that morning and therefore had his suspicions aroused a good three hours before. Now one need hardly fear that a reply from Matthew Pearce would necessarily arouse his suspicions any further, since they had already been aroused to an extent which made them the precursors of certain knowledge. If anything, it would only confirm him in his opinion of what was going on between them, provide him with fresh evidence of her betrayal - assuming, of course, she didn't get to the post before him or it didn't arrive after he had gone to the office, as was sometimes the case.

In the event of her getting to the post first or in his absence, she wouldn't have anything to fear. But due to his habit of early rising and leaving for work just after eight o'clock, when the post usually came, she couldn't be guaranteed of success. On the contrary, it was more likely that he would receive it and, since she didn't often get any letters addressed directly to herself, have his suspicions confirmed by the sight of any envelope with her name on the front. And that would only lead to further trouble between them, to more hostility and recriminations.

No, it was certainly wiser not to encourage Matthew to write to her personally, even though there was no guarantee, under the terms she had suggested, that he wouldn't do so. But was there really any point in sending him the letter now, seeing her husband wasn't altogether unaware that something was going on between them and could hardly be depended upon to encourage further developments in that direction? Surely it was safer, in the circumstances, to drop the affair altogether and resign oneself to living in sexual frustration again, lest Thomas Evans became still more beastly towards her and dedicated himself to making her life even more of a misery than at present. After all, he wouldn't take kindly to any future visits to London, on her part, if he thought she was continuing to be unfaithful to him.

Besides, there was no guarantee that Matthew would welcome her again, that he would want to get involved with her on a regular basis. His relationship with Gwendolyn could only suffer in the process, and there was no real evidence, as yet, that he welcomed the prospect of deceiving her. Either way, it seemed unwise to send the letter - firstly because of her husband's strong suspicions, and secondly because of Matthew's relationship with her daughter and the correlative possibility that Gwendolyn might get wind of it, one way or another, in due course.

But even with those prohibitive factors, even taking into account the additional shame which could befall her if Gwendolyn got to learn of the affair, she still felt the lure of her desire for Matthew, felt the emotional commitment which had imperiously thrust itself upon her, following their clandestine meeting, and made her conscious of a richness of emotional depth she hadn't experienced in years and had virtually ceased to regard as possible. Yes, even given all the prohibitive factors founded upon what other people would think of her, the voice of her own soul still clamoured for attention, spoke to her of the duty she owed to herself and the indisputable reality of her feelings for the artist. No matter how foolish or dangerous it appeared, on the surface, to send the letter to Matthew in the face of the other, external voices which spoke to her, this personal and unique voice of her self-interest would not be quietened but, rather, grew increasingly insistent the more she endeavoured to suppress it!

Now it reminded her that she was thirty-nine and would soon be forty, soon have crossed the threshold into an age-group which was resigned to growing progressively less attractive, less sensuously seductive, as, one by one, the years slipped away. To some extent fortune had been kind to her, it had at least enabled her to preserve a fairly youthful appearance well into her thirties - an appearance which even now was not devoid of a certain juvenile charm. Perhaps this was in part due to the quiet life she generally led in Northampton, what with her ailing husband and the few if any sexual demands he placed upon her? Perhaps also to the fact that she had only had two children? Whatever it was, she couldn't rely on fate to retard her ageing much longer. One of these days she would wake up to discover the ugly spectacle of wrinkles where, previously, the skin had been relatively smooth. She would encounter bags under the eyes where, previously, the skin had been firm, if not taut, and on her fine brown hair, one of her chief prides in life, a scattering of grey or partly grey hairs would appear, as though from nowhere, obliging her to abandon the illusion that she was still young and worthy of physical admiration.

As yet, she still had a few months to go, possibly even years, if fate continued to favour her with a youthful longevity. Why therefore should she waste what precious time remained before the curtain of old age, with its introspective painfulness, closed down upon her, shutting her off, for the remainder of her life, from such pleasures as were still within her grasp? Hadn't she wasted enough valuable time already, thanks in large measure to the wretched health of her husband in recent years? Wasn't it therefore fitting to atone, in some degree, for the neglect she had suffered at his hands throughout the time in question? And how better to atone for this enforced celibacy than by visiting Matthew Pearce in person - he who had brought her back from the dead and enabled her to feel powerful emotions again? Not as powerful, admittedly, as those she had experienced in her late teens and early twenties, but still more powerful than anything she had known either before or since. Surely he wouldn't turn her down, he whom fate would seem not to have treated particularly kindly as far as regular sexual satisfaction was concerned, either. Had it done so, he would never have written to Gwendolyn after so many years and requested her company. After all, there were plenty of women in London as attractive as her from whom Matthew might alternatively have solicited favours, had circumstances encouraged him to do so. Plenty! But for some reason best known to himself, they hadn't. And so he had clutched at the only straw to-hand - clutched, in all probability, out of desperation, an implacable discontent with his celibacy and solitude, he who was so obviously and naturally a ladies' man.

But if Gwendolyn was one straw, then Deirdre Evans felt herself to be quite another and, in her own estimation, a much bigger and tougher one - almost a log. He couldn't, surely, turn her away if she visited him again, especially if she took every precaution to make herself as attractive as possible? No, she owed it to herself to exploit this channel of satisfaction to the hilt, no matter how much opposition Thomas Evans might choose to place in her way. She would send the letter regardless, just as Matthew had sent his own letter to Gwendolyn without any guarantee of a positive response, and hope for the best. For Matthew's approval would far outweigh any disapproval from her husband - of that she was in no doubt whatsoever!