Sweet Tooth Read Online Free Page B

to me that I was looking at my own future. I was twenty-one. What I took to be the norm – taut, smooth, supple – was the transient special case of youth. To me, the old were a separate species, like sparrowsor foxes. And now, what I would give to be fifty-four again! The body’s largest organ bears the brunt – the old no longer fit their skin. It hangs off them, off us, like a room-for-growth school blazer. Or pyjamas. And in a certain light, though it may have been the bedroom curtains, Tony had a yellowish look, like an old paperback, one in which you could read of various misfortunes – of over-eating, scars from knee and appendicitis operations, of a dog bite, a rock-climbing accident and a childhood disaster with a breakfast frying pan which had left him bereft of a patch of pubic hair. There was a white four-inch scar to the right of his chest reaching towards his neck, whose history he would never explain. But if he was slightly … foxed, and resembled at times my frayed old teddy back home in the cathedral close, he was also a worldly, a gentlemanly lover. His style was courtly. I warmed to the way he undressed me, and draped my clothes over his forearm, like a swimming-pool attendant, and the way he sometimes wanted me to sit astride his face – as new to me as rugola salad, that one.
    I also had reservations. He could be hasty, impatient to get on to the next thing – the passions of his life were drinking and talking. Later, I sometimes thought he was selfish, definitely old school, racing towards his own moment, which he always gained with a wheezy shout. And too obsessed by my breasts, which were lovely then, I’m sure, but it didn’t feel right to have a man the Bishop’s age fixated in a near infantile way, virtually nursing there with a strange whimpering sound. He was one of those Englishmen wrenched aged seven from Mummy and driven into numbing boarding-school exile. They never acknowledge the damage, these poor fellows, they just live it. But these were minor complaints. It was all new, an adventure that proved my own maturity. A knowing, older man doted on me. I forgave him everything. And I loved those soft-cushioned lips. He kissed beautifully.
    Still, I liked him most when he was back in his clothes,with his fine parting restored (he used hair oil and a steel comb), when he was great and good once more, settling me in an armchair, deftly drawing the cork from a Pinot Grigio, directing my reading. And there was something I’ve since noticed over the years – the mountain range that separates the naked from the clothed man. Two men on one passport. Again, it hardly mattered, it was all one – sex and cooking, wine and short walks, talking. And we were also studious. In the early days, in the spring and early summer of that year, I was working for my finals. Tony could give me no help there. He sat across from me, writing a monograph about John Dee.
    He had scores of friends but, of course, he never invited anyone round when I was there. Only once did we have visitors. They came one afternoon in a car with a driver, two men in dark suits, in their forties, I guessed. Rather too curtly, Tony asked me if I would go for a longish walk in the woods. When I came back an hour and a half later, the men had gone. Tony gave no explanation and that night we went back to Cambridge.
    The cottage was the only place where we saw each other. Cambridge was too much of a village; Tony was too well known there. I had to hike with my holdall to a remote corner of town on the edge of a housing estate and wait in a bus shelter for him to come by in his ailing sports car. It was supposed to be a convertible but the concertina metal bits that supported the canvas top were too rusted to fold back. This old MGA had a map light on a chrome stem, and quivering dials. It smelled of engine oil and friction heat, the way a 1940s Spitfire might. You felt the warm tin floor vibrate beneath your feet. It was a thrill to