Just then his mobile beeped. He knew it had to be a text from Cynthia; without breaking their pace he slipped his hand into his pocket and, feeling for the phone, switched it off, while Janey tactfully said nothing. Eddy scanned the line of mansions that backed the paved edge of Green Park. The old homes of the courtiers of the Royal Palace, the formal back gardens of these huge mansions lay like tantalizing oases behind brick walls and wrought-iron fences, still contained within the perimeters of the park. These were the residences of the most prestigious families in Britain—the Rothschilds, the Spencers, the Duke of Westminster, to name a few. It was in one of the back gardens of these grand residences that the adolescent Eddy had planned to seduce Janey. It would have been the melding of two fantasies—one of having her, and the other of one day owning one of these palaces. He led her to the back fence of the large Georgian mansion, remembering the garden like it was yesterday.
Carefully avoiding the robotic swing of a surveillance camera as it scanned the lawn, Eddy helped Janey climb over the brick wall. Crouching, they ran across the grass toward a clump of trees. In front of them the high arched windows were shuttered up and the mansion stared back at them like a blind man. It was like stepping into a secret Eden as the sounds of London and passing traffic dropped away. Eddy was even convinced he could hear the soft croaking of frogs and crickets. A languid Venus frolicked with a marble Adonis in a fountain, and there was a line of perfectly landscaped gardenia and camellia bushes, the scent of which floated across the garden to mingle with Janey’s perfume. “Aren’t you frightened we’ll get nabbed?” Janey murmured, her eyes wide in the streetlight that fell over the wall and onto the lawn.
“Don’t care if we do. Wiv a bit of luck we’ll make the Daily Mail.”
“Wasn’t it over here, Eddy?” She pulled him down beside her under a weeping willow.
“You remembered?” he whispered, feeling as if he was being drawn back into the sixteen-year-old Eddy. The possibility that she too had imbued that night with her own nostalgia filled him with a secret thrill.
“Hard to forget. I was waiting for you to make your move but all you did was rabbit on. All them plans about how you were gonna make your millions, get your dad his own fish shop . . .”
“Yeah, well, that never ’appened—the fish shop, I mean.”
“Yeah, well, if you remember, I was gonna become a TV actress, fancied myself on Eastenders . . . and look at me now—single mum and working girl.”
“You ’ave a child?”
“Daughter. Sean and I only lasted a couple of years. Old bastard’s in the nick now. GBH and a couple of burglaries.”
“He always ’ad a short temper.”
“Didn’t he just.”
And they both laughed. Janey wriggled a little closer to him and a shiver of anticipation fluttered in his chest.
“So what did ’appen to you after that night? We never did see you after that.”
He looked back over the lawn toward the darkened mansion and its imperial architecture, which seemed to scream “you do not belong here,” and the memory of the profound disappointment he’d felt that morning after walking her home to her mum’s council flat came back to him.
“I ran off, see. Went to work for me uncle, who put me straight in the way of trading. He had a client who was looking for an office man and the rest is history.”
“So you did make yo
ur millions?”
“I did.”
“And you’re ’appy?”
He didn’t answer; he was thinking about Cynthia, about how she’d never known what it was like to fight to win something, what it was to survive, how real loss and real poverty—things that had shaped him—remained total abstractions to her. Would she ever really know him if she didn’t share these experiences, and how could she love him if she didn’t really know him? And yet he’d chosen her. Why? Was it just the opportunity for social mobility? Or did he really love her?
Wanting to escape his ambivalence, he reached across ten years, his arms as long as time itself and, after burying his fingers in Janey’s long soft hair, brought her mouth to his own. His tongue searched out hers in a great shuddering collision of familiarity, sharp desire, and lust, a passionate embrace that hardened him instantly. He was kissing her for his adolescent self, for the Eddy he’d lost, and for the man he was now. He was going to take her and he was going to take her now and by doing so, he would right the symmetry of the world—all his confusion would be swept away and he would be whole.
Instead Eddy froze.
“Wot’s wrong?” Janey’s face was dappled in the moonlight falling between the branches.
“I dunno, memories I guess.” He looked into her face, but her eyes were veiled and it was impossible to read her. His glance fell down to her mouth, the full-blown gorged slash reddened by the smudged lipstick; the haunting of his teenage years came back to him. Oh what he had done to her in those dreams. As if reading his mind she sat up and, reaching across, kissed him again. This was the confirmation he was looking for, that she wanted him as much as he wanted her. She looked at him, her cheeks flushed, her lips like bruised fruit, her wide green eyes ironic. Losing control, he reached out and unbuttoned the front of her dress. His hands slipped down into that soft flesh and lifted her heavy breasts out, the hard nipples erect. They were full and ever so slightly pendulous, and he fell in love with their asymmetry. Dropping his head down, he sucked on each nipple in turn, hard in his trousers, his hand touching her face as if to find an echo, a memory, his fingers in her mouth. Moaning, she reached down and pulled him free, then pushed his cock between her breasts. Encouraged, he straddled her and rubbed his swollen cock between them, faster and faster, until he felt as if he might come. Holding the base to stop himself, he climbed off her and threw up her skirt, finding the velvet-soft skin above the tops of her stockings. He buried his face between her legs. She smelt wonderful, the perfume of her sex tangy salt undercut with rose musk. Parting her labia, he found her clit, a hard, erect button. He played it with his tongue, gently at first and then, as he felt her thrashing above him, her moaning muffled by her skirt, he took her whole clit into his mouth and sucked it. His hands cupping her arse, his fingers slipped into both her vagina and anus. Now he was her master and she, the butterfly, was pinned out, spread for both their pleasure. He could feel that she was close to coming, her knees trembling against either side of his neck, and suddenly there it was, the clenching around his fingers, the shuddering wetness. Above him somewhere in the translucency of her dress and the dappled light between the branches were her groans. Fearing someone might hear her, he reached up with one hand and clamped it over her mouth, and she gently bit him in her ecstasy.
She pressed him back onto the grass, the crushed scent of it drifting up, the heavy weight of his erection now resting on his stomach. He still couldn’t believe it was her as her face dipped down toward his penis, erect and thick. He could see both the young Janey in all her eager beauty and the adult Janey in the planes of her face, her laughing eyes, the wry mouth that closed over his cock as she sucked him hard, her tongue circling the tip in maddeningly sensual circles. He half sat up, pushing her long hair away from her face, unable to help his fascination as he watched her take him. Now kneeling, she slipped her hands under each of his buttocks and played his anus as if she were taking him, as if she were the man. He caught his breath; there was genuine abandonment and delight in both her face and movements, as if she were as erotically aroused as he was by the fellatio.
His mind flashed to Cynthia’s face when they made love, an act that always seemed to entail Eddy serving Cynthia’s needs over his own, the heiress’s sense of entitlement extending to the bedroom. With Cynthia, Eddy always had to resort to imagining he was with someone else to bring himself off—it was hard not to resent her passivity, the way she lay back as if it was an honor for him to even be in the same bed as she. Janey was entirely different; her enthusiasm was almost as erotic as the extraordinary things she was doing to him with her mouth and her fingers. She was now taking him faster and faster, deeper and deeper, and he could feel his orgasm building. He sat up and pulled her away from him. He looked at her flushed face, a blush mottling her pale skin, her eyes bright, her mouth swollen as if bee-stung. “That was for Eddy at sixteen,” she said, grinning, “but Eddy at twenty-six is beautiful too,” at which they both started laughing until, unable to wait any longer, he pulled her onto his lap and plunged into her, the pleasure making both of them gasp. Slowly she moved up and down, clenching him as she swiveled her hips in a slow, sliding dance. Deeper and deeper he lost himself in her, over and over, all his anger, humiliation, disempowerment of that evening vanishing with each new thrust. Then he moved faster and faster, the race, the galloping hunt, the cock and cuntiness of it all searing through him in a sudden epiphany. This is where he really belonged, in her arms, her legs wrapped around his hips. And in the blinding moment that he came he knew that for the first time in years he was completely and profoundly authentic.
• • •
Later they walked hand in hand like love-drunk teenagers, her shoes dangling in his left hand, his jacket draped over her shoulders. The dawn light was breaking over Mayfair. Outside the Savoy some of the night hotel workers were changing shift with their day counterparts. A garbage truck was crawling down the road. Already the day smelt of summer, and Eddy was charged with the kind of excitement he hadn’t felt since he was a child. “Oi, mate!” he yelled after the dustbin men. Three minutes later they were hitching a ride down to Piccadilly Circus, hanging off the sides of the large truck, laughing at the bleary-eyed who were just emerging from the nightclubs. At Piccadilly Circus they both climbed up onto the plinth and had their photo taken by a German tourist as they embraced Eros, Janey showing the top of her thigh as she wrapped a leg over the bronze boy god as the sun, now rising up between the buildings, caught the glass and the reflective steel in a sudden shower of light. Staring across, Eddy thought to himself all was possible now; he was going to win, score that perfect goal over and over. He was never going to compromise who he was or where he’d come from for anyone ever again. Laughing, he swung Janey down from the statue.
“I am greater than Eros,” he thought, “greater, bigger, more fucking successful. I am a god!” he felt like shouting, staring down Piccadilly with the wealth of London flanking the broad promenade, Janey’s lips now on his neck as she kissed him. “I am invincible”—the notion resounded through his very cells, his psyche, as they climbed down to the pavement and he took in Janey’s tumbling and disheveled hair, small tufts of grass still tangled among the blond strands. “You ’ave made me invincible,” he whispered. But the roar of a passing delivery van masked his words and Janey, not hearing, smiled back blankly.