Evensong

She looked up at him, as if reminded of something she’d forgotten. An instant of scalding attention, then she turned to Gaetano. “Leave us,” she said hoarsely.

Gaetano was almost relieved to do so. He didn’t know what he’d been doing there in the first place.

As the door closed behind Gaetano, they faced each other.

“You still haven’t answered my question. After we’ve done here, I’ll ask you again.”

“After we’ve done here, I’ll give you an answer.”

They started circling.

“I should get showered and cleaned up first.”

“No you shouldn’t. I want it now.”

“I haven’t shaved or washed,” he told her, “in five days. Or cleaned my teeth, or changed my clothes.” They were only token objections. He was surprised at how much he’d been looking forward to returning to his routine. Nothing else with her was simple or uncomplicated, but sex was.

“Yes,” she said, “you smell like shit. The suit still looks good, though.”

“You get what you pay for,” he said, lifting her onto the table. He pulled up her skirt, carefully and tidily. She was wearing silk knickers which, with equal care, he pulled down and left around her knees; an encumbrance, but the essence was to disarrange, not denude.

She waited, patiently but uninterested, while he did all this, even while he made some final adjustments of her skirt upwards and her knickers downwards; then, after pausing to admire his handiwork, he entered her. That was his part done, and now she began hers, taking him inside her voraciously. Such particular intimacies, to a normal couple, might have meant something; but Anwar and Olivia were neither normal nor a couple. It was an arrangement, simple and self-contained, where each party did what he or she wanted, without regard for the feelings of the other. Masturbation for two.

By now she was well into her part. Where he’d been painstaking and obsessive, she was greedy. After five days, greedier than ever. For a moment he felt she’d never let him out again, at least not the way he’d come in. Eventually she did, but only to go another time, and another.

Who was it she was taking into herself like this? Not a real person but a device, a designer dildo. And who was it that he was entering like this? Not a real person but a container, into which he was pumping his contents. It suited both of them perfectly: only a Consultant would have the constitution and stamina to match her appetites.

Afterwards, they sat at opposing places on the table. She smoothed down her skirt; so careful had he been in his preliminaries that it looked no tidier rearranged than it had been when he’d pulled it up.

She usually looked at him without noticing, or noticed him only in passing, and he realised he’d been doing the same to her. But now he noticed. Her face looked drawn, as if she too had spent the last five days in the Signing Room. There was a feverishness in her stare and a downturn, accentuated by lines, at the corners of her mouth. A sort of desperation about her. Arden never looked like this.

“Not enough,” she said hoarsely.

He hoisted her up on the table again, and was about to restart his ritual, but she stopped him. “No. You prefer it naked, don’t you?”

Surprised, he nodded. They started undressing.

Of all the things I’d like to put in your mouth… He did put it in her mouth. Then her hands. And then her vagina, and that surprised him, because this time she took it less greedily. She’s trying to share, he thought incredulously. She was clumsy at it because it was alien to her, and it made him feel embarrassed; and also uneasy, at the apparent shift from their previous routine.

“Don’t do that again,” he said afterwards. “It didn’t work.”

“The other way wasn’t enough.”

“That way was too much.”

She looked away. Then she gathered herself, like she’d done when he tried to stare her down. “I said it wasn’t enough! Go again. It’s not enough any more.”

Like the Reith Lecture, he thought, a small animal baring its teeth. But none of the attacks in the Reith Lecture had unsettled her like this. Not even the one on her life.

They went again, and it still didn’t work. Still trying to share, and she still wasn’t much good at it—her reciprocal movements were clumsy and unsynchronised to his, and she didn’t pick up quickly enough on what he liked her doing. He preferred it when she didn’t care what he liked. This way gave him nothing. He didn’t think to wonder what she might have wanted from it, only that gave him nothing.It didn’t work and it wasn’t the same. Something had shifted.

He stood up abruptly, and started dressing. After watching for a while the play of his almost nonhuman musculature, she too started dressing.

“What’s this about?” he asked, trying to keep the irritation out of his voice.

“What do you...”

“Don’t say, ‘What do you mean.’ You know what I mean. Why isn’t it enough? Why does it have to be different?”