Just Another Friday Night In Memphis - Part 9

??????it was something far worse!

The first entry said simply, 'I'm going to do something to George that
will affect him for the rest of his life'

The second entry was a few days later and said, 'Went to the doctor's
today and had my coil out, now we'll see what happens!'

I started to feel sick but I had to continue now. A month later it
said, 'Success at last, I'm pregnant!'

The implications of what I had just read hit me like a sledgehammer.
Five years previously when she fell pregnant with Alison and I accused
her of playing God she denied it; I now had the evidence in my hands.
What kind of woman plots to have a child without the knowledge or
agreement of her husband just so she can wield power over his life and
destroy him? She must have hated me so much it blinded her to all the
wickedness in her plan. How can a woman plan to have an unwanted baby?
I didn't understand it then, and I still don't. She not only hatched
this plan, but the outcome, a mentally handicapped baby, seemed to make
it even worse. Over the intervening years she sometimes used it to hurt
me during arguments, saying it was my fault, and also that if it hadn't
been for me she would have kept Alison instead of having her adopted.
This was a lie and she knew it, but she couldn't cope with her guilt
over the whole episode, so she made me the scapegoat. As the full
horror of this sunk in I found myself on the floor vomiting, and I
started to panic, I could see my life falling to pieces and I couldn't
do anything about it. I knew that I had to tell her I knew what she had
done, if I didn't it would fester and be far worse at a later date. By
the time she came home from work I had cleaned myself up and calmed
down a bit but as I saw her coming up the path I felt like running
away. She made a cup of tea and could see I was agitated and when she
asked what the problem was I just blurted it all out.

She sat there stunned and couldn't speak for a bit, I was in tears and
kept saying, 'Why? Why? Why?'

For a long time she didn't answer but she eventually composed herself
and said very slowly and deliberately,

'I wanted to make a decision on my own, without having to consult you,
and anyway I hate you!'

She added, 'I suppose you think, serves me right for being such a
bastard don't you?'

I sat there shaking my head and crying and I told her that was the last
thing I was thinking. I told her I thought the whole story was so sad,
that she couldn't talk about her feelings, she could only scheme and
plot against me, and then to have it all go so horribly wrong must have
made her burden of guilt for the past five years almost unbearable.
(She never once said she was sorry for any of this, she never shed a
tear and now, won't even discuss Alison with me. I have felt guilt for
what happened every single day now for 22yrs.) All this only drove us
further apart and the relationship became reduced to sharing the house
and responsibilities of parenthood with me largely doing my own thing
and her not caring.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Throughout these years I maintained my folk club social life and at
some point Jean and I got involved in a dinner party circuit with three
other couples at the Benfleet club. The other couples would take turns
at giving parties but because Jean and I didn't get on I used to
organise a New Year party instead. Dinner parties being small and more
intimate, require the hosts to be sociable to each other whereas with a
large party it doesn't matter so much, there's lots of people and it's
informal.

At first the four couples got on ok, but it soon became obvious that
one of the husbands was not a very nice person. He was a terrible
racist, referring to coloured people as 'mans' and Jewish people as
'yids' or 'front wheel skids' and he was also a bit of a sex-pest,
always brushing up against the other women at every opportunity. His
wife Janet was the complete opposite, very attractive, with a bubbly
fun-loving personality and generous to a fault. She would flirt openly
but no one ever took it serious; I remember saying to Jean on one
occasion that Janet was the safest woman on the planet.

Nobody could understand what she was doing married to Peter. He was
12yrs older than her and a terrible bully to anyone who would take it,
was unhygienic (he bathed and changed his clothes rarely) and was
always bragging about how he was a fighter as a young man and everybody
in Southend gave him respect. He would also brag about the size of his
penis which he claimed was enormous and the envy of every man that had
ever seen it, he would bring this subject up at every opportunity in
front of the other women in an attempt to portray himself as a virile,
desirable sex machine when in fact he was abhorrent. Janet and I became
very close friends and I got on well with her two grown up daughters
and her sister and sister-in-law. She used to have open house on
Saturday mornings and cook breakfast for everyone and I soon became a
regular along with the girls and their current boyfriends. Peter was a
window cleaner in the High Street and worked in the mornings and
everybody loved it with him not being there. On the Saturday morning of
March 12th 1994 I arrived for breakfast to find Janet in a bad mood and
when I asked her what the problem was she said Peter had gone to
Scotland to see an old fianc? that he had stayed in touch with for
40yrs. She didn't care about any of this but resented the fact that he
had told her openly in front of others and she felt he was making a
fool of her.

'I think I'll phone Tony Babesta and ask him to take me out tonight',
she said.

'Tony!' I said in disbelief (he was an old family friend of theirs, a
nice enough guy I suppose but about as attractive as a sack of
potatoes).

'Yes', she said, 'why not?'

'Well you wouldn't go out with me', I said.

'Oh yes I would...please, I'd love to', she replied hastily.

I couldn't believe my ears; did I hear this right?

'Please take me out tonight, please, I've fancied you for years but I
didn't think you felt anything for me', she said.

I had always had a hankering for Janet since we'd first met some ten or
twelve years before but it never occurred to me that she would have an
affair. Whilst my mind was trying to absorb what she had just said I
heard myself say,

'Ok, I'll pick you up at eight this evening'.

Breakfast that morning seemed somehow exciting, I could hardly contain
myself just thinking that this very attractive woman wanted to be
romantically involved with me. It had been ten years since any woman
had shown an interest in me and I have to admit I was a bit
apprehensive; I'd forgotten what was expected of me, I wasn't used to
'courting' and I was getting older and thought I might make a fool of
myself. I spent the afternoon at home watching the clock and pondering
my immediate future. By 7.30 I was sitting in the car on Southend
seafront with butterflies in my stomach. What if I had misread what
Janet intended, the last thing I wanted to do was damage our
friendship, she meant so much to me, to have a friend I could talk to
normally and have a laugh with.

I pulled up around the corner from her house as arranged on the dot of
eight and she came tripping down the path with a broad grin on her
face, I seem to remember she squeezed my hand as she got in and I put
the car in gear to pull away. I took her to a pub on the A12 outside
Chelmsford some 20mls from Southend, where I used to go in the early
70's; they had jazz bands in the saloon bar on Saturday nights, but as
it turned out the jazz was a thing of the past and the pub was almost
empty so we didn't stay. On the way back to Southend we stopped at
another pub on the A130 and had a meal. We were so happy in each
other's company and before we realised, it was closing time. We hadn't
stopped talking all evening but as we approached Janet's turning she
fell silent, then with about a hundred yards to go she suddenly blurted
out,

'I don't have to go home yet!'

It had been my intention to behave as a gentleman and take her home, I
wasn't going to take any liberties but just thank her for a lovely
evening and ask if maybe we could do it again sometime. But Janet
obviously had other ideas! I panicked a bit, dreading getting into a
situation I couldn't handle and said,

'What do you mean, where do you want to go then?'

'I don't care, anywhere, I just don't want to go home yet'.

By this time I had passed her turning and just kept going. We
eventually ended up in Shoebury east beach car park, a favourite haunt
of courting couples for years, partly because it was right on the
beach, a grass car park with no lighting and couples would frequently
go 'skinny dipping' in the summer. As I turned off the engine and
lights she leaned across to me searching for my mouth and kissed me
with an urgency that told me there was no going back now.

'Lets get in the back', she whispered.

Before I knew what was happening she was all over me, kissing me and
touching me as though I was the first man she had been near for years.
The car windows steamed up and Janet completely lost control. Undoing
her blouse and bra she thrust her breasts in my face and gasped,

'Oh, I want you so much! Now! Right this minute!'

Her tongue was halfway down my throat and she was fumbling with my
pants and I couldn't stop her............ and I didn't want to!

After a couple of hours of alternating between grappling and talking I
suggested that we really should go home, it WAS almost 2.30 in the
morning. As we approached her turning for the second time that evening
she said,

'Don't go home darling, come to my house and stay with me
tonight.'

I started to say maybe it wasn't a good idea but she interrupted
me,

'It'll be ok, the girls aren't coming home tonight and as long as you
leave by 7.30 no one will know. Leave your car in the next road and
give me five minutes.'

I stepped through her front door into her lobby and heard her say from
the inner darkness,

'Close the door quietly. I'm in the living room.'

As I entered the living room I had spent evenings in, enjoying dinner
parties, she closed the door and threw her arms around me in one
movement.

'I'm so excited', she said, 'do you want a drink? I don't, lets go
upstairs.'

In seconds we were both naked and so completely entwined I knew this
was what I had been looking for all my life, I was fifty years old and
finally the woman of my dreams had come to claim me! By the time I
left, shortly before 7.30 in the morning, I was a complete wreck, I had
made love with this woman more in one night than I had with Jean in
years, and it had been the real thing, not the sad excuse for love that
existed between Jean and I.

On Tuesday evening as I drove to the club I worried that perhaps Janet
would feel the previous Saturday was a mistake and would be embarrassed
and try to avoid me but I couldn't have been more wrong. She sidled up
to me in the bar and brushed her hand against my leg
nonchalantly.

'Hello', she said in a soft sexy voice, making sure that no one heard
her and trying to look innocent, 'I loved Saturday night, did you? I
can't wait another year, when can we do it again?'

After that we saw as much of each other as we could although it was
only a couple of times a week, sometimes three. I would turn up for
breakfast just after 9.30 on Saturdays when Peter would go to work, and
before her girls turned up with the boyfriends. Janet wanted to make
love every time, but I found it unsettling to come through the door and
be obliged to make love instantly, in case someone turned up and we had
to regain our composure and pretend nothing had happened. Janet was
very rash on these occasions and I began to think she loved the thought
of getting caught. We would frequently strip and make love in her
living room and she would make no attempt at privacy; she had a through
lounge and no net curtains, anybody in the houses across the road could
see straight through her house. She would insist that I kept an eye on
the window in case someone arrived. In fact one morning we were
practically beyond the point of no return when Peter came back
unexpectedly and I had to grab my clothes and run into the downstairs
toilet as Janet grabbed hers and ran upstairs. As Peter came in the
front door I flushed the toilet and walked out into the hall.

'Where's Janet?' he enquired.

'I don't know, perhaps she's upstairs', I replied sitting down at the
kitchen table.

Janet came down stairs at that point, as cool as you like, and Peter
never suspected a thing. On another occasion Sarah pulled up and we
nearly got caught, although she approved of me and always suspected
something was going on. She would grin at us and make suggestive
remarks but we always denied anything untoward was happening.
Eventually when we were sure Sarah was on our side we confided in her
and she would always give her mum an alibi so we could go out together,
frequently dropping her off at theatres and pubs we had arranged to
meet at. Sarah just wanted her mum to be happy and would do anything to
help; she knew her mum's relationship with her father was awful and
said to me once,

'I don't know how mum can bear to be near him.'

After a while the pressure of turning up and having to 'perform' within
minutes made me feel like a circus animal so I started to turn up late
in the hopes that one of the girls had already arrived and I would be
'excused' duties'. This sometimes upset Janet who sensed I was trying
to avoid making love to her because I didn't care when in fact the
problem was that I needed more privacy and the ability to relax and be
loving rather than be a rampant sex machine.

Over the next couple of years our relationship blossomed although Janet
always maintained 'another' social circle that I was not a part of.
This centred around Sundays when she would go to a jazz club with
Peter, (he only went because he wanted to keep an eye on her as he
suspected she was fooling around with someone as their relationship had
worsened since I had become involved with her). At the jazz club she
met a circle of people, mostly men, that she had been at school with
over forty years previously. She said I couldn't go there because of
Peter and she couldn't bear to stay home with him and so, trusting her
as I did, I unselfishly encouraged her to go and enjoy herself whilst I
stayed at home with no one to talk to.

In the early summer of 1998 I detected a change in Janet's attitude
toward me, she seemed to be less intense than previously and I started
to worry a little. Then one Tuesday evening I arrived at the pub a bit
late and our normal little gang were seated round a table and Janet was
next to a guy I had seen once before. (A year or two earlier Janet had
asked if it was alright for a friend from the jazz club to come to my
New Year party with his girlfriend, as they had no where to go. I had
said if he was a friend of hers it was OK and they duly arrived. As it
happens I didn't take to them myself, he smoked a lot and they kept
knocking balloons out of a net I had prepared for midnight, and Auld
Lang Syne. I eventually asked them to leave the damn balloons alone and
said they could play with them to their hearts content at midnight.
They scowled at me and didn't reply but they got the message and
stopped fooling with them.) The guy sat close to Janet and was smoking
a small cigar; he had a sly smirk on his face and kept blowing smoke in
my face to taunt me. Janet either didn't notice his behaviour and my
discomfort with the situation or enjoyed the thought that there were
two men around the table lusting after her, either way she made no
attempt to sit with me. He became more confidant and was actively
chatting to her in a very personal way as if to say she was his woman
and she seemed to relish the attention. I eventually got upset and
rather than let it show I left and went home. I didn't hear from Janet
for the rest of the week and I didn't call her, as I didn't want to
hear any bad news over the phone.

Tbc.