I think I always knew he was my mother's lover.
Daddy was away a lot and busy with his deals and his mistresses and Mummy needed company. That, anyway, was how Gabriella, my older sister explained it to me.
"But she's got us," I said.
"Its hardly the same," snorted Gabriella contemptuously.
At first I wasn't sure why not but Gabriella made sure she explained it to me. At first I was shocked, if a little intrigued, but later I came to accept it as being in the way of things.
He was much younger than my mother, a real "boy toy" Gabriella said. But he didn't seem like a boy to me. He was dangerously, almost thrillingly, grown up, a real man in my world of girls and women.
I was fifteen when I learned that he was sleeping with Gabriella, just back from university, too. I couldn't understand how she could have let it happen as my own dark desires for him were still girlish and unformed.
When I was seventeen, Amanda my middle sister but still two years older than me, let me know that she too had sampled his delights.
I found her and Gabriella giggling in a corner of the rose garden, sharing their experiences. At first they wouldn't tell me what it was about but I pressed the question and Amanda fixed me with her brilliant blue eyes and flat out told me.
Gabriella, dark eyed and impish, could be expected to do anything. Daddy had had to strain every nerve and influence to stop her being expelled from school over that business with the cocaine.
But Amanda was the good one, the straight backed, straight A, straight forward girl interested only in her grades and her ponies.
The thought that she too had spread her legs for this roguish interloper who had now worked his way through my mother and my two older sisters, leaving only ...
"Don't worry, sister dear," said Gabriella mischievously, "I'm sure your time will come, when you've grown up a little."
Amanda giggled and gave me a sly look, quite unlike her.
I turned on my heel and fled.
I was fuming and indignant but I often thought about what Gabriella had said. It did seem to have a certain inevitability about it.
And would it be so bad? He was devilishly handsome, and clever and witty.
And I had often thought about him, on those long and languid summer days waiting for term to start and in the lonely reaches of the night.
But I was away at boarding school most of the time and with other things to occupy my mind. I was at a different school to my sisters (Daddy thought it best, after the business with the cocaine) so not even they were there to taunt me.
It wasn't until the first summer that I was home from university that he really began to play on my mind. I was now nineteen, the age both my sisters had been when they had succumbed to his charms.
If it was going to happen, it would happen this summer, just like with my sisters.
I had always regarded this summer as a test. If I could resist him this one summer, if I could prevent myself being seduced until term started again I would be safe for ever.
But I was older now. I was no longer a virgin. I knew that it was to have a man between my thighs.
This wasn't the nineteenth century. I wasn't going to be seduced and ruined. Did I really want to be safe?
Was this perhaps not a test, not a threat but an opportunity? And if I let it slip away this summer, might it never come again, leaving me always wondering?
Of course this assumed he was even interested in me. He'd never shown much sign of that before, other than a sort of kindly condescension.
I didn't even see him for the first week and couldn't ask about him, didn't want Gabriella teasing me about my interest.
His fling with Amanda had been brief. She was now in a very serious relationship with a Cambridge physicist and wasn't the sort to cheat.
He and Gabriella, so Gabriella let me know, would meet from time to time for a "hot fuck" as Gabriella put it, but it was a casual arrangement with no expectation on either side.
Gabriella wasn't really sure if he and Mummy ever even did it anymore. Daddy was still away a lot, his latest mistress was even younger than Amanda, and Gabriella thought Mummy just wanted companionship.
Although, Gabriella opined, if he were to go down on her every now and then, she doubted Mummy would be complaining.
They were playing chess, the first time I saw him that summer. Mummy playing white as always. He was playing red, toying the antique ivory before making his move with determined insistence.
They both looked up when I entered the room. Mummy stayed seated but he stood up and came over, took my hand and looked me in the eye, said how pleased he was to see me.
It only lasted a moment before he sat back down to the game with his back to me.
But it was enough. He had never looked at me like that before.
It was a look that said, plain enough, that I could have him if I wanted him.
It wasn't a come on, there was nothing forward about it, but it let me know, right then, that the opportunity was there.
I could have him if I wanted him.
I flicked my eyes over to Mummy, her expression was inscrutable.
And I decided, right there, that I did want him. I would have him.
Whether despite Mummy, Gabriella and Amanda or because of them I couldn't tell, but I would have him.
The only question was when.
...
Alex Crosshands was a writer of historical fiction. It wasn't exactly high literature but it was uncommonly popular and sold by the crate load.
He had written multiple volumes of a complex, seemingly endless family saga set in Renaissance Italy (with various other exotic locations thrown in).
They had enough blood and adventure for the boys and fashion and romance for the ladies to ensure they were a more or less permanent fixture on the best selling charts (despite at best indifferent reviews).
I well remember one particularly racy passage being passed gleefully around the dormitory of my boarding school. I couldn't help but notice that the aristocratic older woman being seduced by the young buck bore an uncommon resemblance to my mother. Or that the book was dedicated "For C," which was Mummy's initial.
Obviously I didn't let the other girls know I had any connection to the author.
He lived in a large cottage about twenty minutes walk from our house.
I'm not sure how he met my mother but he was a common visitor to our house, almost a permanent fixture, by the time I was in my early teens.
For the most part his path never crossed with Daddy's but he was never a secret. On the rare occasions they did meet, Alex would be respectful, Daddy would be affable, both men respecting Daddy's superior place in the pecking order, but it would never last long.
Daddy must have known about Alex and Mummy, but it would have been hypocritical for him to complain. More than that, I suspected, Alex's relationship with Mummy made Daddy's life easier and Alex was at least respectful and discrete.
Whether Daddy knew Alex was tupping his daughters as well was less clear.
Of course for a man like that, his amorous adventures were not just restricted to our family.
Or so at least Gabriella led me to believe. She was, or at least affected to be, very well acquainted with his goings on.
Maybe he told her himself, holding her naked sweaty body close to his after one of their "hot fucks" and boasting about his other conquests.
Or perhaps not boasting, that didn't seem his style. He was a curiously unassuming man despite his wealth, his success and, it must be said, his dark good looks.
Probably Gabriella had asked him and he had simply told her. I could see that turning her on.
If Amanda was the good one, Gabriella was the wild one, the slutty one.
"You let that girl run riot," Daddy would complain to Mummy, as if it was everything to do with Mummy and not his responsibility at all.
In fact, it would only be a slight exaggeration to say that Daddy's whole contribution to her upbringing was to pay for her boarding school and hushing up that business with the cocaine.
Slutty and wild she may have been but she had a romantic streak a mile wide. It was one of the few things we had in common. Amanda of course was much too sensible for that.
I could see the appeal to Gabriella of being bedded by an old school rogue and rake. And what better proof of that than talk of his extensive experience?
It was proof of his virility, proof that he was the sort of man Gabriella would want to sleep with.
Most girls would hate it. But most girls wouldn't want to sleep with their mother's lover either.
He gave regular book readings up and down the country to a largely female audience, mingling with wine and canapes with his breathless fans afterwards.
Few men would be able to resist such ripe fruit hanging so very low. And Alex was not the sort of man to refuse himself pleasure.
He had a flat in London too, somewhere ever so slightly boho, Fitzrovia, Borough, somewhere like that.
And there were parties apparently, so many parties, all sorts of parties.
And a flat in Paris too. And a long standing affair with a senior figure in the Parti Socialiste.
Among other things.
But despite all this, he was for years now a very regular visitor at our house. A devoted admirer and confidant of my mother.
He would drop by a couple of times a week, maybe more, although there were longer stretches when he was away.
According to Gabriella, again who knows from what source, they almost never actually "did it" in our house, out of respect for Daddy apparently.
Although note, almost never not never never.
Rather it seemed that all those long walks in the woods I remembered her taking were actually the shortest possible walk to Alex's house followed by a long roll around his sheets.
No wonder she always seemed so pink and breathless when she returned.
Mummy didn't seem to take so many long walks these days but still Alex would come to call with the same regularity as always.
Mummy had been a great beauty in her day, a "trophy wife for Daddy" Gabriella said. But she had no longer been in the first flush of youth when Alex arrived on the scene and that was ten years ago.
Not to mention that Alex was at least ten years younger than she was.
Gabriella would joke, giving me meaningful glances, that he was only sticking around to pick up the full set.
But I wondered if, in their own complicated way, they really loved each other.
And if they did, what did it mean that he was making his way methodically through Mummy's daughters?
I had made up my mind to sleep with him by then so I wasn't sure I wanted to dwell on it too much but the thought made me shiver.
Or at least I had almost made up my mind. I wanted to talk to Amanda about it first and it was hard to find a moment when she was apart from Phil, the dull but responsible physicist.
