My taste for offices as venues for fun began a while ago.
1978 in fact.
I was young, working in a bank in central London, and it was the Christmas party. And I'd just begun seeing the sexiest woman in the office. Maria was eighteen, one year younger than me, Spanish, and unbearably sexy. Long legged, with raven-esque black hair and a smile that could stop the traffic on Oxford Street.
It wasn't the ideal relationship. She lived at home in Edgware. I shared a flat in a block in Notting Hill. Her parents were strict, and unforgiving. My flatmates were uncouth, and unwelcoming. We found it hard to make space to be ourselves.
Not that we didn't try. We had a good social life. We went to gigs, to clubs, to the cinemas. We spent hours in each other's company on Oxford Street, or in Kensington, looking at consumer goods our meagre salaries couldn't even approach.
We weren't naïve. We'd had sex in various places; Kensington Gardens, at night.
On a slam door train returning from a stilted dinner party with the branch accountant and his wife at their home in Beckenham.
Most adventurous, in the toilets of a cinema in Hendon.
Each time I'd felt as if I were pushing her, cajoling her to go to the limits of her morals. Not that she objected that strongly, but I wasn't sure if she was giving in because she wanted to, or because she cared enough for me to go further than she might otherwise go.
The Christmas party.
Drinks in the pub across the road at lunchtime, then, after the branch closed, drinks in the staff room in the basement. Colleagues milling round laughing, drinking warm beer or sweet German wine and babbling about where they were spending the holidays. Maria, leaning on my arm, telling people she'd miss me while I stayed with my parents till the new year.
There was a certain amount of pairing off happening. Annie, the secretary, was rumoured to be in the stationery cupboard with the securities clerk. I was interested in where people might have gone because I wanted Maria.
I'd wanted her all day; she'd come to work, as often, in a barely acceptable outfit of short fitted black skirt, thick black tights and a thin woollen turtle necked jumper. By the time the party started she'd swapped the woollen tights for fishnet stockings that I'd bought for her at a small shop in Kensington Church Street. Her flat loafers had gone to be replaced by black stiletto heeled pointy toed shoes that she'd found on Camden Market one Sunday morning. She called it her post punk look; according to her 1978 was the year punk died and 1979 would see more glamorous women like her making a comeback. I didn't care as long as she made her comeback with me. When she dressed like that she radiated sexiness to me; desire was the only word in my vocabulary to describe how I felt about her..
But the stationery cupboard, much fabled centre of Christmas party liaisons, was locked. Perhaps it was true about Annie.
Paul, the standing orders clerk, was being sick in the men's toilet, and the women's toilet was a temporary conversation venue as the record player in the staff room was turned up too loud for the taste of some.
I wasn't that easily put off. I had plenty of incentives. Maria was quite eager for some privacy too. She didn't protest, or even blush, when I ushered her into the manager's office. The vertical blinds were turned to block the window, the door into the banking hall closed. There was just enough light filtering through the blinds to make it possible to see each other as we started to kiss. She was, in my opinion then, the best kisser ever. Tentative, gentle, her mouth only gradually opening to admit my tongue, her arms tightening around me as she did so. Then the more intense kissing, my hand under her sweater at her waist, resting on warm skin, her groin pushing back at me as I tried to use my pelvis to make clear how hard she made me.
