The Promise
Pt. 0
4
of
4
Previously: When Rob Cumberland leaves his job at a Further Education college in inner London to take up a lectureship at a university, the last thing he is expecting is to be embarking on an adulterous affair with an ex-colleague of twice his age. Popular and politically correct Rob assumes his safe sex promise to be a measure that also guarantees his fidelity to girlfriend Stephanie, the mother of his child, who is at that moment out of town. But domineering college administrator Christine Cutler spots a weakness in this assumption, and decides to personally add a carnal postscript to his leaving celebrations, by ensuring he has a supply of condoms and treating him to a night of casual sex. Although loathed by his friends, by a succession of cunning advances and blackmail tricks, the scheming bureaucrat succeeds in overcoming Rob's initial reluctance and initiating intercourse. Rob then finds that he enjoys sex with her so much that he has no desire to stop. So, rather than making good his escape and owning up when he rings Stephanie, he instead returns to Christine with an erection, and begs her to become his mistress. The acid tongued social climber begins to see possibilities in having a university lecturer lover. But when Rob tries to honour a prior engagement with some friends that Christine dislikes, they quarrel violently and she tells him they're finished...
Note about Sunday Trading Restrictions: In Britain in 1992, most shops were shut on Sundays and pubs were closed from 2 pm right through to 7 in the evening.
***********
The George in the Borough High Street is what remains of a timber framed inn of some antiquity on the pilgrims' road to Canterbury. They serve Sunday lunches there and hence Linda's plan for a discreet send-off for their popular colleague.
Rob had no idea what he was going to do as the bus approached this destination. Rubbing his chin, he found himself unable to assess whether there was going to be a visible mark where Christine had hit him as he hadn't been near a mirror. He was on the top deck sitting at the front. The sun was shining into the windows of the bus and, he thought, into the windows of his soul. It was bringing him to clarity. He was just coming up to the stop when he looked out and saw Linda hopping heavily across the road like a giant frog, while Ell pulled on behind like a ghostly remnant.
No,
he thought.
No.
He went downstairs but instead of getting off, he lifted himself onto one of the high seats at the front. He was going to stay on for another stop and get some thinking time. In the state he was in they'd know there was a
story
, and winkle it out of him. And the bag was the clincher. The bag would be a dead give-away. He thought for a moment about putting it into the left luggage in London Bridge station. But instead, when he got off, he went and sat in front of a pint of bitter in the Wheatsheaf in the Borough Market.
He meant to apply reason to these matters. Instead, he fell into a reverie and images of Christine passed before him.
Fuckit...
Again he felt the devastating confidence in her turning hips as she made that slinky leopard print parade to the toilet in the Mitre. She had paused, on turning to open the door, to give a long stare in his direction. Her eyes flashed fiercely out of the overdone dark makeup with neither irony nor mockery: it was just staring. Her whole presence there screamed that she was out to make a pickup. This was nothing to do with the gentle days of flirting in the School office, and he had turned away, in part intimidated by the ferocity of her glare, but also to see if there was someone behind him.
At this point he had realised that he must have been staring at her, at her arse and its wonderful undulance and that this was her way of calling him out. He had been picturing himself dancing with her and taking liberties by feeling her bottom in a grubby student union disco manoeuvre.
He found that he was somewhat nervous of her re-emergence, in case she challenged him again. Passing, she flashed an indulgent smile with her rouged up lips, and trailed a look behind her, through mascara laden lashes. He realised he was not to be pursued and punished for his lechery.
This, perhaps, was the point where everything changed. With the long bob and the low fringe, she looked like Anjelica Huston—that is, he thought, she looked like Anjelica Huston playing a hooker. He thought about that. He liked it, and he knew that he'd get a nasty raw feeling if she left with anyone apart from her fat companion, Sam.
Other images played in the dark chamber of his head, like the sheer black nightdress she had worn for lounging around. Her breasts bobbed slightly under the restraining fabric. The nipples were deliciously and conspicuously erect, pointing outwards and upwards like a gun emplacement.
"To the Snow Queen," he mumbled as he raised his pint and sipped from it. This took him back to Narnia, and the stories he had read as a child, stories which pay homage to the legend of the Snow Queen, in the person of Jadis the White Witch.
Edmund, the soon-to-be-corrupted boy hero, enters Narnia with a sulky attitude. Through the snows of the frozen world he has stumbled into, there comes the sound of bells and a sleigh drawn by reindeer. As it approaches, an astonishing woman comes into view: snug in her furs, a tall, imposing, frightening figure with an inhumanly white complexion, bearing a high spiky crown and a sorcerer's wand. She interrogates him harshly at first, with the manner of one who is feared and used to unquestioning obedience. After she learns more about him, she softens to provide the shivering, exhausted youth with magical food and drink. Then she allows him to get onto the sleigh and under her mantle, treating him to a sudden burst of charm as she starts to work her enchantment on him, to make him hers.
He remembered a strange, wobbly but pleasurable feeling, as he read about Edmund snuggling under the wrap, while the Queen reveals to him again and again how specially favoured he is in her eyes, and how far she might be prepared to go to please him. The book said nothing of what happened under the wrap, but hidden proximity to the body of this exciting, beautiful and evil woman was more alluring to Rob than whatever it was that she provides for Edmund to eat.
Under the mantle, in Rob's visions, her body was soft and welcoming, as he pushed against it. In this world, to live as a favourite of this exotic and dangerous creature, worshipping her as he rode by her side through the pervasive white of eternal winter, that sounded infinitely better than joining Edmund's dullard siblings in some crusade of do-gooding, tedious in intent.
In short, what he wanted was, he wanted to be seduced.
Earlier, on the way to the bus stop near the flats where Christine lived, a voice had rung out from across the road. It was Sam, Christine's boisterous friend. "Hallo, Rob. Thanks for the chaperone, the other night! I'll tell Christine I saw yer. I think she took a little shine to you." As she walked on, he could just make out that her face was cracking up with ill concealed mirth.
He had stopped for a moment, alone on the pavement; and suddenly felt
very
alone.
He thought now, there in the Wheatsheaf, about that nasty raw feeling. That was basically where he was now: looking at a two thirds empty beer glass with a nasty raw feeling.
**********
Forty minutes later, he was outside Christine's door with no idea of what he was going to say. He was about to give a hesitant knock, but caught it and steeled himself to deliver an assertive one-two-three. Presently she opened the door but held it at a crack to withhold entry.
She was wearing a white floral dress with buttons all the way up the front. Its skirt flared slightly, and it had cuffed sleeves which went a little way down the forearm. It was all suggestive of good sense and an even temperament.
But her eyes were as welcoming as stone chips.
"What do you want?"
He breathed out sighing, and made a helpless gesture by way of answer.
"Is that how you lecture?"
He pushed a bunch of tulips at her by way of answer. In his other hand he had a carrier bag.
She made an act of smelling the tulips and looked at her watch which read quarter past one. She paused momentarily and there was a palpable relaxation.
"We've been quite shit to each other haven't we?"
"Are you alright?"
"I'm okay. I didn't get decked by a madwoman and... oh yes, my daughter came round for a while. So that was a bit of distraction. I didn't mention anything about us... I didn't feel like showing her I'd been making a fool of myself again."
"You've got a daughter?"
"Yes. Duh. I've got a daughter, just about your age. She's a legal secretary and a very good kid, and she's my best pal in all the world. What have you got in that bag? Another present?"
She bent forward to pick up the carrier bag by his feet. She drew out a bottle of Gordon's. Gin seemed to preside over their courtship.
"Well. You mean business. Shall I?"
"You can. I... I'd be drinking on an empty stomach."
"So you didn't have... a roast dinner?" Her smile was like the sun coming out.
