XXIX
Life was certainly changing at Emma and Charlotteâs flat. Emma and Maisie had at last found a house in a quite well-to-do part of the city, and had moved out to live together there. Emma seemed quite reluctant to move to somewhere so expensive, saying that it tied her more than she wanted to the kind of income she was now bringing in; but Maisie was insistent, and as always Emma was unable to resist any of Maisieâs requests. Their move was not a sudden affair. The two of them had been away rather more often than not for several months now, mostly connected with their television work, staying at distant hotels. Often when they were there, it was only one or the other of them as Maisie would visit her mother or Emma would be away on business which Maisie did not need to attend. When Emma was there, Charlotte would make a determined effort to spend the night with her; but in truth, (as Josephine knew quite well) the urgency and significance that Charlotte had once associated with her lovemaking with Emma were much less now. She had come to accept that Emmaâs real love was Maisie, and had moreover come to feel her love for Josephine much more strongly.
Susan still stayed in the flat. She had lost her previous home, as her boyfriend had started a relationship with another man and Susan no longer felt able to come and go as freely as sheâd once done. She quite naturally moved into the bedroom vacated by Emma and Maisie, and although she still professed to a great unrequited passion for Charlotte, she no longer felt the need to spend too much time looking after her. She had even had a brief affair with a Pakistani girl, Aisha, but this relationship didnât last too long. Josephine understood that Aisha had begun to express rather more desire for commitment in their relationship than Susan was prepared to offer. As Susan explained to Josephine, she was a professional fuck actress and any lover she had would just have to accept this fact. In any case, Susan expressed more passion in her occasional lovemaking with Maisie, herself and, less often, Charlotte, than in any of her nights together with Aisha. Josephine felt rather sad that their love affair hadnât lasted very long, as sheâd quite enjoyed the taste of Aishaâs cunt and she adored the way her tongue managed to insinuate itself into her anus.
Josephine was finding that Charlotte was expressing a desire for a seriousness in their own relationship that went far beyond anything that sheâd ever experienced before, even in her boyfriends. She had in fact gone as far as proposing marriage.
âMarriage!â exclaimed Josephine. âDo you understand what youâre saying?â
âItâs perfectly legal now. Didnât you read about it in the papers recently? Marriage is now no longer to be defined on rigid gender grounds. Men can marry men. And women can marry women.â
âWell, maybe so. But whatâs the point of getting married anyway? What canât we do now that we can do if weâre married?â
âItâs not a question of what we can or cannot do. Itâs symbolic. I just want to say to you that you are special in my life. Unique. That I love you. That I want to live with you. That I want to stay with you for the rest of my life.â
Josephine was rather overwhelmed by the intensity of Charlotteâs declaration of undying love, and tightly cuddled her lover. They were very soon making very passionate love on the strength of Charlotteâs declaration, but what Josephine found particularly striking and somehow most appealing of all was Charlotteâs claim that she wanted the two of them to have a baby. Josephine didnât want to confess to Charlotte that as a result of some unpleasant operations sheâd had when she was less than thirteen years old it was extremely unlikely that she could ever be the mother of a child. She always hid from her lover the darker side of her past and the abuse sheâd received in her family from her parents and other relatives. This meant that the only one of the two of them capable of child-bearing was Charlotte, and she was remarkably enthusiastic about the idea.
âWhether itâs you or me, it doesnât matter!â Charlotte claimed. âIâd be proud to carry a child knowing it to be ours.â
âIsnât there a bit of a problem in either of us fathering a child?â Josephine wondered.
âThe father doesnât matter! What matters is that it belongs to both of us: even if only one of us is the biological mother. I would so like it if we could have a child. We could call her Emma or, if itâs a boy, Robert or Charles or something.â
âYes, we could. But we need to find a biological father.â
This was not of course a particularly difficult task for Josephine who in her years in sex theatre had met rather a lot of men who were more than willing to make love to both Charlotte and her. It was necessary that in the lovemaking that both Josephine and Charlotte should be there together; otherwise it wouldnât be âtheirâ child, as Charlotte insisted on calling it. Her view was that if the father-to-be conceived the child while making love to both of them at the same time, then in a real sense it could be said to have an equal chance of motherhood by either of the two lovers. Again, Josephine had no wish to disillusion Charlotte as to the relative probabilities.