WARNING TO READERS - This is a long, rambling, multi-part story and VERY British. The individual chapters will make more sense if read in sequence.
Sorry about the delays between releasing the last few chapters. The text for this story was written over a number of years and includes many small mini chapters and journal style handwritten entries which need to be sorted into chronological order, modernised and edited, before being released. Chapters 30-32 have taken even longer than usual as some sections had become totally misplaced.
Thank you to all readers who regularly vote, leave public comments and send feedback, these things are important as it is the only indication of reader approval that an online author gets.
GF
Chapter 31: Experiences with Customer Relations
I was up, dressed and ready for work shortly after five-thirty on Friday. I wanted to make an early start at Caroline's house, I knew that she would still be in London and I was not going to be making enough noise to disturb her next door neighbours whose house was a good thirty yards away. I had decided to skip breakfast but had made myself an extra flask of coffee and would probably get something to eat later.
It had rained heavily again for a couple of hours during the night and the early morning was overcast with dark grey clouds scudding across the sky towards the channel. The forecast was for a mostly cool, dry day, with a cold north easterly wind and it definitely felt a lot less warm than it had on Thursday, I was glad that I had chosen trousers instead of shorts that morning and had tossed a sweatshirt onto the passenger seat of the van, I might need it later in the day.
Memories of Maggie's naked body and our moonlight nude swim together still haunted my thoughts so that even at that time of the morning I was drifting in and out of being half aroused by my own imagination. I had lusted after my aunt for so long that I just could not get past the memory of her soft breasts against the skin of my chest when she had playfully lunged against me in the pool, my erection trapped between us and how I had rabbited and uncontrollably ejaculated onto her naked belly. Now, in retrospect I recalled vividly that the tip of my rigid prick had been only an inch or two from her pussy.... If she had bounced just a faction higher........?
The most remarkable thing was that Maggie knew what had happened, how could she not? She had seemed totally comfortable with our being naked together, with our physical contact and swept aside my embarrassing wet horniness with one of her gracious smiles. The main thing was that we were tight again; my stupidity over the last couple of days had not damaged our relationship, in fact in some convoluted way it may even have brought us closer or moved our level of intimacy up a peg. I felt that we had moved completely away from being aunt and nephew to being very close and special friends, although I wished that it was more...much more.
I suddenly realised that I was turning the van into Caroline's driveway. My obsession with women and my continual state of near arousal was getting out of hand again; I really could not remember a single thing about the drive across the city from my house. Even at five-thirty in the morning there were commercial vehicles on the road, and I had crossed two busy major roads without noticing, it was downright dangerous. I got out of the van and poured myself a cup of coffee, lit a cigarette and sat on the garden wall to organise my thoughts.
In just the last few days I had shagged three different women. It had been like that since last autumn; I certainly wasn't complaining, in fact, I was beginning to feel like the luckiest man alive, they had all been lovely and they had all been willing partners. I was living in penis heaven.
Additionally; it was a fact that a ridiculously high number of the women that I encountered in my daily routines seemed to come on to me or hint at favours pending. Even Georgia Craven had made a couple of oblique remarks recently which I was not sure were jokes or not, and Maggie and I had become increasingly very affectionate and tactile. My sister's romantic crush was starting to be a serious concern and a few weeks ago I had become my mother's lover for God's sake.
At times since last September I felt it was as though I was irresistible to some women and could sexually arouse others with a touch. The first few months after my curious dynamic seduction of Alice I even had fantasies that my new found sexual prowess was caused by some mysterious external agency; some sort of weird motivator perhaps, which had made me able to influence the sexual desires of any woman that I choose. I had even experimented with looking for a special physical 'touch' which would turn a woman on or make her more amenable to seduction; at times I really believed that it worked.... I was not sure that I totally disbelieved that theory even now, but in reality it was more likely that I had just been lucky finding erogenous zones in my fumbling.
After being chatted up by a couple of girls, total strangers, in the pub one night Dennis had nudged me and said. "Pheromones, matey...that's your problem!" I still had no idea what Pheromones was, I had meant to look the word up in Gwen's medical dictionary but had never got around to it, if I did have it... was it infectious... and what did it have to do with women being attracted to me? The word seemed to ring a bell somewhere deep in my memory... something to do with frogs I thought!
Meanwhile I kept making an analogy to Ann Jellico's bitter sweet comedy play 'The Knack and How to Get It'; it had been made into a film back in the sixties with Ray Brooks as the irresistable lover, Tolen. I had seen both the play and the film a couple of years back at the revival theatre in Bath, and the Tolen character seemed to parallel my own ability to attract women, except that Tolen deliberately set out to seduce any girl that he encountered, with me it just seemed to happen, but in the end he couldn't explain why he was so attractive to women any more than I could.
I ground out the cigarette butt and buried it in the shingle with the toe of my boot. I had spent enough time day dreaming, and so took my gear from the van and unlocked the gate leading to the rear garden. Everything was as I had left it on Tuesday, the over night rain had moistened the ground which suited my purposes admirably, I much preferred to lay lawn turf onto damp soil, it encourgaged the grass roots to immediately start spreading downward seeking water. Most of the gardening tools that I would need had been stored in Caroline's little shed for days including the light weight roller, but I had brought a turf cutter and edge trimmers, and a small petrol driven strimmer.
Some gardeners simply put down turf in a patchwork but Maggie had taught me always to try and lay the rolls in straight columns, and down the longest length of the area to be covered if possible. My own favourite method was to use a 8' length of 1" x 4" timber as a straight edge and start at the centre of the garden and work outwards to both sides so that any turf that needed to be cut was at the extreme edges.
Laying this lawn was going to be a bit more complicated than some as not all the shapes for the flower beds had been finally approved by Caroline. She was not, in my opinion, a difficult customer but she wanted hands-on involvement with the designs, which I actually found refreshing in a client, but was a bit difficult to plan work on a day to day basis. The central lawn was an irregular shape flanked by curving flower beds and would be crossed by a stepping stone path of inset hexagonal flags, but the turf needed to go down if the project was to be completed on time, and so I decided that it was better to lay the turf a bit large and make cut outs later that try to infill around the difficult shapes. In the end the base designs for the garden had been mine and so any minor problems were self inflicted.
I started by unrolling a single strip of turf roughly centrally down the full length of the garden and then once I was content that the sections were straight moved on to laying the next strip on the left side. I needed to leave the other side of the garden until the erectors had been and put up the summer house as I didn't want anybody trampling across the turf for a couple of days. By the time that Waltons turned up with the sectioned summer house at eight-thirty I had completed laying out nearly all of the left hand side of the lawn and was glad to take a break, hauling the rolls of turf into place and then crawling on hands and knees to roll them out was back breaking labour.
Waltons were an old established firm whose garden buildings and furniture were top of the range and they always insisted on doing their own deliveries and erection work, but gave a 25 year guarentee on the product. I spent ten minutes with the foreman making sure that the order was correct and that he was clear about the exact requirement for the erection and hooking up to the electrical cables that Steve had put in. Caroline had choosen an eight foot traditional timber and glass summer house and had been very precise about exactly which way the door and tiny porch should face. There were four men in the team and they estimated that without any issues they should be finished in about three hours and so I decided to get out from under their feet and drive over to the garden centre for some breakfast.
Everything at the centre was running smoothly, we had a really good team who all knew their jobs and could be trusted to work unsupervised for the most part. Maggie and I would never, ever, have dreamed of trying to tell Jack how to manage his greenhouses and growing beds, that part of the business virtually ran itself under his experienced supervision. Emma ruled the office and sales team with a rod of iron but they all adored her.
Maggie and Emma had interviewed and taken on a friend of hers from college, a very butch girl named Tayler Pope, who was to help Emma in the office and answer the telephone and it was planned to have her trained by the time my sister and aunt went to France, which was a great weight off of my shoulders. She was due to start work on Monday.
I had initially thought she was a strange girl, she was twenty-two, seriously overweight with bright green, short cropped hair, and dressed like a punk, with quite a lot of pierced jewellery which she had agreed to leave off at work. She was apparently the star student on the business management course and fitted our requirements even if she was a bit odd. I had only met her once in the college canteen and to my surprise I really liked her; she had a similar warped sense of humour to my own and seemed a fun person. Emma could still be a bit temperamental over girls that I came in contact with and I strongly suspected that she had been keen to hire her partly because Tayler was overtly gay and proud of it.
On Friday morning Maggie usually spent time in the office with Emma going over the weekly accounts, and I found that there was already a stack of delivery notes and invoices on my desk to be initialled before payment. I went through them quickly and passed them back to Emma and then suggested that the three of us should go down to the restaurant for breakfast. I knew that Maggie seldom had more than a cup of coffee in the morning and Emma would not have bothered to make herself breakfast as I had already left for work.
