This story is set in 1981 in England. There was no internet, no mobile phones, and very different attitudes.
Everyone in this story is over eighteen.
Some of the opinions expressed by some of the characters would have been more mainstream at the time. I am not saying that they are correct, nor am I saying that the current balance is perfect. The past is simply a foreign country- they do things differently there.
It interlinks with many of my other stories, but I have tried to make it self-contained and include sex with the exposition.
/-----------------------------/
It was Thursday evening, and school had finished for the day. Jill Summers was waiting in the staffroom to speak with her fiancé, Alan Hampton, and finalise the arrangements for tomorrow's trip to Coketown.
They had been going out for three years and engaged for two years. Alan was a fellow teacher at St. Thomas's Grammar School in Birmingham and came from a well-off family. He had a first-class degree from Oxford. In his mid-twenties, he was already head of History at St Thomas's and was likely to become a headmaster of a distinguished school or an MP in due course.
Alan's kindness, ambition, intellect and patience appealed to the woman she wanted to think she was. Her friends and family approved of him and told her that Alan was a good man. She was almost sure that she wanted to marry him.
She told herself that once the trip to Coketown was over, provided he wasn't selected to stand for the seat, she would finally name the day. She didn't mind him becoming a politician or standing for parliament. She accepted that for him to be selected as a candidate, having a wife or girlfriend to help campaign and smile for the cameras was important, and if she married him, that was part of the deal. The problem was Coketown and that night in November 1980.
She told herself that there was no real risk of meeting the Dapper Man or the young men. She would be in the best hotel in town in the evenings and at the hustings at the Conservative Club on Saturday afternoon. She would be able to persuade Alan that it was best that she spent Saturday morning relaxing in the bath and making herself presentable for the local Conservatives to look over. He didn't expect to be selected as there was a local candidate who was well-liked, but the experience would be good for him. After this weekend, she need never go to Coketown again and she could forget about that night.
Then Alan said, "Apparently, I did well at the initial interviews, and I have an excellent chance of making the final two and a real chance of being selected."
"That's excellent news." Well, what else could she say?
"I really need your help this weekend. Tomorrow night, it's possible that some of the selection committee members will drop in for a word before the hustings. I should warn you about the constituency chairman. He's a well-dressed man in his late fifties who served in the RAF during World War Two. I think he is one of my supporters. The trouble is that he behaves as though he is still a dashing man in his twenties. He has a sense of humour about it. He says that he will keep younger longer, if he behaves as though he is a thing of beauty and a boy forever. He will flirt with you as though you were a WAAF, but don't worry about being asked to do more than laugh and play along."
She asked, "What's his name?"
She knew the answer before he said the name. It was going to be the man in Coketown she most feared meeting and the one most likely to recognise her. It was indeed Rupert Grimsdyke, AKA the Dapper Man. The one thing Alan had got wrong was how much Rupert would dare ask, but that had been because she had made it clear that the answer would be yes.
How she got through the rest of the conversation without vomiting was a mystery to her. At last, Alan kissed her on the cheek and said goodnight.
She couldn't risk meeting Rupert on Friday evening. Alan had made it clear that she would be expected to be pleasant to the man, and he would surely recognise her. She also knew that the hotel had a dance floor, and he would insist on dancing with her. She needed an excuse not to arrive in Coketown before Saturday lunchtime, if at all.
She could only think of one person who could provide her with a plausible excuse. Amber was heading for a break-up with her boyfriend Alastair and owed Jill a favour. Jill had put Amber up for a week last year after Amber had split up with her previous boyfriend, Donald after he had beaten her up in a jealous rage.
Amber insisted that she hadn't cheated on Donald. It was probably true. The man who had triggered Donald's anger was as macho as Larry Grayson. If a man was going to be jealous, then he shouldn't go out with Amber. She was the most sexually experienced woman Jill knew and never had any problem picking up men.
She telephoned Amber from home, who agreed to the visit. It even turned out that the excuse would be the truth. Amber had just broken up with Alastair but understood when Jill mentioned her fear of meeting the Dapper Man. She did ask Jill to bring some wine with her. She said, "I need to wash that man right out of my hair, and it may as well be with vino."
A good thing about seeing Amber was that she was the one person who knew about both Gavin and Coketown. Well, she only knew about the Dapper Man from Coketown, but she knew all about Gavin. Hell, she'd remembered an important fact better than Jill when they had met in January and Jill had told the very expurgated version of her night in Coketown.
Amber agreed to Jill's request to help give some verisimilitude to the cover story by leaving an urgent message tomorrow morning at St Thomas's for Jill to call her.
That left Jill to her thoughts. Jill was frightened of sex and what it brought out in her. Her mind did not believe in pre-marital sex, but her body did.
Her first relationship had both excited and scarred her emotionally. She had met Gavin in her second year at university. He had wooed her enthusiastically, professed his love, and talked about them being soulmates.
She'd been warned by Amber that Gavin was a total shit. Despite this warning, which, in retrospect, she should have realised was coming from an expert, she had persuaded herself that she could redeem him and that he really loved her.
Finally, he had overcome her scruples. The first time they had had sex, he had been gentle and had made sure that she was comfortable. He had held her afterwards and reassured her. After that first evening, he had made love to her increasingly roughly and then publicly dumped her.
It hadn't helped that Jill had been tactless in her views on her friends' failed romances and their unsuitability in the past. Amber was the one friend who had not reacted to Jill's humiliation by Gavin with what the Germans called schadenfreude.
Amber was probably right to say that he hadn't made love to her but fucked her. The problem was that she had enjoyed the experience until it became clear that he wasn't joking about dumping her and despising her. She'd enjoyed being called a whore and used at the time.
She had avoided any more relationships at university, partly because she was scared that they were only after her because, after being used by Gavin, she was seen as a sure thing and partly because her reaction to sex had frightened her. She'd even rewritten the past so that she had convinced herself that she had not enjoyed sex with Gavin until Jill reminded her of the truth. Undoubtedly, that had helped her degree, but it also meant that she was inexperienced and fearful.
She wanted to be married and had told herself that she would look for a husband when she started work. Being the youngest female teacher at St. Thomas's, which was then an all-boys school, meant that there were plenty of eligible youngish men of her social class or higher who were interested.
Two men in particular pursued her whom she found of interest. One was Stephen Williamson, who taught PE and geography and coached the First XV and the First XI. He was 6 foot 2 and built in the same way as Gavin--large and muscular. She was physically attracted to him but suspected that he enjoyed playing the field. The other was Alan Hampton. He was an old boy of the school and, while 5 foot 10 and physically fit, was a cricketer rather than a Rugby player.
She had chosen Alan because she could trust him and because he didn't remind her of Gavin. He also came from a wealthy family. He was instinctively gentle and considerate, as well as being a gentleman. That had, in retrospect, been the problem for most of the relationship. Jill respected Alan, but she wasn't excited by him in the same way as she had been by Gavin.
She had not had sex with him and panicked whenever they got close to it. Part of her thought that she should not have sex before marriage, part of her feared being rejected again once he had had his way with her, and part worried that she didn't really love him in a sexual way. It did not help that she had chosen him over Stephen because she thought Alan was the safer option.
Alan had offered to marry her before they had sex, but she wouldn't fix a date for the wedding. She was afraid of marrying him and finding out she didn't enjoy sex with him. If he'd only insisted on having sex with her or tried harder to persuade her when she had lost her nerve, then she may have been able to commit to a wedding date.
Good girls like her were meant to put up some resistance, but if the man insisted would lie back and think of England. If a girl really didn't want to have sex with a man, she didn't put herself in a position where she was unable to stop the man from insisting. That was another problem with the night in Coketown. Had she wanted it to happen? She hadn't even put up a token resistance to the rugby team.