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.
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It was Thursday evening, and school had finished for the day. Jill Summers was waiting in the staffroom to speak with her fiancΓ©, 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.