Prologue.
Mariko Matsui opened the front door of the bungalow went inside. She was completely soaked from the rain. Swapping trainers for slippers and pulling her backpack off her shoulders, she was just about go through to her room when a voice called out from the lounge.
"Mariko, darling, we have a visitor. Would you like to come through and say hello?"
She turned back around and stood in the door of the living room. Her homestay host, Mrs Castling, was sitting with a smartly dressed gentleman who looked to be in his mid-forties.
"This is Lawrence. A new friend of mine," Mrs Castling said.
Mariko started to give a slight bow and then stopped herself. "Pleased to meet you," she said.
"Oh my gosh, you are absolutely soaked." Mrs Castling said. "I was just about to pour the tea, but it looks like you need to dry out first."
Mariko looked at the gentleman for a few seconds then at her host again.
"If it is okay, I will take the tea with me to my room, please. To drink after I shower." she said. "Two sugars, please."
Mrs Castling had started to pour the tea, but paused for a second. "Two sugars? Are you sure?"
"Yes, please. Thank you." said Mariko. "It was nice to meet you Mr Lawrence. I hope to see you again soon." She pronounced the words as if reciting a formula.
Mariko took the tea and left the room. She went down the long corridor to her bedroom. Entering the room, she put the tea down on her bedside table and her backpack in the wardrobe. Then she pulled off her clothes, grabbed her towel and headed into the shower. After cleaning thoroughly, she came back through, dried her hair and got into bed, pulling the covers tight around herself and turning the light off.
A few minutes later there was a knock on the door. "Come in," she said.
Lawrence entered. For a second he stood by the door and then, without saying anything, he too got undressed and got into bed. He reached out and touched her hair with one hand and then, a few seconds later, started to caress her bottom. Within a minute they were kissing passionately and within five they were making love.
1.
Mrs Amanda Castling was everything Mariko had expected from a homestay 'mother'. She drank tea at around four o'clock off of fine china, often with an accompanying scone. She collected figurines of cats -- some worth hundreds of pounds and made of fine porcelain and some worth pennies from novelty gift-shops on the local sea-front. She seemed to love them all the same regardless of the cost and almost as much as her two real cats: one black and one tabby called Del and Rodney respectively. She helped out at a local charity shop three days of the week and had a little advert in the local newspaper about doing clothing repairs and alterations. At the weekend, she would take the left-over bread and go down to the park to feed the ducks, or take some peanuts and get the squirrels to come over and eat out of her hand. To Mariko she was quintessentially British and represented exactly the kind of cultural experience she'd come to the UK looking for.
There was just one problem. Well, it wasn't even really a problem. It was fine. It was just something that was slightly disconcerting. Something that didn't quite match her view of how the world should work. Once or twice a week, Mrs Castling would have a man over, and they would make loud and passionate love for most of the night. She was increasingly sure it was a different man each time.
Mrs Castling was, of course, very discreet about it and probably thought she was being quite clever. Her bungalow was divided by a long corridor with the two bedrooms and a bathroom at one end and the front door, living room and dining room at the other. Then beyond the dining room was the kitchen and between the kitchen and the garage was a small storage room which, as well as containing Del and Rodney's travel cages and the washing machine, had a sofa bed which, when folded out, completely filled the room. A guest could easily come round the side gate and into that room without alerting the rest of the house. They might trigger the security lighting, but then so did squirrels and birds. This makeshift bedroom was far away enough from Mariko's room that it was not unreasonable for Mrs Castling to assume that it was being conducted entirely without her knowledge.
The problem was the Mrs Castling was loud. And quite vulgar. And very clear about what she wanted doing and how hard she wanted it done. The sound was muffled and on the edge of being audible, but Mariko had very good hearing. For the first couple of weeks, she'd assumed it was the neighbours, but it hadn't taken her too long to put the pieces together.
Mariko didn't know what to make of it all. She half thought it was funny, but it also reminded her that she was on her own in a foreign country and a long way from her now ex-boyfriend, Haruto. She'd talked about him with Mrs Castling. He'd broken up with her when she announced she was going to study her Masters in England, which would only have taken a little over one year, including some preparatory English language study before the course began. That he wasn't willing to wait, clearly confirmed what she'd long suspected - he just wasn't that interested in her, and that was that.
She'd told Mrs Castling that she wasn't interested in dating while she was in England. She was fed up with 'men' if such he could be called and starting an international relationship would just be a headache anyway once she had to go back. Her study would already keep her busy enough. Secretly, she wouldn't mind if a lightning bolt did hit her, but she wasn't going to waste all her time standing out in thunderstorms.
"Having a man can be frustrating," Mrs Castling had said. "Then again, not having a man can be frustrating as well."
Mariko was learning that, while Mrs Castling never swore in her presence, a lot of what she said often had more than one meaning. She often found she had so much trouble keeping up with the first meaning that she missed the second one completely, or at least didn't realize there was one until much later. It was the famous British sense of humour, she guessed.
"No men. Study. English. Travel. Diet." She'd recite her list of life goals. The final always ensured an argument about whether or not she was too skinny. Mrs Castling saw it as her responsibility to try and feed up the beanpole girl.
And despite the occasional nocturnal disturbance and the large differences in age and nationality, they rubbed along quite well. Mariko was no trouble as a guest: tidy, quiet and thoughtful. She was also shy but determined to practice her English and Mrs Castling loved to talk even if she had nothing particular to say, so they had gotten to know each other quite well over the past few months. Mrs Castling had lost her husband a few years ago though she often still talked about him as if he was still around. She wasn't as old as Mariko had first thought, having not quite reached fifty yet, but had adapted to the life of a widow apparently quite naturally and with the stiff upper lip the British were known for. Mariko reverted to calling her Mrs Castling even though she'd been asked to use Amanda several times. Using the family name felt more respectful to her. She'd been very lucky in her homestay. Her other friends at the university had been placed with couples with young, screaming children, or else with elderly couples who served boiled cabbage and whose houses smelt dusty, musty or worse. So she was happy and comfortable here, and England was everything she'd hoped it would be.
And that's how things would have remained had it not been for the Prussian invasion of Silesia in 1740.
Mariko was extremely hardworking and organized and therefore she had completed her end of term essay well in advance of the deadline. Enough in advance, in fact, that she plenty of time to cogitate on its weaknesses in terms of ideas, structure, references and grammar and these weaknesses multiplied each pass of the essay she made. She was increasingly coming to the conclusion that the essay was clearly worth 'probably a distinction, but maybe only a merit if unlucky'. This was totally unacceptable. One day before the deadline, as she was waking up, the perfect way to fix it popped into her head. She'd built the narrative around the Hohenzollern court, but surely a more original take would be to look at what was happening with the Hapsburgs instead. This would mean rewriting practically the whole of the essay to change the perspective, but then she'd have two different essays and could chose the strongest to submit by noon the next day. She'd left the house that morning telling Mrs Castling that she was going to pull an all-nighter in the library and not to cook or wait up for her.
The rewrite didn't go as planned, though. Firstly, there was far less in the library about the Hapsburgs than she'd assumed and what there was wasn't nearly as interesting as the material she already had about Frederick the Great. Secondly, she'd gotten talking with a student who'd done the course the previous year and the girl had showed her the highly marked, but also clearly not that great essay that she'd submitted and Mariko decided that she was worrying unnecessarily. Finally, she'd brought her laptop and power lead, but had forgotten the adaptor to make it fit a UK power socket which she'd used with the hairdryer that morning. She really should get more than one of those. After her laptop died around midnight, she made a few last notes on paper, grabbed a couple of the more useful books and decided to head home.
After the half-an-hour cycle ride back to the house, it was close to 1 a.m.. She was intending to sneak back into the house, but as she got in the porch and was securing her bike, she realized that Mrs Castling would be far too occupied to notice her return however loud she was. As she came into the hallway, she located the sounds as coming from the bedroom next to hers rather than the storage room. Mrs Castling had, in her absence no doubt, decided to use the more comfortable room for the evenings activities. She thought about heading back out, but at this time of night, she really had nowhere to go. She could have crashed in one of her classmates' dorm rooms, if only she felt close enough to any of them to ask. Anyway she had an essay to submit.
Mariko sat down at her desk, powered her laptop back up and opened her essay file. She wasn't going to write a completely new essay anymore, but her extra research had thrown up a couple more interesting ideas that she needed to integrate before going to bed.
"Fuck me harder, big boy. That's right. Just there. Fuck, yes."
