Sarah kept me waiting, but she was worth the wait. Black hair, white summer coat, black tights, and black four inch heels which still left her a good six inches shorter than I am.
A while back, going to a concert would have meant at least a suit and tie for me, and something close to an evening dress for my date. At least for places like the Royal Albert Hall, Sadlers Wells, or the Barbican. These days, it is all a bit more free and easy.
Since this was a summer concert at the Barbican, all I really needed were the trousers and the shirt that I was wearing, and I had left my jacket in the car. Still, I was still dressed more formally than most of the Nigel Kennedy fans. The crowd in the foyer included plenty of jeans, tee-shirts, or casual shirts.
To be honest, Sarah did not really need her summer coat. It was warm enough to do without. But then, she had not worn her coat for warmth, but her tube ride to the concert hall.
It was cut knee length, so that in describing her black tights, all I could actually see were her slender, nylon encased calves, and if they really were tights, I would be seriously disappointed.
They were just plain, sheer black nylon, no pattern, unusually tame for her, for these events at least. Sarah usually wears something more stylish. But if her choice of nylons did not immediately excite me, the promise of what lies between her legs still made a certain part of me extremely pleased to see her.
She seemed slightly breathless. It was just ten minutes before Nigel was due on stage. Maybe she had been running from the tube.
"Sorry," she said. "It took a while to get the children settled with Linda before I could leave them."
She came up close, raising her arms to reach around my neck. I noticed that she had removed her wedding and engagement rings. I always check. She likes to do that when we arrange to meet like this. Pretend that she is single. It never quite works completely.
When you have spent the best part of ten years wearing rings that say that you are taken, it leaves the skin beneath them slightly smoother, and their absence shows. But in its way, that plays right into the scene we are creating. It tells the more astute observer that a married woman is on a date, no longer thinking of her husband, and ready to put out to the guy that she is with.
I put my arms around her, holding her close, enjoying the feel of her against me, even through her coat.
"It's fine," I said. "We have a few minutes still."
Personally I like to be in good time for anything. No last minute rushes. But if you date with a married woman, you have to make allowances.
"I need to lose my coat. Have we time to get to the cloak-room?"
"Sure," I said.
We both knew the way, and headed down the stairs, neither of us needing to check for signage. We had, after all, been coming to the Barbican for years, even before we met each other, before we discovered how well our musical and sexual preferences complimented one another.
As we walked, I asked her about her day.
"Oh, you know, taking the kids to school, shopping, some tidying up, the pick up after school, brought them round to Linda's, and she wanted me to stay for tea. Ben was okay, but Laura was hanging onto my leg, not wanting me to leave. Finally I got away, got home, and changed into something I hope you'll like. And now I'm here!"
She was undoing the belt of her coat. It had not been buckled. Just tied. Enough to hold the coat together. She slipped it from her shoulders as we approached the cloakroom. Her dress looked new. Certainly I had never seen her wearing it before. Something she hoped that I would like. Nice choice. Really nice choice. I liked everything I saw.
We joined the queue, which fortunately was short. Two guys in black trousers and shirts, one maybe Polish, the other black, were busily taking receipt of coats and bags, fastening tickets onto them, and issuing the ticket stubs to the other last minute Kennedy fans.
The Polish guy smiled at Sarah, then, as the woman who had been in front of her moved from the counter, he registered Sarah's dress. His gaze went to her breasts before he regained his professional demeanour. Had she had been wearing a bra, his momentary lapse would still have been understandable, but she had been yet more daring, and the way he covered up his interest so rapidly was quite impressive.
The last time we had enjoyed a concert together Sarah had worn was could only be described as a little black dress, backless, mid thigh and with a plunging neck-line. This one was very different. It did not bare as much flesh, but it revealed more. A lot more.
The dress was look-at-me burgundy red, sleeveless, but with wide shoulders and a high, oval cut neckline, so that only Sarah's arms were bare. To describe the dress as sheer would be slight exaggeration. But only slight. Even in the artificial light of the Barbican interior, the under-curves of Sarah's breasts, the dark circles of her areoles, and her nipple stubs, showed right through.
Sarah's nipples are not exactly unobtrusive. They are not teenage cherries. She has had two children. She has kept her figure and her breasts have kept their shape, or almost so. When I first met her, they may have been just a little more firm, the nipples riding a fraction of an inch higher than they do now, but the only give away that she was a mother of two was the thickness of her nipple stubs. Those stubs had provided milk, and they pushed against the fabric of her dress.
Her areoles were just as visible. Some women have pink areoles, so pale that it is hard to tell where the edges are. Some have hardly any areoles to speak of, just the stubs. Sarah has wide brown circles. They may not be palm width but you would need three fingers to cover them from edge to edge. Beneath the stretch fabric of her dress, they were very definitely there, setting off her breasts so perfectly.
The dress hugged her. It was not just her breasts that it clung to, but her entire body, from shoulders to thighs, where it stopped, just above her knees. This was no thigh revealing, maybe-you-can-see-my-panties-or-my-cunt, short, short dress. It did not need to be.
Sarah has worn that kind of teasingly short dress to these I-am-not-married concert dates, but not this night, never with panties, more likely with a thong, and sometimes just commando. This dress did not tease. The length of the dress was just plain irrelevant. You could see right through it.
The opaqueness of the material revealed the outline of her legs beneath it, including where her nylons ended and her bare thigh began. There was no way that the contrast of dense black stocking top and pure white flesh would not be obvious, even if both showed through as burgundy, dark and light.
What was also obvious was that the light burgundy that was the whiteness of her flesh seen through her dress, was uninterrupted from mid-thigh right on up. Her stockings were self supporting, and they were all that she was wearing. My date's strategy for achieving the no-visible-pantie-line look was effortlessly simply. Just do not wear panties.
Not that her copse of pubic hair was visible.
Sarah has standards. Had she retained her copse of raven coloured curls, it would have been too obvious. It had been there last time that I had seen her, but now it was no more. From behind, following her back up the stairs, I could make out her labia protruding neatly between her legs, but from the front, with the dress stretched taut, there was just the shadow that made you wonder. It was clear that she wore no underwear, but her pubis was not quite discernible. You just imagined that it was.
As we walked, and went up more stairs, and across more hallway, to get to the door for our section of the concert hall, Sarah got the looks that she deserved.
You might expect that older concert goers would be more judgemental than the young, but over the years we had discovered that that was by no means the way it went. Those in our own age bracket were more willing to give looks of disapproval. But looks of disapproval were not the only looks that she received.
Surprise, interest, amazement, amusement, impressed approval, sheer voyeuristic appreciation, calculated appraisal, and blatant leering, together outweighed any disapproval or disdain, by three to one. If you are not much over thirty, have retained your looks, and your confidence, you can show off your body and the so called prudish English take it in their stride. Or most of them.
I heard the 's' word quietly used by a girl not much more than twenty to her female companion. A stage whisper, designed to be heard.
"Did you see that slut?"
I was holding Sarah's hand, and squeezed it encouragingly. She squeezed back.
The girl who checked out tickets at the doorway to the auditorium noticed, but stayed aloof. Sarah might just as well have been clad in satin as the sheer dress that she was wearing. The girl's face registered not the faintest reaction to visible breasts, areoles and nipples, or to Sarah's evident nakedness beneath the dress, from breast to thigh. She tore off the ticket stubs, returning them to me to hold for the duration, and we walked into the concert hall.
I hesitated, checking the seat numbers against the lettering on the ends of the rows. I heard another comment.
"My dear, I just wish I was brave enough, and young enough."
The woman was in her fifties, slim, wearing a pale blue dress that flattered her figure, her white blonde hair worn loose. She had paused just long enough to quietly compliment Sarah on her daring, and then followed her companion to their seats.
Our seats were mid-way along a row. Easing past the half dozen people already settled into their seats, Sarah had no choice except to let them enjoy a close up experience of her thinly clad body. They had to half stand, leaning against their raised seats as we passed, sideways, Sarah turning towards them as she went, her back to the stage, her nipples, areoles and breasts on view beneath taut fabric. Only one did more than mutely register what they had seen. A women in her sixties. She gave out a gasp.
"Well!"
So English, I thought, as we took our seats, but then so had been the people who had been amused or appreciative. Never generalise about a nation.
