Chapter Forty-Eight
"He did what?" I gasped, unable to believe my years.
"Tony and I, he... we... Oh, Mum!" she cried, her eyes unable to meet mine again.
My daughter Isobel had just blurted out the almost unbelievable news that shortly after his affair with fifty-one-year-old me had come to an abrupt end, my first, completely unscrupulous lover Tony had started fucking her instead.
And as if that wasn't bad enough, Tony had been a close family friend throughout most of her life and was the father of her most recent and most serious boyfriend, Jack.
What's more, for the last few months, that same Tony had been trying hard to get back into my own knickers again, less than a year after unceremoniously dumping me.
"Christ, Izzy! He's more than twice your age!" I burst out, amazed.
"I know!" she wailed. "I didn't mean it to happen."
"Did he force you?" I asked, horrified.
Izzy shook her head.
"It wasn't like that," she confessed. "He didn't give me much choice the first time but after that..."
"After the first time?" I exclaimed. "How many times did it happen?"
Izzy made to reply but I held up my hand to prevent her.
"No, don't answer that," I snapped, though I was desperate to know.
"We were both a bit drunk," Izzy, mumbled, her tears finally coming under control. "It was an accident; well, an accident the first time. Please don't tell Dad! Or the boys. Jack would dump me in a second and I'd die!"
"Of course I won't tell anyone. Trust me. Mutually Assured Destruction, remember?"
Izzy grinned wanly as the sound of a car engine starting then pulling away came from outside the window.
"Do you want to tell me how it happened?" I asked. "Would it help to talk about it?"
Izzy nodded. "I think so."
"Come downstairs. Your Dad's just gone to play golf."
Still snuffling, she followed me down the stairs to the large, bright kitchen. Pete had indeed gone out, so we had the house to ourselves. I put the kettle on.
"Tea?" I asked then thought again. "Unless you feel the need for something stronger?"
"Tea is fine Mum," she replied, perching on one of the bar stools and leaning heavily on her elbows. "And wine. I think we're going to need them both."
I messed around rinsing and putting tea in the pot, giving Izzy time to pour two large glasses of wine and calm down before the serious conversation started. The water took an age to boil, but I was patient and soon placed two steaming mugs of hot liquid on the breakfast bar then took my place on the other stool and looked closely at my daughter.
Her face was pink and puffy from crying, her body language somewhere between fearful and confrontational.
"So, when did it all happen?" I asked with as reassuring a smile as I could muster.
Izzy took one of her many deep breaths.
"After Simon dumped me. I wasn't in a good place for a long time, remember?"
I nodded. She had been in a bad state having first been caught cheating on her then boyfriend with Simon, then soon afterwards been dumped again when he had been sent a video of Izzy and Steve fucking.
It was one of a series of videos, some of which I had seen. At that moment I was using the threat of publicising them to make my daughter keep my own affair secret.
"I came home from Uni and needed a shoulder to cry on," she continued. "I wanted to talk to you, but when I got home, I found you and Dad were away. I'd come all that way on the train and needed to talk to someone I trusted, so I went to see my friends. I tried Julie's house but no-one was there so I went round to see if they were at their Dad's flat."
"And Tony was on his own?"
"Sort of. There was a lady there when I arrived, but she disappeared as soon as she saw me on the doorstep. Tony looked very unhappy at first, but when he saw how angry and upset I was, he let me in."
"What happened then?" I asked, dumbfounded.
"I asked where everyone was. He told me they had gone away for the weekend with their Mum. I started crying."
"How did he handle that?" I wondered.
Tony wasn't known for his sympathetic nature with the kids, but Izzy wasn't a kid anymore. Given her response, I had clearly misjudged him.
"Mum, he was so lovely," she said pleadingly, looking me in the eye. "I sat on the sofa, he poured us both large drinks and listened while I poured my heart out. He didn't judge me, he didn't interrupt. He just kept listening and making little comments that made me feel better."
I had experienced Tony's caring, listening side myself. It was at least partly genuine, but in my opinion the thought of conquest was never far from his mind. But maybe I was being unfair.
"You told him what had happened? That you had cheated on Steve and been dumped?"
She nodded.
"I just had to talk to someone, and he was the only one who would listen."
"Did you tell him why you got dumped the second time?"
She nodded again.
"I told him about the videos too. I must have been quite drunk by then because being honest seemed the right thing to do. It seems crazy now, but he was such a good listener and at the time, I felt much better having told someone."
"What did he do then?"
"He came and sat next to me on the sofa and held my hand. He put his other hand on my knee. I felt even better."
"What were you wearing?" I asked suspiciously.
"Just my normal skirt and top," she replied innocently.
I sighed. For my skinny, sporty daughter, a normal skirt was so short it barely covered her knickers and her usual top was skin-tight, revealing to the world the braless outline of the few pairs of boobs in Britain smaller than my own.
She was dressed that way now and thought nothing of it. Tony would have seen it as an invitation as, I suspected, would most men.
"Did he try to touch you?" I asked, suspiciously.
"Not then Mum. We must have talked for an hour or more. Well, I talked while he listened. It was long enough for him to have opened a second bottle of wine anyway. By the time I had stopped crying, that bottle had nearly gone too. I was far too drunk to walk home, and Tony was too drunk to drive me, so he suggested we finished the bottle and I spent the night in the spare room. He said there was a pair of pyjamas in there already."
"So what happened?" I asked
"He went to get the room ready while I washed my face in the bathroom and tried not to look like a tiny tears doll. When I went into the bedroom, he had pulled back the bed, laid out the pyjamas and lit a candle on the dresser. It was so thoughtful of him I felt like crying all over again."
I snorted but for all his faults, Tony could be very sensitive when he needed to be. It was just that his motivations weren't always what the recipients of his kindness thought they were.
"Can I be honest, Mum?"
"It's probably best if you are."
"I... I've had a bit of a crush on him since I was little," she confessed, clearly embarrassed. "When he started paying me all that attention those feelings all came back again. I felt a bit star-struck and went all gooey inside."
It wasn't the big surprise Izzy clearly expected it to be. I had suspected it years ago, just as Tony's daughter had paid Pete a great deal of attention when she was in her early teens. In both cases I had thought it nothing more than the confusion every girl feels when she is beginning to grow up, and I had believed she had got past it long ago.
It seems I was wrong.
"I went into the bedroom and turned to kiss him goodnight. That's when it all went wrong."
"Went wrong?" I asked sharply.
"Maybe not wrong, Mum. It was just when everything changed."
With many breaks for snuffling and severe embarrassment, the story gradually emerged.
Full of emotion and wine, Izzy had gone up to Tony to kiss him goodnight as had happened many times in their past. Well, perhaps not in their recent past. There had been some confusion about which cheek to kiss first which resulted on the goodnight kiss being on his lips instead.
There had been a moment of shock, a giggle of embarrassment then, without either taking the lead, their lips had met a second time and a longer, fuller kiss had developed.
"I don't know why I did it Mum, but I put my arms around his neck and kissed him back."
It had been an instinctive reaction, exactly as I mine had been that first day. Unsurprisingly, Tony had taken it as permission to go further as he had with me.
What man wouldn't, let alone a man like him?
From there things had progressed rapidly and with the same crushing inevitability I had experienced. With a terrible feeling of déjà vu, I pictured how as they kissed, Tony's hands had quickly found their way onto my daughter's bottom, kneading her cheeks through her skirt and panties, pressing her lower belly against his hardening cock.
I understood how, despite knowing it was wrong, Izzy had felt completely unable or unwilling to move those hands away. The similarity to my own helplessness was almost frightening.
"I knew I should have stopped him Mum, but it was all happening so fast..."
She didn't need to tell me how fast Tony could move. As Izzy's story gradually and tearfully unfolded, every bit of my body remembered how it had felt to be seduced by that man's extraordinarily effective technique, my memory easily filling the many gaps where she was too embarrassed to tell the details even to me.
"His hands were everywhere..."
Before she could even think of objecting, his hands would have slipped underneath her tiny skirt and be inside her knickers, his fingers exploring her skinny buttocks, cupping them, flesh on flesh, his fingers exploring her softest, most sensitive parts from the crease at the top of each thigh to the cleft between her cheeks.
"But I wanted them to be. I couldn't resist him..."
From there, as I knew only too well, my daughter's arousal would have given her no chance of escape, or even the desire to do so. If he had run to form, Tony would have pressed his knee forward. If Izzy had responded like her mother, she would have rubbed herself brazenly against it, encouraged by the pressure of his fingers in her cleft and, as her arousal rocketed, by the touch of his fingertips against the base of her slit.
