Christmas with my Mother-in-Law

This story is about a man whose mother-in-law offers friendship and understanding after his wife has walked out on him for another man. It's essentially a love story. It does include anal sex so if that's not your thing you may wish to pass on by.

Comments welcome as always.

Sylviafan

Just about the last person I'd have imagined ringing my doorbell on that misty, damp, Saturday afternoon in late November was my mother-in-law. Soon to be my ex-mother-in-law. But before I get on to her unexpected visit, I suppose I should rewind a bit and do some background stuff.

I'm Gareth, Gareth Procter, a thirty-year-old tree surgeon and, until recently, the husband of Grace Procter. Technically we're still married, the decree nisi is due any day, but she now lives with Hugh, her new man, and I haven't seen her in a few weeks, although we talk on the phone, occasionally.

I won't bore you with too much detail; the story of my marriage is nothing new. I married a girl that I loved very much but I couldn't give her the things she wanted. The material things, that is; what I gave her emotionally was never an issue. Tree surgery's a steady trade and I have my own small company, but I'm never going to become a millionaire in that business. So she became dissatisfied and we started to argue and then there were the silences and the unexplained absences and the texts that she had to go to the bathroom to answer. You get the picture. Eventually she told me that it was over and that she had met someone else and a few days after that I came home from work to find that she'd moved out. There weren't any children, which made things worse, really; I'd devoted all my affection to Grace.

This was in late October, and the next few weeks were quite hard for me. Autumn was in full swing and that's the worst time of the year to feel melancholy, with the weather turning damp and cold and the leaves falling as the trees face the little death that is winter. I was coming home to a dark and chilly house and sitting staring at the gas fire for most of the evening, hardly bothering to eat. The guys that work for me kept pressing me to go to the pub with them after work, but I never did and after a while they stopped asking.

Which brings me to the Saturday afternoon where the story really starts. I'd been out in the morning to price up a few jobs for the next couple of weeks and on the way home I'd done a supermarket shop. At just after three o'clock I was sitting in my reclining chair in the front room staring at the picture over the mantelpiece which was an oil painting of Grace and me at a charity ball, taken from a photograph. I'm looking quite dapper in a dinner jacket and Grace is in a flowing ballgown in cream satin that showed off her narrow waist and her striking black hair.

When the doorbell rang I was momentarily confused; it was so long since I'd last heard it. I went out into the hall and opened the door and there in front of me was Grace's mother. 'Hello, Gareth,' she said, and for a couple of seconds I struggled to process what I was seeing.

'Ravleen,' I said at last. 'I wasn't expecting to see you.'

'No, I imagine not,' she replied in the accents of the Punjab region of India. 'May I come in?'

I stood aside and she walked past me and into the front room. I closed the front door and followed her.

'Can I get you a cup of tea or coffee?' I asked. She was standing with her back to the gas fire, which I'd lit just before she arrived, her hands deep in the pockets of her navy-blue gaberdine trench coat. Her legs were encased in knee-length black leather boots.

'Thank you, Gareth, a green tea would be nice.' I went into the kitchen and made us both a green tea - it had been one of Grace's favourites. Back in the front room Ravleen, still in her trench coat, was sitting on the edge of the settee, as though she wasn't planning on staying long. I handed her a mug of tea and sat down in my recliner.

I'm going to put a bit of history in here again because I think it's important for you to understand the dynamic between my mother-in-law and me.

Ravleen Sandhu was born in the Punjab region of India and came to the UK with her parents in the late nineteen-seventies, when she was about five. She's clever and hard-working and determined and she did well at school, winning a place at medical school in London. After graduation she went back north to Leeds, where her parents lived, and worked in the Leeds General Infirmary for a couple of years before getting a place as a General Practitioner in a semi-rural practice in Harrogate.

Somewhere along the line, and much to her parents' dismay, she married Trevor Keating, a patent lawyer working for a big pharmaceutical company, and a few years down the line they had a single daughter, Grace.

I met Grace in a nightclub in Leeds and we got married a year later. I got on well with Trevor, we used to play golf together occasionally, but Grace's mother was less forthcoming. She wasn't actively disapproving but she didn't seem to warm to me and I wondered whether she thought her daughter had married beneath her station; Grace admitted to me once that her mother had referred to my profession as "little more than gardening".

That was sort of ok with me because the other issue with my mother-in-law was that I found her disturbingly attractive and extremely desirable. So if she kept me at a distance that was probably not a bad idea.

Coming back to the present, the gas fire had warmed the room pleasantly and my mother-in-law had slipped her trench coat off revealing a dark-blue jacket and skirt combination over a black, cashmere rollneck jumper. So I will take the opportunity to describe the lady sitting across the room from me.

Ravleen Keating is about five feet seven or eight inches tall. She's slender and long-legged, a model's figure with shapely hips, a firm bust and a flat stomach. Her skin is a delicious toffee-brown colour and her hair is a shiny raven black, with no hint of grey. She wears it side-parted and collar-length where it surrounds a firm-featured face with a strong chin, full-lipped mouth, a nose that's perhaps a tiny bit too big. She's also got high cheekbones and dark, penetrating eyes with heavy lids surmounted by black eyebrows.

Even at weekends she dresses in a suit with a skirt or trousers; I've never seen her in jeans. And she wears quite a lot of eye makeup and a dark-red lipstick that highlights the fullness and the fine shape of her lips. She also paints her fingernails in various shades of red or purple - rather racy for a GP I always thought.

Personality-wise she is reserved, taciturn even. But when she does speak it is with authority and knowledge. All in all she is a mother-in-law to be reckoned with and I had always treated her with a mixture of courtesy and caution. I had also tried to limit my exposure to her because I found her aura of desirability hard to endure for long periods; I would become breathless and feel my heart racing and I would be in danger of saying something embarrassing in my confusion. Now I looked expectantly across the room at her as she sipped her tea.

'There's an elderly lady who lives in the next street,' she began. 'A friend of my parents. I go round once a month or so to see if she's alright. I thought while I was nearby I could come and see if you were alright.'

Her tone was more conciliatory than I had been expecting and I replied in kind. 'That was thoughtful of you,' I said. 'Thank you.'

'So how are you, Gareth? I've been thinking about you these past few weeks. I'm sorry it's taken me so long to do something.' She was leaning forward, her hands on her stockinged knees, her nails a bright cherry-red.

This really didn't sound like the mother-in-law that I knew. I decided to be honest. 'It's been hard,' I admitted. 'Grace was my world and now she's gone there's a big hole in my life and I'm finding it rather hard to fill, if I'm honest.'

'Yes,' Ravleen replied, 'I can imagine.'

And then I started to feel the old familiar sensation of warmth and arousal that I always felt when I was in the same room as my mother-in-law. And this time she and I were alone, a most unusual circumstance. I wondered how long I could keep her talking before she departed, presumably for good - there were no grandchildren to tie us together. I realised that my ever-present sense of loneliness had, at least temporarily, abated and I suddenly felt better than I had for weeks.

'Enough of my depressing life,' I exclaimed. 'How are you, Ravleen?'

'Well, much the same, I suppose, busy as ever.' She told me about her job in the Harrogate practice and the people she worked with; she injected warmth and humour into her conversation, making me laugh a couple of times at her stories. Afterwards she asked about my job.

'I used to cringe when I thought of you hanging fifty feet above the ground and wielding a chainsaw.'

'Well,' I replied, feeling the devil rise in me, 'it's really only gardening, isn't it?'

She looked at me blankly. 'What do you mean?'

'Isn't that how you described my job to Grace?' I said, feeling mean but wanting to lance a boil that had been festering for too long.

Ravleen blinked, then looked hard at me with her dark eyes. 'I most certainly did not. I've always had the utmost respect for you running your own business and employing people. Is that what Grace told you?'

In a flash of sudden comprehension I realised that Grace had probably made the whole thing up and that maybe all the other nasty things that she reported her mother saying about me might also be inventions, designed to keep a distance between me and Ravleen.

'I'm afraid she did,' I told her. 'And I'm afraid I believed her.'

We talked on as the late autumn light drained from the sky and the only illumination in the room was the hissing gas fire, its light reflecting in Ravleen's dark eyes. She admitted to me that she and her husband had spoiled Grace materially and probably emotionally. 'She was our only one,' she explained. 'I wanted her to have all the things I never had as a child.'

Eventually she looked at her watch and stood up. 'I should go,' she said, 'it's nearly six o'clock. Goodness, we've been talking for almost three hours!'

'Trevor's having a late dinner tonight then?' I asked with a smile.

'I've no idea,' she responded, rather curtly. Then: 'Oh, I suppose you didn't know that he's working in Stockholm at the moment.'

We stood in the hall and Ravleen extended her hand to me, slim and strong with long, red-tipped fingers.

'Thank you for dropping round, Ravleen,' I said. 'It's really helped to talk to you. I think this is the first time you and I have ever had a really good chat. What a waste, just as Grace and I are divorcing.'

She looked at me and I felt as though her eyes were boring into my soul. 'There's no reason we shouldn't meet up again sometime,' she said. 'Who knows? We might even become friends.'

Before I could make some reply she had opened the door and was walking towards her car. I watched as she got in and reversed expertly into the road and accelerated away and out of my sight. Then I went back into the front room and sat down and thought about her. I thought about how she had looked in her tailored suit, how she had smoothed her skirt with her hands as she talked, how she had flicked her hair behind one ear.

It was from that November Saturday afternoon that I began to feel better about Grace and the divorce and all that shit. I suppose that it was Ravleen's visit that had done it, by displacing Grace as the thing I spent all my time thinking about. Not that I was under any illusions about the prospect of a relationship with her; for one thing she was married. And she was still, technically, my mother-in-law. And even if those two things could be resolved, she was still achingly remote and unobtainable. And she was also about twenty years older than me, too, I reminded myself. Grace and I had helped organise her fiftieth birthday party in the summer of the previous year.

But that didn't matter. What mattered is that I wanted to see her again, to be her friend, as she herself had suggested. So I agonised about calling her and tried to think up things that we could do together that would interest her. Eventually, one Tuesday evening in early December, I picked up my phone and selected her home number from my contacts list; I didn't have a mobile number for her. But before I could call my phone sprang into life with an incoming call. I didn't recognise the number.

'Gareth?' The voice at the end was heavily accented and easily recognisable.

'Ravleen!' I answered. 'How nice to hear from you!'

'Gareth,' she went on, 'I've got two tickets to the Impressionist exhibition at the Leeds Art Gallery. I'm not sure if it's your thing or not but I wondered if you wanted to come with me to see it. We could have lunch in town, perhaps. What do you think?'

'When were you thinking,' I asked, having instantly decided that I would go whenever it was, even if I had to cancel some jobs. I wasn't exactly an art fan, a visit to Elland Road to see United play would have been more my style, but somehow I didn't think that would resonate with Dr Ravleen Keating.

'This coming Saturday,' she was saying as I grinned to myself, a wave of gladness washing over me.

'I'd love to,' I told her.

At nine o'clock the following Saturday morning I met my mother-in-law outside the art gallery in Leeds city centre. She was already there, standing by one of the pillars of the entrance portico and my stomach did a flip as I saw her in the full daylight of a cloudless December morning. She was standing very upright, wearing a tan woollen coat and brown boots, her hair shining in the sunlight. She looked gorgeous.

I'd dug out a half-respectable jacket and some chinos and I'd polished my shoes, so I didn't feel completely out of place next to her.

I came up to her and held out my hand but she leaned over and pecked me on my cheek, a quick touch of her lips against my skin that had me breaking out in a cold sweat.

'Shall we go in,' she said. 'It's bitter out here.'

The next three hours were a revelation. Until that morning Impressionism had just been slightly blurry pictures of flowers and things to me. Ravleen opened my eyes to the underlying principle of the accurate treatment of light and its transient effect on objects, especially moving objects. I started to see the paintings through her eyes and I began to like and admire them in a way that I'd never experienced before.

She was captivating, her love of art shining through as she told me a little of the artists themselves and the influences at work in their paintings. I hadn't even realised that there were English impressionists, had hardly heard of J M W Turner, but his Fighting Temeraire completely bowled me over and I spent long minutes in front of it until Ravleen tugged at my sleeve.

'I'm hungry,' she smiled. 'We can always come back after lunch.'

We ate in a Trattoria a few streets from the art gallery. Underneath her coat, Ravleen was wearing a tan jacket and skirt that perfectly complemented her dark complexion. Under the jacket she wore a cream satin blouse that hinted at full breasts beneath, a bit like an impressionist painting. I looked at her across the little table and I was stunned by her beauty. Her makeup was perfect, her face almost untouched by the passing of the years. But I had to ask.

'Doesn't Trevor like art galleries?' He was the obvious person to accompany his wife.

Ravleen sipped her soda and lime and looked across the table at me, her face impassive, gauging what she would say.

'My husband is still in Stockholm,' she said eventually. 'I'm not entirely sure when he's coming back.'

'Is everything alright?' I asked. 'Not that it's any of my business,' I added.

'Everything's fine,' she assured me.

We lingered at the Trattoria for almost three hours, neither of us seemingly in any hurry to be elsewhere. We talked about the exhibition and art in general and then we got onto other topics and the time flew until eventually the waiting staff made it plain that we had outstayed our welcome and I paid the bill and we went out into the darkening sky of a December afternoon.

I was in a sort of temporary heaven, thrilled at being in Ravleen's company but painfully aware that in a short time we would part and I would go back to my lonely house. We stood in the street and looked at each other.

'My car's in the multi-storey near the station,' my mother-in-law said, nodding in the direction of Leeds City station.

'My bus goes from the other end of this street,' I said, regretfully, nodding in the opposite direction. 'Perhaps I could walk you to your car?' I added, hopefully.

'Thank you, Gareth, but it would be a long way out of your way.'

'Well thank you,' I said, 'for taking me round the exhibition. It's really opened my eyes. You're a brilliant guide!'

She smiled, showing her teeth, even and white against the dark red of her lipstick, and I felt the impending shadow of her goodbye. But instead she stood looking at me for a few seconds.

'What are you doing for Christmas, Gareth?' she asked. 'Will you be going to your parents?'

'They're on a cruise in the Caribbean for Christmas and New Year, so I'll be at home, I guess.'

'Oh,' she said, her face darkening. 'That doesn't sound like much fun.'

'I've got a few Marks and Spencer ready meals in the freezer,' I said, lightly. 'I think one of them is a roast turkey dinner.'

'Why don't you come to mine for Christmas?' she said abruptly.

'Won't Trevor mind?' I asked, confused.

'He's not coming back to England until at least mid-January, apparently. Maybe even February.' There was something very odd going on here but I didn't like to ask, especially in light of her invitation which had increased my heart and respiratory rates by about fifty percent.

'Won't Grace and her bloke be there?'

Ravleen gave a thin smile. 'My daughter is visiting her new man's family over Christmas, apparently. Look, Gareth, I know it's a bit of an odd invitation but we could both do with the company and I think we get on quite well. It's a rotten time of year to be on your own.'

'I'd love to, I said, 'if you're sure.'

'Of course I'm sure,' she replied, pleased. 'There's just one thing.'

'What's that?' I asked.

'It's a bit of a tradition in our cul-de-sac that the neighbours come to our house before lunch on Christmas day for drinks and nibbles. It's only for an hour or so. Do you think you could stand that? You'll be the youngest there by twenty years or more, I'm afraid.'

'No problem,' I grinned. 'In fact the last time Grace and I visited you in Harrogate I seem to remember that some of your neighbours had trees that needed some attention. I might be able to drum up a bit of business.'

Ravleen laughed. 'Great! Now I really must go, I don't like driving in the dark anymore.'

'When should I arrive?' I asked.

'Come on Christmas Eve,' she said. 'Now I really must go.' She took my upper arm in her hand and leaned over and kissed me on my lips. Just a peck, but for half a glorious second I felt her lips against mine and I smelled her perfume and my head reeled with the sensory overload. Then she was gone, her heels clicking on the pavement, dwindling into the distance.

I reached out to a lamp post, suddenly weak. Had my beautiful, unobtainable mother-in-law really invited me to her house for Christmas? Where, furthermore, it would just be the two of us. And what was it with Trevor, her husband? What was so special about Stockholm when you had a lady like Ravleen waiting at home? And what would Grace say when she inevitably found out? Well, fuck her! She'd tried to drive a wedge between us while Ravleen was my mother-in-law. After the decree absolute, when she was no longer my in-law, it would be none of Grace's damned business.