Tea and Empathy

While planning permission was coming through, we started working on - and really enjoying - the quite large garden. Undoubtedly all of this had an effect on how Caroline and I felt about one another, although I can't say with any precision what its ultimate effect was on either or the two of us together.

What it certainly did do was force my graduation to the status of a responsible family-home owner. I now wanted to look after my property - and its garden - in a way that was completely foreign to my previous conception of myself. I began immediately to work hard in the garden at almost every opportunity; and I started talking about extensions and improvements to the house, in particular about adding a study, a sun-room and a bigger garage. At last, it seemed I was approximating to the family man with all a familyman's urges - as well as his limitations.

Most of this called for good healthy living. Working in the garden no doubt stirred some juices that had had little stimulation in the previous couple of years. One result was that, much more regularly and frequently, I wanted to make love to Caroline. It was part of a familyman's rights, wasn't it? – or, indeed, one of his fundamental responsibilities. But I had still a strange diffidence in the way I approached her - strange especially given the length of time we'd now been married. Perhaps because of the pervasive social attitudes to sex, I always felt that I was somehow being "dirty" for wanting to make love to a woman - even if she was my wife and we were living together within a sanctified Christian marriage.

Because they were so unusual, I remember some of our enthusiastic couplings around this time in surprising detail. One Sunday, we were both busy in the garden and, by about five in the afternoon, had been working steadily for three or four hours. It was a warm, pleasant afternoon. The sun was shining. We were in the back garden where I'd been cleaning some weeds from below the bathroom windows, preparatory to planting a new bed of flowers.

Caroline took on perhaps a special beauty as a gardener and, as I looked towards her, by chance she moved her body quite innocently in a way that caused a wave of lust to wash over me. I was always reserved in making my feelings known; but surely, I reasoned, she was my wife and it was right and proper that I should want her – and should feel such a compulsive urge to make love to her.

I got up and went over to her.

Rather shyly, I said, "Do you think we could go in for some tea?"

It was like a chat-up line with a complete stranger: "Would you like to come in for a coffee?"

She looked at me with a knowing twinkle in her eye and smiled sweetly - but regretfully.

"Shouldn't we finish out here?"

Clearly she wasn't fooled: she knew perfectly well what I really wanted. If we'd ever dared to use such language in those days, she'd have said, "I know what you really want. You want to fuck me, don't you?"

She was right: that's exactly what I did want to do. In suggesting tea, I was being devious as well as "dirty". I think I must have blushed.

"We can come back...," I pleaded, "....afterwards."

She smiled, "Afterwards?" If she hadn't been worried about who might see her, she'd have kissed me cheekily and added, "After? After what exactly? Tea?"

She glanced over to the neighbouring garden.

"What about the Hollings?"

Like us, our neighbours were working in their garden.

"They'll know why we went inside. They'll know what we're doing."

"What we're doing..." Her words prompted me to imagine even more vividly what we would be "doing". Now I really did desperately want to hold her, hug her... and, yes, fuck her - no matter what the neighbours thought.

"So what? Does it matter?"

"We'll have to pull down the blinds... They'll know why..."

If I hadn't wanted so much to make love to her, I would have admitted that, again, she was right: it did matter. It would be more discreet to wait until evening when, at a decent hour, we could turn out the lights and snuggle up in bed together, with no one to guess what we might be "getting up to" in the dead of night. This was 1960. The sexual revolution had not yet arrived. Even married couples were still expected to be "proper" and do nothing explicit to suggest that they ever indulged in "sex" together – let alone that they enjoyed it.

But I didn't want to wait until evening. I couldn't wait that long. I wanted to make love right now and I could see no good reason why we shouldn't.

Caroline and I had our problems over the years but she was a loving, sensitive personality. Perhaps my wanting her so badly roused her a little. More likely, she enjoyed, like most women, being wanted in what was a perfectly natural way. Above all I think she just wanted to be "nice" to me.

She thought about it. "OK," she said finally. "I'll go in first. You wait here for fifteen minutes - working. Then you come in too." She giggled wickedly. "By then, I'll have your tea ready."

It seemed a long, long fifteen minutes but when I went inside, she'd already pulled down the bedroom blinds and drawn the curtains. The Hollings certainly would have noted that. She'd taken the covers off the bed, curled up in it and was waiting for me. She'd dabbed a little perfume that she knew I loved and put on a light negligee, with just a pair of panties underneath...

She greeted me by asking, with a smile, "Would you like some tea...first?"

I didn't honour her tease with a reply. I just threw off the shirt, shorts and underpants I was wearing and slipped her panties down.

"Mnnn," she teased again, "that was rather rude. You might at least have asked!"

"Sorry," I apologised, "may I?"

She drew me into her arms. "Please!Please...please just take them off and stick him in."

I did as I was told. I "stuck him in"; but I'd had such a raging erection for so long and I wanted her so badly that I went off almost immediately I slipped him so smoothly into her lovely, accommodating body.

So I had to do it again....and again... "He" had a lovely time. So did Caroline and so, especially, did I.

We never did get back to the garden that afternoon. We didn't have any tea either. When we finally could think about anything but loving, we toasted one another in champagne...

The Hollings must have known what we were up to.

"We decided to call it a day when you went inside," Paul Hollings told me next day.

He didn't say so; but I suspect – having guessed what we were up to - he decided he'd like a fuck too.