Free East of the Sun by Julia Gregson

friend of his mother. “Decorative,” she’d called him, to his considerable irritation. He’d walked up Park Lane on his own to get there, more nervous and shy than he liked to admit. The London he’d visited during the grim, desperate last days of the war had been covered in wreaths, full of funeral processions, its parks frowsy and unloved. This new London had shining little cars buzzing up and down Park Lane, frightening the horses. The girls had horrible new hairstyles and blew smoke in your face.
    Partly to spare him from the miserable atmosphere at home, his mother had kept on getting her friends to ask him to parties, but the parties had thrown him. At one, he’d seen a couple openly copulating on top of a pile of overcoats in the spare room and had backed out scarlet with embarrassment and wanting to punch both of them for making a spectacle of themselves. At another, bewildered by a group of excited people sniffing up a pile of powder, he’d caused laughter by asking what they were doing, and been told rudely, “It’s naughty salt, you ignoramus. Cocaine.”
    But Rose. She wasn’t like that. At the Savile Club, where he’d stood in his dinner jacket underneath the ceiling painted with fat cherubs, she’d appeared beside him, endearingly gawky in an evening dress that was too old and slightly too big for her, but unmistakably a beauty with her silky blond hair and sweet smile. The band had started to play a fox-trot and she’d raised her eyebrows slightly and smiled at him.
    “Dance with me,” he’d said, and she’d stepped into his arms. They’d bellowed at each other over the music for a hopeless few minutes during which he’d stepped on her toes.
    “Do you have a chaperone here?” he’d asked her after several dances.
    “I do,” she said with her delicious smile, “but unfortunately she’s downstairs playing bridge.”
    “Have you seen the pictures downstairs?” he said. “They have some wonderful portraits in the reading room.”
    The oldest and corniest line in the world, but she’d said, with sweet gravity, “No, I haven’t, but I’d love to see them.”
    And it was there, in the soft glow of the reading room, beneath a picture of a man wrestling with wild-eyed foaming horses, that he’d simply taken her in his arms and kissed her soft lips, feeling at first a shy resistance, a stiffening in her arms, and then her yielding.
    “Um,” she’d licked her lips thoughtfully, like a child tastingthe last remnants of a sweet, “I don’t think I’ve been kissed before—not like that.”
    And it was at that moment, with this divine, slim, fresh young creature in his arms, smelling of Devonshire violets, the same scent his mother used, that he thought of Sunita, his mistress, and how much he owed her. She’d taught him everything. After three lonely years of bachelorhood in the mofussil, he’d gone to her like a bull in rut, and she’d bathed him and oiled him, slowed him down. Teasing and laughter had also gone into it, a sense that lovemaking could be practiced and refined as well as sublime abandonment. He’d been like a man trying to play a symphony on a penny flute; she’d given him the whole orchestra.
     
    They’d reached her street: a row of battered terraced houses with wrought-iron balconies that had seen better days. The same groups of rickshaw men were gossiping on the corner, waiting for their fares, and, as usual, she’d left a candle burning for him outside her door. Inside her room, she had a glass-fronted cabinet where all the little presents he’d given her—a silver box from a London antiques market, a bottle of scent, a scarf—were proudly displayed. But tonight, in his pocket, he had a check to give her after his speech, a donation he could ill afford, toward her future. His heart sank as he walked up the stairs. For the first time in her life she might feel like a prostitute. He felt like a brute, but he had to do it. Jack Chandler was about to be