Free The Penultimate Chance Saloon by Simon Brett Page A

half-life. Lacking the expectation of fulfilment, his sex-drive had gone into neutral.
    But touching Maria had brought it back to life in turbocharged splendour. The fact that everything still appeared to work made him feel wonderful. Or he would have felt wonderful were it not for the sensation of intense urgency.
    She separated herself far enough away from him to ask, ‘Shall I get that drink?’
    â€˜Do you think we’ll need it?’
    â€˜Be as well.’ And she’d slipped out of his grasp into the kitchen. Bill stood disconnected. For a moment he contemplated sitting down, but decided it would be too painful.
    She appeared from the kitchen with an open bottle of champagne and two glasses. With a knowing wink, she led the way to her bedroom.
    After hurried gulps of champagne, they entangled together on the bed. Fingers scrabbled, poppers popped, zips unzipped, inhibitions melted in a silkiness of underwear.
    Fortunately alcohol worked its timeless magic, and Bill was naked and in bed with Maria before he’d time to worry about the white hairs on his chest, or his pale incipient paunch, or the purple threads of veins around his ankles. And the immediacy of lust made him equally blind to any imperfections of her body (assuming, which a gentleman wouldn’t, that there were any).
    But, to his surprise, moments before they conjoined, he found himself asking, ‘Should we?’
    â€˜What do you mean – “should we”?’
    â€˜Well, just ...’ He couldn’t come up with a satisfactory verbal answer, but he seemed to be coming up with an unarguable physical one, and the ‘should’ question became irrelevant.
    After nearly forty years of Andreas, another body was strange. Maria’s mouth tasted different, felt different, was at a different angle. The outline of her bottom was different, the contour of her breasts different. Everything was different.
    Different, but by no means unappealing.
    Bill Stratton was making love to another woman. And it all seemed to be going rather well.
    Or so Maria, through her moans, asserted. Bill had never really known whether or not he was a good lover. Inside a marriage like his, such a question had not arisen. Neither he nor Andrea had much grounds for comparison. And when she had had grounds for comparison – in other words, Dewi – she had given the impression there was no comparison. Dewi was ‘what she’d been looking for all her life’; he made her ‘feel like a woman’. So Bill, having failed for so long to give Andrea either of these satisfactions, concluded that he probably wasn’t a very good lover.
    But that was not the message he was getting from Maria. Even through the distractions of what his body was feeling, his mind was sufficiently detached to know that her commendation might be part of a routine. Flattery, women’s magazines insisted, was a necessary stimulus to the male libido. But Maria did sound as though she meant what she was saying.
    And Bill began to wonder whether, in fact, Andrea hadn’t taught him rather well. She had certainly known what she wanted in bed, and guided him to the actions that gave her pleasure. These involved the use of hands, lips and tongue at least as much as any other part of his anatomy. And Maria seemed to appreciate such ministrations too.
    Also, though it was only during the very earliest moments of his married life that Bill had suffered from premature ejaculation, it had to be said that, with the years, his ejaculation had become increasingly mature. And Maria seemed to appreciate that slowness too.
    At the moment when he finally came, he saw over her shoulder on the bedside table a framed photograph. Taken fairly recently from the way she looked. In a garden, with a woman who had to be her daughter, and a young man who logic dictated was her son-in-law. And four small children. Undoubtedly four grandchildren.
    But, in the haze of