Free Born of Woman by Wendy Perriam

fancy it. Jennifer did. She was too loving and assiduous, the bed too damned co-operative. He had often dreamed of forcing girls—sometimes forced Susannah in his fantasies, flung her on her front and rammed in the forbidden way. He never dared with Jennifer—wanted to, but feared to. A wife might be offended.
    He couldn’t screw her, anyway—not even conventional fashion. It wasn’t just the funeral—he had no Durex with him. He had never entered Jennifer in a whole three years of marriage without that rubber skin between them. He hated Durex—damn-fool fiddly things. But Jennifer refused the Pill, rejected every contraceptive. Jennifer wanted babies. Well, so did he—not just yet , that’s all. It was a matter of time, money, jobs, convenience. You had to plan these things. Anyway, even without the babies, he preferred to put a layer between himself and any woman, including his own wife. It was safer, somehow, cleaner. Made the thing less crucial. Stopped him touching her most private places. It meant he could keep a shell around himself, one last barrier—enter her and yet still be separate. Hester would have approved of Durex if she had permitted sex at all.
    He had never once had sex in his mother’s house. The rare times he had brought a girlfriend back, they had sat in the front parlour and Hester had fed them rock cakes and stony glances until the hussy left at ten. He had done it in ditches, sometimes, to escape her, lying on dirty sacking or dead leaves, crouching under hedgerows when his mother had five spare beds, all virgin, all unslept in. Yet in some ways he admired her. It was sluttish to sleep around, wallow in it, couple like a dog with some bitch on heat he had sniffed out in an alleyway, then slip in late with a weight on his conscience, bits of bracken in his hair.
    That’s why he had married Jennifer. She made it decent, gave the dog a pedigree. He sat up on his elbow, stared down at her breasts. They looked larger the way she was lying, cupped and squeezed together until they overflowed. One hand was bent towards them, her fingers curving just below the nipple. The same fingers which had closed his mother’s eyes. Were they really closed, or was Hester spying on him still? No, he did n’t want babies. Wanted to want them, at least for Jennifer’s sake, but he knew he’d make a hash of it. He’d seen what sons had done to Matthew—sucked him dry. They had to have the best of everything—clothes, food, schools, holidays. Matthew had turned into a sort of manic money machine, working eight days out of seven, cracking his whip at the world, putting his wife to work, his half-brother, conjuring jobs out of scraps of paper, profit out of stones.
    He couldn’t work like that to keep a son. Sons grew taller than you did, took everything you had, including your wife. If you had a mother, you couldn’t have a wife. For years he’d had two mothers, Hester and Susannah, conflicting and fighting in his head, tearing him apart. One beckoning, one warning; one wise and withered and sacred, one wet, hot, sluttish, eager, open. He couldn’t endure it any longer. He wanted only Jennifer—simple, powerful, strong. She had gone to sleep already.
    He leant across and kissed the back of her neck, ran his fingers slowly down her spine from nape to coccyx, leaving his hand cupped beneath her buttocks. He prayed she would wake and want it. Then he could tell himself she had knocked him off his guard. Her breathing hardly wavered. He turned away, touched himself instead. He rarely masturbated now—less need to with a wife. He could feel the locket hard against his thighs, Susannah opening everything towards him.
    Why in God’s name was Susannah still alive? Because he had kept her alive, not only in his mind, but in his drawings—sketched her a thousand times in pencil, charcoal, ink; ripped off her clothes and made her the