Free In Between the Sheets by Ian McEwan Page B

there are only five or six. Who cares? I am rich and I made my money on the telephone. I shall be forty-five on Christmas Day. I have been married three times, each marriage lasting, in chronological order, eight, five and two years. These last three years I have not been married and yet I have not been idle. I have not paused. A man of forty-four has no time to pause. I am a man in a hurry. Each throb of jism from the seminal vesicles, or wherever it originates, lessens the total allowance of my life-span by one. I have no time for the analysis, the self-searching of frenzied relationships, the unspoken accusation, the silent defense. I do not wish to be with women who have an urge to talk when we’ve finished our coupling. I want to lie still in peace and clarity. Then I want to put my shoes and socks on and comb my hair and go about my business. I prefer silent women who take their pleasure with apparent indifference. All day long there are voices around me, on the telephone, at lunches, at business conferences. I do not want voices in my bed. I am not a simple man, I repeat, and this is not a simple world. But in this respect at least my requisites are simple, perhaps even facile. My predilection is for pleasure unmitigated by the yappings and whinings of the soul.
    Or rather it was, for that was all before … before I loved
her
, before I knew the sickening elation of totalself-destruction for a meaningless cause. What do I, now, forty-five on Christmas Day, care for meaning? Most days I passed by her shop and looked in at her. Those early days when a glance was sufficient and I hurried on to meet this business friend or that lover … I can pick out no time when I knew myself to be in love. I have described how a factor in my life became a structure, it merged as orange to red in the rainbow. Once I was a man hurrying by a shop window and glancing carelessly in. Then I was a man in love with … simply, I was a man in love. It happened over many months. I began to linger by the window. The others … the other women in the shop-window display meant nothing to me. Wherever my Helen stood I could pick her out at a glance. They were mere dummies (oh my love) beneath contempt. Life was generated in her by the sheer charge of her beauty. The delicate mold of her eyebrow, the perfect line of her nose, the smile, the eyes half closed with boredom or pleasure (how could I tell?). For a long time I was content to look at her through the glass, happy to be within a few feet of her. In my madness I wrote her letters, yes, I even did that and I still have them. I called her Helen (“Dear Helen, give me a sign. I know you know” etc.). But soon I loved her completely and wished to possess her, own her, absorb her, eat her. I wanted her in my arms and in my bed, I longed that she should open her legs to me. I could not rest till I was between her pale thighs, till my tongue had prised those lips. I knew that soon I would have to enter the shop and ask to buy her.
    Simple, I hear you say. You’re a rich man. You could buy the shop if you wanted. You could buy the street. Of course I could buy the street, and many other streets too.But listen. This was no mere business transaction. I was not about to acquire a site for redevelopment. In business you make offers, you take risks. But in this matter I could not risk failure, for I wanted my Helen, I
needed
my Helen. My profound fear was that my desperation would give me away. I could not be sure that in negotiating the sale I could keep a steady hand. If I blurted out too high a price the shop manager would want to know why. If it was valuable to me, why then, he would naturally conclude (for was he not a businessman too?) it must be valuable to someone else. Helen had been in that shop many months. Perhaps, and this thought began to torment my every waking minute, they would take her away and destroy her.
    I knew I must act soon and I was afraid.
    I chose Monday, a quiet day in any