THE SEX SCENE

Now, because this is a local story for local people and because we don't like smut we are not going to zoom in on what happened next. If we were looking for readers we would but we are happy with our current crop of regulars and don't want to alienate any of them. So, we aren't going to mention the groping in the entrance hall or the commissionaire averting his senile rheumy eyes as her dress rode up and his fly buckled. We won't mention his hand in her bra and her hand in his trousers. We surely wouldn't speak of them tumbling through the door half undressed and finishing the job on the sofa. We'll not get close enough to see the beads of sweat nor smell the musky sweat. We will pass, in a silence that they could not mimic, over the substitution of animalistic grunts for human speech. We will not detail the exchange of fluids. Sadly that means that we cannot explore the tenderness and the sheer joy of their couplings.

And as they lounge on the sofa in post-coital bliss and fatigue we can resume our surveillance. His head is in her lap - he can distinguish the smell of his semen (like Shredded Wheat with warm milk, he thinks, rather than the horse chestnuts that de Sade would have us believe) behind the perfume she wears and the bodily fragrances that she exudes and he luxuriates in the heady mix. He who had thought his heart stone dead, cold like ice, unused and unusable as an organ of love. The touch of warm human flesh not his against his: he had all but forgotten the feel. The warmth of physical congress, the spiritual closeness to another, the total loss of self at crisis: all these forgotten things had flooded back and suffuse him even now. Encompass him almost completely. cradle him, and nurture him. For the first time in a very long while he feels near whole. Between sips of coffee and cigarettes they drift in and out of sleep. They doze. They rouse. They revel in the afterglow. They do not speak.

Beyond the secure portal of this seductive apartment a man walks back and forth. They passed this man on the bridge in Narrow Street but neither seem to have noticed him so engrossed were they in their own physicality. He passed on the other side of the road darkly. He has his own agenda but we cannot know it. He wears a trench coat, probably Aquascutum, belted, and cinching his waist. Tweed trousers and brown brogues (it is both after 7 and out of the true city). An old fashioned trilby like the one that the man from the Pru used to be depicted wearing tops off this unlikely and scarcely discreet get up (he caries no attache case). He had turned to follow them almost as soon as they had passed on the bridge and had maintained a sufficient distance to remain undetected. His brogues were rubber soled. His breathing was professionally silent, unlike theirs. And now he paced and waited. Back and forth. Back and forth. Patiently.

Our sensual couple rouse themselves and move to re-couple and we leave.



(TBC)