The Year of Dangerous Loving. John Davis Gordon

or a boy? I made love to my first boy when I was fourteen. Not too bad, huh? I’d had big breasts for two years. I was driving a tractor. I was having an orgasm, because the tractor seat was vibrating between my legs. This boy saw me and he said, “Come here and I’ll give you a better one”’

      ‘And he did?’

      ‘He did.’ She looked at him, her eyes sparkling with mischief, then she laughed and hugged him to her breasts. ‘Oh darling – the look on your face! Do I make you jealous?’

      ‘Yes.’ Hargreave grinned sheepishly. It was almost true.

      ‘I’m so glad!’ She rocked him, then collapsed back and stroked her fingertip across his eyebrow. ‘Oh, you’re such a nice man. Such a nice English gentleman. I think I love you …’

      It seemed that his heart turned over. It felt as if he loved her too.

      And his mind formed images of her working out in her school gymnasium, leaping off springboards, flying through the air, doing somersaults, cavorting on the parallel bars.

      ‘Can you really do all that stuff?’

      ‘Oh, yes, I was in competitions. I was quite good, but not good enough to be famous, my breasts were too big, even when I was fifteen. But I won some prizes. Shall I show you how I can walk on my hands?’

      ‘With all that wine inside you?’

      ‘No problem.’ She got off the bed, did a cartwheel across the room, then sprang on to her hands. She balanced there a moment, her body straight, her legs rigid, her toes pointed, her hair sweeping the floor: then she bent her knees and walked across the carpet on her hands. ‘Yes?’ she grinned at him, upside-down.

      ‘Very good.’

      ‘And now …’ She stopped, straightened her legs again, then parted them into a Y; then she dramatically raised one hand. She lifted her arm out sideways, her fingertips pointed. ‘Yes?’

      ‘Amazing!’

      She carefully replaced her hand on the floor, brought her legs together, and did a nimble spring. She landed on her feet in a flash of golden locks, her face flushed. ‘You want to make love like that?’

      ‘I can’t wait!’

      ‘Here I come!’ She ran across the room and took a flying dive on to the bed, laughing.

      ‘Oh …’ He looked at her lying there beside him in the elegant room, her hair awry across the crumpled pillow, the China night out there, and it was hard to imagine her in a sexless smock toiling in an aluminium factory in the winter making pots and pans, living in a tiny grey apartment in a vast, smog-bound, joyless city: she was an exotic creature of the sun and sea and glittering nightlife, how could such beauty be caged in a factory?

      ‘I could not live like that any more. And that is why I decided to fuck my way to freedom.’

      Fuck her way? He had not heard this last weekend.

      ‘What other way is there for a girl in the aluminium works? Everybody was fucking everybody anyway, what else was there to do? But I did not fuck my shift-boss and my floor manager like the other girls just to get a little more overtime on my ticket, not even the factory manager, although he begged me many times. No, I fucked the Party Secretary, because I wanted him to help me get to school to study to be a vet. That is how everything works in Russia – you must know somebody in the Party who knows somebody in veterinary school. And that is how the KGB man got to hear of me, saying he was from Mosfilm.’

      ‘Did you have to go to bed with him too?’

      ‘Of course. It was all a trick. But I thought I was going to be a movie star.’ She fluttered her eyelashes. ‘And here I am, darling, in bed with you. What secrets have you got to tell me?’

      It was even exotic that she was a courtesan, a woman of the flesh, doubtless one of the most beautiful of her trade in the world, that she came from that earthy, sultry other-world, that she possessed a wealth of carnal expertise. What she was giving him would be the envy of any red-blooded man, and it did not even seem that he was paying for it. It did not spoil the atmosphere a jot when there was a knock on the door on the first morning and there stood Vladimir, looking annoyed.

      ‘Oh, I’m sorry, darling,’ Olga said to Hargreave, ‘I forgot – the money.’ They had just finished making love and she was dressing for breakfast, screwing an earring into her lobe. She delved into her weekend bag and produced a credit-card machine. ‘I was supposed to leave the credit-slip downstairs last night for Vladimir, but I got –’ she made her eyes sparkle – ‘excited.’

      Hargreave was not embarrassed but he did not like Vladimir standing there in the doorway like a hood.

      Olga ran the card through the machine, filled in the amount, and gave him the slip to sign. He noticed she had only charged him for two nights. He did not query it, but Vladimir did.

      ‘How many nights you pay for, sir?’

      ‘Two,’ Olga said emphatically, ‘last night and tonight.’

      Vladimir said to Hargreave: ‘Do you go home on Sunday?’

      ‘Maybe,’ Hargreave said. He had no intention of leaving until Monday morning.

      ‘No, he goes on Monday,’ Olga said archly. ‘But this Sunday is my day off, I can do what I like on my one Sunday a month. Thank you, goodbye.’

      Vladimir began to argue in Russian, Olga replied rapidly and closed the door on him. She turned to Hargreave. ‘What cheek! He says if he sees you here on Sunday you must pay for another night. I told him to go to hell.’

      Hargreave did not want any trouble. ‘I’ll pay.’

      ‘No! Tomorrow is my one day off in a month.’ She smiled at him dazzlingly. ‘I told you I would give you a discount and I have – thirty-three per cent! You get three nights for two!’

      ‘It’s a bargain,’ Hargreave smiled, ‘but I don’t want trouble; I think I’d better pay.’

      ‘No, I told him it was against your principles to make love on a Sunday!’ She entwined her hands behind his neck and smiled. ‘But I think we will, huh, just to cheat Vladimir? We’re going to have a lovely time!’

      They did have a lovely time. The previous weekend he had thought was wildly erotic, enchanting, exotic, he had felt smitten: but this weekend it really felt as if he was falling in love. Hargreave knew enough about life to know that this could not possibly be true; he knew it was only a case of wild infatuation, of joyful lust, but love is how it felt and he did not want to analyse it, he did not want to question his happiness.

      That Saturday they did not leave the Bella Mar. He wanted to take her out and walk along the esplanade with her hand-in-hand, to ride in a trishaw, take her to a smart bar, a fashionable restaurant, to parade her, show her off. That’s how Hargreave felt; he wanted people to turn to stare at her beauty, he wanted the whole world to know she was his girl, to envy the fun they were having being together. But it might have been unwise: Olga could be anybody, just a tourist, but they might meet a friend of his and though Hargreave was now a free man who could do as he damn-well liked, perhaps it would be unwise for the Director of Public Prosecutions to flaunt his affair just yet. And he did not want to waste the time that could be spent making wildly erotic love.

      It was almost lunchtime when they went down the sweeping old colonial staircase to breakfast beside the sparkling pool. There was nobody he knew. When she shed her robe to dive into the pool all eyes were on her magnificence. To Hargreave it was the happiest thing in the world, almost incredible, that that beautiful body was his, that an hour ago this gorgeous girl had been naked beneath him – it was almost unbelievable how lucky he was. When she took a running dive at the pool, her flaxen hair flying, all eyes were on her, riveted by her femininity, smiling at her exuberance. And when she had swum her ten lengths and heaved herself out, the water gushing off her, her long hair plastered, and walked unselfconsciously towards him, a spectacle