The Amours & Alarums of Eliza MacLean. Annie Warwick

it was a favour, almost a business transaction. That was a lowering thought, and once more she was struck by her failure to think things through. Whether she knew it or not, what she really hoped was that Billy would want to make love to her, to be unable to resist making love to her, in spite of the risks. “Silly cow,” she told herself, crossly.

      * * *

      For Billy, on Thursday night, sleep had not come easily even though Billy had, using his damp towel to protect the bed linen. Bloody thing refused to go down for what seemed like ages after she left. He was aware that the new improved Eliza stirred his loins, but until she was in his arms he’d had no idea how much. How close he had come to taking her in his bed, with his parents and sister sleeping nearby, freaked him out completely. And that was before she even mentioned that she had chosen him to deflower her.

      Now he was being asked to decide whether he wanted to make love to a glorious little creature with a figure and face like a voluptuous faerie queen and, from what he could discern, a highly responsive libido. If he wanted to? Bloody hell. He wanted to so much he thought he was going to die of a stroke, or a heart attack. Or just spontaneously combust because something was on fire in his loins and he couldn’t put it out.

      There was no force on earth or in heaven – with the exception of a visit from Eliza’s father or the local constabulary – that was going to stop him from ignoring his certain doom and turning up at Eliza’s door next morning.

      By eight a.m. on Friday the household had emptied magically and was making its reluctant way to work on the tube or in a tradesman’s van.

      * * *

      I’ve always found a certain frustration in books which, just when things are starting to get interesting, scoop up the reader and trundle him off to parts unknown, which the author feels it incumbent upon her to share, or perhaps merely because she is a sadist. It leaves one with the choice of ploughing through the tangent, or leafing frantically past it until the promised sex scene or denouement is reached, then having to decide whether to go back and read the tangential information in case it is germane to the whatzername. The dilemma, relative to the above, is that the household of Billy Sylvester, aspiring actor and potential despoiler of a maiden of tender years, has been mentioned, but the reader has not yet been properly introduced. One feels that the introductions should be performed tout de suite, in view of the rather more intimate matters to be disclosed very shortly.

      Billy’s dad, David, married Billy’s mum, Lauren, a pretty brunette, in the early 1970s when they were both twenty-something. Lauren’s own mum, Lily, was the person to whom Billy related most strongly. Lily was a lot of fun with a wicked sense of humour. She had been an actress for a while on the stage in Edinburgh, and was devoted to movies. So naturally Lauren had been named after Lauren Bacall. I’m not sure if Lauren herself had ever been a lot of fun, or whether her mother had embarrassed that trait to extinction when she was an easily humiliated teenager, but in any case the remaining spontaneity was largely driven out of her early in her marriage by her husband’s need for order and predictability in his life.

      David was a builder by trade, and Lauren worked in an office, which she gave up for a few years when her first child, Jeanne (after Jeanne Moreau), was born. Three years later Billy arrived, christened William because his father wasn’t having any more of those cinema-inspired names for his son who was going to grow up to be a solid wage-pulling citizen with no airs. Nobody called him anything but Billy. Except when he grew up a bit and his friends started calling him Billy the Willy.

      He was spoiled by his mother and ignored by his father most of the time. Dave ignored the whole family impartially, so it wasn’t taken personally. Dave’s father had been an army man, like his father before him. Both had been on active service and had returned home somewhat changed by the experience. They had short tempers, low tolerance of aimless chit-chat, a tendency to drink too much, and a preference for isolating themselves from people and social situations in general. They also had a rigid attitude to household routines and general order, because when you are in the army, on active service, you need to know for sure that things are where they should be and that scheduled events happen on time. So by the time Dave came along he had a couple of generations’ worth of army-related stress impacting on his family. This was bound to affect his world view.

      Due to paternal disinterest, Billy was free as he got older to go where and when he wanted, but eventually Lauren’s complaints about him filtered through to Dave, who was moved to contribute one of his rare pieces of input to his son’s social development. One day, when Billy was sixteen, Dave invited him to enter the sanctity of The Shed for a little chat, and did not pussy-foot around.

      “You’ve been out on the streets, drinking and fighting. I don’t like it, but that’s not what I want to talk about. You’ve been rude to your mother and you’re treating the place like a hotel. You know how to behave, and you’ll behave in this house.”

      His son was a little taller than him, and gave him Attitude. This, of course, was sink or swim time, and Dave, not one to take insubordination lying down, was goaded beyond endurance. Billy, in short order, ended up on the floor of the shed, his face in a pile of oily rags, a knee in the small of his back and his hands wrenched painfully behind him.

      Dave, upon releasing Billy’s arms, offered him a hand and pulled him to his feet, continuing as though nothing had happened. “Show me how Robbie Kelly got that punch in,” he said, indicating Billy’s nose. He pointed at his own nose. “Put it here,” he instructed. Billy was still seething, and only too pleased to oblige his father. He missed completely several times, as Dave slipped easily to the side or blocked the blow. After a while they reversed roles and, with some practice, Billy, had he so wished, could have augmented his street fighting skills with some basic boxing science. They returned to the house in companionable silence, and Billy was thus persuaded to at least behave like a reasonable, civilised person while with his family, with little loss of dignity since the whole business was carried out in the confines of The Shed with no other witnesses.

      Billy had one personality for his family and one for his friends, which were worlds apart. Even his accent was different depending on where he was. With his friends, he sounded like a cockney street hooligan, at home his consonants were clearly articulated, and since his time in the MacLean home he had perfected a BBC accent because one never knew when it might come in handy, along with his Edinburgh and Belfast accents.

      But I digress. On the day in question, the three superfluous family members went to their respective jobs and left Billy to his own devices.

      * * *

      Billy showered, shaved, dressed and made his way to the posh neighbourhood, along the lane and through the back gate to the MacLean house. He had prepared a spiel if Richard happened to be in after all. Eliza opened the door to his knock and whisked him inside with furtive glances for neighbours, passing relatives, or the evening news helicopter. It was half past nine and she was as nervous as a cat on a kitchen table with its nose in the butter dish, and so was Billy.

      But what has happened to Billy? The charm, flirtation with a light touch, the satirical humour, the casual studied compliments, where have they gone? In their place was a young man who had apparently forgotten that he’d been honing his courting skills since he was seventeen. The Billy of that time had already spent six months visiting an older woman who taught him the dark arts and how to please and seduce, and in her turn pleased him mightily and frequently. She was beautiful, and he was madly in love with her, of course, but it had to end when her husband became suspicious, and Billy only just made it through the window, thankfully on the ground floor. It was a classic comic dive but without the comfort of a mattress from the props department, with Billy clad only in his underpants, clutching his jeans, leaving the rest behind to be hidden hurriedly by the guilty strumpet.

      It was one of the high points of his life to date.

      This Billy, at this time, was lost for words, since there was nothing he could say that wouldn’t have any self-respecting female showing him the door. “So are we goin’ ta do this or wha’?” or perhaps “Well, getcha gear off and let’s gerrit over wif.” Suspecting that he was unlikely to acquire speech any time soon, Eliza smoothed the situation,