Twenty years had passed since that terrible evening. Twenty years in which lives had been repaired, if not healed, and had branched off in different directions from how those involved had intended.
I had moved away, because I had been about to do that anyway. I wasn’t running from anything, or at least I didn’t think I was. I just had a life to lead. I was 20 when it happened and I had ambitions to pursue – ambitions which could best be pursued in London, not this small town on the Norfolk coast. I was a talented illustrator, and although you can work remotely, and could even in those days, to make a day-to-day living from it, I wanted to be in the thick of it, moving in the right circles, getting to know people.
And it had worked. I had established myself on the books of a prominent agency and been called upon to work on all sorts of assignments, from food packaging to small books.
I was back home for the 20th anniversary of the crash. It wasn’t billed like that, of course. My Mum had just said it would be nice if I could be around on the date that year, so I took two weeks off and got the train from Liverpool Street station to Norwich and down to Cromer. Staying in your mother’s house when you’re 40 is quite strange. She lived an old lady’s lifestyle. The house was quiet, with just the ticking of an old clock unless the TV was on for some dire daytime soap.
I arrived on the day before The Day and we had a quiet meal with my dad’s favourite food and wine: spaghetti puttanesca and Chianti, and it was fine. Poignant at times, but okay. Then, after a few days, she could see I was getting bored, so she invited me along on a weekly get-together with a friend. They were a group of four and each of the women had lost a husband in the crash when a train derailed outside Norwich. The men had been returning from a football match at Wembley and apparently there was a broken rail, which flipped the front of the train off the track, dragging the rest with it.
The afternoon was spent at Dorothy’s terraced house in a quiet, leafy avenue. Edna and Grace had made other plans, so it was just the three of us. Dorothy was tall and slim, a retired teacher, with carefully combed quite long hair dyed a very pale orange. She probably didn’t call it that, but that’s how it looked to me.
I had met the other two in town on shopping trips. There was Edna, a rough-and-ready little brunette, the joker in the pack, with a coarse sense of humour, and Grace, a slightly chubby and stilted grande dame who had never done a day’s work in her life because her parents had money and then she had married a well-to-do businessman with fingers in a lot of pies including a Ford car dealership. Grace wore too much makeup in an effort to add something to the perfectly good face which she spent too much time looking at in the mirror. She had big pouty lips and baggy eyes and was one of those over-managed women who made me want to pin her down and wank onto her chest.
All these thoughts were going through my mind as my mother and I sat with Dorothy and made small talk about my life in London and they told self-deprecating tales of their provincial existence. Nothing could have been more innocent than this regular little social occasion, but I have seen enough in my life to know there is always a subtle undertow of lust and longing. There were probably unspoken feelings among the women when left to their own foursome, but my presence stirred things up a bit and, I thought, accounted for the absence of two of them.
Dorothy seemed to be on my wavelength, as she herself might have put it. She was too old for the hippie generation but I could imagine her waving disconsolately as the peace and love train disappeared over the horizon, leaving her to the middle-class suburban future that had become her life.
A few days later, Mum had arranged to buy Dorothy’s microwave and I was deputed to go round and collect it. Dorothy made a pot of tea and produced some homemade fruit cake and we had our own highly civilised afternoon tea. As I left with the microwave safely stowed on the back seat of my car, Dorothy touched my arm and quietly invited me to go back for the evening meal. She had made a curry with some leftover chicken and there was far too much for her, she said. I graciously agreed and neither of us mentioned my mother, so I assumed it was to be a private matter.
I was back at Dorothy’s house three hours later with a bottle of Gewurztraminer which I thought was bold enough and spicy enough to cope with a curry which I expected to be on the mild side of bland.
Sure enough, it was made with curry powder rather than individual spices, and although it had plenty of flavour, it wasn’t going to knock anyone’s socks off. I, on the other hand, intended to get Dorothy’s socks off, along with everything else, and I sensed that was what she had in mind too.
We sat together on the comfortable tapestry-like sofa, with the dishes hastily shoved into the dishwasher, and made awkward conversation, both wary of saying the wrong thing and jeopardising what we saw as a relationship within the relationship Dorothy had with my Mum. The music of Queen played softly in the background – chosen, I could tell, as the closest thing her tame collection had to “my kind of thing”.
As if at a given but undetectable signal, just as I decided I would have to raise the intensity, she shifted in her seat and came down closer to me, her hip and its lovely surrounding area pressed against mine. I put a hand on her knee and she giggled.
“Well,” she said, “Here we are.” It was the sort of carefully-pitched, non-incriminating choice of phrase that confirmed to me that I should continue. I slid my hand a little further up her leg, onto what could only be described as her thigh, an inch or two into her skirt. She was wearing a knee-length, sleeveless, pale blue dress that was nicely fitted around her chest and stomach, and slightly looser further down.
“You have very nice shoulders,” I said, moving the focus without really knowing why. Dorothy laughed.
“Well, that’s a compliment I’ve never had before,” she said, her right hand landing on my knee with a carefully innocent, friendly pat. I leaned down and kissed her shoulder, and as I did so, my hand slid even further into the tunnel of mystery. It was now definitely between her legs and an unspoken request for permission to continue needed to be approved or rejected. She involuntarily adjusted her stance to free her breasts, which jiggled demurely beneath the blue cotton mix. I went for her neck and my hand leapt up to her chest, squeezing her left breast gently as my face landed on hers and we kissed. I could tell she wasn’t accustomed to this but was determined not to be the stuffy old lady she feared she had become. Her hand moved way up to the top of my thigh and she jammed it down so it was sandwiched between my muscles, the edge of her thumb against the bulge of my cock. As the kiss became deeper and dirtier she opened her hand and placed it on my bulge. I responded by putting my hand back inside her skirt and gently tracing her slit.
Then the floodgates opened and I was at her zip, sliding it down her back as she arched forwards. Then she was on her feet, the dress was on the floor and she was unhooking her bra, to display beautiful, full breasts with pert nipples circles by halos of raised pinpricks as her skin came alive with desire. I reached up and grabbed the sides of her white lacy panties. She looked at me steadily as I pulled them down and she stepped out of them. She pulled me to my feet and looked into my eyes.
“What are you going to do to me?” she asked, as if this were my lair and she had been lured into it.
“I’m going to shag you,” I said. “Dorothy. You sexy woman.” She put her arms around my neck.
“Oh,” she said. “I like to be shagged. I’ve never actually said that before – or anything like it – but I like that idea very much.” I wondered for a split second if she had meant to say, “I would like to be shagged” or if she was telling me she had experience in this area and was looking forward to picking up where she had left off, however long ago that might have been, and showing me her expertise. She marched me confidently into her bedroom, a quiet, sober, functional room with a warm-looking floral duvet cover, which she pulled back to invite me in. She slid in first and shuffled over to make room. Still fully clothed, I had to give her a strip show, which I could tell she was looking forward to. My cock made a grand, showy entrance as I wrenched my pants down and I could see she was enjoying it. When I slipped between the covers she wrapped her arms around me, spread her legs and pulled me over, so I was lying between them. Wasn’t she expecting foreplay, or did she think she had already had it?
I kissed her lovingly on the mouth and then began a slow, steady, devoted pilgrimage via her neck and her breasts, kissing her ribcage, licking her surprised armpits and poking my tongue into her navel, looking up at her to suggest that was not the only recess I would be visiting. Her eyes locked mine with the message that she understood and could hardly wait for my next little invasion. She didn’t have long to wait, as I nuzzled her pubic mound and its little forest before my nose rubbed her clitoris and my tongue plunged into her vagina.
Dorothy’s legs were spread to the maximum and the only way she could expand the exposed zone was to raise them. She hesitated just a second before doing that and I felt this was the most she had ever opened herself up to a man. The polite, respectable, reserved woman was now all inner thigh, pubic hair, crotch, vagina and – yes, she had to admit – arsehole. The realisation that she was completely on display made her eyes freeze for a moment, but I cut them loose with a long lick up her slit and some kisses at the side, in the innocent safe zone between labia and thigh. Then I started to suck at her pussy as if looking for nourishment and her face softened as if she were giving me what I needed, a poor, simple man reliant on a woman for succour.
I pressed my face further into the soft, warm pillows and rivers between her legs and she bucked as an orgasm showed her she was no longer in control. Sensing the arrival of a second, she remained in position and pushed forward, as if there were anywhere further for me to go. As she writhed and rose again, my face slid gently and gratefully down until I was at the brow of her rear valley and I pushed the back of her thighs up. She immediately got the idea and raised them herself, but only a short way, not knowing exactly what she was doing nor why. When she felt my tongue in her most private part, she gasped and I wondered how I could reassure her. I concluded that the thing to do was carry on with increased intensity and certainty, so my tongue plowed her secret furrow and, when she saw that I was not only far from daunted but plainly excited to be doing what I was doing, she put aside her fears, hoisted herself further and rode this new wave of pleasure, which pushed and pulled her until she wobbled on the edge of the biggest breaker of her life and she capsized, to be washed ashore, helpless but safe, as the sun beat down on her nakedness.
It took Dorothy a second or two to return to the world as she lay in my arms, and when she began to speak it was in a dreamy haze.
“Have things changed since my day?” she asked, almost sadly. “Or was it the company I kept?”
“It is your day,” I replied. “And you told me you liked to be shagged. So there must have been times…”
“Shagged, yes,’ she said. “But all the extras! What have you done to me?” We lay together happily, comfortable in each other’s presence until she spoke again.
“But you haven’t actually shagged me,” she said. “You’ve been all over me and you’ve given me orgasms but you haven’t had your… thing inside me.”
“Do you want my ‘thing’ inside you?” I asked.
“It is sort of traditional,” she said. “And I’m a traditional sort of girl.”
“Too traditional to suck my penis?” I teased. Her hand immediately took my bone-hard shaft and she moved into position, down on my body.
“I’m not very good at this,” she said nervously.
“No such thing,” I said. “Take it in your mouth as if you love it. Treat it like my tongue treated you. Just for a minute or two. Then I’m going to lie between your legs and shag you.”
Dorothy performed fellatio on me. I could tell that was what she thought she was doing. She wouldn’t do anything as crude as sucking a cock, but performing fellatio – that was allowed. And she did it with care and affection, which turned into passion as the reality hit her of what she was doing and how much she liked it. Then she climbed back up like a child waiting to be told she was a good girl.
“God, Dorothy,” I said, stroking her cheek. “You are a lovely woman.” And with that, I slid between her legs and shoved my erect penis into her welcoming vagina. And I pumped her and banged her until she broke out of her reverie and announced, “I’m coming! Fuck me! Come inside me! Give it to me! Your stuff…” And I raced along with her until I caught up and my semen spurted into her grateful depths.