Chapter One

At first, it had been just an idea, or rather a series of ideas, miniature narratives. Lucy didn’t think of them as fantasies; they were things that hadn’t happened yet, but which might happen one day, might happen very easily if she let them. Just once, a long time ago, when she was only nineteen, such a thing had happened for real. She’d been on holiday with a friend, somewhere in France, and they’d gone in a hotel for a drink, a rather posh hotel, and at the bar they’d got talking to a gentleman, an older man, forty years old at least. After he had bought them several drinks he offered to take them for a drive in his car, which he said was parked just outside. But the friend wouldn’t go. So Lucy, much to her friend’s disapproval, went alone. She knew what the man wanted to do, and she had had enough drinks that she was curious to see where these kinds of things led. Predictably enough, it led to sex, quite straightforward, uncomplicated sex on the back seat of his large, comfortable car. The sex itself was not especially exciting, in fact rather routine, it seemed to Lucy, although at that time she had hardly had enough of it to know what was routine and what was not. But the idea of it excited her – the anonymity, the lack of any emotional involvement, even the slight element of risk (which her friend had insisted on spelling out to her before walking off in a huff), all these things gave it spice.

In the ten years since that evening, her ideas had become slightly more elaborate, but essentially the structure was always the same. A man, almost invariably an older man, a setting redolent of sophistication, an atmosphere charged with sexual possibilities. An encounter – no names, no promises to meet again, no strings – and what became clearer, as the idea developed, was that the man should do exactly as he pleased. The word that always came to her mind was that heused her. Took what he wanted, and then was gone. Sometimes what these men wanted was rather – well, what word could she use to describe it? Perverted? Deviant? Kinky? Whatever.

She thought sometimes about what the relationship was between these little scenarios and the relationships in her actual life, both the sexual ones and those that derived from her work. As the age of thirty approached, she realised that she was becoming successful. Her years of hard legal study and the grind of apprentice work were now paying off. Her services were in demand, her court appearances more frequent. Her work was respected. She was treated as a serious person, even deferred to by many. She was very far from being a person whom others could take advantage of; whom others could use.

Though not overly given to intense self-analysis, she was aware that her inner sexual life, the ‘ideas’ she kept having, did not match with other’s perception of her. There was nothing about this, which troubled her; she simply observed that it was so. How men behaved to her in her sexual imagination was quite different from how they behaved in real life. And the apparent lack of it extended to her sexual activities too, what there was of them. She would sometimes remark to friends in a light-hearted manner that she hadn’t much time for a sex life these days, and to an extent that was true. Certainly she could not have found time to play the dating game as energetically as Rebecca or Joanna, the two friends she saw most regularly. Not that she lacked for offers. Men she encountered, knowing she was single, would invite her out, but she rarely accepted. Yes, she was busy, but it was more than that. She found, almost invariably, that such encounters disappointed. It wasn’t that the men weren’t pleasant or attractive or interesting. If she had sex with them, it was often enjoyable enough, in its way. But it never had the spice of her