While planning permission was coming through, we started working on - and really enjoying - the quite large garden. Undoubtedly all of this had an effect on how Caroline and I felt about one another, although I can't say with any precision what its ultimate effect was on either or the two of us together.
What it certainly did do was force my graduation to the status of a responsible family-home owner. I now wanted to look after my property - and its garden - in a way that was completely foreign to my previous conception of myself. I began immediately to work hard in the garden at almost every opportunity; and I started talking about extensions and improvements to the house, in particular about adding a study, a sun-room and a bigger garage. At last, it seemed I was approximating to the family man with all a familyman's urges - as well as his limitations.
Most of this called for good healthy living. Working in the garden no doubt stirred some juices that had had little stimulation in the previous couple of years. One result was that, much more regularly and frequently, I wanted to make love to Caroline. It was part of a familyman's rights, wasn't it? – or, indeed, one of his fundamental responsibilities. But I had still a strange diffidence in the way I approached her - strange especially given the length of time we'd now been married. Perhaps because of the pervasive social attitudes to sex, I always felt that I was somehow being "dirty" for wanting to make love to a woman - even if she was my wife and we were living together within a sanctified Christian marriage.
Because they were so unusual, I remember some of our enthusiastic couplings around this time in surprising detail. One Sunday, we were both busy in the garden and, by about five in the afternoon, had been working steadily for three or four hours. It was a warm, pleasant afternoon. The sun was shining. We were in the back garden where I'd been cleaning some weeds from below the bathroom windows, preparatory to planting a new bed of flowers.
Caroline took on perhaps a special beauty as a gardener and, as I looked towards her, by chance she moved her body quite innocently in a way that caused a wave of lust to wash over me. I was always reserved in making my feelings known; but surely, I reasoned, she was my wife and it was right and proper that I should want her – and should feel such a compulsive urge to make love to her.
I got up and went over to her.
Rather shyly, I said, "Do you think we could go in for some tea?"
It was like a chat-up line with a complete stranger: "Would you like to come in for a coffee?"
She looked at me with a knowing twinkle in her eye and smiled sweetly - but regretfully.
"Shouldn't we finish out here?"
Clearly she wasn't fooled: she knew perfectly well what I really wanted. If we'd ever dared to use such language in those days, she'd have said, "I know what you really want. You want to fuck me, don't you?"
She was right: that's exactly what I did want to do. In suggesting tea, I was being devious as well as "dirty". I think I must have blushed.
