In Chapter 1 Alex renewed acquaintance with his favourite Aunt after his divorce and ended up staying with her.
In this way we passed some idyllic weeks.
During the day, whilst Jane was at work, I would potter around the house, doing odd jobs for her and tidying up, walk around the village (which took all of ten minutes) greeting the older members of the community who were out and about, surf the Net, and dip into Jane's extensive library of books on just about every topic under the sun.
One evening, curled up on the sofa together, we got to talking in some detail about her life in the village. She had moved there nearly twenty years before with her husband, a builder-decorator and amateur poet, who managed to pick up a reasonably steady stream of work in the surrounding towns. When Jane was appointed to her job at the solicitors where she was still working they were sufficiently well off to buy the two-bedroomed cottage that I was now lodging in so comfortably.
This agreeable existence had been abruptly terminated when Jane's husband, Nick, died: whilst replacing some tiles on a roof he somehow missed his footing and fell on to the concrete yard below. It was a bad fall; he suffered multiple injuries, including a broken neck. He regained consciousness briefly but never began the process of recovery proper; just four days after the accident he experienced a catastrophic loss of blood pressure, went into shock, and died within minutes.
Jane was not with him when he died but she had spent most of those last days at his bedside, and she told me how he was at times sufficiently alert to take active pleasure in her company: commanding and organised as ever, when she saw that Nick was maybe in a state to appreciate her attentions she told the nursing staff that she would like some private time with her dying husband.
If necessary, she insisted.
Then she drew the curtains of the small side ward, put a wedge under the door (for whose sake, she wondered . . who would really mind?), and coaxed some life into his failing soul, and body, with her beautiful lips and tongue (these are my words now, as I retell her telling). Usually she managed to build him to climax and swallow the last of the spunk that he would ever be able to give her.
She told me that she wondered, looking back, whether she had hastened his death, until a surgeon friend of hers assured her that her husband had done well to survive four days given the extent of his injuries. He added that the combined effects of the opiates and Jane's fellatio would have made his passing as pleasurable as he could have wished for.
That seemed to be borne out by her husband's reaction at the time: although he could talk only haltingly and in fractured phrases he was able to convey his love for her and his deep gratitude for her sexual ministrations. With the sensibilities of a poet and a vein of black humour his last whispered words to her were:
"I told you my love was undying. I can prove that now, by dying before my love for you does."
"He did not, no way, say that - did he? Even allowing that he probably wasn't at his best, being as how he was dying, it's offensively sentimental. And, for a poet - well, unspeakably tasteless."
Jane looked momentarily offended, then relaxed and laughed.
"OK, I was embellishing, but I think he might have been trying to say something like that. Or at least he would have done if he'd thought of it. I guess the dying can sometimes be a bit Me Me about things."
I sometimes wondered about her sardonic humour. I mean, there's dark, then there's dark.
She went on to tell me how she had coped with life after Nick's death. On the surface nothing much changed but she became possessed of a sense of mortality and resolved to experience life's pleasures and joys.
It was not in her nature to exploit or bully so she was not going to gratify herself at the expense of other people, but in her clear-eyed, intelligent way she realised that other people's desire for sex was often thwarted and turned into festering malevolence or self-destructive frustration.
She did not want that to happen to her, nor to anyone that she could help (whilst she was helping herself), so she put her life on a frankly hedonistic course and launched into a series of sexual encounters, some of them one-off engagements, some longer term associations.
Looking at the world in this way, opportunities presented themselves with remarkable frequency, even in the tiny community of sixty or so people that made up the village population. There were also episodes in the town that she worked in, naturally.
Her first liaison was with the local shopkeeper, George, an affable man, whose wife was fond of her husband but not that bothered about sex, which had never been particularly good to her. During one after-hours delivery to her house Jane invited him into her bedroom and they explored their desires and individual tastes. Finding a match they continued this relationship, as it became, for the past three years, until my arrival.
George was one of Jane's gentleman callers that I'd seen in my first week with her. They met once a week to satisfy his passion for anal sex. Jane was not as much into it as George was, but once a week felt about right to her since she was so highly charged sexually and did so much other stuff.
"I'd like to carry on seeing George. You're an important part of my life, Alex, but still only a part. Do you mind?"
I did mind. I wanted this astonishingly sexy, intelligent woman all to myself, but I had the sense to realise that I could easily drive her away by being clingy and possessive. Still, I couldn't help sounding a bit solemn as I replied:
"Quite honestly, I'll find it difficult, Jane, but if you need to keep seeing George I can't say no. It's your life - and your house I'm staying in. As long as we can carry on as we've been I'll go along with whatever you want."
She kissed me lightly on the lips and gave my cock a little squeeze, before starting with a gentle rubbing motion.
"And Mark, Brad, Sue, Michael, Sergei and Mahmoud? Do you mind about them?"
I considered a minute. Had I expected she would ditch all her lovers because of our new, passionate relationship? Maybe I'd assumed she would, or half-hoped for it, without giving the matter much thought?
Was I in an alternate reality Carry On film - Carry on Aunting, for example?
"If that's what you want, Jane. I'm really uneasy though. Not because of you seeing other people - why only one woman, by the way? - but because of practicalities: I don't see how we can carry on as we've been if you're having to fit in - quite literally - all these others."
Still stroking me, gazing at my gradual thickening and rising, she replied slowly:
"That's the second time you've said 'carry on as we've been'."
She looked up at me:
"We can, in a sense, Alex, but it's not going to be the same thing day after day, month after month. We'd grow stale. We can do all the delightful things we've been doing, be intense and really into one another. But we'll be doing other things as well. Or at least I will. What you do is up to you, but I don't want you to mope and start getting obsessive. You'll get yourself down. We've had a marvellous opening to our relationship and spent all this time together, fucking and finding out what else we're into. We develop from here."
She paused. I was reassured by her talking about 'our relationship' as something established, that had begun so well and would continue. I was also very close to coming. She knew this and bent down and took me in her mouth, giving me a series of nibbles, licks and sucks until the familiar torrent of spunk gushed out and down her throat. Well, maybe it wasn't really a torrent, but I could tell myself it felt like that. I leaned my head back against the sofa.
