The Professor's Daughter by Piers Paul Read

Author:Piers Paul Read [Read, Piers Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2013-11-12T06:00:00+00:00

12

Louisa awoke in the morning. Her mind fought for some moments to ward off consciousness but all at once it came upon her and she held her breath as she sensed the sleeping form next to her. Then she slipped out of bed and stood naked next to it, wondering if Jason was there, wanting to rush to him but convinced, in some irrational faculty, of her own guilt. So she retrieved her night-dress from the bed-clothes, pulled it over her body and went to the stove. She brewed coffee, standing there, watching the flame on the aluminium, waiting for the water to rise and splash against the small glass window at the top of the pot. Only when the coffee was made did she dare to go beyond the trunks and packing-cases — as if to tell her husband that it was ready. He was not there.

She went quickly to Ned, who was waking.

‘He’s gone,’ she said.

‘Don’t worry,’ said Ned. ‘He’ll be back.’

They sat at the kitchen table drinking coffee and at nine Jason came in. ‘I just went out,’ he said, with a shrug. He looked tired and drawn, but there was no telling how long he had been out and Louisa did not dare to ask. The three of them sat together in silence, drinking coffee. The frankness, the openness, which was once the way of the two men in the loft, was suddenly gone. There was no mention of the night before: no discussion of the various, adjusted, relationships. Louisa looked at Jason many times, as a prelude to talking to him, but his face was now quite closed to her.

The three of them went to a movie in the afternoon. Louisa cooked curry for supper and after that she returned to Ned’s bed as if there were no question about it. The lamp went off on Jason’s side of the barricade, and Ned took from his shelf a copy of The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana. ‘I want you to read this,’ he said to Louisa in soft, serious tones. ‘It’s a kind of Hindu book of sex instruction, but it was written fifteen hundred years ago.’

She took it: it fell open in the centre of the volume where the pages had been well pressed down.

‘It’s just what we need in the West,’ said Ned, ‘as an antidote to the repression we have in us all after two thousand years of Christianity. I think … I think, if we went through some of these rituals and positions, it might waken you up to a new kind of awareness and help you with some of those New England hang-ups.’

There was nothing but seriousness in his tone of voice. Louisa looked up at the massive man above her, at the sagging stomach covered with black hair to be seen through his open pyjamas. He leant down and took the book from her.

‘People,’ he said, ‘sexually speaking, are divided into types. Now you, I’d say, are a mare, and I know I’m a horse, which makes us what’s called a high union ….

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.