(Part 01)
The Finchbottom Vale nestles comfortably between the Ancient Dancingdean Forest to the south and the rolling Pepperstock Hills in the north and those who were lucky enough to live there think of it as the rose between two thorns and at the eastern end of the Vale were the Dulcets which were a collection of villages and hamlets comprising of Dulcet Meadow, Dulcet-on-Willow, Dulcet Green and Dulcet-on-Brooke, to name but a few, and of course Dulcet St Mary which was where the chair of the Sharpington Day Parade Fundraising Committee, Jayne Keeling, lived.
Jayne Keeling was a tall elegant woman in her late fifties and spent a lot of money on, Spa’s, beauty treatments and manicures and the like to keep herself looking that way.
She lived alone in a large detached Georgian country cottage in a well-heeled leafy corner of the village and it was a bright early autumn morning when she lay cosily beneath her duvet and reflected on what had been a very interesting and eventful summer.
Jayne was over fifty, well, well over fifty actually, in fact she was not only the wrong side of that particular milestone she was fast approaching the next one and she was divorced to boot.
But she wasn’t a lonely divorcee, because she had a wide circle of friends, but no special someone.
Although five years earlier there was someone, she had a lover, a young lover, more than 30 years younger to be precise which she supposed made her a cougar.
Jayne had just come through a rather bitter divorce when they got together, not that she was particularly heartbroken by the ordeal or needed picking up from it.
In fact she didn’t really mind being divorced, she hardly ever saw her husband Graham when they were together anyway, he was always on the golf course or in the 19th or more often than not he was with his secretary.
But when the affair began with her young lover, Kenny, it opened her eyes and showed her that she was still an attractive woman, still a sexy woman for that matter, still a desirable woman and her ex-husband Graham clearly never appreciated that.
Her lover was her next door neighbour’s son, 25 years old with the body of an Adonis, the face of a catalogue model and a brain the size of an avocado and incredible stamina.
She was immensely flattered to still attract male attention at her age, she had had so little attention paid to her by her ex-husband that she had forgotten how attractive she was and Kenny was very attentive, very considerate and extremely vigorous.
A session with him was like Zumba and Pilates combined with mild electrocution.
After a weekend with him she was quite literally shagged out and needed the best part of a week to recover.
Not that she wanted to seem ungrateful, as many women in her position, or positions, would have been quite envious if she’d ever told anyone about him and what he did to her and how often, they certainly would not have been sympathetic if she enlightened them.
After all there was a lot to be said for being orgasmed to the point of unconsciousness at any age, but for a very much over fifty even more so.
It was just that sometimes she would have been quite happy with an early night and a cuddle.
(Part 02)
If her affair with Kenny went on too long she wasn’t at all sure that his vital and sustained attention wouldn’t shag her into an early grave.
Plus the fact she was no teenager anymore and getting ready for a date that would end with her being stripped naked and well and truly ravished took a lot longer than it used to do.
As a teen, a squirt of perfume and some lippy and she was good to go.
Now she needed 24 hours’ notice a good night sleep and five hours to prepare.
At the time she and Kenny got together she wasn’t looking for a man of any description and she certainly wasn’t looking for a toy boy, she hadn’t even asked to have her grass cut, he had volunteered, so she truly was an accidental Cougar.
It all began one early summer’s day when Kenny’s mother, Emily, volunteered her Estate Agent son to spend his day off cutting her not insubstantial lawns.
It was a very hot day, which got all the hotter for Jayne when Kenny took off his shirt and his muscular well-toned torso glistened with sweat and by the end of the day she was at boiling point and when he had finished all the lawns and was ready to abandon his horticultural endeavours and focus his prowess towards attending to her.
Jayne was in the kitchen getting him a beer from the fridge when he walked up behind her and slipped his arms around her waist and began kissing her neck.
And before she could even protest he had turned her around and kissed her mouth and then she didn’t want to protest anymore.
Jayne was still holding the beer in one hand and a glass in the other and then the next thing she knew they were in her bed.
She knew it was wrong but she hadn’t had a man’s hands on her for two years and all she could do was hope he didn’t stop.
That early summer afternoon was the first of many such occasions when she was on the receiving end of some youthful loving.
But as Jayne lay beneath her duvet one morning she wondered if it was worth it, well obviously when she was in her bed it was clearly worth it.
But sex with Kenny, although really marvellous, was also very exhausting.
What she really wanted was someone of her own age, who would appreciate her for what she was when she wasn’t glammed up, someone she could be herself with.
Not that useless article of an ex-husband though, someone kind and considerate.
But what Kenny had done more than anything that summer, was to remind her how much she enjoyed sex and once she had tasted the sweet sensual nectar of lust once again she had an appetite for it that she needed to quench.
So as she lay beneath the duvet she made an important decision, she wouldn’t see Kenny again, because his stamina really could have been the death of her so she would instead seek out a less vigorous partner and with the momentous decision made she snuggled down beneath the duvet and went back to sleep and dreamed of someone to cuddle.
(Part 03)
The Vale was once a great wetland that centuries earlier stretched from Mornington in the East to Childean in the west and from Shallowfield in the south to Purplemere in the north.
But over the many centuries the vast majority had been drained for agriculture, a feat achieved largely by the efforts of famous Mornington Mills, of which only three had survived to the present day and even those were no longer functional and were in various states of repair but in one of them, Dulcet’s Mill, was where Robin Jeffrey lived.
He was one of the two senior partners of Jeffrey and Teague veterinary practice but he was now retired.
The 64 year old widow, whose children were all living independent lives chose the solitary existence where he could spend his time enjoying the two thing that gave him the most pleasure, birdwatching, which he could do from his vantage point in the top of the mill and fishing which he could do in the River Brooke which ran no more than twenty yards from his front door.
He was fifty seven years old when he was widowed, living in Purplemere, and immediately after his wife’s death he seemed to suddenly appear on the radar of the local spinster’s, widows and divorcees in and around his own age.
In fact it all started at his wife’s funeral where he was buttonholed by two well-presented mourners who made it perfectly clear he could avail himself of them if he chose to do so.
But it was many months after his dear wife was laid to rest and only after repeatedly rebuffing the endless advances of even the most attractive of the local pursuing vamps that he finally decided out of desperation and loneliness to dip his toe in the water and began dating but his heart was never really in it.
But he would probably have continued trying nonetheless but for a providential collision.
When quite by chance on one damp miserable day he met Wendy in Stephenson’s Supermarket car park after a minor fender bender.
She was a very beautiful woman, tall and willowy with long light ginger hair, and a smiling freckled face.
Wendy was a much younger woman than Tom had of late been involved with, in fact she was a considerably younger woman than he, whom at the time he looked upon her merely as a casual observer, although he thought she was attractive and shapely with her Lycra outfit doing nothing to hide her assets, he completely overlooked the fact that he was a man and she was a woman, because he believed she couldn’t possibly be interested in an old man like him.
And although they laughed and joked and she flicked at her hair flirtatiously he was flattered but for him it was a nonstarter, the stuff of cheap fiction, or so he thought at least, but in time he was to find out that he was wrong.
(Part 04)
It was a warm summer Saturday afternoon a few days after the accident when Wendy knocked on his door.
“Oh hello” he said doing a double take when he recognised the beautiful smiling young woman, not dressed in Lycra or with her hair up this time, but her ginger tresses flowed free and she was wearing a summer dress, and very little else as far as he could tell.
“Hi Robin” she said and flicked her wayward hair off her face.
“This is a surprise” he said
“I wanted to make sure you were ok” Wendy said and proffered to him a bottle of wine “And apologize again”
“There really is no need” Robin insisted
“I thought there was” Wendy retorted
“Well this is very kind of you” he said “but I can’t accept it unless you join me in drinking it”
“I thought you would never ask” she said
“Well you make yourself comfortable on the patio and I’ll get some glasses” he said
So Wendy walked out through the French doors while he went into the kitchen and got two glasses from the cupboard and after opening the bottle of Pinot he poured two generous glasses of the wine and headed towards the patio.
He stepped outside with a glass in each hand but his uninvited guest was nowhere to be seen, at least not at first.
Robin had assumed she had just taken a turn around the garden while she was waiting and was about to put the glasses down and go in search of her when she suddenly came into view.
“You see I made myself comfortable” she said as she stood on the edge of the patio with the greenery of the garden behind her wearing a bracelet on her wrist, rings on her fingers and a smile on her face and absolutely nothing else.
He returned her smile and then his eyes began to view her in detail beginning with her ginger tresses, streaked with gold from the sun which he followed as they hung down to her naked white shoulders and then every inch of her topography down to the ground.
“So I can see” he replied still holding the wine glasses, and then she began to walk towards him.
Well if the vision of her standing naked had mesmerised him it was nothing in comparison to the view of the naked Wendy when she set her gorgeous body in motion as she walked slowly and deliberately getting the maximum movement into each delicious step until they were standing nose to nose and she kissed him.
And so began a long and torrid relationship between the 57 year old vet and the 23 years old fitness instructor.
He felt faintly ridiculous having a 23 year old girlfriend and had a feeling of extreme amazement and delight, though more amazement if he was completely honest.
His wife Mary would have laughed like a drain if she could have seen him with a girl whom she would have considered a child, he really missed his wife.
(Part 05)
Robin thought that the sex with Wendy was amazing and it made his toes curl, she was supple, agile and pliable in fact she was really quite exceptionally bendy, he even called her bendy Wendy, and she had near inexhaustible stamina.
But even though Wendy was really sexy and a more than accomplished sexual partner she was unfortunately duller than ditch water.
She was “fun” to be with when he was benefiting from her expertise, but her company wasn’t stimulating other than in the obvious way.
Any red bloodied man not in his position would have thought him quite mad for wanting to end it.
But she had no conversation and was the very definition of vacuous.
Gorgeous, sexy, horny as hell and truly accomplished in the sexual arts, but as dumb as a stick.
The truth was that Wendy did not meet all his needs other than the physical.
What Robin wanted was someone like his wife, someone who loved him and who he could love and more importantly talk too.
Someone who knew that Muffin the Mule wasn’t a sexual offence, someone who didn’t think Mr Pastry was a 1960 version of Paul Hollywood and a woman who remembered a time when you had to get up to change the TV channel.
Wendy was not the answer to this want.
Nor could she fill his desire for some nice gentle love making and an affectionate cuddle, some grown up conversation.
Wendy was not someone he could fall asleep in front of the TV with so he decided to end it.
It was a difficult conversation when Robin ended the short breathless affair with the 23 year old fitness instructor.
What he couldn’t tell her was that one of his biggest gripes about having such a young girlfriend was the dullness of her pillow talk.
Wendy was born into a generation that had so many means of communication at their disposal yet she still had nothing meaningful to say.
There was a lot to be said for being with a woman who was wrinkle free and supple, but it was what was said afterwards that he craved.
So in the time post Wendy, and being on his own, truly on his own he had harked back to his youth and the days before his six pack became victim to too many six packs.
His middle aged physique tended more towards the party seven than a six pack.
He smiled at the thought of the party seven, because Wendy wouldn’t have got the joke, it would have gone right over her head.
He also reflected on his old girlfriends of the day with their firm buttocks, flat stomachs and gravity defying breasts which stirred his loins in his lustful nostalgia.
Part of him wanted to return to those carefree days of youth.
When all that teenage sex was so wonderful, when he had such limited sexual experience, and so much of the fun was in the learning.
All the reminiscing left him with a certain longing but he knew the past could not be relived or recaptured.
(Part 06)
There had been no one else after her toy boy, her dreams of having someone to cuddle had not come to fruition.
So Jayne Keeling lived alone in her large detached Georgian country cottage in a well-heeled leafy corner of the village of Dulcet St Mary.
Five years had passed since Jayne had gone through a long exhausting affair with an estate agent 30 years her junior.
And although he stimulated every cell in her body with monotonous regularity for the sake of her health and sanity she decided she would look after her own wants and needs and kicked him into touch.
What she craved was something he couldn’t give her.
She was looking for a companion, a confidant and a friend and not just someone to have sex with, as nice as the sex had been.
Jayne was immensely flattered at her age to attract the attentions of such a young lover, but the price for such toe curling sexual encounters was too high to pay.
What she longed for was to be with someone with life experience, someone she could have a proper conversation with in between the love making or even instead of it.
It didn’t have to be deep and meaningful converse just a bit more intellectual than he said/she said.
So what Jayne wanted was the same thing that Robin Jeffrey craved, someone they could talk too, not about anything earth shattering, it could be as simple as a common history or shared knowledge, someone who knew the name of the dragon in Ivor the Engine, or someone who watched Brief Encounter and didn’t think it was funny, someone who had heard of Biafra, Aberfan and the Torrey Canyon or remembered when there were only three TV channels.
Someone who remembered being able to play music at the wrong speed on a gramophone and who remembered having to wait for the black and white TV set to warm up.
Just someone who understood what the other was saying and wouldn’t stare vacantly at you when you mentioned an event that happened pre 1990.
Both of them had put a stop to their respective cradle snatching relationships and put their hopes in something more age appropriate and eventually their wishes were answered when one day, after five fallow years, a mutual friend introduced them to each other at a dinner party.
The friend was Lynn Cooper who lived on Teardrop Lake, and her daughter Jane did the cooking.
During the course of the evening in between the main course and desert Robin leant over and asked
“Do you remember 8 track stereo?”
Jayne smiled and nodded and all at once realised the significance of the question.
(Part 07)
So Jayne and Robin, at the age of 59 and 64 respectively, finally both got their wish answered and they had their first date a week later which presented them both with more concerns.
Whenever you reach a certain age in life you will have acquired to a greater or lesser degree an unfortunate body shape and gravity becomes your enemy and a simple mirror becomes something to be avoided.
He never had doubts when he was dating the local widows and spinsters in Purplemere or even during his torrid affair with Bendy Wendy, not that she gave him time to think.
But on that occasion the image in the mirror dented his self-confidence, because that time it really mattered.
It was completely irrational, after all it was the same out of shape middle-aged body that had served him well enough.
His face had stood the test of time and he was genuinely quite presentable for his age when dressed in an expensive suit, it was just when he was out of it he was likely to scare the animals.
He really liked Jayne and he was hoping that would be reciprocated by the not unattractive divorcée Jayne Keeling.
Jayne had been having much the same internal discussion as she stood before her own mirror the only difference was that she had been doing it for three hours longer.
Her body was in quite good shape she hadn’t given birth or had a hysterectomy so her body had not reached the level of decline that some of her contemporary’s had.
Plus since she had been put through a long intimate summer workout by the gardening Estate Agent five years earlier which had kept her well limbered up, she had maintained a strict workout regime.
Finally she deemed herself satisfied with the final look, she just hoped it would suffice for him.
She had high hopes of Robin Jeffrey, she was hopeful he might fill the hole in her life.
Jayne had spent five hours getting ready which involved applying endless lotions, potions, creams and balms as well as expensive underwear.
And all the time she was dressing she was imagining Robin undressing her.
And when she looked at the final result of her efforts in the mirror she had no doubts at that moment she would get her man.
The date went very well, dinner at the Cloche Hat in Dulcet-on-Brooke and then back to Jayne’s for coffee.
The kiss came while they waited for the kettle to boil and the moment their lips met Robin was more concerned about bringing Jayne to the boil.
They were both strangely nervous so Jayne went upstairs on her own to prepare herself and Robin followed ten minutes later.
“That’s more like it” Robin said to himself as they lay cuddling in the afterglow and Jayne thought to herself
“That was very acceptable”
They had made love for the first time, and that was the difference, making love was so much nicer than just having sex.
And as they lay in the darkness they had the most banal and trivial conversations which lasted into the small hours and when they had finished instead of making love again they just cuddled up and went to sleep.
There would be plenty of time for more love making and many other interesting conversations.
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