Hot Water Man Read Online Free

wrapped in unknown woollies, was as arousing a thought to him as the swimsuited Christine must be to those urban rivals who had only seen her clothed. During the winter months he sat on the window seat at Durradee, his ‘A’ level economics book on his knee and the rain sliding down the glass. The next summer he saw her entering the sea-front newsagent’s; she emerged with a cigarette between her lips.
    That year he kissed her in the Aquarium. It was stuffy down there; half the tanks were empty. Wedged against the railing, he had kissed her dry lips, while behind them the eels coiled. After that they often embraced, but only in places like the cinema. They were sweethearts in the dark, but ordinary outside. He did not want to go further. Perhaps he was under-sexed. It was just that he did not want to spoil it.
    The next year he went up to London to work, a Cameron’s trainee. He met other girls but Christine was separate. That summer she returned but she seemed more inward, kicking stones along the beach and moaning about her parents. He was part of her family by now; he felt included in this general complaint. She was going to university in the autumn. Their kisses were still fervent but chaste. He felt diffident and dull. Sometimes she snapped at him, and he was helpless. He wanted to grab her and take her by force but then he wanted to protect her, too, from people like himself. She had a secret life, kept from him as well as her parents. Sometimes he saw her on the back of motorbikes.
    She did write; short scrawled notes full of
goshes.
Her writing stayed young and enthusiastic while she herself was changing. He wrote longer letters and more of them, ending them
lots of love
, carefully matched to the endings she put on hers. (Sometimes she put
much
love instead of
lots.
) He started seeing her in London; she wore make-up and tights, he took her to the Festival Hall and they made conversation. She went up to a new university, Nissen huts and bulldozed earth and a scattering of students who all knew each other.
    One weekend he could no longer bear it; he went up to Warwick and made love to her. In the past he had plotted appropriate spots for this; he had made ardent mental bookings – the sand dunes, the creek where the bracken stood waist-high and you could hear the sea. In reality it happened on the narrow bed of her hall of residence during a sleepy Sunday afternoon, the Top Ten being played through the wall and somebody knocking on the door halfway through. They had clung; the footsteps had retreated.
    He was far from being the first. She hinted that she was involved with someone else. But who else had known a Christine before she smoked; who else had seen her through three swimsuits? They did not know her sister Joyce, matronly at fourteen. He possessed years of Christine before she braided her hair into tiny plaits and questioned everything. She wore long Indian skirts and pale stuff over her healthy cheeks. She did not fool him. Her childhood was their secret.
    It was four years before they married. She kept going off with other people and then coming back to him. He did not make a habit of this, himself. But then her father died. Soon afterwards they married. They came together like a brother and sister who had been lost in the woods. They understood each other so well. Or so he thought.
    They bought the Crouch End flat, second floor, nothing special except that it was theirs. She was training to be a teacher but she did not take it up.
    When had things started changing? When she cut off her lovely, heavy blonde hair and frizzed it up; when she preferred to be known as Chris, and discovered it was oppressive to be supported by her husband? In certain moods he felt he was losing her to the seventies. She considered him the conventional one but it was she who followed so obediently the prevailing winds. But he could not blame it all on the decade, however much he would have liked to. He still