‘Sorry,’ said Sharon. ‘I had to take a call.’
‘Oh, really? I wasn’t born yesterday, Sharon,’ said Cindy sarcastically, and terminated the call.
Sharon replaced the receiver and turned on to her back. ‘I’ve got to go,’ she said.
‘Not yet,’ said the man.
‘No, please, I can’t,’ protested Sharon lamely.
‘Liar!’ said the man.
‘No, really, not now,’ she said, but nevertheless locked her legs tightly around his body.
The first-class passenger was not the only man in Sharon’s life. He was just one of a select group of lovers who travelled on her flights and to whose advances she willingly surrendered, as she had today. She had to admit, if only to herself, that she was an insatiable nymphomaniac. But it was the man with whom she had just spent an hour in bed who interested her the most, and the one whom it was her intention eventually to ensnare. By whatever means.
Sharon Gregory had been born an only child in Basildon, but had been trying for almost the whole of her short life to eradicate traces of her ‘estuary’ accent and what the sneering classes scathingly described as ‘Essex girl’ characteristics. She had even considered taking elocution lessons, but decided instead that she would listen carefully to the better educated of her passengers and try to emulate the way in which they spoke. In this she achieved some success, although the occasional grammatical slip would betray her origins.
Sharon’s parents still lived in Basildon, in the same depressing little house in which she’d been born, and in her view they had done nothing to improve themselves. Her father had been a train driver, but had been disabled in an accident and forcibly retired from his job with a meagre pension, and her mother was suffering from some awful debilitating disease. Sharon avoided visiting them, claiming that the demands of duty meant she was often away. The truth of the matter was that she couldn’t abide being in the company of sick people, even when they were her own family.
But Sharon was a very selfish person, accustomed always to getting her own way. And most of the time she succeeded.
However, just over twelve months later there was to occur an incident that put paid forever to the reckless endangerment that typified Sharon Gregory’s immoral and self-indulgent lifestyle.
It was a Saturday evening towards the end of July and it was hot, unbearably hot. All the windows were open in the Gregorys’ house in Tarhill Road, West Drayton, less than three miles from Heathrow Airport, but it made little difference to the temperature, even though it was now ten o’clock at night. The odour of aircraft kerosene fuel that always seemed to pervade the area was even more pronounced because the humidity prevented it from dispersing.
Outside, the usual crowd of noisy Saturday-night revellers, young men and teenage girls mostly, were passing the house on their way to the pub, or making their way to the garish nightclub a few yards further on, the heavy beat of its sound system polluting the still evening air for miles around.
Sharon Gregory hated the domesticity of housework and was grateful that her job meant that she was rarely at home to do it. Nevertheless, she was pottering about in the kitchen, loading the dishwasher and clearing up after dinner. Because of the heat, her long, honey blonde hair was clipped back into a ponytail and she was wearing nothing but a diaphanous cheesecloth kaftan.
Clifford Gregory yawned, turned off the television and ambled through to the kitchen. ‘I think I’m going to turn in, love. How about you?’
‘I’m just making your cocoa, Cliff. I’ll bring it up when you’re in bed, and I’ll come in with you a bit later on.’ Sharon Gregory wished that her husband wouldn’t call her ‘love’; it was so working class. Even though she was working class herself, she had been trying to shake off that image ever since leaving her birthplace. But Clifford had never used any other form of endearment during their seven years of marriage.
In fact, she often wondered if he noticed her at all. She thought, as she had done over and over again, what a mistake it had been to marry a man fourteen years her senior; a man who had turned out to be a boring accountant whose only interest was watching sport on television and spending hours making his wretched model aeroplanes. There were at least twenty of the damned things hanging from the ceiling in the study and Clifford could identify each one and accurately describe the history of its original.
Clifford and Sharon had met on a short-haul flight from Glasgow to Heathrow, and he had asked her out to dinner that very night. At nineteen years of age, she had been completely besotted by a man she had seen as handsome, mature, sophisticated, attentive and amusing, and over the ensuing months he had wooed her and made love to her repeatedly. And he had been breathtakingly inventive as a lover. But once they were married, a matter of two months later, all that had changed.