A Clean Pair of Hands by Oscar Reynard Read Free Book Online

signsthat Thérèse and George noticed now were of more overt manifestations of eroticism.
    One morning before breakfast, George sat on the comfortable settee in the salon, where the morning sun streamed in through the French doors, and to occupy his time before someone else came downstairs, poured himself a coffee and reached for a pile of magazines on the nearby table. He thought it unusual that his hosts should keep a copy of Playboy so visible when there were three young girls in the house, but having quickly riffled through the pages, admired the photos and read a story about a competition between two women to see how many men they could seduce in one day, he put it down thinking that Thérèse might arrive soon and he didn’t want to embarrass her or have to justify his interest. The next publication he selected was smaller, A5 size, and much more explicit. The banner title on the cover read: ‘We Take on the Hottest Mothers in Your Neighbourhood and Pump Fuck Out of Them.’ Below was a picture of a naked woman, bound and gagged, being worked over by at least three men. George quickly put the magazine back under Playboy, which now seemed on a par with a parish magazine.
    The stairs leading to the bedrooms went up in two flights. The first, of only three or four steps, reached a small landing with the next longer flight to the right. The whole staircase was in light oak with a modern hand rail and base rail with a decorative black-painted metal balustrade. Above and overlooking the landing was a plain wall upon which hung an oil painting. It was about one and a half metres high and about a metre wide. It was modern, though it resembled some darker medieval works, but this was not a portrait of an ancestor. It depicted a naked man hanging by his arms with a black hood covering his head.The centre of the canvas showed his genitals in impressive detail. George had passed the painting several times during his visit, but at no time did he stop and examine it. No doubt propelled by a concern that Thérèse or Charlotte could be in the vicinity, George moved on with the impression that the subject was probably a small man with an unrealistically large penis, or the artist’s sense of perspective was defective.
     
    You can tell a lot about a man by what he reads, and one day that is exactly what George Milton was doing by looking at the books on display in Michel’s beautifully appointed study. It was a spacious room occupying part of a mezzanine next to the salon. The wooden panelling and built-in bookshelves covering the longest wall were in light oak and together with a deep red and blue oriental carpet, which deadened sound, they created a light but pleasantly cosy atmosphere. The large desk carried a digital telephone, and computer that Michel didn’t use. It was Charlotte who managed that. A couple of comfortable, soft, cream leather armchairs provided perfect perches for book browsing.
    Michel and Charlotte were avid readers; a pastime shared by George and Thérèse, who could spend hours immersed in the pleasure of just browsing books, and that is what George was doing now. The books chosen by his autodidact nephew consisted of a large proportion of reference books and travelogues, with politics, history, art and architecture much in evidence. These were accompanied by a carnival of erotica filling a whole section and with several piles of homeless books spread along the front of the deep shelves. A quick glance at the titles revealed ‘A Guide to Female Psychology and Seductibility’. The backcover synopsis described the contents as ‘…metropolitan, knowing, street-smart, very funny, and unrelieved by any notion of romantic love’.
     
    One afternoon after an excellent lunch, an example of the quality that the local traiteur could provide, Michel was sitting chatting with Thérèse about family history when he volunteered a comment indicating that he wasn’t happy spending his life in suburban normality,