Transgressions by Sarah Dunant Read Free Book Online

was so anonymous, and how the women’s passivity took on a power of its own. For a while they used them a lot, relying on them as a kind of—what was the marketing phrase?—“sex aid.”
    Then she started to find herself coming back to them when she was alone in the house working. She discovered that she liked the fantasy even more when she didn’t have to incorporate a real lover into it. So what? she had thought at the time. It wasn’t as if the sex in them was particularly violent or damaging, more that it was so, well, so divorced from real life. The more she used them the easier she found it to have orgasms with them, to orchestrate and control the pace and flow of her pleasure. Until, in the end, she got a little scared of how good and how alone they were making her feel.
    By a kind of mutual consent she and Tom had stopped using the magazines so much and after a while she had packed them away in a box under the bed; like the classic suburban couple, she had thought at the time, imagining their children coming upon them one afternoon when they were out, trying to square these pictures of explicit, exploitative sex with the image of their cozy, long-married parents. But neither the marriage nor the children were to be, and when she looked for the box during that brief reawakening of sexual interest a couple of months after Tom had moved out, she found to her annoyance that he had taken the magazines with him. Their absence angered her—specifically, of course, because she knew that she could never ask for them back.
    She stood in the shower, feeling the water run down her body, wondering just how much she would really like to have them again. Enough to go into a shop in Soho and flick through the magazine shelves, then present her selection at the desk, a big grin on her face? No, maybe not. She was laughing at the very thought of her embarrassment when she heard the doorbell ring two stories below. Damn. Chances were that by the time she got out and made herself decent enough to open it whoever it was would already have gone. She decided to let them ring. The bell went again, longer this time—whoever it was was holding their finger against the button. Eventually it stopped.
    She finished the shower and got out, pulling a new towel from the linen closet and wrapping its fresh warmth around her. She dried her hair and headed toward the bedroom. From the vantage point on the stairs she could see right down into the hall to a large buff-colored envelope lying on the mat.
    She went down to retrieve it. When she picked it up it turned out to be bulky as well as big. She tore open the top and a key fell into her palm. She didn’t need to open the front door to know which lock it fitted. At last Tom had come through. But the gifts didn’t end there. She dug farther in and pulled out a CD wrapped with a scrawled note held in place with a rubber band.
    “Only just found it after I got back from Canada,” it said. “Sorry. No hard feelings. Will this make up for the delay?”
    She slipped the paper off the plastic case. The CD with its image of an American city skyline at night was still in its record-shop wrapping. Above the picture was the name, Van Morrison, and below it the title, A Night in San Francisco.
    She stared at it for a moment, not quite taking it in. So it had been him after all. And this was what? His way of making a joke out of it? “No hard feelings.” It was incredible.
    Or maybe not. Maybe the “no hard feelings” wasn’t a reference to the CD at all, but only to the key and how long she’d had to wait. Could that be it? Could the music be just a present? Except Tom didn’t know one end of Van Morrison’s work from another. To pick this one from the ten or fifteen CDs available couldn’t possibly be coincidence. It had to be a statement. But if he had taken it from her, then why bother to buy it again new? Presumably in order to keep the message ambiguous. So when would she get the other