THE TIMES 'Fascinating' Books To Look Out For 2025
E-Book, Englisch, 256 Seiten
ISBN: 978-1-80075-468-3
Verlag: Swift Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Stephen May is the author of six novels including Life! Death! Prizes! which was shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award and The Guardian Not The Booker Prize. He has also been shortlisted for the Wales Book of the Year and is a winner of the Media Wales Reader's Prize. He has also written plays, as well as for television and film. He lives in West Yorkshire.
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One
My Darling Pussy Saturday, 25th of September 1920
Chequers, the early hours 1
Frances Stevenson watches as the prime minister removes his things in a hurry. The sturdy tweed jacket, the good walking trousers, the flannel shirt, the thick woollen socks. His vest. His underpants. A sudden hummock of clothing forming on the grubby carpet of this servant’s bedroom. The room is lit by the marmalade glow of a single lamp by the bed, but it’s enough for her to make out the curves and angles of his body and she smiles to herself. Skinny legs supporting a tummy as soft and as rounded as a new-risen loaf, long grey hair swept back from his forehead and ragged at the sides. A closely clipped moustache. Bright eyes in a rosy face. He looks, she thinks, like a hedgerow bird. An amorous sparrow. She feels especially fond of him at moments like this, when he shows his fleshy vulnerability. As he crosses the few feet from the door to the narrow bed, as he pulls back the thin blankets and slides in next to her, the fuzz on his legs tickles. She doesn’t mind. It’s nice. She moves her hands through his sparse chest hair and over the vaguely feminine slopes of his torso, and David Lloyd George whispers in Welsh. Endearments, she supposes. My sweet pet, my thrilling girl, my only one, things like that. She shivers. It’s a draughty room. Chill intimations of autumn. Cold weather comes early for the servant class, she thinks. His own suite will be warm, the blankets soft, thick and plentiful, the remains of a fire in the grate, a cowboy novel on the table by the bed. A glass of whisky. Everything a prime minister could want. She wonders if she’ll ever get to see it. They kiss now and she moves her hand down to the junction of his thighs. Gentle as a nurse, she takes his shy pidyn in her hand. She feels him relax, hears him sigh. Like a man returning home from a long journey. ‘My darling Puss,’ he whispers, in English. ‘My own sweet man,’ she replies. Bolder now, she strokes and squeezes. A few minutes of this and she’ll roll on top of him, move up by inches and finally lower herself on his face, arms crossed and resting against the cool wall as she grinds her doodle, her gwain, against her lover’s nose and mouth. She loves it when his head is trapped between her strong golfer’s thighs. She loves his urgency then, his eagerness to please. Loves the way he works to find the secret places she’s shown him over the seven years they’ve been together. Loves the way his lips and her hips synchronise movements. The way the liquid heat inside her builds. The power is intoxicating. Here he is, David Lloyd George, triumphant wartime leader, the head of the world’s greatest empire, in thrall to her. While David is beneath her he’s not a politician planning or scheming, he’s not a prime minister, he’s just a man. No, not even that – in sex he’s a beast, a handsome animal, her Welsh bull. She likes to get herself almost there and then climb off his face, to kiss her way back down his body, before rolling him on top of her. Once she’s underneath, flattened against the bed by his comforting heft, she’ll guide him in, will urge him on. She likes to touch her button while he heaves and pants above her. The best thing, the very best thing, is to get there just before he does, to grasp him tight around the shoulders, nails digging deep. She loves the way orgasm is pulled from her, the way it makes her gasp against his neck. She loves to feel him twitch in sympathy inside her. That sudden flash of hot fluid, the way he grunts with relief. It’s a sweet thing. A joy. Tonight though, it seems his beloved pidyn is coy, reluctant, doesn’t respond to her careful tenderness. Retreats from her. Hides. ‘Well,’ she says at last. ‘This is disappointing.’ Her lover sighs. ‘I know, cariad, I’m sorry.’ Don’t you cariad me, she thinks. She can’t help it, she’s put out. Cross. They get little enough time for intimacy as it is and it’s dispiriting to not be able to make it count. She’s been looking forward to him arriving in her bedroom for days now, but he’s not been able to get to her flat and now, at Chequers, the staff have insulted her – and, by extension, him – by sticking her in this garret away from the central buzz and bustle of the house, as if she were just another civil servant flunky, just another Liberal Party bag-carrier. She feels a stab of irritation. It’s another of those nights when she realises how peripheral she is to his life. She went into this with her eyes wide open but still, it gets to her sometimes. ‘Never mind. These things are to be expected at your age.’ This is cruel. David Lloyd George is fifty-seven and paranoid enough about losing his vitality, about his energy declining just as he reaches the pinnacle of his political life. He doesn’t need Frances calling attention to it. He sighs again. ‘It’s not that, Puss.’ ‘What is it then?’ She waits, her head on his chest listening to the percussion of his heart. It seems unsteady to her, arrhythmic somehow. Dangerously agitated. She inhales the warm, biscuity smell of him. She feels mean now and she wants to make amends. She kisses a nipple, tries to reassure him that she’s not really annoyed. ‘Just politics,’ he says. ‘Just matters of state. The usual sewage. I don’t feel like getting into it to be honest.’ Another sigh. A long exhalation, a kind of prayer. Now he’s not a man coming home with relief in his heart. Now he is a man worn out, a man at the end of his rope. 2
Just politics. She’s relieved. It could have been worse. So much worse. Could have been another woman. She knows he struggles to behave. Worse than that even would have been the news that he was unmanned by worries about his children or his wife. Things have been difficult since the summer, since his daughter discovered that Frances, her former tutor, the one-time schoolfriend of her sister, was rather more than simply her father’s employee. The way she found out was unfortunate too. It makes her blush to recall it, and David must shudder to think of it too, although he is not the kind of man to dwell on past embarrassments. ‘I wish you’d let me help,’ she says. ‘Things go better when I do. You know it.’ He does know it. This is why he took her with him to the peace conferences after the war. Her official role as private secretary isn’t simply cover for a love affair. She takes it seriously and she’s pretty good at it. Talking through the events of those tough first conferences with her had helped David clarify his thoughts. She likes to think that if it wasn’t for her, Germany might have managed to wriggle out of some of its responsibilities, might have got too easy a ride. She takes some modest credit for helping to midwife the Versailles treaty. She remembers the last French premier, Clemenceau, in Paris. ‘I can see what David likes about you,’ he had said, fierce eyes glowing, luxuriant eyebrows waggling. ‘You are beautiful, yes, but you also have a fine mind. Very fine.’ Which was sweet of him, if not quite right. She knows exactly what David Lloyd George finds appealing about her mind. He appreciates that she’s bright and she’s clear-thinking, but more than that he likes that she’s not intimidatingly smart. For David, Frances’s brain is like her body: nimble, athletic, flexible without being freakish. She won’t disillusion him, so she keeps her intelligence artfully clothed, just as she keeps her wit innocently flirtatious. Frances knows when to merge into the background. Yes, she’d like to be the next Mrs Lloyd George, yes, she’d like a child with him. She’s always been explicit about that. She loves him and women in love want to be married, don’t they? They want to have children with their lovers. That’s normal. But for now, Frances accepts that a public life together is just not possible, and she’d never embarrass him by being too visible. She keeps herself a beautiful secret, her role in his life known by only the right kind of people in the right kind of places. She has worked hard at becoming a perfect mistress and in return has a life she could never have dreamed of when she was a teacher. Good teachers are important, she knows that, but what she has now even the best teachers never have. Impact, influence, not just on a few bored children, but on millions of people. She helps shape the whole damn world. She has clout. How many women can say that? Anyway, she’s only thirty-one. She’s got time. ‘It’s this political fund debacle,’ he says now. ‘Oh, that,’ she says. ‘Yes, that.’ ‘Have there been developments?’ ‘Maybe.’ She waits. She’ll let him gather his thoughts. He hates being disrupted mid-contemplation, it can make him irritable, can even destroy his mood entirely. Thing with David is that a mistimed interruption can lead to him flouncing off back to his own room. David Lloyd George likes to express himself fully, likes to speak in proper paragraphs, ones with complete sentences that themselves contain multiple subordinate clauses. David Lloyd George is not a man to ration his words. His talk now is a river, a subdued but steady flow. A plangent retelling of the incompetence of his friends and the skulduggery of his enemies. The bald fact is that They plan to ruin him. They plan to give details of exactly how much an honour costs. The...
