Page 38 of Has Anyone Seen My Sex Life?
I smile. And that he did. ‘He probably would have skulked back anyway but thank you for pushing him in the right direction.’ Ro returns the smile and gets up to pour me more nettle tea and offer vegan biscuits (both tasting a little leafy) as she adjusts my ballooned ankle on a Peruvian woven footstool. I wince slightly. She then grabs a couple of sketchbooks and sits down next to me.
‘I need to show you something too.’
She starts opening them and leafing through the pages.
‘A couple of summers ago, remember when you went down to London to spend time with your sisters? Danny enrolled in one of my drawing classes at The Brewery.’
She opens the sketchbooks. It’s all charcoal, blurry and smudged, but there’s a theme: naked people. I feel my eyes have seen far too much in the past week, like I need to cleanse them with holy water. That said the sketches aren’t as graphic as the ones he’s shown me but definitely reveal talent, a real eye for the human form. I flick through the book and suddenly realise something.
‘So you guys knew about Captain Mintcake?’
She makes a face and nods. I feel strangely embarrassed.
‘From an artist’s perspective, of course. Not like some weird perverse orgy angle. He’d show me the drawings and ask me for advice. I told him to put them online. I was stoked he kept at it. I just saw it as erotic art. I thought you knew though. I really did.’
I blush because the revelation was not the fact he drew other people’s bits and bobs but the fact he didn’t share this with me at all. He opened up to his mates and they’d studied the quality by which he’d shade in someone’s foreskin but, from me, it was a guilty secret.
‘I didn’t know. And I’ll be honest Ro, it’s making me feel a little crappy.’
‘Why?’
‘I think it’s the secrecy. It’s just a jolt to reality; what it says about our sex life, our marriage, my body.’
She embraces me and then holds my shoulders, head cocked to one side.
‘My love, don’t read too much in it. You know Danny, he keeps to himself.’
‘But I’m his wife.’
She doesn’t have to say anything. Her look says enough. He should have told you.
‘But try not to internalise this, sweets,’ she says in return. ‘I think this is just a journey of expression for Danny. These pictures just feel like him. At school, he was never out of the art room. He was always sketching. It broke my heart he went to that sodding paper mill.’
I pause for a moment. It’s not escaped my attention that this hobby is a manifestation of repressed professional desires too. I’d been there when Danny had been asked to give up his cool London graphic design job to take over the mill. His dad was wired up to machines, an unsavoury grey pallor about him. Think about all those people we’ve known for years who would lose their jobs, he was told. It was emotional blackmail at its worst. But I always knew he’d take over the business, not because he had a thing for stationery but because he had heart, he was driven by his unwavering love for others over himself and that made me love him all the more.
‘You don’t think it’s too much though? All the sexual pictures?’
Ro shakes her head very slowly.
‘It’s the human form, lovely. It’s all very placid imagery too. Trust me I’m an artist, I’ve seen the whole spectrum of where this can go…’ She stands up and picks a book calledErotica Mastersfrom the bookshelf, turning to the page of a woman giving herself head. I’m pretty sure such contortionism would require the removal of a few ribs and her tongue would need to have the ability of corkscrew, but I study the picture with new eyes. Sure enough, Danny’s work doesn’t veer into surrealism or the sexually violent or kinky.
‘Honey, there’s a difference too between erotic art and pornography. To me, a lot of Danny’s images are not meant to arouse. They are born of appreciation, observation. They’re actually quite tame. I knew someone once who was into vomit.’
Ro sits there very calmly as she says this, almost as if she’s telling me an item on her shopping list. She reads my lax jaw.
‘His name was Gustav. He was Latvian and a fetishist. There were all sorts of rubber and adornments involved.’ I realise Ro has just burst a bubble.
‘But I thought you and Ru…’ For the longest time I’d always assumed they were childhood sweethearts skipping through cornfields, who’d bestowed each other’s hearts to one another from year dot.
Ro smiles broadly. ‘We went to university, we went on breaks. It was necessary when you’re young and full of sexual curiosity. I spent that year in Berlin where I got all my piercings and almost lost all my hair from the number of times I bleached it. We both experimented sexually. Ru was very into men at one point. I thought I lost him to the other side. Went out with a gorgeous Liverpudlian called Greg.’
I love how matter of fact she is about everything. Ro sips her tea looking out the window as Ru entertains the children in one of the large fields outside. Despite all those distractions, they got their curiosities sated, they had their fun, and there was a point where they gravitated back together and carried on having that conversation, building that intimacy into marriage and beyond. It’s a modern-day love story. That includes a vomiting Latvian. ‘But now, do you go there…do you still experiment?’ I ask.
Ro seems surprised. ‘Lovely, sex is a constant experiment, no? Finding those positions and things that someone likes. It’s a work in progress. Sometimes I feel intensely connected to Ru on so many levels. Other times, I’m lying there wondering how we’ve spent twenty years together and he’s still working out where my clitoris is.’
I choke on my tea. It could actually be a bit of nettle.
‘We tried tantric for a while, sex outdoors. Ru had a thing for feet at one point. It comes and goes in waves, the foot thing actually.’
