Five Winters(18)

“Er, I don’t think you should be looking at that, Emily,” I said, lunging for it.

Emily looked at me disdainfully. “It’s only about making babies,” she said. “I know all about that already.”

“Well, I’m not sure the pictures in that book are really suitable for someone of your age. I think Milo’s owners must have left it out by accident.”

I put the book on a high shelf, out of her reach. “Look, I’ll just help Olivia to feed Milo, and then we can go home, okay?”

Emily flopped down onto the sofa as if the boredom of it all might actually kill her, and I made my way to the kitchen, where I found Milo finishing off something that looked suspiciously like sirloin steak.

“Olivia!” I squealed. “Where did you get that from?”

“The fridge,” she said, her eyes instantly filling with tears because I’d shouted at her.

The packaging was still on the floor. It was sirloin steak. Shit.

Milo was licking his lips ecstatically. Emily came to look. It was the first time she’d smiled since I’d collected her from school.

“Well done, Liv,” she said.

A tear dripped down Olivia’s cheek. I sighed. “Never mind,” I told her wearily. “Just so you know for another time, Milo’s food is kept in this cupboard here, okay? Anything in the fridge is for his mum and dad to eat.”

“His mum and dad are dogs,” Emily informed me scathingly, the smile vanishing from her face.

Quickly I scrawled an apology for Milo’s owners and left it with some money on the kitchen table. Then we set off for home.

Jaimie laughed when he heard about it all later.

“It wasn’t funny,” I told him. “It was awful. There were all these men with impassive faces shafting equally impassive women. And who knows whether they had anything else for their tea?”

“You mean the impassively shafting men and women?”

I gave his arm a whack. “No! Milo’s owners. Oh God, it’s so embarrassing! I moved the book, so they’ll know we were looking at it. I just hope I don’t run into them for a while.”

“Emily has a point, though, doesn’t she?” Jaimie said. “She does already know about making babies. Harriet and I told them both all about it when they were young. And they’ve been brought up to be relaxed about nudity.” He chucked my chin, kissing me on the lips. “She wasn’t embarrassed; you were.”

When I had made the decision to give up my job and move to Ely to be with Jaimie, I had decided to embrace my new life, heart and soul, which meant becoming a vegetarian, since Jaimie and his girls were vegetarian. Well, almost vegetarian. I did indulge in the occasional sneaky bacon sandwich during my lunch breaks and meat fests whenever I went back to London to visit Rosie. My move had also meant embracing naturism, although I didn’t really think you could call my approach to naturism an embrace. It was more like one of those awkward greetings when you go in for a kiss on the cheek and the recipient thinks you’re going in for a double, but you’ve already pulled back. Me and naturism were a bit like that. I had got better at it—I didn’t feel abject terror at the thought of stripping down in front of strangers the way I had at first. I just still didn’t understand the point of it.

Naturism made Jaimie feel liberated. It just made me feel self-conscious. I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted to be sitting around having friendly drinks with people I didn’t know and may not have anything in common with anyway, let alone without any clothes on. Jaimie said you forgot about the no-clothes issue after a while, but then, if you forgot about it, what was the point? I’d rather have been cosy in a pair of dog-walking trackie bottoms or stylish in a button-through dress with a full, swingy hemline.

The only time I really enjoyed being naked was when we went on holiday to Greece, and that was because of the naked swimming. And despite Jaimie’s attempts to make me out as some kind of prude, I had swum naked before I met him. Rosie and I had often done it when we’d been on holiday somewhere hot, slipping down to the sea after dark. Only we’d called it skinny-dipping, and we’d done it for the luxury of the warm water on our bodies, not to parade our nakedness to all and sundry.

Jaimie pulled a fiver from his wallet. “Here,” he said. “Here’s your five pounds, although I imagine Olivia is the dog’s best friend now.”

I batted the five-pound note back in his direction, and he laid it down on the table. “Well, I doubt if Milo’s owners are. I only hope they had something else to cook for their dinner tonight.”

“Maybe they got fish and chips instead of cooking and had more time to try out positions from the Kama Sutra,” Jaimie suggested. “What were they doing in the illustrations you saw? This?” So saying, he flipped me over the arm of the chair and pretended to hump me from behind. “Or this?”

Laughing, I turned to see him attempting to balance on one leg with his back arched and an impassive expression on his face as he pretend thrusted.

“Careful,” I said. “You’ll fall over.”

The girls were fast asleep in bed. Very soon, Jaimie and I were making love on the sofa, the floor, and anywhere else we felt like, inventing Kama Sutra positions and giggling until desire took us over and we brought things to a sweaty, passionate conclusion.