The Accidental Woman Read Free

glad to be going to Oxford next year, it seemed to her as good a thing to do next year as any. On the other hand there was no reason to suppose that she would enjoy being at Oxford, any more than she enjoyed being at school, and Maria was opposed to the idea of being pleased or excited without reason. So how to break the news to her mother and father, in a manner which would not upset or annoy them?
    At this point a cat wandered into her bedroom (it was all go in this household, as you can see). This creature, a small brown and white tabby called Sefton, was only two years old but had a bearing and a philosophy of life which belied his age. Maria genuinely loved him, with a love founded, as it should be, on a profound respect. Sefton seemed to her to have got life sorted out, from top to bottom. The goals of his existence were few, and all admirable: to feed himself, to keep himself clean, and above all to sleep. Maria sometimes believed that she too might be happy, if only she were allowed to confine herself to these three spheres of endeavour. Also, she admired Sefton’s attitude towards physical affection. He was for it, from all comers. Perfect strangers had only to stop, to stoop down and to offer him the simplest caress between the ears, and then for a few minutes they would be all over each other, stroking and fondling and rubbing like two young lovers out on the golf course in the throes of pubescent rapture. This was to Maria a source of great envy. Not that she would have liked to be stroked and fondled and rubbed by perfect strangers, of course not. Exactly. What she envied was the fact that Sefton could indulge in this delightful intimacy safe in the knowledge that the pleasure taken in it by himself and his partner was entirely innocent, unless by some misfortune it turned out to be someone of bestial tendencies, and that had never happened to him yet. Not so with Maria. She had, let’s not be shy about this, had physical contact with men, or rather boys, before now, although only two, admittedly, on anything like a sustained basis. For she was not averse, at this stage, to the odd kiss, or the odd cuddle, or the occasional orgasm. But more and more she began to see the sexual cravings of the human race, including her own, as the symptom of a far greater craving, a terrible loneliness, an urge for self-forgetfulness which, so the story went, could only be attained in that peculiar private act which tends to take place upstairs, between consenting adults, and with the curtains drawn. She would not have minded touching Ronny, for instance, huddling together on the back seat of the bus, entering preciously for a moment into a shared world, were it not that she suspected his hands would shortly start moving towards her breasts, or diving between her thighs, making with killer instinct for those parts of her which boys always seemed to find so inexplicably interesting. Yes, she would have been partial to men, perhaps she might even have confined herself to one man in particular, if only she had been able to find one who shared her view that intimacy between two people was of value irrespective of whether it led to sticky conflux. But these problems did not exist, you see, for Sefton, and not only in his dealings with men and women, but also in his dealings with other cats, for he had been thoughtfully neutered, at an early age.
    Maria envied Sefton on three counts. The third was this, that nobody ever expected him to take the slightest interest or satisfaction in human affairs. Thus he was at liberty to parade a breathtaking and perfectly legitimate indifference. Just watching him did Maria a power of good, in this respect. He patently didn’t give a toss about the family’s welfare, except when it affected his own. He was totally self-absorbed, and yet totally unselfish, a condition which Maria knew, already to her great sadness, to be quite unavailable to her. It made him nevertheless her favourite confidant. She