“And your mom?”

  “Ah, that’s a story for another drink.”

  “So set ‘em up, Bed,” she grins at me, tipping the rest of the tequila down her throat then licking her lips.

  The challenge in her gaze suggests she knows exactly how hot she looks doing that.

  I like a woman with confidence, but I have a feeling that given half a chance, this woman will make me burn.

  “So, what’s your name, beautiful?”

  “Oh ‘beautiful’ will be fine, Bedford. But I also answer to Miranda.”

  “Oh brave new world that has such people in it!”

  “Really? You’re quoting The Tempest at me? Yeah, like I’ve never heard that before,” she says, rolling her eyes.

  “Sorry, English major.”

  “TS Eliot said that Hamlet was ‘an artistic failure’ and ‘never has a man turned so little knowledge to such great account’.”

  “From a man who wrote The Wasteland; the most depressing poem in the English language.”

  “Don’t know it, but I’ve seen I Am Legend. That was one depressing movie.”

  “I hate it when the dog gets bit.”

  “Oh God, me too!”

  She downs another shot and wipes her arm across her mouth again, this time smearing her lip gloss. It’s sexy and kind of slutty. I think I’m in love.

  “So, what’s an English graduate doing working in a bar? You did graduate, right?”

  “Yep, seven years ago now. But I like working here… And what better place to hear amazing stories while I’m working on writing my first book.”

  “Yeah? How’s that going for ya?”

  “Better now,” I wink at her.

  “I’d roll my eyes again but they’d probably drop out of my sockets,” she smirks. “I hope your book has better lines than the cheese you’re serving. That last line definitely had a whiff of Gouda, and as for the wink, I’m thinking stinky Missouri Bossa.”

  “You know your cheeses, oh ye of little faith.”

  She lifts one shoulder. “That’s nothing to do with faith—just experience.”

  I top up her water glass, toss in a slice of lime, then have to leave her to serve other customers.

  I’m kind of thinking that she might throw a couple of twenties on the bar and leave, so I’m relieved when she hikes up her pencil skirt to sit on a barstool, kicking off her heels and swinging her legs like a little kid.

  I’m not the only one who notices, and a weasel-faced college guy sidles up to her, his eyes flicking between her cleavage and her legs.

  “Did we go to school together? I could swear we had chemistry.”

  I cringe on his behalf, but the dude is completely oblivious to the shit that’s coming out of the wrong orifice.

  She flicks her wrist at him, like she’s waving away an annoying fly. The loser tries again.

  “It’s a good thing I have my library card, because I am totally checking you out.”

  “Oh my God, so not interested,” she sighs.

  “Ah, come on! What’s your favorite drink? I’m asking so I know what to buy you on our first date.”

  This time she turns to face him, cocking her head on one side, her nose scrunching as if she’s examining a cockroach.

  “You’re not the stupidest person on the planet, but you sure better hope he doesn’t die soon.”

  I hide a laugh behind a coughing fit but the dude is still working out what she just said. His gaze darkens when he gets it.

  “Bitch!” he spits out, and when I think he might say something else, so I stride down the bar, standing in front of him, a warning written in my angry gaze.

  He mutters something under his breath and scurries away.

  Miranda’s expression is sad.

  “Why do men do that?” she asks, her voice low. “Why can’t they just take ‘no’ for an answer? Why do they have to turn mean?”

  “Not all guys are like that,” I say. “I’m really great at being turned down. At least I think I would be if it ever happened.”

  She gives me a wry smile, which is what I’d been aiming for.

  “You’re a funny guy, Bed. Modest, too.”

  “Funny ha ha, or funny peculiar? Wait, don’t answer that. I couldn’t handle being shot down like weasel-face over there.”

  She gives a throaty laugh, dark and smoky, part molasses, part honey, and hella sexy.

  Then her smile fades. “Guys like him think the world owes them.”

  “Hey, he’s a loser, don’t let him get to you.”

  “It’s not him, just … all of you,” she says, her eyes lifting to mine.

  “Including me?”

  “Especially you.”

  “Wow, it usually takes people at least ten minutes to detest me.”

  “Are you saying you’re different?” she asks, her voice serious.

  A slick answer hovers on my tongue, but I bite it back.

  “No, I guess I’m not that different. You’re a beautiful woman and I’m attracted, but I hope I’d never bully or belittle a woman. I really can take no for an answer, Miranda.”

  Her eyes focus on mine, a small frown of concentration pulling her eyebrows together.

  “What do you want out of life, Bed?”

  “I want to write.”

  “Just write?”

  “No, I want to write the Great American Novel.”

  “Like Catcher in the Rye?”

  “Well, yeah. But hopefully write more than one great book.”

  “So? What’s stopping you?”

  “Talent, mostly.”

  She laughs out loud.

  “Really? Are you being modest again?”

  “Honest, mostly. I can write—I’m just not sure I have anything interesting to say.”

  I shrug, uncomfortable with the direction on the conversation, but not wanting it to end either.

  “Hmm, well, you must have pretty good material working in a bar an’ all. Why not start there?”

  “It’s definitely crossed my mind,” I admit. I lean forward, resting my forearms on the polished mahogany. “So, what’s your story?”

  “Are you going to include it in your book?”

  “I might.”

  She sits up straight. “Okay then, but I’m going to need another shot.”

  “Just a single—I want to hear the beginning, the middle and the end.”

  She grins. “You got it. But you’re going to need one for yourself, too. Are you ready?”

  I pour myself a shot and raise it up.

  “I’m ready.”

  We clink glasses and down the tequila.

  Her hazel eyes glitter and a slow smile spreads across her face.

  “Once upon a time, there was a girl who was so pissed at life that she walked into a bar and ordered a double shot of tequila…”

  “I think I’m going to like this story.”

  “I think you will.”

  You know what they say about great novels having a great opening line? Mine was going to start like this:

  A beautiful woman stormed into my bar, ordered a double shot of tequila and slammed it in one go. I just knew she had a great story to tell.

  THE END

  (or maybe THE BEGINNING)

  JULY

  Call Me Mrs Mellors

  I am old, but when I was young, they wrote books about us and scandalous newspaper articles; we were haunted and hunted, reviled and vilified, and now it’s happening all over again. But this time I do not have my husband beside me, my friend, my lover.

  We were the scourge of society, the beginning of the Apocalypse, the end of the old world as we knew – the exaggerations and embellishments knew no bounds. And maybe in some ways they were right. But didn’t they realise that the world had already changed? Didn’t they realise that? Not even after the slaughter of millions of young men in that terrible, terrible war that they called Great: the Great War? Didn’t they realise then that the world had changed? That the world had to change?

  But the wheel turned, and twenty years after the first one, there was another World War. It seemed to me then that a little good might come out of the carnage. Rosie the Riveter was a marvel – a woman wielding a rivet gun, invading men’s territory, doing her bit for her country.

  But then came the 1950s, and women were shuffled back into our little boxes. Only stifling roles were allowed for women; men wanted us barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen, sexuality exorcised from dreams and desires; and all for the moral vacuum of a society that deemed half its population as lesser, and expected them only to reproduce: to be wives and mothers. In that order.

  America has softened my vowels, and my cut-glass accent is less polished. But perhaps only to myself do I sound different.

  I don’t want to be sitting here with this journalist. I resent her intrusion into my private life, my very private life, but perhaps that is the price of a lie that has lasted more than thirty years.

  And perhaps it is time to put the record straight with this new decade of 1960, to answer all those tedious questions, to refute all those vile allegations. What I did was bad enough, but the way they crucified me – there are few people in this troubled world who deserve that.

  So when you tell me that the world is changing again, I will say, but not enough. Not nearly enough.

  I gaze at the young woman in front of me for so long that she begins to redden. I know what it’s like to be stared at, to hear the whispered comments, or not so whispered: the words that are aimed with the precision of a scalpel and the speed of an arrow to cut, to wound, to hurt and drive away.

  Malice can be hidden in the pillars of the community. I know what they think in their heart of hearts. Even here in the New World, even in America.

  Miss Betty Roberts clears her throat nervously as my eyes travel over her.

  She’s wearing a lime green knitted shift dress with tan-and-white co-respondent’s shoes – fashionable again – and she carries an enormous orange purse. Her hair is long and shiny and natural, and she has a flower in her hair. Not a bow, not a ribbon, but a flower – I don’t know what kind, a daisy perhaps. My husband would have known. Such bright colours. He would have liked them. I think he would have liked her.

  Miss Roberts pulls a shorthand notebook out of the voluminous purse, her pencil poised.

  “If I may ask you a few questions, your ladyship.”

  I shake my head.

  “No, Miss Roberts, that is not how we will start. You may call me Mrs Mellors.”

  Oliver would have smiled quietly at my tone: it’s the one reserved for recalcitrant tradespeople and lawyers. Especially lawyers.

  “My name is Mrs Mellors.”

  “Excuse me, I apologise,” she says quickly, worried that her ‘scoop’ as they call it, will escort her to the door.

  I won’t. I’ve waited a long time to say this, and now I have this young woman journalist sitting on my sundeck, a glass of iced tea in front of her.

  “Where would you like to start?” she asks.

  This makes me smile because she’s already realised that I won’t be led or bullied; I will speak at my own speed, saying only the things I want to say.

  “I had been married a number of years when I met Mr Mellors. He disliked me on sight, but our attraction was physical from the start.”

  She blinks rapidly and takes a long cooling drink of tea.

  “My husband was impotent, you see, a casualty of the Great War; but it was the mental impotence that created the most distance between us. He became a successful writer, an essayist, but only so he could gaze on the world from his lofty perch and never lower himself to become part of it. I was 23 when we married. We had a month of honeymoon, then he was off to the War. And he never touched me again.”

  I am long past being hurt my husband’s indifference; in fact, I feel only pity for what he became, a whiny child with a large bank account.

  “I longed for human contact, I longed to meet a man of passion, not the pasty playwrights and insipid intellectuals that crossed my path. And then, one day, as I wandered through the woods on my husband’s estate, I met Mellors. That’s what I called him then. We despised each other on sight. He was rude and curt and abrasive. But there was also what the lady novelists would call ‘an animal attraction’. He was my husband’s gamekeeper – so graceful, so animalistic, so alive.

  “We met several more times, always by accident, but perhaps not. And each time, he kept his distance, spurning my interest with disparaging comments about our differing situations in life: me, the lady of the manor, he the humble gamekeeper. Except he wasn’t humble: he was proud, the best kind of proud. But he couldn’t deny the attraction growing between us, and I had never wanted to deny it. We fell to the forest floor and he took me there. I had never seen such a powerful male member, such a virile body. And where we fell, we rutted like the deer we frightened with our primordial grunts.”

  Lost in the memories of time, I glance up at the young journalist, amused to find that her face is bright red.

  “Miss Roberts, are you quite well?”

  “I’m fine, thank you, ma’am. Gee, it’s awfully hot today.”

  I cock my head on one side as I watch her.

  “Do I shock you, Miss Roberts? Do you think it’s wrong of me to talk about sex at my great age? But then again, the young always think that they invent sex, each generation the same. Ever was it thus.”

  Her flushed gaze meets mine.

  “To tell you the truth, your ladysh— Mrs Mellors – it is a little shocking, but it shouldn’t be, should it? You were both consenting adults. And your husband couldn’t, well, he couldn’t…”

  “Hmm, does that make it right? I wonder. Will it make a difference if I tell you that Mellors was a married man? Oh dear, now I have shocked you. Well, he had his wife had been separated for a long time, but even so, back in 1922, it certainly was thought very shocking. But Mellors and I, we connected both physically and spiritually. Lying on that forest floor, with twigs digging into my back and leaves in my hair, my petticoats around my waist, his male juices flowing down my thigh, I experienced the unearthly pleasure of orgasm – simultaneous orgasm. I believed then, as I do now, that our connection was profound and everlasting.

  “Of course, eventually, I realised that I was with child. Mellors had initiated divorce proceedings against his wife, but even though they’d been long separated, she was angry and vengeful. The appalling things she said about him and about me. I couldn’t keep it from Clifford, my husband, and nor did I want to. But he refused to divorce me.”

  “But why? When the child wasn’t his own?”

  “There are several reasons: control, revenge perhaps, but he also wanted a child to continue his line – even a bastard child would do – but I would have had to give up Mellors utterly, and I simply couldn’t do it. I wouldn’t.”

  Miss Roberts’ eyes are as large as the gobstoppers I see the local children stuffing into their mouths.

  “What happened to the baby?” she asks, her pencil forgotten in her hand.

  “My eldest son, Arthur was born the following Autumn. He took his father’s name, even though we were not living together at that time. You see, in the eyes of the law, the child belonged to my husband, and he persisted in his refusal to divorce me. He had become bitter and spiteful, and he would not give me anything that could constitute my happiness. I was angry then, but years have leant me understanding.

  “He was humiliated, of course. All of society was talking about us. It was simply such wonderful gossip. Wonderful to them; beyond painful those of us at its heart. I couldn’t even be with the man I loved. Mellors had taken a job on a farm, and I was living with my sister. I could only see my lover in secrecy. The strain was awful. When I became pregnant with our second child, we decided that we could not live apart any longer. Even though Clifford had not granted me a divorce, we decided to run away – a new life in a new country. It was a great risk, because Clifford could have had me arrested for kidnapping ‘his’ child. Mellors and I travelled to Liverpool where we bought a passage with third class tickets on a liner to New York. It was an awful crossing, and we all suffered from seasickness.”

  I close my eyes, remembering that terrible time, the dank little cabin, the pitching and rolling of the ship during storms, the smell of vomit and urine.

  “Finally, we emerged like moles into a bright Spring morning in the great city of New York. But even then, we didn’t feel free. We kept to ourselves and we kept moving from one small town to another, never settling for long, always afraid that someone from my past would recognise us. I had a little money from my parents, and eventually we were able to buy a small farm just outside Fayetteville. It was hard work, but we were happy to be together at last. We finally felt like we could breathe. Our third son, William was born a year later. We felt blessed. By then, I was calling myself ‘Mrs Mellors’ even though we were not married, and and no one was any the wiser.

  “But then that dreadful little coalminer’s son from Nottinghamshire, Mr David Herbert Lawrence, wrote a book about us and he called it Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Clifford was livid and determined to hunt me down and reclaim ‘his’ son. Suddenly the scandal was alive again and on everybody’s lips. We were forced to move – the vast unkindness of strangers – until exhausted, we settled here. Where we have truly put down roots.”

  Miss Roberts stares at me open-mouthed, a mixture of pity and just a touch of scandalised admiration.

  “That’s an incredible story, Mrs Mellors. Wow! I can’t even imagine … wow!”

  She realises that she’s babbling and takes a moment to compose herself.

  “So how do you feel about the court case now that Penguin Publishers have reprinted the book after more than thirty years and it’s being read everywhere?”

  “I have forgiven Mr Lawrence for writing it,” I say, slowly and honestly. “Because even though he wrote without our permission, without even speaking or writing to us, he wrote about the beauty of our love, the dark and unyielding passion that we shared.” I meet her gaze. “He wrote the truth.”

  “People are pretty divided about it,” Betty says carefully, “the book, I mean.”