She could not quite remember, and she wanted to. She recalled feeling shock, which had distracted her from the sensation, and then her anger at finding out he was married had superseded the significance of his prying thumb. But the thumb was still there, lurking in the less browsed pages of her mental back-catalogue. And, for good or ill, the page lay open now, demanding detailed perusal.
Had it hurt a little? She cast her net again and again over that fragment of her sexual past, but it would not be captured. Had it not hurt at all? Had it, in fact, felt good? Could it feel good? Why did she want to know?
It was the very shockingness of it that appealed to her now. There was something so elementally rude about the notion of a thumb in one's bum; it was certainly not something she would have told her husband. Or was it?
She wondered if he would like to try it – just to assuage curiosity, of course. It wasn't as if she really wanted to. It would just . . . scratch that nervous itch. There was no way she was going to broach the subject with him, though, so she tried to shelve it.
She tried very hard to shelve it. She really did.
But that thumb would not stay where it was put; it broke the surface of her consciousness like an obscene jack-in-the-box a dozen times a day. She could be on the phone, or pruning a bush, or brushing her teeth, and the snippet of filled-pussy-and-thumbed-arse would flash into her brain, causing her to gag on the toothpaste or prick her finger or cut off the call accidentally. It was no good. She had to get it out of her system.
On sex nights (Wednesday, Friday, Saturday), Mrs Ross started wearing an abbreviated satin slip, bending over at every opportunity to show off a portion of cheeky cheek beneath the lace before events got into their full swing. She incorporated a heavy sway into her walk up the stairs, making sure she was in front of her husband, who would get an interesting view of her.
When this did not seem to shift his traditional focus, she began positioning herself unusually on the bed – instead of lying down on her back, she took to rolling over, tucking a leg against her stomach so that her posterior was tautened and her lips opened temptingly.
'I can't get at you from there, love,' reproved her husband.
She pouted. 'Of course you can.'
'But I want to see your face.'
'Oh.'
There was the rub. He always wanted that slow, sensual, full-eye-contact type of lovemaking, when what she wanted was something earthy and rough that didn't go with champagne and light soul music on the stereo.
'Wouldn't you like to try something different?' she asked, several weeks into this regime of unsatisfying romance.
'Different? I'm not up for wife-swapping, if that's what you're driving at,' he said jokingly, giving her hair a little stroke. She yanked her head away, uncharacteristically.
'Don't be daft. Just . . . a new position or something.' She hesitated to say anything as coarse as 'doggy-style' and settled on: 'From behind, for instance.'
'Oh, Lynnie, I have too much respect for you. You're my princess, and princesses don't get treated like that. Princesses deserve lots of spoiling and stroking.'
And he proceeded to spoil and stroke until Mrs Ross had to restrain herself from hitting him.
She found herself straying to the scruffier end of town on her shopping trips, pausing in front of the window of 'Desirez', a place she had signed a petition against eight years ago. Behind the scratched perspex window were mannequins clad in shiny black miniskirts and fishnet vests, one of them dangling a pair of pink feather-lined handcuffs from a wrist.
Could she go in? She looked around nervously. Somebody she knew might be near, though there was little here to interest her fellow PTA members, unless they had secret tastes for pound-shop tat and sordid sex. Which was possible, she supposed. She laughed at herself and made a bolt for the safety of Waitrose.
'Check the booty on that!' crowed her teenage son to his friends one Saturday afternoon in front of MTV. A selection of amply reared young women shook their sheeny cheeks in skimpy thongs and stack heels.
'That girl has got a handful!' One of the group cried out.
'Boys!' remonstrated Mr Ross.
'They have got lovely bottoms,' conceded Mrs Ross, with a meaningful look at her husband. 'You can't expect a boy not to appreciate them. That's what they're for.'
Mr Ross coughed and said something about the car engine needing tuning.
Mrs Ross said she'd forgotten the mayonnaise and needed to pop out to Waitrose.
Could she? Would she? No, it was ludicrous. After all, what was actually in there? There might be CCTV. She might find her pixellated image all over the local press. But that was silly. 'Respectable Married Woman in Sex Shop Scandal' had never been a headline, as far as she remembered. All the same . . .
Her hand was on the scuffed paintwork of the door, just below the 'Strictly Over 18s Only' sign. She took it away. She put it back. She took it away. She put it back and the door suddenly swung inwards, causing her to stumble against the person behind it.
'I'm so sorry,' they chorused in unison, then they looked up.
'Is it . . . Lynnie?'