Think Twice Before You Slice.

Charlie Simpson was the best boyfriend I ever had. Sometimes I wish I didn't do what I did to him, as he would still be a-shagging me now. But a girl has to do what a girl has to do, as my old ma used to say. I hope that when you have followed my narrative with a sympathetic heart, you will agree that I had no choice at the time.

I met Charlie on board the ocean liner Dolphin in the summer of 34, when we were both on our way from New York to Southampton. I was dining alone when this handsome blond man in a white suit, with a panama hat under his arm, asked me if he could have the honour of sitting opposite me for the duration of the meal. It was a fateful moment for both of us. How could I have said no?

The truth is that I was recovering from being jilted by that appalling cad Cedric Mainweather a month or two before, and, after having had him shot by friends of my uncle Reno, was in the throes of a necessary period of self-indulgent melancholy, which I imagined a long sea voyage tossing on the Atlantic waves would serve to drain out of my system like a bad dose of influenza.

"You have the most beautiful eyes," said Charlie, after we had shared an oyster or two by way of hors d'oevres.

Well, no one had spoken to me in quite that way before. My eyes are indeed a fetching shade of dove grey, fringed into the bargain by the longest eyelashes to be found outside the gazelle kingdom, but such, to that point at least, had been my opinion alone. To hear my ocular beauty ratified by a second party, especially by a strapping Anglo-Saxon in an impeccable linen suit, had the same effect on me as a lighted match on a keg of gunpowder.

Soon we were sucking spaghetti together and exchanging bon mots like two ducks on a moat in the mating season, and so it was no surprise to either of us when we ended up in my state room, shagging the proverbial monkeys' bottoms out of each other as if there was no tomorrow.

There are men in bed and men in bed, but then there was Charlie O'Sullivan. If he was a revolver he would have been a repeater; if he had been a machine gun the word "Gattling" would spring to mind. Suffice it to say that, as dawn scratched at the porthole with its bleary finger, I was feeling as screwed as the Turin tunnel on the first day of its excavation.

By the time we reached Southampton we were inseparable. No two limpets on the hull of the Dolphin were stuck together more limpet-like than we. In fact the ship's surgeon had to separate us at the waist before we could disembark; and within a week of landing we were husband and wife and honeymooning at the Dorchester hotel.

For a month we hardly left the room, much to the annoyance of the chambermaids, who several times called the emergency services under the mistaken impression that we had died without telling anyone. Well, we were in heaven all right, but that was as far as it went.

Ladies, why is it that such idylls never last? Why does the bluebird that lands on your shoulder end up excrementalising on your head? It is as if men have only a certain quota of passionate nights reserved for one woman, upon the exhaustion of which, like rogue bull elephants, they feel a compulsion to roam off in search of pastures new. How does one keep them in check?

We purchased a small cottage near Leicester Square and looked ahead to a dreamlike marriage, consisting of evenings entangled round each other on the sofa, of gardening among the butterflies, and of more shags than you'd find in a shag-pile carpet factory. Alas, illusion rears its pretty head even in paradise, and I, at least, was to be deceived.

After two months at Misericordia Cottage, I began to detect signs of restlessness in my beloved Charlie. There was the way he would scrape his head up against the wall until sections of his scalp fell off, and gnash his teeth so violently that he had to go to the dentist three times a week. There was his new hobby of shooting children in the High Street with a homemade bow and arrow. There was his excessive friendliness to a flock of sheep in the neighbouring paddock. A less besotted woman than myself might have seen hints in this pattern of behaviour, but I was as blind as a mole wearing sunglasses inside a sealed cardboard box full of soot, and I laughed these things off as the eccentricities of an Englishman.

Then he started to disappear, at first for single evenings, without telling me where he was going. Later still he would absent himself for several days at a time, until, dear reader, I was a widow in all but name, having the aromatic pleasure of his physical company so rarely that I was like a sugar dumpling withering in the desert.

Worse still, the tenor of his lovemaking changed. Whereas before it had been incessant, tigerish, demanding, tender, and insatiable, by turns, now it was a quick one, two, splatter, and off to the golf club. And if all your husband can think of after a spot of rumpy pumpy is going for a round of golf then you've got problems, take it from me. Especially if it happens in the middle of the night. Such had become my lot.

Then one day I smelt perfume on his lapel. It shot up my nostrils and exploded in my head like an anti-aircraft shell, to be quite precise. You may wonder at such nasal sensitivity, but lapel-sniffing is one of my hobbies, and I was employed by Scotland Yard as a part-time lapel-sniffer with the forensic science department. I have even appeared on "Freaks Of The Nation", sniffing a series of lapels with such accuracy that I received fan mail for six months afterwards and became a minor celebrity.

My friends in the Police Force, who in those days were the nearest thing we had to a Marriage Guidance Bureau in this country, listened to my tearful marital outpourings and put a detective on Charlie's tail for a week, to establish the truth of the matter. Was he attending tedious conferences on the life cycle of the clothes moth, as he assured me, or was something secretly afoot in the jungle of his desires?

A week later the detective's report lay on my pine dining table like a decaying corpse, its leaves curling at the corners so feverishly had I thumbed them. Beads of sweat poured down my forehead into a broad rimmed jam jar I had placed in front of me so that the gooseberries I had been peeling wouldn't get drenched.

The truth had hit me so hard that I sustained internal injuries, especially in the vicinity of the heart. Not only was Charlie being unfaithful, but it seemed he was doing it on the grand scale. The report detailed encounters with seventeen different women in the seven nights in question, not to mention several visits to West End brothels from which the cad never emerged until the early hours.

I was devastated.

I made my decision.

It was a job for Madame Vestris.

When finally I had a call from Charlie to say that he proposed to return home that Tuesday evening, and could I have a meal of roast venison and leek pie ready for him on the stroke of seven o'clock, I notified Madam Vestris immediately. She arrived in a taxi very soon afterwards, carrying her familiar instrument bag and wearing that sickly smile of hers I knew so well from previous jobs she had done for me.

When Charlie came prancing up the garden path a couple of hours later I told her to hide in the broom cupboard and geared myself for the momentous evening that would transform our relationship profoundly.

I set the repast before my husband and he sat down at the table in his shirtsleeves, with no more than a grunt by way of thanks. He ate, as he always did, with the gusto of a starved water buffalo, but, having finished his last forkful of toasted meat, a distant glazed emptiness, like that of a brainwashed sea-lion, entered his eyes, and those manly features of his formed a mask of stupor. Within a minute he was unconscious and snoring like a roomful of deflating balloons being let off at a children's' Sunday School party.

Madam Vestris stepped out of the broom cupboard right on cue, and, brushing the spider webs from her black dress, and clawing an earwig out from under an eyelid, she helped me heave Charlie onto a waterproof length of sheeting and pull off his clothes.

The enormous organ that sprung into the air with a palpable twang when we pulled off Charlie's pants impressed even Madam Vestris, who had polished a few knobs in her time. It had no reason to be erect, but there it stood vibrating magnificently, as if bowing to an audience. I assumed it was force of habit that gave it such defiance in the face of what was to befall it.

Madam Vestris delved in her bag and produced a large implement that she said was used for the castration of farm animals in remote parts of India, and diligently affixed this to the base of Charlie's scrotum, rather in the way that you screw one of those winged corkscrews into a bottle of Chablis. I was worried that the brute might wake up, for he twitched several times quite markedly, like a conger eel on the deck of a trawler, but Madam Vestris told me he'd consumed enough knock-out-powder to silence a politician, which was all the reassurance I needed.

Then with a sudden jerking of Madam Vestris's elbows and a grinding metallic squeak from the castration gadget, Charlie's balls came away in one sudden movement, and she was dropping them into an ornamental tea caddy and staunching his blood with Vaseline swabs.

A physiologist might have assumed that Charlie's rearing tool would have shrunk back at this assassination of its twin globular partners in crime, but no, the thing still tossed in the air like a stallion frolicking in a meadow. In fact this convenient stiffness made it easier to sever, in the event, for it is never easy to achieve a clean cut on a flaccid object, as Madam Vestris told me later. She was easily able to slice through its roots with the aid of one of those miniature circular saws you can buy in Harrods for slicing cucumbers and trimming nasal hairs.

The cleaning up took some time, but finally we had Charlie lying on a clean sofa, wearing his clothes again, snoring merrily as an ox, and no doubt dreaming of women. As I paid Madam Vestris and waved her goodbye I permitted myself a thin-lipped smile, in the knowledge that dreaming was about all that husband of mine would be able to do from now on, as far as the ladies were concerned.

Yes, revenge is my weakness. I have to admit it. No one slights me without paying the consequences. I do have a cruel streak in me that you'd never guess from my honey-plum features. You see, my revenge on Charlie had only just begun.

The first of my pleasures was listening to his complaints and objections, which continued unabated for the next few weeks.

"Tough luck, buddy," was my usual reply, as I laughed or sneered unsympathetically at his whining frustration.

Ooh, I loved every minute of it.

Once he had completely healed I went one step further in taunting him by running my long fingernails over his empty mound at every opportunity, and taunting him about his infidelities. At first he would push me angrily aside, but as time passed, he became far more docile, as Madam Vestris had predicted he would, and I was delighted to see that he was becoming resigned to his fate and seemed to enjoy my teasing stroking of his empty loins.

I promised him he had no need to worry, for I would always stay loyal to him, and that I had only ordered the operation so that we could resume the idyllic lifestyle with which our marriage had begun.

Of course, I was lying my head off. In fact, once I had successfully lulled him into emotional dependence on me, and he realised there was absolutely no point in his looking elsewhere, I began to indulge in evenings on the town on my own, acquiring a few lovers along the way. I took the utmost pleasure in dressing sexily for the evening while Charlie watched, applying my red lipstick with one eye on the mirror and the other on his crestfallen features behind me. I was in power, and I loved it. There was nothing that cock-less cuckold could do.

Once I got him used to my sleeping around, I went one step further and brought men back to the cottage to share in the following ritual, which gave me the utmost pleasure.

Me, my guest, and Charlie would sit around in the parlour chatting politely and having the odd drink; then my pick-up and I would begin a little canoodling, followed by kissing; then my hand would slide down the fellow's trousers, and so on, while Charlie was forced to look on. I assure you I was turned on as much by the look of chagrin that never failed to appear on his face as by the ministrations of my lovers. Then our clothes would slide to the floor and we'd do the business right there on the sofa, like a couple of rabbits. It was a theatre performance from first to last. Boy, it was double pleasure.

I enjoyed this sort of thing so much that I realised I was becoming addicted. Bit by bit I began to demand increasingly large sums of money from my gentlemen, and I became a prostitute. I would bring the client home and make Charlie watch through a peephole. He worked as my maid, prepared all my outfits and did the housework.

It was a great life, and the perfect marriage. And, you know, that feeling of revenge never did wear off. Every minute Charlie suffers is to me like nectar dripping from a leaf onto my extended tongue.

But I do have one regret. Of all the men I've slept with since I met Charlie, none has ever been able to give me the good seeing to that he could in his heyday. If I had just one wish in this world right now it would be to have Charlie back as he was before, just for one night. For old times' sake, if you know what I mean.

This story was written for you ladies with cheating husbands out there. Revenge is sweet, but do think twice before you slice.

By Plum.