Pleasure Mounds

Gerald Rawlings with his movie star looks and no money worries is the product of a good, middle-class family. He is head art teacher at a decent comprehensive school and life is just peachy - all that is except his wilting marriage. His stick insect wife’s coldness drives him to seek comfort in the arms of a young lover. Arms, which Gerald finds out to his horror, that are too young. To make matters worse, a homeless man from a forgotten past has pictures of his multiple indiscretions and threatens to make them public.
The snuggle-toothed blackmailer wants revenge for events that occurred years ago. It is all too much for Gerald who sees his new appointment as head of the art department in a good private school evaporating before his eyes. Worse, the horror of a very long stay in one of Her Majesty’s less comfortable prisons lies in front of him.
In mental meltdown he employs the service of a heavy frying pan to deal with the crisis. Now with a body in his kitchen he has to work out how to dispose of it undetected, but things don’t go smoothly. Mosquitos and whisky seem set on adding to the chaos surrounding him.
To compound his misery, his wife admits her passion for the busty, young Swedish dental receptionist at her dental practice and demands he sell his much cherished family home as her lawyer has told her she is entitled to half of everything he owns. The trusty frying pan is once more pressed into service but things spiral from bad to worse when he is involved in a car accident. He flees the scene and now totally adrift from reality, seeks the help of an old pupil in Newcastle who becomes a willing partner in Gerald’s fight for survival.
Gerald flees to Spain as the youthful key to his prison cell starts to make blackmail demands. While he is gone his sister, in dire need of his help, arrives from Australia to find his house empty. Her own life is in chaos since her scientist husband ran off with all her money. She is an angry woman who leaves the cold, wet climate of Britain to go to the family villa in Positano, Italy taking Gerald’s house keys and money.
On his return to the UK a saviour appears on his doorstep. A girlfriend of the blackmailer who has had a long-term crush on him offers to help. She manages to extract a confession of the blackmail plot from Daryl, her moronic and sometimes boyfriend, who is in league with the blackmailer. With her help the blackmail threat is removed and a relationship springs up between them but her sexual demands are too much for Gerald.
The police are very suspicious of his wife’s disappearance but try as they might they can find no evidence and by the chance brutality of one of the officers involved and his subsequent dismissal from the Force, the enquiry is dropped. Gerald is a free man. Free to take up his new appointment.
At a dinner to introduce him to the other staff at the new school he meets a tall, gorgeous, wealthy woman, Marci Cunningham, who makes her desires plain. They spin into months of heady romance but unknown to Gerald she discovered his murderous past. This information plus Gerald’s financial future she keeps to herself. She loves him and neither his past not the enormous wealth that lies in store for him deter her. He did what he had to do to survive and she is proud of him. But does life have another joker in store for him?
Over the following months they enjoy a good relationship that finally results in a proposal of marriage and she and her three children move into Gerald’s house… but does fate have another hand to play?