The publication of "Lips to Cheeks" by Dick Barker was quite a shock to a good portion of the the English landed gentry. Despite the author's denials, there was no doubt in many a mind that the hair-raising sexual escapades and experiments in assorted vice described in the book were thinly disguised authobiography. The book was soon banned throughout England by the London Metropolitan Censor working in conjunction with agitated members of the Home Office. It was banned in France and on the continent as well as being a book "against the interests of public morality." Underground collectors of modern erotica snapped up all available copies and the book was soon an out-of-print choice item.
These observations of the famous phychoanalyst, Dr. Scymanski will help the reader unravel the tangled sexual perversions revealed in the story:
"I advised Mr. K, who was a well-built handsome young man to try to have intercourse with a prostitute to ease some of his sex pressures. He tried a prostitute, but with miserable success. As soon as the girl undressed and lay on the bed exposing her vagina, he broke out in a cold sweat md ran out of the bedroom in agonizing fright.
"When I asked Mr. K. what he did like sexualy he replied, 'I experience an exciting erection whenever I see a man up to thirty years or so wearing especially tight pants which reveal the bulge of his testicles and outline of his penis. If the seat of the trousers are dirty and worn. I visualize the anus coming in contact with the cloth. I then imagine my erect penis tearing through the seat into the young man's rectum, and much to my embarrassment I often experience a spurting ejeculation which soils my underwear.'
'If I do not ejaculate while watching a handsome young man with tight trousers, I go home and put on a pair of pants similar to the ones he was wearing. Then I will rub my buttocks on a chair or on the floor and this excitation will make me ejaculate while experiencing a delightful orgasm.'
'Afterwards I have a special thin cane in my closet which I use in the following manner. I strip off the pants exposing my naked buttocks, then watching in a full-length mirror I hit myself until my buttocks are covered with reddening welts. This generally produces another ejaculation'"
A close study of the psychology of the sexual pervert as revealed in "Lips to Cheeks" will aid the reader in warning him of innocent-appearing pitfalls to avail. A broadening of the knowledge of sex neuroses also leads to a greater tolerance and understanding of others.
Continental Classics presents this novel in its complete and unexpurgated version. Because of the abnormal sexual and psychological themes of his novel, it is recommended only for the graduate student and mature adult reader.
Allan Saunders, M.A. New York City April, 1968
Archive Note: The large number of misspellings present in the original pocketbook are faithfully reproduced in this text. No attempt whatsoever has been made to correct those misspelled or misused words.
CHAPTER 1
I was born without one...
A strange confession, with which to begin a candid account of sexual experiences! Don't misunderstand me.
I was born with the usual five senses, all of them clean and keen, and some horse-sense to go with them; more than my share of curiosity, which a lifetime won't slake; the usual apparatus, in working order; but no sense of bodily shame. Not a shred, not a fig-leaf.
Now, this is a terrible deficiency! A moment's thought makes it obvious that all our society would fall to pieces if it was without shame. The clothing industry and the pin-up industry would be the first to fold. But the churches would soon have to follow. Lawyers an judges would be queuing in their thousands at the labor exchanges, and newspapers would reduce to half their size. One can't even be a savage without this heaven sent faculty, which I have been unaccountably denied
It was obvious to me as soon as I could think, or sooner, that society and I could never get along together in these circumstances. A hermitage in the desert seemed indicated. But we .know from the Decameron and the mediaeval painters what sort of worries the hermits have. So we had to do a deal, society and I. For my part, I mustn't make my weakness too obvious to others, particularly people who might be trying to teach me, rear me or employ me; and society would turn a Nelson eye as long as I kept my conduct comparatively private. This was English society, of course; and that's the English code.
Negotiating this curious treaty was not easy, as it had to begin so early in life: at the nipple, really. But I well remember the day we concluded our terms, society and I.
I was a youngish man at the time. I had recently given up wearing a napkin and had been promoted to brown velveteen knickers, as I was supposed to be "dry." I could walk and talk a bit; but paradise was already lost, my mother had produced a third son, I was no longer the baby, the apple of her eye. A little vomiting moist object of which I, if you please, was supposed to be proud and fond, got all the attention.
But in this little vignette of memory out of the darkness of the past I sense gaiety. I see a warm livingroom, full of fun and chatter. Even though my parents were fully occupied with my little brother, I was laughing.
I was getting some attention from another quarter, which soothed my vanity. My father's oldest friend, the Major, a military man with bristling moustache, was playfully bouncing me on his knee, making the insane gurgling noises that adults instinctively make to small children, and fondling my rosy thighs.
You would look far to find a more stalwart pillar of society than the Major. He had family pride (i.e. snobbery), military ideals (i.e. disguised timidity), conserva tive outlook (fear of ideas and of change), chivalry (dread of women), and a professed dislike of sentimentality (distrust of his own kind heart). All this I knew long before I could talk, from the set of his eyebrows and the dangle of his gold watch-chain when he bent over my cradle.
Bouncing on his knee I was riding the high horse of state, imbibing the sound ideals of this most respected upholder of the proprieties. It was a fine wordless lesson he was giving me.
But what, then, in the name of virtue, was his righ hand doing?
Gently but unmistakably it had crept inside my knicker-leg. His fingers had reached an adjunct which my parents had never mentioned, and for which I hac' therefore invented a name of my own. I said it nov* to the Major: "Owgypowgy!"
He smiled and said only "Goo-goo-goo!" He w, pretending that what he was up to was only the same i tickling my ribs or the palms of my hands. But somt how it was not the same. His index-finger was running lightly, persistently, round the tiny worm. I laughed more: he meant it as a joke, I saw that now. A nev kind of joke. What a funny feeling! Did I want t] make water on him to cap the joke? No, it wasn that. It was something else.
My little prick stiffened up. An exquisite pleasure coursed through my body.
Eros and Aphrodite had entered my life, through the tip of the Major's finger. I hope I have never since failed to accord those great gods the adoration which is their due. I owe them and their agents the deepest gratitude.
They have seen to it that I had a nice variety of experience, rewarding me in proportion as I brought no prejudice to mar or debar it. These anti-social deities were apparently pleased that I thought pleasure a good thing: they gave me pleasure with my elders and my juniors, with both sexes and the in-betweens, with love and without. I found it better with love, but good without; nearly always good, whatever the cost in the end.
But while I digress my Dutch uncle is advancing a little further, putting his finger into the crack between the cheeks of my bottom. I don't suppose it was very dry or clean. Probably he had something to smell, afterwards, for a souvenir; let's not begrudge him thatat least he wasn't fastidious, and to be fastidious in matters of love is a grave fault.
Now he drew back a little. He was playing with the small throbbing penis. He bent his head and kissed me on the mouth; I felt the prickle of his bristles and smelt his breath, laden with tobacco and wine.
My parents had turned, were coming towards us. The Major very dexterously took his hand out. He looked at me quizzically.
My immediate impulse was to cry "Look, Mamma!" and show her the big thing I had got. Let the world admire it, and emulate me, and share my pleasure!
But I did nothing so disastrous. A warning voice made itself heard. The look in the Major's eye, perhaps; still more, the way he extricated his hand from the dangerzone, let me know how society feels about these things. I knew all at once that we were fellow-conspirators. I continued to ride a very cock horse on his knee, and gave him, I am sure, a knowing smile. He kissed me again, very thankfully, before he left. He knew his hand could return with confidence to the same attractive spot in the future. It did, at intervals, till I was sixteen. I'm very glad I never betrayed him.
Of course it is possible he thought I would accept this first overture with perfect innocence; he could not know that I would be making my social contract that day. There is such a thing as childish innocence, in a certain sense of the term. I know a charming woman who has had a long and vastly complicated sexual career. I asked her, in an intimate moment, and to intensify my pleasure, about her first memory of the joys. She told me it was when as a child of four she was taken to the Zoo. A kindly attendant lifted her up to look at the animals, and wriggled his fingers inside her hole while doing so. Her mother and sister were close by, so his audacity was considerable. She remembered distinctly how hotly she enjoyed the sensation; how she sat tight, and made him carry her from cage to cage, the whole length of the cat house and back. He paddled his fingers in her baby cunt all the time. What a kind man, she thought! Only years afterwards did it occur to her that he might have done it for his own pleasure, rather than hers.
But she never told anybody. Why not? She did not know why not. Nor do I. Unless she, too, made a social contract of concealment and self-protection that day. Or possibly it did not even occur to her that there was anything worth mentioning. After all, it was a truly inward pleasure! She closed her baby lips over the warm memory. I imagine it revived in her unconscious mind, if not consciously, when the organs of a hundred males entered her, in after years, and enriched the experience with its wetness and heat.
The Major, I need hardly say, was a concealed homosexual; I always took it for granted that my innocent parents had no idea of the fact. They were such a pair of puritans, you wondered how they ever got as far as a fuck. But you never know your parents. Years later, a very sophisticated old man hinted to me that long ago there had been a secret love between my father and the Major. That was simply beyond my imagination, and probably untrue. I think the Major was incapable of loving in his own age-group.
He was very good for my ego, as I was the middle child. He was the first person to make me feel an object of excitement and desire.
The Major showed no interest in my brothers. I was "his boy," and he gave me presents, especially books, and taught me to paint in watercolours.
He learned to time his visits, for talks on current political affairs, with my father, to coincide with my bath-night. My mother remarked on how domestic he was, and what a shame he was not a husband and father-while his hand, under "the suds, was feeling between my legs, touching the little crinkled ball-bag, hardening the prick, pulling the foreskin back, and once putting the soapy tip of his finger right inside my bowel, till I wanted to shit right there in the bath. His broad back was between me and my hovering mother, and I abetted my seducer by holding the loofah and flannel across my middle to screen his hand from the view, if anyone had chanced to look.
There was a happy time when I did not need bathing, only supervising, and the Major was allowed to do that service, and to dry me, all by himself. He had a trick which he much enjoyed, of so manipulating the rough towel as to give me an erection without his having touched it at all. Then looking at me with mock reproach, he would exclaim softly, "Why, what's this?" and seize it, while I wriggled and laughed.
This, alas, gave way to a time when supervision was out of the question, I was expected to bathe alone, and I used to listen mournfully to the Major's voice, talking to my father downstairs, wishing (as I expect he was wishing, too) that he could find an excuse to come to the bathroom; but he did not dare. It did seem for a time as if all that was over.
There are many interesting things about him that I shall never know: mysteries he has taken to the grave. Had he acquired a taste for small boys in India or Africa, as so many English soldiers do? Was I the sole object of his attentions, or did he have a private life that I knew nothing about? (He surely must have had!)
As for the opposite sex, at the time of my first little adventures with the Major, I did not know there was an opposite sex. I had no sister, and my mother was a sexless goddess of maternity, like a Victorian statue. I must have been six or seven years old when a boy at school, exhibiting his own organ to me with understandable pride, told me the astonishing news that girls had holes instead of pricks: "Didn't you know that}" he said (he himself had just found out).
I was at once devoured by curiosity to see one: a desire by no means easy to satisfy. Judy was the obvious person to approach. I was sentimentally in love with Judy, who was my own age. She was very nice, and gave me sweets, and I had kissed her at Christmas. But I was too scared of the consequences to ask her pointblank to take her pants down and let me see what she kept inside them.
But my curiosity burned, distracting my thoughts from lessons. It became necessary to think of a stratagem: my first.
One day Judy raised her hand in class: "Please may I leave the room?" And she hurried out with great urgency, clutching herself between the legs because her need was great.
I put up my hand and asked if I might get a drink of water. "Very well. Be quick."
Quick? I had never shinned up those stairs at such speed.
The dame school was a converted private house. The upstairs W.C. was for girls, the one-downstairs for boys; so I was silent as well as swift. Judy had not troubled to latch the door. I pushed it and it swung wide, and there I stood and grinned, appealing and appeasingly.
Judy, a small rosy-faced brunette, with legs too short to reach the floor properly, was perched awkwardly on the throne, her skirt bundled up under her arms, her body bare from the navel down to her socks.
So it was true, what I had been told. Nothing but a little hairless cleft, under her pot-belly, making plentiful wee-wee. She looked at me incredulously, then uttered a scream, and down came the curtain of her plaid skirt. Jumping down, she reached for her knickers.
I ran, like any lover caught by an angry husband. I slid down the banister, and I was back in my seat in class when Judy's feet came pattering down the stairs. My face turned red, then pale, as I waited for the thunder.
Judy returned, her eyes like saucers. "Did you call out, Judy?" "No, Miss Farrell."
"But we all heard you. What did you scream for, Judy?" "I saw a spider."
But at playtime, Judy whispered to me: "If you do it again, I'll tell."
Our romance did not survive the blow. But I had fallen in love with cunt: was cunt-struck, thunderstruck with cunt, for ever!
Magnificent obsession! Cunt is literally nothing, a space between two walls of damp flesh; but it's also the fountain of life, and the pearly gates of the earthly paradise. It's no more ugly or beautiful, intrinsically, than a hand or a tooth; but how it rings all the bells!
Perhaps if I had had a sister and been used to seeing her naked, from infancy, a cunt would have been a commonplace thing to me. But perhaps not. Perhaps I should have found her cunt just as exciting and delightful as I thought Judy's, and later little Vera's, the first I actually felt, and all the others that followed. And there would have been a fine kettle of incest! I have never yet avoided anything just because it is forbidden. Call it greed, curiosity, impudence: they were father Adam's virtues.
Vera, since I might as well tell that tale here as elsewhere, was a sweet, cool, blond child, tall for her age, and slender. How clearly I remember her, and her golden party frock with white cuffs! I don't know our ages, exactly, when it happened. Anything between seven and twelve. I don't think she had the smallest bump of breast as yet: and she had compact, boyish buttocks. I had known her only casually; she was skipping-partner of a girl in our neighbourhood, whom I knew but did not like. Yet when that children's party began, and the heated atmosphere began to tickle me up, I knew instantly that Vera was the one, and I had only to wait for my opportunity. I thought she had the touch of shamelessness required.
The air smelt of scent and was full of giggling. We played toilet, spinning a bread platter and running to catch it. We danced, angularly, badly, not knowing how to hold each other, or quite daring to. I danced with Vera. The winter dusk had fallen, curtains were drawn close and lights were on. Grown-ups had left us to ourselves for a while. One of the boys turned out the light.
Instantly, without hesitation, and as though I had myself arranged for the light to be switched off, I reached down, lifted the hem of the golden frock, found the elastic top of Vera's pants round her slender waist, and slid my hand down her middle. With my left arm round her shoulder I held her close to me, so that when the lights flashed on again it could not be immediately seen what I was up to. But the same boy, or another, plunged us in darkness again almost at once, and kept it so for some minutes, while much struggle and din went on round the switch.
My hand slid down, as I said, over Vera's smooth belly-was there a trace of downy hair?-and for the first time in my life my fingers touched those tender lips. I was startled at the wetness between them: it was like putting a finger in a mouth. I did not know, in those days of innocence, that it was so wet because she was "giving" to me, she must have been excited in advance, too, and her juice was coming down. All I knew was that instead of pulling away, or screaming, or pushing my hand away, she just kissed me on the mouth, with her head turned sideways on my shoulder. My prick was nearly tearing my breeches open, but all I wanted was to feel and touch and explore that little hole of hers. I had been right: as soon as I saw her I had been sure she was the one girl who would let me, and would not make a fuss or set up a coy resistance. I don't know how I knew but I did.
After a couple of minutes, magical minutes for me, the lights did come on, and in the noisy confusion I managed to pull my hand out and she to pull her skirt into place undetected. One child's accusing voice said "I saw you kissing!" but that was all. I hurried out of the room and smelt my fingers, intoxicating myself with that salty, sweaty smell, animal and divine. I nearly swooned. I was unwilling to wash it off, but I was afraid that if I went back in the room with it everyone around me would smell it, for the odour seemed very pungent and penetrating. So I licked my fingersit tasted salty, too, and tingling-and wiped them on my handkerchief; so that I could privily smell my handkerchief now and then, and remember it all.
When we played postman's knock, I announced three stamps for Vera; she came into the passage to receive the kisses, which I duly delivered. In spite of the unreliable doorkeeper, who was liable to pry, I felt her again, and this time I felt the cheeks of her bum, too, squeezing the firm flesh and putting a finger between, as the Major used to do to me. What a pupil I was proving! But when I pressed Vera's hand on to my prick, even outside the clothing, she pulled her hand away instantly.
That is the last time I ever remember seeing Vera. God knows why. And I don't know, even now, whether she was scared and flustered at feeling my horn, or merely cautious lest the doorkeeper should spot us. It's nearly forty years ago, dear Vera, but I still remember the feel and smell of you, which is more than can be said of many a girl I have met since. Perhaps I was by no means the first boy to feel you, though I've always believed I was. Anyway, I salute your coolness, your nerve, your good sense, and the way you " gave." I don't remember your saying a single word, but you spoke with the lips between your legs! A liquid language to be understood with the fingertips, like Braille. You blessed me, unaware.
Which brings us, or may as well do, to my little cousin, Lizzy. It was an experience (like my first peep) that linked sex with W.C.'s; ah, well, "love has pitched his mansion in the place of excrement."
It was rather like the Judy episode, only I was older, and bolder, and I went further.
Lizzy was a bashful creature, with long ringlets, a little older than I was. She would be eleven or twelve, but had quite a figure, distinctly shapely calves and round rising breasts. We rarely saw our cousins and the appearance of this one, a person to whom I was related, next best thing to a sister, was an event. She seemed to me utterly fascinating. I was in love with her before tea was over.
We were living in the country, that summer, and it was a hot, drowsy afternoon. The garden was full of bees and not a breeze stirred the fruit trees and lavender-clumps. The grown-ups dozed in the summerhouse. My older brother, having showed off to Lizzy till he was bored with himself, went away for a bikeride with the farmer's son. I and my younger brother played with Lizzy.
We had a hiding game. I found her, crouching in a thicket.
"I like you, I do like you, Lizzy," I said, kneeling on the ground beside her. I kissed her. She laughed, jumped up and ran away.
We played another game. My young brother had to pretend to be ill, and lay on a wooden bench. It was my idea, and typical.
How hot it was! and how beautiful Lizzy looked, with her big soft eyes and long ringlets and the swelling bubbies inside her frock! I had caught a smell of her sweat, and it made me want to play naughty games.
"He's very bad, we shall have to operate," I said.
"Don't, you tickle," said eight-year-old Leslie.
"Look," I said, and with one rip of the finger I undid all his flies and exposed his little apparatus, flabby as a shrimp. He in his innocence did not bother to cover himself, but just said, "Ow, you hurt!"
But Lizzy said: "You are naughty!" and blushed. All the same, she had a good look, it seemed to me.
"We shall have to fetch some medicine," Lizzy said, walking away.
"Wait here," I said to Leslie. He obeyed, lying on the bench, vaguely doing up some of his buttons.
"Don't be long," he said.
I followed my cousin, calling, "Dizzy Lizzy!"
She was over near the house. "Where are you off to?" I cried. She shook her head and waved me away. "Won't be a minute," she shouted. Of course I then knew she was going to relieve herself. But as she had not said so, I could half-pretend I didn't know, and could catch her unawares: the stratagem came to me in a sexy lightning-flash. I went behind the hedge, then round the back of the house, stalking along unseen, like Deerslayer. I knew that fly-infested whitewashed earth closet, with its well-scrubbed seat; I knew the bolt that the grown-ups used, that was too stiff for a child's fingers; I used to keep the door shut with a half-brick.
But who would have the forethought to tell Lizzy about the half-brick? Nobody; and I did not believe the dear dim creature would think of it herself. I thought she would rely on doing her pee quickly and coming out again, seeing that the adults were all down at the summerhouse, and that she might assume (not knowing me) that I would not pry.
I saw her go in, I waited a minute to give her time to get herself settled, then, just as with Judy years before, I simply gave the door a good push, and it swung inwards.
"You can't come in, I'm busy," Lizzy said. Perhaps she really thought I had gone by mistake, for the same purpose as herself. "Busy Lizzy," I said.
I was not so lucky this time, her frock was down over her knees and I could see nothing, except her drawers (for those were the days of white frilly drawers) round her ankles.
I had an idea she was doing more than just peeing. She had a tense, strained look, and the word "busy" was often used in the childhood realm for "shit."
"Go away!" she said. "What do you want?"
"Let me see yours, and I'll let you see mine." A fair offer?
"No, I don't want to."
I had stepped in close to her, and actually shut the door behind me. Our voices were low and trembling. With one hand I had unbuttoned myself and dragged out my stiff prick. With the other I reached under her skirt, though she fought and pushed me away. But she was only half-hearted; and I knew what to make for.
A thrill ran through my fingers: she had a tuft of pubic hair, soft as her ringlets. I felt remarkably grownup, to be touching such a mature person.
I slid my hand right under, and the last drops of hot water ran through my fingers. I put my hand still further under and my first finger encountered something sticky: she had been doing both. I heard the bit drop, as I took my hand away again.
"You are rude," she said, grabbing a piece of paper and wiping herself vigorously.
I did not feel "rude," though I could not explain my shamelessness, but I had now withdrawn from the assault, a bit frightened at my own daring, aware of the possible consequences. There was nothing for her to do but pull up her drawers. Why, instead, did she hesitate ?
It was very hot and still and suffocating. A bird was singing outside, sleepily. I still had my erect penis out. An inspiration:
"You've got some hair, I haven't any yet, look!" I said.
She did look. I took her hand and she let me make her touch, too. She gave a little shiver, and took her hand away.
"It goes like this," I said, drawing the foreskin up and down. "Show me yours, Lizzy, be a sport!" A powerful word, that.
"Well, hurry up, then, what do you want to see? You are awful!" she exclaimed breathlessly, pulling up her skirt again, propping herself on the edge of the seat and pushing her thighs forward. Holding the hem of her frock under her chin, she put her fingers on each side of her twat and opened it like a flower for me to see inside. The light was dim, but I seemed to see a corridor of lips.
I pushed myself, almost fell, on top of her, and for a moment my inadequate, pale: prick was throbbing against its goal. But I did not know how to make an entry, and she, thoroughly frightened, cried "Get off me!" and shut her legs up tight.
Now she did pull her drawers up, breathing hard. I watched her, thinking how wonderful to be a girl and have that delightful organ, a cunt, there in one's possession all the time!
"Put your thing away!" she said. She added with sudden curiosity, "How ever do you keep it in your knickers ?"
She knew less than I did, that girl! "It isn't big and stiff all the time, it goes small, like you saw Leslie's,"
I said. "But it won't while you'n looking at it," I added. However, I buttoned it away as best I could, and we scampered away from that closet as if we had left a skeleton in there.
Leslie met us, wailing, "Where have you been? you're mean!" We did not tell him.
That little cousin, you'd think butter wouldn't melt in her soft mouth. But when Leslie's back was turned she whispered to me: "If you don't do what I want you to, I shall tell... Climb that gate and jump off the top."
Happy to be blackmailed, I did it, though I fell on my face and made my hp bleed. Lizzy came and wiped the blood away, and whispered, "Get hold of Leslie's thing!"
I was astounded. This was an unexpected command. But I wanted to obey. I shouted, "Can't catch me!" to my brother, dodged him, tripped him, wrestled with him on the grass, and in a few moments had him stretched on his back, the leg of his shorts up to his crotch, and his "thing," as she called it, exposed to view, held between my triumphant finger and thumb.
Cousin Lizzy was looking down, smiling saucily. Leslie was yelling "Dirty beast!" at me. I let him go, and even let him win a wresding throw, to pacify him.
At that moment we heard the voices of the grown-ups, and Lizzy's whole appearance and manner changed.
"Here's mother, I shall have to go now," she said, demurely.
"Haven't the children been good!" my mother exclaimed.
We shook hands at parting, nice and polite. Then I thought to myself, with mortification, after they had gone: why didn't I make her show me her tits, too? What an idiot I was to be content with so little! But
I glowed at the thought of how much, all the same. I was gazing at my hand. The end of one finger was tipped with yellow.
"What were you doing all that long time?" Leslie asked me when we were alone.
"Having a fuck," I said.
"I don't believe you!"
"I did it because she asked me to," I boasted. "Liar!" he said. "I'm going to tell you said that. I'll tell Sandy."
Sandy was the other brother, eight years older than I.
"You daren't," I answered. But I only hoped my words were true. Sandy was tall, and strong, and might be very cross indeed.
CHAPTER 2
We moved back into town and I saw Lizzy no more, though we sent each other Christmas cards for a year or two.
Most of my childhood's sexual pleasures, apart from the rare Vera and Lizzy episode, were either solitary or homo-perforce. I can't remember how old I was when I was initiated into the joys of masturbation, but I remember very well how it happened. I had become the friend, or devoted fag, of an older boy, a hulking fellow of fourteen or so, an athletic, swaggering, ad venturous character named Jim, who loved smutty jokes, and made up impossible tales about women, friends of his mother, who he said paid him to fuck them. It was not believed, but it made delightful listening.
He tolerated me, liked my flattery and laughter, I dare say. He did not show me much sign of affection, but took me to his home sometimes and showed me the model steam-engines he had built. He even let me walk home with him after school if he was not going with a gang from his own form.
But one spring evening he let me tag along, even with his classmates, three roughnecks of whom I was considerably in awe. Jim started boasting of what a "bright babe" I was, how I knew all about cunt and could swear like a trooper. I tried to live up to this reputation, and they all laughed a good deal. O yes, I knew a lot! Up to this time, mind you, I had .never had an orgasm.
The eldest one quizzed me: where do babies come from ? how long does it take ?-like a schoolteacher, and I answered to his satisfaction. I had been told all that by a girl named Dolly whom I sat next to in the little mixed school, not long after the Judy adventure. (Wasn't that true "co-education?") My kind, cold parents of course never mentioned "the facts of life" to me.
The fact that Jim was showing me off, as though I were his pupil or his slave, and the idea that I was on trial in some way, heightened the tension on my nervous system. I half-skipped, half-ran, keeping up with these big fellows, with their long, "swanky strides.
The eldest boy, my chief inquisitor, who was darkeyed, fine-featured, with a wide mouth, was named Jack Allen. I had never spoken to him before, but had seen him swim and run. He now said mockingly: "Bet you've never seen a cunt, youngster."
"I have!" I said, eagerly, indignantly.
"Not since you came out of your mother's."
"I tell you I have, any amount of them," I said.
"When did you last see one?"
"Last week."
"Whose was it?"
"The girl next door."
"Did you fuck it, or throw your cap at it and run away?"
They all laughed, at my expense.
"I had a feel," I said.
"Is that all? Why didn't you poke her?"
"Her mother came in."
They laughed some more, disbelievingly. But what I had told them was true. All the same, if they had known the facts, they would have ridiculed me more than ever.
The girl next door happened to be ten months old. Her brisk, busy mother, quite a young woman, half my own mother's age, seeing me idling in the garden, asked me over the fence if I would like to come and help bathe baby. I went, rather bashfully, and stood with pink ears, staring at the happy, naked little girl in the bath and thinking what a wonderfully broadminded mother this was. I swear it was actually the first time I had seen any female of the species completely naked! When it came to drying time, the mother actually invited me to help dry those rosy, infinitely creased thighs, and said, "Come on, young man, powder her bottom and between her legs!"
I did these awesome services, and saw the child napkined and dressed again. Next day, Sunday, I took care to be in the garden at the same time, and again was invited over. The business was just about to begin. The air smelt of ammonia. The mother took off the napkin, drenched in pee, then lifted the creature into the warm water.
After the washing the baby was lying on her back on a towel, and the mother went to get some lanoline, leaving me alone with her infant. The baby began to cry. I knew the risk, I suppose, but I had an overpowering desire to see and touch the cunt which looked so disproportionately big, because of the deep crease it was buried in. I parted the flesh, wormed my finger in, touching the prominent little clitoris. I discovered something that naughty young nursemaids know: the baby stopped crying and gurgled with pleasure and satisfaction. I moved my finger in and out, wickedly excited. There I was, my finger stuck right in the baby's hole, when the mother came back.
"What do you think you're doing?" she said, flushing.
She took me by the collar and conducted me to the door. I do not know whether she saw my ever-ready horn bulging my trousers, my storm cone hoisted, so to speak, though she easily may have done. But she said firmly: "I shan't tell your mother this time, but never you come near my baby again." (The baby had changed gear from a gurgle to a cry, to show she did not agree with her mother.)
But I did not tell these humiliating facts to Jack Allen, Jim and the others.
We were walking across the park, a short cut.
"Coming for a smoke?" red-haired Derek asked.
"Yes, let's," the others said. They put their caps in their pockets, and I did the same. If you were caught at some illegal act, it was better not to be wearing the school cap: that was the code.
A winding path with steps descended to the men's piss-house among the bushes; it was practically underground, but was unroofed, and had nothing but the usual wall of glazed tiles, with water running down it into a trough. There were no "stalls" or divisions to protect privacy: everyone could always see everyone else at work.
He's too young to smoke, he can keep cave" Derek said, nodding his head towards me.
"But I want to go, I want a pee," I said, going down the path.
"Let him come down, we can hear if anyone's getting near," Jack said.
They produced half-fags from matchboxes, lit up, took deep draws. Jim offered me a couple of puffs from his Woodbine. My head seemed to whirl. It might have been hashish.
To be smoking, with my seniors! and with a vague but strong sense that something else was going to happen, I didn't exactly know what. It would be something, to taste again that mystery and excitement.
Having said I wanted to make water, I had to make it good, so I stepped up to the wet, yellow-encrusted wall and pulled out my dribbler. Jack, my questioner, promptly stepped up on the right of me, and Derek on the left. The other two, Jim and little Pip, went on with their smoking. I have not yet said anything about Pip. He was thirteen, but not even as tall as I was, and round-shouldered, with a pale face and a sharp nose; always grubby, most unattractive. But he was quick-witted, cunning, good at providing cribs for homework and willing to be the servant and jester of the big boys, for the sake of their company. He was always with Jack and Derek; I was soon to know more about the reason for that.
Derek looked down at himself as he piddled, but Jack looked at me. I stole furtive looks at both their weapons. Derek's was like my own, only a little bigger, the water coming out of a curly leaf of skin. Jack must have been circumcised, for it looked very like a mushroom, and he seemed to be tugging and tormenting it, even while his stream was shooting out. It was flabby but at least twice as big as mine.
"Bet I've got the biggest cock in here," Jack said. "Come on, all show."
"Well, I won't win," I said, blushing but smiling. They all laughed. Jim and Pip did not take up the challenge. Derek said to Jack, "It's bound to be biggest when it's half hard, stop frigging it."
"But I want to," said Jack. "Let's all have a wank. Hey, Bobbin"-he had picked up my nickname-"can you fetch spunk?"
I understood him, though I had never seen the famous stuff. But I did not like to admit my immaturity.
"I don't know," I said.
"Don't you know how to?" Jack asked. "Shall we show him?"
"All right," said Derek, who had been playing with his a little and already enlarged it. It's wonderful with young boys, how quickly they can get a cock-stand; they work on a hair trigger, and get stiff in a matter of seconds.
"Come on, Pip," Derek said.
Pip understood very well what was expected of him. With an impudent wink at me, he went to Derek, fondled his prick, drew his balls into view, and stroked and frigged with quick, light caressing movements. He must have had a lot of practice! He stretched out the other hand towards Jack, evidently capable of doing two at once. But Jack moved away from him, shaking his head.
"Come on, I'll teach you, Bobbin," he said. Still very much the teacher, but obviously more than interested in me; it must have been like having a virgin, for him.
I couldn't help shrinking away at the first touch of his hand, but he was determined. He pushed me into the corner, seized my wrist and put my hand on his prick. His other hand got hold of my small rod, stiff enough for anything by now, and I had the virgin's feeling of submitting to the inevitable, the "O well, this is it, here goes" feeling.
My pale foreskin ran back off the purple head and pink shaft, then forward again, with thrilling strokes. I tried to do for Jack what he was doing to me, but it was difficult, I was distracted by my own pleasure and by the sight of Pip pulling Derek off. (Jim was simply standing by, grinning, looking embarrassed.) Also I did not know how to deal with a cock with no foreskin.
I suddenly saw Derek grab Pip by the ears and bend his head down. Pip took Derek's penis in his mouth. Derek gave two great spasmodic jerks, and Pip pulled his head away and went to spit in the trough. I was revolted. "That's something I'll never do!" I thought, wondering how Pip could do it without being sick: but perhaps it tasted nice? At the same time I was disappointed at not having seen what I wanted to see, the actual shooting of the spunk.
But I was just about to see it, all the same. Jack said breathlessly, "Quick, quick!" and I obeyed. His fat, hot prick went off like a gun, six long jets of white curd, the first two of which went all over my shorts. That pungent, faintly metallic smell filled the air. I felt wildly abandoned, and Jack sensed that I was coming to a climax. Though he had come himself, he was still excited enough to want to make me, to complete my initiation. I had the sensation of racing up a steep hill, without quite enough breath for it, struggling to reach the top. Suddenly I was there, there, over the hill, the summit... but alas, nothing came. I began to sag, spunkless, a "youngster" still.
"He's too young, he hasn't any spunk," said Derek, buttoning his fly and watching disdainfully.
"Never mind, kid, did you like it?" asked Jack.
"Not half!" I said. I was touched by his kindness, and pleased that he hadn't made me take it in my mouth. I did not get used to that idea till later. I thought Pip (who is now a respected clergyman) either servile or of exotic tastes; but I must admit that I kept remembering what I had seen, and always got the horn when I thought of it, and sometimes imagined myself Pip and sometimes Derek.
"What's up with you, Jim, have you run dry?" asked Derek. "Toss him off, Pip."
Jim, with a sheepish glance at me, and seeing that my innocence was now beyond repair, flicked his fag end aside and unbuttoned his fly.
"Hurry up!" said Jack, who stood with his arm round my shoulder in a comforting manner.
Watching, I saw that Jim's pleasure was different from Derek's. He opened Pip's fly, and frigged himself with one hand, Pip with the other. He did not let Pip touch his at all. There was something eminently refined about Jim's performance. He stroked the smaller boy's tousled hair as though he were a girl. Then, when he wanted to come, he pushed his prick inside Pip's fly, against his bare belly, put his arms round Pip's body and clasped him tightly, one hand on his bottom. It was very brief, much quicker than the rest. His face looked like someone in a trance, with eyes tight shut, as he came. I think Pip spent too, but I could not be sure: they were in a nice jellied mess about their shirts and flies, I hope they had unsuspicious mothers.
The orgy was finished, without any interruption. Jack distributed chewing-gum, and we trooped out. Only as we left did I, looking back, see the face of a man, with thick glasses, peeping down through the long grass: the hidden spectator who had watched it all.
I did not tell the others. We parted company and went our ways. Then I doubled on my tracks and went back to the scene of the crime. I was trembling with fright, but in the grip of my ruling passion, curiosity. I saw the man had gone from the place where he had been lying and looking down on us. Was he a detective, a father, a murderer, or what? Anyway, I went back into the lav and had another piss; and looked at the spunk on the pavement, where Jack had come.
As I was going out again, I met the man. He had a shabby mackintosh on, and a thin face. He was quite young, in his twenties. He said "Here!" and instantly pulled out his enormous prick, which was erect. But my courage failed me. I dodged past him and ran all the way home. That was the last I saw of him, except in dreams, in which he frequently turned up. With a prick like the Tower of Pisa.
I was too young to "fetch spunk" but I had learned how to masturbate and have a climax. That was a great step forward.
Masturbation! Why does no poet praise this wonderful self-pleasure? It is wickedly miscalled self-abuse, pollution, and such slanderous names-this pure and lifelong joy. There should be a medal struck, of Saint Narcissus, bending over an endless white stream of come, rubbing the delicate flower-stem of his prick with his devout hands.
I heard of course the usual false warnings, how masturbation could send you mad, give you tuberculosis, make you unable to get children when you were married. t simply never believed them. The only moral 1 drew was not to trust parents, teachers, authorities and not to believe the kind of thing that, "for your own good," they told you. Psychologists say it is the struggle with his father that makes a boy a rebel. I had some of that, too, but it was sex that made me a rebel. I soon saw that law and custom were set against freedom and pleasure, and I learned with naive surprise that those laws and customs hardly corresponded at all to what people really did and really thought. After that I could sometimes laugh at, sometimes pity, sometimes dislike but never admire "Society," all those bishops, police, governments, armies, bosses, royal academies, public heroes, the lot "up there," whose world tends to be a cruel shambles, painted over with hypocrisy. They made me a hypocrite against my will, because I had to conceal my tastes and pleasures to live in peace. Even that does not save you. I kept out of jail, but before I was sixteen I had a "bad reputation." On the whole, though, I have been glad of that. By arousing people's curiosity, it has brought me new experiences, and has made me ineligible for stuffy respectability.
After my initiation by Jim's friends, I masturbated often, but still no spunk appeared. The stories I made up in bed at night changed from Red Indian themes to sexy ones; I would fall asleep holding the inflamed member, quite sore with rubbing, but without having reached even the illusion of a climax that Jack had given me. Jack himself showed no more interest in me, having taken up with a girlishly handsome lad in his own class. The only one of the gang with whom I had anything more to do was Jim.
He stole a book from the market which had diagrams of the male and female bodies, a medical work. We studied it together in his room, where the model steam engines were. We whispered, so that his mother, whose footsteps we could hear, should not overhear us. By and by his hand crept into my fly and he hugged me close. I knew that he wanted to repeat the performance he had done with Pip, and I decided to let him, though dreading the mess it would make. 1 tried to touch his prick, but he put my hand firmly away. His prick was his own, he liked to play it his own way! Neither of us said a word. He frigged me rather clumsily, not giving me much of a sensation. Then he shut his eyes and began to quiver. We were sitting side by side on his bed. He suddenly threw me on my back, got on top of me, pushed his hot rod up inside my shirt, then adjusting his position got it between my legs. I understood what was needed, and tightened my thighs on it. He came in two swift pushes. The stuff swam into the seat of my pants, alarmingly; but I did not turf Jim off me till he had panted back to normal and opened his eyes again.
"That was just like fucking Mrs. Manton, next door," he said. "But I wish you could spend, too." I smiled, being perfectly sure that only in imagination had he had Mrs. Manton, next door, or any other woman.
The same thing happened again when we went on bike rides in the country sometimes.
But when the hell would I be able to come properly? I pined for that, even though the other boys in my class mostly couldn't do it, either. (There were a few prudes who would not even talk about it. I was always inquiring!)
In the end it was kind Miss Nature who masturbated me: I had my first wet dream-I think I must have given up frigging for a time, in despair. I shall never forget. the dream. I walked into a room and there kneeling on the hearth-rug in front of a blazing fire was a beautiful girl, naked, glowing in the firelight. I went up behind her, pushed my cock into her right armpit, leaned over her shoulder and held her breast, taking the nipple between finger and thumb. She turned her face up to kiss me, and I came, in the armpit, without seeing or touching her cunt at all. I had a great sense of triumph, in which I awoke. Warm, slippery wetness everywhere, pyjamas, bedclothes, thighs: I was on my back, and even my navel was full. I nearly leapt out of bed to tell the world the wonderful news. But I didn't have to do that: the starchy patch would tell my mother next morning. I wondered what she would think. She never gave a hint of that. I wonder what she thought the earlier times, of Jack's seed on my shorts, and Jim's in the seat of my breeches. Perhaps she did not allow herself to think anything at all. Perhaps she was silently embarrassed. As a dear now-dead friend of mine used to say, "To the pure, all things are embarrassing."
Before I leave the dry days of my childhood, when only curiosity can be satisfied, and enter the great Wet Era that starts with puberty, I must chronicle one more episode. It concerns the Major, my father's old friend.
I was a rosy-cheeked boy of about twelve, lively, and fond of the open air. The Major, still a regular visitor, had not dared, I suppose, to give any sign of sexual interest in me for a long time; judging perhaps that I had got to an age when I might react against it, and perhaps tell tales. However, he found me in distress one evening, because a family trip to the seaside had been cancelled, my younger brother having caught chicken-pox. On an impulse, the Major volunteered to take me, alone, to the sea. I was pleased, and my parents, without any misgivings, were very grateful.
We took sandwiches, which my mother made, afed the Major bought a botde of lemonade. It was only a half-hour's train journey to the little resort. I carried a towel, for paddling (I could not swim). We did not stay near the crowd and the promenade. After I had had a couple of penny-in-the-slot games the Major said we would walk to a "more secluded" part. The sand was firm and it was a perfect day of early summer. We walked joyously along at the foot of the cliffs.
I kept saying, "Shall we stop here?" and he kept saying no, further along. We left the last holidaymakers behind.
Presently the Major said, "Don't you want to pump ship?" (a fig-leaf metaphor, to cover shame).
I did not know this expression, so I said, "No."
He said, "I think you do, by the way you keep holding your willy. I do, anyway"-and he walked up to the foot of the cliff, undoing his buttons. Was that all he meant? I did want to, certainly, and stood alongside him to piss. He half-faced towards me and looked at my "willy," which he had not seen for years. I looked at his, too, having rarely seen a man's, and got the impression that though not very big it was halfway to an erection. He had very little pec to do, and finished first, but did not put his away till I had done the same. He had such an air of wanting and not daring to do something more that I remembered in a flash all the times he had "interfered" with me when I was small.
We walked still further along the sunlit beach and we saw a wonderful thing: Venus herself, fresh from the foam.
On a large flat white stone stood a girl, about sixteen, entirely naked, entirely alone, drying her golden hair. Her clothes were twenty yards away at the foot of the cliff. She was perfection itself, to my eye, with round, fine young breasts, pink nipples, slender waist, a little golden down on her pussy but not enough to conceal the crack. Above all, she had no shame. She did not use the small towel to cover her body or any part of it, she did not turn away but stood full face to us, she did not smile or look coquettish, but watched us gravely as we approached. We passed within five yards of her. She stopped drying her hair, and let the towel dangle from her hand, with the other hand on her hip. The sun gilded her from top to toe. I glanced back when we had passed, and risked a smile, for she was looking over her shoulder at us. But she still did not smile, and went on drying her hair. When we returned along the beach, later, she would be gone, I knew. Such visions don't last.
The Major plodded on. Presumably the sight was one of complete indifference to his temperament. Me, I nearly had heart failure. My day, my year, was made.
We finally reached the absolute seclusion the Major sought. We ate our food, picked up curious shells, played ducks-and-drakes with flat stones, and afterwards took off shoes and stockings to paddle. The glittering ripples were cold and unexpectedly warm by turns.
The Major held my hand and made me jump and splash. Then he led me, quite deliberately, I know, deeper than I should have gone. His own hairy legs were so much longer than mine. In rolled a bigger wave, and ouch! I was soaked to the crotch. I yelled at the cold douche and ran back up the beach. He trudged after me, laughing.
"I'm all wet, what am I to do?" I wailed.
"There's nobody about, take your clothes off," he said.
"All right."
I did not actually guess at the time that that was what he had wanted and contrived, but if I had guessed I should probably have obliged, just the same.
He helped me to take off the wet things and spread them on a rock. "You might as well take your shirt and vest off, too," he said. I complied, and ran around bare, with him after me, dodging and larking, till we both tired. He must have felt just as thrilled at the sight of me as I was with the girl Venus drying her hair. In the end I collapsed on the sand, panting.
The Major came and sat very close to me. I let him draw me close to his body, and was quite unsurprised when his hand squeezed and felt my bottom and then my balls and prick. He put one finger in my arsehole a little way, a rather nice sensation. But owing to the sea-breeze I had no erection yet. I squirmed around dodgily, but he pursued and held on till I began to harden. I saw a strange expression on his face: it seemed to me he had tears in his eyes. Then I got a terrific shock: he kissed me, passionately, on the mouth. There were years of hunger in that kiss. He clasped me like mad, and I could feel his huge erection through his trousers.
Of course he did not put his tongue in my mouth, a practice I did not learn till later; and nothing else happened. He would not let himself pull out his prick, or even come in his trousers: his will must have been working overtime! And as for me, I couldn't come, as yet, however much he might have wished it. But I let him kiss me a score of times, and kissed him back, with candid warmth; and lay nude in his arms for a long time, in the sun. I doubt if he had a happier hour in his life. To me, too, it was all radiance and pleasure.
I am a pagan, self-evidently. I should have been born in ancient Greece, and made a Plato happy, or crept under the cloak of a Socrates.
The Major, for once, overcame his shame enought to talk sex to me a bit. He asked me, holding my erect tool, whether I played with this often, whether I let other boys do so at school, whether I liked him, the Major, to do it. To all of which I answered truthfully, "Yes." He asked about the older boys, which was my favourite, what was he like, what did we do? I described Jim, and gave him a few facts. His listened with melancholy intensity. Then he kissed and fondled me again; and suddenly dived down and kissed my navel, and my prick; just once, very swiftly, took it between his lips and at once let it go. I did not mind at all. It was not a bit like Pip's performance.
He got up and said brusquely we must be moving. Poor man, he may well have lived in panic for a week after that, expecting handcuffs. Or perhaps he knew he could trust me. I hope he did.
It was a day out of old Arcadia. I loved every sunlit minute and so did my old admirer. But, alas for him! all the way back along the beach and on the train home I was thinking of the wonderful girl, who stood and dried her hair and let herself be gazed upon without flinching.
CHAPTER 3
Above the desk, I read, as a duty, a poem that said, "She was a phantom of delight." Below the desk, I read a poem scribbled on ruled paper, passed from hand to hand. It concluded:
Mary said O what a whopper Let's lie down and have it proper.
I had already begun to learn that every world has an underworld. I did not mean to miss half of life by sticking to the official, respectable part.
There was giggling at my right, along the row. I saw that my exhibitionist neighbour, Eric, who had passed me the rhyme, had his cock in his hand and was playing with it gaily, while the English master' talked about the phantom of delight. The ink on Eric's fingers had come off in streaks on the knob of his penis. I grinned and whispered a remark. The teacher looked up and ordered me out of the room for talking. I thought this an awful injustice, knowing what Eric had been up to. But Eric was a favourite anyway. He once told me that that particular teacher, a brawny Somerset man, had taken him and another boy to his home and given them glasses of port, and played the gramophone to them.
"Did he toss you off?" I asked, with a sudden hunch.
"No," he said. "O no." But from the way he said it I didn't believe him, I just assumed he had been sworn to keep mum, and I did not want to make him break his promise. I felt a pang of jealousy: why couldn't / be a favourite? So I began to go about saying I hated favouritism.
I loitered among the clothes-pegs, waiting for the English lesson to end. Soon I was joined by Eric, who had asked if he could "leave the room"-go to pee. "Come on," he said to me, "let's go and have some fun."
I knew what he meant, of course, and off we went to the place appointed, which smelt like a stable. We pissed, then drew some large diagrammatic pictures of prats and pricks on the wall, wrote slanders about our friends and added a few insults to our teachers. After this exercise in art, we shut ourselves in one of the closets. Eric took his trousers down-we had gone into long trousers, now-and sat on the seat. I played with his prick, hardening it for him, and he did the same for me, as I stood there close to his knees. We talked about girls.
"Have you ever been out with Sally Wells?" he asked me.
."No, but I've heard of her. I saw her at the pictures with Johnny Buxton."
Everybody had heard of her. Sally's name was written on the walls of all the school lavatories. She was a plump girl of fifteen, wonderfully notorious among the boys.
"She lets her father do her," Eric told me. "When he found out she'd been shagged by Johnny, he said, 'I might as well try you myself,' and that night he got into bed with her."
"Does her mother know?"
"Course not!"
"How do you know?"
"She told me herself, she tells everybody. She doesn't care!" Eric said. "Here, let me stick this up your bum." "No fear!" I said. "It's too big." "Let me feel and see if it is."
"Wet your finger, then-" I didn't want to be hurt.
He sucked his forefinger and pushed it into my bottom. My erotic feelings surprisingly increased. So apparendy did his. We both began to rub quicker, and though he had decided not to try to bugger me he kept his finger there, while he frigged me with the other hand. I rubbed him between finger and thumb and we splashed off almost at the same instant.
This cheerful boy Eric became my most regular partner for masturbation after that. But he told me that "the best wank in the world," for him, was when he stole one of his sister's sanitary towels, made a hole through the soft gauze and cottonwool, and pushed his prick through that. It was years later that I saw the incestuous meaning of it. I asked him to bring one of the towels to school and let me try it, but he quite jealously refused.
I wonder why he did not try his sister himself-or did he, later on? There's more of that than meets the public eye. It occurs to me, by the way, how much more lively interest we should have taken in our English lessons if the teacher had told us the poets were not plaster-saints, that Wordsworth had a daughter by a pretty French girl, that Shelley slept with his sister, and Byron gave his half-sister a baby! to say nothing of Wilde and his boys.
I was now fourteen: my voice was breaking, my skin was pimply, my limbs were clumsy, brown hair was growing round my prick and balls and I tended to contradict everyone. I tossed off, alone or with others, every day and night, till I got to eight times a day; then, being pale and shaky, I cut down (like smoking) to twice a day, by effort of will. At the same time I was getting soulful about girls and other matters. I wrote unsigned love letters to an attractive, haughty girl who lived in our street. She took no notice of me. I went to dance classes on a Saturday morning, and fell in love with first one sweet-powdered partner and then another. In a little drawer in my bedroom I kept a lace handkerchief one of them gave me, and a snapshot of another with "kisses to remember" written on the back.
I also at this time fell in love, for about six weeks, with a sloe-eyed boy, the same age as my younger brother. He was smooth-skinned and lithe as an eel. But I never spoke to him and only once touched him, when we brushed together accidentally in the crowd going into school and I trod on his toe. He smiled very forgivingly at me. But I never thought I had a chance of his favours. I heard, years later, that he was at that time already a fully-fledged homo, known to his schoolfellows as "Lily," and in the habit of picking up men. But I had no inkling of it.
I had a religious spell, and was in love with Jesus for a year. I never missed a Sunday service or a Sunday school class, and was the minister's pride. But it never occurred to me to amend my ways, or even to consider that masturbation and sexual thoughts ought to be avoided. I had made a hole in my trousers pocket, a trick which Eric taught me, and could frig away in comfort all through Bible readings and prayers, just as I did in school lessons.
However, I fell out of love with Jesus at the end of the year, and in love with learning. I studied prodigiously and began passing exams. But I did not lose interest in my favourite subject, even for a moment.
It was at this period that I came as near to incest as I ever have done: I had sexual transactions with both my brothers.
The first was with my younger brother, Leslie. When I been initiated into the love of Mrs. Palmer, the Fivefingered Widow, as the sailors call masturbation, and had had a wet dream to show that I could come, I naturally wanted to initiate someone else in my turn, and exhibit my powers. Who more natural than my brother ?
The idea came to me in a flash, when I walked into the bathroom to wash my hands, one night when he was bathing. I took a long time, washing and re-washing my hands, making conversation, looking covertly at him, wondering how to broach the subject. Nothing had ever happened between us except the time I had exhibited him as a "sacrifice" to my cousin Lizzy, and that had been no thrill for him.
Presently he stood up and began to dry himself, as the water ran out under his feet. He was slender, hairless, amiable-looking but decidedly stupid. I was a bit afraid. But curiosity and desire were rising in me, and I determined to go ahead.
"That's a big one, for a young 'un like you," I said, touching his penis playfully. It was, too, though a little swollen by the hot bath.
"Don't," he said.
"I bet you can't make it any bigger."
"Course I can, if I like."
"Shall I show you how to toss off?"
"No."
"I can fetch spunk." Bet you cant.
I pulled out my prick and began rubbing it up and down. He got out of the bath and sat on the bath side to watch. In spite of himself, his own prick got hard. When I touched it again, he did not say "Don't," and pretty soon I was frigging it for him, and myself with the other hand. Then I stood between his legs, weighed his little balls in my hand, pressed and rubbed his prick, and pressed my own on his damp, steamy body. When I felt my climax coming, I turned sideways, guided his hand on to my prick, clasping my own fingers On top of his, and shot my white jets into the bath.
When I felt discontented with solitary pleasures, after that, and had nobody else available, I used to make the often unwilling Leslie my sex-playmate. I don't think he ever really liked doing it with me, except -the time I gave him his first come: he was overjoyed when that wet splodge warmed his legs and ran on to his Bedclothes (for I had crept into his bedroom that night). He hugged and kissed me, that time, as he used to do when he was a little boy. Otherwise, there were no caresses in our affairs together.
But my experience with Sandy, my elder brother, was a big surprise to me. We were at the seaside, and I had to share a bed with Sandy, a thing I had never done before. It was hot summer, we were pleasantly tired with sea-bathing, and I fell asleep as soon as my head touched the pillow, in spite of the strangeness of Sandy's great length of flesh and warmth alongside.
Sandy, by the way, was grown up: an exceedingly handsome young man, who had been engaged once, and jilted. There was nothing feminine about him; to me, he was rather paternal, and I looked up to and loved him.
I dreamt that a big dog was licking my knees, then my balls and prick. I both liked and hated it. All at once I became conscious.
I could hardly believe it was happening. But yes, Sandy had rolled over close to me, and was gently fondling my parts, drawing the foreskin up and down. When he realised I had woken up and was not resisting him, he led my hand to his own weapon. It seemed very big and thick and rose from a forest of hair. I was scared by its size, but I felt very flattered by Sandy's intimacy.
I came quickly (he had touched exactly the right button, the point of maximum sensitivity). My drearhy state, the memory of the big, bad dog, and the thought that this game was even more likely to be frowned upon when it was between brothers than with strangers, all helped to bring me on. Sandy closed his hand over the end of my prick so that he could receive it all in his palm, really feel the jetting forth. Then he lathered my come over his own prick making it slippery under my hand. He took longer to come than I did, though I knew how to do it well enough and give him pleasure. I would have liked to rest, but duty is duty. I frotted away for him. He folded me to him, panting and sighing, then clasped me tightly between his long thighs and with a sudden heave emptied upon me. We lay quiet a long time, not worrying about the hot puddle on our hands and bodies, and I fell asleep in his arms, feeling naughty, triumphant and satisfied.
Had we been French, I suppose that Sandy, and I too perhaps, would have been frequenting brothels and gaining experience of another kind: our sex-life would have become what's comically called "normal" already; and what we should have missed!
During my masturbations I always had (and still have) images before my mind's eye. Some people do it mindlessly, thinking of nothing. After I had seen the naked Venus on the beach, she nearly always assisted in my nightly one-handed love-scenes. I wonder if she picked up my mind-waves and had erotic dreams of her own? If so, they must have been good ones: the things I made that exquisite girl do!
In these years of puberty, I had one other episode with a girl-not a success, but significant, later on. We were in the country again. I was one of a party gathering blackberries. At this time I was fourteen. The girl, a rosy-cheeked country lass who had rocked me in my cradle, was eighteen. Quite suddenly I became aware of her physical attractions, her sturdy legs, her round bouncing breasts, her red lips. I contrived to be alone with her, out of sight of the rest of the pickers, behind a massive prickly hedge.
Ruby climbed a gate and reached with a hooked stick for some fat berries above us. It was not so much the sight of her lacy underwear as the whiff of cunt catching my nostrils that made my ever-ready prick begin to twitch and stir. I stood right underneath her and looked up, hoping the legs of her knickers would sideslip and let me see the crack. It didn't; and becoming aware of my manoeuvres, she climbed down. As she did so I pushed my hands into the voluminous petticoats, trying to grab a feel.
"Bobbin!" she exclaimed, flushed and furious: "how dare you!"
I kissed her, but she turned her mouth aside and my lips went on her ear instead. I tried to get at her breast, but she was bodiced up in an old-fashioned way that gave me no opening: I tore the collar, which made her angrier than ever.
She kept saying, "Stop it! I'll scream for the others!"
I was fighting hard, like a maniac, for a triumph that could hardly have been a pleasure. I got one arm round her waist, held her like a wrestler, and yanked her frills up with the other hand, trying to get my fist between her legs. But she did not mean to yield. She was a strong countrywoman, and I only a slim awkward boy. I bruised her thighs, and she gave me what was almost a knockout slap across the face. I realised I was no match for her and gave up the fight. My face smarted, tears came into my eyes. My prick had given up hope, too, and was drooping again.
Ruby's indignant anger melted all of a sudden, and she called me silly in a cajoling way, and put a dewy dock-leaf against my burning cheek. We went back like mother and son, she with a protecting arm round my shoulders, and I with a bewildered suspicion that I should never understand women.
I thought to myself: "She didn't scream for the others, after all. Now, why not?" And I couldn't think of an answer.
But I had a wet dream about that fight, and very often found myself thinking amorously about Ruby in the next two years. For it was two years before we met again.
In the year after the Ruby episode I read voraciously, played a lot of tennis, swam, grew taller, frigged myself silly, and got as much sex fun as I could with my brothers and friends.
Leslie was sulky and positively jealous-such is human nature-when one day on a picnic in a quarry he came round the rocks and found me tossing off a schoolfriend of his. Only the tact and charm of the schoolfriend, who coaxed Leslie to join in and make it a jam session, saved the situation. We did it all standing up, I remember, three little conspirators huddled together in a coign of the cliffs, while the larks sang above us. I made up a legend about the flowers that would spring up where my seed fell on the ground, and how everyone who smelt them would be sex-mad and would fuck with everybody he or she met that day. The other two took this story up with delight, and applied it to the people we knew, teachers, parents and all.
Sharp little Leslie said, "And the Major would smell it, and he'd come after you'' for which I smacked him on the head. I wonder how many different brands of jealousy that boy suffered, where I was concerned!
Aside from such remarks as that, all our sex-talk was of girls, usually those older than ourselves, "women." So much we craved, so little we knew.
The autumn brought parties, and now that I and my schoolmates and girl friends were fifteen years old or round about that age, parents would often allow more latitude, would kindly absent themselves for hours, leaving .the young to fumble their way towards experience. It was a year of violent quarrels, passionate loyalties, cliques, absurd intrigues. At the parties, we would sit for whole hours in the dark, playing squelchy games, chewing one another's lips, whispering scandals and smoking perfumed cigarettes. Yet there was no copulation: fears and conventions still held all in check. But the joys of exploring were tremendous; the triumph of getting a hand down the neck of a struggling girl and squeezing her half-grown breasts, subduing her to quietness and coaxing her small nipples to stand erect like tiny pricks; or pushing a finger into a tight vagina, hearing that sharp, "Don't!" of fear and pain as you pressed on the unbroken hymen!
At one of the parties I met at last the notorious Sally Wells. She was a turbulent redhead, seventeen or so, and played jazz on the piano. I can't remember how I came to be at a party of my elders, but I was certainly the youngest there, and there was some illicit drinking of gin and beer in the bathroom. I had a tooth-mug full of gin and sodawater, a vile mixture, and felt wild but a little sick. Sally, probably to flout some older admirer, made a fuss of me, asked me to dance with her, and even sat by my side on the stairs, while others pushed past us or jeered from below. At length they went away and we were all alone; my tipsy head lolled on her shoulder. I put a tentative hand between her legs and she did not resist; she quickly put practised fingers into my fly and played a little with me, at the same time streaking her scented mouth back and forth across my lips. But when I tried to change our positions she resisted quite firmly; she knew cxacdy what she was prepared to concede; she was well aware that she was Sally Wells, and that it was a renowned privilege to touch her cunt, though a privilege enjoyed by many.
I was full of curiosity about her and questioned her boldly.
"How old were you when you first let a boy do this?" "Seven," she said.
"How old when you first let a boy go through you?" (an odd term, that, for fucking). "Eleven," she said, composedly. "How many times have you done it?" "Hundreds, why?" "Is it true your father does?"
"Yes, of course." This was said so smoothly, carelessly almost, that I did not know, and still do not, whether it was true or not
"Will you let me, Sally?"
"No."
"Why not?"
Instead of answering she gave me a kiss, and pushed her tongue into my mouth, exploring under my tongue with its soft tip. It was the first "French" kiss I had had, I think; at any rate, the most intoxicating. I almost came in her hand. Then, immediately, she broke away from me, at all levels, ran down the stairs and went back into the noisy room. She had, at small cost or risk, done what she set out to do: added another slave to her retinue, made another propagandist who would help to spread her sexy reputation. I could hear them teasing her about her absence, and her barbed replies bringing shouts of laughter. I crawled up to the W.C. and vomited my gin. How dissolute and heroic I felt, that night!
Then the wild bells rang in a new year, and I was sixteen.
Behold the transformation! My pimples had vanished, my limbs had taken on proportion, my puppy-fat had gone from my cheeks, my chest had expanded and my belly flattened. I bought a razor, though I hadn't much need for it yet. I was a slim, light-footed youth, with a soft skin, who never walked when he could run or dance. My voice had become deep, I had brown pubic hair, a prick of modest size, with outsize balls, it seemed to me. My body pleased me, I was happy to live in it. (Now that it's middle-aged and spreading I have to content myself with the efficiency of its functions!)
Here I was, a young man ready and well equipped to do the "act of love," who had never done it. How we could come so near to it and not do it, beats me, when I look back. There was an enormous amount of sitting about in the back seats of cars, and standing about in alleys, after dances and parties; no end of being pulled off in a handkerchief by your girl-friend of the moment, or thumbing her clitoris in the pictures. There was even, at a party of fourteen and fifteen year olds, a demonstration fuck by two youngsters, both virgins, I am sure; fully clothed, he on top of her, going through the motions as they imagined them to be. It was all hilarious, a great joke. The girl was a chubby brunette, for whom I had a strong desire myself, and it gave me quite a pang-why couldn't I have been that lucky boy ?-he was a cheeky-faced youth, with a lock of ginger hair falling over his eye. They lay down on the carpet, we stood round in a circle making mocking remarks or giving advice; one boy keeping cave at the door. Her legs were spread wide and he knelt between, resting on his elbows; but her skirt remained down, and his trousers, fully buttoned. Though it started as a joke, it got more serious, for him at any rate, and he really began to get a rhythmic beat into his motions, and seemed to be closing his ears to the things we were saying. The girl, too, stopped answering back and looked at him wonderingly. Somebody dropped a book on his backside. He got up abruptly, with a sheepish smile, and went out of the room. Another boy tried to get on top of the girl, but she pushed him over and struggled to her feet, laughing and blushing. I do not know whether her co-demonstrator had come in his trousers: there was still a visible bulge there when he got off, so perhaps not. We thought the whole thing huge fun, strange young animals that we were.
In the spring I saw the Major for the last time, though neither of us knew it would be so. He was going abroad on his doctor's advice. There was a good deal of joking about that, behind his back. My parents and friends thought he fussed far too much about his health; but he went to Switzerland and died there. I felt inarticulate grief and anger when I heard of his death.
He seemed quite his cheerful old self when he came to say goodbye, that bright spring day. He brought a bottle of wine and I was allowed a glass or two, which made me merry. He gave me a parcel of books, chiefly French: Voltaire, Rabelais, Mirabeau, in soft leather, from his library. I talked everybody's heads off, and at eleven was ordered off to bed.
The wine gave me an intuition: I thought, "He'll come and see me"; and as I wanted to be admired, I put no pyjamas on, but lay nude in bed, gently playing with myself and daydreaming.
Perhaps twenty minutes later I heard his footsteps, heavy on the stairs, and heard him go to "pump ship," as he would say.
Sure enough, he presently popped his head in the door of my bedroom:
"Are you too old to like being tucked in?" I smiled assent, and he came to the bedside. He sat down.
"Are you warm enough, Bobbin?" he asked, caressing my bare shoulders. He tucked the bedclothes round my body. He smoothed my back, felt the not very muscular arms, ran his palm over my chest.
Then he simply held me tightly and I listened to the thud of his heart. The moon shone in through the window, golden and glorious.
"I suppose you're too old for kissing," he ventured.
"Not when it's you," I said, and held my face up to be kissed. He pressed his closed lips very hard on mine. Then he fondled me with both hands, but all above the waist. I took hold of his wrist and boldly drew his hand under the covers, down to my erection, which was pulsing away there in its own excitement.
"O my God!" he murmured.
So for the last time he did the little things he had always loved to do, caressing my prick, drawing the skin silkily up and down, weighing the ballbag in his palm, and putting his finger-tip into the hole of my bottom. He did not make me come. He said, "Let me look at you!" and I threw back the covers and stood up proudly, a gleaming young body in the moonlight, my pole sticking out in from of me like the horn of a unicorn. He looked his fill, turning me round and about, then clasped me to him and kissed me again. Perhaps he had an orgasm, I hope so, for it was the last pleasure I was ever able to give him. One last prickly kiss, and he hurried away.
I conjured up a picture of Sally Wells being fucked by her father, whom I imagined in the likeness of the Major, and made myself come in my handkerchief. Then I went serenely to sleep.
CHAPTER 4
Looking back over those years of childhood I notice two things: how lucky I was never to land in real trouble, and how mild were my emotions, compared with my sensations. For all my illicit sexual dealings with both boys and girls, no parent or teacher ever descended on me in wrath, though surely some of my young partners must have blabbed, at times! But perhaps not: after all, I never forced one of them, against his or her will. They consented, and they kept mum. Not that much was done, after all: no actual fucking, no buggery; only the normal sports and explorations of the young. Perhaps a few parents turned a Nelson eye, remembering their own childhood. Perhaps my very shamelessness protected me, a magic shield.
The only time I was fairly caught was by the mother of the baby girl next door, as I have related. Now I was a manly character of sixteen, and that mother looked at me pensively over the fence, sometimes, and blushed at her thoughts (as if she could read mine). She spoke to me in a friendly way, but I did not dare to go over the fence, though I handed sweets to the little girl. Surreptitiously, when the mother was not about, I watched the little girl piddling in her sand-pit, then dabbling her fingers in the warm wet sand, a favourite game of hers. But I never touched her again, though, frankly, I would have liked to. Or the mother, either.
The mother engaged a new maid to look after the toddler, an Irish girl of sixteen, my own age, pretty as a picture. I made eyes at her, but we had never spoken, when one day I had a great thrill. It was late evening. I went into the bathroom but did not immediately put on the light, as I noticed the light was on in the bathroom next door, and the spring blind was not drawn down. Someone was moving about in there, I saw the rosy-pearl gleam of flesh. Presently she came under the light, and I, playing Peeping Tom, saw her in all her young splendour, that little coleen: stark naked, petite, black-haired, black-eyed, with springy round bubbies, and black hair on her pussy, like the ace of spades. She suddenly paused, looked out of the window suspiciously, as if she had felt the caress of my eyes, then pulled down the blind and I could see only the shadowshow, as she put on her nightie.
The next night I kept trotting upstairs, on one pretext or another, till I saw the light on. Again I could see her, fully clothed, however, and bending about, filling the bath, as I guessed. I too put the light on and ran a bath for myself. She disappeared and reappeared confusingly. I locked the door, and undressed. We had a lace curtain instead of a blind. My window was steaming over. I stood on a chair and wiped the steam away, and drew back the curtain. I could no longer see Molly, who was presumably in the water, reclining, soaping that seductive pussy, sponging those tits. Could she sec me, as I stood naked at the window?
I had my bath, standing up, most of the time, so as not to miss a glimpse at the window. I stepped out and rubbed myself with the towel. Needless to say I soon had a frantic erection, that drove me to wild action. I switched the light on and off three times, like a signal. Nothing happened. I waited a few minutes, then did the same again. Molly approached the window, towelled, and reached up her hand to pull down the spring blind, staring across to where I was. She pulled the blind about a foot, then paused again.
She disappeared once more. Had she gone away, to tell tales? I gave my three flash signal again. This time, her light replied: three flashes.
I hurried to the window, wiped the steam away once more, stood on a chair and waved. I saw her wipe the steam away, too. But she was wrapped in a towel from head to foot. I had nothing on, and turned in profile to exhibit my standing tool more conspicuously, frigging it to show what I meant. I could sec only the upper part of her, but she too climbed on to a chair or box, under the light, where she had stood the night before, and slowly, deliciously, unrobed, uncovering first a shoulder and breast, then the other shoulder, then letting the towel fall completely. She pirouetted round to show me her bottom and give me a profile view as well. Then she jumped down, probably with a sudden access of shame, and down came the blind.
I watched till the light went out, and saw another go on in the skylight of her attic bedroom, but no glimpse of her was visible up there.
by now I was in a fine state. I hurried to Leslie's room. He was drowsy, and did not want to be awoken.
"What do you want?" he mumbled.
"I want to get into bed with you," I said, scrambling in.
"What for? No, I don't want to, I don't feel like it." "I've just seen the maid next door having a bath, it was marvellous," I said. "Feel this."
"You're a liar," he said as usual. "You're always horny, I tell you I don't feel like it. No!" He struggled, and rolled over on his face.
But I was too randy to take no for an answer. I yanked his pyjama legs down to his knees, and forced my knees between his thighs. Lying on his back, I rubbed my prick in the groove of his bum, and even playfully tried to jab it in the hole, but he was too dry and resistant. He tightened the cheeks together, which gave me an exciting sensation in itself. So I pushed it lower down, so that my knob was touching his ballbag. By now he had begun to warm up, in spite of himself, as I could tell. I put my hand down and he let me slide it under and hold his penis. I enjoyed pressing my tummy on the two cheeks of his little bottom, and I came in a quick spasm, half thinking about him and half about the colleen. The thing that it was most exciting to think about was her turning round to exhibit all sides of herself, and then all at once turning coy afterwards.
My young brother was grumbling at my puddling him up-"Why do you make so much?"-and then complaining because I had left off doing anything to him, having satisfied myself. "I haven't shot yet, Bobbin, you are mean!" he said. "I say, can I do it on your bottom ?"
"O all right"-I had no thrill left in me, but did not want to be ungrateful. So we reversed positions, and he, clammy with my come, rode on my bottom, giggling like a schoolgirl. His cock was small, only the size of my forefinger. I felt it nudge my hole, and it was almost in when his spunk gushed. He subsided, with a long "Oooo!" that was partly pleasure and partly guilt. He was always reluctant to start, and always felt guilty afterwards, unlike me. I squeezed his shoulders reassuringly, before I left to go back to my own bed, and told him patronisingly, "You're a good kid."
But my larks with my younger brother were coming to an end: we lost interest, and even as a substitute I didn't really want him any more; while Sandy, the elder, had left home.
As for my Irish girl, we went on signalling and exhibiting to each other a couple of times a week before we even had a conversation. Then one evening I waylaid her in the back alley, and we cuddled in "the shadows. I told her how pretty she was, which was no flattery. She let me feel her tits, but put up a struggle when I tried to get my hand in lower down.
"Not now-you mustn't-not now!" she said. I did not catch her meaning, till finally I shoved my hand into her knickers, encountered a thick gauzy wad, and came up with a bloody finger. I think she expected me to be disgusted at contact with her menstrual blood, or the smell of burnt toast which it gave out; but I laughed. From the first contact onwards, I have never felt fastidious about a woman's periods. "The flowers," we used to call it when I was young. I liked my little Molly in flower. But she couldn't understand that. She had her share of shame, after all.
We met again when she was all clear, and she let me play with that pussy I had seen from afar. She resisted when I directed her hand to my fly, but at length held me with scared fingers, and learned how to stroke and manipulate my "thing," as she called it, till I came. But she would not let me put it near her cunt. Anyway, we could hardly have fucked in the alley so near home, and we had no other place or opportunity. We were caught once, kissing and cuddling there by my parents, who rebuked me sternly later; they seemed mainly worried about class distinction!
I enjoyed shocking her, which was easy to do. She blushed to the eyebrows when I told her what I did with my brother, after first seeing her exhibit herself at the window. "Goodness, you didn't! Goodness!" she exclaimed. "How do you mean?"
So I described it in exact detail, and she kept saying, "Shut up, I don't want to hear any more!" but obviously wanting to, all the same. When I fingered her, she was very wet. She was in the mood, and told me something to excite me, too. "I like to think about you when I go to the lav.," she said. "I squeeze my legs tight together and it feels lovely." We were both highly excited, and I think that in spite of the difficulties, standing up in the dark corner, we should have at least attempted to couple, that night; but a lamp shone upon us, and a cyclist rode by, turning his head for an eyeful. He must have seen her holding my cock, if nothing more. Molly was very flustered, straightened her clothes at once, and exclaimed, "I hate this place!"
Once again, nothing really happened, and pretty Molly went to another job, and I more or less forget her. It was just one more of the frustrated sex contacts that go on everywhere, all the time. Under the business of life there is a great network of them, winks, touchings, pinchings, rubbings, sly orgasms in crowded buses and trains, glimpses of the "private parts" of strangers through keyholes, windows, holes in lavatory walls, kissings and suckings and finger-fucks in back alleys, mutual masturbations with brothers and sisters, private pleasures in front of mirrors or through holes in sanitary towels, lascivious memories and wet dreams. A huge network of unadmitted pleasures, making up by far the biggest part of the sex-life of poor, hungry mankind.
After passing my exams, that year, I went for a holiday in the country, and there I again met Ruby, the girl I had assaulted among the blackberry bushes. She was now twenty, and in full bloom. Hers was a simple country prettiness, her figure was too short and solid to be good, her face round and rosy, goodnatured and gay. The lads of the village found her very attractive, and she was flirting with several at once.
She looked at me with new eyes, and remarked on how much I had grown. I sized her up appreciatively: her bottom was round and mobile, and her big breasts seemed almost out of control, they swung and bounced about so much. But I never imagined I had any chance with her.
One moonlight night, however, she had to cycle from one village to the next, and I was going the same way, so we rode off together. We had a bantering conversation about her boy friends, as we rode, and I found pleasure in watching the motions of her strong legs. Ideas began to form in my head, and I thought of a stratagem.
"I'll have to get off, Ruby," I said, ceasing to turn the pedals. "What for?"
"I have to pee." I dismounted. "O all right then." She followed suit. "Come with me," I said. "Not likely!"
I went among the bushes. I could hardly produce a drop. I got a semi-erection, instead. I heard Ruby rustle the bushes, and knew she had decided to relieve herself in a secluded spot, at the same time. The patter of her piddle on the leaves, noisy in the warm, still night, led me to the place. I surprised her, squatting on her heels.
Of course she told me to go away, and of course I refused. I liked catching her in this vulnerable, intimate situation^ and the very sound of her stream gave me a thrill. She had not quite finished, and I put one arm round her shoulders, the other between her legs. It gushed hotly through m^ fingers, then trickled away and died off. She said nothing more at all. She stood up, my hand still there, and stepping a pace away from the wet leaves we began kissing, fondling, squeezing, with rapture, as though we had come out for nothing else. There was nothing coy about Ruby, now. She gave herself the privileges of her seniority: she knew that for all my bold advances, I was totally inexperienced and needed a teacher.
She put her hand down and seized my prick-I had not even buttoned myself up again after my piddle. She shook and jerked it rather too fiercely for my taste. I pulled her down on to the grass.
**I want to have you," I whispered, in a strangled voice.
Ruby pulled her own pants off, pulled me down between her legs, and undid my trousers from top to bottom, then slid her hands in to embrace my buttocks. I found a way into her bodice, and touched her great soft breast. I squirmed my tongue into her cheek. I felt the wet lips of her cunt, and tried to find the clitoris in the folds. I made my left arm a pillow for her head and fumbled inefficiently with the right hand.
Ruby was panting with excitement. She wanted it desperately. She had had a number of strapping country lovers, but now she was having a virginal lad of sixteen, giving him the first full experience of his life, and she knew it. The notion raised her to boiling point. Besides, she had a two years' old memory of sexual interest in me to add to the stimulus. So had I!
Ruby's firm hand took my prick and guided it into position. I felt the warm, slippery walls hold it deliciously. Bursting with excitement, I pushed in, pulled out, pushed again and felt all the golden warmth in me pour down my body and gush up through my prick in one flood. I had come-on the second stroke. Poor Ruby!
I panted, and almost wept on her breast.
"I couldn't help it," I sobbed. Tears of fury filled my eyes. I tore handfuls of grass out by the roots.
"It's the first time, isn't it, Bobbin?"
"Yes," I confessed brokenly.
"Well, never mind"-she smiled and stroked my head.
I put my hand between her legs. She put her hand on top of it, squeezed her legs together, and her muscles went rigid for a moment or two, then relaxed. That small pleasure had to content her.
Before we put ourselves to rights and rode away again, Ruby squatted and squeezed and wiped out what I had left in her. That was all the contracepting she did. Happy-go-lucky, the country girls.
I had achieved the act that symbolises manhood, that was about all that could be said for my first fuck. My sensations had been intense, but maddeningly short-lived. Would Ruby ever give me another chance?
Yes, I did have the amiable Ruby again, several times, and with proper enjoyment, though not for a year or more. In fact, I had her almost at yearly intervals during my adolescence, as circumstances would have it. And meanwhile, Ruby and Molly and all were swept right out of my head by my first real love affair.
I was just seventeen, the classic age for calf-love, I suppose. It was in the gap between my being a schoolboy and becoming a student. My first holiday on my own, a sunny seaside resort, and a girl only a little older than myself. Jean was eighteen. She had come all the way from Scotland to join an English girl she knew, but her friend had been taken ill, and Jean was alone among the Sassenachs. We were staying at the same boarding-house, and were the only people without partners. It was natural that we should become tennis and dance partners for the fortnight we were there, and should be treated in an indulgent, romantic way by our elders. Natural that we should look at each other with an eye to physical charms, and be inclined to surrender to the atmosphere of tinsel sentiment-the sweet dance music in the glass on the seafront, the fairy lights along the promenade, the whispered suggestions of the waves. But to me something more surprising happened, something that all these things could not account for.
I remarked earlier in this chapter how strong were my sensations in childhood and how mild my emotions. I had a distant affection for my parents, mixed feelings for my brothers, a tender regard for the Major, spasms of romantic warmth for Judy, and Lizzy, and Jim, and the boy they called "Lily." But with Jean it was passionate love, and at first sight.
She was a "nutbrown maiden" from the Highlands, and not particularly pretty, having the prominent cheekbones and jawbone characteristic of her race, but a frank and friendly look went with them, and her figure was trim: she walked beautifully. Her voice was richly Scottish, and soft in the country way. She laughed a great deal, and talked to me not of film stars but of Byron, whom she idolised, and of her country's history, about which she had passionate feelings. This amazed me, as I had little or no interest in the history of my own country, let alone any emotions about it. But I was caught up in her enthusiasms, and everything she said or did seemed wonderful. I lay awake at night thinking about her, I was desolate if I missed seeing her at breakfast or tea, I found I wanted to be with her all of every day, and nothing seemed any good any more if she was not there to share it. I wanted to serve her, suffer for her, sacrifice myself for her; I wished she were drowning so that I could rescue her. But, unfortunately she could swim better than I.
I was so dazed with this whirlwind in my heart, that for three days I made no sexual overture to her, though in retrospect that seems incredible! On the third day we went swimming in a salt-water pool by the shore, instead of in the sea; there was a band playing waltzes, and we tried to waltz together in the water. She did not mind my clinch, and her pear-shaped breasts in the wet costume were compressed against my chest in a pleasantly erode way. "I wish we could swim without costumes," I said. She answered unhesitatingly, "Yes* so do I," and added that she had done so, in Loch Ness.
"Alone?" I inquired, "or with the Monster?" I felt a jealous pang.
No, with her girl friend, Kate. She told me how pretty her friend was, such long legs, and such lovely round breasts. The frankness of this description filled me with joy. That night, dancing in the glass hall, I said, "I bet your friend's breasts are not as nice as yours."
She only laughed, but we both know the significance of my remark. I suddenly said I was tired of dancing, and how about a walk?
Jean agreed, we left the hall, and walked under the stars, heading inland, up the hill towards the castle. Soon we left the road, and were entirely alone, on the grassy swards among the clumps of trees, with the old walls high above us and the white line of the waves far below. It was chilly. I was afraid Jean would say that it was too cold to sit down and that we must keep walking. I wanted to make an attempt to fuck her, but had no idea whether she would play or not, or whether she was a virgin. (I hoped not.) Instead, I found myself telling her I was in love with her, and just about offering her the sun, moon and stars. Did she love me, too?
"Yes," she breathed; O yes, she did love me, from the minute she saw me. I believed her, absolutely. I did not know whether to rush on to the question of engagement and marriage, but decided to leave all that till nearer the end of our holiday, in case she might be scared by such a precipitate move. We had a bout of kissing instead. Then we sat down on my mackintosh, and while she recited Byron my hand stole into the leg of her knickers. When I reached her clitoris and began to make that famous nerve jump, she turned off Childe Harold and fell back in my arms. My other hand reached her breast. The pear-shaped are not my favourite -I might have preferred the round ones of her friend Kate-but they were soft and young. And they were hers, my own love's, my Jean's, and I was touching them, and she wanted me to touch them. That meant everything.
I pulled her knickers down, felt her muscular hips, held the cheeks of her bottom in my palms. I moved one hand away from that delightful region, to undo my buttons and get my rod out. She took hold of it, and murmured: "O Bobbin!" in a sigh of adoration. She guided it expertly into her cunt, with an anxious admonition: "You will pull it out in time, won't you? I dinna want a bairn just yet."
"All right," I said, a bit disappointed over this handicap, and cursing myself for not having thought of buying a French letter.
But I was fairly launched on the second fuck of my life, and determined not to spoil it by coming too soon, as I had with Ruby.
I already knew I was not Jean's first lover, young though she was. Without saying a single word she taught me, by her own muscular movements, how to move rhythmically and not too fast, to go deep into her and draw slowly out almost to the tip, a steady thrilling piston-stroke. And then gradually speeding up, my head swimming with images of clouds and swirling waves, till a sudden automatism took over, so that I was no longer in control. It was as if the great god Pan was riding on my back, making my rhythm for me. As I kissed her my mouth watered and I let the saliva spill into her mouth, and heard her gulp it, and felt her excitement increase. I was driving faster, faster, my mind almost blacked out in helpless dizziness, I could feel the surge coming up through me, coming, coming, and I knew she was coming, too. But like an alarm clock breaking into one's sleep, her warning words returned and on the final stroke I pulled right out, thrust forward on to her belly, and filled her navel with my hot milk, which overflowed both sides and ran down her hips. She had come at the same instant, and we went limp together, wrapped in each other's arms and as happy as two creatures can be.
We lay there an age under the stars, without speaking. She quietly wiped up the mess, presently, with her handkerchief. The air was colder, but my braw Scottie did not seem to feel it. By and by she began playing with my limp cock, with loving and exploring fingers, and touched the sensitive under-skin of my balls. I was surprised to find myself rising again. I reciprocated by feeling around inside her cunt, finding the pee-hole, and reaching right in till I could touch the mouth of the womb. She particularly liked it when I ran my finger back and forth on that gothic arch inside the inner Hps. Now I was wanting her again, feverishly, and soon sank myself into her depths.
Jean was a girl who really cooperated, really used her cunt, made a rhythm to match mine, gripped and rolled my prick so purposefully that you would have thought she had a small pair of hands in there. Once again we came together. Every single time I fucked her she managed the timing so that we came on the dot together, and that is a wonderful thing.
The next day I made so bold as to buy some French letters. I became a pretty regular customer at that shop, where the fat old chemist smiled at me knowingly. I shagged Jean every day and sometimes twice and three times a day, on hills and in dells, on beaches and park benches (very difficult, that) arid once or twice in her bedroom by stealing about in bare feet at dead of night-we were both scared of a scandal at the boarding-house. But everybody must have guessed what was going on between us: we looked so gaga, and so radiant, and so exhausted at times, and we could , help making intimate gestures or remarks. Jean not only loved me, she loved the act of love. She had a great appetite for the flesh itself.
I asked her who had been her lover before me. A young man, she said. Nice, but not the marrying sort, and he had gone abroad. Was he the first? No, there was one other. Who? She didn't want to talk about it. But I persisted, and after a few days' nagging, she told me. He was her schoolteacher, a man of about fifty, and he took her virginity on a desk, in detention one evening. She was the only girl in the building, the last to leave, and he was supposed to be locking up, when he suddenly put his arms round her and kissed her. Then he lost control, and possessed her.
"I was fourteen," she said. "He mopped up the blood with blotting-paper." "Did it hurt?"
"Och, yes, like anything, I got no fun." "Did you hate it? Did you tell anyone?" "Goodness, no! He was awfu' nice and gentle." "Did he have you again?"
"Ay, a few times, till I left school." She added: "He had a few ither girls, too. I used to advise him, which he could try and which were-telltales and prudes. He used to ask me, do you think yon Mary would let me? v and I'd say, O ay, she told me she'd let the postman grope her, an' all. But steer clear of Janie Campbell."
"And did he get caught?"
"Not a bit of it. He retired last year and the collection for him was the biggest the school ever raised,"
"Why wouldn't you tell me about him, are you ashamed of it?" I asked her.
"Not really, but I'm always afraid to talk about it, I wouldn't like it to get back and mak' trouble for him," she said. "He was awfu' gentle."
One day Jean and I decided to bathe in the nude. We walled till we found a desolate, weedy shore, with low cliffs behind. No sign of tents or ice-cream carts here. We stripped and left our clothes by the cliff, then ran and danced on the beach, and flung ourselves into the waves. The afternoon was sunny, we were having a May heat-wave, and the sea, though foaming in, was not cold. It was heavenly to feel the play of air and water on our flesh from head to foot, the splash of the spray on our genitals, the absolute direct contact of the elements, with no veil of convention to spoil it. Heavenly, to me, to see my Jean with nothing to break the smooth continuity of her lovely young body from shoulder to toe; to see her breasts dancing in the wave crests, and the water slip over her bottom as she dived, like the backs of seals; and to feel the wet weed of hair between her legs, when we lay embracing in the shallow ripples at the edge.
We ran about on the sand till we were dry, and then inevitably, automatically, ray down and began making love. She played with my cock, which needed no coaxing, however. I rolled on top of her, and was just getting in, when my eye caught a flutter of colour on the cliff-top. 'Among the tussocks up there were two people, a man and perhaps a girl or perhaps another man, a youth, lying face down, side by side, watching us.
I told Jean. "Tell them to go away," she said.
I stood up, totally nude-our clothes were ten yards away-my prick up in front like a clothes-prop, and shouted, "Please go away!"
The peepers did not answer. One of them trained apair of field-glasses on us.
I repeated my appeal. They took no notice. I distinctly heard laughter.
"They won't go," I said to Jean. "I don't care, let them look. Let the wide world look, if it likes to see two people happy. Do you mind much?"
"Are they men or women?" Jean asked.
"Both men, I think."
"O weel, let them watch, if they'll enjoy it," she said.
So I knelt down again between her thighs, and she held my prick, which had drooped a little, and frisked it back to vigour. The salt sea had sealed her up a little, too, and I had to play a while with the lips till she lubricated freely. Then again I went in and took her, with all the ease of familiarity and all the fervour of youthful passion.
It was a curious sensation to know that those two up on the cliff were watching every motion, with lecherous curiosity. I think we were not an unlovely sight, our two sunlit young bodies blending into one and beating in rhythm like the heartbeat of the cockeyed world.
Except perhaps at the very climax, I could not forget those four eyes, but it did not inhibit me. Jean and I confessed to each other, afterwards, that we even got a slightly perverse thrill out of the idea, once we had accepted it. And they certainly had all they could wish.
We lay awhile sunbathing afterwards, arms entwined, flat on our backs, prick, cunt and tits carelessly displayed to the viewers, lazy and content. When we got up and walked towards our clothes, the couple on the cliff got up too, and began walking back to the town. We never saw them clearly enough to identify them, but I inclined to the opinion that the smaller one was a girl, while Jean preferred to think they were both males. Who were they? Husband and wife, father and son, homosexual lovers, just two randy young men looking for thrills? Did they masturbate themselves or each other as they watched us, did they couple when we rested, had they come when we came together? All we knew was that they walked away with their arms round each other's waist.
We must have passed them again in the days that followed, on the sea-front or the beach or in the shopping-streets. We used to say to each other, "Do you think it was that couple?"-and laugh. We had the tantalising knowledge that they must have recognised us, whereas we could not spot them. It gave us a certain self-conscious swagger, being on parade before those unknown eyes.
The holiday drew to and end, and I asked Jean again whether she loved me. "O ay," she said. "But holidayfashion, ye know, Bobbin, not for life."
This stung me. I would love her for life, I vowed.
]he shook her head and told me I wadna. I was chilled into silence. It was impossible, now, to talk of engagement and marriage. The whole idea blew to smithereens, like sea-foam, at her realistic touch.
On the last day we went for a last walk up the hill where I had first had her. We sat down and talked sadly of parting.
"Look here, here's guid news for ye," she said, pulling her knicker-leg aside and showing me a sanitary towel in place. "I'm not in the family way."
But I was crestfallen. "I wanted to have you, for the last time."
"Never mind."
She bent down and began to suck my prick, by way of compensation. Nobody had ever done it to me before, and I found it a delicious sensation. But too passive; soon I was wanting to fling myself forward, to urge my thickness into her hole, any hole, her arse, her mouth even, but to be the driving force, not simply to have my juice sucked out of me.
"Take this thing off, let's have it all the same!" I lid.
No, she couldn't, she never had, she wouldn't like it, I might hurt her. But she too wanted a last fling, and wanted very much to please me. I unpinned the wad, and plunged into the blood. She cried out at the first thrust: the flesh felt peculiarly tender, she said. But her sensations were sharp and she was never more estatic than that last time, almost foaming at the mouth. As for me, the idea that she was having a new experience keyed me up, too, and I felt extra love and gratitude to her for risking it for my sake. I used no French letter that time, and did not attempt to pull out, certain that this one time it was safe. We came as if we would never stop coming, and I pulled out my totem-pole all lathered in spunk and blood, like a symbol of pagan sacrifice.
Jean and I cried when we parted. But how right she was! We wrote to each other for six months, and exchanged greeting cards for Christmas and birthdays for two or three years. But our next meeting was postponed and postponed, and the idea began to seem ridiculous, and I wondered how I could ever have thought about proposing marriage to that girl, whom I knew so slightly. I came to realise that it would be a fiasco if we ever did meet again-we should both have changed to much, our calf-love was over, and our fresh copulations could never measure up to our magical memories.
But now I wonder! I rather wish we had met again, and risked our disillusion, and trusted our instincts. We might have made something of it, even at a second throw. It isn't every day that one meets a woman who can put herself so completely, so simply and beautifully into the act of love. But in those days, I did not yet know how rare a gift it might be.
CHAPTER 5
Student life now began, and a new town to explore. It was not Oxford or Cambridge, but an interesting seaport. I left home without a pang, and my parents, proud and stately, bade me a gracious adieu. I settled in a hostel, and quickly made new friends.
Everyone's idea of student life is the same, and it is true, inasmuch as students try half-consciously to live in accordance with it. The pattern is one of sport and idling, violent last-minute spurts of work, outbreaks of disorder, exploits to help some oppressed minority somewhere, all-night arguments on philosophy or modern art, passionate friendships with one's own sex, masquerades and practical jokes, "good times" with barmaids and shopgirls.
All of this I had, including the emotional friendship, though my aesthetic soulmate meant nothing to me physically. In fact, I thought after falling in love with Jean that my sex life had taken on the official colouring, and that I should never again have any affairs with males. Not that I had any remorse for those of the past: I simply thought they were a part of growing up, and were now left behind. I did not know myself. I did not know that I was destined never to leave any part of my life behind, that the feelings and experiences of childhood, of adolescence, of young manhood would always be alive in me, and that there was no limit in my nature to the range of sexual desires. Slowly, over the years, this truth was revealed to me.
Continuing to write love-letters to Jean, I never thought of trying to be "faithful" to her. The idea of "fidelity" never came naturally to me. I was anxious to find some willing girl who would relieve the head of steam engendered by the absence of Jean.
My student friend and I had a joint flirtation, or friendly rivalry, over a girl student of seventeen, a fluffyhaired blonde whom we both fell for when she played in a college production of A School for Scandal. She was slight of build, brilliant of complexion, witty and talkative; she knew almost nothing, and was uninterested in the things that we liked to argue about. She played one of us off against another, and in the end I got into a perfectly desperate state about her. She would let me kiss her and fondle her tits, but never allowed my hand to get above her knee. My friend got the same treatment-we compared notes, of course-but he took it all as a joke, and I began to want that girl quite madly. I told her point-blank what I was after. She simply laughed and wisecracked me.
Finally I told her I could stand no more of this frustration. I didn't want to see her again unless an until she decided to surrender. She ridiculed me, and we parted.
I tried to put her out of my mind. I would cuddle my pillow and think of Jean on the sunny beach, or go to sleep and have a dream in which a man in a mackintosh was forcing his prick into my mouth or a dog was licking my balls, making me gush into th bedclothes. In one delicious dream, I put a glass chamber-pot under the bottom of my cousin Lizzy, and lay down to watch while she made pee and shit in it. She exclaimed, "I'm busy," and seized my prick between her two bare feet. I came on her toes.
With these bizarre dreams and my quota of masturbation, I let off some of the pressure. But work ana sport did nothing to diminish my sensuality, as they are supposed to do.
One day I was called to the telephone in the hostel.
"Hello," said Margaret, the fluffy blonde, in a light flippant tone. I waited to see what she wanted.
"I'm bored with not seeing you," she said. "I used to like seeing you, you know. Is it necessary?"
"You know what I said. I don't want to go out witn you unless you are willing to sleep with me."
"Mm."
"Are you willing?"
"O well-if I can't talk you out of it."
I realized that she had actually rung up prepared to make the great surrender. My hopes, spirits and self-esteem leapt to the top of the barometer. I made a date with her for the next night.
I had a friend, not at college, who lived in a bachelor flat, and who was kindly disposed towards love and lovers. I rang him up. It was exceedingly inconvenient for him, but I coaxed, urged and practically compelled him to clear out and lend me his flat for the great occasion.
He did everything very nicely: even left us a halfbottle of wine.
I met Margaret and found it thrilling to see her again, to kiss her and touch her hand. For all her joking manner, I could see that she was excited and keyed up
We ate together, then went to the flat, read my friend's note of welcome and drank his wine.
We were in a perfect setting, we were enjoying each other's company, our conversation skated gaily on the subject we had in mind, and I had never felt more triumphant. We sat on the divan. We reclined. We kissed, and at last she allowed me to play with her soft parts.
"Are you a virgin?" I asked. "Yes."
My pride inflated another degree. My prick was eager: I put her hand on my trousers and she held the lump of flesh with evident curiosity. I undressed her. A slip of a girl, but most delicately moulded, rosy and flawless, with coralline nipples, blonde pubic hair and a beautiful mound of Venus. She lay back and opened her legs to receive me.
I stripped in haste. But what had happened to my cock? It was flabby and useless. I frigged it furiously but it positively shrank. I lay down beside Margaret, kissed her lips and her nipples, ran my hands all over her, played with her cunt till it was oily-wet, explored her bottom. I put her hand on my prick and she toyed with it helpfully. But all to no purpose. It simply would not rise. Here I was with the most desirable and desired of girls at my disposal, ready and waiting for me, and found myself impotent! It was ghastly.
In a vain attempt to cover up my humiliation, and a vain hope of overcoming it, I climbed on to the girl, in position for a fuck, and began the motions. But though my most sensitive nerve was a-quiver, and sensation was rising, the flesh was as soft as the lobe, of an ear. I breathed fast and strained. Sensation itself was dying out in me.
Inevitably, though in a gentle voice, came the question: "What's the matter?"
I could not say. I cannot to this day, though the same thing has sometimes happened on other occasions; not often, thank heaven.
It was no use. I had to give up, though for almost an hour I tried to coax my prick to do his duty. I even (for the first time) brought the images of other people to mind, to try to stimulate myself: Jean, Lizzy, Ruby, the Major, all were sacrificed to the occasion. But they left me colder than ever.
Margaret said she must be going, and got up and put her clothes on again. Now, I thought, she really has a right to laugh at me. But she did not, although she must have felt bewildered, and vilely cheated. Very little was said.
We left my friend's flat, kissed goodbye and parted without further talk.
I walked about in the rain, wondering whether my affliction was permanent, whether my sex-life was over. At length I went home and to bed, in the bleak student hostel. I lay sleepless, and very near to tears. But what was this? I had a huge, fighting-fit erection, which a sledge-hammer could not have bent. And sexual images swarmed into my mind-of everything but Margaret. It was the little foreshore Venus who stood, naked and lovely, before my eyes, as I spurted into the bedclothes.
My bosom friend took Margaret's virginity, not long afterwards, and described the fuck to me in edifying detail. Later on, I had her myself, several times, in cars, and dark corners: no difficulties! No great ecstasies, either.
Was I inhibited about Margaret in the first place because she was a virgin? I can't think so. I had other encounters with virgins, eminently successful and delightful, in due course. No, I think I had waited too long for her, wanted her too desperately, and found that dramatic self-offering was just more than I could take. A starving man can't sit down and eat a rich feast. Prostitutes say a sailor home from a long voyage is no good on the first night But there may be other, deeperrooted reasons for my flop. Why, since I thought this girl so superlatively attractive, did I never really have a first-rate fuck with her? Was it her touch of mockery? I couldn't escape the thought that she did not take me, or sex, entirely seriously. Why should she? you may say; for there is a funny side to the business, and I was no less ridiculous than young men of that age usually are. But without a certain seriousness at the heart of the matter, sex won't yield its full flavour.
The first time I had a virgin was a couple of years later. A student: and O the absurdities of student behaviour, looked back upon! She was a year or two younger than I, her name was Lena, she was studying biology, and to be truthful I had not paid any attention to her when I first saw her. She was a studious type, though with a boisterous laugh, and was rather strange in looks-the long, pale face of the Restoration period, with black ringlets; a very wide mouth. She was always surrounded by her own crowd, an excited, chattering crew. But one night at a student dance I was drunk, and found myself lurching round the floor with her in my arms; and then sitting out in a corner of the refectory, with the lights low, and everything swimming around me.
She allowed me to kiss her, but resisted my attempts to feel her breasts and her cunt. It was not difficult to resist me as my limbs were almost out of control. I asked her how many men she had slept with. I put the question brutally, just for the hell of it; just to force her to say "none." She did, quite coolly: "None. I'm a virgin." I told her she had no business to be, and that a girl ought to get herself a lover as soon as she started to menstruate. That was the law of nature, I said, and modern girls were "all miserable neurotics as a result of disobeying it."
I went on in that way till I passed out and began to snore. Whenever I met Lena after that I used to say: "Lost it yet?" or "When are you going to take me to bed?" or "Like to get rid of your neurosis-the hard way?" She used to laugh, and sometimes wisecrack me in reply.
Then one day I received a note, in the grand student manner:
I have decided to present you with my virginity, having thought over your arguments objectively and decided that they are on the whole sound. On the night of the staff dance it should be possible for us to meet safely somewhere for the ceremony, while establishing an alibi at the dance itself, earlier or later. I leave you to assign a place.
Yours, Lena.
To this letter, in which no word like "love" or "darling" occurred, I replied, "I am happy to accept the gift and will make the necessary arrangements."
Another friend's flat, this time. He was a homo, and thought copulation with the opposite sex the most fearful bad taste, but he "supposed people would do these things."
Lena and I went to the dance separately, met there like casual friends. She wore black velvet, doing her best to look elegant, her flesh looking startlingly white by contrast, her black locks and eyebrows matching the velvet, her face paler than ever, her lipstick bloodcoloured, her teeth shining as she laughed with a rather unnatural gaiety. We had a couple of dances together and drank some smuggled liquor in a car with other youths and girls. I felt amused and elated at the prospect before me. She had not changed her mind (I halfthought she might) and we made our plans.
I slipped away first, and had a half-hour wait in the drab little flat, warming it and myself before the gas fire: it was a frosty night. I wallowed in the flattery of her offer, with lurking fears that the case of Margaret might be repeated: she too had offered me that "gift," and I had failed to take it!
When Lena arrived, she had had another couple of drinks and was decidedly dizzy. I closed the door: she flung her arms round my neck and we kissed. I slipped my tongue into her mouth and she nipped it gendy with her teeth, then sucked it as though it were a nipple or something else. My hands meanwhile began exploring her shape, which she had previously tried to prevent my doing. I touched her moist, shaven armpits, the long slope of her partly-bare back, the softness of her waist, the firm hips and the firm cheeks of her arse.
"Don't let's go in the bedroom, let's do it here," she said, and sat down on the rug in front of the gas fire. "All right. Let me undress you." "In a minute."
We lolled in each other's arms for that minute, and a real sexy heat began to suffuse me. It increased when I helped her out of the velvet frock and the underslip, and unbuckled the suspender belt, and watched her neatly roll off her silk stockings. At that point we stopped again for kisses, after which I unfastened her brassiere. Now she had only her pants on, widelegged, silky affairs. Her breasts were firm and well-sprung, as befitted her eighteen years, but almost oval in shape, with dark nipples, and not very large. I kissed them, and made the nipples stand; then kissed the warm space between. What a long, supple body she had! At last I pulled down her panties. A soft-haired pussy, on a good mound of Venus, a pleasing small waist, long slender legs, a deep dark trench between the cheeks of her bottom. I'm not sure I really liked her.
She sat down and clasped her knees and watched with candid interest as I undressed.
"I've never seen a naked man before," she remarked.
My prick was enlarged but not hard, due to exertion or nerves and doubts. I stood close to her and without invitation she reached up and felt it, ran her hands over my balls, drew her fingers through my pubic hair. I dropped on to my knees and had the horn in no time.
"O goodness, I haven't room for that!" she exclaimed, half in joke and half in fright.
"Let's see," I said.
I put my hand in her cunt. It was not vyery big, but it was lubricating all right. I put a cushion under her bum to elevate it a bit, and lay on top of her, easing in. Her face twisted sharply.
"Does it hurt?"
"A bit."
Well, it had to. I played the fish slowly, drawing in and out only to the depth of my knob. She clasped' her hands round my bottom. My excitement increased, I suddenly wanted to be deeper in, to let her have it Up to then she had enjoyed it, though with some fears and a little pain in the stretched lips. Without warning I drove it in, and felt something give. She gave a whimper of real pain, and her body bucked like a colt. I felt, or thought I felt, the blood on me, and had the sense of triumph, at being the first to enter her, the giver of her first unforgettable experience of a man's body. I knew that every stroke was pain for her now, but I was in the grip of that natural, automatic rhythm that rises in its own sweet tempo to the climax. I put my hands round her arse, to clasp her closer and force it deeper, digging my fingers right in the furrow, the middle finger of my right hand pressing in the "eye of bronze," as Genet calls it. I clamped my mouth hard on hers, as if to stifle any cry of pain she might make and I mounted, mounted, mounted to my orgasm, till I spent, jabbing deep and sharp on the final strokes.
Then I lay spread and breathless across her, with my prick slowly going soft inside her, in the curdle of blood and come.
No precautions! We had simply taken the hair-raising risk, without even discussing it. We were undeservedly lucky, that first time.
The pain was not all that bad, she said, stoically smiling. Had I enjoyed her? I hardly liked to tell her how much; but I did, and she looked happy at this mead of praise. She had made her big gesture, taken the great step, and that thought in itself gave her huge satisfaction. We examined her cunt together, with curiosity. I was still starved of the sight. "Do you like it?" she asked.
I rhapsodised about it, playing with the bruised lips. Her bottom gave a little quiver as I touched the clitoris, and she began to fidget.
"I'm glad it's a nice one," she said, "because I want to have hundreds of lovers."
Lena never married or had children; she settled for the steady, obscure, academic life of biological research, with well-timed vacations for her abortions, and has easily achieved her ambition: it is several years since she told me she had passed the two hundred mark on her tally of lovers, and she was looking pretty well on it.
I wanted her again, straight away, but she gave me a most scientifically-reasoned argument that the future pleasures of her sex life would be greatly enhanced if the muscular tone was allowed to recover and the epidermic tissue to do something or other before we tried a fresh assault. I was, at that age, readily captivated by a plausible argument, and only insisted that I should have the next throw, and that she shouldn't immediately launch on that . succession of other lovers to which she was looking forward all too eagerly.
She went to the bathroom, and I lay still in front of the fire, luxurious, half-erected again, feeling like the king of the castle, thinking of practically nothing.
The naked girl walked back into the room, tiptoeing sweetly back to where I was, and stood astride of me, smiling down. She had washed away the traces of the deed, her pubic hair was fluffy from towelling like the hair on a baby's head, and she smelt of perfume.
She was as fresh as spring, and I was tempted to do something I had not done before. I sat up, held the cheeks of her bottom in my two hands, and put my face between her legs. My tongue found its way into her vagina, where it lingered, then darted in and out. She ran her fingers caressingly through my hair, murmuring my name. My tongue then explored the hps, moving up till it flickered on the clitoris, which in my school days we used to call "the boy in the boat." This she loved: she began to jerk with abandon, and though I began to find it hard work, her excitement was mine, too, and my unemployed prick was hot and quivering. I squeezed with my hands, pressing her on to me: she squeezed my head between her clammy palms. She was wet again with her oily secretions, despite the recent visit to the bathroom, and the perfume was overcome by the fine young-animal odour of her body. Little moans escaped her lips, and she went rigid as a totem pole; then with an "er-er-er!" like an effort of the bowels, she had her splendid orgasm and collapsed on her knees.
Along with the sensual thrill, I had a feeling wich I am not sure I approve of: the sense of power, the satisfaction that I, I, I had made her into that tranced, rigid creature, and now into this soft, helpless one, with whom I could do absolutely what I liked: who certainly would no longer resist this rod of mine, wherever I might choose to put it. The feeling may not be altogether creditable but I suppose the male will experience it, willy-nilly, as long as the sexes endure, which may be quite a long time.
But in spite of my powerful position, I did not fuck Lena again that night. Her argument (quite false, I belidve) still dazzled me; and for the sake of her pleasure with future lovers, I abstained. I kissed once more her dark nipples, and the space between her breasts. She took my prick in her mouth and rolled her tongue round it, without any urging on my part, but I could tell it was only an act of kindness; her thrills were over, she was in a state of dreamy exhaustion. I did not want her to finish it without active enjoyment on her part, so I called it a day, and began to dress. She still sat there, saying nothing, her eyes almost closed, her long smooth body utterly relaxed and faintly rosy from the gas fire.
At length I kissed her back to life, helped her to dress, and took her out into the open air, which cut through the haze of alcohol and sex like a blade. Our college scarves fluttered, identical.
"Thank you for having me," she said.
"It is I who should thank you," I replied.
We shook hands.
CHAPTER 6
At Redprick University, if I may coin a name, my name was now habitually coupled with Lena's, almost as often as I was coupled with Lena; which was in rooms, railway compartments, shop doorways, dry ditches and the college refectory (though not at mealtimes), sitting, standing or lying as the opportunity afforded. Rarely in bed, for we rarely had a chance.
We did it with zest, and made it a point of honour not to speak of love. If we were separated for a day, we wrote notes to each other-about a new gramophone record, or the syllabus of the debating club.
But for my self-esteem, and the exercise of freedom, and for the feeding of that healthy appetite between my thighs which asked for a less monotonous diet, I had to hunt up some new women for myself. Lena was all very well, but life is short, one might die tomorrow.
I felt that what I really wanted was a mature woman, say thirty years of age, who could positively teach a young man something new. A provincial Messalina, with gilded nipples and breath that smelt of Spanish fly, would do very nicely. It was only necessary to look around.
Meanwhile, my only alternative to Lena was dreaming: either by night, of my usual exotic variety of loves, or by day, often lying in a steaming hot bath, fondling my erection with lazy, loving fingers, till some sudden vision, the Venus of the beach, or simply the blushing and outraged mother of the baby next door, would start me frigging like mad, racing to a climax and curdling the scented water of my bath.
I was particularly angry with' myself for never making advances to that outraged mother, as the more I thought about it, the stronger my conviction that her shame had sowed the seed in her mind, and that if I had boldly been my shameless self I could have laid her. She was at an age when many women begin to develop a secret desire for very young lovers, and I was well enough developed, before I left home, to have given and received joy in that quarter. Ah, well, we all have something to regret
Did Lena open her legs to other students before I knew it? Looking back, I can only wonder.
A party was the turning point. It was to be on a Sunday night, at the house of a student fortunate enough to be a native of the same town-and his parents were away for a long week-end. He was laying in drink, to which we contributed in advance; drink was cheap in those golden days. Even penurious students could afford to get drunk; they did not have to rely on rock-n'-roll and Coca-cola to "send" them.
"I'll collect you and take you along," I promised Lena.
It happened that the previous day, Saturday, I went on an expedition with a local antiquarian society to see an old abbey of the north. A long railway journey-I always like long railway journeys-and adult company, instead of students, a nice change. For once, I was not actually thinking of cunt! I was looking forward to a chaste outing of scenery, conversation, historical interest. Besides, I was sore and satisfied from a heavy bout of the previous night.
But...
It turned out to be one of those days, common in lusty youth, when I was randy without cause. On the way to the station I kept noticing women's legs, the way their arses swayed, the pleasant bouncing of their breasts, and finding far too many of them attractive. I knew what this signified, and it worried me, for I could foresee no outlets.
But one never knows.
We filled one of the railway coaches, one of the saloon kind with little tables. I knew a number of people, and we talked away merrily. My eye flitted from one middleaged woman to another, but I did not see my Messalina among these amiable schoolmistresses and wives of architects. They were all over thirty, the right age-group, but they were bread and butter types, in sensible shoes; their breath would smell of glycerine-of-thymol and their cunts of carbolic soap; not my favourite aphrodisiacs, those. It should be easy to forget my randy mood, in this company, though the train motion kept me half-erect.
I was never one of those youngsters who wear jockstraps or specially-designed underpants to ensure that they do not get the horn when dancing or riding on a bus. I took all sex sensations with thankfulness. I was more in sympathy with the tactics of a youth I used to know who deliberately unbuttoned his flies before entering the room at adolescent parties, to draw the whispering attention of the girls; though whether it led him to the goal, I can't say.
Suddenly among the company I saw someone entirely different from the rest, and my heart missed a beat.
Was she thirty? She was not. She was fourteen, and looked less.
She had a soft, pointed, babyish face, fair hair and blue eyes, and her name was Hope. Her surname, alas, was something like Stubbings, and she was the daughter of the secretary of the society, who wore thick pebble glasses and said everything twice. Hope stood on one foot, tapping and turning the toe of the other, making shy answers to a motherly dear who was asking the usual questions about school and what-do-you-wantto-be? The girl had flat heels, bare calves above her short white socks, a dark blue pleated skirt, a white blouse lightly caging a pair of just-developed breasts like fluttering doves, and a school blazer. There was not a single point of distinction anywhere, she might have been any one of a million English misses. But at sight of her, my dream of Messalina flew out of the window, something went soft in my stomach, and something went hard in my trousers. I talked about vegetarianism to the woman at my side, without taking my eyes for an instant from little Hope.
But on the whole outward journey I never got a chance to speak to her at all. I passed her, going to and from the train lavatory, and to the buffet. She gave me a smile now and then-mere friendliness, but I felt very grateful for that. Once I passed her in the narrow space between the seats, when she was standing up, and my loins ran over the soft hills of her buttocks and the valley between, with conscious pressure; and I let my hand trail across the same geography, lightly, after them. She smiled again, over her shoulder. She was so innocent, I think she would have smiled the same way if I had put my prick into her hand. For two pins I would have done that, and more.
We arrived. We viewed the old abbey and ate lunch at the flashy hotel.
Now at last I made some progress. We were the youngest there, and it seemed natural to everyone that we should talk to each other, walk round the ruins together, and sit side by side for our meal. Our elders began using phrases like, "you young people." They even poured out some wine for us at luncheon, which was unwise of them! They did not know I had already stolen a kiss, lagging behind the others among the ruins. She gave it so nicely, and let me crush her in my arms. I pushed my tongue between her lips, and probed masterfully with it dll she got the idea and parted her little white-teeth to admit it, though I don't think she had ever had that sort of kiss before. Her mouth was small and hot.
At lunch I tried to sparkle and she laughed at everything. Her own remarks were all absolutely common place, but she said them as though they were original, and I was enchanted. She readily promised to sit next to me on the way back, if she could get away from her father. "I'll ask him," she said, and she did so, with great simplicity. With equal innocence, he agreed, and I took care that our seat was at the farthest point from his.
We sat in the extreme corner. The wine and fresh air had left Hope perfectly dizzy. She lolled against me, smiling, and I kissed her. Somebody on the opposite side of the carriage said: "Hey, steady, there!" in a half-joking reproof, and we simply smiled and did it again.
Before the end of the journey, there was a real rumble of indignation at our end of the coach, and people were saying, "Well, really!" and "It's shameless!" The more acute observers had noticed that I had got my hand into the armhole of the blouse, inside the concealing blazer, and had that virginal breast in my hot palm. Hope's willing cooperation was a great help. If she had struggled, I could never have managed, as I astonishingly did, later in the journey, to worm my hand round behind her, under her skirt, slow inch by inch, and inside her pants. Moving with infinite caution, taking my time, I got to her slit. She had hardly any hair, and the lips were firm as a toddler's. They were soon wet on my fingertips.
Her body simply curled against me, with artless pleasure, our flesh was in contact and accord from top to toe, her head lay drowsily on my shoulder, and I kissed her whenever I felt like it, on the silk-soft cheek or the mouth. We were so close, we were almost inside each other, almost one. I doubt if any of those shame-ridden and embarrassed fellow-passengers of ours detected that I was feeling the soft parts of this wonderful child, and that she was allowing herself to enjoy it, or that for a time I held her hand under mine on my thigh, and secretly guided her fingers over the shape of my prick, which she explored thus passively but without coyness. They cannot have known those facts, or they would have created a real stink, I suppose. But they sensed our bodily intimacy, quite strongly enough to upset their moral applecart. It began to sound like a lynching party by the time the train was in the station.
I risked a last quick kiss before she went back to her father, and then I hurried away. My head was singing with delight. Hope had promised to go with me to the party the following night, if her father would let her. I said I would ring up and find out if it was all right.
Funny about those dear excursionists (with whom I had now lost my young-man's popularity for good): at the beginning, when we two were being shy and sentimental with each other (as it seemed to them), we were love's young dream incarnate, and they adored us. But when we made it obvious that our bodies as well as our idealistic little souls were warming up, that we actually felt desire for each other and didn't mind who noticed it, the bile and gall of their life's frustration rose against us. They hated us, venomously, out of their cleanly respectability.
I wanted that child madly, I wanted to push my cock in her to the hilt, do you hear, you flat-heeled sensible teachers and virtuous fathers? You are protecting her innocence, aren't you? What if she doesn't want it protecting?
Is she too young? Not a bit. I make my own age of consent. Through Hope's sweet body, which is fresh as calves' breath, alive as a farmyard buttercup, Nature is giving her consent, and that's good enough for me.
If I could have got her to that party I would have seduced her like a shot. (What, and spoiled her for marriage ? Nonsense, educated her for marriage. Virginity ruins a mort of marriages, don't the experts tell us so?)
But it was not to be.
Was I mad in the first place to even contemplate taking her to that student party, flaunting her before that ribald crew, and knowing that Lena would be there, perhaps angry and jealous? Why not take her to the pictures instead? Because I had a scheme. I knew what I was doing. At that party there would be drink (she had taken wine on the excursion) and beds. I could think of nowhere else where I would have such an opportunity. Not for a long time, at any rate; and in case I wanted to strike while my iron was hot, and she was soft. I feared the word might go round from the members of the society to Hope's parents, and their vigilance be aroused.
I was afraid this might have already happened by the time I telephoned the next day; and I was slightly nervous as I lifted the receiver. Her mother answered. Yes, Hope had asked her about the party: was I sure it would be "nice"? Her father was away preaching, he was a lay preacher, and the timid mother had to make up her own mind on this difficult problem: "You will take care of her, won't you, she's only a little girl?" The best, never fear.
I turned up for Hope with a taxi (which I couldn't really afford) and repeated my reassurance to the mild mother. I entirely forgot that I had said I would collect Lena and take her to the party.
Hope was in a pink organdie affair, which ought to have made her look grown up but didn't. She was a very different girl, and my heart sank: I was going to have to work hard to get her to relax. She was nervous, afraid of having her frock crushed perhaps, but unyielding in my taxi embraces. She submitted, but with a slight struggle, to my kisses, but only on the lips, refusing to part her teeth. She let me caress the shape of her breast, through her frock, but as a concession, not as though she enjoyed it; and she would no longer laugh at anything. Her only remark about the party was the discouraging one, "I can't stay late."
Wait till we get there, I thought. We were late already, as I had been unable to get a taxi by telephone and went into the town to pick one up-a ridiculous manoeuvre; actually, I must have been dawdling on purpose, from obscure motives.
There it was; but I wished she would ease up a little before we arrived among a crowd who would be an hour's drinking ahead of us.
We arrived at the grey-brick Victorian house: jazz was boom-booming and chortling within, and all the windows were lit up. The front door was open, and somebody saw us and ran out with a whoop, just as I was paying the driver.
The somebody was Lena. She appeared to be dressed in a torn veil, the colour of yolk of egg, which adhered to her at some points and left her at others. Her left breast was showing, like the shell of the said egg. She had black high-heeled shoes, on which, being wildly drunk, she rocked perilously. In one hand she had a half-empty glass of Scotch. She waved to me, then took in Hope at a glance, and let out a laugh like a maenad. I always thought that Lena had the most abandoned laugh I ever heard. She grew into a quiet, studious person, with a discreedy complex love-life, but always if something touched the right button she could let out that hair-raising laugh, with the effect of a sexbomb exploding.
Hope looked at her, with terror and dismay, jumped back into the taxi and told him to drive her home.
I was shrieking, "No-please-Hope-stop" but I knew it was all up. The taxi gathered speed, and I had lost the little girl forever. Lena, who had unwittingly helped all those flat-heelers to save the virgin from a fate worse than death, looked bewildered, gazing into vacancy. Then she let out her laugh again, and screamed, "Bob-bin, Bob-bin! who was it, what happened ?"
"Come in, Lena, and shut the door," I said. "Where can I get a drink?"
It was hardly possible for me to reproach Lena! But if she had consciously planned her effect, she could not have done better.
I found my host and began drinking and presently dancing, too, though not with Lena. I was feeling sulky where she was concerned. Not less so when I saw her soon afterwards in the embrace of a brawny footballplaying idiot whom I had always despised. His hairy hand was holding that wayward breast which refused to stay in the veil. I went back and furiously mixed my drinks. The gramophone wailed Downhearted Blues.
Now at last I was pleasantly tight. The music wove in and out and around itself, chasing its melancholy tail, and one tune blended into another. The lights were much dimmer, the smoke was thick, and in it I saw a fresh-faced girl looking sadly at me, shaking her head. She was Sandra, a friend of Lena's, and dull but good-natured. I resisted a strong impulse to show her my arse. I grabbed the nearest girl and began trying to dance with her, though it was no more than a boozy reel around the room, and we had circled it once before
I even looked at her. I then saw that she was dark, lurid, fleshly: I kissed her as we hurtled round, and then slid my fingers over her bottom. She broke away, laughing, and went out of the room. I followed her, chasing her along the passage and up the stairs like a loony, shouting about what I'd like to do. She disappeared round a corner. I could not tell where she had gone. I opened a door at random and there-with the light on-was Lena, still half veiled, on a bed, with the footballer, trouserless, shagging her like Old Harry.
"Hello, Bobbin!" she called cheerily, waving her hand.
The athlete swore, and his big hairy buttocks went on driving away without a pause. I swayed, holding the doorpost, watching in hypnotic fascination. It's a curious sight, at any time.
"Put the fucking light out," commanded the young man, panting between the words. This made me laugh, and Lena laughed too. He probably did not like that. Nor would he be pleased that I had not obeyed him. But he was getting into his rhythm and was past caring, really. Good lad! I began to admire him; he went manfully on, come hell and high water. Lena too began to take it a bit more seriously, and to shut her eyes and give little yelps, which he silenced-as if embarrassedby clamping his mouth on hers. He had been chivalrously resting on his elbows, but now he let her take his full weight and put both hands under her arse, to gather her more tightly to him, and pounded away at full tilt.
It was a novel experience. I was not in the least roused by it, sexually, nor yet repelled: I watched and drank in the details, and wondered with a faint pang whether he was better at it than I was, whether she enjoyed him more. She had her arms round his neck now, rather fetchingly, and gave him mouth to mouth with a will, while the bedsprings did the groaning for them. Damn it all, I did feel a sensual stirring at last, looking at the romping of her smooth thigh, between stocking top and flimsy dress-for she had not bothered to take her stockings off, this time. It was the sudden uncovering of the soft waist, between pelvis and rib, that got me. I almost identified myself with the young man in the last moments, as he came.
I heard Lena's laugh again, as I went out of the room.
Well done, old side of bacon, I thought, if you can't have the fucking light out you'll fuck in full view rather than be thwarted, and give a good account of yourself at that. As for my dear Lena, she's fairly launched on her cent baisers, and if she wanted revenge for my intended disloyalty to her, she has certainly had it. O Hope, Hope, will these fingertips ever forget the feel of your twat, now snatched from me forever? Will there ever be anything as pleasing as the lolling of your young and silly head on my shoulder, the drowsy pressure of your thigh against mine? A wave of self-pity hit me and I began to submerge.
The dark, fleshly one ran away when she saw me approaching again. I gave it up, had another drink, and joined a group who were arguing in another room about whether modern art was living in an ivory tower. I rook a vociferous part in this, and made what I thought to be exceedingly brilliant remarks. Some of the others were apparently drunk enough to think so, too. But all the time, my head was spinning faster, and my heart was sinking as if into a whirlpool, being drawn down to the depths of misery. I've lost everybody and everything, I kept thinking. Nobody wants me.
In the background I could hear our host saying indignantly, "Why the hell can't some of you put towels under you? The beds are covered with whitewash, how the hell can I get it off? Are you going to leave it to me to talk my way out of it tomorrow, when my mother comes back? I call that bloody immoral!"
I suspected he was speaking of the eiderdown on which Lena and her Tarzan had been cavorting. It must have been her juices, if so, as I noticed (with approval) that he used a French letter.
I became gloomier and gloomier. I'm the man that girls forget, I thought. I had two more drinks, and passed out.
I came to myself with a most wonderful and unbelievable sensation. I don't know how long I had been unconscious. Apparently I had had the good sense to he down in a corner of the most dimly lit room, separated by a bookcase and an occasional table from the halfdozen dancing couples, and someone had kindly covered me with an old mackintosh.
My cock was standing and was experiencing infinitely delightful sensations. All by itself? No, it was being sucked. A wriggling pair of legs, not mine, projected from the mac, a silken high-heeled pair, which I had no difficulty in recognising. Lena, alcoholic, madly randy, remorseful and sorry for me, all at once, had more or less discreetly clambered into my corner, crawled under the mackintosh, and found her way to the root of the matter. She had aroused it before she aroused me, and I lay there like a sultan while she inhaled it, smoked it, licked it industriously, even avidly. Her fingerdps played lightly on the shaft of it, and the other hand played with my balls and tickled the sensitive skin between there and my arsehole. Where had she learnt this art? Perhaps it was a natural gift.
I caressed her head with one hand, to show I was awake and appreciating it. I tickled the nape of her neck, and this seemed to stimulate her to a frenzy. Her lips now began to do all the work, pulling my foreskin back and forth in their soft wetness, like an infinitely active cunt. Her saliva was spilling over my cock, and my excitement was extreme, but because of all I had drunk, I took ages to come.
She would surely flag in her efforts, she began moving slower-heavens, how tiring it must have been!-but I held her head hard down on me; she must not stop! What could I do to make her continue? Some new stimulus seemed required, but I was in no position to provide it! The best I could think of was to toy with her ear-lobe and then wriggle my finger suggestively into the ear. Strangely enough, this succeeded! It gave her the assurance that I wanted her, wanted the thing she was doing, wanted a climax. She sucked with a new thirst, as if she were a baby and I were her mother's breast. She would soon get the milk. And the delicious agony prolonged itself, while I wanted and didn't want to come, would and couldn't, and my cock seemed distended, as if twice its normal size.
I remembered Pip, in the park lavatory where like an Indian brave I was initiated by my elders: how Pip made the big boy, Derek, come in his mouth, and then spat it out, and how repellent I thought it. Here was Lena doing the same thing, and it wasn't repellent at all, it was marvellous. God, she was almost coming too, wriggling and squirming, well past weariness and into that state of entranced determination that marathon dancers and Olympic milers have in the end. Her fingers scrabbled fiercely, almost painfully, at my scrotum and my groin, then she pressed my prick between both palms like a praying mantis, and went into a real ecstasy, as at last, at long last, my milk surged up and boiled over into her mouth. She did not draw back or spit out, she swallowed it in great choking gulps, straight down as it came, and did not stop work until her tongue had licked the last drop as it oozed from the tiny hole in my end. Then she lay there, her sweaty head couched in my crotch. I heard laughter from the dancers.
I was happy. Lena and life had made amends to me.
I was also hungry, and presently we emerged from the mac, and we went in search of something to eat. In the kitchen we found bread and fish-paste, and were soon munching sandwiches happily together, sitting on the table.
"You didn't even wash your mouth out," I said. "No," she answered, "why should I? It was all you." I put my arm round her. Her friend Sandra came in.
"You know Sandra, don't you? She knows all about us."
"Who doesn't?"
"Now, you needn't worry, Sandra's awfully nice, she's my friend." "I wasn't at all worried."
"She understands how I feel, even if she is a virgin." "Do you?" I asked Sandra.
She only smiled, and said nothing at all. Her silence began to bore me, and I made my excuses and left them ferreting for more food.
The party was still battling on. The drink was nearly finished and the lively were looking after the sick.
"You might refrain from trampling broken glass into the carpet," said our host. "You are a lot of skunks. I've got to answer for this tomorrow."
I drifted off into the next room, and for the next halfhour I joined in a new argument about science and the subconscious. But I wasn't brilliant any more. Every thing looked sweet and simple to me. All my pearls had been sucked away by Lena.
"Whose French letter is this on the sofa? You are a lot of hounds," said our host.
I went upstairs to relieve my overladen bladder, but opened the wrong door, as usual. There was a demurelooking girl, about nineteen, dark, with a quaihdy attractive cast in her eye, getting dressed. She was standing by a tousled bed, fastening her suspenders to her stocking-tops. I remembered seeing her through the smoke, drifting in the arms of a youth who was now downstairs begging for aspirin.
"No," she said. "Wrong door."
I went out, found the right door, pissed, and then went back into the same room. She had her pants in her hand.
"I think this was the right door, really," I said. "No, why?"
I took the knickers out of her hands and put them on the bed.
"Don't be in such a hurry," I said. "Kiss me first."
"No, don't be silly. No. Please."
I kissed her. Her lips were swollen from the attack of her recent lover.
My hand slipped down to her bush.
"You've been making love, with Alan."
I kissed her again. I whispered into her ear: "Wouldn't it be exciting to have it again, from me, while you're still wet from him?"
"You say the most terrible things."
"Wouldn't it? from a stranger, like me?"
"I don't know."
"Take hold of this."
"No." But she did.
"Take these things off again."
She let me undress her. A plump, round little body, all spheres, round head, round breasts, round belly, round buttocks, round, rosy knees, all as nice as pie. She had the giggles.
"Hush!" I said. But she could not stop giggling. Her body was still throbbing with her laughter, as I slid my cock easily into her. She was wet as a sponge. I fucked for a long time but again it seemed to me I would never come. This seemed the more likely, because of all Lena had taken out of me. Besides, Beryl's cunt was so wet and relaxed that it did not grip me at all. And damn the girl, she could do nothing but giggle, one would think I was putting nothing in but a feather; Perhaps that's how it felt, after Alan.
I drew out. "Turn over," I said, rolling her over by the hip bone. She buried her laughing face in the pillow. I got in from the rear position, and this seemed a bit better, because of those nice cheeks to push against. I reached one hand up to her breast, the other underneath so that I could thumb her clitoris. She was enjoying it like fun, but still laughing.
"Have you. got anything in?"
A contraceptive, I meant.
"No."
I did not want to be a father, especially as it might be Alan's child. Should I give up altogether? But to fuck without an orgasm isn't good. I suddenly drew out my wet shaft and pressed it into her arsehole. It was the first time I had done such a thing. She stopped laughing and tried to wriggle away from me, but I pressed and urged and eased, while my hand worked double time in her cunt. She did not say a word, and ceased to resist. Once she relaxed it was surprisingly easy to get it in, all slippery with her juices as I was. After all, she doubtless often excreted shit thicker than what was now entering. Pushing my finger far down in her cunt I could feel my own prick through the thin dividing membrane. And this round, virginal hole, with its sunray creases and its powerful circular muscle, gripped me wonderfully tight, at every point.
The door of the room opened and shut, and the light went on.
"Bobbin, I've been looking everywhere for you," said Lena.
Beryl began to giggle again; it sounded like real hysteria this time. I was furious.
But I could not think of anything to say. I stopped riding, but did not' dismount. We had a blanket over us, thank goodness.
"I wanted to tell you," Lena maundered on, sitting on the bed foot, "I didn't mind you bringing that girl with you. And I don't mind you having Beryl, I hope you're very, very happy."
How could she again be so drunk? There must have been a flask stashed away somewhere, which had just come to light. The private liquor of our host's unlucky parents, probably.
"I'm very tired, can't I come into bed with you?" she said and lifted our blanket as she said so.
"Bob-bin!" she exclaimed, observing how we were coupled. She climbed in alongside us, pulled the blanket up and whispered, "Go on, then, don't stop!" in her maenad voice, the voice of her hidden wildness. She ran her hands over us, and lay as close as she could get.
Beryl flinched and tried to shrink away when Lena's drunken hand touched her breast and her hip-bone.
"Christ, not that!" she exclaimed in a muffled whisper, half loathing, half humorous resignation and a "let the heavens fall" tone. For she could not get away, or move even a fraction, without hurting herself quite a lot. My hand in her cunt was still pressing her on to me. All these minutes I had not moved, but used all my weight and contrivance to keep her humbly still, with a warning pressure here or there if she twitched a limb. Meanwhile my prick felt twice its normal size. Tales I had heard floated into my head, and I began to wonder if I had really got swollen and would never get out without the surgeon's knife, and would be the centre of a national scandal about student orgies, and would go straight from hospital to jail. For I knew that under the grotesque laws of England, what I was doing to Beryl, my very new acquaintance, to wit buggery, was a crime, even between husband and wife. A law more honoured, I might say, in the breach than the observance... and I was well in the breach now.
Lena stroked my unoccupied hand, and placed it without bashfulness between her own legs, where she held it in place and did her own frotting. Her legs squeezed and writhed, and she again whispered hotly, "Go on, go on!
I recommenced my strokes, relieved to find I could still draw in and out, and Beryl gave a groan of pain at the first pull, but I think it did not hurt her appreciably after that. Whether she didn't know what my other hand was doing, or whether she was past caring, I have no idea. I moved the hand under her a little, till my thumb was in her neat little navel, my hand spanning the soft roundness of her belly, my little finger inserted in the top of the lips, just caressing the head of the boy-in-the-boat. Beryl was silent except for her heavy breathing, while Lena was whispering and moaning like the jungle, with my hand in her mango-swamp. But I knew, all of a sudden, that Beryl was enjoying it, and not merely in the clitoris. Her whole self was enjoying the sense of being forced to do something wicked and forbidden, (notions quite alien to me, needless to say), and something she had never done before, with an element of pain in it, like a second virginity to lose. Perhaps she was anal-erotic too, and got physical pleasure from the stretching of that hole, and the deep stirring in her bowel, perhaps this probing awoke infant memories of the enema that daddy pushed in so lovingly when she wouldn't shit! or daddy's well-greased finger itself! I don't know. I think the whole situation was enough, without that, to excite her to the point of hysteria, and did. For she suddenly began to gurgle and for a moment I thought she was suffocating, it sounded so strange, with her face buried in the pillow.
Good God, she was laughing again! that mad, bubbling, underwater laughter, and it shook her from head to foot. I felt it in my toes, and in the very inside of my prick-sinews, in the threefold welt of the tool; and her buttocks shook with her laughter, vibrating like soft drums against my balls. It fired me, and I began to gallop like a horseman, pulling her on to me, and myself deeper into her, working and working and rising to it, with Lena going crazy and flinging her arm over us both, Lena's wet kiss on my ear, Lena's leg, clammy-hot, touching mine and Beryl's full length, pressing us and eager to share us somehow, and Beryl laughing and nearly losing her breath. This girl under me throbbed with laughter, I pushed with my belly on to the quivering cheeks of her bum, and her wonderful ring held my prick tight as I mounted, mounted, then flung away all control and came inside her. Lena came, too, a second later, digging her nails in my wrist; I think she had already come once or twice, she seemed to have reached the non-stop stage where nothing would finish her but exhaustion. I don't know about Beryl.
I think she did, but it may just have been the climax of her laughter.
I did not he long upon her, but pulled out the shrinking member, now very sore and sorry for itself.
"Bob-bin!" cried Lena, in a pleading voice that was not difficult to interpret.
"Good Lord, what do you think I am, a steam-engine?" I asked her, reaching for my pants.
At that she let out her fearful and unmistakable laugh, which must have been audible and recognisable all over the house.
Beryl sat up and bounced out of bed: flushed, sweaty, no longer laughing, but smiling in a friendly sort of way. There was no resentment on her face. I admired the aplomb with which she wiped her bottom with a lace-edged handkerchief and then dabbed it with some perfumed hand-cream which she found on the dressingtable (doubtless the property of our host's mother or sister, and rarely put to this use). Soon she again presented the same picture as when I entered the room: fastening her suspenders to her stocking-tops.
We made ourselves presentable, Lena and I joking together, Beryl putting on her horn-rimmed spectacles, which made her look as if she had just come out of anatomy class, as she had, of course. Then Beryl led the way to the door, remarking, and it was the only remark of any kind that she made: "Alan will be wondering what's become of me."
"I doubt if he will guess," I said.
We joined the merry throng, many of whom were now sleeping in chairs and on settees, singly or in one another's arms. There was more tobacco smoke than ever, the same gramophone record was playing, the same untiring couples were dancing. Our host came up to me.
"I hope you put a towel under you," he said darkly. "Under her, I should say. I always considered you less of a sod than the rest."
"Don't worry," I said, with a false smile. I was pretty sure the bed would be stiff with Lena's overflow. We might try, later, what a clothes brush would do, I thought.
I helped him make coffee; we had to water it a good deal to make it go round, but it was very welcome. A great revival followed. A young man read a short story he had written. A heated discussion on its symbolism began, in which I took an active part.
"But it's supposed to be funny," he exclaimed angrily. "You were meant to laugh."
He was told to pipe down. His humorous intention had nothing to do with the real significance. It all showed the state his unconscious mind had got into.
"Balls!" he said, getting really cross.
"You never know what underlies laughter," I remarked, with heartfelt sincerity. I looked at Beryl, but she did not even smile.
"Arc you enjoying life, old man?" asked a fellow I was rather fond of, a fat and jovial character whom nobody took seriously.
"No," I said. "I'm sick of students. I want a cosy, middle-aged mistress, for a change."
"You think she'll be grateful, and give you presents, I suppose?"
"I want one who has slept with a hundred sailors, and knows all the oriental arts of love. And how to make Turkish coffee," I added.
"Don't you think this has been a damn good party?" he asked, changing the subject.
"I suppose that means you've had your end in."
"Not exactly, but I think I'm going to get it, if there's still time. Another hour's coaxing ought to do the trick. She lets me kiss her, but she keeps mysteriously disappearing." "Who is she?"
"That plump one, Beryl. Do you think she'd play?"
"No," I said, "I should think she's rather a prude."
"Well, I actually asked her, when I was tight, whether she was a virgin, and she admitted she is. I'm a bit scared of breaking one in, come to that. But she's bloody attractive in spite of her squint. You can't see her very well from here, but don't you think she's nice?"
"She is rather attractive," I said, "from the back."
I wished him luck. The coast was clear for him, as Alan had deserted her and was going mad over a vamp creature with very long dark hair, large loose lips, and enormous scarab ring, purple eyelids, and a tidemark on her neck.
"I know you're a sadist," Alain said, loudly, "but as long as you're not a lesbian The arguers had now gone on to politics. Tempers were rising and an owlish man with a pipe was declaring, "Every philosophy student knows that dialectical materialism is a lot of cock."
"But it works, doesn't it? It works!" said another, waving his arms.
"As a political force, of course," said the girl whom I had been vainly chasing earlier in the night.
I turned away from that bunch. My brain was flagging, and there was now an important diversion: our host had found a sheet with a patch of blood, left to soak in the kitchen sink. Who had been deflowered? We never knew. But I was sure it was not Beryl.
"If you can't observe the ordinary decencies," said our host, "I simply shan't be able to throw another party."
Lena came up to me, leading her friend Sandra by the hand.
"Listen, Bobbin," Lena said. "This is my friend Sandra, and she's a virgin."
"Still?" I said. "She must have had a dull party."
"She wants to go to bed with Jack Maitland," Lena went on.
"But he's not here."
"Not tonight, stupid, but sometime. And she doesn't want to till she's seen what it's like, and she would like to watch somebody do it."
"Do what? Fuck?" I asked brutally.
"Yes, so I've said she can watch you and me, do you mind?"
Sandra, rather pink-cheeked, looked solemn and bovine. I considered this crazy Lena-ish proposition Perhaps it might lead to something of interest, some variant on the great theme.
Always the little gentleman, and happy to oblige, said, "O.K., why not? When shall it be?"
"Let's do it now," said Lena.
"Hell, no, I couldn't," I said. "I'm squeezed dry darling, as you well know."
"No, Lena, some other time," Sandra said. Somehow this piqued me.
"Come on, Bobbin, no time like the present," said Lena, brightly ignoring my plea of incompetence.
"It really doesn't matter," said Sandra, "I didn't mean it."
This determined me.
"Come along, then, girls, we'll see what we can do," I said, and ushered Sandra and Lena through the door
We went back to the same bedroom in which I hac had Beryl.
"Here we go round the prickly pear," I said, locking the door, this time. The previous time I had never noticed the key.
Lena began to strip, and I did the same, almost mechanically.
"But what's Sandra going to do, work herself off with her fingers? Is she going to stay fully dressed?" Sandra said nothing. She sat demurely on a chair. "Do get undressed, Sandra," said Lena. "No. I'd rather not."
And there she sat, fully dressed, watching with blushing cheeks and hungry eyes as Lena and I uncovered our nakedness. My cock was soft but longer than normal, because of all its usage. It was sore, too, from the tightness of Beryl's bottom. We sat on the bed and Lena began playing with it.
"Let Sandra touch it. Come and touch it, Sandra," Lena said.
"No, thanks, I don't want to."
"Yes, do, you must! Have you never touched one?" Lena asked.
"Naturally not," said Sandra, with prudish dignity.
Lena seized Sandra by the hand, pulled her out of the chair and brought her over. She guided her hand to my parts. This was a very good idea, as it turned out. I had not been responding to Lena's handicraft, so far. But the shrinking touch of this bovine virgin, a strange hand without experience, quickened my flesh. She felt it turning stiff. Lena held her wrist, so she could not escape, and her hand gained a little in boldness; her fingers dared to explore, even into the grass-roots. Sandra looked amazed at the change, as the bolt of flesh stood upright and the foreskin rolled back.
Lena was now impatient to have it, and pulled me with her as she stretched out on the bed with her eager legs parted. Sandra sat on the chair again. Her bosom heaved. Not a bad bosom, when one came to notice it She held the sides of the chair tightly and stared with determination at the process now beginning.
I laced into Lena with all the old zest. She was a good girl, after all. At first I pretended she was Hope, and then gave up and decided to have her as Lena; I thought she deserved it. I kissed her nipples, squirmed my tongue in her mouth, rammed my fingers into her arse, and rode on her long smooth limbs with joy and ease. Turning my head aside, I saw the hard-breathing Sandra was squeezing her legs together for all she was worth. Fully dressed, and without so much as putting a finger to her clitoris, she was coming in her panties. That did the trick for me. I had Lena crying out with inarticulate pleasure and in a few moments we came, simultaneously, with a mighty bound.
I was puffing like a dog in a heat-wave, Lena was subsiding with little moans, and Sandra had her eyes shut as if she was praying. My prick shrank down in no time, and slid out.
I gave Lena a friendly good-night-and-thank-you kiss, and climbed off her.
"O blast!" I said. "Why did nobody remember to put a towel on the bed?"
Lena laughed. Sandra looked shocked. Then Lena swung her legs off the bed, with her pubic hair all damp and glistening, and said, "Now I think I'll watch, I never have watched."
"Watch what?" said I.
"Watch you have Sandra," she said.
Sandra jumped to her feet, exclaiming: "No, no!"
It was my turn to laugh, and I was simply doubled up.
"I know it's supposed to be Jack, but Bobbin's so kind, he'll be ever so gentle."
"Gentle!" I spluttered.
Lena had her arm persuasively round Sandra, half coaxing, half imprisoning her. Sandra looked positively frightened of Lena's nakedness, to say nothing of mine. I was limp and laughing, quite unarmed.
"Don't you want her?" Lena asked me, reproachfully. "She's very nice, look!" She upped Sandra's frock and pulled her pants down before the poor girl knew what she was doing. I saw a rather nice pair of hips and a triangle of hair so fair and so slight that her cleft was undisguised. But it was a short glimpse: she pulled her pants up again as soon as Lena would let her.
It didn't mean a thing to me, alas! When we first went up to the room together I think I had in mind the possibility of fucking the pair of them. But having just had my third orgasm of the night, I felt it didn't matter if I never saw a cunt again. A glass of hot milk and a nice rest, that's what would suit me now.
Those two girls, the naked and the clothed, were struggling like wrestlers, and arguing the toss, both talking at once so I couldn't sort it out. I was standing up, about to get dressed ,and feeling satisfied but anything but randy. Yet it suddenly seemed to me a bit of an outrage that Sandra should get all her fun for nothing, and play Madame Touch-me-not, when she had touched me, and had that free demonstration in the ars amoris. She was full to the brim with shame, my old enemy shame: she was ashamed of her thoughts, ashamed of having watched, ashamed of having enjoyed it, and ashamed of that little private come she had in her pants, I bet.
"Come on, Sandra, let's have a look at you," I said, going close to her. "Uncover your tits, for a start!"
She said nothing but "No, no!" and tried to push me away. I seized her shoulder.
"Are you going to be as mean as that? Take all and give nothing?"
She stopped resisting and looked pensive. She must have some sense of justice after all; or a bit of secret exhibitionism hidden away, a tiny wish to be admired. She did not have to do anything except stop fighting. Lena eagerly pried Sandra's tits out of the bra, having already slipped the dress off her shoulders. They were white, defenceless little things, with baby-pink nipples. Just because of her shamefastness, I toyed with them, and gave one a little suck. Then I pulled her pants down (no resistance this time), and felt her virginal vagina, strictly on principle. My principles were the only upright thing I had, at that moment.
"Sometime we'll give a show for Lena, won't we, Sandra?" I said, kissing her, and taking my searching hand away.
She did not say a word, but with dignity pulled her knickers up and re-bagged her breasts. She went to the door of the room, then turned before going out and said, "Oh-and thank you, both."
I went to the window. Daylight was beginning to appear. "Why don't we get some sleep?" I said. "Lock the door again and turn out the light and come over here."
I was mad to imagine I'd get much rest if Lena stayed with me. As if it mattered. One could always sleep through a lecture next day as long as one didn't snore. Well, there's the student life. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.
Lena entwined me and we went down into the depths.
CHAPTER 7
A change came over my life. I met the travel writer R.X. For the purpose of these pages I'll call him Rex.
He was staying in that city for some curious reason -a relation of his was dying slowly in a neighbouring village and he wanted to be on hand-some said out of affection, some said in hope of screwing a legacy out of the poor old girl. He was also finishing a book, resting up between his pursuit of the Incas and his next head-hunt. He lived in middle-class lodgings, and raised the honest guinea by an occasional lantern lecture. I went to one of these generically-boring affairs to please a girl I hoped to sleep with, a girl with a naive enthusiasm for authors, celebrities of any kind, and foreign travel. She had read some of Rex's books, which I certainly had not. She talked non-stop about him as we waited for the lecture to begin. I was wondering whether she would talk as much in bed as she did out of it
Rex appeared. He was younger than I expected, somewhere in his early thirties, rather tall, military in bearing, with a small moustache, and sandy hair with small waves brushed straight back, short-back-and-sides style. He had a quiet but sonorous voice, easy to hear everywhere in the hall. It all sounds commonplace, he could be anyone, by the mere description. But it wasn't, and he was really someone!
The girl at once fell madly in love with him, and no blame to her for that. Later, I read some of his books and was disappointed. She had no disappointment, seeing the man after reading them. On the contrary. But I knew then that he was one of the people whose magic is in themselves, their personalities, and they can never put die best of themselves into their work.
I had expected to be bored, and I yielded slowly, reluctantly, to the spellbinder. But he got under my skin with his unexpected wit, first of all, then the charm of his unconventional slant on things. He never thought the "natives" quaint, or the mountains picturesque. He sank into the places he visited, and came up with the spoils; and obviously was loved by the peoples who heaped their gifts and their secrets on him. He also seemed, to my ignorance, to know everything about every subject: literature, languages, physics, geology and history. It was a journalistic smattering, really, but he had it at his fingertips as required.
To please the lovesick maiden, we went to the platform afterwards and scraped acquaintance. He played up to her with perfect courtesy. She asked him some damn silly thing about the Andes, and he said, "That's a complex question. I think I have some material that would answer it, though. Would you care to have tea with me tomorrow, in town somewhere, the Kardomah, shall we say? and I'll try and satisfy you." (Satisfy her! not in the Kardomah, at all events!) "Perhaps you could both come?" He included me in the invitation, either for courtesy or safety-a chaperone, to protect her name or his own virtue-I wondered which.
He never made love to that poor little fan. Neither did I, come to think about it. She switched her loyalty to an actor at the repertory theatre, so all was well.
I continued to meet Rex, and could talk of nobody else. He seemed to enjoy talking to me, and was very patient in argument. I got more education from this than from all the professors rolled into one. I introduced him to my friends-he apparently liked the company of students a lot better than I did-and I met some of his, who were very mixed, from mannish old ladies to smart doctors' wives, long-haired would-be painters to uncouth dock labourers, who seemed to worship the ground he walked on. Best of all I liked our long talks tete d tite in pubs and cafes, weighing up the universe and unfolding the mysteries of remote places and peoples.
He was a bachelor and never spoke of sex, except in joke, or scientifically, or when he asked me to tell him about myself. He was obviously unshockable, so I gave myself the exhibitionist pleasure of telling him the tale of my exploits among the students. It amused him highly. He capped it with stories of the initiation of boys and girls which he had seen in New Guinea.
He remarked one day, "My landlady's dear daughter, Rosy, has taken a fancy to me, and turns up naked in my bedroom, offering herself with my morning tea. I do my best to make her happy, but it's really a bit much. I hope I shan't have to change lodgings."
This story excited me. How wonderful to have a naked girl offered with your morning tea-to hell with the tea! But perhaps she was a hag. I asked him.
"She's very pretty, and sings like a canary," he said. "Her age? Twenty-nine. She ought to be married. But she's unlucky. Her last lover turned out to be a bigamist. Haven't you seen her? No doubt you will, next time you call at the house. Would you like her yourself? I'll be happy to arrange it. She'd do anything to please me."
This really was a friend! He laughed at my eager Ill ness to take up the offer, and I was not quite sure wasn't joking.
Twenty-nine was not quite middle age, but near enough, to someone ten years younger; and it was right out of the student class. I only hoped I would find her attractive. I was so sick of my own age-group and category.
I couldn't help telling the promise to my student friend of the moment, a cynical aesthete named Ewan, who had a grand contempt for the student community.
"It's very handsome of him," I said, "to be willing to share her, when he doesn't seem to have any other mistress kicking around."
"Don't be so damn silly," said Ewan, "Rex is a homo, everyone knows that." "What!"
"Queer as a coot. He likes boys. Didn't you know?"
I simply didn't believe it. They said this about everyone celebrated, anyway, and the more I thought of it less likely it seemed.
"He's presumably after you" Ewan added.
"Well, he's never given the slightest sign of it, if so, and I've known him three months," I said. I was sure it was nonsense. "I'll ask him," I added.
"Yes, do, ask him!" Ewan grinned. "Tell me the result. I shall be most interested."
I should be very disappointed if Rex's interest in me was only sexual, after all, and not personal. But I knew it was not so, from those long, animated arguments we had.
But of course it might be both kinds of interest. He did like to walk around with his hand on my shoulder in a paternal style sometimes. He once remarked that a certain person, male, was "a bit of a bitch." He had a grand, immoralist, or super-moralist, creed, which would surely permit him to do anything, and which certainly dazzled my mind.
"When one reaches a certain stage of development," he said, "one can say 'a thing is right because I do it.' I passed that point ten years ago."
On the other hand, he seemed to me to radiate masculinity. He was tall, soldierly, quiet in dress, bold in decision. His virile qualities did not melt away when he was drunk. I had discovered during the months I had been getting to know him that he drank a great deal, in a quiet way. Scotch whisky, mostly. I had smelt it in the air after his lecture. His breath was permanently laden with it, and he casually let fall the fact that he used to have his first drink immediately after breakfast. But he could be pretty drunk before anyone knew it.
I went back to Ewan and said, "There's another thing, Rex doesn't show the slightest interest in the Tonydarling crowd." (That was our nickname, from their manner of speech, for the usual clique of student pansies, who went about in a gang, "camping," and using a special vocabulary of mysterious phrases like "cottage love" and "trolling the dilly.")
Ewan said, "They're too conspicuous. But you'll find they all know about him. He has most of his fun abroad. He likes black ones and brown ones best, and red and yellow for afters."
"You don't count those, do you?" I said. "That proves nothing."
I added, "Besides, I'm passing for white."
"You'll be passing for brown, soon."
This silly talk of Ewan's, about coloured boys, only convinced me the whole thing was groundless gossip. Just because he was a famous writer, and a bachelor.
Why was I so worried? Ah, that's another question.
Psychologists tell us small boys are often obsessed with a secret dread that daddy, or a bird with a sharp beak, or a bogyman with a chopper, will cut off their precious little pricks, leaving them only a wound, like their sister's. I don't think I ever suffered that fear! If so, I have buried it very deep.
Then later, they tell us, boys and young men lose confidence in their manliness and behave in an excessively hearty way to reassure themselves.
I had given myself a number of assurances by now that I was of the masculine gender, and I had never thought of buying a chest-developer. But I certainly imagined that I had "grown out of" all sexual dealings with the male. It had not occurred to me that I might be an object of attraction to a man. I was a bit disconcerted at the idea, and tried to put it out of my head.
My affairs with women had languished since Lena had moved over to a first-eleven footballer; I never took up with Sandra or Beryl, as I found them equally unattractive by daylight and common-sense. "No more students!" I had made that a mental rule for myself.
Which brought me back to Rex's landlady's daughter. I found that after all I did not want to ask Rex any blunt questions about homosexuality. Instead, I pressed him eagerly for details about Rosy, and begged him to let me see her. He laughed at my eagerness.
At last he said, "All right, meet me tomorrow in Rowley's bar, at seven, and I'll take you home to supper. You'll have the privilege of being served by Rosy, how will that suit you?"
"And listen," I said, "you will tell her in advance that she's got to sleep with me, won't you?"
He laughed again. "How is it possible to be as young as you are?" he said.
I was piqued. I considered myself adult and sophisticated.
We met in the bar, and drank too long for my liking. For one thing, I felt a bit fuddled, and would rather have been clear-headed to see Rosy. For another, I was impatient; and I knew the difficulty of getting Rex out of a pub, once he had had a few. He liked to stay till closing time, spellbinding the barmen and finally the customers with his talk.
However, he let himself be led out by a quarter to nine, and we reached his lodgings by nine.
"What time is your supper?" I asked him.
"Whenever I wish it," he said, loftily.
We went in. His lodgings were anything but stylish: the usual dowdy provincial house, with conventional oleographs on the wall and a dreadful quantity of tassels and fringes on the furniture. Rex had done nothing to his own room to improve it, except to put an African idol on the mantelpiece. Much of his stuff, books, papers and clothes, seemed to be still in suitcases, as though he might dash off at a moment's notice. There were plenty of bottles. He spends all his loose cash on liquor, I thought. We drank another Scotch, then went downstairs.
"Did you tell Rosy she had to sleep with me?" I whispered. He only laughed.
His landlady came out and greeted us. Would we like something to eat now ?
Rex said we would. I sized up Rosy's mother. She looked nice, a stupid, kind sort of person, fat, colourless and slow-moving.
In the dining-room I asked him why he didn't put up his own kind of pictures and so on. He held my two shoulders and sang: "I'm only a stro-ho-lling va-ha gabond, so good night, pretty maiden, good night."
Very soon the landlady brought in the food. I was surprised that Rex had not been asked what he would like and had not indicated any preference. He just accepted what they chose to put before him. It was ham and eggs, with tomatoes, and the remains of a seed-cake. I ate willingly enough, but I thought, in a restaurant, he would have ordered like an epicure!
As soon as the landlady had gone out of the room, I said, "But you promised Rosy would serve me."
"Of course, so I did!"
"Ask where she is, please!"
When the landlady came back to ask if we would have coffee, I nudged Rex openly, and he said, "Where is Rosy tonight?"
"Gone off to her aunt's for a couple of days, you wouldn't rather have tea, I suppose?"
My hopes were dashed. I didn't care what we had, if I couldn't have Rosy.
After coffee, Rex, who apologised lightly to me for Rosy's absence, asked would I like a liqueur. We went to his room and had Grand Marnier.
"Are these your cameras? They look pretty marvellous," I said.
He showed them and explained the gadgets.
"Would you like to see the pictures I can't put on the screen for my dear respectable audiences?"
Wouldn't I just! He unlocked a case, and we sat down on his divan-bed to look at them.
"This is the circumcision of little Africans on the banks of the river, at dawn. They stick a thorn through their poor little foreskins. But the cold water has numbed them, like an anaesthetic. I had to hide my camera and use an automatic release and a telephoto lens, of course. It's all secret, but the tribe liked me, and didn't mind my watching. Only they wouldn't have let me take pictures, had they known."
He then came to pictures of a remarkably beautiful tribe, not African, something light-golden I imagineNagas, maybe, or Karens, or Annamites. Delicious young girls, stark naked, one with her legs apart and her finger stuck in her hairless quim. One, taken from the back, from some place of concealment, showed a row of young women side by side, all shitting into a trench among the bushes.
"What would they have done if they had caught you taking that one?" I asked.
"According to custom," he said, "they would have cut off my balls and nailed them to a palm-tree."
He opened a rubber wallet and took out some more pictures. He gave me a quick look, as if to see how I would take them. These were of boys, of the same tribe, of various ages, twelve to eighteen one would guess. Some singly, some in groups. Two grinning boys with their arms round each other's neck. Naked, of course. Then some taken indoors, with a background of straw walls. A youth with a tremendous erection. Two boys with erections, holding each other's.
"Do you like them?" Rex asked, nonchalantly.
"Yes." It was true, I did. The ones of the girls excited me more, but I could not deny that these were more than merely interesting and they threw a light on Rex. He showed me another. He himself figured in it: taken, doubtless with the automatic release. He was sitting on a chair, and had a nude boy of great beauty, perhaps about thirteen, on his knee. With one hand he was holding the boy's erect penis, decidedly a creditable one, and the boy's arms were round his neck.
"Was he nice?" I asked.
"Adorable." He added: "They're like the ancient
Greeks, all the men have their boys, there, it's quite normal. The boys offer themselves. So do girls, and there's no disapproval. But heaven help you if you were to approach a married woman."
"The opposite of England," I remarked.
"Which picture do you like best?"
I picked the one of the girl with her finger in her cunt, and a provocative smile on her lips.
"I'll give you that one," Rex said. "And now I'm afraid I have some work to do, so you'll have to leave me.
I went away more" puzzled than ever. It was a week before I saw my enigmatic idol again.
During that time I kept remembering the pictures, and kept saying to myself that after all, those brown boys didn't count. Just as I had said it to Ewan.
I played with myself, gazing at the picture of the girl, who seemed to be playing with herself while gazing provocatively back at me. The next night I rather wished I had chosen the picture of the row of gleaming bottoms, with little chippolatas of shit sticking out. However, it did not matter, I could remember it well enough...
Masturbation was my only sex joy, except for occasional dreams, at that time. And still a great joy, too; but I could do with something more. It seemed an age since the vacation, when I had been back to see my parents, and enjoyed a trip into the country, and my annual tumble in the hay with Ruby, the girl who had given me the first fuck of my life. That return had been nice but with a touch of melancholy, as I felt it would probably be the last time: she had hinted that she might get married soon.
I showed Ewan the picture Rex had given me.
"O God!" he said, his mouth watering. "Lend it to me for an hour."
"Don't you wish you'd been the person who took it?"
He gazed at it avidly. "O well," he said, "maybe he's ambidexterous."
"He's normal," I said. "I tell you, coloured boys don't count, all the Englishmen have them in India and Morocco. In this tribe, they expect it. An old Spanish custom."
I convinced myself, if not Ewan.
Well, nearly.
A week later I met Rosy, at last,-Again we went back to Rex's lodgings from Rowley's bar, where I had met him by accident.
(That's hardly accurate! I had gone to the bar, not for the first time, in hope of seeing Rex; and behind that was the hope of being taken home to meet his landlady's daughter. Did I really imagine that like a sultan he could or would command her into my bed? I am a born optimist.)
We went back too late, this time, for supper, and I had had too many drinks to care about food. There was Rosy in the hall: I knew it before we were introduced.
You might imagine I would be disappointed. Not a bit: she was a fine, attractive young woman. Mature, decidly; over-made-up; her reddish hair had been touched up, too, with some kind of tint or burnish, but it glinted in voluptuous coils. She had rings on her rather fat little hands. But a really winsome smile, warm and simple; and shapely legs, and a proud upstanding pair of tits. A glow went over me: the thought of this lovely young woman walking naked into Rex's bedroom, into my bedroom-I gulped, hard. How hot her palm was! My parents would have called her vulgar, and they would have been right. But I was no snob; and few men are snobbish where sex is concerned.
"Pleased to meet you," she said. I would have liked to reply, "Is your cunt as warm as your hand?" but said it with my eyes instead. She turned to Rex and said familiarly, "Your friend Tim's here, he said he'd wait in your room. I told him we'd got a few people coming in, and he said make it a party. Ring up Johnny, too, go on. Ma Sutherland is here already and Joan Bright, and there's plenty of beer."
"Ah!" said Rex. "Excuse me-" and hurried to his room.
With the boldness of my half-tipsy state, I pulled Rosy to me and kissed her.
"Well, I don't know!" she said, humorously indignant.
I kissed her again, Frenchly this time, and she pretended she wanted to escape, and then pretended to surrender to superior force. Her tongue licked round mine, and her hands slid and clutched on my shoulderblades. After I had stopped kissing her, she said, "Stop it!"
She led me into the living room where her mother and three men and a woman and a girl were drinking and chatting and roaring with laughter. I greeted her mother, and was ceremoniously introduced all round. I took a drink and joined in the talk, but at the back of my mind was a question-mark. Rex's friends seemed all ordinary people, though of mixed types; but two I had wondered about: one was Tim, a handsome young Irish lad, who was a carpenter, and the other was Johnny, a clerk to an accountant, about my own age, who had a very girlish laugh. I must admit that as soon as I heard the suggestion that Rex was homosexual, I thought of these two. And now they cropped up like this.
But I still suspended judgment. I felt myself getting decidedly drunk. The evening began to slide by at a great pace. One of the men, a bookmaker, played the piano and everyone did Knees up, Mother Brown. Another man sang Songs of Araby very soulfully. The third, a youngish fellow with a wooden leg, was avidly cuddling Joan Bright, a girl who looked plain, wholesome and eager. "Don't touch his stump!" Rosy called to her, and somebody else warned the man, "Mind she doesn't break it off!"
Rex had appeared, with Tim, and a bottle of gin. Everybody made a fuss of Rex, especially Rosy's mother. Time passed. I danced with Rosy and clutched her tight. Johnny turned up, and did a kind of female impersonation, in one of Rosy's hats. "Camping herself silly," said Tim, and all my suspicions were confirmed.
I was tight, and bright, and stupid. I went up to Rex, who was talking to Tim in a corner, and said: "Can I speak to you alone? I want to ask you something important."
Rex obligingly came out of the room with me, looking a bit worried. "What is it?"
"You know those coloured boys, in the photos you showed me?"
"Yes?"
"You know you said you had them?" (I was swaying.)
"Now, come along, Robert, back to the party."
"Don't try and evade me," I insisted. "You did say you had them. What I want to know is, did you stick it up their bottoms?"
"Now, Bob," he said soothingly.
"Did you? I've got to know. Terribly important," I mumbled. "Did you really sodomise them?"
"Be a good boy, Bob. If you want to know, no, I've never done that in my life to anyone, it repels me. Have you, by the way?"
"No. Yes, to a girl," I said.
"Even more repellent," he said. "Shall we go back?"
"No," I said. "What did you do, then?"
"Use your imagination. If you can't guess, ask me again next week and perhaps I'll tell you." He added in his lecture-hall manner, "Anal-eroticism has nothing to do with-"
"With what?"
"With me," he said, and walked back into the room.
I followed. I felt the gaze of Tim and Johnny on me. The little party seemed very gay. People began telling smutty stories, but I was too drunk to see the point of most of them.
Then the party thinned out, people were going home, and at last I was in a corner kissing Rosy and doing as much as I dare, with her mother in the room. I had a "whisky cock": she must have felt it sticking up under her bottom as she sat on my knee.
I was half-asleep, all the same. The lights were low and I was in a sensual daze. At last the man playing the piano got up and shut the lid. Rosy got off my knee.
"He'll never get home, I'll make him comfy down here," she said, and I slowly realised she was speaking of me.
The piano man put on his hat, and said, "Good night, all." I opened my eyes wide and gazed round the room. Rex and the young men, like the other guests, had disappeared. Rosy's mother had gone to bed. I was alone with Rosy.
"I'm going to be sick," I said suddenly.
"Come this way, lovey," said Rosy. She led me through the kitchen into the garden. She held my forehead while I threw up my liquor. Afterwards she gave me some soda water and sponged my face.
The fresh air had pulled me together amazingly. Rosy and I sat on two kitchen chairs and held hands, and I talked quite sensibly (I think) about the people at the party. She told me amusing tales about them and we both laughed. Then she said, "Come, it's bedtime. Can you walk home?"
"I don't want to," I said and began kissing her and mauling her about.
"Stop," she said, "you're breaking my straps."
I had a handful of her delicious breast, by this time. Young and resilient, it was, with a nipple like a turnedup nose, hardening under the pressure of my fingers.
She wriggled and struggled in my grip, saying all the time that it was too late, and I was drunk, and I ought to go home, and even saying that she hardly knew me! (true though that was). But presently she caved in, suddenly, and gave herself up to the kissing and caressing; her struggles turned to sensual squirming, as if her body was getting out of control.
"Be very quiet, then," she said, turning out the light and leading me up to her bedroom.
I thought she was afraid her mother would hear, but later I learned that her mother knew all about her love affairs and made no fuss about them. Perhaps it was for Rex's benefit that we were to be quiet!
We did not use the electric light, in Rosy's room, but undressed by the glow of her gas fire. She looked at me admiringly, in that flattering light, and ran her hands down my sides. My cock had shrunk, with nerves, or something, and I was rather ashamed of it, as I stood looking at and fondling her body. But she put her hand down and held it in her hot, fat hand, and I began to rise to the occasion. She was so experienced, so maternal, that she inspired absolute confidence, and yet was a simple, goodnatured girl. This, this was the naked girl who walked into Rex's room, according to his story, and offered herself. The picture returned to my mnid's eye, and excited me again. Now I had a stand like a ramrod.
"Are you in love with Rex?" I asked all of a sudden.
"I was," she said, "but what's the use?"
I did not say any more. I lifted her right off her feet and tossed her down on the bed. Then I climbed on, in reverse, my face between her legs, my fork over her face. My tongue touched her clitoris and slid up and down her slit, while she, with hands lightly holding my hips, drew my prick into her mouth. This sixty-nine affair, or Golden Boat, was something I had always wanted to do and never done. Our bodies slid sweatily on each other, and divinely keen sensations ran up and down my spine, along my limbs and out at the dps of my toes and fingers. Rosy took her mouth off my steaming knob for a moment and licked my balls, her tongue going like little darting flames. This was too much for me, I got alarmed for fear I should come too soon. I stopped sucking her, and pulled my head away, though she said in a breathless whisper, "No, no, don't stop!" She tried to heave her loins up to my mouth.
This was enough, however, and I turned round, whispering, "I want to fuck you now."
She rolled over, face downwards, and offered me the rear approach. I had no objection to this, and slid it into her cunt with the greatest of ease. Her buttocks were like round Dutch cheeses, and the air smelt of Dutch cheese, come to think about it. I slid one hand under and held her on to me, both to get a deeper thrust and to give her a clitoral rub at the same time.
What a clitoris she had! my hand confirmed what my mouth had discovered, that it was knobbed like an electric light switch. It was almost like the rudimentary prick of a hermaphrodite, and I wouldn't have been too surprised if it had suddenly come, with a little white spurt of its own. All it needed was a pair of marbles, to complete the illusion. But she had enough wetness to give me, without that contribution.
I drove away, with long steady strokes, quickening at times, slowing down again, and Rosy gave suffocated gasps of pleasure. I put my spare hand under one of her tits, and she bit the pillow with pleasure. I must have been a grand lover that night, for the drink was still swimming in my veins and I had one of those famous alcoholic cock-stands that will last forever but won't let you come. My head was clear enough for me to have control over what I was doing, and take conscious pleasure in it. I worked Rosy up with deliberation to a splashy orgasm, and then took it from there, on the down-beat, without letting her lose the excitement or go quiet again. She had no sooner exploded, with jerks in all directions, than I started up the rhythm again, slow but meaningful, and brought her up, up, up, to another climax. I enjoyed it all, for she cooperated with the muscles inside her vagina, while I nudged the mouth of her womb with the nozzle of my cock. And yet more, I enjoyed it like a musician, master of an instrument. She was rapturously surprised, as she told me afterwards, at this great-lover stuff. I could never have achieved it without the alcohol. It's only by chance that one can never reach that happy state: in ninetynine drinking-bouts out of a hundred, one is either short of the mark or incapable.
Drink is the Judas of sex, the most treacherous ally it can have. But that night, for once, it was a true friend. Though, of course, it was Rosy's friend, more than mine!
I felt more like the producer than the actor, as though I were directing somebody else's performance. I had never played the thing like this before. Funny, because in my heated imaginings in advance, after first hearing about Rosy from Rex, I had always thought of her as the mature, experienced woman (as no doubt she was) leading the young man in her own sophisticated pathways. But here she was helpless with passion, and I in control, running her up and down the scale!
It went on and on, until I thought, "No, it must end sometime." I could tell that Rosy was pretty nearly exhausted. So was I, but I had never got near an orgasm. I must, must come. It would be a failure of manhood on my part if I couldn't; I would have to act it, go through a pretence of coming, and perhaps she would detect it, for all women are detectives by nature. I began to panic, and could feel my flesh going numb, losing interest. I flogged it harder, but seemed to be slipping away from the crest, though I was gasping like a walrus by now. Yet when she was sucking me, a little while before, I had been afraid of coming too soon.
I seized her wrist and guided it, and she quickly got the idea and wriggled her fingers under my balls. This was a terrific help, and my sensations returned.
Confidence came back too: I was going to make it! I began the rhythmic romp uphill, and tried hard to shut my mind to any kind of thoughts. And at last I shot my bolt, with Rosy lashed to a fresh foam under me. When I did come, it was more like muscular relief than anything; like breasting the tape at the end of a quartermile. I don't believe I shed a thimbleful of juice.
All I wanted was a good rest. I fell asleep while waiting for Rosy to stop quivering. She had to wake me to shift my weight off her poor mauled body.
Eventually we sat up. She clung to me, and shed a few tears.
"I'm so thankful," she said, "that you're not one of those. I thought you might be one of Rex's fairies, like Johnny and Tim. They're very nice, but they're not interested in women."
"Aren't they?" I said. "But I am."
What would she have said if she had known that I had been asking myself all night what I would do if Rex made an advance to me? that I had never stopped thinking about it, at the back of my mind, even when I was having Rosy? and that I had not yet absolutely decided on the answer?
I found I was in no hurry to meet Rex again after that night. When I did, he was perfectly affable, his well-mannered self, and showed he knew all about things by asking me humorously whether Rosy came up to expectations. I assured him she did. I was taking her to a dance the next night, I told him. "Good," said he.
"And did you have a good time with Tim and Johnny?" I asked.
"They're nice fellows, you should get to know them better," he said. Johnny, in particular, admires you."
"Hm."
Smooth, I thought.
Later, we walked round the moonlit park, talking of various things. Rex took my arm.
"Johnny," he remarked, "is a little jealous of you. Understandably. He knows I'm out of my mind about you.
I stopped in my tracks.
"I know, I know," he went on before I could say anything. "It's all hopeless, you're horribly one-track, you're only interested in your precious Rosy, and you think homosexuality is shameful, and so on. Not even to save a wretched man's sanity would you allow so much as a kiss. Besides, it's against the law!"
"Listen, Rex!" I exclaimed indignantly, "I don't care a hoot for the law, you ought to know that, and as for shame I haven't got any. And I'm not so horribly onetrack, or at least I used not to be, because I had larks with my brothers, and other boys at school. It's just that I've grown out of it."
"Have you?"
"Rex," I said, falteringly, "is it true?" "Is what true?"
"What you said... that you're sort of... in love with me?"
"O my dear!" he exclaimed, breathing painfully. His grip on my arm was tighter.
I was moved, and a bit sad. He had tears in his eyes.
"I don't think I could love anyone, a man, like that," I said gently.
"No, I know," he said.
"But you can kiss me, if you very much want to," I said.
He looked so hopeless, and I admired him so much, it would be idiotic prudery to refuse him a kiss, I thought. Did I secretly, unconsciously, want more, and guess that I would be ready to yield more when it came to the point?
Someone was walking towards us. Rex steered me into a side lane, and round the bend where it turned, and into the dark moon-shadows.
Putting his arms round my shoulders, he pressed his lips to mine, thirstily. With strange sensations of crossing into unknown land, darkest Africa, I accepted the kiss.
He began to tell me I was beautiful, I was all youth and springtime, I was manliness and feminine grace all in one, I had virility and the skin of a girl, I resembled young Persians he had known... I knew this was all exeggeration and compliment, but it was not unpleasing; and because I believed he was in love, I believed he sincerely meant it all. He wove a spell of words over me. He told me of the anguish of self-restraint he had endured, and how he had determined never to let me see his feelings, but his resolution had broken down at last.
How true was it? I still don't know. Neither does he, I dare say. He could intoxicate himself, as well as me, withwords, and believe his own rhapsodies. He could make an erection sound like a grand passion; just as he was making me into a Greek god. He loved words, and his own emotions. Looking back, I wonder if in the end I wasn't more in love with him than he ever was with me. I certainly had a great attachment to him.
When his eloquence died down I submitted again to his kiss. I allowed his tongue to penetrate my mouth, and I responded as best I could.
His breath reminded me of the Major's, when I was kissed as a child.
I can't, surely, have been so naive as to imagine it would stop at a kiss! Rex was pressing me to him, running his hands over my shoulder blades, holding my loins, pulling me close to him by my buttocks. It was all very strange. I tried to project myself into him, and imagine his feelings. I tried thinking of myself as a girl with a lover. I was aware of his erection, hopping away there behind the double barrier of gents' suitings. In me there was some force resisting, and another opposite impulse wanting to explore, to experience, to advance further into the dark continent.
Rex repeated his phrase about saving a man's sanity, in a whisper in my ear. He seemed so madly eaten up with desire that I could think it might be true. He had put it in the form of a question, and I murmured, "All right."
His hand slid round between us and he unbuttoned my fly. I was not erect, but I was not entirely soft, either. The bizarre and exciting atmosphere had already had some effect, and I was half-hard when his swift, exploratory fingers reached my flesh.
He kissed me again, while his hand with obvious delight played about with me. He felt my boyish pelvis, the curly pubic hair, my balls and then my prick, drawing his fingers very slowly up it from base to 'tip, as if to learn it by heart. The foreskin was peeling back by now, and he knew by my frisson when he had reached the most sensitive part. Whatever resistance I had was melting fast. My prick adored his skilful touch and quickly became as firm as the Eiffel Tower.-(There's nothing like experience, I thought.)
I was full of very complicated feelings: the mixture of repulsion and attraction, to start with; then the affection I had for Rex and the magic flow of words stimulating me through my imagination; that adolescent uncertainty about what I was; a half-fear that I might turn into a painted pansy overnight; the memories of the Major, and my boyhood friends; all these made a cocktail of emotion such as I had never swallowed before. There was even a feeling of disloyalty to Rosy, who had said so tearfully that thank goodness I was not "one of those." And I wasn't-or was I?
One thing I certainly was, a sensualist: I don't think that even one of Rex's little black brothers, with all their generations of technique behind them, could have been more responsive to his caresses than I was. The only trouble was, I couldn't hold back long enough: one hand kneading my spine seemed to touch nerves I didn't know I had; the other played so brilliantly round my parts, from lightest touches to a firm ring of finger and thumb frigging up and down with steadily increasing speed: he must have felt the fast increasing throb in the threefold bloodvessels inside my prick, for he turned himself aside just as I breathed, "I'm coming!'*
The white liquor, like a little rain of moonlight, leapt out and landed beside our feet, just missing his clothes. He wiped me with his handkerchief, then gathered me again in his arms for a last kiss. I suppose he must have come in his pants, but I don't know at what point in the proceedings. I had not touched his cock at all with my hand. I was purely the passive partner, in so far as that can ever be said of the male with his active shotgun. Rex sighed with profound contentment. I was glad.
I went to my bed that night in a state of fierce turmoil and conflict. Life and sex were no longer so simple! I lay there wrestling with my confused ideas and emotions, and, inevitably, wrestling feverishly with my inflamed member, the cause of all the worry. In any crisis, such as exams, I always felt the itch to masturbate; more especially in a crisis of this nature. I went over the pros and cons of the matter, and then relived in my memory the happenings of the evenings, the things Rex had said, the first approach of his hand: and now, alone, I gave myself up to the pleasure of it without qualms. I frigged by an old, curious method I had found for myself years ago: holding my balls in one hand, grasping my wrist with the other, and squirming the inner side of a wrist, like a wheel, against the front of my prick. It needs a photograph to illustrate this tactic, but it would have won a Highly Commended at the International Masturbation Jamboree and Friggers' Fair. It lias a very egotistic, enclosed, self-sufficient feel about it, though I am sure it doesn't compete with the Japanese method which I have heard of but never achieved-a way of making a vacuum with the two hands, in which the swollen head of the organ is positively sucked! Perhaps it is a legend, like the horizontal cunts of the Chinese girls. (I have met a man from a far countree who maintains that Chinese tale is true! He says that though the slit is vertical, really, as in the West, they splay the pelvis and use themselves in such a way as to give the crosswise impression when you fuck them. I can't quite visualise it, but could so persistent and widespread a yarn have absolutely no foundation? Hundreds of generations have had a chance to verify it!)
During this little digression I had been jerking up to my climax, and here I was, coming in the bed, and biting the pillow.
I went smoothly to sleep; there's no sedative like it. Such is the sexual vitality of youth, that I had a wet dream that same night, and woke up just as I was coming once more, with a good, healthy shot of spunk. I am not sure of the details, but Rosy and Rex both played a part in my dream, and the same conflict was it work.
CHAPTER 8
I never solved the conflict. I was like the boy who worried about the sex problem, and woke up with the solution on his stomach. I did not refuse Rex the next time he wanted me, what is the point of refusing what you have once granted? I simply enjoyed it, with more and more abandon, and thought less and less about the whys and wherefores. But I did not give up Rosy. On the contrary, my affair with her flamed more hotly than ever.
At the dance the night after Rex had first touched me, Rosy told me what a wonderful lover I was. I said a private prayer of thanksgiving to Bacchus. We danced closely and I had a powerful horn: it was almost a musical copulation. It went down after a time, and she asked me mockingly, "Have I offended you?"
When we went home, her mother had left supper for two. We ate it, Rosy sitting on my knee. When I had her afterwards it was very different from the first. I was ferocious in my attack, almost tearing the clothes off her, and nibbling her earlobes and nipples, and pounding away like a blacksmith. She could tell I was going to come too quickly and she loyally forced herself to a quick climax to meet me. Psychologists can make what they like of that.
"Stay the night!" she whispered.
But I was not sufficiently sure of her mother's attitude for that. And I did not feel like meeting Rex at breakfast. But I stayed with her an hour, talking in whispers, and then I had her again. During the hour, I fondled her splendid breasts, nuzzled between them and let my fingers play in her wet labia. We exchanged interesting information: such as that when I made her nipple erect, she felt a nice tweak in her clitoris; and that when she touched a particular nerve in my neck, behind the ear, I felt it at the other end of the telegraph wire, between my legs. We put these revelations into practice.
Rosy was inquisitive about me: what other girls had I had? I told her one or two harmless anecdotes. Had
I ever been to a brothel or had a tart? I told her truthfully, no, I liked girls who did it for pleasure, not for money. She was disappointed, she wanted to know all about those girls and what they did.
"Some day I shall try it, I expect, and then I'll come and tell you," I said. "Tell me about yourself, instead, what's the first thing you can remember in the sex line?"
"In a field," she said, "an old man with grey hair. He came up and gave me some sweets. I was quite little. There was another girl with me, but she ran away. "What did he do?"
"He pulled it out and showed it to me." "You didn't run away, too?"
"I couldn't, I wanted to go to the W, I was afraid I'd wet my knickers. When he showed it to me, I laughed. He told me to hold it, so I did. Then he sat down and pulled me on to his knee and showed me how to rub it for him. I wasn't frightened, I don't know why."
"Well, go on. What happened?"
"Naturally, he put his hand between my legs, and I was starting to dribble, I couldn't contain myself. I remember I said, 'I can't help it,' I was quite ashamed of myself."
"And could he contain himself?"
"No, he didn't, and I was ever so surprised at what came out of him. Then he jumped up and buttoned himself and ran away. He never kissed me or anything, but he gave me the rest of the sweets. I was so pleased to see him go, because then I could relieve myself. I never told anyone, because I thought I would be the one to get blamed." We laughed together. She added reminiscently: "He can't have been so old, really, by the quickness of him, and the way he ran off. I expect he was about forty, but I thought he was ninety at the least."
"What was the next?" I asked. "Tell me about losing your virginity, who was it?"
"Kiss me," Rosy said. I thought she was being reticent about her maidenhead, but it wasn't that. Relating the story of the old man in the field had excited her: her face was hot, and her limbs were tense. Her thighs clutched my hand, that was stiil playing there between them. She felt my prick and found it getting stiff again
"Bob!" she mumbled. "Give me it!"
I rolled on to her and she guided my prick into her cosy bird's nest with her eager fingers. There was no difficulty, as everything down there was sopping wet; it was just like docking the Queen Mary.
I glued my mouth to her mouth, my dull nipples on her sensitive ones, my right arm under her neck, th* fingers of my left creeping round her smooth luxurious buttock into the cleft of her arse, and our toes tangling. This time I couldn't have come as quickly as the first even if I had wanted to; my glands had so recently emptied themselves. I wanted to give her a lot of pleasure, for I liked her very much: she had a simple goodness that shone out of her. What she needed was a good husband, not a fly-by-night like me, and I believe she got one in the end. Meanwhile, the least I could do was give her as much pleasure as she gave me; or try to.
I fucked her with long, steady strokes at first, and then began to quicken but not too fast; I tried to prolong it Her hands clutched my back convulsively, I could feel the sharp print of her fingernails.
"Bob! Go on, Bob. O Christ I'm coming!" she whispered, breathlessly, and come she did, long before I was at a climax: a stiffening of her legs and arms, i writhe of her soft parts, a terrific shudder, and a new gush of lubricating oil. But she did not pack up and want a rest, as I would have done. She went on in a continuous quiver, and had orgasm after orgasm, miniature ones, like waves hitting a shore. The inside muscles of her cunt worked on me all the time, I could feel them right through my prick, they were kneading it like new dough; I could believe the mouth of her womb was taking a suck at my knob, too, for its own satisfaction.
This joy only an experienced woman could give. Rosy brought all her past and laid it on the bed for me, a gift; I could not be jealous of any man she had had before me, as I was their beneficiary.
Rosy's hand was running down the channel of my spine, then it was under my balls, lightly frisking the surface. Her tongue was under my tongue, her lip spilled saliva into my mouth. She raised her legs and crossed them behind my back.* The heat radiated from her taut, burning cheeks, and her left arm was right round my neck, so that her searching fingers could play with my left ear, turning it into a little erotic zone of its own. Turning her mouth aside from mine, she bit me in the shoulder; a sharp icicle of pain that only braced my nerves and forced me on faster.
"I wish I could swallow you up inside me," she gasped, and it almost seemed as if she might, with the wonderful suction of her vagina. "Hurt me, do what you like to me!"
I was hurting her, unconsciously, my grip on her tender flesh was so tight, as I saw afterwards: I gave her blue bruises that lasted a week. But I was not trying to hurt, only to enjoy and give joy. I was going up into that mindless phase of the orgasm, when the rhythm grows automatic, and sensation gives way to something beyond itself: I was in the wet caverns of night, the warm animal body of life was all round and over me, I was pressed between the huge hides of oxen, their great slobber-mouths were licking me, I \vas on the roof of a bucking train coming out of the tunnel of bowels, my prick was bursting, my mouth was filled with crushed grapes, the hands of children were patting my limbs from end to end, I was hosed down with hot rosewater, Rosy-water, I was nothing but one big pulsebeat, a great white artery of spunk; I blacked out, the seventh wave threw me up the shore in white spume and left me there.
After that, Rosy made me a cup of cocoa before I left her. I had not managed the miracle that alcohol had performed for me on the other occasion, but I had lived up to my reputation with Rosy all right; and for my part, I had enjoyed it more, with no worries about whether I could come or not, and with more natural confidence, somehow.
I felt a bit of a hypocrite, letting her think there was nothing between me and Rex, but I couldn't tell her, and what good would it have done?
All the same, I had done very little deceiving up to then. I was sorry to begin it. I accepted it, however, as one of the hard necessities of my life. To be completely open with everyone would mean going to jail, and having no job, and losing countless pleasures. To say nothing of the quarrels and heartaches and jealousies it would create; though perhaps deception creates even more, in the long run. The tangled web and so on.
Anyway, I kept Rosy in the dark about Rex, and if she had asked me I would have denied it.
I did not keep Rex in the dark about Rosy, though he never sought details-they would have been very distasteful to him, I'm sure. He made an occasional flippant reference to it, sarcastic but indulgent, as though it was something childish that I ought to have grown out of, like thumb-sucking. He knew well enough that I was not in love with the girl, so he did not worry. It was my emotional loyalty he wanted, and sex occasionally as intimacy.
In sex, he wanted to be all active. He did not let me touch him, at this stage of the affair. He simply wanted to enjoy me, with his fingers and his lips, give me pleasure, and reassure himself of my affection, I think.
I had got over my qualms and it was pure sensual pleasure to me. If he seemed like parting from me at night without a caress I would even ask him, didn't he want to? and then he always found some dark alleyway where he could kiss me and toss me off, if nothing else.
It was true as he had said, that he did not go in for buggery-he was possibly too fastidious! so that experience did not come my way. Would I have refused? No, I don't imagine so. But I was content with what he did want.
In his room one afternoon (Rosy was out, with her mother, and I was glad they were not in the house). Rex tumbled me on the bed, tickling and joking; I was being my age, a young carefree animal, and to him a very attractive one, firm and lithe, with a complexion as good as a girl's. He soon had me unbuttoned, and my trousers down to my knees, my shirt up to my waist, and the game had become more serious. My cock erected like a spring, and he amused himself pulling it forward and letting it slap back on my belly. Then suddenly he plunged down and took it in his mouth.
I held his head between my two hands, my own head thrown back on the pillow and abandoned myself to the passive joy. He sucked with skill-experience, again! his hands meanwhile fondling my waist and thighs and balls. When I came, he swallowed it thirstily. He wasn't fastidious about that! Why should he be, anyway?-it was something he more than enjoyed, something he wanted with appetite and passion. He once said lightly that it was "cleaner than kissing, from the hygienic point of view, because our mouths are simply full of germs, all as eager to copulate as we are!" But that had nothing to do with why he liked gamarouching: he liked to drink my living seed, suck it into him like mother's milk. He felt that was the extremest intimacy he could have with me, bodily. He did it whenever we could manage the circumstances. I liked it. I liked to give him what he felt was a privilege, and I loved the sensation itself-there can't be a man alive who doesn't enjoy the feeling. There are thirteen muscles in the tongue, and Lord knows how many in the lips, all under wonderful control: no cunt can compete with them for skill, they know exactly what they're doing. But they get tired quicker than a cunt.
So from Rex, inhibited about bottoms but not about mouths, I learned something-the strangeness of people's rules about what's "clean" and what's "dirty," what may be done and what is taboo.
Rosy was a good girl, a fine girl, good-hearted and giving and living. She was also silly, she poured the neighbourhood gossip into my unwilling ears, and she bored me to death at times. Fucking or dancing she was grand, but otherwise we hadn't much in common.
My relationship with Rex was one long, amusing conversation, with a romantic tone and sexual undertones. I felt like his pupil, in everything. He was like those tutors of classical times, those pederastic pedagogues, like the one in Petronius; only, unlike that boy, I did not allow "liberties" to get presents out of him. When he wanted to give me a watch, I was offended and refused, remarking, "It's not my birthday."
I discovered gradually that he had another, hidden, life. He took me one day to an Arab cafe in dockland. Sailors of all nationalities were there, and a bunch of painted, twittering pansies ready to amuse them. There were a few women, too, not very attractive, I thought. Four of the pansies, screaming, "Rex! Rex darling! where have you been all this time?" surrounded us when we sat down. They looked at me with piercing eyes, one rather coy, the others disdainful; I smiled at them in a well-meaning way. Rex smiled at them all, indulgently, patting the coy one lightly on the bum. There were hoots of laughter from the next table. The air smelt of French tobacco and Turkish coffee.
Was it a revolting scene? Not to me. I thought, if you knew these boys you would find them just as nice and as nasty, as kind and as cruel as any other people, the same mixture. Rex isn't afraid to know them. He plunges in here, with his courage and sympathies, just as he does in the pygmy villages or among the South Sea Islanders.
Somebody with a flask laced our coffees with rum and I began to get high. All at once I saw a really attractive girl: a little light-coloured negress, about seventeen, in a short, loose dress that managed to suggest she had almost nothing on underneath. She was at the coffee-bar, trying to buy some biscuits, and there was a laughing argument with some of the fairies, who were giving her advice. I drifted up (Rex was talking to a boy) and joined in the fun. I was accepted at once, and she smiled up at me: what tiny white teeth, between those thick lips! She had a pointed chin, a flat nose, big brown eyes, a red hair-ribbon. I began to talk to her, and as there was quite a crowd round the bar we were able to huddle at one side in comparative isolation. I put my arm round her waist, as it could not be seen. She pushed it away. I put it round again, and she let it remain. I presumed she was a tart. How did you begin to ask the price? Anyway, I had next to no money, and couldn't very well ask Rex for some.
I noticed a side door near the bar. "It's very hot in here, shall we go out for a breath of air?"
I moved towards the door as I spoke and opened it quickly. She did not answer, but let me usher her out. This was mad, I thought, shutting the door after us. But to hell with the money, I wanted her very much, I'd have her first and argue afterwards.
We were in a dark patch beside the cafe, near a chicken-run, I stood her against a wall and sucked her strange dark lips. I put my hand inside her frock. She had conical breasts and very big nipples: she quivered when I touched them. She wagged her strong tongue like a pendulum in my mouth. My left hand found its way under her hem and inside her pants, which were so wide they could hardly be called protective.
I liked her crisp, curly pubic hair. I" expected a big gap there, but no, it was a tight, neat little cunt, carried right forward, like a child's, not away back between the legs: I believe she could have pissed against a wall, like a boy. It was moist, but felt unused: perhaps she was even a virgin? She quivered and squirmed so violently when I touched it that I was afraid she was ill and would have a fit any minute. Her eyes were shut, she seemed to be going into a trance. But how could I have her? Traffic was passing not twenty yards away, and somebody else might come out of the side door, anyway.
I had a huge beat, and if I didn't get it into her soon
I should come in my trousers from the mere quivering of this young, black body against me.
At that moment I heard voices. A man stepped out of the shadow saying: "What you doing with my girl, eh?"
He was a white man, square-headed, sailor-like, and he had doubled his fists.
She snapped out of her trance immediately, ducked under my arm and opened the side door again. I dived in after her, trying to shut the door behind me, but the man got his foot there. The girl shot behind the bar and vanished into the kitchen. I stumbled across to the table, mumbling a warning to Rex, who got up and faced round to cover my retreat. The man looked about seven feet high and six feet broad, he had a bottle in his hand like a club, a fellow-tough was behind him to back him up, and I did not think this a very good time and place for a fight. The bottle crashed over my head as I reached the door. But the Arab proprietor and a sailor grabbed the big man by the arms and put a half-nelson on him, while to the shrieks of the fairies I made my getaway. Rex followed me, and we ran with undignified haste till we could catch a bus.
"I see there are places I mustn't take you," Rex said. "If this was East Africa, I'm afraid you'd soon be seeing your most precious ornaments hanging from a palmtree.
"Did you see her?" I asked him. "Oh, she was beautiful!"
"Taboo, apparently," he said. "Well, never mind, you're still intact."
A statement which he was proving to his own satisfaction, an hour later.
How many sexes can you be? I asked myself. I really ought to make up my mind, oughtn't I? Both the homo and the hetero tend to distrust, if not dislike, the amphibian, I found. Not that I minded very much what they thought. Owen insolently called me "Madame X" sometimes, but I only laughed. It was true my most romantic feelings at the time went to Rex, if my highest excitement was aroused by women.
I was getting nowhere with my studies, had lost interest in the academic life and all its dreary prospects, and felt pretty sure I should fad in my exams. So the bright thing to do would be to quit before I was ploughed. And do what?
Suddenly an enchanting prospect opened before me. Rex's book came out, he collected some royalties, paid some of his numerous debts and began preparing for a new expedition, this time to Abyssinia. He asked me to go with him as his secretary and aide-de-camp.
I said yes without the slightest hesitation. Faraway places with strange-sounding names, and all that. The Lion of Judah and the Queen of Sheba and Arthur Rimbaud. I also thought at once of little black nymphs and pliable boys, of course. I had an inner realisation that this adventure might mean committing myself completely to one half of life, however: Rex's life; almost like a marriage, instead of just an affair. That was how it would be to Rex: he made love-speeches to me that proved it. But inside myself I kept the belief that I could dodge it, that I needn't absolutely "go over" the sex borderline, and "be a queer," even then.
I shall never know how it would have worked out. I made up my mind to go, and my enthusiasm for Abyssinia made Rex happier than I had ever seen him. The nearest I actually got to it was an Ethiopian night club in Paris.
We were to have a fortnight in London, first, while
Rex prepared his kit; then a visit to Paris, and on to Marseilles, where we would take ship.
I gave up working, sold my books, and to avoid stormy scenes with my tutors I simply ran away when the time came, leaving letters which I wrote on a cafe table.
With all my movables in a couple of suitcases I met Rex at the railway station and away we sped to Loridon.
Never having seen the place before, I found it wildly exciting. I did all the usual sightseeing, fountains, pigeons, pictures and old armour.
We also went to a lot of theatres and eating places. But what impressed me most was the appearance of London by night, and not only the West End, for we went to places ilke Hammersmith to see plays, and Hampstead to dine with Rex's friends. It was the enormous dark web of streets, the roads spreading like the fingers of a wicked hairy hand, the miles of people who did not even know one another; the prostitutes lurking on corners, and the cars cruising for pickups; all that prowling darkness just outside the glitter and rush. That was what impressed me, that vast jungle. What had Abyssinia got that London hadn't? I wanted to plunge in, and be seduced into new vices.
To Rex, I was a bride on a honeymoon. He bought me clothes and presents, outside of my nominal salary, which had begun, and which I earned very easilytaking lists of requirements to his dictation, and pricing things at various shops. I accepted his gifts, thinking, Why not? it gives him pleasure. (A whore's argument.) He showed me off to his friends. Some were sedate and literary. Some were very queer indeed.
We stayed at a Bloomsbury hotel. One room, two beds. I wondered whether there were any funny ideas in the head of the boots and the chambermaid, when we were installed there, the first night. We had eaten out at a Turkish restaurant, and drunk wine in the French House, and come back tired and gay, joking about everything. And at last we were in our room, the door closed on us, we were beginning our first whole night together. It really was honeymoonish: I wished that for one night I could really be a girl, breasted, cunted and beautiful, with black chiffon pyjamas and neck-length hair. But of course, if I had been, Rex would not have been interested! This seemed to me, as I took off my manly brogues and unbuttoned my shirt, a quaint fact.
Rex certainly watched me with a bridegroom's hungry eye as I stripped off. I grinned saucily at him, and did not put my pyjamas on. He, too, stripped, and I looked him over with curiosity, for I had never seen him naked before. I looked quite a sylph by comparison, with my soft downy skin and lack of muscle. He was sunburnt from past travels, strong and soldierly, with spare, taut flanks, biceps like wire rope, and smooth ridges of muscle on his shoulders and thighs. He had no hair on his body except the bush round his prick, and what he had there was crisp and brown.
He was really a fine sight, by any standard: mature, fit, aesthetic and masculine. Yet he would probably never father a child, and that seemed a pity.
For all my girl-mood, I did not feel very sexy at the sight of him, only admiring. The situation excited me, though, and Rex's devouring gaze. My cock, which he looked at as if it were the first rosebud in June, was a little inflated, but still dangling.
I had the curious spectacle of his own weapon rising. It grew before my eyes, with a series of jerks or highkicks, till it was sticking out, hard as iron, quite a noble object.
The ornament of a noble figure. Some people profess to find the male outfit ugly, but I am not of that way of thinking. Rex's looked like a Roman warrior in his helmet. Lovingly modelled, like the one on Michaelangelo's David, or on some splendid African sculptures, the penis can be either magnificent or sinuously tender and appealing, according to its mood, but beautiful in either. Like any other human feature, it can be either handsome or plain.
"I can read your thoughts," I said.
"Impudent stripling," he said. "Excellent wretch." He moved close and embraced me. I put my arms round his neck. He put his hand down and fondled my parts, till my prick was as stiff as his own. Then he clamped them together, his and mine, face to face, with his hand round both. He murmured some endearments, and pushed me on to the bed. We lay down together, and pulled the covers over us.
I ventured for once to touch his privates with my hand, and play around them as he liked to play around mine. He let me, but with a shade of reluctance, 1 thought. That was not what he wanted. Now, surely, tonight he will want to put this in some orifice of mine, my arse or mouth, I thought. But he did not. He wanted nothing more than I used to do with my brothers.
Rex was not at all a narcissist, as I was. He did not want to be the object of my caresses, he wanted me to be the object of his. He was drunk with the utter joy of possession, that first night in the hotel with me. He kissed me from head to foot, even my toes. He sucked my cock till it seemed to swell, almost to bursting-point. But he gave up, cunningly, when he felt me getting over-excited, for he wanted to prolong his pleasure before making me come.
We lay on our sides, face to face, legs entwined, arms likewise. Rex had put out the bedside lamp, there was just the breathing darkness of London, and its traffic that never seems to stop. Our hot pricks throbbed against each other's belly, as we squirmed in the grip of passion. Rex put his hand down behind me, so that his wrist was in the cleft of my bottom, and I felt his fingertips, passing between my legs, brushing the corrugated skin of my balls. He touched me up so lightly that something seemed to jump of own accord in the core of my prick, like a watchspring.
Suddenly, he turned me on my back. He could hold out no longer, his passion was devouring him, he stretched full length on top of me and his mouth came down on my mouth, his tongue almost down my throat. He put one lover-like arm under and round my waist, forced the other between us and held our two pricks together as though they were a pair of little lovers, themselves. I gripped him with my thighs, which nearly sent him mad with desire. He rose on a terrific pounding climax. For once, I was not the first to come. I was just beginning to work up to it when I felt him leap and shudder and spill all over me: that hot, strongsmelling puddle of fulfilment!
He kept still a moment, panting; then realised that my pleasure was uncompleted. He slid down the bed, put his mouth into the creamy lake, drew my knob into his mouth and slid his hands round my buttocks. I had not far to go, and he sucked and licked with a very glib tongue. I do not think he knew how much his fingers in my bum-cleft had to do with it. Those searching and tender finger-dps sent ripples up and down my spine, and made my very guts throb, even lighting little electric filaments in my balls. My prick expanded like a bubble. My hands held the head of the man who adored my body so wildly, and who wanted to suck me into his bloodstream. My bubble burst, I poured myself into his mouth, and his cheeks quivered between my hands.
After that we had a lovely dreamy hour together, in each other's arms, in perfect peace. The sort of peace that David and Jonathan must have known together, when the sling was emptied; or any other two lovers of the antique world, when they were alone, and had done all they could want to do together.
Rex asked me, "How was Rosy, when you parted? She was tearful, on the last day."
"I feel rather bad about her," I admitted. "But she knew we had no future, and she took it rather well I got fond of her, you know, but this had to be. Our last night together was rather ghastly."
"How?"
"I had to have her for the last time, but I was no good, I knew she only wanted a souvenir and her heart wasn't in it. And I only wanted it to prove to her that I was as fond of her as ever. I could hardly come, I had to think of-other things. Just after we'd finished, her period came on. That made things all right. She had been worried sick, as she was a week late."
"You little idiots," Rex said. "You'd have been in a nice mess if she had been pregnant, and this trip just about to begin."
"Yes, I know. But we were lucky, as it happens. And that helped the parting, because her mind was so much relieved."
I did not tell Rex I had detected another motive in myself for having wanted to acquit myself well in Rosy's arms, that last night. That was, that I wanted to convince her I had not become "one of Rex's fairies," and was still a capable lover, still able to want and to have her, Vanity. I finished up rather crestfallen, that night: it was such an effort to reach the orgasm. She must have felt the sense of strain.
Anyway, I had written to her. Saying nothing, of course. Dear good Rosy: but I was young, and she was just another woman, another rosebud for me to drop on the path behind me. I was a not very excellent wretch.
I did one or two things during that London trip that I did not tell Rex about. He might well have been amused or pleased, even, but I was not sure. He might have scolded me, for taking needless risks. He might have found my behaviour "repellent," in that fastidious way of his.
On one of his errands I found myself a short cut through one of the London parks. It was a sunny afternoon. I had the sense of liberty and adventure, with the great exciting spread of London around me.
I went into the nearest palace of piss, to relieve my bladder. I was immediately joined by an old gentleman, who stood next to me and stared ostentatiously at my weapon. This was no new experience, but I simply ignored these gazers and walked out, as a rule. This time I looked with interest at the old man's face. He had white hair, a red complexion, with wrinkled watery eyes, and must have been well in his seventies. It seemed to me remarkable that he should still be such an eager voyeur. What satisfaction could he hope to have? And had he been doing this all his long life? I wondered. Was it really in my power to give him sexual pleasure?
He looked poor and not very clean, as well as old. I felt charitable. Instead of buttoning up when I had finished my pee, I stood toying with the instrument, letting the old stranger look. There was nobody eke there. With a glance over his shoulder to make sure we were not observed, he suddenly reached out his skinny hand to touch and seize it, whispering, "Lovely!"
I touched his pathetic member, which had probably not stood to attention for years. It did not respond, of course. But he held and squeezed and rubbed mine, as though it were his own. Perhaps he imagined it was himself again, in the days of his vigour. He seemed to want to get strength from me, from my youthfulness, as if my electricity would run into his system through his fingers, out of my magic wand. Perhaps that was possible, too. All sorts of mysterious things pass through the pores of our wonderful skin into another's being, when we touch: especially when our soft parts touch, even when they are hard! Vitamins, TNT, electronics, cosmic rays and iron jelloids, as well as sweat and seed.
I let the wicked innocent old man look and feel his fill, and his claw-like hand knew what it was doing. His bent fingers found their way to the sensitive spots, and he held me tightly to him while he tossed me off. As I neared the climax, footsteps approached. The danger brought me on like lightning, and I jerked in his hand, splashing on the floor, just in time to cover it with my foot and turn away as a tall burly fellow came in. The old man's reactions were slower, and I was sure the young man guessed something had been going on. The air smelt sexy, anyway. The old man stood at the wall, pretending to be still pissing or about to piss. The young man stood next to him and looked suspiciously at him and at me. I felt panicky. Perhaps he was a plain-clothes detective. I forced myself to act calmly and move without haste. I buttoned up slowly. The reckless old man was already staring greedily at the newcomer's tool. As I walked away I glanced back, and was amazed to see the newcomer frigging up an erection for his benefit, without the least concealment. He gave me a broad wink.
I went out into the sunshine, my limbs all of a tremble, and sat on a bench to recover, thinking to myself, "So this is London!"
Nor did I tell Rex about the little thrill I got and gave the night we went to Highgate. Our host and hostess were a middle-aged couple who went in for "gracious living." The wife, with tinted hair, was sweet and musical. The husband, bulky, handsome and literary, was an obvious old queen. Their son, fourteen, was a ravishing lad, with fair skin, white teeth, an infectious smile and a cowlick of soft fair hair.
After we had wined and dined, I went up to the bathroom. John was just coming out, in his striped pyjamas, his face all newly scrubbed and shining, and a towel over his arm. He turned in to the next room, saying a polite good-night.
"Is that your room?"
I wandered in, and pretended to be interested in his sport trophies, while he climbed into bed. "Shall I put your light out for you?" "Yes, please."
I did so, and sat down on his bed. I thought of the Major, and determined not to let timidity hold me back, as it sometimes did with him. I put my arm round John's waist; encountering no shrinking or resistance, I put my hand down between his legs. He was already erect! As thick as my middle finger, and creditably firm.
"Don't," he said in a whisper, and tried to push my hand away. I refused to be pushed, and got a firm hold on it, sliding his foreskin up and down. He gave himself up to the pleasure of it. I kissed him. His mouth was very soft. I was quivering with excitement: it was nice to be seducer instead of seduced, for a change.
"Can you fire this gun?" I whispered.
"Yes."
I knelt beside the bed and sucked him off. I had his prick right in my mouth, nearly down my throat, till my lips touched his balls. I was hardly ready for his hot little spurt, it came so soon. I let it all go down, finding at last that I really wanted to.
by this time, I was very nearly coming, myself.
"Come on, toss me off, the way you do the cricket captain," I whispered, putting it into his hand. He giggled softly, and jerked me fast, with a strong little grip. I tried to catch my spendings in my handkerchief, but some went on his pyjamas and his flesh. His mother would doubtless think he had had a wet dream.
I kissed him again, murmured, "Keep mum!" and hurried down to rejoin the others. I had been missing for a long time.
"We guessed John must have waylaid you," the father said. "He's mad on sport, as you'll have discovered."
"Did he show you his medallion? He's very proud of it," said the mother.
"As a matter of fact, he did," I said. "And it's certainly something to be proud of."
As we were leaving, John's father pulled me into the corner among the coats and kissed me fervently, pressing my thighs. So Rex had been confiding secrets to him; or perhaps, knowing Rex, he took the situation for granted!
I wished I could have been alone with John's mother for a few minutes, too. I would have liked a hat-trick. Three in a family: that would be something!
I had no worries about what John's father would say, if he found out what had passed between me and his son. He could hardly play the outraged parent, with me, having given himself away. Not that John would tell, come to that.
I heard some hair-raising tales during our stay in the great Sexopolis.
Rex fixed himself some publicity, by ringing up a journalist he had known for years. This man was a hearty, if ever I saw one: a dark-eyed hook-nosed dissolute-looking person, in his thirties, with no great physique, but obviously a little stoat with women. He came to supper at our hotel and did an interview with Rex about his next trip and his book plans. But he did not make many notes, and it was hard to get him to absorb any facts, he was so busy reminiscing about his own experiences. Sexual, of course. He kept saying, "Listen, I must tell you this, and then we'll talk business"-or "Interrupting you just for a moment..."
He apologised for his normality-"I'm sorry this is all so bloody straightforward, nothing up your street. I wish I were a queer, keep me out of trouble, after all you can't get Bobbin here in the family way, can you?" He roared with laughter. "No offence meant. Do you like hearing about women?"
"Bobbin's a shocking womaniser," Rex said.
"Is he? You like a bit of cunt, do you? You ought to try both at the same time, man behind, woman in front," he said to me.
After another gulp of brandy, the journalist said to Rex: "Do you think I ought to try a bit of brown, just for an experiment? Everything once...but I'm not the type, really, am I?"
"Certainly not," Rex said.
"But all my experiences are so damn ordinary... Wait, I must tell you this, it was a bit of something out of the ordinary, but I hope it never happens to me again. Christ! Have you tried sadism, Rex? Well, don't."
The irrepressible creature went on:
"It started out marvellous, like a wet dream. I was covering a ball at the Savoy, the Duke of Kent was there with a party, and the Russian ballet people were there, and there were nearly as many journalists as guests. Anyway it was champagne all the way, and everybody was lit up. I'd had about five glasses of champagne when I suddenly saw the most luscious piece of cunt I've ever seen in my life. I just managed to save her from a shower of champagne that some idiot spilt over the balcony, and that gave me an excuse to ask her to dance. She was a fine, tall, beautiful blonde, with tits like whipped cream nearly coming out of her dress. Just holding her bare back when I was dancing with her made me imagine I was undressing her.
"I tried to talk about this and that, but it was no bloody use, I got a cockstand like the Monument. I tried to dance away from her, sort of at arms' length, but that was a bit unnatural, and she came closer in spite of me. She'd have had to be made of wood not to have felt the old man knocking his head on her thighs. I thought any minute she'd leave me flat. But what could I do? I tried thinking about corpses and cold baths but it made no difference.
"Anyway, she suddenly looked me in the eyes and said: 'Hey, this is too good to waste! Let's go to my flat and do something about it-it's only in Leicester Square.' And she pressed her cunt right on to my knob as she said it.
"Christ, I didn't need asking twice, believe you me. She went and got her cloak and we grabbed a taxi and went to her place. In the taxi she massaged my prick and swallowed my tonsils-it was all too good to be true.
"I'm not boring you, am I? I'll just finish this yarn and then we'll talk turkey. You can tell this is a true story, 'cause I'm telling it against myself.
"Her flat was as ritzy as hell, all cushions and mirrors and a damn great radiogram with a built-in cocktail cabinet. She put on sweet music and mixed some white ladies, but I was in too much of a hurry to bother much with drinking. She let me strip her. She kicked off her shoes and I undid her hooks and got her out of her frock and petticoat. She had lovely long legs, shapely as a mannequin's. I undid her bra, and her breasts absolutely jumped out at me. I kissed them and sucked them and nuzzled in between like a fucking beaver. She had gold lace panties, believe it or not, and she let me pull them down and play with the creases of her arse. She was kissing me all the time. Then I undid her bit of a suspender belt and rolled down her stockings, and finally I had her laid on the divan without a stitch, and I gave her a tongue bath, all over. "Then she sat up and said: 'Let me undress you,' I and she really seemed to enjoy taking my things off.
"I was feeling about ready to fuck her from Leicester Square to Piccadilly Circus by now. But she suddenly said: 'Look, I've got a little idiosyncrasy, I like being whipped. I want you to whip me.' And she opened a cupboard and took out a stick, what the Indians call a lathi. I could see she had quite a collection of whips and canes in there.
"It wasn't much in my line, but anything once, and I wanted to oblige her. I could wait a bit longer, for my reward.
"She bent over like a schoolboy, and I gave her a few whacks across the bottom. She shouted, 'Harder, harder, go on, hurt me!' So I slashed her here and there, as hard as I could bring myself to do it She wanted quite a lot, and she really began to look worked up, she writhed about with one hand in her cunt, and a wild look came into her eyes. All of a sudden, she began to slaver at the mouth, and seized the stick out of my hands. In two twos, she was lashing me like old Joe Buggery, and I was yelling blue murder. The louder I screamed the harder she hit me. She caught me one on the balls that doubled me up, and then when I bent over she tanned my arse. I hadn't got a stitch on, and I was half tight, and I couldn't defend myself. She was a lot taller than I am, athletic and strong as hell. I just ran, round and round the room, and she after me, madder and madder, till she fell down on the floor on her face, one hand under her cunt, jerking like an epileptic, moaning and biting the bloody cane and having a terrific come.
"I watched her, bloody well fascinated. It was quite a sight I thought, well, I've had to pay for my fucks one way or another, but I didn't expect to pay like this, it's a pretty high price. However. Then I saw she was pulling her clothes on again. I said, 'Here, come on, Joyce, let's get to bed and have the real thing, now.' But she calmly says: 'O no, nothing doing. I've had my pleasure, you can go home now.' What do you think of that?"
"What did you do, did you go home?" I asked.
"I was in no position to argue with that bloody murderess," he said. "All I got was weals that lasted three months."
As he was about to leave us, after hours more of such yarns, the journalist dropped a remark which was to alter my life's direction, and was ultimately the reason why I never saw Abyssinia. He said to Rex:
"I suppose you know, by the way, that Mark Fanning is back in town?"
"No! is he really?" Rex looked excited. He added, "Does he know I'm here?"
"Not yet, but I don't mind telling him, now that I've got my story. I didn't intend to let him scoop me."
"Who is he writing for?"
"O he's free lance. But he'll probably write you up for the Guardian, they take most of his stuff. He covered the cannibals for them, and the expedition to find the sea-serpent. They'll take anything he cares to writeeven a piece about you, old boy."
"I wasn't thinking about that," Rex replied.
"No, I know. Well, do you want me to tell him your address, or not?"
"Yes, why not?" Rex said. "If he wants to see me."
After the journalist had gone, I asked Rex who the mysterious Mark Fanning was. I vaguely knew his name.
"Just an adventurous journalist." "How adventurous?" "Very."
They must have had an affair, I thought. I was sure of it when I saw them together, a couple of days later. No caresses-at least in my presence-but a long handclasp, and such an eloquent staring into each other's eyes!
I did not like Mark. I was jealous, because he immediately muscled in on our life and plans, as if he had a right to, and because he knew so much about everything, and because he was charming but catty to me. He was about twenty-five, very Oxford, extremely handsome and bronzed, with frizzy gold hair and a lordly walk. He whisded on the letter S, and smelt of rosewater. He was brave, clever, feline and ruthless.
Whereas I had simply obeyed Rex's orders, he ha ideas of his own and began to put them over to Rex, most energetically. He could fix up with a newspaper for exclusive articles at a fee which would pay all Rex's expenses for the trip. On the second day of meeting us, Mark went further than this and proposed that he should come along, too, and write the articles in collaboration with Rex, cable them back to the newspaper, and take care of all the financing. On the third day, he was re-planning the route, and suggesting new equipment. He took over my inventories, struck out some items and put in others. I found myself with nothing to do-he was doing all the letter-writing and secretarial work with his left hand, so to speak, while drawing maps and plans with his right.
Rex did not seem to notice that I was upset. He seemed absolutely fascinated by Mark, and agreed to everything he suggested. "Don't you find Mark charming? He's good fun, too," he said. I did not think so.
"He's not my type," I said shortly. "He's obviously yours."
"I didn't think we should ever be friends again," Rex said. "I'm so glad we are."
I didn't ask for any details. Of course, before long I caught them kissing in our hotel room, but I didn't mind about that. Rex still wanted his fun with me at night. But all the same I thought he was less enthusiastic. My chief worry was that my job, my usefulness, was gone, and I suspected that Rex secretly wished I were not going with him, after all. I was sure he was out of love with me, if he had really been in it, and that his flame for Mark had revived, and put mine out. I was a nice young thing to play with, but little more. Did I want to go as his second-best concubine? I asked myself.
by the time we left London I was very miserable, feeling neglected and out of it. Mark came with us, of course, superintending everything, asking me cattily if I was quite comfortable. The pleasure of a calm and sunny Channel crossing could not cheer me.
But my youthful spirits were not totally repressible. Life turned up another card for me.
A middle-aged woman and her daughter, expensively dressed, rushed up to Rex and made a fuss of him. He introduced them and we all had some drinks. He told me at the first opportunity that the mother, Flora, was a society divorcee and a patroness of struggling artists. The daughter, Joan, seventeen, had begun to paint, and they were going to Paris and Rome and Ischia. They had lots of money and "knew everybody" and were very sophisticated.
They were thrilled to meet Rex again and to hear about his expedition, and they glowed over me, most flatteringly. We were at least all going as far as Paris together and would be able to see one another during the coming week, Flora said.
Mark joined us. It appeared the two ladies knew him already, and I thought the polite greetings on both sides were a little chilly. I wasn't sorry about that.
Flora, about forty-five, wore her hair cropped in a rather lesbian style, and had sporting tailored suits. Joan was more feminine-looking, with fluffy brown hair, puppy-fat cheeks, fine shapely legs and quite a bust. Both had red lips and prominent brown eyes, big greedy eyes, eager to see everything in the world.
In my state of sulks over Rex, I was just in the mood to fly back to the opposite sex, and I fell instantly for Joan.
It wasn't mutual, however. Joan liked attentions paid to her, enjoyed flirting, but was not looking for any thing more. Nor did she want to consider me, in particular, anything more than a playmate: certainly not a bedmate, which was exactly what I would have liked to be. It took quite a time for this attitude of hers to get through my vanity and sink into my mind. Meanwhile I built up marvellous fantasies, and undressed her mentally every time I saw her. The lips of my mind were always caressing her nipples; I made it obvious from my behaviour how I felt about her; but she was cool and quick-witted and amusing, nothing shook her.
But Flora, her mother, was another matter altogether. She talked in doubles entendres, and made little secret of her interest in me. She felt much the same about me as I did about her daughter!
I played up to her a bit, partly out of pique with Rex, partly because it pleased her so much, partly because she was Joan's mother.
We leaned over the rail and watched the ship's wake. Flora sent Joan away on some fool's errand, and no sooner had she gone than the mother began squeezing my arm and rubbing her body amorously against my hip. She had had a few brandies and her tongue slurred some of her words.
"Tell me," she said in an intimate voice, "how are you and Rex getting on? You can be frank with me, I've known all about Rex for years and years. Are you very much in love with him?"
The idea obviously excited her, strange creature that she was.
I did not know how to answer so I smiled mysteriously.
"Do you have it every night?" she whispered, almost choking. "Yes," I said, to please her.
She gripped tighter, and pressed closer. "How lovely!" she exclaimed. "Yes, but-"
"But you're jealous of that horrible Mark. Don't trust that one, not a single inch, dear boy, he's simply a rotter. In Abyssinia, he'll simply throw you to the cannibals. I can't think why Rex doesn't see through him. You're not the same type as that at all, I could see that at once."
She paused for breath, and looked round quickly to make sure we were not overheard. Then she said: "You're not one-track, arc you? I mean, you like women, too?"
I squeezed her hand, gave her an encouraging smile, and nodded.
"I knew it!" she said triumphantly. "I knew it instantly, as soon as I saw you. You sec what a lot I know without having to be told!"
"You do, indeed!"
This kind of stuff went on for quite a time. Flora had a way of making me feel we belonged to a romantic underground movement, and all our conduct was illegal and thrilling. It was pleasant to be with someone who got such a high kick out of it all. She revered Rex as a writer, traveller and celebrity, loved him for his perverse life; but she had a special warmth for me because I was bi-or multi-sexual.
She was an indulgent mother to Joan but treated her with a slight contempt, as too young to have any sense. She glowed when I paid Joan a compliment, because she was proud of the girl's looks and talents and clothes. But she spoke to her condescendingly at times, while she treated me as an equal.
The trip was soon over. Flora gave me their Paris address and I promised to look them up. I also invited them to come one evening and see "us."
Flora smiled. "We'll see," she said. We parted.
Rex booked us in at a hotel, and I found we had three separate bedrooms: he, I and Mark. I said nothing. Perhaps we were going into training for the tropics by a period of chastity? But on the first night Rex came to my room. He sucked me off avidly, yet he did not seem to want an orgasm of his own. I wondered if Mark had squeezed him dry, but I refrained from any spiteful remarks. I was glad of the bit of pleasure, and the reassurance which it seemed to imply.
"Flora would love to watch us doing that!" I said, afterwards.
He did not like this remark very much.
"You seem rather taken with those two," he said.
"Yes, especially Joan. I'd like us to have them here to dine one evening, if you wouldn't mind."
"Mm, well, not this week, there's much to be done. We'll discuss it again, shall we?"
"At any rate, I'd like to go to see them at their hotel."
"That might be possible."
He went back to his own room shortly after that, leaving me feeling forlorn and low-spirited. Down the street I could hear an accordion, and bursts of laughter, and the click of billiard balls. The life of Paris, I thought, but I did not feel a bit gay. Holding my melancholy prick in a damp palm, I fell asleep.
CHAPTER 9
This book is dedicated to one subject, so I will not waste words on the sights of Paris: the phallic Eiffel Tower or the pelvic arches of Notre Dame. I saw them, of course, and the Cafe Flore and the Deux Magots and the Ddme. I enjoyed the food and wine and loved the sight of lovers in tight, steamy, unashamed embraces in public places. I looked with joy at the banned books along the banks of the Seine, and saluted a free country. I spare you the details: smoke a Gauloise and recall them for yourself. I will spare you also the description of our "business" activities: interviews with tedious people and some pleasant book-hunting in the National library.
Rex took me to a dive one night. Mark excused himself from this expedition. We went because I begged for this treat, which I could not have found for myself. Rex's French, Rex's money and Rex's "contacts" were essential.
A negro played melancholy chords on the piano, while we drank Pernod and watched the strange "ballet." This consisted of two girls, high-yellows or quadroons, having a slow-motion lesbian love affair in rhythm. One was slim and played the passive role: she had a pretty mouth, with attractive thick upturned lips, a pair of long supple thighs and the breasts of a girl just developing into adolescence, though she looked about twenty. The other woman was older, short and stout, and looked as muscular as a slaughterman. She had a ferociously ugly face and a very forceful style of movement. When she pretended to come between the younger one's legs she did so in a wild spasm, and appeared to be chewing the girl's nipple in her strong jaws. The pianist, who had a sense of humour, marked the climax with a long descending ripple of notes and a sharp discord.
It all made me shudder a bit: it was so bogus, it had such a taint of sadism, and the slaughterwoman was so very repulsive.
There was only one really pretty girl in the joint, and she was surrounded by three of the most alarming desperadoes I had ever seen: I imagined a knife in my back if I so much as smiled at that delicious morsel with her small piquant face and big round eyes. Were those toughs going to possess her? It would be a rape, and she would be in hospital with multiple injuries!
However, we drank, I became hazy, there was some dancing, and I found myself partnering a not unattractive girl, who turned out to be English. She was tallish, with a good figure, and had fair hair flopping over one eye. She wore hardly anything, and her dancing was so close and insinuating that I felt like a rabbit in the snake's coils. Seeing that I was half-drunk and didn't know my way around, she organised everything, drew me behind a plush curtain and upstairs into a "particular room," with bed and bidet. I thought, here goes, my first professional tart! I was tottering more than a little on my feet. She kindly helped me to undress.
"What's your name?" I asked.
"Dorothy."
It would be. A very English name to suit a very English girl.
She wiped off her lipstick with a face-flannel, remarking that I wouldn't want that stuff on me. I was astonished at this considerate touch.
I undressed her-it didn't take long-and she mean while ran her hands over me, praising and flattering me. My prick was flabby, but she professed to admire it, and my balls, extravagantly: and her talk and her caresses were certainly a tonic!
She did not rush me, at any rate in the preliminaries, the "heats"! She let me dally awhile, kissing her and playing with her resilient breasts. When we were lying naked in bed together, and her hands were fondling my cock, she wanted to talk. The little waiter, who was queer, had found out already that Rex was the same, and the word had reached Dorothy, who wanted to know whether I had ever done anything in that line. I did not mind telling her, and she seemed delighted. She asked me whether I enjoyed the "exhibition" by the two coloured women. I said yes, and asked whether they were genuine lesbians. She said the younger one had men as well, but the elder only had girls. Dorothy admitted having submitted herself-"She's marvellous, she seems to go right through you," she said. I came to the conclusion that Dorothy had not gone on the game simply for the money-she had an avid, perverse interest in sex and its variations.
She dived down the bed and with a darting tongue she licked my thighs, my balls, the stem of my prick from base to dp and then drew the whole knob into her mouth. She gave it tiny alarming toothnips, while her tongue flickered round it. And all the time I thought of birds.
| That morning by the Seine I had watched a swan treading another, and here in the case-house was an inferior but erotic picture on the wall of the divine swan treading Leda.
It happened that I had asked Rex, who knew everything, how birds copulated. "Just like lesbians," he said. They did everything through the same slit, and when it came to mating, the male mounted the female, pressing his slit on to hers, which she reared up beneath him, Then he pressed out the inner wall of his hole so that it fitted inside hers, like a flange, and shot his white sperm into her.
So Leda and the swan was physically quite possible. And I thought of that slaughterwoman, protruding her inner lips into Dorothy's cunt, in their "marvellous" embraces. Birds, and Leda, and Sappho of Lesbos with her schoolgirls, and these tarts in their ferocious pleasures -all these images tumbled round in my half-drunk brain, and my excitement became frenzied. My mood changed from passive to active, very suddenly. I pulled Dorothy up the bed and turned her on her back.
"Take this, then!" I panted, thrusting it into her.
I thought, what they tell you about tarts having slack cunts, like horsecollars, is simply not true: and I didn't care whether they used alum or had stitches put in to tighten them up, as people said. All I knew was that Dorothy fitted like a glove on my modest instrumento, or like the coils of the proverbial snake, till I had sensations that I did not know I could have. Her bum was squirming and her fingernails scrawled my back: she gripped and quivered and shimmied.
"O Christ!" she moaned, her mouth slavering: "Go on, go on, O honey, it's marvellous, O God, I've never had it like this before. O it's too hard, it's too hot, you're burning me, I can't bear it, go on, go on!"
If I was half drunk I was also half sober. It was suddenly obvious to me that she wanted to hurry me on, she was trying to make me come quickly, and she knew the art. But I wanted to prolong it, and the fuck became a terrific battle between us, a tug-of-war, with Dorothy pulling me towards an orgasm with all the strength of her womb, and I keeping up the pistonstrokes but trying with my mind to hold back the eager juices in my balls and not let the climax arrive too soon.
I could feel the sweat running between our soft bellies, which made a laughable squelch sometimes, like a smacking kiss, when they parted and came together again. The smell of her cunty sweat filled my nostrils with a strong exciting tang, too strong for all her perfume to quench it.
"Quick, quick!" she cried, "I want to come!"
Was she really excited at all? Most likely it was all an act. I had to credit her with being a wonderful actress, then. By way of prolonging the shag, and not letting myself go under too soon, I thought about it, and tried to decide whether she was genuinely enjoying it or just pretending. If it was a pretence, she certainly meant me to be a satisfied customer. But she wanted it over quickly no doubt so that she could get on to the next client: some tough like those I had seen downstairs!
My reason said she was play-acting; but my body wanted to believe it was real! It was so flattering, the idea that I could give thrills to a professional, who had slept with half Paris.
Good heavens, what was she doing now? Drawing up her knees, sliding her feet up my belly till she had her legs over my shoulders and was doubled up like the letter V under me, and one hand round the back pressing my balls against her bum-hole. I felt as if I had gone several yards deeper into her, and wouldn't have been surprised to see my prick coming up through her throat. And the muscles inside her started a rhythmic rolling that quickened my prick to a new sensitivity.
"I'm coming, O darling, I'm coming!" she breathed, and bit my lip lightly with sharp little teeth. So was I, by this time; the stimulation was too great, I couldn't have held out for another second. My pounding synchronized with hers, and I felt the wave swim up the channel of my cock and break into her with a gorgeous rush.
She let me pant there on her breast nil I got my breath back. Then she became businesslike, went straight to the douche.
I sponged myself down and got dressed again. I couldn't help asking her, "Did you really enjoy it?"
"Of course," she said. But was it true? I should never know.
"I'll tell you one thing," she said. "You're not a queer."
She was applying her make-up again as she said this. I did not reply: what could I say? She added, "I thought you were, to start with. You're just having a good time, all round, aren't you?"
I would have tried to explain that I didn't accept the modern categories-that I didn't think it was queer to be queer, for one thing-but she had put it so simply that I didn't bother.
Besides, I was thinking about her accent, the way she said that phrase, "to start with." I asked her where she came from. Just as I suspected: my own home town!
All the way to Paris, for a bit of home cooking.
But she has the Parisian recipes, I consoled myself.
Dorothy was extremely pleased when she found we came from the same place. She was no longer in a hurry, she sat down and gave me a cigarette and chattered like mad about the cafes and pubs, and what bands played in the local dance-halls. She told me she was a fruit merchant's daughter, and ran away from school, and was turned out by her parents after she was found picking up motorists on the by-pass. Then she hitchhiked to London and got a job in a night-club... she talked on and on, in a natural, homely way, so natural that I was convinced that everything before was acdng, repeated for every client. Now she was being natural because I had stopped being a client and become a person, a fellow-citizen. This depressed me. Drink, sex and life had all gone cold on me, and time was draining away.
"Come on," I said. "I can't stay here all night."
She looked a bit hurt, but she was used to doing what men wanted. She led me downstairs again, where we were eagerly awaited, she by the angry proprietor and I by the impatient Rex.
Rex looked at his watch. "Either you've done everything, there is, or you couldn't manage anything," he said drily.
The next day, prompted by my vanity, I began to say to myself again, "Perhaps she really did enjoy it, after all?" And then I thought: "You can never know for certain. That's prostitution."
Well, there it was. I had had my first experience of that ancient institution, which has been so many things to so many people.
Flaubert wrote to his mistress: "It is perhaps a depraved taste, but I love prostitution, and for itself, too, quite apart from what there is underneath. My heart begins to pound every time I see one of those flashily-dressed women walking in the lamplight in the rain... The idea of prostitution is a meeting-point of so many elements-lust, bitterness, complete absence of human contact, muscular frenzy, the clink of gold-that to peer into it deeply makes one reel. One learns so many things in a brothel, and feels such sadness, and dreams so longingly of love!"
Perhaps I didn't peer deeply enough, but I didn't feel such extreme sadness, or dream so longingly of love. I suppose I could have been bitter, when I suspected Dorothy of pretending an orgasm when she didn't have one-but wasn't that the kind of deception I was paying for? (or rather, Rex was paying for)! As for complete absence of human contact-Flaubert didn't happen to meet a tart from his own home town. Lust, yes, muscular frenzy, yes; but the rainy lamplight and the clink of gold, no, they belong to the past, or to some French film about the Nineties seen at Studio One or the Cameo-Poly.
by the way, I'm told that Ovid, that great ancient authority on the arts of love, disapproved of women who pretend to come. But it's better than those who don't even pretend to enjoy it, surely!
When we got back, Mark was waiting. He took Rex aside and spoke to him. I heard various French names, including "Cocteau." Rex came over and said to me: "I want you to excuse me, Bobbin, while I look in at a party with Mark-you go on to bed, you must be tired out
I could not even bring myself to answer, and went to bed without a word, so angry that it took me a long time to get to sleep.
The next day in the Rue de Rivoli I met Flora and Joan. They were shopping under the arcades. I asked them to come to supper with us the next evening. Flora looked surprised, but agreed, subject to a telephone call to confirm it. We had an aperitif together, and I tried to see Joan's nipples down the front of her dress while her mother slyly felt the muscles of my left thigh. We both had to rely mainly on our imagination.
When I told Rex I had asked them to supper, he became very lofty with me, said he was surprised I had not asked him first, and added that it was quite impossible. When I asked why, he said, "There are many things you don't understand." I pressed for an explanation. He said Mark was coming to supper, and we couldn't have them at the same time. Flora had done Mark a deadly injury years before, something that could never be forgiven. He refused to give me further details, and I lost my temper and expressed my own opinions about Mark. Rex suddenly cried: "Shut up!" and slapped my face, as if I were a naughty child. Possibly I ought to have hit back, but I just could not strike him. I tore out of the room.
I knew by now that everything was really finished. I did not hate Rex, all my spleen was directed against Mark.
Flora took it very smoothly when I rang up to cancel the invitation. "That's perfectly all right, dear boy, you come here instead and dine with us. We're in the Avenue Victor Hugo, you know, near the Place de l'Etoile."
I told Rex I was going for the day, though my invitation was actually only for the evening. I spent the day roving about Paris on my own, boulevarding, drinking instead of eating, wondering what to do about Rex and the trip to Abyssinia, and trying to turn my angry thoughts in the direction of Joan, with her big laughing eyes and her well-sprung breasts. I was as drunk as a fiddler's bitch by the evening. Everything becomes very easy when one reaches that state. I found the apartment without any trouble at all. Every door sprang open, the lift delivered me on the mat. Flora and Joan tittered as I teetered in. Even the servant was not too discreet to smile.
The rooms were very grand, in a tasteless sort of way. Snowy linen, showy silver and all that sort of thing, and electric candles in real eighteenth-century candlesticks to illuminate the dinner-table, with its pyramid of fruit and its winebottles lolling in ice.
The carpet made your feet feel as if you were walking on a sheep's back, and there was a lot of ochre velvet and black silk about. As for Joan and her mother, a pleasing quantity of woman seemed to be escaping from their tight casings. Soft jazz was coming from somewhere invisible. I began to forget my troubles and relax.
They fussed over me very nicely, those two ladies, and we had cocktails, after which I scarcely noticed what I ate. I know it began with fresh salmon, iced, and that there was a very buttery dish of little peas, and that 1 had a large wine-goblet which got itself refilled all the time without any prompting from me. I remember wondering whether Flora introduced Spanish fly or some other aphrodisiacs into the food, and looking back I think it quite possible she did: she was that sort of person. Myself, I've hardly needed those things up to now, though the day is doubtless approaching...
As we were drinking coffee and fine, a friend of Joan's arrived, a young French woman painter, rather plain, with a crooked nose and jutting lips. She spoke English badly, in a low timid voice and looked nervously at me and Flora. Perhaps she was conscious that she was poorer than Joan and Flora, and more cheaply dressed. Joan led her very courteously in the conversation, helping her to express herself.
Presently they talked a little in French and then went out together, explaining that there was an artist they had to see at the Dome.
"My dear," said Flora when they had gone, "they're so hopelessly in love, they simply have to be alone together, they can't bear anybody else's company. Why don't they simply say so and have done with it? This is Paris, after all! But no, they have to invent an artist they want to see at the Dome."
I was a bit jolted by this, but tried not to show it My head was swimming very nicely and nothing mattered very much.
One more drink, and I began pouring out my troubles to Flora, who laid my head on her bosom and was very comforting. I told her I was through with Rex, and yet was dependent on him.
"Forget him, come with us to Ischia," she suggested.
Why not? I really thought I might. "Could I pick up a living there?" I asked her.
"Dear boy, you could pick up anything, there," she said.
I asked her what was the injury she was supposed to have done to Mark, years ago.
"I? to him?" she almost screamed. "Why, the miserable child tried to blackmail me! I had to threaten him with the police! O the unutterable swine!"
I seemed to have stepped into deep and dirty water, so I asked no more questions.
I was now letting time drift along and putting my sorrows out of mind. We joked a little. Flora's body was reclining very close to mine. She turned the pages of a bunch of sexy magazines, Paris-Bcautt and ParisHollywood. In one of the latter was a picture of a girl fully dressed except for her panties, riding a bicycle. One could imagine, if not actually see, the nub or horn of the saddle sinking into her labia. The bare cheeks of her bottom overflowed the back of the saddle in two soft flanges, deliriously.
"O my God, look at that!" Flora said. "Do you know, when I was a young girl I had to give up riding a bicycle, I simply couldn't stand it, and I dared not tell my mother the reason."
I was a bit dense, with the haze of drinks. "What was the reason?" I asked.
"You know very well, you just want to hear me say it!" she said, breathing hotly over me. "You're trying to make me blush." (Good Lord, I thought, that would be an undertaking!) "Very well, then, I'll indulge you. I'm such a clitoral type, it was a delicious agony to ride a bike, from the very first time I mounted one. I was only about ten, at that time. Every pedal stroke made me quiver, and I used to come back panting and trembling and red in the face, so that my mother thought I had been riding too fast. That was what first taught me-well, you know what. Instead of getting better it got worse, or better, whichever you call it, but by the time I was a budding maiden, you know, it was so terrific I had to give up. I just couldn't go shopping and come home in that state. There, now I've confessed it to you, and you're the first person I've ever told."
Looking back, I think that's very doubtful, but I believed her at the time, and felt duly flattered at being the first person to hear these intimacies. She knew what she was doing; those picture magazines, and her story, and the nearness of her body, very warm and soft, and wickedly perfumed, were building up my mood. The magazines slid to the floor and I found myself kissing her.
Her tongue was a serpent, her blue eyelids flashed like signals, her flesh heaved gently as I pressed closer. But she wanted to play it slowly, she pushed away my exploring hand, and for ages we did nothing but kiss. She must have felt the hardening of my cock, for I let it press on her thigh, and by her stirring and writhing I am sure she must have been secreting her juices thick and fast. But she wanted to take her time.
Also she wanted to talk, or rather to be talked to. She would have liked some confession, such as she had made to me. "What was your first experience? What was it like? Tell me about it, tell me everything!" she begged, panting. I was quite pleased to oblige, not only for her pleasure, but because recalling some of my early thrills was nice, it helped to increase my ardour, which (I'm afraid) was not one hundred per cent stimulated by Flora. And I did not want to let her down. I told her some of the things I have already related to you, reader.
She was very susceptible to words, and mental images. Her eager questions led me on, and she kept exclaiming: "O my God! no! You didn't did you? Is that true? You're telling me the truth, aren't you? Go on!"
My prick was simply aching, with having been erect so long. At last she judged the time was ripe for a move to the bedroom. I went to empty my bladder. When I returned, she had lit two candles-real ones, not electric-in the bedroom, and there were two sticks of sandalwood smouldering aromatically in the hands of a Chinese laughter-god. The mysterious source of music gave out Hawaiian guitars. The sheets were peach-coloured, and the place was full of long curtains and mirrors-we could see ourselves, flattered by the golden light, whichever way we looked. She was holding a glass of wine in one hand and offering me a similar one with the other. As I took it, I reflected that this was the first time I had been offered a seduction in the good old traditional vamp style, with all the trimmings. Though some of the "effects" were a bit cheap and tasteless, I liked it! The oft-tried recipe works, all right.
It soothed my wounded vanity-even though an imp inside me was laughing at it all. Even the wine was spiced, and again I wondered about aphrodisiac.
When I had drunk it, Flora took the glass from my hand and put it down. She led me to the bed and began undressing me, with the endearments she would give to a child, a naughty boy who was being forgiven at bedtime for his tantrums during the day. She would not let me touch her at all, at this stage. I simply had to submit, even to letting her kneel on the floor and take off my shoes and socks for me. When finally she pulled down my underpants, she gave an exclamation as though shocked at what she found there. Not that there was anything spectacular: my cock was only about half erect, taking a quick nap, so to speak, after its long stand on sentry-go, before being sent into action. She touched it tentatively, with curiosity, as if she had never seen one before; then stooped down and kissed it, and the soft skin of my belly.
I now judged it was my turn to act, so I turned her round, and began unfastening the back of her frock. It fell around her feet, then, and her petticoat followed. Perfume breathed from her close-shaven armpits. Above her long fishnet stockings were two samples of smooth thigh below the black lace stepins.
I undressed her with her back to me, holding her slippery, silky self close to my naked skin while my hands slid round to unfasten the suspenders from her stockingtops. I knelt down to pull down the stockings themselves, and rested my cheek against the seat of her pants, as I did so. Then I undid the flimsy suspender belt, after which I rose to my feet again to unfasten the bra and let her tits swing free. The fragrant femininity of her clothes and of her body surprised me: I had always seen her in harsh, tweedy things till that night, and rather imagined her underclothes would be made of jute, and her only scent would be Imperial Leather. But tonight her womanly side was on parade.
I was still standing behind her, but one of the long mirrors showed her to me: her sleek cropped head, her flushed face and wet mouth with lips a little parted, her smooth strong shoulders, her breasts not very large but round as grapefruit and well supported, a well-fleshed middle with a navel deep and full of shadow, all in the wavering candlelight. And my own face like a young satyr peering over her shoulder.
Lastly, I pushed her pants down over her hips and let my hardening prick lie along the cleft of her buttocks, its head nosing on between her legs. In the mirror, I got a shock: I saw the naked lips of her cunt: she had shaved it as close as her armpits, and no doubt scented it the same. My hand caressed her belly from the navel down to the clitoris and it was literally as smooth as a baby's bottom.
When my hand got as far as that she threw her head back on my shoulder, turning it towards me for a kiss, while her hands gripped my wrist, but not to push it away, rather to hold it to the spot.
What she said about cycling must have been true: her clitoris was fantastically sensitive, she almost jumped out of her skin at the very first touch. Her labia writhed together like a pair of snakes.
I tumbled her over on to the bed, and she was already so near to coming that it was hardly a fuck at all.
I got in very quickly and easily-there was plenty of room, and she was sopping wet. I began the motions. Flora seized my hand and guided it between our bodies, whispering, "I want your hand there, use your finger, darling." So I found and frigged her clitoris, while drawing in and out slowly beneath it. She came with a seethe and a spasm that shook her from head to toe.
I gave her a few minutes to get over it, lying still with my prick sunk deep in the well. Then I began to make strokes, in search of my own share of satisfaction. But she said: "No, no!"
"What do you mean?" I exclaimed, stopping instantly and ready to be angry.
"Let me lie on top!" she begged.
Was that all? yes, I readily consented. I would probably be more successful with her if she did the work!
We reversed. I found I could now see ourselves in a mirror in the ceiling, and I confess there was a strange added thrill in watching the smooth rippling back ot the avid Flora, riding me, her buttocks shaking, and my hands clutching round her, the whole thing distant, like another couple.
She whispered to me what she was thinking. Her lesbian side had come into play again. She was pretending that my prick was hers, so to speak, that she was stuck in me, that I was her girl and she was ravaging me, forcing me, against my will. She wanted me to struggle! I struggled a little, and her excitement redoubled. She certainly could do things with her cunt, and in this position she was able to titillate her clitoris on my tangle of hair without the aid of my fingers. She quickly came again, and still was unsatisfied.
For all that, I was not getting anywhere, and I realised I should need the aid of my own imagination to reach a climax. I began to think of Joan: imagining myself stalking into the room and pulling the French lesbian off her, forcibly taking her place between those delicious young thighs.
In the midst of all this, it struck me that in the bedroom where we were there were two beds, the double one on which we were lying, and a single one two yards away.
I surprised Flora by asking, as she panted on top of me, whether her daughter slept in this room, too.
"Of course," she said. "She's not really my daughter, you know, did you think she was?"
I was astounded.
She added: "I've adopted her. I'd like to adopt you, too, Bobbin. I can give you everything."
"Would you give me Joan?"
"Willingly-but she wouldn't play, my dear."
"Do you have her, here, in this bed?"
"Yes, of course. O God, how marvellous she is!"
The idea of Joan, here, on her back, in my place, lying under Flora just like this, breast to breast with her, suddenly did the trick for me. My sudden clutching and muscular stiffening, and the fervour with which I all at once kissed Flora and sucked her lips into mine, told her that my sexual core had been touched, and her convulsive movements hastened us both up to a hot torment, a rapid feverish crisis: my fingertips stuck so hard in the cheeks of her bottom that I must have left ten black bruises, as I clutched her twisting loins on mine and her cunt swallowed my come.
Flora blew out the candles and pinched out the incensestubs. She climbed back. I nestled against her, nuzzled her breast, and fell instantly asleep.
I stayed the night. In my dreams or half-dreams 1 entertained the idea of Joan coming back into the room and getting undressed, quite innocent of my presence. But she didn't. I think it was all arranged between them, in advance. The two lovers had decided to allow each other a "holiday night," by mutual consent.
Before dawn, Flora awoke me: it was her hand stealing round my hips, touching me up, that drew me out of sleep. Again she rode on top, and with the same limitless excitement, seeming to come in a chain of quick climaxes, with hardly a break between. I held back, and then at last forced myself on, at the end of a sweaty half-hour. After which I think even Flora slept.
She was asleep when I woke, and feeling grateful for many things, and having an early morning hard that needed the right kind of massage, I got on top of her and shoved it in. She was actually awakened by the thrust, and opened terrified eyes; but she knew what to do. I retained my orthodox position, this time, but again obliged with a little clitoris-work, with my hand on her hairless mound of Venus.
The bedroom smelt of stale sandalwood, stale candlewax, stale come, stale cunt, stale sweat and stale scent. With the fumes of wine and a few surreptitious farts thrown in, of course. I was not sorry to get some fresh air.
Flora came down to a cafe with me, in mid-morning, and over an aperitif renewed her invitation to Ischia. I did not commit myself.
I intended to go straight "home," but one drink led to another, and Flora slipped her purse into my pocket, and the coloured umbrellas of the boulevards were enticing. We spent the whole day in a long hazy cafecrawl, and at night we found ourselves at Versailles, in some rose-lit restaurant which turned out to have bedrooms attached, so we turned in. She telephoned Joan first.
The wines and brandies had turned me passive, more passive than ever, and I simply let Flora help herself, do whatever she felt like doing. Amazing creature, she was as hungry as ever. She made her little boy, her girl, even the schoolmistress who had first touched her up under a towel at the swimming-pool. I was even once, perhaps as a concession, allowed to be a man! I slept whenever she let me. She was paying in drinks and taxi-fares and so on for what she wanted, and she was getting it: I was a stooge and a stallion, but I was past caring what I was. Many men would have envied me, others would despise me. I didn't care. But I did not grow fonder of Flora. She was only kind out of self-interest, nothing more.
When we went back to Paris next morning I had a fierce hangover and felt drained dry, shagged out. We had a last aperitif together.
"Do let me adopt you," she begged again.
"Listen," I burst out. "First I had parents, then I had tutors, then I had Rex, now it's you. Do you think I want to be a slave all my life? I'm going to go back to England, and get a job, make myself independent, and find some silly young girl to adore me."
She looked at me coldly. "Aren't you being stupid?"
"Very likely," I said. "And you've done wonders, Flora, for me, for which I'm grateful. But you'd be tired of me next week-"
"And you're tired of me already?"
"No, I'm only tired by you. But I should tire of you, too. You only use me as an instrument of pleasure, a dildo, and I let you because I get some pleasure out of it, too. But it wouldn't last, on either side. You'll find plenty more dildoes, tomorrow."
She did not like this moment of truth. She denied it. "I'm fond of you, but you don't appreciate it, you're too young. You'll live to regret this parting, Bob. But remember me. Write to me sometimes, care of Cook's. I shall often have you with me-in imagination."
Yes, I should join her secret art-gallery of memories, sensations, to be summoned up when she wanted something to spur her to an orgasm, as she talked about me to some other lover, or writhed masturbadng between the sheets on hot afternoons. So we parted.
I was probably a fool, but I had to obey my impulse, I said to myself as I hurried back.
Rex and Mark had gone. Whether to another hotel or straight off on their travels I do not know. There was a note from Rex:
Dear Bobbin, I am sure you realise everything has become quite impossible. It's a pity, but there it is, mistakes will occur. The enclosed will ta%e care of your return to England. We may meet again some day, who knows? Bon voyage.
Rex.
I went back to England.
CHAPTER 10
I decided I could not in any circumstances go back to the city from which I had started out, that University city still full of my old fellow-students, and of Rex's friends. As for the town where I was born, I was not a bit anxious to go back there, either: defeated, without a job, and hardly able to explain my position, unless with a pack of lies. No thank you!
Like most provincials, I was enamoured of the romantic possibilities of London, its bigness, and the feeling that in this city you could be anything or do anything, according to your capacities. I decided to try to live in London. Which meant getting a job very quickly. Unfortunately, I couldn't approach Rex's friends, who could no doubt have helped. But I didn't feel like knocking at their doors and telling them my story. I knew hardly anybody else. Even sex had to take second place, while I found a way to eat.
Answering advertisements, walking about the streetssome nights I was even too tired to masturbate! I would fall asleep, weapon in hand, before I had time to come. Or worse still, worries would edge into my mind and push the nice erotic fancies out. With a shrinking prick, I would find myself wondering whether to pay a fortnight's rent in advance, to keep myself from spending the money on food; or what was the fare to Ealing, and whether the job would be gone when I got there. That is a very bad frame of mind. To be unable to relax and think of sex before you sleep, that is really unhealthy. Before he sleeps and immediately he wakes, a man should always think of sex, dreamily and richly, erection in hand, whether he is alone or not. Then Pan will play the pipes close to his ear, and his whole body will be put in tune, for the night or the day.
And since the subject of sex has cropped up, I must here record the great change. It's easy to be wise when looking back, but I think I actually knew it at the time. I went to Paris an adolescent, with all that implies; I came back a man. Perhaps some new hormone was flowing. Perhaps I had been knocked into shape by painful experience, by a disillusionment and a couple of follies. In sex, I was still capable de tout of course; but I could never feel girlish again, or boyish, in quite the same way as before. I felt more like an independent person, nobody's pupil, or bride, or serf, or mere playmate. This I suppose was a step forward, and goodbye to all that.
About this time I became less the graceful Corydon, and began to flesh out in a more manly style. Nature spared me those betraying characteristics of the "queen," a lisping tongue and a swaying walk. I was very glad of that. All the same, however virile I might become in appearance, I could never turn into one of the "hearties" or settle down to a one-track existence. I remained what I have always been-a shameless sexophile, a lover of sex in all its forms. I overheard a snatch of conversation at a party, once: two men talking, and one said, "Don't you think he's a sex maniac?" The other replied: "No, I think he is the sane one. All the people who don't love sex, they are the maniacs."
I was delighted with that man. I never found out if it was myself that they were talking about. I hope it was.
In time to avert starvation, I got a job as a clerk with a firm of general exporters in Holborn. I had a room with a gas-ring in Regent's Park Road, and I ate my midday meal at a restaurant in Kingsway. London became more familiar to me, less a place of mystery and glamour. The first thrill of having landed a job also wore off, and I found myself one of the humdrum horde doing poorly paid work in a million similar offices.
To "better myself," in the handling of foreign correspondence, I decided to go to night school and learn another language-Italian, which seemed to be in demand. It looks, now, as if Fate, Destiny, or perhaps old Pan himself, took me by the hand and led me up that echoing staircase and into that small classroom with its greenish walks and flyblown lampshades. What a place to fall in love!
She glowed like an evening primrose in that dreary setting, among those earnest, angular, bespectacled men and maidens, of assorted ages and sexes; some of whom were nice people, jolly people, and some would perhaps have appeared good-looking or even sexually attractive if only she had not been there.
There are women, and even some men, who think Phyllis's looks commonplace. They say she looks like a million-a million other products of English high schools. Perhaps she does. To me, she was unique. But what is there to say about her looks? She was not tall, she came up to my shoulder. She had round, soft, rosy cheeks, still pudgy with puppy-fat round the cheek-bone, under the ears, for she was only sixteen. Her hair was straight, golden as the sun and so soft she, could never control it; she therefore wore it rather short.
Her eyebrows were fair and thick, her nose was small, her lips were protrusive and sensual. When she blushed, her skin looked unspeakably tender; and I became very adept at making her blush. She had decidedly noticeable breasts, inside her cheap little blouses or jumpers, a wellproportioned figure, and legs that were both shapely and sturdy. She had not much conversation, but she liked to laugh. Whenever I made a joke she thought it terrifically funny; and her teeth were very pretty. That was Phyllis.
Her father was a travel agent, and would like her to go into the same business in due course: hence the Italian lessons. She was much the youngest person at the classes. The next age-group was about twenty years old, but those two or three were uninteresting types, and I came next in line. We got acquainted without delay.
At our first meeting, I said to myself, "This is it. This is the girl I prophetically mentioned to Flora."
At the second or third meeting I had begun saying to myself, "Idiot, you're not in love, you can't be, you mustn't be! Do you want to tie yourself down to fidelity, betrothal, marriage and a nice little suburban home, already? There's no future in this, for you, my boy." I went on saying it for a long, Jong time, and denying to myself the obvious fact that she could twist me round her little finger, if she chose.
Fortunately for me, she was pleasantly stupid, and did not know her own powers.
Though I did not want to fall in love, I did want to fall into bed with her, very, very badly. Her laugh, the way she walked, and her lazy, nasal, sensual voice all had their share in making me randy. I could not look at the hair on her head without wondering whether the hair at her cleft was equally soft and golden. When she walked, just to watch the movement of her buttocks, smoothly rolling from side to side, from the back, gave me an erection every time.
But she was far from ready to be seduced. In many ways she was very childish, and used to give me artless accounts of school and home that made me feel awfully old and sophisticated. She would not go back to my lodgings, but she consented to go to the pictures and there we held hands in the dark and she allowed me some long lingering kisses. My tongue was eventually admitted, though she parted her teeth only so very little that I was afraid she might snap them shut and bite me any time. By and by this game had its effects, however, and she got tense and writhed a little, as my mouth watered into hers: we strained together, and her cheeks were burning, while I cupped her breast in my hand, but not inside the dress. This embrace went on till the lads in the rows further back made sucking noises, and she broke angrily away.
The second or third visit she let me put my hand down her neck and toy with her titties. The nipples were very tiny and pointed, and stood up immediately they were touched. She would not allow me to put a hand in her pants, but only to feel the bare thigh just above her stocking-tops. She also let me guide her inexperienced but inquisitive hand over the shape of my prick, outside the clothes, and she gave it a squeeze or two.
I had to go home and play with myself, or have a wet dream, and I felt I was back at the beginning. But that was inevitable with such a simple young thing, and I did not mind going slow, as I enjoyed it all so much. We sat in cheap cafes and drank soft drinks or coffees, while I gave her a romantic light-comedy account of my life, very watered down, leaving out almost everything related in these pages. She laughed and asked heaps of questions, and thought it all exciting. She even made me think so, too.
At last I admitted to myself the truth about my feelings. We were sitting in a dowdy little cafe. I had been through torments because she had been talking about a boy who was a wonderful dancer, and who was taking her out every week. I burst out all at once: "Shut up! Can't you see that I'm in love with you?" And she burst into tears.
This upset me more than ever, and I was in agonies till she dried her eyes. Then she assured me the other boy didn't mean anything. When I said, "Well, do I?" she said, "O I don't know. I'm too young."
Hewever, she invited me to her home. I didn't know what complications awaited me there. But at first, all went very well.
Her parents were pleasant, ordinary people. We had tea and were allowed to sit alone in the parlour afterwards, playing the gramophone. I had never gone through this courting routine before and felt a trifle awkward. But I played my part, and we had a few clutchings and tonsil kisses, though with one eye on the door in case someone should come in to offer us biscuits or ask the time.
She told me afterwards that her parents liked me, but wanted to know why she didn't have a boy of her own age. She said she did, and named the dancing partner, which silenced them. I kissed her and asked if she liked the partner as much as me. She flung her arms round my neck, at that, and kissed me quite passionately, declaring that the boy meant nothing to her, except someone to dance with. But it would keep her parents quiet-she pointed out the advantage of that!
"If I have two, then they think I can't be getting serious with one," she remarked. I had to concede the point.
After I had told her I loved her, and I repeated it every time we were alone, I made progress in intimacy. There was a big stretch of parkland not far from her home, and one evening we walked there at dusk. We found a couch of grass, where no intrusion was likely, and we lay on our sides, mouth to mouth, hip to hip, with thighs entwined, getting clammy together. I undid the front of her blouse, released those demi-peaches from their quite unnecessary uplift-contrivance and looked at and fondled them, which she now allowed as freely as kissing. This time I sucked the coral points, and put my tongue in the warm valley: she liked it, judging by the convulsive clasp of her hands on the top of my head.
I was determined at least to see and feel her cunt, this time, and I even thought I might deflower her on the spot; but she had her own idea of tempo, and I had to abide by it.
However, while she was a little excited at the touch of my lips on her breasts, something they had never felt before, I improved the occasion by tickling her knees, which were very ticklish; and running my hands over her thighs and crotch, quickly and lightly, tantalisingly, over the top of her skirt, which I remember was a pleated grey thing of something like gabardine.
Phyllis blushed, and smiled, and said, "Stop it!"pushing my hand away with no great determination. I played the same little circuit, making sure that my touring finger-ends ran right over her furrow and up the mound of Venus. The fourth time I did this I clenched her lips with mine and let my pressure linger. She was tense as a bowstring, and then suddenly relaxed; her resistance gave, as if a muscle had broken somewhere. I insinuated my hand under her skirt. I could feel the moisture on the outside of her pants.
She lay back passively, her forearm across her face in an attitude of embarrassment, while I pulled her pants gently down to her stocking-tops, and looked and felt and kissed the hole I had been longing for. The hair was indeed as fair and downy as on her head, the lips were firm and tight, the clitoris as prominent as a nipple, and the actual opening of the vagina so small that I was afraid I should never be able to enter it at all.
I probed about inside it with my fingers; she drew a quick breath of pain as my fingernail scratched her hymen, perhaps; I went back to lying full length and kissing her, while I worked her clitoris up to a quick little orgasm. Then I unbuttoned my flv, which had almost unbuttoned itself by this time, and pulled out the lot.
But Phyllis knew by my movements what I was up to. She sat up instantly and said, "No!" She even pushed her skirt down over her knees.
Perhaps her first sight of the male organ rampant frightened her. Perhaps it was just convention, or even fear of the consequences, which I myself ought to have been worrying about, as I had no protection except heaven. I coaxed in vain, and a physical struggle proved useless, too: I wasn't prepared to use all my strength, and really hurt her, so we were like two puppies tumbling about together and getting nowhere.
We finished up kissing again, our hearts beating faster than ever, and soon I guided her hand on to my prick. She fondled it with the clumsiness of a novice, while I was expertly touching her up to a second climax. I decided not to try again to take her virginity but to leave it to another occasion. I could see she did not know or care how to manipulate me with her hand, and she was frightened to let my prick even approach her cunt; so, changing my position, I pushed it between her breasts, and came a creamy pool there, which startled her to death.
As we went away, arms entwined, stopping now and then to kiss, I told her the obvious truth that our bodies wanted each other so much that soon they would have to get together, and she would have to give me her virginity. She hung her head and said in a low voice, "I know."
The next time I saw her I asked her when it would be. But she capriciously laughed at me, and said, "Never."
Taking her at her word, I suffered ridiculous and needless torments over this. Yet all the time I knew that what I had said was true, and that soon she would have to have me, and I would have to have her, because we were so much in love. (O yes, she had admitted it by now, she loved me!)
But was it true love, on my part? you may ask. True calf-love, perhaps. How long does a young man remain a calf? I had just decided I was a full-blooded man! Was I in love? I certainly thought so. I would never have tormented myself about any other girl's caprices, or worried all day long over some little thing she had said, or fretted about her dancing partner. I wrote eloquent love letters. We discussed how many children we should have. We agreed that we could be engaged the next year, when she was seventeen, and married as soon as I made a quick fortune.
All this was entirely sincere. I felt madly romandc about Phyllis, and convinced myself she was no ordinary girl. (She could hardly have been more ordinary, as a matter of fact: nice but no great beauty, pleasant without wit, respectable but not too prudish, and the real outlines of her character, like the bone structure of her face, concealed in puppy-fat.) To me she was extraordinary, the Golden Girl... And yet if fidelity has anything to do with love it couldn't be love. Before I knew what was happening I was in a sexual tangle with three girls simultaneously, and life was getdng difficult again. Somehow I just couldn't help myself. What with old habits, and one thing and another, I was unfaithful to Phyllis almost before I had time to be faithful.
Oscar Wilde says very truly that the young want to be faithful and are not, while the old want to be faithless and cannot. But for myself, I haven't yet reached the second stage and don't think I ever entered the first; I never remember trying.
However, for months, actually months, I neither seduced little Phyllis (beyond the point already described) nor ran after anyone else. When I masturbated, it was
Phyllis I thought about. But my sexy dreams were not so single-track! Curious people, of various ages and sexes, came into those.
While we were in this halfway, stink-finger, kneetrembler and gob-sucker stage of seduction, I got some admissions out of Phyllis. She confessed to masturbating frequently, and for several years past. Not only alone, but with a friend of hers, a distant cousin, who was an orphan and who stayed with her during holidays from boarding-school. As soon as she herself discovered -by accident-the pleasures of the fingertip, she taught her girl friend the art. The friend was even younger than herself, only fourteen now, and not yet ten when first initiated.
"She has taught a lot of other girls at her school. She'll be getting expelled," Phyllis remarked. "That will really be my fault, won't it?" and she went off into giggles.
I am pretty sure that conversation took place before I saw the little cousin, Elsie, for the first time. If I had never prised those confessions out of Phyllis, with that insatiable sex curiosity of mine, things might never have happened as they did. Perhaps I should have looked upon Elsie as a mere schoolgirl, which she was, and let her go her sweet way unmolested. How much better! (and what a lot of fun and everything else would have been missed)!
