Helena (6 page)

As Jack thrust
harder and deeper into me, Bruce had taken his member in his hand
and was now masturbating furiously, angling his shaft down into my
face. As his seed spurted onto the cheeks of my face and across my
mouth, my lips automatically parting to taste his cum, Jack came
inside me too, propelling me to another fitful orgasm, which seemed
even stronger than the preceding two. As my vaginal muscles
clenched around Jack's tool, my hips pressing tight against him, a
violent charge raced through me.

When Jack
pulled out of me I collapsed onto the carpet, and lay there in my
satiation, as my orgasm eddied away, little ripples of pleasure
muting to a contented glow.

As the
afterglow of my orgasm died in my body, my shame grew. What was I
doing there, lying naked in such an abject state with those men,
who now all looked incredibly stupid and ugly staring down at me.
If they hadn't looked so victorious, and I hadn't felt so
vanquished, then I might not have felt so bad. It was the feeling
that instead of any tenderness, any grace, the afterglow tenderness
and grace that you always managed so well, Freddie, they looked as
if they had somehow taken something from me. What a pathetic
country England can be with its snobbery and its inverted snobbery.
I felt so terribly middle class, a victim of working class
prejudice. They no longer saw me as a mutual pleasure seeker, nor
as someone who had been amenable to their pleasuring, but as a
silly middle class girl who had been stupid enough to let them have
their wicked way.

Now I was
frightened; I gathered my clothes, as they smirked at me,
comfortable in their collective superiority. I got dressed quickly
and made for the door.

"Don't go,
Helen," Jack pleaded. "We want some more fun."

My heart beat
in fear. I felt sickened and nauseated by what I had done, but
still like the little sheltered country girl that I was, I
remembered my manners.

"I'm sorry,
but I have to," I said not daring to meet his eyes.

"See you
around then." His farewell echoed by the other two.

I closed the
door and sped back to my house.

I didn't sleep
that night. How could I, Freddie? There was such a mixture of
emotions in my head. I couldn't so quickly forget the intensity of
my pleasure but nor could I dismiss the keenness of my shame.
Tossing and turning on my bed, my back red and aching, my body
exhausted and sore, I wondered if I was going mad. What had
happened to the thoughtful, modest girl I was? What was becoming of
me? I had let the genie of my sexual life out of the bottle and it
was frightening. My life seemed to be spiralling into chaos. I had
lived by order and now there was no boundary, no restriction. In
short, Freddie, I had looked into the abyss of my sexual hunger and
it had terrified me. I wasn't ready, Freddie, not then.

So what did I
do? Of course, I put the genie back into the bottle as quickly as I
could. The next morning, bleary-eyed, weary, frightened, I decided
that I must restore order. I thought of Gregory, of his kindness,
of his goodness, of his undoubted love for me. I would never tell
him, could never tell him what had happened. It would be something
so completely beyond his comprehension. I could only live with
myself if I never ever let the genie escape again. I chose the
order, comfort, and the reassurance of companionship, bland though
it might have been contrasted against the fire of my sexual
need.

I phoned
Gregory at nine in the morning, my hand shaking on the telephone,
my voice quavering. I poured my heart out to him, told him that I
had been crazy, that I loved him so much, and that I wanted to live
with him forever, and that nothing else mattered as much as that.
Gregory was elated, and there and then proposed to me over the
telephone.

It was such a
comfort, such a balm to my soul, my life was back on track, no
permanent damage had been done. I could forget what had happened. I
could dedicate the rest of my life to my husband.

I thought that
I could forget, I really did, Freddie. I nearly did until you came
along. I nearly did.

The time has
come, Freddie, the time has come.

So, as you
know, I settled down with Gregory. Daringly, feeling we were
snubbing convention, we even lived together for two months before
tying the knot.

Terrence
officiated at my ceremony so my father could give me away. It was a
happy day for everybody, including me. I felt my life had a
purpose, a direction. I could banish all those thoughts from my
nocturnal bed now that I shared it with Gregory.

Our sex life
didn't improve greatly, but that was secondary next to my deep
satisfaction with marital life. I felt at last a bona fide member
of the grown-up club, as if marrying Gregory had been the last rite
of passage to adulthood.

Gregory, now a
vicar, did not take on a parish as everybody expected he would, but
instead got a post lecturing theology at university, the same
university where I studied to be a teacher, specializing in special
needs education.

The first six
months, although hectic with all the studying and training I had to
do, were blissfully happy for us. Our relationship seemed to both
broaden and deepen. I realized, if I had never known before, what a
good man Gregory was, and how lucky I had been to catch him.

Both of us
took to metropolitan life, rejoiced in its exciting diversity. I
especially enjoyed discovering the various nooks and crannies of
London that I hadn't previously known. We constantly made plans for
the future, talked vaguely about having children and maybe working
abroad for a couple of years. We made a lot of friends too at the
university, and although neither of us was rich, we were very
content with our lifestyle. We even believed, for some mysterious
reason, that we were leading something of a bohemian life.

I confess this
now, Freddie. As I was not totally satisfied with my sex life, I
still occasionally pleasured myself, if I had an hour or two, if
Gregory was at a meeting or at work and I was studying at home. I
would normally take a glass of wine into the bathroom with me and
luxuriate in the water, sipping on my wine, my hand eventually
seeking out my clitoris.

It no longer
perturbed me that I stimulated myself in this way. I had
accommodated this aspect on my life into some notion of the
complexity of my character, of human beings in general. So, perhaps
there was less shame in the actual activity, but what was harder to
comprehend was the increasingly extreme images that I employed to
bring me to climax. Occasionally I would think back to my rough
encounter on that night, dismissing my distaste for the odious men
by replacing their faces, although not their actions, with more
handsome men, remembered from college or tube stations or my casual
daily encounters. I also often elaborated on the events of my
finals night, sometimes multiplying participants, sometimes
introducing female characters aiding their humiliation. Some images
of degradation I tried to fight, but I couldn't. In that final
moment of climax they would flood my mind, be unleashed from my
unconscious and it seemed there was nothing I could do to prevent
such a deluge of debauched imaginings.

I did toy with
the idea of going into psychoanalysis, but this seemed just too
ridiculous. My parents were never ones to be sympathetic to what
they largely saw, apart from extreme cases of mental damage or
breakdown, as self-indulgent pampering. Nor could I have afforded
to go. The other problem being that I enjoyed my lazy baths so much
that even if the images that prompted me to sexual satiation were
disturbing the net result was very satisfactory.

So life went
on. I lived with Gregory for three years like this, faithful,
loyal. We never did go abroad, at least no further than a dutiful
trip to Rome, an occasional weekend in Normandy, a summer holiday
in Spain; but the talk about babies, at least from Gregory, became
more incessant and insistent. I found it strange that I didn't want
a child. I loved children. It was my job after all. I loved caring
for them, wiping their noses. The more wretched they were the more
my natural emotion was moved. However, something prevented me from
that further commitment as far as Gregory was concerned. Behind his
back, I still took the pill each month. Gregory would look at me,
waiting to see if I had menstruated, and each month he would be
vaguely disappointed that the hoped for pregnancy had not
occurred.

So the years
passed. I settled into my job. We still talked vaguely about moving
abroad, about Gregory taking on a parish, about having children. If
anybody had asked me at the time that I met you whether or not I
was happy, I would have said yes, unreservedly. Life did seem a
little dull, a little boring. My desire for different or more was
edged into the recesses of my mind. Life was settled and I had
settled for it.

There was, as
there always are, disputes, arguments, bones of contention. Gregory
would complain about the amount of time I spent on my work; I would
argue with him about his lack of support in my chosen profession.
Occasionally, I or he would take out our frustrations on each
other, but nothing exceptional, nothing that couldn't be resolved
once the anger had subsided with a quiet talk, a kiss, a joke,
whatever. I never again lost my temper with him as I had done that
time he came to see me during my examinations. In fact, the subject
was completely dropped from conversations, neither of us ever
mentioning it again, nor did I ever talk to him about my
dissatisfaction with my sex life.

However, the
day I met you in the gallery I was angry with Gregory. The previous
night he had come in and told me that he had to go away for two
weeks to a conference in Kenya, as part of a Christian charity
delegation. He couldn't postpone, and he didn't see why I was
getting so angry with him. How it wasn't possible for me to
understand that helping starving, destitute people was so much more
important than being around for a couple of weeks for his wife. He
never said as much but the implication was that I was being
selfish. It was one clever little trick of Gregory's this,
deflecting criticism by making you feel guilty about your meanness,
and your silly little materialistic aspirations.

The next day,
yes, Freddie, that day, I woke up still feeling angry with him. He
tried to kiss me on the cheek but I spurned him in my sulky mood,
and then, after he had gone, I decided to ring in work and tell
them that I was sick. I had barely had a day off since I started
and the thought of facing my students and then a gruelling two
hours meeting later - I had become a teacher governor for my school
- was intolerable.

I lounged in
bed for an hour, my mind veering between my annoyance with Gregory
and the guilty feeling that I shouldn't have shirked my
responsibility by taking the day off.

Suddenly, the
idea came to me, in my mild depression, that I should do something
with the day. Remembering the great time I had had when I first
came to London and forgetting how long ago it was since I'd had a
stroll in the city centre, I decided to get dressed and go out.

I know we
often talked about this, Freddie, the seeming arbitrariness of our
meeting and that aching sensation, at least for me, that somehow
you were my destiny, the personification of a fate that with the
passing of time seemed so predictable, so obvious: my life's path
could only have taken this course. But I cannot say I took the tube
to the centre searching for a man. The links in the chain are
incredible. I was in the National Gallery because it was the first
place I had visited in London and I was nostalgic for the past,
because I had taken the day off, because Gregory had made me angry,
because he had told me he was going to Nairobi, because the man who
had intended to go couldn't because his mother had been involved in
a car crash. You know that we could go further back, go deeper. I
know for example that the only reason you were there is because a
lecture that you were about to give had been cancelled due to
circumstances beyond your control. And so it goes on. But why then,
knowing the tenuous thread that led us both to peruse the old
Italian masters at eleven o'clock one wintry morning, did the whole
thing seem so preordained; why did I feel destined to meet you?

You know
Gregory that I am not superstitious, nor a lover of romance, nor do
I feel that I am in some way special, but why Freddie, why did the
whole thing just seem so meant to be?

I didn't
notice you at first. I was engrossed in all that medieval art, that
orgy of Italian religiosity, the beautiful Madonna's, the crucified
Christs, thinking how human they all looked, how beautiful, even
Jesus racked on the cross, looked like a man. And this seemed the
saving grace of Christianity and its greatest crime. It was
attractive because it was precisely human, with all its weaknesses,
its struggles and its sufferings, but overlaid on this touching
humanity, humanness, was the biggest foible of all, the deathly
creation of abstraction, the manipulating truths of assumed
certainty, this intellectual arrogance, this pitiless
superiority.

I didn't like
to think of this. I just liked to look at the faces, imagining the
life of some Mantuan model in a Mantegna painting, the beatific
sadness of her eyes, wondering what happened, what joy or pain she
lived through; or seeing all those Italian faced Jesus' with their
dark eyes, their tiny beards and tautened bodies. Maybe they really
were carpenters or fishermen. It was not what the pictures
represented that impressed me, but the actuality of the lives that
constructed him; or, what can I say, my imagination was again
working overtime.