The Gift of Shame (3 page)

‘Who’s Turner?’

‘My chauffeur.’

‘You have a chauffeur? I’m impressed.’

‘Strictly speaking he’s employed by my company. He usually drives the company car but he’s been dying to have a go in the Maserati. It was that that lured him out tonight.’

It was another reminder of how little she knew of the man who had so comprehensively invaded her life and her body.

‘What do you do?’

‘I’ve got some property.’

She lapsed into silence. Kenneth had hated people who created paper profits and produced nothing. ‘Economic leeches,’ he had called them. She had, with Kenneth, developed some radical attitudes of her own. Now she was consorting with one of ‘them’. Yet another betrayal – the third or fourth – she was rapidly losing track.

Helen spoke defensively as if he had been listening in on her silent thoughts. ‘You must have a very low opinion of me.’

‘What brought that on? Have I offended you in some way?’

‘Not you. Me.’ She looked across at him behind the wheel and saw him smiling. ‘I’m not usually like “that”,’ she added quietly.

‘Of course not. I think you’re a very special lady and I intend to cherish you.’

‘Is that why you thrashed me?’

‘I thought that was what you needed.’

‘It won’t happen again.’

‘Didn’t it excite you? At one point you asked me to hurt you some more.’

‘It’s very bad taste to repeat things said in the throes of orgasm.’

‘Did you?’

‘What?’

‘Orgasm.’

‘You know I did.’

‘I’m one of those men that is never sure. I’m glad.’

She fought down an impulse to say ‘So am I’ and reached out a hand to lay on his forearm.

He acknowledged it by looking down and smiling. Feeling that his smile meant he was patronising her, she withdrew her arm. Arrogant bastard, she thought, he thinks he’s got me precisely where he wants me.

‘I have an unfulfilled fantasy,’ he said so suddenly that, at first, she wildly thought he must be speaking to someone else.

‘Haven’t we all?’ she asked.

‘You have unfulfilled fantasies?’ he asked, sounding genuinely interested. ‘I’d love to help you fulfil them.’

She laughed. ‘You’d need a limitless resource.’

‘I have a limitless resource,’ he said, very soberly.

Looking across she could see no trace of a self-deprecating smile or laugh. ‘So what is this unfulfilled fantasy?’ she asked.

‘I want a girl to go down on me while I’m driving. It’s never happened to me.’

‘I’ve news for you,’ she said. ‘Nothing’s changed.’

‘You won’t do it?’

She looked directly at him but his eyes never left the road. ‘Do you seriously think I would? We’ve known each other for barely twenty-four hours.’

‘You did it in the bedroom. What’s the difference?’

She stared out the side window. Resentment, she neither wanted nor could cope with, was rising rapidly in her.

This man was supposing too much, too readily assuming
that
she was
his
creature, willing to devote herself to
his
pleasure.

There rose a need to assert herself. To establish that she was an independent being, not some appendage he’d taken from a dusty shelf. She might have done so then and there but for her crippling guilt.

Her mistake, she thought, had been to allow him to drive her down to the coast. She wanted him to stop the car and let her out, before reminding herself that this was her car and that his was following behind.

So there was the solution! He could simply step into his own car, turn round and return to London. She need never see him again.

He broke in on her thoughts. ‘Do it for me and I promise I’ll fulfil any fantasy of yours. Absolute promise.’

‘Now you’re treating me like a casual pick-up.’

‘I love whorish women,’ he murmured, almost to himself.

‘Then I’ve an idea,’ she told him. ‘Why don’t you stop the car, get into your own and drive back to London? You might even be in time to catch some tired prostitute on her way home. I’m sure, given the right incentive, she would happily oblige.’

He laughed out loud for nearly a minute. ‘Not the same thing,’ he said when he finally finished. ‘I want a whorish woman – not a whore. There is a very big difference. Of course it would be perfect with someone who loves me.’

Helen reached deep down inside for all the scorn she could muster. ‘You don’t imagine I’m in love with you, do you?’

‘I’m determined that you will be.’

Now it was her turn to laugh.

‘Too late now,’ he was saying. ‘We’re nearly there.’

In the context she thought, at first, the remark had been directed at their relationship but, looking up, she was surprised to see the first of the town’s signs. The time had flown, the
mileage
dissolved. It was the most painless drive from London to Eastbourne she could ever remember

She directed him to her parents’ home, conscious that it was much later than they would have been expecting her. A further problem was that she could see no way of avoiding inviting him in to meet them.

Perhaps his generosity would ease the inevitable tension this would cause. As they were driving through the London suburbs she had remembered her promise to provide the cursed liqueurs, without which her Mother didn’t consider it to be Christmas. She had asked him to stop at a store and, when he understood why, he had insisted on buying a bottle of every kind they had.

Now, in the trunk of the car were bottles of liqueurs she had never even heard of, supplemented by a huge mixed box of every conceivable kind of liqueur chocolate ever created. Her mother was going to love this man!

In the event, her optimism proved false. Her mother’s smile of greeting froze the moment she saw Jeffrey following Helen into the house burdened by the bottles of liqueurs.

The display of abundance did nothing to diminish the chilly reception. She could see her mother’s intuition had sight read the situation. Her only consolation was that her mother couldn’t possibly guess at the depth of her daughter’s debauch.

Jeffrey stayed just long enough to drink a cup of begrudgingly offered coffee before departing.

The only positive response to his visit came from her father, who was impressed by the expensive sports car parked outside the house. Her mother had dismissed it as a ridiculous extravagance.

That night Helen thought about the past twenty-four hours. She remembered the guilt, but also the thrill in her total
surrender
of self and inhibition. Before sleeping she had recalled his every word and conjured up his every gesture; probing them, turning them this way and that, in a search for hidden meanings.

She decided that there were none, or room for very few. He had a directness about him which was disconcerting but, in its honesty, attractive.

Most particularly, she recalled his fantasy in the car and knew for certain that, one day, she was going to do that – and much else – for this uniquely demanding man.

Christmas Day was, as always, disappointing. Some distant relatives turned up. Her mother fussed over the strewn wrapping papers, lunch was late and the turkey overdone. Her parents got irritable with each other and, when all the ‘outsiders’ had departed, rounded off the festive day with a row.

In need of some time alone she walked through the early night streets and found herself thinking about Jeffrey, tempered only by the memory of the previous Christmas when she and Kenneth had been here together.

She remembered Kenneth’s tentative experiments with her body. Last Christmas, slightly drunk, he had wanted to sodomise her. She had refused when his clumsiness had caused her too much pain.

She wasn’t sure about Jeffrey. Somehow she suspected she would feel no pain.

It wasn’t until she was almost on the point of leaving that her mother mentioned Jeffrey.

‘Who is he?’ she had asked suspiciously. ‘I don’t like him. Not one little bit.’

‘He’s someone I hardly know. He offered to drive me down, that’s all. You know how I hate to drive after dark.’

‘Long way for someone to come who hardly knows you.’

‘I think he was going to his own parents’ house. They live along the coast somewhere.’

The lie hadn’t convinced her mother. Mothers know their daughters too well, she concluded, because they were once daughters themselves.

2

THE RETURN TO
London was an unexpected anticlimax. What she had expected, she couldn’t imagine. Jeffrey on the doorstep, perhaps? How could he be when he could have no idea when she was coming back?

Wandering around the empty apartment she felt unutterably lonely. With the holiday season still in full swing to call Millie or anyone would seem to be begging for an invitation. Instead, she consoled herself with a bottle of whisky and the endless stream of movies pouring out on every TV channel.

At some point she must have dozed off and was quite shocked on waking to find her first memories were of Jeffrey. She had, in those first unwary wakening moments, for the first time, found it difficult to summon up Kenneth’s smiling face.

She dragged herself to bed – to sleep and hope for better things from the following day.

It was close to three in the morning when she woke to the frightening sound of voices in the other room. Fear paralysed her until her more rational mind told her it was the sound of her own voice on the answering machine. Someone was calling her at this unbelievable hour.

Cursing herself for having forgotten to switch off the call monitor she got out of bed, eased open the door and listened, uneasily feeling that she was intruding on herself.

Her own announcement ended, she waited with bated breath to see if the caller would dare leave a message.

‘Hello. This is Jeffrey. It’s just past midnight …’

Liar! …

‘… and I wanted you to know I was thinking of you. Please call me the moment you get back. Speak to you soon!’

Listening to the machine re-set itself she wondered why he had bothered to lie about so apparently insignificant a detail.

Puzzled, she rewound the tape to hear the message through again. Had he forgotten that answering machines recorded the time and date of the call?

Even supposing he didn’t know, was he so unworldly that he had not even allowed for there to have been an intervening call which would have also exposed his lie?

She found herself having her first real doubts about the true nature of the man who had assumed so much over her.

It was then she realised that she had overlooked the most illuminating facet of the call. Had Jeffrey been lying awake at three a.m. thinking about her? Thinking so deeply that he had been moved to call her with no expectation that she would be there? Then, having done so, been too coy to admit that he had called at such an ungodly hour?

Of course, he might simply have been returning from a night out and had thought to impress her with his devotion. But for what reason?

She replayed the tape, listening carefully for any signs of slurred speech which might have indicated a drink-inspired call. There was none. He sounded endearingly sincere and, but for his lie about the time, she might have, there and then, called him right back.

Instead, she turned off the call monitor and went back to bed.

Some hours later she woke in a state of confusion. This had happened to her several times in her life and more especially
since
Kenneth’s death, but this morning was something different, something more intense and frightening.

Nothing seemed to make sense and nothing was as it should be. Rationally she knew where she was but the images that haunted her dreams remained hovering, undefined, on the edge of her waking mind. Something was bothering her. A problem that her dreams had left unresolved.

The feeling grew and no amount of coffee could drive the apprehension away. Something out there in the mists of the future was lurking, waiting in ambush. She would have liked to call somebody but there was no one.

Millie was her closest friend but she already knew that talking to her would be met with a frown and the admonishment to ‘pull yourself together’.

Something more stopped her calling Millie. It was the knowledge that, no matter how great her resolve, she would, in minutes, have confessed everything that had passed between her and Jeffrey. That was a shame she wasn’t yet ready to share. Not even with Millie, whose own answer to depression was a romp in bed with someone new.

Millie was without doubt the most outrageous woman she knew. Flagrantly unfaithful to her adoring husband, drooling to know the details of everyone else’s sex life, and scornful of anyone that espoused the slightest regret no matter how outrageous their behaviour, Millie had once said: ‘In life you should only regret the things you
didn’t
do.’ No. On this precipitous edge Millie was not the person to confide in.

Trying to distract herself by tidying up the apartment she came face to face with an echo of her own debauch. Lying half concealed under the bedcover was the belt he had used to beat her. Seeing it, she had involuntarily reached out to pick it up but then hesitated as if it had become a venomous snake. All her unsettling images suddenly resolved themselves into one.
Jeffrey
. He was the serpent gnawing at her mind. A cancer that needed immediate surgery. Going to the telephone she dialled rapidly, anxious to put her impulse into effect.

‘Hello? Jeffrey?’

He sounded excited. ‘Where are you? Are you in London?’

‘Yes. At the apartment …’

‘I’ll be right there!’

‘No!’ she yelled into the phone, but her voice bounced back off the already dead microphone.

Infuriated, needing to stop him at all costs, she dialled his number again. His answering machine came on. He couldn’t possibly have left immediately, so when the tone came she spoke urgently hoping that he had also left his monitor switched on.

‘Jeffrey, please pick up the phone. I have to speak to you. I can’t possibly see you. Not today.’ She waited a moment more before the answering machine clicked off and returned her to the baleful dialling tone.