The Gift of Shame (8 page)

Meanwhile ‘George’ sat feeling as if a dentist had sneaked up and injected her entire body with novacaine.

There was more murmuring at the door but, this time, thankfully, it was the sound of ‘Lesley’ departing. It was then she realised she was still wearing the hat. How long ago her preparation all seemed now! The hat lay in her hands like the reminder of another life.

When he came back into the room, thankfully alone, she found her voice. ‘Why did you do that?’ she asked him.

‘It’s what “us chaps” do.’

Silently, she looked at him. Were men an alien species? Had he imagined that what they had seen could, on any level, be construed as titillating, arousing or anything but humiliating to the onlookers?

‘Sad, isn’t it?’ he asked, voicing her thoughts exactly.

When he came and reached down for her she went into his arms with a sob of relief. The nightmare was over and the world could resume its axis.

But not quite.

‘Look,’ he said, and she watched as he reached under the glass table and, pulling away a furry rug, revealed a mirror laid to reflect upward.

‘What’s that for?’ she asked.

‘For you,’ he said. ‘You told me you liked to watch yourself suffering.’

She felt herself jellifying. The protest her brain was making was choked off by the excitement in her throat.

His voice softly insistent, he said, ‘Kneel on the table.’ When she hesitated, he added, ‘It won’t break.’

Suddenly, the role intended for Lesley was clear. ‘She’ had been hired to witness her humiliation. As she tentatively did as he said, she reflected that, comparatively, it made what was to come an act of love.

‘Stay quite still,’ he murmured as she knelt on the table and looked through its transparent surface to her ‘twin brother’ looking back up at her.

She watched as Jeffrey reached round and loosened the rolled-up trouser tops and then eased the elasticised top over her hips. Fascinated, she felt distanced, like an audience watching a play, as he ran his hands over her rump. Then she flinched and gasped as she felt the lubricant jelly being worked into her.

Now she knew he really meant to go through with it she felt her body preparing itself – except it had gone into action in the wrong place!

‘You’re going to get a thorough screwing,’ he told her, moving her raised buttocks towards the end of the table. ‘You can scream and shout all you want. It won’t make the slightest difference.’ He was standing behind her now, as she stared down at the frightened face of her ‘brother’s’ reflection as he waited with her.

Standing behind her, she felt him hard and probing. She gasped in anticipation of pain as he found her and tried to force entry.

With a tight grip on her hips he thrust again and she found
herself
falling forward to rest her arms, to the elbows, on the glass top.

Then he withdrew, but the respite was fleeting, since he had withdrawn only to better prepare the ground. His jelly-laden fingers searched her out and acted as warning precursors for the giant that would follow in their path.

Again he addressed himself and this time the resisting sphincter muscle surrendered to him and she screamed as he surged into the breach.

The mirror relentlessly recorded every flicker of expression, each and every one of her protests against the strange sensation, but there was no escape now. He was lodged firmly and moving smoothly while she stared, in horror, at the maddened face in the mirror.

Now the rushing sensations were close to unbearable; layers of pain and pleasure so intermingled they seemed inseparable. Now she saw her reflection screaming and she cried out for the lash of him.

‘Yes,’ screamed the demented creature in the mirror. ‘Yes!’ and he responded, bucking and rearing into her with even greater vigour, ever greater cruelty. Now, having transmuted pain into pleasure, she rejoiced; she no longer cared about what he was doing to her. Happy only that he could harvest such pleasure from her body, she felt herself thrashing in the grip of an orgasmic wave.

Insensate to anything, overburdened with delight, she felt him throbbing and pumping, and filling her with his pleasure.

When his exhausted weight bore down on her she slid forward to lay on the glass, her head now turned sideways away from the indelicate, mirrored, vision and thanked any interested god that she had lived long enough to know this moment.

They lay for long minutes, he still inside her but now of more accommodating size, in silent communion until she got an uncontrollable fit of the giggles.

‘What’s so funny?’ he asked, defensively acerbic.

‘I was just thinking of poor Lesley,’ she said. ‘“No penetration”! She doesn’t know what “she’s” missing!’

5

THEY WOKE LIKE
lovers.

Lying side by side in his huge bed beneath a single sheet, they held hands in silent communion, feeling no need to question or explain.

She was the one to break the potent silence. ‘Yesterday, when I saw you on my door monitor you looked exactly like someone in an old newsreel.’

‘Good news or bad news?’ he asked in a slightly puzzled tone.

‘At the time I didn’t know, but now I do.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes. Because now I feel exactly the same.’

‘As what?’

‘As if I was in an old newsreel.’

Raising himself on one elbow he looked down into her smug, smiling face and was puzzled. ‘Have I missed the point of this conversation – or what?’

She shook her head. ‘I haven’t come to the “point” yet.’

‘Would you mind hurrying up? I have this uncontrollable urge to fuck you.’

She smiled, cat-like. ‘You must have seen those old newsreels of the Allied troops liberating France.’

‘Of course.’

‘Well, right this minute, I feel like one of those French women, beside themselves with joy, clambering onto the tanks.’

Looking down, his expression was still puzzled.

‘Liberated,’ she told him. ‘That’s what you’ve done to me. Liberated me after months of oppression.’

His eyes flickered during a momentary stunned silence. ‘I think that’s about the best compliment I have ever received.’

‘My hero!’ she said, but couldn’t contain the giggle.

His mouth nuzzling into her throat, he murmured, ‘And how, exactly, did those newly liberated women reward their conquering heroes?’

Purring with pleasure at his caresses she could barely contain her mounting excitement. ‘Well, first they would permit their hero to bring them chocolates and then, perhaps, allow a kiss. All most proper, of course. Then, another day, perhaps he would call with flowers and get two kisses. Some days later she might receive chocolates
and
flowers …’ His lips on her breasts were creating tidal waves, making it difficult for her to maintain her little-girl tone so she broke off to indulge herself in moaning restlessness.

‘And, after all this long drawn out courtship – what did he get?’

‘Movietone never showed that,’ she managed – the words barely escaping her throat.

‘Shall we try an educated guess?’ he asked as his lips moved to cover her urgent mouth.

Suddenly the bed was a battlefield. No more a place for bantering philosophers or, even, thought. Here only the animal responders could survive. Ecstatically, her body greeted his penetrating surge while her brain became fixed in a loop of joy.

This was right! This act between these two people at this time and place, she thought, was the true definition of
consummation
; the saturation and the wholesome, natural completion of self.

She welcomed his unstoppable climactic surge with genuine joy, screaming out with an intensity more appropriate to fear than pleasure. Suddenly they fell apart like broken dolls to lay appalled at the pleasure they had known at each other’s loins.

She was the first to find words. ‘
Ah, mon Colonel! Où sont les autres?
’

He was still gasping for breath. ‘For God’s sake don’t talk French to me. I can barely think in English!’

Filled with the joy of a confident temptress she rolled to press her breasts against his heaving chest. ‘I wanted to know where the rest were?’

‘Rest of what?’ he gasped.

‘Your Regiment! We liberated women do not stint to reward our liberators and we show no discrimination!’

‘Or mercy!’ he gasped.

Kissing her way down the centre seam of his chest and belly she came upon his fearful pride.

‘
Pauvre petit!
’ she murmured. ‘
Je crois trouver un héros tombé!
’ With sinuous tongue she reached out to tease the ‘fallen hero’ now limply lying in repose, bringing a moan of delighted protest from him.

‘I see it all now,’ he said. ‘The entire Machiavellian plot!’ Reaching down he seized her head and turned her grinning face towards his own. ‘You’ve insured me for a million pounds and now you’re set on fucking me to death!’

Her laugh rang out in delight. ‘The way I see it, is that it’s got to be worth a damn good try!’

Dragging her up the length of his body he brought her nose to nose. ‘’Tis a far, far better thing I do now than I have ever done.’

She joined in to mangle his quote. ‘That a man should give his life for a woman’s pleasure?’

Closing his eyes against the intensity of his sigh he pushed her head to rest on his chest. ‘This is a moment of such exquisite pleasure I feel there ought to be a way of preserving it forever in amber.’

Each pleasurably confident that their thoughts were identical, they lay in silent communion for some minutes before he spoke.

‘Tell me something,’ he said.

She smiled upward. ‘Like yesterday?’

‘No. Yesterday I asked you to say something you have never before dared say to a lover. This is different.’

She waited, confident that there was nothing she couldn’t tell him.

‘Tell me something about yourself that you’ve never told anyone. Not even your best friend.’

A twinge of pain, discomfort, shuddered through her. This man had plundered her body in the most absolute manner possible, and she had rejoiced in the surrender, but now it seemed he wanted to assault that most intimate part of her body – her mind.

She knew exactly what he wanted to know. Just as yesterday the five words that had hovered on the edge of her lips, unspoken for years, had struggled free, now her greatest secret was there, fully formed, and impatiently waiting its turn – but it was too painful to share, even with him.

When she was very young and still experimenting with her own sexuality she had discovered that the man who lived opposite her in Eastbourne had been spying into her bedroom with a telescope. Night after night she had tormented the man, sometimes giving him full view of what he sought and on
others
coming to the brink and then closing her blinds before he got what he wanted. She had been knowingly cruel in her exhibitionism and thought herself a monster while consoling herself with the thought that he was only getting what he deserved.

Night after night she had revelled in knowing his eyes were on her and, goaded into even more daring acts, she had felt like a latter-day Scheherazade and found fuel for her own fantasies. One night her mother, looking out from another room, had discovered the man spying from a tree to which her exhibitions had lured him, and called the police. The man had been dragged into court and lost his highly placed position with the local authority. He had, to his honour, never mentioned what must have been obvious to him – that she had known and conspired with him – while shame had prevented her saying a word about her own repeated complicity, and he had been hounded out of town, his reputation in ruins. This incident was known to no one but themselves and remained her most shameful secret. From time to time she would calculate how old the man must be by now, and by what standard he must judge her own behaviour. While that man lived, the only other guardian of her guilt, she knew she could never be truly free. Not even now, not even with this man who had brought her to the edge of paradise, could she share it. Instead she sought to divert him.

‘I used to run an airline,’ she said and then waited as he absorbed her meaning before reacting precisely as she had hoped he would.

Raising himself on one elbow he stared down at her. ‘You what!?’

She laughed, delighted by his reaction. ‘I did!’ she insisted.

‘An airline?’ he asked.

She nodded, almost unable to contain her happiness that she had managed to surprise him.

‘A real airline? I mean, one with aeroplanes that flew?’

She nodded again.

‘Which one?’ he demanded.

‘Well, all right,’ she confessed, ‘it wasn’t exactly an
airline
, but we did have planes and they did fly.’

‘What was it then?’

‘A club. There was this small airfield near where I used to live. The owners would sometimes rent their planes to other people and sometimes, if they were qualified, they would fly them as air taxis. I used to run the office.’

Sinking back onto the pillows he sighed with relief. ‘For a moment I thought I was in bed with the Chairman of British Airways!’

Her laughter rang round the bedroom.

‘I always wanted to learn to fly,’ he said, and when she stayed silent, went on. ‘Never had the time.’

Her silence had become palpable and, curious, he looked across to see that tears were flowing from her eyes.

‘What’s the matter?’ he asked with immediate concern.

‘That’s where I met Kenneth.’

‘Kenneth?’ he asked and then immediately felt stricken as he remembered. ‘Your husband?’

Her chin trembling now, she nodded.

‘Christ!’ he said feeling an idiot. ‘I’m sorry. Look, I blundered into that! Millie had told me what happened, of course. The last thing I wanted was to upset you.’

Her shoulders were shaking now, and she turned away, murmuring into the pillows.

He reached for her but she, now openly weeping, shrugged him off.

‘Look, there’s nothing that’s happened between us for you to be ashamed about.’ He felt helpless seeing her pain and feeling he had nothing to offer. ‘You’re a young woman. No one could blame you. Please don’t …’