Helen And Desire Read online

  The village itself was small and was situated high over the water and high over the little cove which, for a number of years, I had regarded almost as my private property. I had swum there since I was twelve years of age and had seldom been disturbed. No stranger ever came there, only sometimes a courting couple from the village, but, as that sort of thing was severely looked upon, not often even the villagers.

  By the time I was fifteen I had taken to going into the sea naked. That first time it was a sudden decision, no sooner thought than acted upon. The idea, for reasons which I was unable to analyse, seemed to explode through my entire body, becoming a sensation of weakness at my flanks and of excitement at my navel. I remember standing there at the edge of the water, my toes pressing into the sharp shingle, flexing the muscles of my calves and thighs, and looking for the first time downwards at the slim yellowish twist of my body. There, through the delicate hollow of my half-formed breasts, I glimpsed the beginning of a chevron of silky hairs, damp to the touch from the sweat of my young body, from which my long slender legs seemed to radiate like spokes. I realised then that in some mysterious way this was my body’s centre, the axis of my desires, the mercurial fulcrum around which all my movements would henceforth pivot, and in whose ecstasy my female limbs, bared at that moment to the light sea wind, would find fulfilment.

  Then, with my eyes closed, the victim of my sudden obsession, I moved like a sleepwalker into the sea which rose upwards over the finely haired skin of my legs until, with my knees submerged, the water became a circle of cool pain at each thigh. All the world was extinguished save for my own flesh and the softly pervasive flesh of the sea.

  Gradually, I opened my knees and felt the hot centre of myself pulled downwards into the water as though by a gravitational pull, and, as the lip of the water swung coolly between my buttocks and took my lower belly within itself, all the tension in my body was released and I sank ecstatically backwards beneath the surface of the water.

  How long I remained there, bobbing like a cork beneath the surface, I don’t know. Every muscle and sinew was relaxed, so that my splayed limbs and the white curve of my torso in sinking were abandoned like flotsam to the relentless will of the water.

  I count the sea my first love and, in a sense, the most immaculate, for there was no percussive sentiment between us to pollute the elemental tremors of our union; unlike the liaisons to which I later consented, the passion that fed it was an impersonal one.

  When I came out of the sea I found I was bleeding. I must have gashed myself during my plunge on a sharp splinter of coral, for there was a small cut just above the knee on the sleek concave surface of my inner thigh. By the time I had waded ashore the blood, in twin streams, had trickled down as far as my ankle. I sat down on the shingle, drew my knees apart with my hands, and allowed the sun to strike the wound on which the blood had already begun to congeal.

  My father, a narrowly religious man, forbade the hired hands to keep company with me. He viewed my approaching maturity with a mixture of fear and pride; fear, because among the menfolk in our village there was not one whom he would willingly have accepted as a son-in-law; pride, because, widower that he was, he found himself once again possessed of a desirable young woman who drew the glances of all the young men in the village. For my part, I despised the young men of the village, partly, I suppose, because of my father’s constant admonitions, and partly because, having read widely from childhood of the world beyond the bleak sunstruck desert of the interior of Australia, I despised the mute fatalism of men who would live and die in an isolated village like ours. The world of the villagers led to abrupt limits on all sides. Although I had little opportunity for comparison, I knew intuitively that the men of our village had in some subtle way, doubtless because of the inflexible pressure of nonconformist religion, allowed their manhood to go from them. They were vulgar creatures and, like most vulgar creatures, suspicious and afraid.

  This was probably the real reason why I avoided the beach where most of the village girls bathed. Although I would have been protected there by the strict conventions of the community, I was reluctant to exhibit the bold outline of my torso to the prurient eyes of the village men. I waited for the day when my father would be dead and I would be able to leave the village for the last time.

  Such were my thoughts when, on the eve of my eighteenth birthday, I climbed once again down over the rocks to the isolated little cove below the village.

  On the very next day I would be eighteen. I stood looking out far across the coral-studded sea for a long time, conscious again of the dull excitement at my roots that began the moment I decided to come there. For it was almost a ritual by this time. Without haste, I would remove my clothes until every shred of my being was exposed to the impersonal gaze of the sun and the sea. My lissome body, like a blade of grass in the light wind, exuded a pinprick sweat of excitement so that the slow surfaces of my belly and my flanks glistened like dull sequins in the sunlight. The hairs of my lower abdomen had spread by this time, and a tenuous filament of sleek hairs connected the strong jut of my mound to the deeply indented whorl of my navel. My breasts, grown hard with desire, were dully painful in their arched-up position, and the lilac putty of my nipples was as heavy and ambiguous as mercury.

  As I came out of the sea, I moved my hands briskly against my limbs to remove the salt water which clung there. But I was unsatisfied. For the first time the sea had failed to bring relief to my limbs. In exasperation I threw myself down on the shingle and lay there on my front with my cheek pressed against the shells. I do not know what I expected other than to feel the thrust of the earth against me, perhaps nothing, for I was conscious only of the tension in my muscles and of the oblique sultering dilatation at my roots.

  As I lay there, I caught sight of the log. It had been there for some days, washed in by the sea. It was half-rotten, fat, with a portion of the rough bark still intact. For a moment I looked only, and then, gradually, the knowledge of what I was about to do came over me like a sickness, the familiar weakness at my thighs, the hard little rotation of pleasure somewhere deep under my navel.

  A moment later I was standing, looking down upon it, and then, sinking to my knees, I brought my sex close to the rough bark. My whole body quivered and, with a sob, I collapsed on top of it, crushing it against my crotch by the pressure of my knees, and against my breasts with all the force of my arms. So violent was the convulsion of my body that the log rose under me and my body toppled sideways, bringing the waterlogged weight of the wood directly on top of me, rough and damp, and bruising the delicate sun-dusky skin of the front of my torso. Meanwhile, my back and buttocks were ground against the cutting shingles which crackled like china chips as my buttocks, riven by an irresistible arrow of lust, tightened spasmodically to bring my flailing legs round the log to grip it with the force of a vice against the hungry jaws of my sex.

  When the agitations of my body ceased, I lay quite still under the heavy hulk of the tree, and I opened my eyes and stared straight above me at the unchanging cobalt depth of sky that fell upwards into infinity without cloud and without horizon.

  My body was painful from the superficial wounds which the weight and the rough texture of the tree trunk had inflicted upon me. I could feel the sting of broken skin at my knees, at the cleft in my thighs, and at my delicate breasts, but I could feel no hatred for the thing that had hurt me. Almost reluctantly, I moved from underneath it. The whole front of my body was red from its abrasive contact, and, here and there, the trickles of blood mingled with the muddy liquid which had exuded from the bark and with the green smears that were evidence that the tree had once been rooted in a fertile soil.

  I returned to the sea to wash my wounds. The salt nipped them painfully and my clothes when I put them on chafed the tender skin. Soon, however, I was dressed and, without further thought for the pain, I turned to go home.

  At that moment, the sound of a man’s laughter came to me. For a moment I froze with fea
r. What if someone should have witnessed my actions? But then I realised that the laughter came from the far side of a line of rocks more than twenty yards away and that the rocks cut me off completely from the sight of whoever was there. I might have gone straight home then had I not heard a woman’s voice call out in fear: ‘No . . . please . . . I can’t . . . let me go!’

  Without further thought, I moved quickly towards the rocks. The panic in her voice excited me. Tired as my body was, it was aroused by the urgent secrecy in the woman’s voice. My heart was beating fast as I scaled the rocks and brought my eyes to a level from which I could look down on them.

  I saw them at once. They were lying close under the shade of a strangely shaped rock which was suspended over them like a stalactite, the woman – I recognised her as one of the village girls who had been in my class at school – with her skirt disarranged above her knees, a sharp crescent of plump white flesh apparent between the top of her stocking and the hem of the displaced skirt, and her face red with the struggle against the man – I did not recognise him at first – who was straddled on top of her, his arms pinioning hers to the ground. Occasionally, leaning the weight of his body on top of one of her arms, he released his grip with one hand, reached down, and clawed at the swelling white orb of one buttock which stuck out from the frilly lace of her knickers like the gleaming nob of a boiled egg from a tattered eggshell. But every time he did so, the girl bucked violently underneath him and he was forced to bring his hand back to her wrist again to prevent her escape. Suddenly, during one of these manoeuvres, the girl succeeded in toppling him over onto his side, and at once, before he had time to regain his balance, she had lifted a large pebble and struck him a glancing blow to his forehead. He uttered a cry of pain and brought his hands to his head while she, hesitating no longer, made good her escape. I watched her run quickly between the rocks and disappear from sight.

  The man sat up, still rubbing his head, and at last I was able to recognise him. It was Tom Snaith, one of the young men of the village who had been to the war and who had returned when he was demobilised. As a matter of fact, he was employed by my father, who looked upon him as a blackguard and had threatened to fire him on more than one occasion. He was a dark-skinned young man of more than medium height, well-built, and he seldom appeared in public without a cigarette between his lips. Evidently he had decided not to give chase because now he lay back on the shingle and lit a cigarette. He held it in his right hand while his left, stretched out at ninety degrees to his body, lifted a heap of shingle and allowed it to trickle from his tilted palm back onto the ground.

  I hesitated. An idea was beginning to dawn upon me. Snaith had at least been in the outside world. With his help I might be able to escape sooner than I had expected. Was that all that decided me? I don’t know. I had seen him lying heavily on top of my schoolmate and my body, in spite of its cuts, was already eager to succumb again to the primal turbulence which I had lately experienced. I suppose I wanted him as well. I wanted him immediately. His heat hard as the tree had been, but warmer, and with more resilience. I had never seen a naked man.

  Boldly, I climbed into view and walked towards where he was lying. He sat up quickly at my approach and I felt his eyes studying the nervous movement of my walk. When I was within speaking distance, he addressed me with a sneer.

  ‘I thought your father told you not to speak to strange men?’ he said.

  ‘It was you who spoke,’ I said.

  ‘So it was!’ he replied.

  We looked at one another. And then I saw his eyes which, in his reclining position, were on a level with the hem of my skirt, move downward to my calves, which were almost gold from the sun, and remain there for a moment before he threw a glance upwards and said: ‘Why don’t you sit down?’

  I did so without replying.

  Suddenly he knitted his brows.

  ‘How long have you been here?’ he demanded.

  I looked at him. He was wearing his shirt open at the neck, and the muscles of his chest were well-outlined beneath the dark hairs.

  ‘Tell me something first,’ I said. ‘Why did you come back here – to the village, I mean?’

  He threw his cigarette against the rock.

  ‘God knows!’ he said.

  ‘Why don’t you go away again?’

  He laughed bitterly.

  ‘It takes money,’ he said.

  ‘I could get money.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  I noticed that his eyes had once again fallen to the small triangle of cloth where my skirt rucked up against my mound. I raised one of my knees, casually, but so that the white skirt fell away, leaving the heavy surface of one thigh exposed. For a moment he stared at the bare flesh and then he looked quickly at me.

  ‘Together?’

  I nodded. ‘I can take the money from my father’s safe,’ I said.

  ‘You mean it?’

  ‘I was watching when you tried to make love to Peggy,’ I said.

  He grinned. And then suddenly his face relaxed and, as though he were making a tentative bargain, he laid one of his brown hands on the dull opaque skin of my thigh. A quiver ran through me. I was now beyond my own decision. I slithered on the shingle into a position such that his hand came into contact with the moist and tremulous hairs of my sex. A moment later, his shadow blotted out the world for me, his lips, slightly open, came against my own, and his hand moved upwards over the smooth skin of my belly, tracing a hundred contours of my thighs and buttocks, while I, losing the thread of all thought, arched my torso against him and waited for the inundation of relief.

  Beyond the edges of myself, I existed at my lips, at the twin excitements high and hard beneath my shift against him, at the tip of the finger which, with slight pressure, broke the frail webs of sweat that my body exuded in its delirium, and fiercely at my woman’s pole to where eventually his fingers came, opening like scissors inside me, flooding my virgin body with pain and pleasure until suddenly, my skirt high above my waist and the lower part of my torso abandoned to his will, his hard male core broke through between my cloven hair, and his angry movements culminated, his body rigid, in a javelin thrust that seemed to cleave me in half. The tension in my thighs relaxed. My outspread legs twitched nervously for a moment and then came to rest like long plant shoots on the shingle. The hard concentration that had existed in my flesh became liquid and the relief moved like a sensual lava through my limbs.

  Snaith had opened the front of my blouse and his firm lips sucked voraciously at my left teat. The pliant flesh shaped itself to the ring of his mouth and I breathed more heavily again as, with the slickness of a camera shutter, a small needle of desire pricked through my loins. I moved my fingers through his dark hair, at the same time pressing the back of his head so that his face was almost buried in the fleshy part of my breast. Then, with my other hand between our bodies, I pressed against the flatness of his belly, downwards, mingling my fingers with the hairs of his crotch, until, his spirits reawakened by my caress, his buttocks tightened and his power moved again at the wet richness between my thighs. This time, one of his hands came round under my trembling buttocks and his middle finger slipped surely into the downy rut which ran like a gully between them. There, torso-thrust against torso-thrust and my plump golden thighs spread-eagled under the tufted white rectangle of his moving front, all the radiant juices of my young starved body mingled with the pearly male stream that marked the consummation of our union.

  A few moments later, he drew away from me. I rolled over, bringing my thighs, which were hot and smeared with our love, together tightly as though to contain the strange male emission that I knew then for the first time. He meanwhile had rearranged his dress and was seated crosslegged smoking a cigarette. His first words were:

  ‘Did you mean what you said?’

  I was lying on my front, perfectly composed, my skirts decent once again, leaning on my elbows.

  ‘We must go to Charleston,’ I said. ‘We
can go south from there.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Tonight,’ I replied. ‘Before my father takes the money to the bank.’

  ‘And we can be married in Charleston,’ he said, as though he were talking to himself. ‘He won’t be able to do anything then.’

  Fortunately, he could not see my face. What a fool he was! The thought of marriage had never crossed my mind. To be a house-slave as my mother was, to lose my freedom and adapt myself to his absurd male requirements! That was my first experience of this kind of idiot male presumption – why do they assume that because we have need of their bodies we will be willing to submit ourselves to the drab pattern of their everyday existence? If a man is poor and must work, what an overbearing impertinence to expect a beautiful woman to harness herself to his venal and constricted existence! Such men should be housed in a stable after their toil, and, if it is a woman’s pleasure, they should be loaned to her for her occasional enjoyment. I had to suppress the impulse to laugh in Snaith’s face.

  ‘We go tonight then,’ I said. ‘You must borrow a motorcycle and wait outside the house at midnight.’

  He laughed.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘I’ll be there.’

  Chapter Two

  I was not mistaken. I had just written those words that Snaith spoke to me when the heavy tent flap moved. I crammed the paper out of sight under the sheepskins. The man stood in shadow looking down at me where I lay.

  For a few minutes he said nothing and then, suddenly, he pointed his finger at himself and said something which I could not understand. Perhaps he was telling me his name. When I did not answer, he continued to gaze down at me.

  Under his impenetrable gaze, I felt something stir in me. It was as though some delicate plant inhabited my loins and was at that moment thrusting its roots and shoots into the darkest reaches of my flesh. I acted quickly, or rather, found myself acting quickly, for I did not consciously decide to play the part I did in the mute pantomime which followed. I was stripping myself of the robe they had given me. And then I was lying naked on my back in a prone position a few feet away from the man who looked down at me. My legs were heavy and apart. And then I was raising myself on my elbows, my body bristling in a tawny arch, my heels tight on the sand beyond the sheepskins, so that the hot halter of my loins rose like a snake about to strike at the man in the shadows.