tickling at my balls. We slumped, we panted, and lay still, then I drew my cork out with a dragging feel and flopped upon my back beside my sisters hip, she limp, quiescent and unmoving then, her face as peaceful as a baby angel.
“It was good that you came, Harry, was it not?”
Caroline laughed at her little pun and stood over me with legs apart, her bush displayed. The look of challenge had not left her eyes.
CHAPTER THREE
It is twenty years now since that afternoon. The bed remains as it remained. Only the covers and the linen have been changed, are frilled more now with lace and pooled with silk. The same sun casts its glow into the room on summer afternoons as then it cast, dappling their breasts and thighs with leaves of light.
Love is a game. My wife-dear Caroline-has made it so. A game that has no losers, she declares. Dice of desire are cast, the bottoms and the cunnies wriggle on. Even this afternoon, lying with them both, poking my sister first, then Caroline, we spoke of it. Adelaide smiled with hooded eyes, stretched like a cat as she always does, black stockings sheathing up her fine, firm legs, richer and plumper now about her thighs, her breasts the heavier, her bottom ever eager to receive.
“We would never have done so many naughty things if Caroline were not so wicked,” she will often say. It intrigues her to use the adjective and adds a spice to it. I have known them both laugh against my mouth the while we teased each other, sheathed it in. There is laughter often and no darkness here. I have known… But no, my pen runs on.
Caroline interrupts me frequently to read what I have written. I do not like what I have written and have told her so. I come not within a dozen leagues of what I mean to say. The words, like butterflies, escape my net. The weight of a pendant tit upon the palm, the rearing of a naked bottom to the hand, the ineluctable sensation of coursing up one's fingers to the curl-fringed quim of a young girl who sobs against ones mouth-such cannot be described. It is a mere pointing to the moon that hangs too far above-a stabbing of the fingers to the stars whose distance mocks one. Thus I say again, again, to Caroline. She teases me. Her kisses breath upon my mouth the same desiring that I always knew.
“Why, dearest, do not try too hard. You will achieve. Father often said that if you would best do a thing, you must do it without too much thought, for the mind constructs a lattice-work of doubt, hinders all efforts and diverts the aim. Miss Withers dines with us tonight. Wait till you see her drawers-how tight they are!”
Caroline often speaks thus, darting from one subject to another.
“Shall I see them?” Often I wish to draw her back to the subject that I started on, but never do.
“You may. She is a spinster, as you know-but such a comely one and, I regret to say, my pet, a full five years younger than I am. There may be tears from her, but I will kiss them all away. Would that I were a man and had a prick. Well-sometimes I do wish that. I shock you still a little, do I not?”
“No.” But my flush betrays me. Pretending that I wish to kiss her words away is merely a disguise for my desires which burn as brightly as her own, and kindled by her ever on.
“Miss Withers, Harry, she is like-well, very much like-Gertrude Smeath, in looks. Remember her?”
“My goodness, yes. But kiss me, do!”
“Not now, not now. A full week you have toiled, and yet so little written. Three more pages, if you please, before the evening charms us with Miss Withers' sighs. You know I want to read about us all, and so does Adelaide. Get on with you and get your duty done. Write sweetly, though, of Gertrude; she was really nice!”
“I will change her name at least.”
“No! You may not! It is a lovely name, so redolent of ripeness as she was, and is. How long is it since we encountered her?”
I shrug. “Three years, or four perhaps.”
“Harry, it does not matter. To begin at the beginning and to go on till the end-how boringly conventional!” A laugh and she is gone. My pen tip hovers, scratches once again here in my enforced privacy where I have set myself this task of memory. Here there is nothing but the dancing of the words, the arabesques of verbs and adjectives, the commas dabbed by penis tip as a pointillist tips his bright colours to the canvas. Quotation marks become my introducing chords. Here one may speak and another may fall silent, wait her turn.
Gertrude Smeath, then. Very well. It was six months after that first orgy that we met the lady. Here I must interpolate, however (seeking a mite of tidyness in the order of things) that Adelaide's husband had not quite treated her as she had said. The truth was, she was bored with him- had met Caroline some time before and hatched all sorts of wicked plots with her. After our bedroom romp, my sister was not long in parting from her mate. He betook himself to Ceylon to take up his father's tea plantation and left the house to her: a generosity to which he was persuaded in great part by Caroline who had no scruples when it came to such, disdaining as she did and does the idea that property is the prerogative of males.
I am diverting, and shall be chided for it by my wife. It irritates me, however, to see loose bits of string about. I had not been expected on that first afternoon I have described. The girls, as then they were, had been playing together in an amourous way and, on my appearance, the quick-witted Caroline had used my visit on an inspiration-Adelaide having listened from upstairs, though I did not know that then.
I am pleased with myself that I have tidied up that little piece, shall be called a pedant for it, but I do not care- will make amends by turning now to Gertrude who was then thirty and as Junoesque as I do not doubt she now remains. It was the beginning of the bicycling period then and we encountered her on the road a mile from Adelaide's home. The front wheel of her bicycle had come loose and, having no means of tightening it, we loaded it precariously on to the roof of our carriage and took it to her home some miles away. There we were royally entertained in a very lovely mansion that she and her husband had.
“How young you all are!” she flattered us, and I remarking to myself all the time the delightful prominence of her bottom in the cycling knickerbockers that she wore. Indeed, she saw my eyes upon them and without offense, twirled round and asked, “Do you like them? They betray the figure better than a gown, I think.”
That very sentence eased our path of friendship. Women have a great instinct for certain matters, and Gertrude was not long in divining that our relationship was not of the conventional. Indeed, by teasing questions- which embarrassed me at first much more than it did Adelaide and Caroline-she soon elicited our closeness and my sister's married or half-married state.
“One does not want a husband about the house too often-it impedes one's pleasures, does it not?” she asked. There was much dispensing of wine that afternoon. I believe she wanted us to become a little bibulous to make our tongues loosen all the more, but Caroline at least had summed her up. There was no need for tipsiness.
“We are free-thinkers just as you Gertrude, yes. Is it not called that nowadays?” Caroline asked.
“It is, my dear, and I am glad that you are such. There are so many stuffy folk around. Do you read much?” she asked observing Caroline's quick eyes upon a book that lay upon a table near her chair. Before Caroline could answer, she went on, “It is by de Sade-a very wicked man. I suspect that it would shock you. Better that you do not pick it up.”
This being, of course, a clear invitation to do exactly that, Caroline's hand moved towards it, though without betraying such eagerness as I suspected that she felt.
“He is full of darkness,” Caroline said to the apparent great wonder of Gertrude. By stretching her arm to a full extent, she was able to flip open the top board of the volume so that it flopped its flap upon the table top and left the title page revealed. So calmly and with such elegance did she perform this simple gesture that I felt myself as if falling in love with her all over again. I knew the measure of her coolness in that moment more than I had done before.
“You have read him?”
There was great surprise in Gertrude's voice. Caroline had notched-up one as we nowadays say. Gertrude rose and went to Caroline's armchair to perch her luscious bottom on one arm. Having so intervened herself between the book and Caroline-which gesture I believe caused my future wife a tremor of annoyance-she picked the volume up and laid it in Caroline's lap.
