Helena
by
BARTON
Helena
published as an eBook in 2012 by Chimera eBooks.
ePub ISBN
9781780801124
mobi ISBN
9781780801131
Chimera (
ki-mir'a,
ki-
) a creation of the imagination, a wild
fantasy.
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This work is
sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or
otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated
without the publisher's prior written consent in any form of
binding or cover other than that in which it is published, and
without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent
purchaser. The author asserts that all characters depicted in this
work of fiction are eighteen years of age or older, and that all
characters and situations are entirely imaginary and bear no
relation to any real person or actual happening.
Copyright Leo
Barton. The right of Leo Barton to be identified as author of this
book has been asserted in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the
Copyrights Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This novel is
fiction - in real life practice safe sex.
1
You know that
my real sexual life began with you Freddie, and to some extent
ended with you, as every new encounter pales by comparison. You
were, are, the rock in the pool, everything pre and post you, is
mere ripple, eddying away from the explosion of your love.
However, there
was an existence before you made your magnificent entrance into my
life; you deserve to know the defining moments that made me so
amenable to your charm, the pre-history of our love.
I told you
about my childhood, the vicar father, the home-making mother, his
obsession with godliness, hers with cleanliness. Nothing so unusual
there! "Be a good little girl and say your prayers." "Be a good
little girl and tidy your room."
And I was a
good little girl. I always did what I was told. I was paraded
around our drab village like an icon of saintliness, not like one
of the Latin beauties you told me about, although I looked the part
with my raven-black curls and my alabaster skin, but more
mundanely, in the English, Anglican way, trailing my mother's
skirts; the whole approval of a village resting on my young,
starched shoulders. I was "as good as gold", "a cherub", "a little
angel". I was a mother's blessing, the answer to a father's
supplications. I said my prayers; I cleaned my room.
I can't
criticize my parents for not understanding what was beyond their
ken. They did their duty and asked for little; their sins were
minuscule: an uncharitable word immediately regretted, a too
stringent adherence to text or law, an occasional and usually
magnanimous repression of truth or instinct: the mere petty
peccadilloes of such an enclosed life. Nothing too elaborate, too
sinister; their lives were bound up in being good, in making do, in
blessing the little joy they had.
So, let's make
the leap from the filial background to the erotic foreground, to
those first stirrings of arousal? It is impossible to say exactly
when they began. I would need therapy or hypnosis for something
like that. All I know is that in my innocent mind, my prepubescent
sexual life started with considering the potential of wrongdoing.
You know even Anglicans, however flimsy the creed, are still mildly
manachean.
What I mean,
Freddie, is that if the body is the repository of sin, so I
suppose, to me, the thought of doing something bad was also
connected with the sinful pleasure of the body. I think even in
those days before my sexual awakening, there was something
physically arousing about being naughty.
Freddie, you
come from a big family, a scruff of brothers, a puppy dog of
sisters. To be an only child is hard. How desperately you crave
attention, maybe because it is even more readily available. There,
my greediness already revealed, the more I have the more I want.
(Is this not the basic nub of the problem?) And what was worse was
the need for their approval. I had to believe what they wanted me
to believe, that it was the devil whispering in my ear, the fearful
evil snake of Satan wishing to expel me from the garden of parental
love.
I could not
stop being a good girl, and being a good girl made me so unhappy,
having to carry all the weight of that evil inside me, the incubi
of my bad dreams, the demons of my bad faith, imploring me to go
further, to be naughty, to be rude, to be vulgar. I wanted to do
bad because I was never expected to; badness, like my awkward
curiosity and sexual self-expression, all lay beyond the dull
boundaries of their stultifying normality and their arched sense of
duty.
The continual
submerging of my incipient darker desires under the prosaic
monotony of my life, the endless studying, the church attending,
the helping mother in the kitchen, was difficult enough during the
day, but at night it was impossible to hold at bay. I could still
staunch the flow of words that fashioned themselves into
unanswerable questions about omniscience and divinity, I had my
incantations and my devotion to goodness, but, by then, my body
too, had blatantly betrayed me. At night, as my mind became
sluggish, my body would grow acutely alert. First, in that state
between wake and sleep, harrowing hypnologic hallucinations taunted
me, teased me; a man half remembered, half invented from biology
books and the teenage magazines of schoolgirl chums, would appear,
his prick limp, growing under the attention of my tongue. Where on
earth had I got this idea from? I would wake in the morning ashamed
of the moistness between my legs that had stained the flat sheet of
my single bed. I could feel the tingling red of my cheeks, my heart
thumping inside my chest, as I would attempt to fill my mind with
purer thoughts, as I tried to rationalize my desire by imagining
that the devil had insidiously invaded my sleep.
I had to give
in; the pressure was too great. I felt it in my throbbing heart, in
my perspiration, but mostly in the burning need of my sex. Imagine
a young girl reaching her hand down, lifting up her winceyette
night gown, splaying her legs, the tips of her finger edging to her
vulva, searching for the root of the intense itch, slowly slipping
her moistened finger over the strangeness of her labia, coming
alive in the heat of passion, and then discovering the kernel of
her heat in the tiny, sheathed protuberance above. What had been a
mere oddity of the body momentarily became its center from which
everything else emanated. That first tingle of erotic pleasure sent
a shock wave through my body and mind.
It was too
enjoyable to resist. As my mind filled with the sordid images of
boys' cocks and hirsute men I had seen in the local swimming pool,
my little button grew under the stimulation of my forefinger. As
unfamiliar as the sensation was, there was another feeling that I
was in some sense coming home, or better, that what I was
discovering I had known all along. It was too natural, the way my
finger manipulated my clitoris too automatic.
Of course
there was still guilt. I had given into the devil; each time I
masturbated, I showed how soiled I was. However virginal my body, I
believed, strangely as I still do, but now with joy rather than
regret, I had the soul of a whore. In church, as I listened to my
father's erudite homilies, far too learned for the majority of his
parishioners, I prayed to god for forgiveness, promising him that I
would never do it again. It! But as daylight receded, I would be
enveloped by my teenage lust.
Freddie you
know my love of literature. You know how much I love best the works
of the imagination. You told me once that I had a good imagination,
and that I was a natural storyteller, like all single children who
in their isolation and loneliness have to invent their life over,
create a parallel world peopled by invisible friends and friendly
creatures. Well, it was here that I honed my childhood imagination,
here in the darkness of my adolescent room, I conjured up erotic
images, using my mind to abet the satiation of my body.
My father's
best friend was another vicar from the neighbouring parish. A
younger, more virile man than my father, he would often come to our
house, for what my mother quaintly called supper. He too was a
kind, generous man, and bore no relation to the rugged and lewd
protagonist I created in my fantasies of rough seduction. Fantasies
of Terrence roughly taking me in every possible way I could
imagine, images of his rugged hands on my tender body, or being
beaten under his strict discipline.
Quite
incredible, Freddie, for a sixteen-year-old virgin, whose closest
sexual experience was an awkward, fumbled kiss at a school disco
with a boy from my geography class.
The fantasies
too advance to a realistic conclusion. I never did tell you
everything, Freddie, at least not until now.
I had known
Terrence since I was a child. A bright, sensitive man, wordy,
erudite, his life enclosed by theology and clerical duty, he never
married, always remaining, I am convinced, a virgin.
He was awkward
with children, and with teenagers for that matter, although he
always made a sterling effort with me, telling me stories,
listening to my problems, playing with me in the garden; trying
hard to hide the embarrassment he felt at participating in
children's games. He would be kind and charitable and later, after
I split up with Gregory, generous.
Terrence was,
is, a handsome man, with lucid, deep-set, green eyes, the high
forehead of a scholar, good bone structure and neatly trimmed blond
hair.
Attractive
though he was, he was inveterately clumsy. He inhabited his body
like a foreigner in a strange land; his long legs always seemed too
long. His mind always distracted by disputative points of theology
or parochial preoccupations, he would frequently bang into things
or trip over. It brought much mirth to my own family who tenderly
mocked him for his clumsiness, seeing it as an indication of a
dreamy unworldliness. I always thought he had wasted his life. He
would have made someone a good husband, and maybe he would have
found more happiness with a wife and family than I suspect he found
nestling in the bosom of the church. As I grew up, and even long
before I met you, Freddie, I always thought that Terrence was an
emotional coward, too frightened of committing himself to another
woman.
He
occasionally used to visit Gregory and myself in London. They would
sit up for hours discussing esoteric aspects of doctrine, as well
as the burning issues which consumed the church at the time, in
much the same way that Terrence and my father would do. Even though
I was the old family friend, I think that it was my husband's
friendship that he really enjoyed, finding the company of women as
difficult as children.
After Gregory
and I separated, and you had taught me how to feel like a woman,
Terrence came to see me. He wasn't very comfortable at the idea of
being with women generally, and even though he had known me since I
was a little girl, he was distinctly uneasy with me, not knowing
what to say to me in the wake of my separation, protectively making
a manly stab, misguided though it was, at blaming Gregory for
neglecting me.
He arrived one
Saturday afternoon straight from the synod where he was advising
some bishop or other on clerical law, saying that he couldn't have
gone back to Norton Heath without coming to see me. He was leaving
in the morning, but he would like to take me out to dinner; my
father would never forgive him if he didn't, he said as an
afterthought, embarrassed because it made his visit sound like an
obligation. He didn't want to impose himself on me as he had an
acceptable place to stay at the university.
It was strange
seeing him after so much had happened, after you‚ Freddie.
For the first
time in a long time, I remembered my fantasies. How ridiculous it
all seemed now, looking at Terrence, his physical awkwardness, his
temples now flecked with gray, the crooked smile he always employed
to cover his social embarrassment unchanged after all those years.
His world, the same world that my parents inhabited, had never
seemed so far from my own, a world of order, limitation,
stagnation.
He had clearly
noticed how I had changed, the make up, the hair again loose around
my shoulders as it was when I was a child, the way I dressed, gone
were the long skirts, the pastel-shaded cardigans. I could tell he
was a little surprised at the black halter-neck and the high-heeled
shoes. He told me I looked somehow younger, when he really meant
sexier; the not so deftly hidden implication being that he was
worried that I had somehow gone off the rails to be dressing up to
so blatantly show off my womanly charms.