Helena

  HELENA

  by

  LEO BARTON

  Helena published as an eBook in 2012 by Chimera eBooks.

  ePub ISBN 9781780801124

  mobi ISBN 9781780801131

  www.chimerabooks.co.uk

  Chimera (ki-mir'a, ki-) a creation of the imagination, a wild fantasy.

  New authors are always welcome, or if you're already a published author and have existing work, the eBook rights of which remain with or have reverted to you, we would love to hear from you.

  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.

  Chapter 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, mor
e 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.

  We went to a local French restaurant; our sporadic conversation was mutually embarrassing, the huge pregnant pauses punctuated by the dismal clatter of our knives and forks. Terrence, even though I had insisted on paying, worried about the expense of the meal, the extravagance going against his Christian humility.

  I had decided to drink, if only to alleviate something of the boredom of the evening. Terrence indulged me a little, probably putting my drinking down to my recent marital distress. In his rather predictable mind, I was taking refuge in the bottle after suffering so much humiliation because of the desertion of my spouse. How wrong could he have been!

  We talked about my family, my mother's recent illness, my father ageing well, as I primed open another mussel and saucily sucked on the moist inner flesh. He talked at length, thinking, I suppose, that I was interested in such things, about the various debates of the synod and some esoteric biography he was about to write about an early father of the church. This was the stuff that always left me cold, even when Gregory had been there; Gregory was always riveted by the detail and depth of Terrence's knowledge.

  I wasn't drunk, but alcohol made me look at him differently, not as the family friend, or the middle-aged cleric, but as a sexual man, a real sexual man as opposed to the perverted figure from my naive, childhood fantasies. He was still handsome. I wondered what his sexual life was like, if he masturbated, and if he did, did all that dread guilt and remorse descend upon him afterwards as it had done with me. I didn't think he was gay. I had noticed the way he had cast sly glances at my fulsome breasts through the black velvet of my dress, his eyes quickly averting once I had caught him, his mind searching for some inane topic to diffuse his embarrassment.

  As his coffee came and I ordered another demijohn of ruby wine, I decided, cruelly maybe, that I would interrogate him.

  "Terrence, have you never thought of marrying?" I said sipping on a wonderfully fruity bottle of claret under his disapproving gaze.

  "Oh, I've thought about it, but you know it takes two to tango, and I'm always so busy." The answer was too pat, too well rehearsed, the glib response he must have offered whenever he had been pressed on the matter. He must have been mildly irritated too as I had interrupted him as he was making some crucial point about Tertullian or Ireneaus or whoever.

  "But don't you miss not having a woman?" It is you Freddie who brought all this out in me. Before I met you, I would never have played such games. You turned an earnest girl into a mischievous imp.

  "I'm with women all the time." This was still all too trite. He took a dilatory sip of his coffee. For a clumsy man he ate and drank precisely, used mastication and potation almost like a shield to hide his nervousness.

  "What women?" I asked, turning up the corners of my mouth into a provocatively, teasing smile.

  "Oh, you know, my parishioners, there's the women's league and..."

  "No I mean a relationship." When I had been a child and occasionally had asked intrusive questions he had always been able to shrug them off, to deflect his embarrassment by utilizing his adult superiority, but now he was confronted with a grown woman.

  "No, I haven't," he said rather curtly.

  "But have you missed it?" He was rattled now, a man slow to anger, confused by it, I could sense his indignation at my brazenness, his pale cheeks perceptibly flushing red, even under the subdued light of the restaurant.

  "Yes, I might have liked to share my life with a woman." The triteness was all gone now. I had managed to break through a little of his reserve.

  "What do you think you have missed?" I had never talked to Terrence like this before. When I was a child, because of his friendship with my father, I had always seen Terrence as a much ol
der man, having that accoutrement of power that we bestow on adults when we are children, but he was barely twenty years older than me, and, in this moment it was me who had all the power.

  I sensed that I had touched a raw nerve. I had mentioned that which I should have not. I slowly repeated the question.

  "Oh I don't know, having somebody close, you know, the intimacy, that kind of thing," he replied, wistfulness seeming to have momentarily tempered his displeasure.

  "What about sex?" You can't get much blunter than that, talking to a fifty-year-old virgin vicar who also happened to be your father's best friend. He was taken aback by the question. He must have thought that I was drunk. He cast a glance down at the half full carafe of plonk.

  "You have to make sacrifices for what you believe in. I have offered up my life to God. I have done it joyfully. I have no regrets." I could hear a quaver in his voice as he spoke. Now we had moved from the territory of rehearsed explanation to prideful self-justification.

  "God gave you a good body. Why do you think he doesn't want you to use it?" Maybe my voice had risen slightly, I don't know, but the conversation had begun to take a confrontational edge.

  "No reason, but there are choices! I made my choices..." I could see that he was absolutely astounded to hear the little girl who used to innocently sit on his knee talk in such a way, about subjects once removed from bland generality to the personally specific, he found so embarrassingly distressing.

  "I think you were frightened. I think that you are still frightened," I pursued him relentlessly.

  "Frightened of what?"

  "Frightened of women, frightened of living your life, frightened of sex!"