Helena Read online

  Even so, there were frustrating limitations with Gregory. He would not go down on me, although I longed for him to do so. Likewise, neither was he very comfortable with the idea of me putting his cock in my mouth. And we always, and please don't laugh Freddie, employed the missionary position. Gregory told me, rather romantically I thought at the time, that he liked to look into my eyes when we made love.

  I thought with time things might change, that as we grew together, a necessary corollary of our deepening love would be a more thorough exploration of our mutual sexual pleasure.

  Our situation was strange because even though we were both virgins, and I, of course, was the woman, I felt that it was I who had to treat Gregory gently, not to be too greedy, not to go too far too soon or else I would hurt him, or he might somehow find my lust too crude, too disgusting and go off me.

  I realized then that Gregory was much more sexually repressed than I was, but that this repression was a self-willed act, a consequence of his beliefs. I could not see any disjunction between believing in god and cunnilingus, in leading a Christian life and his making love to me from behind. But Gregory could!

  I had hoped that I would now have been able to stop fantasizing about sex; now that the real thing was happening why bother imagining it in my head? But the desire within me wouldn't let go. In the darkness of the night, alone in my room, my hand would stray between my legs, making me feel doubly guilty, in fact trebly guilty: firstly, because surely I was betraying Gregory by caressing myself anyway; secondly, I was betraying him because he never registered in my fantasies which were always peopled by strangers or half acquaintances; and thirdly, because my fantasies were becoming more and more outrageous, completely distanced from what happened to us when we made love. I could never tell him that I dreamed of being sodomised, gang-banged, bound and whipped, or given cunnilingus by a bevy of beautiful women. What had the lurid images in my world of sexual fantasy have to do with Gregory's gentle love-making?

  I'd read my Freud, my Reich, my Jung; I'd studied the feminists, the sociologists and the anthropologists. I was living in a time when society, its pleasures and its pains, was opening up and out. I knew that it was not unusual for a woman to have sexual fantasies, even wild sexual fantasies. Nothing was supposed to be repressed anymore, the most unusual sexual practices were often discussed on chat shows in the late afternoon; the body was king, its multifarious pleasuring not only a given, not only a right, but a veritable duty. But this was my problem, because I knew, I only knew. The disclosure of so many varied sexual practices remained in my mind on the mere level of intellectual abstraction. How was I supposed to equate this vertiginous free for all of sexual variety and indulgence with my sheltered life, with my parents' gentle philosophies; how could I assimilate all that libidinal relativism with meek Gregory? There was to be, as I said, no Damascus like conversions to libertinism, no assuaging of so many years of genteel conditioning. Sex carried all the weight of a biblical nomenclature: I believed in sexual tolerance; in theory at least, I could accept sexual variety; I held politically correct views about homosexuals, bisexuals, and where it was mutually consenting, sadists and masochists, but I didn't feel it. After my hand had stimulated my clitoris and my mind had conjured vivid images of domination and submission, of buggery or orgy, of what I then considered to be the grossest practices of defilement and depravity, I would be swamped by a terrible guilt, by a sense of betrayal, by a deep depression that I was so sexually incontinent, that I had so easily submitted to the temptations of the flesh, even if, at this stage, it was only my own.

  For the vast majority of time, I was happy with my relationship with Gregory; I was more than happy, my mind brimmed with love for him as I anticipated our future life together. When he moved to London and I was stuck at university completing my final year, I longed for him with such intensity that I swear my body ached. I counted down days in my mind until the next time I would see him. Every day, no matter how laborious my studies, I would write ten page letters, and although never straying into the language of my felt sentiment, the sheer prolificacy of my letter writing bespoke of my urgent need of him.

  However, as happens, people do not always live up to expectation, and sometimes when we met, I felt a certain bathetic disappointment. This was less Gregory's fault than mine, having invested perhaps too much hope, too much faith in a mere mortal. I had imagined him to be wittier, to be kinder, to be better in bed than he was in reality. How the keenness of my imagination has often let me down! Sitting on trains, or when money was tight, hunched up on coaches, my heart would race with anticipation, expectation, the hands on my watch turning painfully slowly. I would be exasperated by a short hold up on rail or road, and then as I entered the station, the excitement of seeing him would almost overwhelm me, and then I would be there, kissing him, hugging him, only for five minutes later to be wondering why I had made such a fuss.

  How can I explain this? Gregory was not deficient; he would make the necessary fuss over my presence, but he was, after all, only Gregory, not the fantasy figure I had imbued with so many qualities that he did not possess, or at least not possess in the abundance that I had imagined. We fitted together, that was all. We were made for each other; the man was my fate. I could get bored with Gregory as I got bored with my own company. The hoped for ecstasy did not happen, or after our initial embrace, did not last.

  This is not so unusual. As a species we are quick to disappointment, our dreams can be crushed by the lightest contact. I do not wish to disparage Gregory, and there was nothing too unusual, I think, about my occasional disappointment, but I mention this in the light of my only sexual experience outside our relationship, before that is, Freddie, meeting you.

  The weekend before my finals, Gregory arrived. I hadn't seen him for two weeks, and initially I hadn't discouraged him from coming to see me, but once he was there, I realized what a mistake it had been for him to come. Not only was he in my way, he also seemed to lack the sensitivity to see it. I wondered whether it was because he thought, subconsciously though it might have been, that my exams, ergo my career and my ideas, where somehow less important than his.

  Over the two days, my anger began to build up. I was annoyed with myself too for having allowed him to come in the first place, and maybe I turned that anger on him as well. It was, of course, impossible to study with Gregory sitting there in my cramped student room; Gregory kept on telling me that there was no point in cramming, that it was too late to learn any more so I should relax, take a break, go out with him instead. It incensed me, this attitude. When he had been studying for his degree, I had sat patiently with him, asking him random questions to aid his revision. He did not offer to do the same with me.

  And my exams were so important to me. Without Gregory at college, I had put all my effort into passing them. My head was full of English and Religious Studies. I so desperately wanted a first. It seemed some validation of my own intelligence, of my own self-belief.

  I had restrained my anger all during his visit, but then as he was about to depart, he asked me if I was going to go down to visit him in London the following week.

  It all came out. How could he be so inconsiderate, so selfish to ask such a thing when he knew that I would be in the middle of my exams? What did he think I was studying for?

  He apologized immediately, confessed to his tactlessness, but by then I was uncharacteristically furious. Maybe it was that his apology seemed a little too practiced. He always apologized if I was angry, even if he had no reason to. Humility meant nothing to him, apart from a functional way of him getting out of a domestic scrap.

  My specific annoyance at his insensitivity demonstrated at his having to come to see me in the first place, led to a more general assault on his character: a veritable assassination. I lambasted him for emotional cowardice, for taking me for granted; for intellectual pomposity; for not being a real man. I was terrible, lashing him with my tongue, my frayed nerves flaying his. He cowered under m
y attack, his eyes lowering, his shoulders shrugging with a kind of, 'if that's the way you feel about it,' attitude.

  He listened and listened, making no attempt to interrupt me, let alone contradict me. All that studying had caused me such stress, had been in a way symptomatic of all those things I had held inside me for too long, my social and sexual repression, my low self-esteem, even my predictable future, all my interests and my desires subsumed by Gregory's unchallengeable convictions. I was out of control and I knew it. My bitter invective culminated in a slur on his manhood, as I told him that he didn't even know how to make me happy in bed.

  Gregory's train came before we had reached any resolution, before my anger could subside into a desire for reconciliation. Why couldn't he have stayed, taken a later train? I wondered. He didn't. He slumped onto the carriage, relieved perhaps to be no longer under the lash of my acid tongue. I watched as he took up his window seat, not even looking at me as I glared at him, shouting my parting words, "It's finished Gregory. It's all over."

  The train pulled away. I watched it recede into the distance, imagining it was my future, prescribed since childhood, disappearing into the spring night air.

  It was as if I had seen him for the first time, seen an old, tired young man, a moral coward who hid his fear behind noble Christian platitudes. The love he felt for god seemed overwhelming; the love he felt for me seemed flimsy, half-hearted. I was suffused by a wonderful sense of freedom and possibility. I was free and I could do anything that I desired, no longer having to somehow fit in with what Gregory wanted.

  Of course, a few hours later I was crying in my room. How could I have been so callous, so stupid? I had thrown the one good thing in my life away. And how unfairly! Gregory had come to see me because he cared about me, because he loved me. How could I accuse him of being half-hearted, of not really caring about me, if he had spent his scarce money coming up to see me? And the things that I had said! Had he really deserved such an onslaught? That first flirtation of freedom seemed like an aberration once back ensconced with my dry texts, my dull academic books.

  But for all that, I felt an incipient pride stirring in me, something holding me back, something that remembered the sombre, tensed face in the train window; and I felt that if he truly loved me he would call me. I suppose that that is why I refused to ring him. I should have done it that night when I knew that he was back in his college, but I didn't; maybe also, I was ashamed of my behavior. Whatever, I didn't ring him and he didn't ring me. I told myself that I couldn't let my argument with Gregory ruin my chances. All my life I had been encouraged to study, to read. I couldn't worry about him, not now. I had to put all my efforts into passing my exams. After that, I could sort things out with him, when I had calmed down, when I had time to regain perspective.

  Three days later when he did call, I refused to answer, telling my flatmate to inform him that I had gone out. It was hard not answering, but by that stage, all my remorse had been turned to a kind of petrified determination to succeed in my exams. There was an unmerited belief that Gregory had provoked me, and that he couldn't really care that much for me if it had taken him so long to contact me.

  You can not, you Freddie of all people, who breezed through every examination you sat, who never worried unduly about success or failure, even though success was always a closer friend, no, you can not imagination the elation I felt once I had completed my exams, knowing that I no longer had to read through those arid theological tracts, or struggle with eighteenth century blank verse. I was confident that I had done everything I possibly could to get my first; it was now out of my hands. I could relax.

  I was not the only one to feel that way. That particular Friday night the college bar thronged with relieved students, the cheap wine flowed freely, as we celebrated our freedom from the relentless pursuit of knowledge. Everybody was happy and magnanimous: all petty antagonisms forgotten in our collective race towards oblivion.

  I am not excusing myself by saying that I was drunk. For one thing, even though you know I have never been a great drinker, I wasn't; affected yes, tipsy most definitely, but I still knew what I was doing; and secondly, Freddie, I know that I don't have to excuse anything I have done or do, to you.

  So not drunk, but most definitely reckless, I danced and danced that night, finding a kind of mental release in physical exertion, liberation in the wild, lewd gesturing of my body. I laughed manically at the most trivial of things, I hugged students I had barely had a good word to say about in three years, and I drank viscous, red wine.

  My flatmates departed from the party early, looking both concerned and perplexed at my refusal to leave with them. How would I get home? I didn't know and I didn't care. What should they say if Gregory rings? Tell him I'm dancing. So, I was left alone on the sweaty dance floor, enjoying the feeling of exhilaration that swept through my body, dancing to the loud pounding rhythms of the dance music.

  At eleven, I left the college bar. I'd been dancing and chatting with some students from my English class. They had asked me to go on to a party with them, but I had refused, thinking that really it was time for me to get back. As they left together in a taxi, I felt an immense sense of disappointment that I had not gone with them, and instead was returning to my shared house. I felt angry with myself. All the literature I loved had been about affirmation and adventure, about accepting life in all its diversity, yet here I was refusing every opportunity that came my way, too frightened to even begin to live.

  I ambled to a taxi rank and waited in line for a cab. The queue was full of Friday night revellers off to discos and nightclubs. It often happened in such places that boys would try to pick up girls by asking them where they were going, the more gallant willing to pay, the less, with offers of splitting fares. The campus had been full of horror stories about what had happened to those who had accepted lifts, and I remember in my own house a rather smug discussion where we had all agreed how mad girls had been to accept such potentially dangerous proposals.

  However, as I waited in line that night, there as usual being a dearth of taxis at the weekend, a man in front of me, who I hadn't been paying much attention to, turned and asked me where I was going.

  "Drysdale," I said.

  "Do you want a lift with us, luv?" he asked, pointing to his two mates who stood beside him.

  I knew that being a good little girl, I should have said no, but after so annoyingly refusing to go to a party that I really had wanted to go to, I boldly said yes.

  I was introduced to Phil and Bruce. Phil was about thirty, a strong man, with slicked back hair and strongly defined features. He would have been handsome if there wasn't something a little rough looking about him, a drunken leer in his eyes, a self-regarding swagger about the way he stood. A ragged scar arched a couple of inches from the lobe of his ear to the centre of his cheekbone adding a sense of danger to his general appearance. Bruce was much younger, barely of a legal drinking age, fresh faced, a pair of pale blue eyes under a short crop of wheat-coloured hair. Jack, my interlocutor, was by far the most handsome of the three: his face looked intelligent, spoke of an experiential knowledge that the other two did not possess.

  To the generally middle class girls of the college these were stereotypical "townies", boys out for the night looking for some promiscuous encounter. They had the kind of rough, and, to me, foreboding faces that I wasn't used to seeing in my rural childhood, only maybe occasionally in a gardener or a farm boy. It was always considered uncouth amongst my college friends, a kind of unwritten rule, that you never dated such boys.

  I have to say that as I entered the taxi I did feel a certain sexual charge, my erotic imagination still fully functional through the perceptible befuddlement of my booze affected brain.

  They let me sit in the front, as they squashed in the back. They had been drinking too, but it would be unfair to say that any of them were drunk either. They laughed heartily in the back about some girls they had come across in the pub. Phil said something
about a blond girl being 'a bit of a dog', but Jack shushed him up in deference to my presence in the front of the taxi.

  I didn't speak to them much, but looking through the rear view mirror I could see Bruce staring at me. I smiled, but in his embarrassment he turned away. Jack started to make conversation:

  "So, where are you from, luv? You don't sound as if you're from around from 'ere!"

  I told him where I was from and that I was studying at the university.

  "A smart lass, and what are going to do when you finish, like?"

  "I haven't the faintest idea," I said turning my eyes around to glimpse him, suddenly aware of how plummy my accent must have sounded to them. Jack, though, seemed neither perturbed nor amused by the way I had spoken. There seemed something protective about him, some intimation of kindness, I thought.

  As we arrived in Drysdale, I asked how much I owed for the taxi ride.

  "You owe us nowt, love. Don't worry, though, we're all getting out. We only live around the corner." It was Jack again, reaching his arm over, handing a note to the silent driver.

  I didn't feel at all apprehensive about them getting out with me. I was only two doors from my flat and I wasn't particularly scared of these men, not even scar-faced Phil.

  I perfunctorily protested at taking a free ride but they wouldn't relent. Gallantly, they walked me to the door and said good night as I reached inside my handbag for keys.

  Then almost as an afterthought, Phil said: "How about a nightcap then, if you're not doing owt. The night's young an' all that."

  To my house mates, all securely tucked up in their beds, the idea of going back with three men would have sounded like the height of lunacy, but as I said, I was tired of turning down invitations. I still felt that mixture of annoyance with myself for not going to the party and elation after having at last finished my exams.