“Do you wish to come again?”
I am become in this moment my own apparition, yet am clothed in body. Bizarre my words and yet controlled in tone.
“There are booths, places for pleasures, entertainments, here.”
“Be not too urgent in your endeavours, uncle. If it is not I, then it will be another. Are there girls to be had here, among the gypsies perhaps, the nondescripts whose blouses veil full breasts, whose mouths are sullen with desire?”
“Would you have one such? Are you more fond of women than of men? How controlled you are! Were you taught thus?”
“Question upon question!”
My laughter is released. An excitement of confession is upon me, yet I catch at hooks and covers of discretion. Perhaps it does not matter, does not matter at all. One is bound to silence by understanding rather than instruction. Among the caravans on the slope we wend. The country Arabs stare, dirty upon wooden steps that lead with brevity to small worlds of the indescribable. The crowds recede behind us. Planted here and there in grass some loiterers stand. I am eased within myself, know not the reason for my jollity, a fragrant juice of love upon my lips. The air is open here and haunted by no ghosts.
Perhaps I never was, have yet to be. The sun has warmed my bottom, glossed and round.
Behind a tent my hand is taken-I am of a sudden turned, breasts to his chest.
“I am your kin, Laura, possess the ceremonial, ancestral rights.”
“What? There are none such! Are there such? What a wanton you would make of me! Am I to have belief in things that cannot be or yet in solitude should be conducted? Dark in the night and whisperings of wind, creakings of shutters and the candles fast extinguished? Such is a poetry of movement, motion, and desire surely not too subtle for imagination.”
“At least then you have imagined!”
“Should I not? I have seen the swelling of breeches at my approach and yet have ever guarded my avenues betwixt my cheeks, between my thighs. Once, being come upon the garden, half asleep as I lay with my skirt raised, I parted my thighs, allowed all to be seen. Feeling languorous, I fondled myself, impressed the batiste of my frilled drawers to my nest, the better that the lips might then be viewed. But then Mama came and I was forced to cease my fretting. Through the fluttering fronds of my eyelashes in the sun I had seen the stiffness of his stalk so clearly outlined that it were as naked.”
“What a pretty cock-teaser you are, then! Is that the truth of it?”
“Shall you play Pontius Pilate with your wicked stand? What is truth? Am I not my own truth? Come, let us to the pillage of one less innocent than I. There is a booth, you say, a place for pleasure, entertainment? Will not the multitudes come, surprise us at some lewd display?”
His lips attempt my own. For this impertinence I move away, unclasped, and saunter here and there, beguiling as I know I can beguile.
“There will be privacies, Laura, insinuations of hands, meetings of mouths.”
“If I permit them, as to my own person. Is there some overlord there, a master, mistress, harridan, or whore?”
“A mistress, yes. One of gentle family who fell upon hard times.”
“Gay girls say the same thing, so I have heard- claiming to be the daughters of penniless clergy or shipwrecked captains. I will know her genuineness or not. Is it far?”
“On the marquee yonder, below the hill. She does not wish to be seen by all.”
“Discretion in an open place? It is to be laughed at! I sense a commonness about her purpose, but even so you may take me there. Have care that no hands are laid upon me that I might despise.”
“It shall be as you wish.”
His tone is starched and ironed. Seemingly I have offended by not falling beneath him on the grass. Fantasies, however, serve me better for the nonce. I have been beneath him, but he knows it not, have felt the slime of comings on his cock, the piston's easing from my sheltered dell, faint spatter of his sperm upon the grass.
Rather would I taste strawberries now, sugared, dipped in cream, my quim licked by a Vicar's pet while he, incurious, sleeps by. Such scenes, I believe, Rowlandson or another drew. There was a sheaf of them, as I discovered, beneath an atlas on my father's shelves. The maids were comely and the men mature. Pricks were displayed, looked thin and spired, some being seen to spout, some not. Some waited while the maidens squatted, pissed, or urinated standing, legs apart. There were soundings of experience to be made, as I apprehended. Was there pleasure to be taken in such viewing?
I laid my hand upon a prayer book as I looked, to guard myself from devils, and yet ever turned the leaves. Fadings of colouring lent a charm to all I viewed. Upon seeing how the men's testicles hung, I stirred my loins. The crests were rubicund. I licked my lips. I had not then sucked upon one such but secretly had wished it.
Upon learning that I had viewed them, for I had turned them all about, my aunt had them put away-or burnt, averring that my father had purchased them in foolish youth. One should not keep for too long images on paper, so she said, for it implied unfulfilment in the eyes of those who looked. There was-sadness in the stillness of the figures, she averred. I, being then emergent, knowing the pulsing penis at my bulb, replied that were the eyes of those depicted able to move-were some magic to enable them to move, even without movement of limbs-then sadness would be not apparent. So I cogitated and was found right in my thinking, for there must ever be movement and a flowing. The power of movement exceeds the power of sound. So is the sea witness also to this truth.
My thoughts become more dry upon approaching the marquee. Above the awnings crude paintings are displayed of women seemingly naked and yet not. They represent participants in the Tableaux Vivants which are evidently here to be seen, my uncle explaining that in such the ladies, so attired in tights of near flesh colour, array themselves in still and classic poses. The law, he says, requires that they do not move-an absurdity, yet thus propriety is maintained.
His arm goes forward, a flap moves, we enter. The ground is boarded. The planks groan and flap. Two girls, near-naked and with dirty feet, sit listless on a bench. Upon our entrance one rises and scuttles round behind a screen. My uncle coughs. Whether it is a signal of content or dissatisfaction I know not.
The girl rises, uncertain, her face too pale for this bright summer day. I would make her lie outside without a parasol.
“She'll come in a minute-the mistress. Was you to see her?”
Her voice is drab and has no taste to it. She will couple with those who will sperm her only in silence, her small mouth working like a doll's. She speaks because a silence hurts her mind and brings uncertainty.
“Yes.”
Her small hurt comes to me. I cover it with a smile as one might cover up a fretting bird that sings in darkness to bring back the sun. Upon my speaking then a lady appears. I would call her such for she has the carriage of one, the neck well held, hair groomed, faint rouge upon her cheeks. Not yet in the middle way of life, her body has a bloom of firmness, slim.
“You are well come. This is your daughter?”
“My niece, Madam. Permit me, Laura, to introduce Amelia.”
“Amelia Symington-Smythe. I have no use for anonymities-have you Her smile is charming-intimates that I might be untried. I am brought here perhaps to some green altar to be sacrificed. “I have a bower within-will you not come?”
Behind the screen an enclosure that itself is full tented, roofed, surrounded and made private. Lamps are necessary. Light glitters through green' glass, through blue, through pink. Two ottomans, and cushions here and there. We are seated. An air of hesitation hovers.