It hurt Charlie a little as she thrust herself home and began to slip slowly up and down, but it was delightful pain.
His man's voice seemed strangely old, and Charlie wondered what on earth that staid personage would think if he knew exactly where his master was getting on the phone from. Suits he asked for, collars, shirts, etc., boots and ties, and at the hats he spent violently. He felt a savage bite on the neck, and collapsed with his man's voice in his ear, saying, 'Yes, sir, and your aunt's here, sir, and would like to speak to you, sir.'
Charlie gasped, but there was no way out of it; Aunt Lavinia must not be offended.
'Oh, Charlie, is that really you? What wonderful inventions these are. I feel I can almost see you-'
Charlie shuddered.
'-and I hear you're having your things sent down by motor. How nice. Do you know, I've never been in one. I shall take the chance of running down to see you; I can get back by train. See you later-goodbye'-and she hung up.
Charlie explained the situation to the girl, as she leisurely buttoned him up.
'Oh, let the old lady come,' she said 'I can behave like a lady; don't you worry. I was brought up as one. I'll put on my very best party airs, and she won't complain of her dinner, I give you my word. Does she know Bertie, by the way?'
'Oh, certain to.'
'Very well; I'll be a foreign widow, who met Bertie in Hamburg or somewhere. I speak perfect French and German.'
Charlie weakly acquiesced.
'I'm afraid you don't quite know Aunt Lavinia,' he said; 'she's very, very mid-Victorian!'
'Never mind, I can be early Victorian. I'll be her friend for life before she's been here two hours. Now come along into the house, and I'll tell you what 1 really want you to do for me-or-it is a lovely morning, and 1 don't know whether you like swimming or not, but I do, and I've a lovely little private bathing place nearby.'
Charlie was very much ready, and after the page-boy had been sent to give the chauffeur his instructions, they wandered off, hand in hand, down a little lane to a highly palisaded backwater.
There were two big and comfortable dressing-rooms, one for men and one for women.
'Sometimes we are very respectable and wear bathing costumes and things,' Maudie explained; 'but sometimes, like this morning, for instance, we don't do anything of the sort, and you are just going to undress me, mother naked, and we'll swim about like Adam and Eve.'
It was not the first time Charlie had got into a bath with a cockstand, but it was the first time he had dived in to swim like that. When he turned over to float, the little siren Maudie swam up to him and laughingly tied a dainty handkerchief on to his rampant mast.
' Now you can show your colours,' she said. 'You look like a submarine with the periscope stuck out of the water.'
She swam like a sea-nymph, and her figure, all naked and glistening with the water as she poised herself for her dives, made Charlie forget all about Aunt Lavinia, tailors' bills or any worries in this world. He made an ineffective attempt to get into her while they were both floating-he had heard of such things being done-but the result was nearly a watery death for both. However, they managed to toss each other off, then Maudie called a halt, and they clambered out and on to the landing stage.
The mattresses, covered with thick towelling, were beautifully soft, and their wet bodies sank luxuriously into their embrace.
'There's a very pretty little grass slope over there,' said Maudie, 'if you prefer nature. For my part, I agree with the late lamented Oscar Wilde-Nature may be very nice to look at, but it was not intended to sit on. Let's lie here, and let the sun dry us. There are lots of little towels lying about if you want one.'
Charlie's only reply was a passionate kiss.
His hand strayed to where it shouldn't, but the girl put it gently away.
'Not just now, dear,' she said; 'we've had a good bit. Lie quiet in the sun. You can smoke if you like. You'll find cigarettes in the cupboard in the dressing-room, and all sorts of drink if you want it. Personally, I should like a little champagne cup. Yes, I should: my butler makes it to perfection. I'll phone up to the house.'
'But-he mustn't see us like this.'
'Oh, he won't; there's a sliding door opens into the back of the cupboard.'
She went to the telephone. How lovely she looked standing there in all her naked grace, quite like a Grecian goddess-and what a contrast to the very modern apparatus in her hand. Charlie longed to take a photograph of her, and the girl seemed to divine his thoughts.
'Like to take a picture of me? There's a camera in the shed. I know you photograph.'
Charlie took six. He was an ardent and expert photographer, and he had taken many pictures from the nude, but he had never had such a model as this. He appreciated now the beauty of the shaven mount of Venus; she was shaved under the arms too.
The cup came in a beautiful old china bowl accompanied by two Venetian glasses with long silver stems, like magnified punch ladles. They squatted with the bowl between them, and sipped. It was heavenly.
'Does old-er- Tubby come to do stunts like this?' asked Charlie.
'Oh, Lord, yes; he flops about like a porpoise.'
'Lucky beggar!'
'Well, I suppose he is lucky. He spends a great deal on me, of course; you can see this house isn't run on air, but he is lucky in getting a girl a little out of the common to arrange amusements for him; you've no idea yet what we can do for you.'
'I should die;'
'Oh, no, you wouldn't. If you take lust delicately and scientifically, it hurts no one; only people who fornicate like animals, and have no thought above the actual parts of their bodies which are in contact, upset their constitutions. This is a pretty little swimming place, isn't it?'
'Ripping.'
'And the mixed bathing very much au naturel is jolly, isn't it?'
'Rather.'
'My own idea. They used to do it, I believe, in Medmenham Abbey days. Now we'll dress and go in; I want to show you the house. Bring the camera, and we'll develop those. Take some more of me in various stages of my getting dressed, and use up the whole spool.'
Charlie, nothing loth, did. First with just her stockings and shoes on, then with a hat added to that, next with drawers, and so on through the stages till the complete, idyllic, muslin-clad river girl used up the last exposure.
They got back to the house by another route, through a somewhat severely classical garden, peopled with very excellent statues of heathen gods and goddesses.
'Tubby doesn't like this,' she said; 'he calls it the Lemprierium. I caught him one day trying to shoot the fig leaf off that Apollo with an airgun. I punished him by having him strip, gumming a great fig leaf on him, and making him walk about here for two hours: each time he passed the Apollo he had to apologise to it and kiss its behind. The others did laugh; you know what Tubby's figure is like.'
Charlie was prepared to be surprised at the house, but he was more than surprised. Very large, an old Elizabethan mansion, slightly built on to and modernised, it was from without the embodiment of stately grace while within it provided the most up-to-date comfort. Charlie remembered that Tubby's father owned many factories in Lancashire, but they must do pretty well to keep this up; the old man himself had a bit of a reputation for chorus girls.
They went cursorily through the house. It was not furnished at all like a tart's house, but rather like that of a great lady of fashion. The servants were certainly rather comic opera, and a prettier lot Charlie thought he had never seen. The menservants he encountered were French, bar the very staid old butler.
They came at last to a little boudoir overlooking garden and river.
'Now we'll talk,' said Maudie. 'First of all, give me that camera; I'll have the pictures developed.'
The white-clad page-boy took the machine.
'Firstly, Charlie Osmond, I know all about your skill as a photographer. Well, I'm mad on it myself, and I'm pretty good, as you shall see directly.