Most of her friends were virgins too. The sexual revolution might have wreaked rampant havoc everywhere else in the world by 1970, but in Pelham Bay and nearby Durraton married men still had ‘fancy women’, the contraceptive pill had yet to become freely available, young girls who got pregnant had their bottoms smacked by hysterical fathers, and books with a high sexual content, from Fanny Hill to Lady Chatterley’s Lover, were known simply as ‘dirty’ and you had to cover them in plain brown paper.
Jenny and her friends had been ‘brought up proper’. It might not make much difference in the long run, but the rigours of doing their homework and not staying out late, added to more than their share of parental brainwashing, was inclined to protect their virginity for longer than usual.
So long, lanky Jenny lay dreaming about what she had never quite had, and of being five-foot nothing and shaped like an egg timer. Angela Smith was five-foot nothing and shaped like an egg timer.
A blow fly buzzed noisily in Jenny’s ear. She flicked at it instinctively and her eyes opened in an involuntary blink. There was Angela, looking smugly angelic like her name, leaning against Todd Mallett instead of a chair. Todd was totally captivated by Angela in those days. His arm was around her shoulders. His hand rested on her left breast, pretending its position was an accident. He stirred and kissed the top of Angela’s head.
That was quite enough for Jenny. She dumped Cobbett on the lavatory roof where she felt he belonged, and jumped to her feet, shouting that she was going for a swim.
The concrete was burning hot beneath her bare toes. Jenny ran as fast as she could along the parade to the steps, down over the pebble ridge to where the sea hit the flat rocks at the bottom of the cliffs. There are places there where the Atlantic is deep and green and the rocks form natural diving boards stretching out to sea. When the tide is high and the surf is low, it is safe to dive in and down to the sand and pebbles and weed twenty feet and more below. Jenny knew every natural diving board that Pelham Bay had to offer. Nimble-footed she ran from pebble to pebble across the ridge. Years of practice made sure that she never stumbled. Speed and fleetness of foot were the secret. She headed for the furthest of the flat rocks and sprinted into a dive. Down down into the cold water, then, floating slowly upwards into the sun again, Jenny rolled onto her back and lazily crawled seawards, looking back towards the holidaymakers splashing around in the shallows. She was a competition swimmer, powerful and confident.
It was four o’clock in the afternoon when Mark Piddle got the call. ‘Your patch, old boy,’ said his editor.
Mark was twenty-three years old now, a trainee reporter in the last year of his apprenticeship. He had first been to university and gained a degree. He often wondered how, because he had been an idle, although able, student, just waiting to do what he had always known was the only thing he could ever do — join the staff of a newspaper. He was spending the afternoon in bed with his girlfriend, Irene Nichols. He had moved her into his small one-bedroomed flat just two months before, and she was the first girl he had ever lived with. It was a whole new scene for Mark; he had found something he had needed for a long time, and everything else came second to the suddenly freely available sex, which dominated his life. Everything, that is, except the job that he had dreamed of since he was a small boy.
He replaced the receiver on the phone in the living room, thinking briefly as always of the days when he would be able to afford a bedside extension. Standing there for a moment, naked, still half-erect, scratching his head, his beard and his balls, he wondered if he could manage any serious work that day. But the thought of a body found in Pelham Bay — a murder, his boss Jim Sykes had said — was almost as exciting to Mark as sex. It was just that the timing of the call had not been good. He hadn’t finished yet. Through the open door of the bedroom he could see Irene still lying on the bed, her little-girl breasts pointing towards him, and he could feel his erection hardening again.
For just a couple of seconds he hesitated. Then he walked towards the waiting girl. It wouldn’t take long now. He was nearly there.
‘Who was it?’ asked Irene, in the ringing tones of the commonest area of Durraton, which Mark always pretended he did not notice. In fact it grated badly, in spite of his loudly proclaimed socialist ideals. As the son of Durraton’s vicar, Mark had been educated at a minor public school, populated mostly by farmers’ sons, which had given him an average education, an above-average arrogance and sense of his own importance, an even more above average obsession with sex and all its possible variations, and a distinctive accent which he was just beginning to learn to tone down to a universally acceptable level.
‘Jim,’ he said, deciding on a show of totally false indifference. ‘Still thinks he’s working for a national daily, silly old bugger. Our rag doesn’t come out until Thursday... but he just has to ring me up in the middle of a Sunday afternoon, doesn’t he? “My patch” indeed!’
Irene wanted to know what the story was. Mark was too busy to answer. His hand had slipped down between her legs. Typically he thrust three fingers into her without warning. She instinctively flinched, but he pushed all the harder. She was willing enough; even when he hurt her. That was why he had moved her in, to the dismay of her parents, who believed, quite correctly, that he was using her. His own parents pretended that they did not know Mark was living with anyone — let alone a girl from the lowliest council estate for miles around.
Mark was still at an age and way of thinking when all he required from a girl was a good time in bed. Actually, for him it was an attitude that was never to change much.
He never hit Irene — he was not violent in that way — but the sexual act was an act of aggression much more than of love for Mark. Their frequent protracted sessions left Irene more or less constantly slightly bruised and battered inside and out. But Mark excited her. He was someone from way beyond her limited horizons. And she doted on him, more like a puppy dog and its master than a young woman and her lover.
Mark was chewing on her breasts now. Her nipples were hard as buttons. She began to fidget obligingly. She had got used to the fingers harshly pushed inside her, and they were not hurting so much. With his other hand Mark shoved her legs upwards, spread them wide apart, and began to play with her bottom. She flinched again. He reached for some of the cream on the bedside table. It was not so bad then. Soothing almost.
Anxious as ever, she spoke to him in drawling throaty tones dedicatedly copied from bad American movies. ‘You’re not going are you?’
‘Certainly not,’ lied Mark. He rolled over between her legs, startlingly aware of his own desperate horniness again and sure in the knowledge that Irene would demand no further arousal. He drove himself into her. She was ready at any time for anything he wanted to do to her with little or no preparation. Anything at all in exchange for the certainty that he would let her be there that night and the next morning and the next night. Ashamed of his thoughts he hammered into her, bigger and harder and more selfishly than ever.
He thrust inside her so forcefully she slipped towards the side of the bed, so that her head and shoulders were over the edge. He had his hands on her shoulders, forcing her downwards. This made her pelvis swing up towards him, and seemed to force her open even more. He was a long way inside her and it was sensational. He knew he must be hurting her back, but he couldn’t stop. His mouth was on hers, his teeth bruising her lips. His tongue down her throat made it impossible for her to protest. Ultimately the top part of her body slipped off the bed, so that she was balanced on her head and shoulders, wedged on the floor against the side of the bed with her legs flailing helplessly in the air while he was still in there hammering away, relentlessly pressing her into the floor. The top of his body weighed a ton on her chest and shoulders, and he had his hands on her wrists now, pinning her down. His legs were still on the bed, and by kneeling slightly he was able to force himself into her even more powerfully. He liked the feeling of her total helplessness. He was so far in he thought he was going to touch his penis with his tongue as he thrust it into her throat. God, he liked it this way.