Rape

by Marcus Van Heller

  She smiled at me in a twinkling recognition of my suggestion of mutual sympathies.

  "Well, well," she said. "I'm sure Henry and I could provide you with some material." She laughed with an air of good-natured tolerance in the driver's direction and he grunted.

  "What's your name?" she asked me, suddenly. "I might have read something you've written."

  I hesitated a split second. I had intended to lie about my name just in case they read English newspapers. But I decided with the unlikelihood of that and the possibility of their seeing my passport, plus a certain feeling that I might see more of them than I'd bargained for, that it would be more practicable to tell the truth.

  "Harvey Crawford," I answered. The woman pondered. I sat silent in amused anticipation.

  "Do you write for Colliers at all?" she asked. "Sometimes-but it's a very competitive market."

  "Yes. I think I've seen your name in the magazine

  -but I can't remember what it was you were writing about."

  "I've written a few short stories for them and some articles on art," I replied, warming to my tale. "But I haven't done much lately as I've been working on my first novel."

  "How interesting. And do you paint as well, then?" she asked.

  "Better than I write, I think," I answered.

  "I've always wanted to have my portrait painted," she murmured, as if more to herself than to me.

  "I'd be delighted to repay your kindness to me if you're staying long enough in Cannes," I said.

  "Oh, no" she laughed. "I was only musing. How rude that must have sounded."

  "Not at all. I'd be flattered to be allowed to paint you. I'm quite serious."

  "That's really very nice of you. We'll see," she replied.

  We talked for a long time about art and writing in which she had a certain "cultural" knowledge and she eventually introduced herself and her husband. Her name was Gene Gaynor. Her husband said nothing.

  After the woman had solicitously asked if I'd care to eat yet, we pulled up at a large roadside restaurant for a meal. We had made great progress under the concentrated guidance of Mr. Gaynor and were clearly going to reach our destination in good time.

  Out of the car, I was able to take better stock of my companions and it was a pleasant stocktaking regarding Gene Gaynor. She wore a sleeveless blouse, exposing her slim brown arms, a scarf at her neck. Her legs were covered by fawn coloured slacks which fitted neatly over her small round buttocks, her slim hips. Her breasts, too, as far as I could judge, were small, but well-shaped, and she held herself with a carefree poise. I passed out a bag to her from the back seat and in taking it she brushed her fingers against mine. I looked up quickly and her eyes were smiling at me.

  We followed Henry Gaynor into the restaurant. He was not very tall-no more so than his wife-and his thickset figure was running to fat. His face, which might once have been manly handsome, was not flabby and not very distinguished. He could have passed for his wife's sugar daddy.

  During the meal I tried to give the conversation to Henry Gaynor for a while. I felt I was beginning to establish a sympathy with his wife, but I was a little put out by the man's silence.

  Eventually he relaxed a little after a good bottle of wine and talked about the way the car stood up to the most rigorous treatment and had been over most of the world with him. He was obviously a rich man, but it was difficult to say what his wealth was founded on. He was one of those men who is described as "in business." He had read a few books, his favourite author being Jerome K. Jerome-"always good for a laugh"-and his specialty was golf. Then, as if he had said too much, he relapsed into silence, concentrating on his food and his wine.

  Over our coffee, Henry excused himself to go to the toilet. Gene Gaynor looked at me as if to say 'alone at last' and reaching over the table, smoothed her fingers over my eyebrow.

  "You've the remains of a nasty bruise there," she said, pursing her lips in sympathy. "And down here." She brushed her hand over my cheek. "Did you get in a fight?" Her cool fingers rested on my cheek for a second or two while her eyes smiled gently at me.

  "Yes. I got involved in a brawl in Les Halles," I answered. "One of those affairs where you have no time to prove your neutrality, when it's every man for himself."

  "You poor dear. Those bruises really need some attention." Her solicitousness, little marks of affection, were coming more and more in the open.

  "You're very charming," I answered.

  She smiled contentedly at me and Henry returned and flopped into his seat.

  A little while later Henry paid the bill.

  "Really. Please be our guest. We've been so glad to meet you," Gene Gaynor said-and I couldn't gracefully refuse.

  I opened the car door for her and for a moment as she climbed in, she placed her hand on my arm as if to steady herself. Her fingers squeezed into my flesh although she didn't look at me. I thought, on the whole, she was inclined to be a little too rash.

  We chatted pleasantly while the countryside, the towns, the villages sped by. Even Henry joined in a little more as the day wore on. I realized that perhaps he was a litle shy, a little embarrassed at his wife's unconcealed attitude towards him-an attitude of tolerant amusement was perhaps the most accurate way of describing it. Embarrassed, perhaps, at what appeared to be his defenselessness against it.

  We stopped for a drink on the last lap of the journey-insisted on paying this time-and it was then that Gene Gaynor suggested we might all care to go for a swim the following morning. I said I would like to very much. Henry said he had promised to play golf.

  "Oh, you and your interminable golf," Gene Gaynor simulated a pout. "Surely you can put that off until later."

  "Well, I said I'd telephone George as soon as we arrived, but I suppose I could leave immediately after a swim and have lunch at the club." Henry had done the unexpected.

  I explained that I, too, had arranged to see a friend on my arrival-I was afraid Gene Gaynor was about to suggest I should stay at their hotel and, although by no means poor at the moment, with my uncertain future I had no wish to be over-extravagant. So they put me down in the centre of the town and I arranged to meet them the following day in a cafe.

  After taking a room at a small, comfortable hotel, I studied French and English papers, but could find no later news about myself.

  The following day I arrived at our rendezvous early so that I could watch them approach. Gene swung lithely out of the car dressed in a yellow sweater and a full, gaily coloured skirt under which her legs moved freely. I rose and shook hands with them both and after a coffee and a little bright chatter we set off for a less densely populated stretch of the beach-an impossibility to find.

  Settled at last we followed the custom of stripping on the beach. I had bought a pair of trunks and a towel, which, like the others I wore under my clothes. Clothes piled beside us, we lay back for a while in the hot sun, soaking it into our skins, watching the bathers and sleepers gathered in little family clots, strewn in pairs, single sometimes, with newspapers over their faces, drinking lemonades, beers, eating bananas.

  The bruises on my body were disappearing under the brown of my tan and beside Henry I must have cut a fair figure. Thick and hairy, he had at one time been muscular in an ungraceful way. Now his muscles were being inundated with layers of loose flesh which rounds of golf were not sufficient exercise to dispel.

  But I noticed Henry only in passing for I was unable to restrain myself from studying Gene, a fact which she noticed, catching my eye upon her from time to time. She had one of those figures which, half-hidden under clothes, suddenly blossom into much more provocative dimensions when revealed. More provocative proportions rather. For the slimness of the waist is suddenly revealed and the slim beauty of the legs, the firm small roundness of the buttocks-hidden, in their smallness, under clothes,-the firm pointed protrusion of the breasts, which again appear as only medium mounds under the disguise of swathing clothes.
Gene Gaynor was like a piece of willow, a woman without awkward angles, seeming, as some women do, to have been whittled out of one slim, smooth, strong piece of spongy wood. I was enchanted.

  She, catching the admiration in my eyes, seemed to tense her body, to turn, showing it off, imperceptibly while a gleam of sex charged her eyes as she smiled at me.

  Henry lay, oblivious to our growing recognition, eyes closed, fat chest heaving whitely in the sun.

  "I'm going in now," Gene announced after a while. "You coming, Henry?"

  Henry grunted and said he would later. He preferred a snooze.

  "Are you coming?" She looked at me, raising her eyebrows, slightly.

  "Certainly," I answered.

  The next moment, she was racing with quick little strides over the soft sand, nearly tumbling, feet pushing for a firm foothold bringing out the sturdy little muscles in her calves and thighs. I raced after her, drawing quickly level over the firmer sand of the shore. We plunged together into the foam-flecked blue, the warm but cool-feeling water. For some distance we swam out together, free-style. She was quite a powerful swimmer and I had a job to keep up. Soon we were lost from the shore, cut off by dozens of bathers, whose heads and bodies and rubber rafts ebbed and flowed in a fluid wall. She relaxed at last and paddled, recovering her breath from the exertion.

  "Isn't it wonderful?" she shouted across the few feet of water which separated us.

  "I think," I called back, "that I'm going to enjoy my stay here much more for having met you."

  "I'll do my best to help." She had paddled closer and for a moment our hands touched. Impossible to say whose grip tightened first, but the underwater pressure swept up together with the pull of our hands and she was there alongside me in the water, face and shoulders beautifully bronzed against the white of her bathing cap and costume, hazel eyes melting in a soft caress, lips slightly parted. There, upright in the water I kissed her and she responded fiercely. We sank, together below the surface, broke and came to the surface again, eyes laughing at the pleasure of a new discovery.

  We swam and floated a little more and then made our way back through the jostling bodies to the shore.

  Henry appeared to be asleep when we sank, wet, but already drying, in the sand beside him. Gene sprinkled sand on his reddening stomach, letting it fall from higher and higher altitudes until he awoke with a start.

  "Go and have a swim." she told him. "You need some exercise or you'll never get round the course."

  Henry slapped her playfully-the first sign of life he'd shown towards her since I'd met them-and waddled off to splash eventually into the clear sea and paddle his way from the shore.

  "I think I'll get dressed while there aren't too many people looking," Gene murmured, "It'll be hopeless trying to get a bathing hut. I never bother."

  "Yes, go ahead," I said with a slight inflection which made her flash a quick sexy smile at me.

  "You're not to stare," she said.

  "I'll try not to," I answered, continuing to look at her.

  I lay still, watching her through eyes half closed against the glare of the sun as she dried herself rapidly in the exposed places of her body. Sitting, half covered by her towel she slipped her shoulder straps off and pulled the sweater over her shoulders. Of course, she wouldn't be wearing any underclothes as she'd arrived with her costume already on. I watched her appraisingly as she slipped the damp costume clingingly from her torso and had a glimpse, which she seemed in no hurry to prevent, of the whiter rounds of her breasts before the sweater slid over them. She would need no brassiere anyway to keep those firm little breasts haughtily poised. She inserted the end of the towel under her sweater, dabbing and massaging the damp flesh into dryness and then, wrapping the towel round her waist so that it formed a skirt with a split from waist to knee down the side facing me, she wriggled out of the costume altogether. The thin strip of flesh, laid bare to me down the whole length of her leg, revealed the shadowed beginnings of the slight concaves of her buttocks as she tensed a leg to dry it with an end of the towel.

  "I hope, Harvey, you don't object to my deshabille," she said, quietly.

  I had noticed the invitation in the use of my Christian name.

  "As a matter-of-fact I find you most charming that way," I replied. "Although not, perhaps quite sufficiently deshabille."

  She laughed at my bold acceptance of the cue.

  "Well, this is hardly the place," she said.

  "I await the right one with eagerness," I retorted.

  She slipped her skirt over the towel, buttoning it up the side, her lips apart in a light smile and then whisked the towel away from under the covering, reaching under the skirt again to dab dry her legs and intimate places.

  For my part I felt it more fitting to the circumstances to await Henry's return before I started a striptease act. While we waited for him to reappear, Gene drew faces which were immediately obliterated by silvery falls, in the sand at her feet.

  "Henry spends a lot of time playing golf while we're here," she said. "He always leaves me to my own devices to a considerable extent."

  "I got the impression his opinion wouldn't have worried you much anyway," I suggested.

  "Well, I don't like to be too flagrant in my abuses," she answered." Henry has a lot of money and I believe he thinks I wouldn't be completely unfaithful to him."

  "Which of course is his little dream," I said.

  She smiled at me with a deep smile that was as if she had opened her arms to me.

  Further conversation was cut short by the arrival of Henry, stalking unsteadily through the sand. He plomped down beside us saying that he thought he had time to have lunch in town if he popped round and saw George before hand.

  "Don't put yourself out, dear. I have Mr. Crawford to keep me company."

  There was a suggestion of hurt sarcasm in her voice which I thought rather clever and which Henry obviously took literally.

  "No. Oh no, of course not," he muttered quickly. "I can do that easily. Are you sure, dear, that you don't mind me being away during the afternoon?"

  "Oh, I'll cope," she answered airily.

  Henry and I dressed as discreetly as we could and we must have contrasted considerably. He with his gone-to-seed flabbiness, fast becoming a stocky rotundity; I with the slim muscular remnants of earlier athletic days and the tuning-even against a certain amount of dissipation-which later judo training had provided. I noticed Gene's deep hazel eyes roaming over us and could sense that these were her thoughts.

  Once dressed we headed for the car and then Gene suggested that Henry should leave us and visit George to save time.

  "It's in the opposite direction to the hotel," she said.

  "I feel like a walk and perhaps Mr. Crawford would be good enough to see me back to the hotel."

  "All right, dear," and Henry was away, threading painfully in the huge car through the multi-sized, multi-coloured blizzard of traffic.

  Walking back the few hundred yards to the hotel, Gene linked her arm with mine and turned her body in towards me slightly. With an uneasy stirring in me, I could feel the firm, warm flesh of her breast pressing against my biceps, her hip, naked under the thin skirt, rubbing against mine.

  "Are you taking me out this afternoon?" she asked, with the contented anticipation of one who knows the answer already.

  "What does Henry think you do?" I asked.

  "Oh, he thinks I swim, walk on the sands, ride, eat, drink, go to the cinema. But he wouldn't mind me going out with you, anyway. Henry's like that. He knows he has no choice really and he'd sooner keep me than restrict me in these little things and risk losing me. Not, as I said, that he really thinks I'd be unfaithful to him."

  "You have it all your own way, in fact," I said with a grin.

  "Uh-huh." She pressed against me with a little movement of affection-or desire.

  We reached the hotel in a few minutes and she disengaged her arm.

&n
bsp; "Won't you come up and have a drink?" she asked. "A little aperitif before lunch?"

  It rather amused me to find myself in the position of the sought-after, I who had so often played the role of the seeker, and I began to feel very pleasantly disposed and rather affectionate towards this woman I'd known for such a short time, in addition to sensing the thrill of union tingling my skin.

  "That would be nice," I said. And she stood, half-poised on a forward step, lips apart in a silent laugh of sheer animal excitement for a second or two before she preceded me, limbs swinging gracefully under their slight shield of clothing through the foyer.

  Once in the room, which boasted an adjoining bathroom, I noticed, she turned towards me, placing her hand gently on my chest, running it over the tight muscles of my torso through the silk shirt which I wore. Just as if this were a performance which we had rehearsed and moved into quite naturally, I drew her to me, slipping my hand over the smooth flesh of her back, feeling it taut and strong under the moving tissue of sweater.