‘Tomorrow morning?’ I said with some surprise.
My host laid his hand on mine across the table.
‘The sooner you go, the sooner you’ll be safe, my dear.’
‘Your papers are in order?’ Lieutenant Hawkes asked me.
My host replied for me. ‘Quite in order,’ he said with finality.
‘In that case,’ Hawkes said, ‘tomorrow morning’s as good as any. I don’t want to hang about Singapore for my leave.’
‘Quite so,’ the other replied. ‘Mr Hawkes, my dear, is going to fly you as far as Calcutta, quite a distance, some 2,000 miles. You will of course break the journey, twice in fact, once at Bangkok and again at Rangoon. From Calcutta you can go where you want, by boat or train or in an ordinary passenger plane. Mr Hawkes will not have time to take you farther. It is fortunate,’ he added meaningfully, ‘that you were able to bring your passport with you when you left your husband. I shall give it to Mr Hawkes before you set out in the morning.’
The remainder of the meal passed very pleasantly. About ten o’clock, my host suggested that I should retire so as to be fresh for the morrow’s journey. I did so gladly, hoping for once that my host would not visit me in my bedroom, because after a week’s violent lovemaking my whole body ached with fatigue.
I fell asleep quickly and I was not disturbed.
The engine droned steadily. Below was the flat studded plain of a huge sea which stretched in all directions as far as and beyond the eye’s power of vision. Hawkes was even less talkative than he had been the evening before. He sat at the controls in wooden silence, his face set grimly and his lean body relaxed.
I had been studying the map. We had left the land behind us in less than two hours, and its disposition as it disappeared in a purplish haze puzzled me. It seemed to me that if we flew across the sea at all en route for Bangkok we should leave land on, and not far on, the left. As it was, we were now out of sight of land altogether, and, what was even more strange, we had seemed to fly above a very broad channel, leaving land to both sides of us as the channel widened into sea. There had been a number of ships, like toys bobbing in the ocean, but now, for the best part of an hour, there was nothing but the ominous endlessness of deep green sea.
‘Are you sure we’re going the right way, Mr Hawkes?’
‘Yes.’ He didn’t even turn to answer. He was looking straight ahead. I felt, somehow, that he was tense and nervous.
‘What I can’t understand,’ I said, pushing the map in front of him, ‘is how we left the land behind us. It doesn’t seem right according to the map.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, we should have left the land behind us to the left.’
‘We did,’ he said briefly.
‘We didn’t!’ I said in alarm.
‘Do you think I don’t know how to navigate?’
I didn’t know what to say.
‘Perhaps you’d better take over,’ he said sarcastically.
But I had begun to be afraid.
‘There was land to left and to right of us,’ I said.
‘Look,’ he said tonelessly, ‘if you think you can fly this plane better than I you’d better take over.’ With that he pushed the steering column forward and released his grip on the controls. The plane gave a sickening lurch forward and downwards, and in a fraction of a moment, as he kicked one foot forward, twisted into a spin. I screamed and closed my eyes. How long we went downwards I don’t know. I remember only that the spinning motion stopped and gradually with a terrible relentless motion the nose of the plane came upwards almost, it seemed, out of the sea. And then we were flying low over the water at what appeared at that level to be an incredible speed.
‘Had enough?’ I heard him say.
‘You damn fool!’ I shouted angrily above the roar of the engine. ‘What do you think you are doing?’
He didn’t reply. He nosed the plane upwards and slowly we gained height until we were flying at approximately the same height as before.
‘Who the hell are you, anyway?’ he said suddenly.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Come off it,’ he said drily. ‘Do you think I like doing this?’
‘What?’
‘The game’s up,’ he said, still without looking at me. ‘There’s no use shamming anymore. Look,’ and his voice was gentle suddenly, ‘I’m sorry to have to do this, really. You’re a brave woman. I respect you. But this is no time for tomfoolery.’
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ I said.
He shook his head hopelessly. ‘Look below you,’ he said. ‘Do you see any ships?’
‘No.’
‘So you haven’t a chance, have you?’
I was terrified. He was looking at me now, not unkindly.
‘What are you saying?’ I said, almost in tears.
‘Can I do anything for you? I can do it anonymously when I get back. Look, for God’s sake take a hold of yourself. You knew damn well what a dangerous game you were playing. Alright, you’ve lost. The next one might have more luck, and then it will probably be my turn. And then, later on, his. They’ll get him sooner or later.’
I broke into tears. ‘Please Mr Hawkes! I don’t understand! What are you going to do to me?’
His handsome face turned towards me again and his grey eyes were gentle. ‘If it will make it easier for you,’ he said tenderly, ‘I’ll shoot you first. But anyway, you’ll be dead by the time you hit the water.’
‘For God’s sake tell me why!’
‘You make it very difficult for me,’ he said. ‘You must have known your job was dangerous.’
‘What job?’
‘Oh, for God’s sake cut it out!’ he said. ‘Do you think we believed your Commander’s wife story for a minute? Really, I didn’t think the authorities could be so naive. Your job was suicide.’
‘You must listen to me!’ I said desperately. ‘You must believe me! I don’t know what you’re talking about!’
He looked at me incredulously.
‘Are you trying to tell me you are not an agent of the British government?’
‘Of course I’m not! Don’t you see?’
His expression was perplexed. ‘I almost believe you,’ he said.
‘You must believe me!’
For a long time he was silent.
‘I believe you are telling the truth,’ he said at last.
‘Oh, of course I am!’ I began to say, but he cut me short.
‘Quickly,’ he said, ‘tell me who you are and what you were doing in Chen’s house.’
As briefly as possible I told him the history of my adventures since leaving my home village in Australia, how I had run away from home, given myself to men, travelled thousands of miles to arrive finally, almost desperate, in Chen’s garden. He did not press me for details about my sexual affairs but his lips loosened in a soft, nakedly sensual smile. And then he laughed. Turning to face me, he said:
‘You must prove it to me, Helen.’
‘How?’
‘Have you ever made love in an aeroplane?’ he said.
I shook my head.
He laughed softly. ‘Take off your clothes, Helen,’ he said.
‘Sit astride my knees,’ he said.
I was standing beside him, completely naked. My clothes lay in a small heap by the side of his seat. His right hand, reaching to the cabin floor, stirred amongst my still-warm silk scanties.
‘How warm your clothes are!’ he said, and his hand moved upwards from the discarded silks to the warmer, more living silken surface of my inner thigh. He pulled me gently towards him, raising his hand under the heavy substance of my thigh so that my leg swung over his knees and I had only to sit to bring my warm belly and the smooth-haired lip of my mound against his own parts, which he had bared with his free hand. With the other, he still controlled the flight of the plane, west-wards, across the vast waters of the Bay of Bengal. For, of course, I had not been wrong. We had travelled northwest fr
om Singapore through the straits between Malaya and Sumatra, out above the open sea. With the hand which controlled our flight he pulled me closer to his lower belly, his hand pressing against the smooth globes of my buttocks. His other hand, meanwhile, brought his excited member against the entrance to the cave of all my feeling. When he was satisfied with our position, the hand which had pressed me towards him returned to the controls, easing gradually back on the steering column so that my wet and pulsing vagina, parted at its extremity by his thrusting manhood, contained him suddenly like a glove. Up, up, up, the weight of my own flesh causing me to be spiked more deeply against the sudden upward motion of the plane. As we climbed, my whole body lay on top of his and his free hand, calmly and with the skill of a fine pilot, brought my head and my lips against his. We lay there, making an acute angle with the horizontal, our eyes open in the bright blue daylight which swamped us through the windows of the cabin, while little scudding wisps of cloud fell away below us at either side. As yet, we had hardly moved. It was the movement of the aeroplane which caused the creeping accumulation at our loins. His feet worked skilfully at the rudder bars, tilting the plane and causing my torso to swivel voluptuously against his, our bellies grazing languorously and the shock of the meeting of our bodies absorbed by the resiliency at my breasts. Our bodies, together in illusory suspension in the wide ether, absorbed all space, the lure of stars, flesh chucked minutely against flesh in this strange carnal confluence. His strong warm lower belly in its tilted position was the fang of a vast upward propulsion, raking with its fleshy dagger at the warm and viscous bin of lust which I lowered around his desire. Out of the world he seemed to drive me, beyond laws of motion, with the white ether streaming downwards with no velocity. The shifts, the slips, the slides, the slithers, the glides, the rolls did not move so much as concentrate a stranded passion, a still aerial conjunction which increased as the belly surfaces, fused by some aerostatic law, shuddered and sang above our wet sexual confusion. I could happily have ridden there pricked by this man’s passion until the world’s end, but, alas! that was not to be, for at that moment, when the seeds shifted for the thousandth time in my craving womb, Hawkes’ soft voice came to me:
‘Have you ever been beyond choice, Helen?’
The earnest seriousness of his voice brought me back to the world. My eyes read 17,000 feet on the altimeter, saw again the trailing wisps of cloud and came finally to rest on the grey eyes which looked upwards into mine with a questioning look.
I ran my fingers through the soft brown hair which framed the handsome face, the face of a flier, a dangerous man, a criminal, perhaps a traitor, but the face of a man with whom in the short space of an hour I had fallen violently and irrevocably in love. Here at last, I felt, was a man to whom I would be willing to surrender not only my body but my freedom. For the first time in my life, I felt then, I had met a man who was worthy of me. For an hour he had careened about the sky with me, controlling every tremor of our love with his wrist. I didn’t answer him. I pulled his lips upwards against mine and kissed him with all the doting passion at my command. It was I who spoke next.
‘Who is Chen, darling?’
He laughed harshly.
‘Chen is a kind of king, darling. He controls the drug traffic in southeast Asia.’
‘And you?’
‘One of his pawns,’ he said with a quiet smile. ‘I do as I’m told, double-cross the Navy, and am tolerated because I’m useful. You see, I’m one of the naval pilots who have been lent to the Customs House to track down the head of the drug ring.’
‘And he told you to get rid of me?’
‘Yes,’ he said quietly.
‘Are you glad you didn’t?’
He dropped his eyes. ‘You don’t understand, Helen,’ he said. ‘That’s what I was trying to say about being beyond choice.’
‘What do you mean, darling?’
‘I have got rid of you.’
‘How?’
‘I had no choice, Helen. When I made love to you I signed our death warrants. He would have killed me if I had taken you back, killed us both. I should have dropped you a while back. You see, my darling, there is not enough petrol to return to land. Another ten minutes and the tank will be empty.’
The grey eyes were looking into mine, calm and without fear. Even this sudden and shocking news of my impending death could not shatter the wonderful illusion of fulfilment. I lowered my lips onto his, brushing them merely with the wet full curves of my own, and then, my mouth whispering in his ear, doting, trembling, I uttered the words: ‘Fuck me again, darling, now . . . before it’s too late . . .’
I was still astride his naked thighs when the engine sputtered into silence. I burst into tears and tried to move away.
He said: ‘Stay where you are, Helen, this is the best way to die. There’s nothing we can do.’
Then began the long swift glide downwards through the scudding wisps of cirrus clouds, and the sea, like a vast inverted green-black saucer, moved upwards to meet us.
‘Don’t turn, darling,’ he said quietly. ‘I’m going to bring her down as smoothly as I can.’
The sea at the windows on either side raced past like a vast and glittering black ribbon. As the plane lurched to alight, I threw my arms around his neck and crushed his head with all the strength of my torso against my naked breasts. The aircraft shuddered, slewed, somersaulted, and then, in a fraction of a second . . . blackness.
INSERTION BY MAJOR PIERRE JAVET, ADJUTANT, GHARDAÏA.
I regret the necessity of having to interrupt the account of Mlle. Helen Smith at this point. Unfortunately, there appear to be a number of sheets missing from the manuscript.
The Arab denies all knowledge of these missing pages. He found the manuscript, he says, as it stands. All our attempts at ‘persuasion’ have been of no avail. Thus, at a critical point in the amazing document, we are left, to risk a figure of speech, ‘in the air!’ In the water, rather, for the small aircraft must have hit the water to have somersaulted in such a manner.
This is unfortunate in two ways. In the first place, the continuity of the woman’s trek across the desert with the caravan is interrupted. When we take her up again, she seems to be installed in what I imagine is some kind of brothel, and we are thus deprived of pages in which the last stages of her journey might, through her descriptions, have taken on real geographical reference. That is to say, she might have described some well-known landmark whose presence in the manuscript would have led us to trace her whereabouts quickly and efficiently. As it is, progress in our investigations is, at least temporarily, blocked.
Secondly, the continuity of the document as it pertains to her crash into a shark-infested sea with the young naval officer, Hawkes, and her subsequent appearance in the middle of India, is broken. How she escaped from that plight, and whether or not Hawkes perished (this latter appears likely because of a later reference in the manuscript to the young pilot) we shall perhaps never know.
An interesting sequel, however. Information passed on to the British government about the character Chen has already led to his arrest and conviction on a charge of wide-scale opium smuggling in southeast Asia. Other facts have already been checked by the various governments concerned and every item of information (e.g. the burning alive in a barn not far from Sydney of a man called Tony Sulla, next to whose body was found a branding iron, and in whose flat was discovered correspondence which led to many subsequent arrests) has been corroborated.
Thus, I feel, it would be stupid to doubt the veracity of the document. Literally, everything capable of corroboration has been subsequently corroborated. As for the character and inclinations of the protagonist herself, I should count myself fortunate indeed to be able to corroborate that for myself!
Chapter Seven
(An unknown number of ms. pages missing)
. . . delight in my body. For Abdullah, though a cruel man and without doubt a criminal, was an imaginative lover.
The Goda
vari River was smooth, yellow, and oppressive. The nights were deep violent-blue, shadows everywhere, and the endless guttural din, low and suggestive of white-cloaked figures which squatted near the river, smoking to drive off the mosquitoes. Sometimes a voice was raised, a shout, drunken laughter, sometimes the shrill cry of a woman or the whine of skinny children, and often, merely the eternal croaking of the frogs in the thick yellowish silence.
‘You will be my wife,’ Abdullah had said, running his strong brown hand with its thick calloused fingers through his beard. ‘You will have children. All the women have children. A woman is not a woman without children, and you will grow used to the life. We are an old people, a great people, although for the moment our star is not in the ascendant.’
He talked. Night after night when he returned to me he talked in a low guttural voice, indistinguishable from the voices of the other men, with the same heavy sensual accents, the same brave and wistful eyes. And his hand would come to rest on the hot sultry flesh of my thigh, and usually he would pull me underneath him and make love to me there and then, seeking I suspect to bind me to him by creating his child in me, a child of the river, brown, skinny, who, if he was not carried off by cholera or typhus or one of the other diseases, would grow up to be such a man, fearless, a rebel, who had never grown to accept the yoke which the English had through centuries of conquest foisted on his people.
I think he was proud to have conquered me, simply and childishly proud to have a white woman open her womb to his dark seed. And sometimes he would sit looking at me merely and softly call upon me to take off my clothes and bare the radiant smoothness of my torso for his dark and passionate lips.
From the beginning, of course, I had no intention of passing the remainder of my life there by the execrable stench of the Indian river. I would like to have borne his child for him, but I knew that that would be to seal my own fate. It was he whom I came near to loving, but with the love of a mature woman for her son. This great male who was the veritable king of the poor encampment on the banks of the Godavari was at heart a child, a child who rebelled against his ‘father,’ the British Raj, and who found in me a mother – a woman after all of the oppressors – who would connive and scheme with him for his eventual deliverance. Yes, I would not have grudged him a son, but to have become for always the subject of a subject and thus imperil my freedom so miraculously given back to me after the suicide flight over the Bay of Bengal – I could never have made that decision. Freedom? I don’t know what that is, except that it has to do with the giving of the mystery of my flanks, with the taking of pleasure into myself; it is an act, but an act which must not be contaminated by an idealism such as Abdullah’s, Abdullah the oppressed, Abdullah the rebel, Abdullah the liberator.
Helen And Desire Page 9
