Helen And Desire

by Alexander Trocchi

  ‘I’ll speak to him, Nadya. I’ll tell him it would be good for you to go to France.’

  ‘Oh, if you will, he may listen to you!’

  ‘The only point is, Nadya, that the reason you want to go is precisely the reason he doesn’t want you to go.’

  She laughed softly.

  ‘You don’t need to tell him that,’ she said slyly.

  ‘Do you think he doesn’t know?’

  ‘Oh, dear!’ she said in the voice of a spoilt child. ‘I’ll never get away!’ And then she became suddenly excited. ‘Listen, Helen! If you were to offer to go with me to Europe, he might let me go!’

  ‘Don’t be silly, I hardly know him.’

  ‘Oh, but he likes you, I can tell. He might let me go if you were to go with me – really, Helen. You’d like to go, wouldn’t you?’

  It was a possibility. The only trouble was that I didn’t have a passport. My journey halfway around the world was illegal. I wondered whether Mr Pamandari could get me one. Ever since I had set out from Australia, my steps had been dogged by the lack of this vital document. At any moment if the police should question me I could be in trouble. But surely my host, with all his vast wealth, could arrange to get one for me? And Nadya’s father would surely do his utmost if his daughter begged him to. I decided to tackle Nadya on the subject that very night. I had no doubt that she would be a willing accomplice.

  ‘You would like to go, wouldn’t you?’ she said again.

  ‘Yes, Nadya, but let’s not talk about it just now. Later, when we go to bed.’

  A crafty look came over the girl’s beautiful face. ‘You will sleep with me,’ she announced. And then she giggled. ‘It will be fun, won’t it?’

  ‘What would your father say?’

  ‘Oh, he’ll never know! We’ll rumple up your bed as though you’d slept in it and we’ll lock both our doors. Anyway, there’s a communicating door between our rooms. If anybody comes, you can easily slip back to your own bed before I open the door. See, it’s easy!’

  I laughed resignedly.

  ‘Alright,’ I said. ‘But only for tonight.’

  She giggled again. ‘Oh, Helen, you’re wonderful! Let’s go soon, now! Wait! I must go and say goodnight to Papa. I’ll tell him you were tired after the journey and have gone to bed.’ With that, she rose from her seat on the balcony and ran into the room towards the door. As I heard it close behind her, I got up myself and walked slowly across Nadya’s room to the communicating door. In my own room I turned down the bed and undressed, and then, wearing a thin silk nightgown, I slipped back into Nadya’s room, climbed into her bed, and drew the covers up to my chin. With Nadya’s help, I had begun to realise, nothing was beyond me.

  Her silvery laugh came from the other side of the room.

  ‘Helen! You’re in bed already!’ She was standing with her back to the door, which she had locked behind her, slim, of medium height, as graceful as a fawn. Her dark eyes were shining delightedly in my direction, and then, suddenly meek, she hung her head and moved across the room silently towards me.

  ‘I said goodnight to Papa,’ she said, sitting down at the edge of the bed, almost reluctant, I felt, to remove her clothes.

  I watched her with a smile.

  ‘Shall I come in now?’ It was the voice of a child.

  ‘You’d better take your clothes off first,’ I said.

  Once again, in a lightning movement, she peeled her sensuous flesh of its silk coverings and stood naked before me. Again, ashamed of her body’s heat, her petal-like eyelids drooped, veiling the eagerness of the dark eyes. Her movements were beautiful. When she poised on the balls of her feet, her pelvis was thrust forward and her breasts pricked into firm erection. Her full buttocks and her delicately studded belly shone dully with that peculiar gloss of young and virgin flesh, while the proud black tussock at the crux of her torso overhung the smooth and supple downward sweep of her tapering legs. With hesitation, she opened her eyes and looked down at me. ‘Do you really think I’m beautiful, Helen?’

  ‘Of course you are!’

  ‘I’m coming in,’ she said, as though to conceal her nervousness. I did not reply. A moment later, in the darkness – for with nervous haste she moved over quickly and switched out the light – I felt her desperate young flesh close against me. I took her firmly and gently into my arms. She made no resistance, shuddered slightly and buried her face in my neck. With one hand I touched her buttocks, grazing their delicate skin with slow titillating strokes to kindle her hymeneal torch with the flint of desire. She breathed deeply and her body exuded a sweat as delicate and as tentative as spring rain. ‘Kiss me like a man, Helen,’ she whispered urgently. I moistened my lips with my tongue and lifted her head so that hers, dry with fearful anticipation, waited at a distance of a fraction of an inch, a leaf ’s thickness away, and slightly apart, inviting like the curtains of a woman who is desperate but ashamed. I touched their soft palpable surface with the tip of my tongue, moistening the contours and causing her whole torso to twitch and quiver. Then my lips pressed more firmly against hers, her resistance gave, and my tongue penetrated into the melting vortex of her mouth. At first it was slack, passive, and unresponsive. It was the torrid part of her body which responded, blindly, closing its simmering flesh against me in the strange tropical heat generated by our bodies beneath the sheets. The mouth, which I suppose she identified with her will, for it was her mouth which was being wooed, or thus anyway she deceived herself, was open in a soft desperate paralysis. She would not give. She was being taken. She ignored the ebullient purpose of her loins, the feverish volcano which, set like a second and less modest mouth at the junction of her sweltering thighs, rubbed itself voluptuously like a cat against my thigh. That mouth was out of sight and thus she could pretend that it did not exist. Its luxury, its dissipation, was no part of her will which, mummified little nothing that it was, sought to give the impression of resistance by a feigned passivity of lips and tongue, which was the more sensitive under the sham anaesthetic. Shortly, however, even the show of resistance became impossible. She could delude herself no longer. She wanted me to goose her, to pretend that I was the man whom, in the lonely meadow of her bed, she had desired since the age of puberty. Tentatively, I felt her lips close round my tongue, making a voluptuous channel for it, shadowing in time, in imagination, the channel which she would gladly give to the male thing when it would come. Softly, through our gentle lipping motions, her whispered words came to me: ‘Be a man for me, Helen!’ All this while, I had not been physically insensible. The vast liquefaction of my ever-present desire had already spread throughout the soft vinery of my limbs. I could no longer resist the child’s passion. My fingers sought her soft and excited crevice, pruning the hairs, and slipping easily at first into the wonderful slime-coated sheath. She was a virgin. How ludicrous for this beautiful creature to have suffered so long! I would have given anything at that moment to be a man. As it was, there was something abortive in this sweet cultivation of her. How soft she was against the fine linen sheet! What a weight of sensuality quivered in her bossy thighs! What superb husbandry the tillage of this virgin field demanded! I felt suddenly unworthy, remembering the day of my own spring and my bucolic capers on the lonely beach. My first lover had been the sea himself, Poseidon, ravishing me under a wave. But it was too late to back out now. The subtle grammar of her sex had transformed this peerless Indian maiden into a lusty wench such as one might find giving herself to an elderly ploughman in the hayloft of a barn. She was a slut, a hot bitch who demanded satisfaction. She no longer spoke or even attempted to. She was a sweet bitch in the raw, gamey, sweaty, sweltering, bucking her beautiful arse like a serving-maid under a milkman. She intended to be had and my slender fingers were already too far in for safety. Her maidenhead was rending. Her whole belly was in flames. ‘A . . . aaa . . . eee . . .’ This had the effect of putting me at a distance. I felt responsible for her. If her father found out he would skin me alive and I had alr
eady realised that the morrow’s sheets would bear the telltale marks. I shook her and tried to bring her to her senses.

  ‘Nadya!’ I said urgently, removing my fingers hastily. I felt myself grasped desperately and her body, suffocated with its passion, used mine as I had used the log on the beach a long time ago. But I was adamant. If this was what she wanted she would have it. But I had no intention of compromising my position as a friend of the family. I took her cruelly by the neck and with my knee I forced her smouldering loins away from me. But I had reckoned without the will of the child. That factor in the situation had now reversed its direction and was reinforcing the white-hot combustive lust which had incendiarised her whole belly.

  She had gone mad. ‘Do it!’ she said fiercely. ‘If you don’t do it, I’ll scream and tell my father you forced me!’

  Nothing would extinguish her. At least nothing which seemed to go against her will. And so I changed my tactics.

  ‘Nadya, darling,’ I crooned. ‘Of course I am going to do it to you! I want to do it as much as you do! But we must be careful my little virgin! Otherwise the servants will know and it may get to your father . . . you wouldn’t want that, would you?’

  This had the effect of calming her. Her grip relaxed.

  ‘How?’ she said.

  ‘We must turn on the light for a moment,’ I said. ‘Do it and I’ll show you.’

  There was no shyness in her movements. Her smouldering young body was brought into bold relief by the soft electric lights. She stood there, a few yards from the bed, her wonderful tawny breast heaving and her belly rising and falling with the effort of breathing.

  I slipped out of the bed and turned back the sheets. There, on the snow-white linen was a tell-tale stain of blood.

  She looked at it with non-comprehension.

  ‘Is that me?’ she asked in a small voice.

  ‘Yes, darling,’ I said. ‘That’s what I mean. We must be careful.’

  Quickly I removed the sheet and carried it into Nadya’s bathroom. She followed me like a little dog and stood watching me with interest. As I rinsed the stained part of the sheet in cold water I was suddenly struck by our twin reflection in the mirror. I was fair and she was dark. Without exaggeration I don’t think I had ever seen two such superb young creatures. Both bodies seem to be inhabited by an almost supernatural lissome radiance. There was not an ugly curve on either of us.

  My tenderness for her returned.

  ‘You see, darling,’ I said. ‘You haven’t done this before. And the first time one does it one always bleeds a little. It’s nothing to worry about, but we must take precautions.’ I wrung the water out of the sheet and examined it to see if any traces of the mark remained.

  Nadya, meanwhile, nodded, came close to me, and kissed me lightly on the cheek. ‘You’re very good to me, Helen. I didn’t mean it about telling my father, honestly I didn’t!’

  I smiled. At the time she would have screamed without compunction. She was used to having her own way and would make a bad enemy.

  ‘Of course not, darling,’ I said gently. ‘But if you want to go on, we must take precautions.’

  ‘Oh, we must go on, Helen! I’ve never experienced anything like it in my whole life! Please let’s go on, Helen!’

  ‘Alright, but you must promise to do as I tell you. If you disobey your husband as you tried to disobey me, he’ll beat you.’

  ‘He wouldn’t dare!’ she said proudly, but then her air of superiority was suddenly transformed into a look of genuine surprise. ‘Would he, Helen?’

  ‘You wait and see,’ I said. ‘But meanwhile, if you do as you’re told, you’ll never have cause to complain that your Helen wasn’t good to you.’

  ‘Oh, I’ll be good, Helen! I promise I will! And I’ll tell you what! I’ll get my father to get you everything you want!’

  ‘There is something I want, as a matter of fact,’ I said, ‘but we’ll speak about that later.’

  ‘Oh, what is it, Helen? Tell me and I’ll get it for you!’

  ‘You wouldn’t understand. It’s a passport.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Don’t worry your pretty little head about it. I’ll speak to your father about it.’

  ‘Come on, Helen . . .’ She had forgotten about it already. She was standing close to me, her hands on my naked hips, with a playful sensual smile on her lips.

  ‘Just be patient, Nadya. Here, take this sheet and put it back on the bed. I’ve got to find something to put over it.’

  She took it gaily and slipped back into the bedroom.

  When she had gone, I selected a large bath towel. She had laid the sheet on the bed again and was lying naked on top of it, her arms stretched out like a cross and her legs spread wide, like the estuary of a deep river. I couldn’t withhold my admiration. ‘Really, Nadya,’ I said, ‘you’re the loveliest girl I’ve ever seen!’

  She smiled, simulating shyness.

  ‘What would you like to do to me?’ Her voice was sensual.

  ‘You’ll find out soon enough,’ I said, advancing towards the bed. I threw the towel towards her. ‘Put that underneath you on top of the sheet,’ I said.

  She obeyed.

  A moment later I was in bed with her.

  Her soft hands, still moist, alighted at once on my hips and drew the lower part of my body towards her. At the same time I was surprised to feel her fingers, restless and inquisitive, like birds at a nest. ‘Do you like that?’ she whispered softly. In answer I put my arms round her and drew her close to me, forging close, and our lips met again, this time without hesitation and completely thawed in sexual abandon. Meanwhile, the corrosive motion of her fingers ignited the seed, as incandescent as magnesium, in my loins, and, chafing strongly with my limbs, I swung one heavy thigh across her and mounted her. She trembled at my weight, dragged her legs from under me and raised them in a cleft stick on either side. She had asked for it and I intended to give her it without mercy. I felt my hands take hold of her. A low quavering whinny burst from her lips and her long nails sank into the flesh at my shoulderblades. I let her body grow used to the feel of the thing inside her and then I began to strum her, diminuendo, until her magnetized hips rose and fell in a strange syncopated dance. She came soon after that, for the first time in her life, and in the heat of her virginity. As her body’s movements grew slack, I drew her buttocks on to my shoulders, and pressed my mouth against her lovely wound. Her belly rose and fell, expiring, so it seemed, all the waters of her maidenhood. Her belly was wet with the delicate perfumed perspiration of her quenched lust. Under my tonguing, however, her passion began to reassert itself. I caught it in its rise, reversed positions, and forced her head to my own soft lyre. She fell to her task with an eagerness which soon brought the sacred fire into the most Stygian, the most crepuscular part of me.

  ‘I see, ‘Mr Pamandari said. ‘Well, don’t worry my dear, it can no doubt be arranged.’

  We were seated in the sun room, Nadya, her father, and myself. It was about a week after my arrival. During that week Nadya and I had become inseparable. She had brought up the subject and Mr Pamandari had turned to me in a fatherly way and asked me how I happened to be in India without a passport. Briefly, omitting all compromising details, I told him of my leaving home and of my stowing away on a merchant ship which was bound for India. I admitted that I had been discovered in the hold but said that I had managed to leave the ship, unknown to the Captain, at Madras. From there on, I told him I had wandered through India until the moment at which he had found me near the Godavari River. He was kind enough not to insist on details. On the contrary, whenever I seemed embarrassed in my account, he glossed over the subject with a ‘Yes, of course, it’s not important,’ until, when I had finished, he said, ‘I see,’ patted me on the shoulder, and told me not to worry about it.

  ‘It may be difficult,’ he continued, ‘to obtain a British passport. There, it is not easy to bribe. But I can no doubt get you a Turkish passport, or an Egy
ptian one. We shall see.’

  Nadya jumped up and kissed her father on the forehead. ‘I told her you would get one for her and you will, won’t you?’

  ‘I shall do my best, dear,’ said the Parsee modestly, and added, ‘if I would do it for Helen alone, then you may be sure that if it is your wish also I shall be doubly certain to do it.’

  ‘There!’ said Nadya, turning to me triumphantly.

  Mr Pamandari waved aside my attempt to thank him.

  ‘My dear,’ he said, ‘if you could for one moment imagine the change you have wrought in Nadya since your fortunate arrival in this house, you would realise that it is I who am indebted to you. You have been more than a sister to her. So say no more about it.’

  ‘Papa,’ Nadya said, ‘if Helen would come to Europe with me, would you allow me to go?’

  ‘Haha!’ he said with an indulgent smile. ‘So that is why you are so anxious for Helen to have a passport!’

  ‘Well, it’s one of the reasons,’ Nadya admitted grudgingly.

  ‘And how do you feel about it, Helen?’ he said, turning to me.

  When I shrugged my shoulders in an effort to seem constrained, he continued:

  ‘One of the reasons I have not allowed Nadya to go to Europe has been the fact that I knew of no one in whose charge I could send her. As you know, my daughter will one day be a very rich young lady. Naturally, I am not happy about the thought that without proper supervision she may fall for the charms of some mountebank. But this puts a different complexion on the matter. If you were willing to escort her during her sojourn, I might not feel so bad about it. Nadya knows nothing about the world. To some extent, that is my fault. But then, it is always difficult for a widower like myself. Whom should I trust? She has no mother, no sisters. But now it is different. I have seen her bloom in your company. And I flatter myself that I am a shrewd enough judge of character to know that you, Helen, are to be trusted implicity. You would see to it that she didn’t get into bad company. I have never been in Paris myself, but they tell me that it is a sink of vice. And if one can judge from the literature that comes out of that city I am inclined to believe it. Virginity there is evidently not worth a fig!’