A Multitude of Sins

by Margaret Pemberton

  Julienne twisted on to her knees, not removing her hand from beneath the delicious weight of his scrotum. ‘Did you know that there were rumours that the Royal Scots are going to leave the island?’

  He didn’t know and he didn’t really care. He was a businessman, not a soldier. She was running the tip of her tongue lightly around the head of his cock, blowing softly on it, her hand firm and warm on the shaft. ‘How do you know?’ he asked, his eyes closed, his voice strangled in his throat.

  Julienne paused in her ministrations, looking down at his cock with satisfaction as it pulsed and hardened. ‘A friend told me,’ she said, and wondered whether she should terminate her affair with her Royal Scots major. To continue spending time with both him and with Derry might prove difficult, even for her. She sighed. Derry was really a most promising lover. It seemed as if her connections with the Royal Scots would have to be severed.

  ‘Adam Harland thinks it will be a great mistake if they do go. He thinks the Japanese will attack us and that we should have more regiments stationed here, not less.’

  ‘Then, he’s a bloody fool,’ Derry said thickly. ‘Don’t stop what you’re doing, for God’s sake!’

  She bent her head again, her tongue running like a river of fire from the base of his penis to the tip, whorling around the blood-engorged head, her hand moving with slow and rhythmic expertise.

  ‘Is Harland the middle-aged Englishman Stafford’s been complaining about? One of the Semco directors out here for some kind of sabbatical?’

  Julienne nodded, gracefully straddling him, one knee on either side of his tensed thighs, smiling to herself as she saw how his penis was straining upwards towards the tight glossy curls of her pubic hair, the moist hot lips of her waiting vagina.

  ‘His wife is very young and very beautiful and very.…’ She paused, thinking of Elizabeth’s curious untouched quality. ‘Very inexperienced, I think.’

  Derry was uncaring of Adam Harland’s wife. ‘By God, you’re not!’ he panted harshly as with her fingers she parted the dense mat of her pubic hair and opened the lips of her throbbing vagina.

  ‘Now, chéri,’ she whispered hoarsely, gently pulling his penis back from his stomach until it was pointing straight up in the air, still not plunging it into her hot moist depths. ‘Let me show you how the second time can be almost as good as the first!’ And as he moaned for her to hurry she slowly lowered herself on to the swollen tip, shuddering in ecstasy as the soft pillar of her flesh slid down on him and she was filled to the rim with his hardness and thrusting strength.

  ‘Oh, that’s good, chéri!’ she whispered as his hands grasped hold of her hips, and she moved on top of him in voluptuous pleasure. ‘C’est magnifique!’

  Tom Nicholson and Lamoon were laid on cushions on the floor of the Harland’s summerhouse. Elizabeth had been prompt in inviting them to dinner, and many more dinners and suppers had followed. She had also kept her word about not gossiping about their affair. No one else knew of it, apart from Helena. Not even Alastair or Julienne.

  ‘We can’t go on like this, Lamoon,’ Tom said fiercely. ‘I have to speak to your father.’

  ‘No!’ Her dark eyes were enormous in the pale gold of her face. ‘That would be the end of everything, Tom. He would send me away or marry me to a suitable Chinese. He mustn’t know! Not ever!’

  ‘He can’t marry you off without your consent!’ Tom said savagely, springing to his feet and pacing the wooden floor. ‘It’s 1939, for Christ’s sake! Not the Middle Ages!’

  ‘It is still the Middle Ages for Chinese girls of good family,’ Lamoon said sadly.

  He swore, knowing that she was right, knowing that nothing on earth would persuade her father to allow her to marry an Englishman.

  She rose to her feet, walking with infinite grace towards him, her long black hair hanging sleekly down her back. ‘Don’t feel so violently about it, Tom,’ she said gently, slipping her arm through his. ‘It is the way things are, and we must learn to accept it.’

  He pulled her into his arms with a groan. He loved her, but there were times when her Chinese placidity nearly drove him mad. ‘How can you be so accepting of prejudices that are so crass?’ he asked despairingly.

  He was a foot taller than she was, and she stood on tip-toe, kissing the corner of his mouth. ‘Because there is nothing we can do. Tom. We both know the rules and, whether we agree with them or not, we have to abide by them.’

  ‘Damn the rules!’ he said vehemently. ‘Not everyone respects them! Raefe Elliot doesn’t, and the world hasn’t caved in around his shoulders!’

  ‘Of course it hasn’t,’ Lamoon said with amusement. ‘Raefe Elliot is a man. And the Chinese girls who are his friends are not upper-class respectable Chinese girls. He is not intent on marrying one of them.’

  ‘If he wanted to, he would,’ Tom said darkly.

  Lamoon giggled. She thought perhaps Tom was right. But Raefe Elliot wasn’t Tom, and she wasn’t a Wanchai bar-girl. For girls like her, mixed marriages were out– there were no exceptions, no alibis, no discussions. As a businessman, her father conducted himself in a manner that his European customers regarded as enlighteningly westernized. In his home, western mores had no place. He was a rigid disciplinarian, as all Chinese husbands and fathers of his class were. If he once knew or suspected that his daughter was consorting with an Englishman, then Lamoon knew she would never see Hong Kong or Tom again.

  ‘We must be grateful for what we have,’ she said practically, her slender body pressed dose against the long hard strength of him, ‘if it wasn’t for the nursing classes, we wouldn’t be able to meet at all.’

  ‘I am grateful,’ he said huskily, bending his lips to the soft sheen of her hair. ‘But one afternoon and one evening a week aren’t enough.’

  The war being waged on China by Japan had been to their advantage. When Lamoon had asked her father if she could attend nursing classes at one of the local hospitals, he had reluctantly agreed. It was an activity that did not lower the family status, and it would be as well for her to be useful if international affairs deteriorated.

  Lamoon had enjoyed the classes immensely, but she no longer went to them. Instead she met Tom. At first, the difficulties had seemed insurmountable. They couldn’t go for drinks at one of the many clubs that Tom’s friends went to with their girls. They couldn’t dance at the Peninsula, or hold hands across a candlelit table at the Parisian Grill. If they did so, they would be seen. The Chinese grapevine would hum into life, and her father would know of her activities within hours, possibly even minutes.

  Instead of going to any of the normal venues, they had driven out into the New Territories, avoiding the more frequented roads, walking hand in hand along little-used tracks. It was on one such excursion that Adam and Elizabeth had seen them, and now they had somewhere else to meet.

  This summerhouse was tucked away at the bottom of the sprawling garden, out of sight of the main house. Gradually, as their visits to the Harlands had become more frequent, it had become accepted that the summerhouse was their meeting-place, and inviolate. On a Thursday afternoon, when it was her nursing-class day, and if Elizabeth and Adam were out together, or with friends, the houseboy would open the door to them and they would walk through the house and out into the garden and down to the summerhouse.

  ‘I don’t understand why you will come here, but refuse to come anywhere near my house,’ Tom had said in the beginning, bemused. ‘It’s only fifteen minutes away.’

  ‘Because if anything terrible happened, and it was discovered we were meeting, my father would not lose as much face if it was discovered we were meeting in the home of a respectable married couple as he would if it became known that I had visited you in your home, alone.’

  Tom was too well aware of how important face was to a Chinese to argue the point with her. Their afternoon meetings had continued, and the little summerhouse had become the centre of their world.

  He lifted her up in his arms and turned back
with her towards the cushions. They had met at a party for influential Chinese businessmen and their European counterparts at Government House. Her mother had been ill, and she had taken her mother’s place at her father’s side. He had never in his life seen a girl so beautiful. Her hair had shone like burnished jet, her dark almond-tilted eyes had flickered once in his direction and had then been demurely cast downwards, but he had seen the suspicion of a smile at the corner of her mouth, and he had known that she was as attracted to him as he to her.

  He had known, right from the beginning, that to try to date her was crass and impossible. Chinese girls of her social background did not make assignations with anyone without their father’s permission and certainly not Europeans. But he had persisted. He had driven out to her family’s mansion at Shan Teng and had waited until he had seen her being driven from the grounds in a chauffeured Rolls. The Rolls had taken her to an exclusive hairdressing salon in Victoria. When she came out of the salon an hour later, he had been waiting for her on the pavement and, to his indescribable relief, she had agreed to meet him. That had been the first of her skipped nursing classes.

  The following months had been the most tortured he had ever known. She had come to meet him willingly, her mouth parting shyly beneath his when they had kissed, but he had known that he couldn’t make love to her with the same selfish lack of thought as he might have done to a European girl. If she became pregnant, there could be no hasty marriage to make matters right she was running risks enough in merely meeting him. He couldn’t ask her to run even greater ones. Ones that would destroy her life.

  He wasn’t accustomed to celibacy, especially when it was coupled with such raging physical longing. At first, he had been unable to sustain it. He had had a brief and not altogether unsatisfactory affair with Julienne, and there had been occasional forays into the bars and nightclubs of Wanchai. He had soon stopped such expeditions. The bar-girls with their long black hair and pale gold skin had been cruel reminders of Lamoon, so like her and yet so many light-years different from her.

  At the beginning of the year, when he had left Hong Kong for a business trip to England, he had been relieved at their separation. It would enable him to think clearly, perhaps to find the strength of mind to end their affair once and for all. When he had seen Elizabeth Harland aboard the Orient Princess, he had been filled with hope. If any woman could banish Lamoon from his thoughts, surely the ethereally beautiful Elizabeth Harland could do so. But she had not been another Julienne, sexually indiscriminate and looking for fun outside her marriage. In the end, he had never even propositioned her. He had known that such a venture would end in failure and, by then, he had known that it was too late. That no woman, not even Elizabeth, could replace Lamoon in his heart.

  ‘We have to be able to marry!’ he said fiercely as he laid her down on the cushions. Christ! He had been in love with her for eight months, and for the last four months he had been totally celibate. It wasn’t a situation that could possibly continue. She lay very still, her hair spreading around her shoulders like a pool of black ink. ‘We cannot marry,’ she said softly, her eyes holding his, the expression in them one he had never seen before. ‘But we can be husband and wife to each other.…’

  His breath was coming short and quick, his heart slamming against his breastbone. ‘No,’ he rasped. ‘There are too many risks for you.’

  She slid her arms around his neck. There were too many risks for her if he did not make love to her. He was a handsome healthy thirty-five-year-old man, unaccustomed to celibacy. If he did not make love to her, the risks were that he would turn elsewhere for lovemaking. To the pretty, sensuous Mrs Ledsham, or to the bar-girls of Wanchai. And she wanted him to make love to her. She wanted to feel his strong hard body naked against hers. She wanted to take what happiness she could before their affair was discovered, and before her father sent her far away.

  ‘I love you,’ she whispered, and as she spoke she was unbuttoning her cheong-sam, her fingers trembling, but her eyes utterly sure as she stepped gracefully free of it.

  He was a man of iron self-control, but that control had been exercised to the full for the best part of a year. He hesitated for one brief agonizing second and then, with a groan, he, too, began to scramble out of his clothes. Restraint was gone, and in its place a burning, savage hunger, demanding to be slaked.

  ‘I love you … love you…,’ he gasped hoarsely as he flung his trousers and shirt on top of her discarded cheong-sam.

  He had always imagined that when they finally made love it would be with the utmost tenderness. She was a virgin; she would need time, gentleness. Never in his wildest dreams had he imagined it would be like this. A voracious scramble to free themselves of their clothes, an animal-like eagerness to transcend the bounds he had previously placed on them. She kneeled in front of him, her breasts pale and beautiful, the dark centres erect and taut He cupped them in his hands, glorying in her beauty, bending his head to them, kissing, sucking, nibbling.

  ‘Quickly,’ she panted, her eyes urgent, her pupils dilated. ‘Quickly!’

  He pressed her backwards, his hand going to the small restraining panties she still wore. His palm closed over her mount of Venus and she moaned, digging her nails into the flesh of his back. She was smooth and hairless, soft as a dormouse. He wrenched her panties down to her knees, to her ankles, knowing as she kicked herself free of them that he was going to be all the things he shouldn’t be. Quick. Urgent. Brutal.

  ‘Oh God!’ he prayed, but it was no use. He had waited too long for her to be able to exercise restraint or tender loving care.

  His fingers touched her and she gave a willing cry, the cry of a small wild animal on the verge of copulation. She was hot and moist, as ready for him as he was for her. With a groan that seemed to come from the soles of his feet, he guided his penis to the entrance of her vagina, his mouth bruising and grinding against hers, his tongue plunging deep as he thrust into her dark sweet centre, experiencing a cataclysm of relief that almost robbed him of his senses.

  Afterwards, when he could breathe again, when his body had stopped shuddering with pleasure, he became conscious of the wetness of tears on his shoulder. He pushed himself up on to his elbows, looking down at her with horror. ‘Lamoon … sweetheart … don’t! It won’t always be like that, I promise!’

  Through her tears she began to laugh. ‘Oh dear, won’t it? And I thought it was so wonderful!’

  Relief swamped him. Her tears were not because he had hurt or disappointed her; they were a release of her emotions, and he felt tears sting the back of his own eyes. ‘Oh God, I love you,’ he said passionately, folding her once more in his arms, lying with her on the scattered cushions, delighting in the feel of her small, delicate, exquisite body next to his.

  She turned her head slightly, kissing his shoulder. ‘I have to be going,’ she said regretfully. ‘The class will be at an end in twenty minutes.’

  He stifled his disappointment. Chu, her father’s chauffeur, would be waiting for her at the front entrance of the hospital. He had to get her down to Victoria and to the rear entrance five minutes before the nursing class ended. Then she would walk through the hospital, emerging from the front entrance as if she had been to class, and no questions would be asked.

  He sighed, reaching for his trousers. He knew that Lamoon thought that their becoming lovers was as far as they could take their relationship but, for him, today had been only the beginning. Snatched hours one afternoon and one evening a week were not enough. He had been speaking the truth when he had said that a way would have to be found to enable them to marry. He zipped up his trousers and fastened his belt buckle. Perhaps Raefe Elliot could help him. He knew how the Chinese thought He would know the best way to approach Lamoon’s father. He held out his hand to help her stand. He would see Elliot at the earliest opportunity. Lamoon might have accepted that they could never marry, but he would never do so. Not while he had breath in his body.

  Ronnie Ledsham sat
in the Peninsula Hotel’s Playpen Restaurant and watched the doors, a small smile crooking the corner of his mouth. Elizabeth Harland would get the surprise of her life when she asked for Julienne’s table and found only him waiting for her. Julienne would be furious when she found out how he had enticed Elizabeth, but he was accustomed to Julie’s fury and it never lasted. Within minutes she would be giggling, and he would, of course, tell her that his ploy had been in vain and that Elizabeth had rejected his advances. In reality, he was determined that she would do no such thing.

  He had already had one double whisky and soda and he raised his index finger slightly to summon the waiter and to order another. The Playpen wasn’t one of his usual haunts. He found the long narrow room, with its lush red carpeting and potted palms and red-shaded table-lamps, far too colonial and prim and proper, but it Was a rendezvous that would arouse no suspicions in Elizabeth’s mind, and it had one mitigating factor in its favour: its windows afforded splendid views, looking out over the harbour and the cloud-wreathed majesty of Victoria Peak.

  He glanced at his watch. She was five minutes late. He had thought women only kept men waiting, not their women friends. He wondered if he had been too confident in thinking that his wheeze would work, it would have been normal for Julie to have rung Elizabeth and have asked her to lunch, not to send a note. His smile deepened. He had been proud of that note. He had long ago perfected an imitation of Julie’s hasty scrawl and he thought that he was now beginning also to capture the flavour of her breathless messages. ‘Darling Elizabeth,’ he had written, ‘I saw this dog collar in Lane Crawfords and thought it perfect for your little dog and please, please, please do me a favour and meet me for lunch at the Playpen tomorrow at 1 o’clock as I’m in the most awful trouble and Ronnie is going to kill me! Please, please, please! Love and kisses, Julienne.’