Читать книгу The Amours & Alarums of Eliza MacLean - Annie Warwick - Страница 7

Illustrating the futility of imposing the modern legal system on the teenage libido.

It was eleven p.m. on Thursday and Billy, resplendent in boxer shorts, was lying on his bed reading through a script for an audition. He had done this a few times already and was getting better at it, so he figured his luck had to change soon. A faint thump, followed by a scuffling sound on the porch roof beneath his window, failed to distract him. It was the sound of tapping on the window glass which eventually broke through his concentration.

“Jesus H. Christ!” he said to himself, as he opened the window and let Eliza in. “Jesus!” he said again, quietly, and damning himself a second time according to the family prohibition on blasphemy. She was wearing jeans and a short top, nothing too revealing but oddly sexy for that precise reason, and he felt immediately uneasy. “You can’t be in here! Your father’ll have me thrown in jail!”

“Who’s going to tell him?” said Eliza, shaking her hair out to effect removal of a collection of small twigs and leaves.

“So … what do you want?” he asked, irritably.

So far, Eliza thought, this is not going swimmingly. “I’m going back to Australia.” May as well cut to the chase.

Billy felt both relieved and desolate. He didn’t say anything, which was telling in itself since he had the reputation of being able to talk under water with a mouth full of marbles.

This was going to be harder than she had thought. And she hadn’t thought it through, not really. Because she was overwrought and sexually frustrated, Eliza burst into quiet, desperate tears. He was not proof against this in her, because she was a kid who hardly ever cried, even when she broke her arm or tore her leg open on a nail. But here she was, silently shaking, with tears running down her face, all the more poignant because she tried to hide them. He was over in an instant, and put his arms around her. Mistake number one.

Her arms went around him and she snuggled into his bare chest, feeling the fine hairs tickling her face. If this wasn’t an older man, she didn’t know what was. She stopped crying, and turned her pretty face up to look at him, her eyes huge and tear-wet, lips pink and full and inviting. And of course – what’s a gentleman to do? – he kissed her. Mistake number two. He felt her response, and his control started slipping accordingly. Abandon hope all ye who enter here. He kissed her once more and definitely with feeling.

There was a tap on the door. “Billy,” said his mother, with that uncanny sixth sense shared by mothers since morals were invented. “Is everything okay in there, love? I thought I heard noises.”

“It’s okay, Mum. Don’t come in, I’m changing.” He sounded remarkably normal, considering he had a nymphette in his bedroom and his boxer shorts were no longer fit for maternal eyes. By that time Eliza had slid under the bed, holding her breath. What was tolerated at eight was not okay at fourteen and she knew it. Mrs Sylvester was fairly liberal, but she wouldn’t have wanted her son to be buggered in jail.

Lights went out, and all was silent. At this point, they were both lying on the bed and he had his hand over her mouth because she kept trying to sing some verses from “The Creel” very softly in his ear.

But the old one, she’d been still awake,

When something that was said.

I’ll lay me life, said the silly old wife,

There’s a man in my daughter’s bed.

The old man he got out of bed

To see if it was true,

But she pushed me down with her lily-white arms

And under the coverlet blue.

They both giggled silently and hysterically, climbing under the coverlet which was actually red.

He kissed her again, softly at first. She lay entranced, with her eyes shut, and her breathing erratic. His lips were lovely, soft and insistent. He kissed her more thoroughly and she felt like sexually charged Jell-O and like she would never be able to make another independent movement or speak another word. His hand crept up under her top to caress one of the breasts which had been intruding on his thoughts and featuring in his dreams for some time now. She inhaled sharply as a sort of electric shock caused her back to arch and passed through her all the way down to her toes. Then, quite suddenly, he sat up, hauling her with him. He was breathing hard, his eyes were heavy and his boxer shorts provided little in the way of modesty.

“You have to go. Now,” he managed to say, as if his life depended on it, which it sort of did.

“Okay,” she said, “but I’m going away, and we may not come back so I may not see you again. Ever. I don’t want to be an inexperienced virgin anymore. I want to have sex, and I want it to be you the first time, even if I never see you again. Especially if I never see you again,” she added.

He just looked at her, shaking his head in a more bemused than dismissive way.

“Don’t answer me now,” she said. She was taking charge, like she did at home. Organising. “Dad is out all day tomorrow, I’m not going to school. If you want to come around after nine, it will only be us. If you don’t come, that’s okay because I know this is really weird and statutory rape and whatnot.”

He still didn’t answer but his hand was speaking for him, stroking her arm while he stared at her with his mouth slightly open. Any marbles would have fallen out long since but he still had nothing to say. So she crept out of the window, across the roof and down the tree. All of which wasn’t as easy as it had been five years ago. She went to bed that night, not sad, and hugging to herself the memory of kissing him and being kissed, and knowing he wanted her. Even if that was all there would ever be.

* * *

By eight a.m. on Friday, Eliza was second-guessing her own temerity. It had all seemed pretty clear-cut yesterday morning and last night: Eliza loves Billy but they can’t be together because she has to leave the country, so why not have sex with him and get devirginated at the same time? Seemed like a plan. But in fact he had not answered her, he had not leapt at the offer. And why should he have, since the minute the deed was done, a squadron of burly policemen would come and haul him off to jail, where his cute ass1 would languish with all the sex-starved criminals in a place where, by all reports, he would never dare to bend down and pick up the soap.

1 U.S. usage. ‘Arse’ just sounds plain wrong.

But she bathed and dressed carefully anyway, applied perfumed cream to her skin, every inch of it. She put on a pretty sundress with thin shoulder straps, and a pair of lacy panties, omitting the bra completely which she felt would only get in the way (omitting the panties too would lack subtlety, she thought). She made up the bed in the guest bedroom downstairs with fresh sheets, and put some fragrant flowers in a vase on the dressing table. Candles could be a bit of overkill. After all, it wasn’t a seduction, it was a favour, almost a business transaction. That was a lowering thought, and once more she was struck by her failure to think things through. Whether she knew it or not, what she really hoped was that Billy would want to make love to her, to be unable to resist making love to her, in spite of the risks. “Silly cow,” she told herself, crossly.

* * *

For Billy, on Thursday night, sleep had not come easily even though Billy had, using his damp towel to protect the bed linen. Bloody thing refused to go down for what seemed like ages after she left. He was aware that the new improved Eliza stirred his loins, but until she was in his arms he’d had no idea how much. How close he had come to taking her in his bed, with his parents and sister sleeping nearby, freaked him out completely. And that was before she even mentioned that she had chosen him to deflower her.

Now he was being asked to decide whether he wanted to make love to a glorious little creature with a figure and face like a voluptuous faerie queen and, from what he could discern, a highly responsive libido. If he wanted to? Bloody hell. He wanted to so much he thought he was going to die of a stroke, or a heart attack. Or just spontaneously combust because something was on fire in his loins and he couldn’t put it out.

There was no force on earth or in heaven – with the exception of a visit from Eliza’s father or the local constabulary – that was going to stop him from ignoring his certain doom and turning up at Eliza’s door next morning.

By eight a.m. on Friday the household had emptied magically and was making its reluctant way to work on the tube or in a tradesman’s van.

* * *

I’ve always found a certain frustration in books which, just when things are starting to get interesting, scoop up the reader and trundle him off to parts unknown, which the author feels it incumbent upon her to share, or perhaps merely because she is a sadist. It leaves one with the choice of ploughing through the tangent, or leafing frantically past it until the promised sex scene or denouement is reached, then having to decide whether to go back and read the tangential information in case it is germane to the whatzername. The dilemma, relative to the above, is that the household of Billy Sylvester, aspiring actor and potential despoiler of a maiden of tender years, has been mentioned, but the reader has not yet been properly introduced. One feels that the introductions should be performed tout de suite, in view of the rather more intimate matters to be disclosed very shortly.

Billy’s dad, David, married Billy’s mum, Lauren, a pretty brunette, in the early 1970s when they were both twenty-something. Lauren’s own mum, Lily, was the person to whom Billy related most strongly. Lily was a lot of fun with a wicked sense of humour. She had been an actress for a while on the stage in Edinburgh, and was devoted to movies. So naturally Lauren had been named after Lauren Bacall. I’m not sure if Lauren herself had ever been a lot of fun, or whether her mother had embarrassed that trait to extinction when she was an easily humiliated teenager, but in any case the remaining spontaneity was largely driven out of her early in her marriage by her husband’s need for order and predictability in his life.

David was a builder by trade, and Lauren worked in an office, which she gave up for a few years when her first child, Jeanne (after Jeanne Moreau), was born. Three years later Billy arrived, christened William because his father wasn’t having any more of those cinema-inspired names for his son who was going to grow up to be a solid wage-pulling citizen with no airs. Nobody called him anything but Billy. Except when he grew up a bit and his friends started calling him Billy the Willy.

He was spoiled by his mother and ignored by his father most of the time. Dave ignored the whole family impartially, so it wasn’t taken personally. Dave’s father had been an army man, like his father before him. Both had been on active service and had returned home somewhat changed by the experience. They had short tempers, low tolerance of aimless chit-chat, a tendency to drink too much, and a preference for isolating themselves from people and social situations in general. They also had a rigid attitude to household routines and general order, because when you are in the army, on active service, you need to know for sure that things are where they should be and that scheduled events happen on time. So by the time Dave came along he had a couple of generations’ worth of army-related stress impacting on his family. This was bound to affect his world view.

Due to paternal disinterest, Billy was free as he got older to go where and when he wanted, but eventually Lauren’s complaints about him filtered through to Dave, who was moved to contribute one of his rare pieces of input to his son’s social development. One day, when Billy was sixteen, Dave invited him to enter the sanctity of The Shed for a little chat, and did not pussy-foot around.

“You’ve been out on the streets, drinking and fighting. I don’t like it, but that’s not what I want to talk about. You’ve been rude to your mother and you’re treating the place like a hotel. You know how to behave, and you’ll behave in this house.”

His son was a little taller than him, and gave him Attitude. This, of course, was sink or swim time, and Dave, not one to take insubordination lying down, was goaded beyond endurance. Billy, in short order, ended up on the floor of the shed, his face in a pile of oily rags, a knee in the small of his back and his hands wrenched painfully behind him.

Dave, upon releasing Billy’s arms, offered him a hand and pulled him to his feet, continuing as though nothing had happened. “Show me how Robbie Kelly got that punch in,” he said, indicating Billy’s nose. He pointed at his own nose. “Put it here,” he instructed. Billy was still seething, and only too pleased to oblige his father. He missed completely several times, as Dave slipped easily to the side or blocked the blow. After a while they reversed roles and, with some practice, Billy, had he so wished, could have augmented his street fighting skills with some basic boxing science. They returned to the house in companionable silence, and Billy was thus persuaded to at least behave like a reasonable, civilised person while with his family, with little loss of dignity since the whole business was carried out in the confines of The Shed with no other witnesses.

Billy had one personality for his family and one for his friends, which were worlds apart. Even his accent was different depending on where he was. With his friends, he sounded like a cockney street hooligan, at home his consonants were clearly articulated, and since his time in the MacLean home he had perfected a BBC accent because one never knew when it might come in handy, along with his Edinburgh and Belfast accents.

But I digress. On the day in question, the three superfluous family members went to their respective jobs and left Billy to his own devices.

* * *

Billy showered, shaved, dressed and made his way to the posh neighbourhood, along the lane and through the back gate to the MacLean house. He had prepared a spiel if Richard happened to be in after all. Eliza opened the door to his knock and whisked him inside with furtive glances for neighbours, passing relatives, or the evening news helicopter. It was half past nine and she was as nervous as a cat on a kitchen table with its nose in the butter dish, and so was Billy.

But what has happened to Billy? The charm, flirtation with a light touch, the satirical humour, the casual studied compliments, where have they gone? In their place was a young man who had apparently forgotten that he’d been honing his courting skills since he was seventeen. The Billy of that time had already spent six months visiting an older woman who taught him the dark arts and how to please and seduce, and in her turn pleased him mightily and frequently. She was beautiful, and he was madly in love with her, of course, but it had to end when her husband became suspicious, and Billy only just made it through the window, thankfully on the ground floor. It was a classic comic dive but without the comfort of a mattress from the props department, with Billy clad only in his underpants, clutching his jeans, leaving the rest behind to be hidden hurriedly by the guilty strumpet.

It was one of the high points of his life to date.

This Billy, at this time, was lost for words, since there was nothing he could say that wouldn’t have any self-respecting female showing him the door. “So are we goin’ ta do this or wha’?” or perhaps “Well, getcha gear off and let’s gerrit over wif.” Suspecting that he was unlikely to acquire speech any time soon, Eliza smoothed the situation, making him sit on the couch with her, drinking coffee and talking about general things. Then she said, “Is this a bit weird for you?” as though she were the nineteen year old, and Billy the quaking virgin.

He put his cup down, took her hand, and kissed her gently on the inside of the wrist. He was relaxing, and some of his, really quite extensive, skill set was returning. “No, not weird. Really nice. We can take our time.” He smiled at her in a way that made her fanny2 twitch. “I was thinking we could make love, not just have sex. And that takes time.”

2 U.K. and Australian usage. For instance, landing on one’s fanny, as one does in the U.S., would be considered a frightful experience by most Australian females.

“You have definitely done this before,” she commented.

“Not exactly this,” he admitted.

She climbed onto his lap with a knee either side. “Not yet taken a maidenhead then, milord?”

“No, little trollop, and I look forward to it. But there are other things we can do before that happens.” He kissed her comprehensively, her lips, her neck and her shoulders which he had liberated from their shoulder straps. He could probably have taken said maidenhead there and then, but this was something he really wanted to do brilliantly, for both their sakes.

So Richard, had he known, could at least have drawn comfort from the fact that his wish for an older and more experienced lover for Eliza’s first time was about to be realised.

Billy stood up with Eliza still astride him and lowered her gently to the floor. “Take me to the bed,” he said, playing Cher’s part in Moonstruck. She recognised the line and, laughing, led him into the prepared boudoir. They stood face to face next to the black painted iron bed with its white sheets, neatly turned down, and lacy pillowslips. He nibbled at her lips rather than kissing them, and she, a quick study, nibbled him right back, while unbuttoning his shirt. He occupied himself with unzipping her sundress, sliding it down and letting it drop to the floor.

As skin touched skin they both burst into flames and rushed, impatiently, out of the rest of their clothes. Billy had the primitive impulse to throw her roughly onto the bed and take her quickly, but he resisted the urge. Turning her around so her back was against him, he bent his head and pulled her hands up around the back of his neck, so she was completely opened out and exposed. He kissed her neck and ran his hands over her breasts and hips until her breathing was ragged and a sigh escaped her. Then she turned suddenly and quite unexpectedly took control, pushing him firmly onto the bed.

His older woman had failed to instruct him in the initiation of virgins. He was on his own for this one, but he knew from boys’ locker room conversations (young men are surprisingly clinical and task oriented about these things) that the more sexually aroused the girl was, the easier the first penetration. It was an absolute first for our young lover, to be considering the comfort and pleasure of his partner unless it was for his own ultimate benefit. He had certainly faked consideration in the past, but this was the first time he found himself feeling such tenderness and concern, to the extent that his own pleasure was secondary.

He needed to ease it back a notch so he kissed her some more, and ran his fingers slowly up the inside of her thigh. He threw the seduction manual away, techniques were forgotten, and his Don Juan Within took over. Such a soft, white little thigh – he had to slide down and worship it, kiss it thoroughly, from groin to knee and back again. She chuckled at this, deliciously, he thought. But then what would be a silly giggle in another girl was a thing of delight in Eliza. She stroked his hair, and when she pulled him back up to kiss him again, his fingers gently caressed and probed her.

Eliza made a sharp sound, indicating shock, as two fingers slid carefully inside. The sounds she made quickly became gasps of pleasure as his fingers found what they were seeking. He didn’t need to enquire solicitously if she was okay. She was obviously very, very okay. Billy was totally and almost painfully hard, which helped in his dexterity with one-handed condom fitting, the wrapper already torn and waiting. An early lesson with his older woman to reduce condom fumblage resulted in formidable fitting speed. I’m sure somebody somewhere has introduced condom fitting as a competitive sport, and one feels that Billy would have acquitted himself well.

She said, panting, “I don’t want this to happen without you in there.”

Speech was difficult, but he reassured her. “We’ve got all day to get it right, love. We can try as often as you like!”

She chuckled again and, apparently deciding to accept his offer of totally self-indulgent pleasure, pulled a pillow over her face to stifle the noises she was making and to hide her face. Billy took the pillow away, wanting to look at her, to hear her, as her body plunged and her head tossed from side to side in total abandonment. He brought her to the brink, then slowed her down several times, then, as she finally climaxed, and before she settled to earth again, he slid inside her. Another gasp of shock, and he stopped the movement.

“No, don’t stop,” she said. In spite of the discomfort of being entered for the first time, she was unable to stop herself from pushing down on him. “It feels incredible.”

If Billy had been able to access his frontal lobes or speech centres he might have thanked God for sending him such a libidinous, licentious little virgin with such a rudimentary hymen. As it was, Eliza was making lovely noises in rhythm with every move he made, somewhere between a whimper and a scream, and he was concentrating what little self-control he had on making sure he didn’t come before her. He gave himself to his own happy noises interspersed with affectionately and quite daftly muttering her name over and over, “Lizzie, Lizzie, Lizzie.” She took off again and this time she screamed the place down without the pillow over her face, and it set him off immediately. No-one was listening, so his voice joined hers, then, gasping for breath and looking at each other, they both burst out laughing.

“Jesus!” he said, as he carefully removed himself from her, and the condom from himself. “Bloody hell!” he said, putting it conscientiously in an exquisite Murano glass bowl which, although not etched with the words Used Condoms, was clearly for that purpose. He hadn’t finished with the expletives yet. “Fuck me dead!” he mumbled in her ear as he snuggled her into his chest.

“I was thinking of waiting a bit,” she said, innocently. He shook with what she took as laughter, and therefore a gratifying acknowledgement of her first R-rated jest as a non-virgin. Eliza was transfixed by her first experience of sex with an actual man. She wasn’t sure at first where her body began and ended, and therefore whether the body wrapped around her was Eliza’s or Billy’s.

“Wow!” she said, breathlessly. “My father advised me to have sex with an older man the first time, and I can see he was right. Although I must say I don’t think he expected me to carry out his instructions for at least a couple of years,” she added in a subdued manner, noticing her Conscience glaring at her in an affronted fashion, a hand on one hip and pursing its lips. It looked a little like her Auntie Danni, in fact.

Billy shot a nervous look at the door, immediately revived at the word “father”. He was not entirely happy with having Richard in the bed with them, but nonetheless asked, salaciously, “And what other advice did your father give you?”

“Well, he did say never to believe a man who says ‘I love you’ during or straight after sex, because he is confusing love with gratitude.”

Billy rolled over and kissed her. “You are absolutely gorgeous, and I adore you,” he said. “I love you, I love you, I love you!”

“I love you more,” she said, with an amorous growl, biting his shoulder. She thought she really did love him but was secure in the knowledge that he wasn’t aware of it. Billy laughed delightedly. He thought perhaps he loved Eliza, but he also was secure in the knowledge that she wouldn’t take him seriously.

“He also said,” she added, “never believe a man who says ‘I love you’ when he is trying to get you into bed, because, well, he is just trying to get you into bed.” She thought about that. “That is so wrong,” she said indignantly. “If I wanted to just have sex with someone I wouldn’t feel the need to go banging on about being in love with them and wanting to marry them and have their children.”

Billy remembered with difficulty, and with a sudden twinge of conscience, that Eliza was only fourteen, and wondered if she had been here before, like a previous incarnation. Whatever the reason, her straight talking and complete lack of self-consciousness were part of the reason he adored her. Did he just think the word, adore? Yes, apparently, in fact he had said it out loud a few minutes ago. He tried it again, and again it fitted how he felt about her. Okay, so just the post-sex thing, then.

Billy was a bit of an intellectual; there was a thinker well hidden behind his testosterone-driven loutish persona. There don’t seem to be many words in the dictionary to describe a promiscuous man, except those which imply desirable rakish qualities, but let’s face it, once Billy became sexually active he did so with enthusiasm. He was, in fact, a tart, slut, slag or floozie. Even now, he was starting to feel a certain guilt and shame for having inveigled so many girls into bed, the back seats of cars, against large trees or indeed anywhere which promised reasonable traction and a bit of privacy. He was known, when desperate, to have broached the odd minger,3 who was ostensibly offering sex, actually looking for love, and vulnerable to self-deception. What he was doing was, essentially, masturbating in a vagina, and once he started thinking about that, it all seemed a bit less impressive.

3 Minger: an unattractive woman. (In the following I have borrowed, bleached, laundered, starched and ironed one of the many definitions from Urban Dictionary.) Not simply unattractive, “the phrase usually implies she is unkempt, over-weight and has hygiene problems”. “She is also sexually promiscuous – a person who spreads sexually transmitted diseases.” “A somewhat crude term [which] comes from Northern England and from Scotland.” “Example: [Larry] woke up hungover. Two-thirds of the bed contained a sweaty mound of stinky minger with unshaven armpits and huge bush. His genitals itched terribly.” Additional comment from author – I feel a certain satisfaction in the thought that “Larry” caught crabs, herpes, clap, pox and Dismal Itch.

What he was doing with Eliza was absolutely nothing like that and it is just possible that Eliza made a man of him. At the time, though, he was her Prince, and despite her apparent maturity, she knew little of how young men treated young women, or she might have looked upon him with less reverence.

There was still quite a bit of the day left, so they cuddled, talked, slept, ate lunch in bed and, of course, made love. Eliza was intensely interested in Billy’s body, particularly his penis. She examined him, felt him with her hands. She caressed him with her breasts, watching the effect as she ran her nipple along the length of him, to see where he was most sensitive. She tasted him with her tongue, but although she knew about blow jobs there was no way she was doing that. Geez, it looked huge! A girl could choke to death!

She told him about her introduction to self-pleasuring, and asked him how he did it. There was a conspicuous pause from Billy’s direction, at being asked outright how he masturbated, but when he collected himself he was happy to have her help him in his demonstration. She watched, speechless with delight, and kissing any part of him she could reach, while the semen pumped out of him. You see, nobody had ever told her that she should feel guilty, or ashamed, or disgusted at all this. Obviously somebody wasn’t doing his job.

By the time they had finished or, more accurately, were completely spent, Eliza felt she was thoroughly experienced, and Billy felt like he was the one who had made love for the first time. They were too totally buggered to even try it in the shower, so they washed each other fondly, dried off and dressed.

“I’ll let you know when we’re leaving,” she told him. “I’ll come over or something.” She didn’t have to say: We can’t do this again. It was going to be painful enough to separate and absolutely unavoidable.

“Don’t go without seeing me,” he said. “I want to give you a present, something of mine, so you don’t forget me.” His eyes looked as though they wanted to cry, but he wouldn’t let them.

“I will never, never forget you,” she said, also feeling tearful. “Even if we are both married to other people and have kids and live in different countries.”

“Me too,” and he meant it. And for the next six years neither of them forgot, well maybe for short bursts when life was interesting, but they never put the memories away in storage boxes labelled “Billy and Eliza, Finished Business”.

They took their leave of each other a few weeks later. She gave him a St Christopher medal because she said she had seen his future: he would go to Hollywood and work there as an actor, he would be well known, and would have to travel a bit so this was to keep him safe. She was bit fey, was Eliza, and she knew this because she had seen it all in a dream one night. It was a dream that made her very sad because it was the way to lose him forever. Billy gave her his genuine Phantom ring; she and Billy were always retro in their tastes, and she had read his father’s Phantom Comic Album, 1965. She knew well the ring was a prized relic of childhood, or of somebody’s childhood since he had found it in a second-hand shop, and she was touched by his sacrifice. It was made for larger fingers but it fitted on her thumb.

* * *

Richard thought it was excellent timing to be leaving England now. When he arrived home on the day of the Devirgination, Eliza had the place looking neat and the spare bedroom put back as it should be with the sheets in her washing basket. But she winced a little when she sat on the hard kitchen chair to join him in a cup of coffee. She had left the bedroom door open a little and, prompted by some fatherly ESP, he went in. It all looked fine, but the shower was still wet, the soap had been used, and, to his finely tuned olfactory sense, the room had an aroma somewhat reminiscent of a knocking shop.

And, of course, the used condoms in the Murano glass bowl were a dead give-away.

“Darling, I think this might be yours,” he said, showing her the evidence of her oversight.

“Dang!” she replied, trying for a casual air of sophistication. “I knew I forgot something.”

“Who?” he asked gently, “and in what manner?”

“Will you call the police?” she asked, less sophisticated and definitely less casual now. “Because if you are planning to, I will never tell, even if you roast me over an open fire.”

He took her face in his hands and planted a kiss on her forehead. “Don’t be ridiculous. We don’t have an open fire. They’ve been banned for years,” he told her, maintaining an air of gravitas with some difficulty.

“I have no interest in the laws governing the age of consent, and I don’t want all the gory details,” he continued. “I just want to know who it was and whether you had a classy first sexual experience and not a sordid, painful fuck with some undeserving little ratbag. And I’m glad you used condoms, by the way.” Richard had hoped, rather than believed, he still had some time up his sleeve in which to talk to Eliza about the pragmatic considerations. As I have already implied, his parenting skills were somewhat uneven.

Eliza looked up at him uncertainly. “It was Billy. We like each other a lot, and he was really gentle and gorgeous about it all. It hardly hurt at all, and it was heaps better than doing it myself. In fact it was amazing. I think he’s had some training, you know!” She stopped for breath. “Dad,” she said.

He was smiling now, and trying not to laugh. “Yes, my little love?”

“If you run into Billy between now and when we leave, could you act like you don’t know?”

“Done!” said Richard. “By the way, if it hurts to sit down for more than a day or two, you should see the doctor,” he added, remembering the practicalities of the situation. Then, “I’m sorry … that I’m dragging you away from him. I know you’re going to feel sad for a while.” She nodded in agreement, her head down, but did not otherwise take the opportunity to put him on a guilt trip.

Richard wasn’t really sorry. In fact he was possessed of a sudden, violent impulse to draw his sword, unseam his daughter’s despoiler from the nave to the chaps and fix his head upon the battlements, or perhaps hang his hide from same, he couldn’t decide which. With the passing of time, however, and a little calm reflection, he became aware of a certain sentimentality over this milestone. He settled on feeling relieved that Billy had done a sterling job with his Eliza.