Читать книгу The English Governess - John Glassco - Страница 6

In London’s Great Portland Street, not far from All Souls Church, there is a row of gloomy mansions which have not changed appreciably in the last half century: the same tall narrow windows, the same grey and sombre stone (only darker now from the encrustations of fifty years’ soot), the same recessed and pillared doorways confront the passer-by as in the final quarter of the last century; and the same impression of sternness and secrecy prevails. Who lives there now? one asks. But that does not matter. The neighbourhood is still respectable, but the whole street has an air of exhaustion, of having played out its part, of being, in every sense of the word, finished, — and this impression seems to become intensified to the south of the great church, where stands the row of houses we have mentioned. They seem, somehow, the saddest houses in the world. Can it be that their sadness somehow springs from a mysterious discrepancy between the vigorous, blazing life they once contained and the embers and ashes they now suggest? It may well be: these houses have seen better days. Happiness, you would say, has at some time made her home here, and has now gone elsewhere.

Happiness, yes: and more than happiness, romance. For here, more than sixty years ago, in that great gloomy house opposite, – the third past Langham Street, to be precise – there blossomed the romance of Richard Lovel and Harriet Marwood: a story so bizarre in its beginnings, so fraught with suffering and ecstasy throughout its course and so fantastic in its outcome, that the old house which witnessed its birth and infancy might well look melancholy with the despair of seeing such a story ever matched.

And it is true that such loves as Richard’s and Harriet’s have gone out of style, like the habits, manners and costumes of the past: laws and customs change, carrying away with them the very conditions of such a romance, its climate and source; so now these old love-stories can only serve us as fictions, as dreams maybe, of something that is gone forever but which still holds up before us an ideal towards which we can yearn though we cannot follow it, and which we can enjoy with the added knowledge, at once sweet and full of boundless regret, that such things can never happen again. For there are loves which are impossible in the world as it is these days.

In the year 188–, when this story begins, the Lovel family, one of the oldest in the county of Hampshire, had for two generations its seat in the great house in Great Portland Street. The move had been made in the late ’fifties by Mr. Richard Lovel, the first of his line to distinguish himself in any way other than by the exercise of an enlightened self-interest and an adherence to principles of the most orthodox conservatism. This gentleman had speculated in railway shares to such advantage that within ten years, by the employment of methods into which we need not enquire too closely, he had realized the comfortable fortune of nearly £50,000. This sum had been enough for his wants; he had then sold most of his patrimony near Christchurch, reserving only a cottage built on the site of the earliest Lovel holding, and settled for good in Great Portland Street; where, as if the transplantation had not agreed with him, he had died within less than three years.

He had had only one child, a son remarkable during his youth for the elegance of his manners and the habit of dissipation, and also for the size and vigour of his virile member which was almost a byword in the demimonde of dancers, courtesans and smart masseuses whom he frequented. But these distinctions had been accompanied by considerable shrewdness in business affairs; and on his father’s sudden death young Arthur Lovel, without curtailing either his pleasures or his life in society, had soon settled down to the life of business, at which he proved so adept that the family fortune increased rapidly under his hands. At the age of thirty he had married the Lady Edith Belsize, the fourth daughter of an impoverished peer who was delighted with Arthur’s waiver of the question of settlements. He had undertaken this marriage for two reasons which seemed highly sensible to him, –the beauty and the title of the young woman. He received no more than these; his wife had never been in love with him; indeed it is doubtful if the emotion of love could ever have found a place in the bosom of that cold and beautiful girl, while the curious sexual behaviour of her husband did nothing to attach him to her. Arthur Lovel, congratulating himself that at least she would fall in love with nobody else, had returned to his business and his pleasures with an easy mind. The fruit of this happy union was an only son.

Richard Belsize Lovel was fourteen years old when his mother died. He was at this time, when we first make his acquaintance, a rather insignificant boy, small for his age, shy, of a reserved disposition and a sweet and even temper. Outwardly, his was a timid and passive character; even the delicate beauty he had inherited from his mother recalled the frail and affected grace of a girl. At school his comrades at first called him Sissy: Sissy Lovel. He had blushed at the nickname, but made no attempt to deserve any other. But it was not long before his most striking trait emerged in an inordinate sensuality of both mind and body; and this earned him the only distinction he enjoyed among his schoolmates: he was then admiringly called Smuggy: Smuggy Lovel; in recognition of his sexual prowess at the nightly sessions of onanism in the dormitory, where he displayed a singular felicity in producing repeated erection and orgasm. The distinction was shortlived, however; for his proficiency in this field had led to his being publicly expelled from the school only a few months before his mother’s death.

For the rest, he was far from being stupid, and the depth and swiftness of his intelligence, allied to his shyness, sensuality and tendency to self-effacement, would have combined to assure him – at least in the world’s view – a future either full of unhappiness or of a rich and rapturous fantasticality. Of him, as of the young Hartley Coleridge, it might have been said at this time,

Nature will either end thee quite, Or, lengthening out thy season of delight, Preserve for thee by individual right Ayoung lamb’s heart among the full-grownfloats.

His father, as we have said, was a man of business and a man of pleasure; he had never attended closely to his home, much less to Richard’s upbringing. The boy’s expulsion from school, and the sudden death of Lady Edith, left him in a quandary. He had known of his son’s solitary habits, which he deprecated strongly, but believing that this was a matter for his wife’s attention rather than his own he had forborne any action. The expulsion, however, caused him real concern: he saw the now motherless boy in danger of being permanently branded with the stigma of a shameful and ridiculous habit.

“Good God,” he said, “what am I to do with this wretched boy of mine?”

The question was not rhetorical, for the woman he was addressing was his regular mistress, an Irishwoman of great beauty though humble extraction, whose practical good sense he valued quite as much as he did her skill in giving him pleasure. At the moment of his question they were lying on the daybed in the darkened room of her smart flat, and for some time she had been occupied in stroking and sucking his member into a fresh erection after its repeated ejaculations; now, without ceasing the play of her fingers, she answered her protector.

“I will be a fool then, Arthur, and tell you.”

“A fool, Kate?”

“Yes, for I’ll be risking having a rival. And yet I’m only a fool for telling you what any fool can tell you. What the boy needs is a woman to look after him at home.”

“A woman? In my house? God forbid.”

“And why not? One of these respectable women you have so many of in England, these governesses I mean – daughters of clergymen and such, right-minded, well-educated, strong-handed young ladies, certificates all in order – I mean one of those women who can take a boy like yours in hand and make a man of him.”

Mr. Lovel was silent; he played with the nipple of his mistress’ swelling breast with an absent air as she went on.

“Yes, and you must make sure you find one that’s prepared to use strong measures, Arthur. The boy wants the discipline, you know.”

“Eh? You mean that’s the way to cure him of this vile habit?”

“I do indeed. There’s only one way of breaking the boy of it. It must be fairly flogged out of him. So see you get the right kind of governess, and leave the rest to her.”

Mr. Lovel was silent once more for a few moments; then he nodded briefly, as if to himself, and turned his attention back to the naked woman who was still skilfully masturbating his own member. His hands were toying now with her ample buttocks, seeking the anus.

Kate laughed. “You’re ready for more buggery now, are you not? Well, and so am I... Come now, I’ll suck you again for a bit so you can slip in easily and take your pleasure as you like it.”

Mr. Lovel smiled as her warm wet mouth closed around the bulb of his penis, enjoying the complex caress of mobile lips and the rapid titillation of a strong and expert tongue. His eyes closed luxuriously as one of his mistress’ hands massaged his tense testicles and the forefinger of the other, swiftly moistened between her own thighs, slipped into his rectum and tickled the entrance cleverly; he was already tasting in anticipation the pleasure of buggering his mistress.

For Mr. Lovel, like many Englishmen of his station at that period, greatly preferred to sodomise his women: this, to his mind, was a form of pleasure much superior to that of regular intercourse; and indeed it was many years since he had ejaculated anywhere but in a woman’s bowels or mouth, places which seemed to him ideally fitted for the reception of his sperm. Even Lady Edith had been obliged to submit to this predilection of his, though most unwillingly, as soon as Richard was born; and her air of shrinking and disgust had compared most unfavourably, to her husband’s mind, with the eagerness for the same species of penetration shown by his mistress.

Here we must remark that this rather unusual taste of Kate’s had been developed at an early age and in a manner which, as her protector often thought, did great credit to the standards of her class; for the fact was that her father, a poor workingman who had lost his wife when their daughter was barely twelve years old, had, instead of inflicting a stepmother on the sensitive young girl, transferred his whole affections to her herself and taken her to his bed; and there, out of consideration for her virginity, he had continued to sodomise her most lovingly for seven or eight years, thus sowing the seeds for that passion which was the source of the mutual pleasure now enjoyed by Mr. Lovel and herself.

Now, after bestowing a final vigorous tonguing to her lover’s magnificently erected organ, she rose and disposed herself to receive it in its favourite place, stretching her smooth buttocks with her hands to afford an easier passage into the tight and handsome rectum. Mr. Lovel’s eyes fixed greedily for a moment on the light brown wrinkled lips that were already puffing and contracting rhythmically in their eagerness to welcome his member; then with a deepdrawn sigh of pleasure he placed its head against the orifice, and pushing firmly, insinuated it slowly in the moist and reeking passage. Kate, with an expert writhing movement of her loins, and herself already panting with pleasure, then let it play in and out near the entrance to her bowels for the next few minutes, affording its bulb a veritable massage with the well-developed muscles of her moist sphincter, and all the while titillating her own clitoris so as to keep abreast of her lover’s pleasure. Gradually she admitted the stiffly thrusting member deeply and more deeply, and then, quite beside herself with lust, kept doubling and straightening her spine, panting out all manner of obscenities and encouragements to Arthur and frigging herself wildly until, as his warm sperm gushed into her bowels, she reached her own crisis and united the spasms of her shaken frame with his.

But is spite of his enjoyment with his mistress, Arthur had not forgotten the problem of his son; and a few minutes later he returned to it.

“So I must engage a governess for Richard,” he said thoughtfully as Kate was tenderly sponging his flaccid member.

“Ah, but be sure you engage the right kind, the flogging kind.”

“And how the deuce do I make sure of that?”

“Why, you just insist on firmness; for that’s the word they will understand. See, when you advertise, you must state that it’s for a boy that needs a firm hand.”

Arthur watched abstractedly as she rolled his soft member delicately in a linen handkerchief to dry it. “A firm hand, eh?” he said with a smile.

“Aye. That will mean the whip, you know. It’s well known in their world.” She shook scented powder over the now shrunken flesh and patted it in lightly. “Ah, it may be a fool I am in telling you to take a woman into your house, Arthur. But my heart goes out to the poor boy, who is in a fair way to ruin his health and prospects by all that playing with his thing.”

Arthur bent forward and kissed his mistress tenderly on the cheek. “Ah, Kate,” he murmured, “you need have no worries on the score of losing me to any governess.” He smiled. “Is it likely I should ever find a woman as fit for my pleasures as yourself? No, my dear, the woman who likes a member up her rectum is all too rare in this world at any time, as I well know.”

“Well, that’s true enough. And I think I know your other tastes and likings in bed better than anyone else will be able to – be she lady, servant, governess, or even a common whore like me.” And in a sudden burst of affection she pressed her lips to his hand.

Arthur Lovel was deeply touched. “Indeed, Kate my dear,” he said, fondling her handsome head, “you are the dearest and wisest whore I have ever had. But come now, let us go back to bed. You shall suck me nicely now, for I think I should like to spend once again; only this time it will be in that lovely mouth of yours which gives me not only such pleasure but such good advice.”