3 THE FORCED AFFAIR

A second girl, one less moral.

She smiled brightly at him and said in her delightfully clear comprehensive school voice that Chantelle was her name too.

“There aren’t many of us Chantelles around,” she said.

“There was only the one back then, between the wars,” he sighed, and she wondered, suddenly, why there was a lonely tear running down his face.

“Don’t cry,” she said quietly, “you don’t need to.”

“You weren’t there, so you won’t understand,” he murmured, and retreated back into his memories. Once they’d been fine recollections of magical years but now that their shadows had deepened they were almost painful.

He hadn’t seen Chantelle much after that. She was, she told him so many times that the words were still etched in his memories, spoken now, as then, in the refined voice that defined her station in life, a decent girl. There were some things she wouldn’t dream of doing and if he suggested it again then she’d tell daddy and daddy would make sure the whole wide world knew what a filthy mind he had and how he wanted to ruin a girl’s reputation.

He hadn’t looked at himself like that, not then and not until he met Melissa, and the last thing he wanted to do was spoil anyone’s reputation, because he knew full well how important reputations were.

But he did meet Melissa.

He took Melissa on the river in his father’s rowing boat, too. But he knew he must be careful not to let ill-considered things slip into the conversation. Instead he must enjoy her for herself, for her charm, her wit, the pretty way she smiled, the honey in her voice, the tinkle in her laugh. So he rowed to the special place where the bank was crumbling ever so slightly and pulled up like he had that other time with that other girl.

“You’re sweet,” she said when he offered her a cigarette. Yes, everyone smoked back then. It was the thing to do and some doctors even suggested it might be beneficial. It might ward off coughs and colds. It might give a man a husky, manly voice.

“And so are you,” he replied, meaning it. Melissa was a well known figure in some quite important circles. He knew that because his own father was in most of those circles. He didn’t know it yet, but his father was the richest man in the world and could afford to party in the company of elevated party girls like Melissa.

It was that time on that river bank, after he spread a blanket on the turves for them to sit on, that Melissa smashed his world into smithereens.

“Your dad brings me here,” she told him, quite out of the blue, quite blatantly, five words that changed his perspective on everything.

Because his father was an odd figure.

He hadn’t had a job yet he was always rich enough to live it up, to go to extravagant parties in big houses where the important men of the day went, to drink expensive champagne out of the twee crystal slippers of society’s jolliest maidens… or princesses. They were mostly princesses. They wore glittering circlets on their heads and spoke nonsense most of the time, according to father.

And he went to those parties quite often, telling Braxton that it would be his turn soon, when he was a man. He was sixteen, and not a man! He knew that, of course. You don’t become a man until you’re twenty-one. At least his kind didn’t. The sons of labourers and miners and rough, useless men like that were men soon after they were born. It was a natural order in things.

“He brings you here?” he asked shocked because, in his mind, the one thing led to another and being there, lonely to the world, out of sight and out of mind with only the birds in the treetops witnesses to what you did and said, might invoke routes to intimate adventure and new discoveries, and father was a clean living man who went to church.

He’d only been sixteen, so he didn’t really know what those adventures might be.

“We make love on this very spot,” she sighed, “your dad and me. Oh, I know he’s not young any more, not our age, it would be daft if he was, you being you and me being me and both of us born the same year, but he’s quite a gentleman and he knows what a girl likes, and he provides it in spades. He takes precautions, though. Plenty of precautions.”

She might have been talking a foreign language when she mentioned what a girl likes and precautions because he’d always thought he knew what girls like, nice silk stocking, an enticing dress to wear at parties where their legs were very much in evidence, hair done just right with those sweet little curls, kiss curls they called them, with hats like spikes, and bright red lipstick to emphasise their beautiful mouths. But her tone of voice suggested it almost certainly might be something else.

Leaning on the orchard gate his sigh, crafted from both memory and regret, made Chantelle sigh with him.

“She seduced me,” he said, quite blatantly and in a quavering voice that was more than just age.

And she had! And it hadn’t taken her long. First the way she touched him, where she touched him, where Chantelle would never have touched him, the way she excited him as she fumbled inside his clothing and kept telling him about his father.

“He liked this too,” she said, her voice tinkling, “he makes me do this to him and then he gives me a present! You know, diamonds and stuff, though I’ve already got more than I’ll ever need to wear! Are you going to give me diamonds? The son of a so rich a man must be planning on giving me something really special!”

And what, apparently, his father liked her to do to him was both outrageous and beautiful and went through his entire body as if it was a dart fired from Heaven. And he liked her to do it to him, too. He closed his eyes and lay back and let her, Melissa was good at what she did.

Yes, he’d give her diamonds! He’d give her whatever she wanted, it was the least he could do. After all, father did. He gave her diamonds.

And when, with a volcanic surge unlike anything he had ever experienced in his life before was over, he said so to her.

“What can I give you?” he asked.

“Oh, you have,” she chirruped at him, “you’ve given me everything I’ve ever needed and if it all works out they’ll have to listen to me and give me what I want, give me the man of my dreams and a life worth living, or the shame will be on them, too.”

He might have been listening to uncle George’s parrot in its cage for what Melissa’s words meant to him.

Because he’d given her nothing. Surely.

Except, of course for a few drops of semen.

“That’s what she wanted,” he groaned at Chantelle by the orchard gate, “she wanted to force me into marrying her. I didn’t know at the time, I didn’t understand, but she had her eyes on my father’s wealth… but, child, I asked you a question. Will you marry me?”

© Peter Rogerson 02.12.19