So much for the better parts of Sir Lawrence Terstyke, Bart, Merlin House, Sussex. The morbid parts are swiftly if painfully summed up. While George Maytemper, flushed, as it is said, with success in the provinces, took his troup to London as Mr. George Maytemper and His Players, where they would be engaged in comedy repertory, I pleaded malaise and fatigue to Maytemper before he left for the metropolis, but hoped that he would be accessible to me there once the troup became established, which would surely come about, I told him.
Maytemper was amenable and trusted that I would recover my spirits in due course. I must say that he kept an adroitly straight face-it was common knowledge that I had consented to be Terstyke's mistress.
What nobody was privy to was that since Loki and Sir Lawrence had stoked my carnal fires, I was developing a libidinous-ness incapable of tenninal satisfaction. The onset was gradual, not sudden, and I first became aware of it when, late one evening, Sir Lawrence brought back to Merlin House an overgrown, lumbering youngster obviously addlepated and without average sense. The baronet explained that he had “borrowed” the hulking, smiling youth from one of his gambling friends, a farmer in the district. I was in our bedroom brushing my long black hair when Sir Lawrence appeared with the chap who was quite tall but misshapen, being small in the shoulder and wide in the hip.
“Borrowed you for some milking, eh?” Sir Lawrence said in an overly loud and drunken voice to the lad and proceeded to feel for the youth's phoenix through his strained trousers and then familiarly yanked at it, as though he were ringing for a servant. “Ay, that you done, m'lord,” the lad said, laughing oafishly and nodding his unkempt head, staring at me. I was in negligee and observing their actions in the mirror. I absolutely could not control myself. I turned on the vanity bench, not missing a stroke of the brushing, and slowly crossed my legs, squeezing my thighs together. Naturally the lad saw. I had put it in full view. His jaw lolled and he said to the baronet pitifully, “Pull me some more, m'lord.” I knew I had touched the primeval ooze and would be wallowing in it. It had taken nothing more than a vacant-skulled rustic to arouse me. And as I was aroused, I was descended-I could be as coarse as the most foul-mouthed slattern. “Come here,” I said to the boy. “I'll show you what pulling's like if you've got a cock bigger than a thimble.” Sir Lawrence laughed again, gently patting his own pipe and balls.
The boy approached me diffidently. His blue eyes were watery and there was a sort of whitish cottony fuzz growing on his head.
Altogether unprepossessing except for the doughy balls to be kneaded and the prick to be reamed. Indeed, a mere clod could set me afire. I licked my lips. He forgot to lick Ms-spittle was accumulating at his mouth comers. I grinned wryly- even that did not repel me-the spittle was an extension of semen. “I'll wager you an emerald to match your eyes, Victoria,” the baronet said hoarsely, “that the farmboy will outlast you.” “And if I lose?” I asked as the lumpish bumpkin gazed at us bewilderedly, one of my quivering breasts slipping outside the negligee. “I'll use you as equity at the gaming tables. If the cards come low, you will have a queue to service.”
“Done, m'lord,” I said mockingly. The amber eyes of the gray-haired man were feverish. “Get on with it, Victoria. I've never stood in the wings before. Most exhilarating, my dear, most exhilarating.” I calmly unbuttoned the boy's trousers-his knees were trembling, which only stoked me the more-and closed my sweaty fingers about his shillelagh, which my imagination labeled knobbed and doughy. But the piece wasn't that way at all-it was actually velvety to the touch, one of the smoothest and whitest pissers I've ever encountered, and I brought it out into the open to admire and hold on to as I asked him, “What do they call you, boy?” “It be Floyd Cunlippe, m'lady. I be a bastard,” he added with a sort of sad meditativeness, nodding his head gravely. I was touched, but not overly. I was far more touched in the groin where I felt a kind of mailed fist churning, grinding. I felt predatory, vicious. The clod called. Floyd must have sensed it because, suddenly, his watery eyes widened and he tried to pull away. “No,” I said. I shook my head and held on. The holding-on glazed the lad's expression because in a moment he had become very gross in my hand, like a fatted calf, and his big hips started to roll. Floyd Cunlippe had become a sacrifice, and he stood there on shaky legs. I swiftly kneeled and applied the nipple of one of my teats to Floyd's stiff white spar. “My darling,” the baronet said, teasing his own penis by pinching it gently, “you really are a prize cunt, you know? It wouldn't surprise me in the least to learn that that clitoris of yours has a little brain all by itself and has rather taken over your entire body-the slit revolution, so to speak-” “M'lady, m'lady,” Floyd cried out in an astonishingly high, womanish voice, “I be set to whitewash the barn!” And he fell back. Fortunately for him, the bed was directly behind and, as his body struck it, his priapus became a gusher and I, slamming down on him-to employ a vivid Americanism-capped him. While I did so, and he writhed beneath me, he kept yipping in that womanish register which he apparently had recourse to whenever overly excited that he was a foundling and undeserving. A foundling and undeserving, he kept repeating as I sucked greedily, greedily, as though I were an infant at my mother's breast, Louisa Quist-Hagen, the Marchioness of Portferrans herself, and simply couldn't get enough. You may think what you damned well please, dear reader, such as that I was too early weaned, and from thence stem all my difficulties-but I tell you there is nothing like the pump of the cock in the mouth, the warm semen washing away all mouth disorders, so to speak, and pouring calm, with its oiliness, on the troubled, turbid waters of the psyche. Lawrence Terstyke himself was moaning in bliss as he lay down beside Floyd and masturbated against him to a climax… As it turned out, the farmboy did not outlast me and neither did Sir Lawrence Terstyke because, on his subsequent trip to London to purchase me the emerald with which to pay off the bet, he became involved in a drunken brawl in Soho and was knifed to death. Mistresses, contrary to the sentimental bilge written about the matter, rarely mourn their lovers' demises, and I was not one of the rarities. Furthermore, I had mourned once and that, I vowed, was enough to last me a lifetime. True again, I do miss my brother and, occasionally, sharply so, but that's a special relationship and I confess I don't quite understand it. I had become Terstyke's mistress because he and the great Dane had rekindled my sexual fires, and had been one of the few men able to make a stab-if you'll forgive that play-at sexually satisfying me. The stab was now gone, quite permanently. There was no further reason for me to stay in Sussex and, as soon as I settled what I could of the baronet's affairs, I packed and was off by coach to London. I must add that Loki, the great Dane, was inconsolable, or I would have taken him with me. As it was, the beast would have wasted away-a most cruel fate-so I had him put to death. I had written George Maytemper, of course, and he had replied post-haste that I was welcome to rejoin his players at any time I chose, and that I had only to name the date and time of my arrival. He was about to cast Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, and he thought I might be a redoubtable addition to the players. The furor over Wilde had long since been dissipated; he had suffered his gaol term and was now a broken man -and surely we English in our insufferable hypocrisy over sex had crucified the Irishman. The least we could do, in some recompense, was to keep playing his quite immortal comedies. At any rate, as it turned out, Maytemper did cast me in the Wilde and we opened to a good house at the Tarton, the theatre he had rented for the repertory group. My beauty was such, of course, that I required no starring roles to have a legion of admirers-and I confess I was indiscriminate in my choice of sleeping mates, which means, naturally enough, I had little choice at all. I debarred no male on account of the tint of his epidermis, requiring only that it be reasonably clean-a snobbery I learnt to dispense with.
I avoided long- and short-term entanglements-I preferred the shallow unhappiness of day-to-day or, at most, of month-to-month relationships to the vicious, eviscerating unhappinesses of full-scale affairs. I had, of course, given up any idea of finding any particular man who might sexually satisfy me. I do not mean, sweet reader, that I had developed any difficulty toward reaching orgasm; on the contrary, orgasm came to me practically as first nature. What the trouble was, to put it cleanly, was that I could no longer reach satiety. No sooner quit of one climax, I was ready for a second, and so on in what amounted to an infinite series interrupted only by my vocation as an actress and my needs for food, sleep and the ineffable pleasure of evacuation. In consequence, as it is said, the men fell away from me, gracefully or painfully, like leaves of grass. Even Terstyke and his great Dane, who gave me some of the best fucks I've ever had, did not suspend my carnal itch. There were other diversions I indulged in, certainly. After all, London is London and, indeed, was. It is not widely admitted, but one does enjoy the sordid metropolitan backdrop.
One may even come to have the callous pleasure of watching homeless children-of which there were many in the great city-sharpening the edge of their already thin bodies in order to cut and consume, quickly enough, the crumb of survival. I could, too, and did, have the delight of watching the costermonger frequently pass off his inferior fruits and vegetables to the unwary-my pleasure was one of contempt both for the seller and the buyer. As a Cornishwoman I had quite a clear idea of what fresh provender looked like. Among the crowds on the London streets- both shruggingly indifferent and highly concerned subjects of Her Majesty's empire-were the Gypsies who hawked birds, snakes and hedgehogs, the last-named, amazingly, for the obliteration of the pestiferous beetle. And, if I may thoroughly confess, I took a child's delight in gawking at the fireworks at the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens.
Apart from the infinite quaintness of the city, I was squired to innumerable parties where I danced half the night away in the lancers and the polka… It was during this time that my father and mother, the esteemed Marquis and Marchioness of Portferrans, made overtures to me to return to their fond embrace at Hagen and Quistern houses. The overtures were conveyed to me through my brother who, observing the faded elegance of my rooms at Quarkney's Course-the hotel I resided at because of its polyglot quality and its proximity to the theatre-said he now regretted having effected the confluence of his sister with George May-temper. “You know, Clarissa,” he said gesturing at the faintly run down condition of the interior, “this is simply not the sort of thing for you.” “James, what is the sort of thing for me?” He gazed at me for some time, his emerald eyes aglow, his milky skin as tempting to the female as mine was to the male -and I could have sworn his brain was rife with memory of the early days in Cornwall and Kensington. “Funny,” he said at last, “I don't think I'm sure of what is the sort of thing for you. I can't quite grasp whatever it is. I think, Clarissa, you've eluded me.
You've certainly eluded our progenitors.” “Have they sent out search parties for their daughter?” I gently asked. “Not quite.
But they're prepared to deal handsomely with you,” James said. “One develops quite a fondness for guilt- otherwise how could it be borne?”
“Point, James. Yes. But I am in no mood to be hawked to the scions of nobility. What I regret is that I've even showed them the courtesy of changing my name. What the hell, Quist-Hagen would look most inviting on the marquee.” My brother grinned slashingly and I loved him for it-indeed, for anything Jamesian, although even for him I could not return to the parental menage. “What will you do, Clarissa?” “Keep balancing on the boards-for a while.”
“Acting,” he said. “Yes,” I said. And I thought at that point I had better cut him to the living quick, as one might say, so as to avoid the possibility later on of the most horrible sort of shock, the sort of shock that could destroy, because of the love he bore me, his very foundations. If James no longer would seek to see me, potential ignominy on my account would not be Iris-or my parents', either; but I was thinking, really, exclusively of my brother. I wanted, on account of my insufferable carnal itch, to experiment on the most sordid level so that, conceivably, I might reach satiety, and I was simply waiting for the best time to dissociate myself from the theatre. As it happened, I had a visit in my dressing room from one of the most exquisitely coiffed and dressed women I have ever seen, an individual who helped me orient myself to the most radical step I had ever taken in my life-but I am getting ahead of my story. I had to hurt James now in order not to hurt him, later, irreparably.
“James,” I said. “Eh?” He was, in his elegant manner, gazing bemusedly out the window at the soot sifting through the London atmosphere. “I know,” I said softly, “what I'm going to tell you will hurt you terribly but I really do think it will be for the best.”
He swung round sharply, blanching. “What are you driving at, Clarissa?” “I don't want to see you again, James,” I said. I thought I was maintaining my control but my twisting fingers gave me away. I had no idea I was entwining and disentwining them. And their tension certainly was not lost on my brother. “That's palpably untrue,” he said in amazement. “Look at your hands.” My face flushing, I could not meet his gaze. “It has got to be true,” I whispered. “Which is something else again. What sort of melodrama are you involving yourself in, Clarissa? Are you going into hiding?
Are your creditors overwhelming you? You ought to see mine -poor tradesmen, they are so outclassed when they've neither the lower or the upper to go to, but have only the middle to mull in…” “Not hiding.” “What, then?” He was imperious, as only my brother could be. He was arrayed in authority but it was neither overbearing nor oppressive. “It's not an accomplished fact so there's no point in discussing it.” “We had better-discuss it, Clarissa, before it becomes an accomplished fact.” “I will not discuss it, James.” I stood up, my brow working frantically into lines. “Clarissa…” he said mollifyingly. “Don't you understand?” I cried out. “I've got to see how far I can go-and I can only do that alone, and certainly not with you looking over my shoulder and occasionally making intense attempts to drag me up from the gutter. Don't you understand that your loving me can stop me? and that if I see you from time to time I will feel the impact of your loving and I won't then be able to take an action?” “I don't know what gutter you're so intent on wafting away in, but there's no good reason for any of us to be in any gutter-” “Oh, my God, James.” He smiled tightly.
“I do sound like a curate, don't I? And the odd thing is, Clarissa, is that I have decided to go into the church…” I stared at him. My belly keeled over and for a moment I thought I was going to vomit. The church? My brother a divine? The irony, I thought, was too juvenile-I laughed immoderately. James, after a moment in which he looked at me with pure hatred, began to laugh too. “You will go to the guillotine-and to God,” I said, “with your face up because your collar will have been turned backward. But why the church, James? I thought you were so keen on medicine.” “I was, Clarissa. I remain so, but I think I'm a little keener on God-the care and maintenance of the soul is quite as important as that of the body, which both you and I-” he grinned-“took excellent care of, and it is through the sensual, after all, that one comes to the soul. But I don't want to sermonize at you, Clarissa-you may indeed have to see how far you can go. I should have told you that right off. I'm sorry. I'm terribly preoccupied with making the shift to divinity school-I'm leaving the technologic world to find out where God ends and man begins. I think we have to discover just where that point is so that we can take care of the gap between. If we don't take care of the gap, Mary Wollstonecroft's monster out of Frankenstein, suitably intellectualized, will say that's where he begins.” His face lightened momentarily. “We don't want that, do we?” “No,” I said in a low voice. “Nor are you taking the next coach to the gutter,” he said. “No. Seeing how far I can go may be confined to the theatre -which I've no intention of leaving for several years, in any case.”
“And you don't want to see me.” “Yes. I will have lost a brother,” I could not resist adding, “while you will have gained a sister-Jesus Christ.” He smiled wryly. “The homosexuality of the Son of God is open to some doubt,” James said, “but we are working to reduce the incest content, although the Holy Ghost is hardly fleshy enough to be included.” He shook his head. “What really concerns me now is the idea of not seeing you.” “At least till I find out what my limitations are.” “Which takes most people a lifetime,”
James said. “Yes,” I said. A shadow passed over his face. To this day I do not know if it had been caused by a cloud swifting across the sun, or by his spirit momentarily winking out. “It seems,” he said, “as if we must go our very separate ways.”
“Yes.” “Clarissa, I do love you, you know. I shall miss you bitterly. Bitterly.” Anguish crossed his face. For a moment I thought he might lose control. But he did not. An infinitely weary grace held him up, I'm quite sure. He kissed me then, full on the mouth. I clasped him in a terrible desperation and put my loins to his-I wanted to feel the lift and the heft of him. But I felt nothing, nothing. We disengaged. James had won through. I had lost.
“Please tell Mother and Father,” I said, “that it's quite too late. They may disinherit me, which is perfectly all right-I'm earning my own way and shall continue to do so.” “All right, Clarissa,” he said, his hand on the door. “Victoria,” I said. “Victoria Collins.” I smiled wanly. “Yes, of course. Victoria. Goodbye, sister.” James had won again.