Feelings of Fear Read online

  She reached out and gently touched it with her pink-painted fingernails. Cliff couldn’t take his eyes off her, and quivered when she drew her nail all the way down the underside of his erection and lightly scratched his tightly wrinkled testes. A single drop of clear sparkling fluid appeared at the opening of his penis, and she collected it with one of her fingers as if she were collecting dew from a mushroom, and tasted it.

  As she did so, she opened her thighs, and amid the dark fur of her pubic hair her vaginal lips opened with a soft but audible click, revealing a crimson opening that was brimming with juice.

  And then he thought: Holy shit – no rubber.

  She took hold of his shoulders and drew him toward her. For a moment he hesitated, and she felt his hesitation. “What’s wrong?” she whispered. “Don’t tell me you don’t want to do it.”

  “Listen – I don’t have any rubbers. Well, I do, but they’re back at the base. Maybe I could go down and ask one of the guys if he—”

  She smiled and shook her head. At the same time she grasped his penis and luxuriously rubbed it up and down. “I don’t want you to use a rubber. I want to feel your naked cock inside me.”

  “But come on now … what if you get pregnant?”

  “Then all the better. That will give me one more reason to stay alive.”

  With her other hand, she reached between her legs and parted her wavelike lips even wider, and guided his penis so that the head of it was nestling between them. He looked down at her and he thought that he was probably as close to heaven as he ever would be. Then she dug her fingernails into his buttocks and pulled him into her, and he wasn’t even close, he was there.

  They made love all night and she didn’t want to stop. The stained-oak headboard knocked against the wallpaper so persistently that Tom came and told them to move the bed away from the wall. “You can shag all you like but the rest of us doesn’t want to hear it.”

  When Cliff was exhausted, Anne knelt between his legs to suck and lick at his softened penis. She succeeded in cramming him all into her mouth at once, balls and everything. Then she sat astride his face so that his own semen dripped out of her vagina and on to his forehead. “I anoint you,” she said.

  Toward dawn she fell asleep against his back, with one of her fingers deeply inserted into his anus. He slept, too, and because of the blackout curtains neither of them realized it was morning until they heard the thunderous banging of beer-kegs being dropped into the yard outside. They sat up simultaneously and stared at each other.

  “Jesus, it’s eight-thirty. I have a briefing at nine.”

  “And I’ve got a train to catch.”

  They climbed out of bed, and Cliff pulled the curtains open. It was a bright, sunny morning, and he had to lift his hand to shield his eyes. His face was puffy and pale and his back and thighs were covered in red scratches. Anne’s lips were swollen and there were chafe-marks on the white flesh just above her stocking-tops, from Cliff’s stubble.

  She came up to him and put her arms around him. Her breasts swung and her nipples grazed his stomach. “If I never meet you ever again, I want to say thank you,” she said.

  “Oh, come on, we’ll meet again,” he chided her, and then realized what he had said. “Don’t know where, don’t know when …”

  “Well, perhaps,” she said.

  “What do you mean ‘perhaps’? Give me your address in Torquay. I have three days’ furlough coming up soon. I could visit you.”

  “I don’t know the address yet. It’s called Sunnybank but I don’t know which road.”

  “You’re not going to vanish and not give me any way of getting in touch with you? Not after last night?”

  “I wasn’t looking for any kind of attachment.”

  “Oh, really? I thought we were pretty attached. Most of the time, anyhow.”

  She kissed him and curled herself into him in a way that no girl had ever done to him before, almost as if she wanted to be part of him. “Eager … that wasn’t the reason I wanted to do it.”

  “So, what reason?”

  “Please, Eager. Don’t ask me. I don’t want either of us ever to find out.”

  They stood so close together by the window, and outside the huge white cumulus clouds sailed through the morning air, fully-rigged to cross the North Sea to Holland, and to Germany, and even beyond. Cliff watched them and couldn’t bear to think that he and Anne were going to be parted, and that he might never touch her again, not even once. During the night, their intimacy had become complete, as if they had crawled through each other’s bodies like potholers down some dark, wet sluice. They had done almost everything that two lovers are capable of doing, and more.

  Eventually, however, Anne touched his lips with her fingertips and said, “I have to go. There’s a train from Royston at nine fifteen.”

  “Do you have time for breakfast?” Cliff asked her. “When he can get the bacon, Tom does a great bacon and eggs – and when he can get the eggs.”

  She shook her head. “Honestly, I’ll be late.”

  “Then do you mind if I do?”

  He picked her up in his arms and carried her back to the bed. He laid her on the twisted sheets and opened her legs. Then he licked her, very slowly and sensually, all around her clitoris. He probed the tip of his tongue into her urethra and finally plunged it as deeply as he could into her vagina. She lay motionless while he did it, one hand resting very lightly on his shoulder, staring at the ceiling.

  They parted outside the pub. Although the day was bright there was a stiff wind blowing, and her scarf flapped.

  “Cheerio then,” she said.

  “Cheerio.”

  She took hold of his hand and momentarily covered it with hers. When she took it away again, he found that he was holding the silver medallion that she had worn around her neck. On the other side of the road, a gaggle of geese were honking loudly as a postwoman cycled past. “What’s this for?” asked Cliff.

  “Well,” she shrugged, “keepsake.”

  He held it up and it flashed in the sunlight. “What is it?”

  “St Catherine. She’s my guardian saint.”

  “Wasn’t she broken on a wheel or something?”

  “That’s right. But no matter how much she suffered, she never denied her faith. She was a heroine.”

  A bus appeared in the distance, a toytown bus, cream and white. It came closer and closer across the wide, flat countryside, and all the time Anne said nothing, but smiled as if she were going into Royston for an hour or two to do some shopping, instead of disappearing out of Cliff’s life for ever.

  It was only after she had boarded the bus, and he saw her sitting at the back, with her hand half-covering her mouth, that he realized that tears were streaming down her face.

  * * *

  For the remaining four days of the rest and recuperation period that had followed Blitz Week, Cliff immersed himself in planning, organizing, and flying practise. He worked almost as hard as he had when the Eighth Air Force had been bombing deep into Germany every single day. His ground crew took to calling him Cliff Hanger, because he was always hanging around the hangars.

  He was doing everything he could to keep himself busy, and not to think about Anne. But he couldn’t get her out of his mind: the way she had felt when she was lying in his arms, the way she tasted, the way she laughed. What haunted him most of all her was the way in which she had been so demanding and yet so lacking in guile. She had only been going to Torquay, to nurse a whole lot of old folk, and surely there were plenty of men in Torquay. Why had she acted as if she had wanted to live through a whole lifetime of sexual experience in just one night?

  Everywhere he went he carried her St Catherine medallion. It dangled from the switches above his head when the 379th Bombardment Group resumed bombing the shipyards at Kiel, the Heinkel aircraft factory at Warnemunde, and the Focke-Wulf factory at Oschersleben, only ninety miles southwest of Berlin. He didn’t know whether it brought him good luck, but a
fter eleven daylight missions to the Ruhr, the worst damage that his Fort had sustained was a flak-riddled starboard elevator.

  In October, the weather closed in, and for days on end the East Anglian countryside was swept with rain and muffled with dirty, low-flying cloud. Three missions were attempted, and each time most of them were called back, because the cloud over Germany was even worse – sometimes rising up from ground zero to 30,000 feet. They managed another light raid on Oschersleben, but they spent most of their time waiting for the weather to clear, with rain dripping off the plexiglass noses of their grounded Forts.

  One dark Thursday lunchtime, Cliff finished his twice-weekly letters to his mother and his brother Paul, handed them over to the censor, and then cycled to The Dog & Duck for something to eat. The cloud was so low that he was actually cycling through it, actually breathing it in. The countryside all around him was almost invisible, so that he felt as if he were cycling through a bone-chilling dream. The grass on the roadside was a vivid, unnatural green.

  He reached the pub and left his bicycle where he always did, propped against the wall. He walked in and the saloon bar was almost empty, except for a ruddy-cheeked old farmer who grew potatoes and curly kale hereabouts, and a foxy-faced British squaddie who was smoking roll-ups as if he had only fifteen minutes left to live.

  Tom came up to the bar and asked him “What’ll it be?” as if he were asking Stan Laurel about his prospects with his sister-in-law.

  “Pint of Flowers, please, Tom. And what have you got to eat?”

  “Cottage pie. More cottage than pie, though.” He meant that there was far more potato than meat.

  “How about a cheese sandwich?”

  He sat at the bar drinking his beer and eating his mousetrap sandwich, listening to Music While You Work on the wireless, turned up just loud enough to be irritating and not loud enough to be enjoyable.

  He had almost finished when the door at the back of the pub swung open, and he saw somebody standing in the stairwell. The day was so dark that all he could see was a silhouette, lined by grayish light, but there was something about the figure’s hair that gave him a cold sliding feeling all the way down his back.

  “Anne?” he said. “Anne, is that you?”

  The figure remained where it was for a moment or two, and then turned without a word and climbed up the stairs. The wireless was playing, “Sally, Sally, pride of our alley … and more than the whole world to me …” Cliff climbed off his barstool and made his way to the back of the pub. Tom didn’t pay him any attention: the access to the toilets were through the same door. Cliff reached the foot of the stairs just in time to hear the latch of one of the upstairs bedroom doors closing. He hesitated, listening, and he was sure that he could hear someone walking across the creaky floorboards of the back bedroom, and sitting on the bed with a bronchial groaning of bedsprings. He grasped the banister and mounted the stairs two at a time, as quietly as he could, until he reached the landing.

  He listened again, but all he could hear was the wireless; and in the distance, the harsh, lonely droning of a B-17’s engine being tested.

  He approached the back bedroom door and tapped on it. “Anne?” he called. After all, if it wasn’t Anne, all he had to do was apologize. But supposing she didn’t answer?

  “Anne, it’s Cliff.”

  He waited almost a minute more. He was about to go back downstairs, but then he thought: damn it, what am I scared of? He opened the latch and pushed the door halfway open, giving a loud, false cough as he did so. “Hullo, there? Anybody there?”

  Although the curtains were drawn back, the room was almost impenetrably gloomy. All Cliff could see through the window was fog. It looked just the same as it had before, with its dull brown wallpaper and its cheap varnished bureau. “Goodbye, Old Pal” was still hanging on the wall above the bed. And on the bed lay Anne, completely naked, with her hands held behind her head.

  “Anne?” he said, closing the door and sitting down next to her. “Why didn’t you answer me? I nearly gave it up.”

  She gave him a faint, tired smile. “I knew you’d come,” she told him. She took one of her hands out from behind her head as if his appearance had freed it for her. He leaned forward and kissed her, and she ran her fingers into his hair. “I knew you wouldn’t let me down.”

  He reached for the bedside lamp with its galleon shade, but Anne held his wrist and said, “Don’t … not this time. I’m not really looking my best.” And she was right. As Cliff’s eyes grew gradually accustomed to the gloom, he could see that she was desperately pale. The only color she had were two plum-colored circles under her eyes, and two hectic spots of crimson on her cheekbones. They looked more like bruises than rouge.

  “Honey, what’s been happening to you?” Cliff asked her. “Are you all right? You look like somebody beat up on you.”

  She lifted her head to kiss him again, and as she did so she winced in obvious pain. “I’m all right, really I am. I’m just pleased to see you.”

  “I want to know who did this. It wasn’t that old boyfriend of yours, was it? The one you were ‘just chums’ with? I’ll have his ass in a sling.”

  “Sh – sh – sh!” Anne quietened him, a finger pressed to her lips. “It was an accident, that’s all. A car, in the blackout. It was all my own fault. I don’t want you to be angry, darling. I just want you to stay here and make love to me.”

  Cliff glanced toward the door. “I don’t know … have you told Tom that you’re here?”

  “It doesn’t matter. All you have to do is lock the door.”

  Cliff kissed her again, and then again. “Do you know what?” he said. “I think you’re amazing. And this time I happen to have some rubbers with me.”

  “You don’t have to bother about those.”

  “Well, if you’re sure …”

  He stripped off his flying jacket and his gray cable-knit sweater. It was so cold in the bedroom that his breath smoked, and he wondered how Anne could stand to lie there on the quilt with nothing on at all. He pulled off his pants and already his cock was rising. “Come on, let’s get under the covers.”

  “I want to look at you first.”

  He knelt on the bed between her legs. She ran her fingers around his shoulders and down his chest. She sat up, wincing again, and kissed his nipples. She bit them, too, and he said “Ouch!”

  “Why don’t you do that to me?” she asked him. Those rainwater eyes were unusually dark, the pupils widely dilated.

  “You mean, bite you?”

  She held up her left breast in her hand, offering it to him. He looked at her for a moment, very unsure of what she really wanted him to do. Then he tentatively kissed her nipple, and sat up straight again, smiling. In return, however, she gripped his penis so hard that her nails dug right into it.

  “Hey, ouch, Jesus,” he said, trying to pull away, but she gripped him even harder.

  “Why don’t you bite me?” she repeated. “You’re not frightened, are you? I’m only a stupid tart with no morals at all! What does it matter if you bite me? What does it matter what you do to me?”

  Still Cliff hesitated, but then Anne took hold of his balls and caught the skin with her fingernails, pulling it upward. It hurt, but in a strange way he was beginning to find it exciting, too, and his penis swelled even harder. He bent forward and took her nipple between his lips. He could feel it stiffen against his tongue. She clutched his balls even more painfully, so he nipped her nipple between his front teeth.

  “Harder,” she demanded. “You can bite it right off if you want.”

  He bit it harder, and she gasped, and lifted her hips.

  “Hey, look. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to do it so doggone hard.”

  “Harder,” she panted. “For God’s sake, darling, do it harder!”

  He took a deep breath, and then bit her nipple so hard that he tasted blood. She let out a high, strangled yelp, and bucked up and down on the bed so that the springs scrunched. Cliff bit her a
gain and again, first one breast and then the other, biting them until he could almost feel his incisors closing together, and then chewing them with his molars. All the time she gasped and shivered, and there was a thin slide of blood coming out of the side of her mouth where she had bitten her tongue.

  Cliff lifted his head and said, “Anne – Anne, listen to me – I can’t hurt you any more. I’m just not—”

  But Anne opened her legs wide and said, “Fuck me, Eager. Fuck me just as hard as you can.”

  “Anne, I—”

  “Fuck me, you bastard, if you care for me at all!”

  He took his penis in his fist and guided it into her wide-open vulva. He had never known a girl so wet. Her upper thighs were smothered in juice and even the quilt was soaking. He thrust himself into her as hard as he could, but even that didn’t seem to be enough for her. She rolled him over and sat on top of him, straight upright, so that he penetrated her as deeply as he could physically could. With every thrust he could feel the neck of her womb touching the head of his cock, and with every thrust she shuddered and wept.

  She reached behind her and tried to force two or three sharp-fingernailed fingers into his anus, and it was then that his muscles tightened and he climaxed, far too soon but he couldn’t help it.

  Anne literally hissed with rage and disappointment. “You bastard! You complete bastard! How could you do that to me?” She pummeled his shoulders with her fists and then started to tear at his chest-hair.

  “For Christ’s sake, Anne—”

  But she climbed off him, and worked her way up until she was kneeling over his face. “Now bite me some more. Bite me there.”

  “Anne, forget it, honey. I’m not going to do it. I’m not that kind of guy.”

  In a sudden and explosive rage, she seized hold of his hair and sat down on his mouth with all of her weight, so that her vulva was forced right into his mouth. She dragged her hips from side to side so that her lips were scraped against his teeth, and her pubic bone bruised his nose. All he could taste was salt blood and starchy semen.

  This time, he took hold of her wrists, gripped them tight, and bodily twisted her away. She hit her head against the wall, but he rolled off the bed and stood up, panting for breath.