Notebooks of the Young Wife (4 page)

‘I take photographs of female genitals. Preferably wet ones. If you’ve nothing planned for the next hour or so, Jane, I reckon you’d make a good subject.’

I didn’t need asking a third time, so we downed the rest of the bottle, paid up and headed off to her base round the corner. She had taken up a term of residence at a joint called the Art of Correction, dedicated to the induction of novices into the ways of discipline. It was situated down a side alley we ducked into through a brick arch, and was not going to attract the attention of anyone not in the know. The sign above the door was the sole indication of its purpose and that was enigmatic enough. One had to look hard at the picture of a girl who seemed to have been interrupted in the proofreading of a manuscript to notice that the interloper’s hand held a punishment strap.

Niamh used a key to let us in, and I followed her along a corridor and up a narrow flight to the first floor. The place seemed deserted. Under a short fleece she was wearing a skimpy T-shirt and cotton Bermudas that emphasised the curves of her solid figure. I reached out and took hold of the waistband, bringing her to a halt on the turn of the stair. There was a glimpse of a dark cleft, then her body was against mine and I squeezed a full buttock.

‘You like that, yeah?’

‘I like, very much,’ I said into her ear, nuzzling the neck.

‘I’ve not been spanked for days. We want you nice and juicy and if that would do the trick...’

I kept a hold of her while she steered us into a room and locked the door. She went over the table on her elbows and I peeled down the shorts to find an arse that swelled out completely bare, without even the minimal cover of a thong. Here was another knickerless girl after my own heart. Spanking was what she was going to get, but first I gave in to the temptation to inspect the goods at the closest quarters. Far from raising an objection, when I hunkered down behind her the Irish girl obligingly arched her back to present me with an even better view. Covered in a fine down, the skin was pearly-white and indeed without hint of bruising, and I explored its soft resilience with my two hands. Then I straightened up and crooked an arm round the compliant waist to deliver the first smack.

‘Uh-uh.’ It was a throaty noise that encouraged me in my task. But this was to be no punishment session and I stroked and caressed as much as I whacked with a stinging palm. I was making love to a young woman in a way we both understood. When the area had turned a beautiful salmon-pink I stood back. She rose from the table holding her bum, blew me a kiss and fired up a floodlight on the computer desk in the corner. Camera in hand she waved me up onto a table that resembled nothing so much as the examination table in a doctor’s surgery. It was equipped with the stirrups appropriate for a gynaecological examination, and I understood that her photography was going to be of the most intimate kind. I was already juiced to dripping point inside my jeans and stripped them off to climb up so that my calves could be lifted and positioned.

‘Fucking beauty.’ Niamh bobbed about between my spread legs, eye glued to the viewfinder as she stored image after image of my seeping cunt lips for the delectation of future generations. It was a heady experience that I have to say made me ooze still more. I’d heard of the injunction to ‘smile!’, but this candid camera had me doing something decidedly more earthy. Then she laid aside the device and looked up at me from squarely between my parted legs.

‘Um, Dr Jane Double-Barrelled: the important person who keeps the national smut safe. I asked if my lens could get in there, but I didn’t check if you were up for a tongue. Well, I know you are in theory, but I mean like mine. Here and now.’ The charming creature had taken a fit of shyness and I just fell totally in lust.

‘You should be warned that while I showered this morning, since that time the young wife has had a go, then your gorgeous arse made me wet my pants and this fevered snapping of cunt pics has got me leaking all over your table. So it’s likely to be strong stuff down there, sweet girl.’ By the time the sentence was finished she was wearing the biggest grin I’d seen all year and pushed her face right into the nitty-gritty.

I’d been taken into the charge of an enthusiast – a self-proclaimed ‘muff-diver
extraordinaire
’ – who in seconds flat had me at that pitch of sensation where pleasure crosses into pain. And held me there while time stopped. In the end I begged and sobbed my way to the release that was, at last, granted. As I lay back gasping from the intensity of it all I thanked the gods out loud for the continuing silence of the building beyond our small room which brought a chuckle in response.

‘Well, the bar isn’t open and after the sesh last night the others are either off or dead. But you shouldn’t have worried. I’m in here kinda regular with the camera and all, so nobody passing by thinks twice about the noises.’ I had the grace to blush at my assumption of special status when I was merely one among many to receive the treatment. But Niamh seemed not to notice and bundled me cheerily into the small bathroom conveniently en suite. After she climbed on a stool to pass me down a towel from the top of the cupboard, I seized the opportunity to sit on it, take her across my knee and complement the spanking with a bit of deft clitoral manipulation. A pale shadow of the efforts of the
maestra
herself, I feared, but it seemed to do the trick and she showered happily enough once I pushed her into the tiny cubicle on her own.

When I emerged later, the Irish girl was swathed in her robe and bent over the keyboard staring at her monitor. ‘I’ll print you out some in A5 to take away, and if you fancy one or two I can do them big. Be good framed on the office wall, right?’

‘Right.’ The impish grin made me want to start all over again with a hand to the bottom, but as I gazed it was replaced by a look of slight perplexity. ‘See, Jane, I don’t want to speak out of turn, I mean you being the expert and all that.’ She stopped and stared at me again.

‘No turns needed, girl. Just spit it out.’

‘Well, that girl who was writing in seventeen-whatever, you’re thinking it would be a big find if a lot of her stuff was in this country house. That she’s like a little-known figure.’

‘As far as I know, yes.’

‘Then you’d better cast your eyes over this.’ I moved in closer and, peering at the screen, read:

...
Uxor studiosa
. When I was researching the book I only ever found two pieces by her under that name. It seems there might be more in a collection over in England but they wouldn’t let me near it. V frustrating! But I know a lady in SocHist with contacts in the scene so I’m gonna keep on the case.

Now, as regards the query about how things got published back then...

I looked up puzzled while Niamh began to explain.

‘It’s just a post, right, but what we’ve got here is what the engine found on an earlier trawl and that’s got corrupted. The link to the current page is dead so you can’t get to register and sign in. The site must be a goner. It was the only hit for her name, so it’s true she’s not exactly famous.’

‘But can we find out how long ago it was, er, posted?’ Not being a chat-room sort of person, even in their more academic manifestations, I was content to show my ignorance.

‘Tricky. You’d think it would be the easiest thing in the world but the buggers don’t usually give you a date. Though hold on a minute...’ She scrolled down the entries then jabbed a finger at the words that appeared. ‘Look, here’s a bit about a forthcoming conference, the next month it says, and there’s the name of it too. You could find out when that was, yeah?’

‘I should think so.’ The girl was brilliant.

‘Okay. I’ll print out this little lot and you can take it away. Along with the pics.’ She flashed me one of the dirtiest winks it had been my pleasure to receive and my groin responded with a throb. But away was where I had to go: with a spot of luck I might be able to get more than a date. If the writer of the posted text had been doing research for a book then she ought to be on our records. I took the sheets from Niamh and just as I was stowing them in my document bag there was a tap on the door.

‘Nevie, are you in? Open please, it’s me.’ The key was turned and a pony-tailed blonde stood in the doorway. ‘Oh sorry, I intrude.’

‘Come in Helga. Meet Jane. She was just about to go.’

‘Hi, Helga.’ I studied the ice-blue eyes as Niamh pulled her into the room by an arm. The Nordic-type beauty was dressed in a charcoal bodysuit that was fetchingly snug, and seemed to have locked on to her fellow worker to the exclusion of all else. I bowed out with a thank you to my host, catching sight as I did of the zip of the garment coming down. It was time to leave the youngsters to it. But the glimpse of breast and crotch I caught suggested one layer was the rule at the AOC, and as I closed the door on them I resolved to call back soon.

When I got out of the cab security was on the prowl. It was a twenty-something guy I’d not seen before, and as he checked my ID I thought of asking him in to look at my dirty books. If he wasn’t a reader, there were plenty of pictures to tickle a young man’s fancy. But I had things to do, so I suppressed the urge and headed up the stairs at the back of the building. Courtesy of the Library I was installed in a flat carved out of three top floor rooms; it was tiny but had all the essentials like a kitchen, a shower and a king-sized bed. The lounging about that passed for work – as well as that with no such pretence – was mostly done in the den off the main office, and I went straight down to it.

The symposium referred to in Niamh’s printout rejoiced in the title of
Sexual Herstory: New Explorations
, and was an easy one to crack with an online search. It had been held in Chicago at the very beginning of March, so that put the interchange on the web page at two months or more back from the mid-May we had reached. So far so good. The next step was to identify the author of the post. It had already occurred to me that research for the (unnamed) book would almost certainly have called upon some of our own resources at the BL and those, of course, were on record. But where to start? Applications for access to the collections came in at quite a rate, and if work on the project could have begun five years ago or more that would make a long list. And in any case, what would I be looking for? No, it would make better sense to jump in at the other end: if the lady had been to us at all, the
Organum Venereum
would have been one of the titles requested. So what I needed was the log of its consultation.

I keyed in the two words with the date of 1787, clicked on ‘accessed’ followed by ‘sort by date’, and there it was: ten entries that stretched back over the five-year period I’d chosen. The most recent could be set aside, being mine, for the volume still lay with the others on the corner of the desk. The next most recent was on the 12th of the 2nd and credited to ‘573D’, that my master-list revealed to be one Jonathan Squires DD, The Old Rectory, Wythingford. I wondered briefly what he might have made of our
domini puella
, but I couldn’t see a Doctor of Divinity in the Shires having much truck with ‘herstory’ so I passed on. Two more from December were English academics, also male, and anyway I had it in my head that I was looking for an American.

With number five that is exactly what I found. The October before Belle Torman PhD, Assistant Professor of History and Women’s Studies, spent three days with the learned tome and it was hardly credible that its one female author could have gone unnoticed. The clincher for me was the fact that her appointment was with the University of Chicago, explaining her familiarity with the conference arrangements. But even assuming I had found the poster, it was her interest in the Ardingley stash that singled her out for attention and a degree of alarm. Had she managed to give it the once-over or was she still trying? And what was I going to do about it?

All these questions called for an inspirational dram so I opened the implements cupboard and took out the bottle of Laphraoig that was nestling amongst coils of braided leather. The scald of smoky peat at the back of the throat jerked me awake. I didn’t need all the answers; what I needed to do was to get to the house myself. Sooner, not later. I looked at the wall clock: it was coming on to eight. I couldn’t get the director herself until the morning, but a deputy freshly returned might well be checking things out at work before the new week. While she’d be sitting more comfortably by now, I was prepared to bet that our little encounter would still be in Judith’s mind. It was just possible she would be favourably disposed enough to pick up the phone. As it was, I faced down the answering machine five times before I heard a live voice.

‘Nemesis Archive.’ She sounded a little peeved.

‘Judith, you
are
there. Don’t be cross with me, please.’

‘Ah, that’s Jane, isn’t it? After our last meeting, I’ll go for the polite and respectful option. Just in case.’ I permitted myself a chuckle, then launched into what I had to say.

‘I’ll be brief. You know about the Everett hoard, I take it. Well, it seems someone was sniffing around back before the old man snuffed it. An American academic.’

‘I see. So you’re wondering if they got in. I don’t know a lot about it, to be honest, but I thought the place was tighter than a schoolboy’s arse...’ an apologetic cough came down the line ‘...as the saying goes. In, er, some quarters. I’m rather immersed in stuff on first times just now.’