The Persimmon Tree (26 page)

‘Who’s “we”? Commander Long hinted at some other organisation.’

‘Nick, you’re trying to deflect our conversation. Just remember I’m an Intelligence officer, I shouldn’t even have mentioned codebreaking, a taboo word in Intelligence. You also know I’m not going to tell you who the “we” is. Can we stick to the subject?’

I was being thoroughly reprimanded and at the same time was witnessing yet another quality of the remarkable Marg Hamilton. She didn’t put up with bullshit! I was an expert at changing the subject in a conversation; it’s part of being a loner, when you don’t want to give away too much about yourself. I thought to apologise, then decided not to. It had been worth a try, anyway. I shrugged. ‘It’s stuff I know how to do. I mean the jungle, boats, living off the land and from the sea. I’ve been doing it since the age of twelve.’

She must have noticed that I’d finished my meal because she returned her fork with an impaled bean to her plate. She’d also all but completed her own dinner, only three more beans survived, not counting the one on the fork. She rose from the table, dabbing her pretty mouth with her napkin. ‘Come and sit down,’ she instructed, pointing to a small couch covered in a material patterned with hibiscus blossoms in pink and red. It was the brightest object in the room and I rather liked it, as it reminded me of the manse garden in Rabaul. All it needed was hummingbirds feeding on the nectar.

I sat down and Marg sat beside me, half turned to face me, her slender legs crossed. She was wearing a perfume that triggered a yearning in me, something in my long-ago past — maybe my mother had worn a similar one. ‘Nick, you’re only eighteen but already you’re more of a man than anyone I’ve ever met,’ she began. If she saw me blush she ignored it, and continued. ‘You have a gentleness that is going to drive women crazy and a toughness they are going to be unable to resist. You have brains and beauty.’ I guess by this stage I must have been roughly the colour of beetroot because she laughed. ‘Men can also be beautiful, but if you prefer I’ll change that to “looks”; looks along with brains and a tough inner core that women will beat down doors to get to. The butterfly collector and the young man — it’s an irresistible combination.’

It was all a bit much and for a moment I thought she might be gently sending me up. But then I saw that she wasn’t. ‘You could have fooled me!’ I mumbled, trying to grin but feeling my mouth go strangely lopsided. In a sense, I suppose, Anna had beaten down my door in the compound of
De Kost Kamer
when she’d brought me dinner, but then, I reminded myself, at that stage she wouldn’t have known if I was a two-headed monster with crocodile teeth.

‘Don’t throw it all away, Nick. Don’t do what Rupert Basil Michael Long wants,’ she said, pressing her hand upon my knee.

‘Why do you always refer to him like that, using all his names?’ I asked, again deliberately evading an answer to her plea.

She threw back her head, her chestnut hair swinging and for a brief moment covering her pretty face before settling, at the same time withdrawing her hand and making me immediately wish she’d return it to my knee. She wore a look of impatience. ‘He doesn’t see men. He
only
sees solutions. He doesn’t see a beautiful and exceptional eighteen-year-old with a lust for life. He just sees a radio operator behind enemy lines. For him it’s a jigsaw puzzle…’

‘Funny you should say that,’ I interrupted. ‘That’s exactly what I thought. I was a one-colour component, one of those pieces you know must belong to either the sky or the open piece of ground in front of the giant’s castle. When we shook hands and I agreed to go to HMAS
Cerberus
he tapped the driver on the shoulder and told him not to spare the horsepower. I doubt if we said a dozen more words on the rest of the way to Fremantle.’

Marg leaned forward and replaced her hand on my knee, the closeness of her breasts made it difficult for me to breathe and that part of me below the waist with its singular mind was in all sorts of trouble. ‘It’s the Rupert and Basil and the cherub lips. In combination they’ve destroyed him; the Michael never had a chance. What do some parents think they’re doing when they so carelessly saddle a child with names of past family? It must have been hell at school when he was growing up.’

I grinned. ‘Try being a butterfly collector some time!’

Marg laughed. ‘At least you were big enough to defend yourself. Rupert Basil Michael Long is very short and must have been a pathetic little bundle of misery as a child.’ She was leaning very close, her beautiful breasts almost touching my shirt, her hand on my knee, lips wet and slightly parted. Her perfume sent me dizzy with desire. If I hadn’t been sitting already I feel sure I would have gone weak at the knees. Her hand slid down into my crotch and at the same time our lips met. I’d like to think this last bit was due to my assertiveness, but I don’t think it was. Anna and I had swapped tongues a fair bit so I wasn’t the complete novice, but now it was below the waist that I was coming apart big time. Marg’s clever fingers had the buttons of my fly undone and the rest acted like a jack-in-the-box.

Marg ceased kissing me. ‘My goodness, Jumpin’ Jack!’ she exclaimed. She gave me a wicked grin. ‘Nick, I’m sorry, there’s a fire down below that needs my urgent attention or it might get out of hand.’ I was surprised that she was also breathing heavily. Next thing you know, she’d slid from the couch and onto her knees on the carpet in front of me, then put her mouth on Jumpin’ Jack, her lips sliding down to his base, then slowly back. It was the most exquisite feeling I’d ever experienced.

Now, I know every adult male in the world has probably experienced what Marg was doing to me. It hardly qualified as an aberration and every pimply schoolboy includes this in his fantasy agenda, imagining the soapy pads of his fingers as a pair of luscious female lips. I’d even taken D.H. Lawrence’s
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
, where such a moment is described, to the masturbatory peace and quiet of the outdoor toilet on the mission station when my father, in yet another of his birds-and-the-bees moments, had handed me the book at the age of fourteen and said gruffly, ‘Instruction for the use of essential gender knowledge.’

There is a first for everything, for laughter and pain, for certainty and uncertainty, for joy and sorrow, and mostly we forget to inscribe these firsts in our book of memories. Often our first intimate sexual encounter is awkward, conducted between two inexperienced would-be lovers, as might have been the case between Anna and me, had she consented. We let the moment escape, thinking perhaps that this initial sexual fumble must improve, that eventually we’d acquire a desirable memory of the moment, one as we imagined it should be. All I can tell you is that I felt no sudden stab of guilt concerning darling Anna. If conscience plays a part in these things, then mine had gone walkabout. Marg stroking me expertly with her lips was for me akin to dying from pure pleasure, but instead of dying I felt as if I would explode from within with sheer joy. Crying out, I knew I was unable to contain myself. It was then that Marg, as if by magic, unbuttoned the front of her dress. I don’t know how she’d managed to snap open the hooks and eyes that held her brassiere, but her beautiful breasts were bared in front of me, and at the moment I could no longer contain myself, her mouth withdrew and she moved forward and cupped her breasts about a now thoroughly jumping Jumpin’ Jack, enfolding me so that I came against her softness. Then she rose and straddled my knees and allowed me to clasp her glistening breasts. ‘Rub them, darling,’ she said. ‘Gently, this part of me is for you.’ It was the first time I had experienced the true generosity of a woman giving herself to a man. ‘That was the entrée, Nick. Into the shower and then the bedroom for the main course,’ she instructed.

‘Yes, ma’am,’ I sighed. ‘Anything you say.’

Together in the shower, gloriously hot, Jumpin’ Jack recovered quickly. Towelled and glowing, Marg led me by the hand to the bedroom, to a double bed with crisp white sheets and what eventuated as the hardest-working night I had ever enjoyed.

‘First a small ritual we need to go through, Nick. In case you’re unfamiliar with their use, let me begin by explaining that I’m in Naval Intelligence not just for the duration of the war but as a permanent career. I am also a big girl now and a very careful one. Intelligence teaches you that,’ she said, using a clever double entendre.

I started to blush. Was she going to ask me if I’d brought any French letters? ‘Marg, I’m sorry,’ I stammered. ‘I never thought… er, anticipated.’

‘No, of course you didn’t, darling boy,’ she interrupted. ‘The nicest surprises are the unexpected ones. As long as you remain rigid I shall be at rigid attention,’ she said, again cleverly while neatly removing my embarrassment. She produced a small square package, tearing it open. ‘Naval issue. Kindly lie back and think of England,’ she laughed.

‘I’ve never been to England, or even to where I think you’re taking me,’ I said, trying to break the news of my virginity to her and in the process being too clever by half.

‘Oh!’ She grinned. ‘Am I not the lucky one then! I shouldn’t be surprised if in one night we enjoy several journeys to the nicest places, Nick.’

The trouble with writing about making love — I don’t want to call it sex because to me it was much more — is that all the words are worn out. In Marg’s arms and experiencing her lovely body I had come alive. Something dormant in me had emerged and making love was as much about the experience of being held closely, intimately, as it was about mutual gratification.

From the age of five I had been denied even the simplest physical comfort a child might expect from a mother. The Japanese woman who thereafter took care of my daily needs seldom touched me; to her culture I was an ‘it’, a Western child and certainly not worthy of a spontaneous or any other show of affection. Anna was the loveliest thing I could imagine, but Marg was a woman. I don’t know how to describe the difference, but a young bloke, particularly a virgin, needs to be taken by the hand and led into the wonderful mystery of the female body while, at the same time, being shown how he must please his partner as well. Marg was a willing teacher who made no bones about her own demands and in me she had new clay to mould in any way she wished. I had more than discovered sex. I had discovered the wonderful mystery of womankind.

By morning I was utterly exhausted. Marg brought me breakfast in bed: scrambled eggs, toast, orange juice and a pot of tea. She was wearing a pretty, oyster-coloured dressing-gown and sat on the edge of the bed. ‘Nick, that was lovely. More than lovely. I hope you enjoyed yourself as much as I did?’

‘Marg, I don’t know what to say except — thank you.’

She smiled and bent and kissed me lightly on the cheek. ‘It’s my call, you do understand that, Nick, don’t you?’

‘Your call?’ I wasn’t sure what she meant.

‘My bed, my body, both belong to me alone. You must understand, Jumpin’ Jack doesn’t have proprietorial rights.’

I blushed furiously. It hadn’t occurred to me to expect such rights. In childhood I hadn’t ever enjoyed the proximity to the opposite gender that establishes the roles of the male and allows young blokes to make assumptions so that they think of a woman as a lesser being in the pecking order or in the bedchamber.

‘Marg, if what happened last night was all that happens to me until I die I shall be eternally grateful to you.’ I think she must have seen that this wasn’t simply morning-after grateful boy-speak. I had grown up a whole heap in one single night, but that didn’t make me feel as if I was entitled to an encore; to any more than she had already so very generously given to me.

Virginity in a male is a much overrated possession that has nothing to do with inner purity but is simply evidence of a lack of opportunity. I knew that I had been especially privileged in the manner in which I had experienced the second birth of the male, his delivery into manhood by a good woman. Now I tried inadequately to put this into words. ‘If you’re lucky,
really
lucky, you get a Marg Hamilton to terminate your virginity with an exquisite experience such as last night,’ I said, hoping I didn’t sound over-sentimental or sloppy or even pompous, knowing there was an element of my father’s pedantic syntax involved.

Marg brought her hand to her brow, drew back her chestnut mane and laughed. ‘Nick, you really are a thoroughgoing rascal! But I think that may be the nicest compliment I have ever been paid. Darling, don’t let them bury you in the jungle. Please!’

I spent the morning in town buying a can of engine oil and a pot of grease. Examination of the spark plugs indicated that they were just about on their last legs. I paid a motor mechanic two shillings to lend me the equipment to adjust the tappets and timing, and a set of spanners to fix the wheel alignment, as well as a jack to lift the Austin sufficiently off the ground for a big bloke to crawl under the chassis. It took me most of the morning to source all the stuff I needed but then, of course, I realised that under wartime conditions taxis were unavailable. Finally I paid four Aboriginal kids who were hanging around a sixpence each to carry the jack while I humped the other stuff back to Marg’s flat. I was sweaty and tired as I paid the kids. ‘No fags, you hear… lollies only!’ They laughed, running off.

I found a pair of overalls in the garage that had obviously belonged to Marg’s brother. I undressed, conscious that I only had Peter Keeble’s clothes and the clean, unironed shirt hanging from the boarding-house window. The overalls fitted more or less, with the legs about six inches short and a fair bit of my chest showing where the metal buttons couldn’t meet the buttonholes. I worked on the Austin 7 all afternoon and into the early evening. It was obvious that under Marg’s stewardship it had been badly neglected, but it was still a bonzer little car and there were careful touches everywhere indicating that her brother John must have kept it in tip-top condition.