The only fly in the ointment is her Aunt. She's never much liked Aunt Ellen, and never understood why someone as genial as her Uncle could have married someone so dour. Aunt Ellen starts in the day after Rebecca's arrival: if Rebecca is not going to go to school or college she should be out finding a job. Her Uncle pleads her cause -- give the girl a chance to take stock. But though Aunt Ellen refrains from lecturing Rebecca further, the looks she gives her, and her general aura of disapproval, speak volumes.
Fortunately Aunt Ellen is rarely around. She holds some important position at the Hospital -- Head of Nursing or something -- which obliges her to work long and unsociable hours. Often she's away all night; or else she has to start early or return late. And when she is at home she is usually asleep: such that the one firm rule that her Uncle insists upon is that Rebecca take care to make no noise that might disturb her Aunt.
After Windsor, after her dismal room in London, it is heaven. She starts to relax, to unwind. She walks, she lounges in the garden, she picks up books at random from her Uncle's bookcases; sometimes she mounts the swing and watches the world beneath and above her spin by.
But there's something more pressing than any of this to which she has to attend.
With the pressures removed and the luxury of some leisure time to herself, Rebecca is aware that she has been neglecting her own sexual needs. At Windsor she had learned how to pleasure herself -- but there was never sufficient privacy, and latterly it had become a fraught affair, girls constantly calling out to her to leave herself alone, even tugging the blankets off her to 'inspect' her -- before going back to bed to fiddle noisily with their own private parts. And though, since she has run away, she has had sex with a number of men, none of them has been made of the stuff to stir her own juices. George's hand between her legs was pleasant; and she might have got there with Toby had he been less impatient. But the sad fact is that several weeks have passed since she last had an orgasm.
Rectifying this is now a priority; and accordingly, on a morning when no-one is in the house, she closes her bedroom door and prepares to put matters right.
It is a warm day, and the bedclothes will only be a hindrance. So she strips off all her clothes and lies on top of the bed with her legs parted. Then, lubricating her fingers with saliva, she starts to play with her clitoris.
It feels so good after such a long absence. Soon her labia are engorging, her clitoris too is swelling, and the sensations of sheer arousal are drawing gasps and involuntary thrusts and jerks from her. As she often does she tries to find a fantasy to compliment the sensations, to crank up the sexual charge: she pictures Toby, pounding at her remorselessly; she pictures Mick, then Ralph, then draws on other men she has known or merely seen in the streets, undressing them, watching their members rise and their scrotums tighten. But none of these seems quite right; none add their own sexual charge to the charge generated by her fingers. She nearly ready to come, and she really wants the right imagery to kindle her orgasm to perfection: when suddenly she finds herself reliving the moment she laid into Marcia by the bicycle sheds. She sees the girl go down, sees her bare legs flailing and hears her disbelieving screams as her knickers are practically torn from her body. The sexual voltage between Rebecca legs surges. She sees again the stricken girl's trimmed pubis, both sees and feels her own fingers forcing their way inside her vagina, fighting against the girl's struggles, determinedly worming their way deeper inside her. She can hear her own voice shouting: 'now who's getting it inside her?'; and as Marcia writhes helplessly and Rebecca's remembered fingers twist remorselessly Rebecca launches into a screaming, explosive orgasm, so powerful that her body jacks up and down on her bed, her pelvis thrusts skywards, her legs flail outwards then jack-knife back towards her shoulders until she finally subsides, gasping and groaning and feeling as though a thousand volts of electricity have just passed through her.
"Oh my God,' she says out loud when her senses have returned to her. "Where did that come from?"
It's a rhetorical question: she doesn't really care about the how or why: all she knows is that she's just had the most powerful orgasm of her life.
So powerful that, unusually, she doesn't immediately want to carry on and pleasure herself further. Rather she basks, staring at the ceiling, at the wallpaper, until maybe half an hour has passed, at which point her fingers start to get restless again. Before she knows it she's diddling her clitoris and feeling that lovely, inimitable sensation steal over her. This time, though, there's no doubt where she is going in her mind. Again she returns to the grass next to the bike sheds. Again she straddles Marcia, watching the girl's bare legs thrash, watching the thrashing become ever more desperate as she wrenches off the navy knickers and exposes the hapless pudenda. She's getting wetter by the second, the patch between her legs is slippery and hot. She watches again as she forces her fingers inside Marcia's vagina, feeling the muscles trying to fight her, the hot desperate struggle as her fingers prove too powerful. At the same time she draws her knees back as far as she can, spreads her legs wide and slides her fingers into her own sopping vagina. 'Now who's getting it up them,' she breathes, and as she thrusts her fingers in and out it is simultaneously both her and Marcia who are being penetrated, both her and Marcia who wriggle and protest and are forced to submit. She thrusts harder, forcing her muscles apart, forcing Marcia's muscles apart, the two girls merge, she is finger-fucking herself and finger-fucking the screaming, protesting Marcia until with a final vicious thrust deep into herself she lets out a cry between a squeal and a scream and plunges over the brink into a second all-limbs-shaking galvanic orgasm.
When it is over, and the spasms have died away from her body, she laughs. Laughs loudly and unrestrainedly. She doesn't know why she is laughing: at the ridiculousness of it all; at the imagined expression of some shocked neighbour overhearing; at the unwitting complicity of Marcia. But she feels like laughing -- why shouldn't she laugh? -- after two mind-blowing orgasms.
Over the subsequent days and weeks she continues to revel in the leisure she has to explore her own sexuality. The Portugese cleaner, Paula, comes every Tuesday; and on Fridays a man comes to work in the garden. But on other days, when she knows her Aunt and Uncle are out and she has the house to herself, she takes to wandering naked in and out of the many rooms, exploring different erotic possibilities. She likes to rub herself against different fabrics: in the large living room is a sofa covered in velvet, and she straddles this, along with the backs of other sofas and the arms of chairs, trying out the sensations generated by coarse and silky covers, by corduroy and leather. She sinks into different chairs, spreads her legs and rests her feet on the arms or footrests, trying out which positions make her feel randy, which give most comfort. Sometimes she rests her cunt on the cool, stainless-steel handle of a kitchen trolley; sometimes she likes the clammy, alien feel of leather against her anus. A dog, or a human with a dog's olfactory sensitivity, would be able to trace her movements, sniffing from one room to another, creating a join-the-dots map of the places she has scented with her sex.
In a similar way she explores her own body, teasing out the folds of her labia, trying out all the different ways of rubbing and flicking her clitoris, seeing how many fingers she can comfortably insert into her vagina and generally charting the fine differences in sensation her body can give her.
It isn't all sweetness and light, though. It is not so long since she was at Windsor, and memories of the misery and humiliation she suffered there can ambush her without warning. When they do she finds the best remedy is to go and have a rub. Sometimes the unpleasant memories dissipate at once: more often they persist, and when this happens she gives herself up to vengeful fantasies. She sees her tormentors -- Gillian, Marcia, Philida and all the others -- tied-up or imprisoned, entirely at her mercy. She watches them cry and beg as she forces them into humiliating positions then twists her fingers mercilessly into their vaginas or into their anuses. As the girls thrash around helplessly Rebecca gets wetter and wetter: her fantasies are so vivid it seems as though she can make these things happen in reality, like sticking pins into a voodoo doll. Then she comes: and the whole edifice of her vengeful fantasy dissolves, returning her to the benign environs of her Uncle's house once more.
Uncle Noel has always been a tactile man. When Rebecca was a child he used to throw her in the air and catch her, or bounce her on his knees, or gallop with her on his shoulders. Now Rebecca finds he hasn't lost his fondness for physical contact. He hugs her before they say goodnight; he lays his hand lightly on her shoulder sometimes when they're talking. And from time to time, when she's preparing food in the kitchen, he'll come up behind her, put his arms round her waist, and peer over her shoulders, sniffing appreciatively at the food. She knows, on these latter occasions, that he's looking down at her cleavage; on the one occasion she challenges him, asking him if he's getting an eyeful, he's quite unapologetic, and tells her she has a really fine pair of tits. She's not quite sure how to respond; but he says these things in such a candid way that she feels flattered above all else.
One evening they've finished playing cards, and he's sitting on the sofa, finishing the last of his gin and tonic, when he pats his knee and says sleepily:
"Come and sit on my knee."
"Aren't I a bit big for that?" she replies.
"I don't think so," he says.
It feels a bit strange: she hasn't sat on her Uncle's knee for many a year. Nevertheless she does slide herself onto his lap, puts one arm around his neck and, conscious of her bare legs, tugs down the hem of her dress.
"That's cosy," her Uncle says.
"Aren't I squashing you?"
"A bit: but I don't mind. Look: there's something I want to talk to you about."
"That sounds serious: is Aunt Ellen badgering you about me again?"
"It's not that," says her Uncle. "It's about your mother: have you thought about going to see her in prison?"
Rebecca stiffens:
"No," she says. "Absolutely not."
"But why?" asks her Uncle. "We were all shaken by what happened to her. We know she broke the law. But was what she was doing really so bad? Do you really disapprove so much?"
