Dapper is the word for Uncle Noel. He's a neat, fine-boned man, always well but not showily dressed, who bears a distinct resemblance to both Rebecca and her mother, most noticeable in his jet-black hair and his smiling, alluring eyes. He's twelve years older than Rebecca's mother, which puts him in his fifties: and, as is immediately evident to Rebecca, age has begun to catch up with him. His hair is neither so black nor so plentiful: years of fine wining and dining have compromised his trim figure; and, as if to compensate for the balding patch on the crown of his head, he has grown a foxy little moustache.
His manner towards Rebecca, which has always been teasing and affectionate, hasn't changed though.
"So what have you done, robbed a bank?" he asks, after they've hugged on the doorstep.
"Nothing that exciting, I'm afraid."
"No? Pity -- they're all run by crooks, they deserve to be robbed."
He stands back, and casts an appraising eye over her:
"My word you've grown," he says. "I'll bet the boys are round you like bees round a honey pot."
"I'm not the slightest bit interested in boys," says Rebecca.
"No?" Uncle Noel raises an eyebrow sceptically. "Well, if you say not. Now what can I get you to drink? We've got fruit juices, squash, goodness knows how many kinds of tea. Or maybe you'd prefer a gin and tonic these days?"
"Tea would be fine," Rebecca says.
An olive-skinned woman is hoovering in the living room, so they take their tea through the conservatory and into the garden, where they sit in loungers under a spreading chestnut tree. There's a pleasant scent of pine in the air.
"So would you like to tell me what's been happening?" invites her Uncle. "Bit of a shock getting a call from the Police -- thought they'd rumbled me at last," he laughs.
Rebecca gives him a much sanitised version of events. It excludes all the sexual encounters; but since she can't really avoid telling him that she's no longer on the roll at Windsor, she mentions only a fight with another girl.
"Girls fighting eh?" says her Uncle. "They should sell tickets. I hope you gave her what for."
"Let's put it this way," says Rebecca: "I think she'll regret having messed with me."
"That's the spirit," says her Uncle. "Shame about your exams though -- your mother and I always hoped you'd go to university. Any chance of taking them somewhere else?"
"No," says Rebecca. "I've had it with schools, exams, the whole works."
"Well," says her uncle: "I never went to university and it hasn't done me much harm."
He looks round over his domain, taking in the fine mock-Tudor house with its terrace and conservatory; the manicured lawn mown into stripes, the shrubbery full of laurels and rhododendrons. Rebecca has never known quite what her Uncle does for a living: 'something in the city' she was always told: some sort of financial consultant. Whatever it is he has certainly done well for himself.
"You're welcome to stay here," he assures her. "Stay as long as you want."
"Thanks," says Rebecca. "What about Aunt Ellen though?"
"Ah," says her Uncle, and the shadow of a frown flits briefly across his brow. "Don't worry -- I'll square it with her."
"Thanks." She smiles at him, and a flicker of complicity passes between them, which takes her back to the old days, when he would always take her part in family arguments, always be the one to slip her extra pocket money or buy her a forbidden ice cream, usually with the injunction not to mention it to her mother or her Aunt.
Suddenly her attention is caught by something on the far side of the lawn:
"The old swing," she exclaims: "It's still there."
"Still there," says her Uncle. "It doesn't get used a lot these days."
On an impulse Rebecca gets up and crosses the lawn where, hanging by a single rope from the branch of an oak tree is a short section of branch. She clutches the rope, tests it, then jumps, shrieking as the rope swings and she scrambles to lock her legs around it and support her bottom on the branch seat. Her bare legs shoot up into the air; she clings on, wriggling, getting her balance: then she starts to swing, feeling the air swoosh past her face and over her legs. She throws her head back, loving the giddy feeling, seeing the world upside down, savouring the long, irregular creaking swing of the rope. She can feel the rope between her legs, pressing pleasantly against her knickers, against her snatch, and she swings with ever more abandon, feeling almost out of control, sometimes spinning round, the skirt of her dress up round her thighs, her hair falling now backwards, now forwards across her face. She can see the earth and the grass, the treetops and the chimneys, her Uncle watching her from the lounger.
"Well," beams her Uncle, when she finally dismounts and, face-flushed, brushing down her dress, returns to him. "Well, well."
So Rebecca is installed at The Larches, her Uncle's home. It's a pleasant life: she has a fine room, at the opposite end of the house to her Aunt and Uncle, which looks out over the rose garden and from which she can see the blackbirds in the laurels and the squirrels frisking across the lawn. She goes for walks over the common and the golf course; she helps herself to whatever food and drink she wants; and in the evenings, after dinner, she plays backgammon and bezique with her Uncle at the baize-topped card table in the living room.
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.
