Maudie: revelations of life in London

CHAPTER TWO

On a little slope, very green and fresh-looking, and completely shut off from the house by the trees, a number of really sensible-sized cushions were spread. Thither, after breakfast, Maudie led the way, and flopped, making no bones about showing her lovely legs right up to the knee. Openwork stockings are distracting enough at the best of times, but when it comes to the very finest of red silk, and the tiniest of little, red morocco shoes at the end of them matching exactly the scarlet sash encircling the wearer' tapering waist, it takes a strong man to think of anything but the worst. Charlie flopped by her side, and took a kiss, whirl was only stopped by the page-boy's judicious cough. He had the daily papers and cigarettes.

'I'll ring if I want anything,' she said. 'Now see that we'll not disturbed.'

There was an electric bell fixed to one of the trees likewise a telephone extension.

'My word, you do do yourself well,' said Charlie, nestling down very comfortably, and toying idly with the little dear' knees, 'telephone and all.'

'Oh, it's very convenient. I've a lot of journalist friends who like to lie about here in the summer, and there are telephone lines to their offices. It's wonderful how inventive you can be when you've got a nice girl all over you, and a feeling of delicious laziness. These cushions could tell a bit.

'Now, you put your hand up higher, right up; nobody can possibly see us unless they go past on a boat. I want to talk a little business to you.

'First of all, you'll want some clothes. I'm sending my car up to town. My chauffeur can take my message to Half Moon Street-you see I know where you live-and get what you want. Are you on the phone?'

'Yes.'

'Well, ring your man up; have you got a man?'

'Yes; I just, about run to that.'

'Well, get on to him now; I want the chauffeur to go soon. I'm going to keep you here tonight-unless you've got anything very important on?'

'No; and if I had I'd miss it.'

'You won't be able to sleep with me. My really best financial boy is coming, and I've got to attend to him. I think you know him, Bertie Evans-James.'

'Bertie-Tubby Bertie; oh, Lord, yes! I wonder I haven't met you.'

'I don't come up to town much. I love this place and Paris. Now you ring up and tell your man that a chauffeur called Gerstein will call with your card.'

Charlie reached up to the receiver, which was hung conveniently low.

'One minute, dear,' whispered Maudie. 'I've a wicked little fad. When any of my men pals are telephoning, I like to get on top, and just ride on it; it's ripping.'

Charlie was only too pleased, and lay back as she knelt over him and loosened his trousers.

Lord knows what came out was stiff enough! Eight good inches of it, hard as steel, and panting with hot lust.

She bent and kissed it, first running her tongue lightly round the glans; then, with a quick movement she slipped her leg over and seemed to flick the great member into her boiling little volcano of a cunt.

It hurt Charlie a little as she thrust herself home and began to slip slowly up and down, but it was delightful pain.

His man's voice seemed strangely old, and Charlie wondered what on earth that staid personage would think if he knew exactly where his master was getting on the phone from. Suits he asked for, collars, shirts, etc., boots and ties, and at the hats he spent violently. He felt a savage bite on the neck, and collapsed with his man's voice in his ear, saying, 'Yes, sir, and your aunt's here, sir, and would like to speak to you, sir.'

Charlie gasped, but there was no way out of it; Aunt Lavinia must not be offended.

'Oh, Charlie, is that really you? What wonderful inventions these are. I feel I can almost see you-'

Charlie shuddered.

'-and I hear you're having your things sent down by motor. How nice. Do you know, I've never been in one. I shall take the chance of running down to see you; I can get back by train. See you later-goodbye'-and she hung up.

Charlie explained the situation to the girl, as she leisurely buttoned him up.

'Oh, let the old lady come,' she said 'I can behave like a lady; don't you worry. I was brought up as one. I'll put on my very best party airs, and she won't complain of her dinner, I give you my word. Does she know Bertie, by the way?'

'Oh, certain to.'

'Very well; I'll be a foreign widow, who met Bertie in Hamburg or somewhere. I speak perfect French and German.'

Charlie weakly acquiesced.

'I'm afraid you don't quite know Aunt Lavinia,' he said; 'she's very, very mid-Victorian!'

'Never mind, I can be early Victorian. I'll be her friend for life before she's been here two hours. Now come along into the house, and I'll tell you what 1 really want you to do for me-or-it is a lovely morning, and 1 don't know whether you like swimming or not, but I do, and I've a lovely little private bathing place nearby.'

Charlie was very much ready, and after the page-boy had been sent to give the chauffeur his instructions, they wandered off, hand in hand, down a little lane to a highly palisaded backwater.

There were two big and comfortable dressing-rooms, one for men and one for women.

'Sometimes we are very respectable and wear bathing costumes and things,' Maudie explained; 'but sometimes, like this morning, for instance, we don't do anything of the sort, and you are just going to undress me, mother naked, and we'll swim about like Adam and Eve.'

It was not the first time Charlie had got into a bath with a cockstand, but it was the first time he had dived in to swim like that. When he turned over to float, the little siren Maudie swam up to him and laughingly tied a dainty handkerchief on to his rampant mast.

' Now you can show your colours,' she said. 'You look like a submarine with the periscope stuck out of the water.'

She swam like a sea-nymph, and her figure, all naked and glistening with the water as she poised herself for her dives, made Charlie forget all about Aunt Lavinia, tailors' bills or any worries in this world. He made an ineffective attempt to get into her while they were both floating-he had heard of such things being done-but the result was nearly a watery death for both. However, they managed to toss each other off, then Maudie called a halt, and they clambered out and on to the landing stage.

The mattresses, covered with thick towelling, were beautifully soft, and their wet bodies sank luxuriously into their embrace.

'There's a very pretty little grass slope over there,' said Maudie, 'if you prefer nature. For my part, I agree with the late lamented Oscar Wilde-Nature may be very nice to look at, but it was not intended to sit on. Let's lie here, and let the sun dry us. There are lots of little towels lying about if you want one.'

Charlie's only reply was a passionate kiss.

His hand strayed to where it shouldn't, but the girl put it gently away.

'Not just now, dear,' she said; 'we've had a good bit. Lie quiet in the sun. You can smoke if you like. You'll find cigarettes in the cupboard in the dressing-room, and all sorts of drink if you want it. Personally, I should like a little champagne cup. Yes, I should: my butler makes it to perfection. I'll phone up to the house.'

'But-he mustn't see us like this.'

'Oh, he won't; there's a sliding door opens into the back of the cupboard.'

She went to the telephone. How lovely she looked standing there in all her naked grace, quite like a Grecian goddess-and what a contrast to the very modern apparatus in her hand. Charlie longed to take a photograph of her, and the girl seemed to divine his thoughts.

'Like to take a picture of me? There's a camera in the shed. I know you photograph.'

Charlie took six. He was an ardent and expert photographer, and he had taken many pictures from the nude, but he had never had such a model as this. He appreciated now the beauty of the shaven mount of Venus; she was shaved under the arms too.

The cup came in a beautiful old china bowl accompanied by two Venetian glasses with long silver stems, like magnified punch ladles. They squatted with the bowl between them, and sipped. It was heavenly.

'Does old-er- Tubby come to do stunts like this?' asked Charlie.

'Oh, Lord, yes; he flops about like a porpoise.'

'Lucky beggar!'

'Well, I suppose he is lucky. He spends a great deal on me, of course; you can see this house isn't run on air, but he is lucky in getting a girl a little out of the common to arrange amusements for him; you've no idea yet what we can do for you.'

'I should die;'

'Oh, no, you wouldn't. If you take lust delicately and scientifically, it hurts no one; only people who fornicate like animals, and have no thought above the actual parts of their bodies which are in contact, upset their constitutions. This is a pretty little swimming place, isn't it?'

'Ripping.'

'And the mixed bathing very much au naturel is jolly, isn't it?'

'Rather.'

'My own idea. They used to do it, I believe, in Medmenham Abbey days. Now we'll dress and go in; I want to show you the house. Bring the camera, and we'll develop those. Take some more of me in various stages of my getting dressed, and use up the whole spool.'

Charlie, nothing loth, did. First with just her stockings and shoes on, then with a hat added to that, next with drawers, and so on through the stages till the complete, idyllic, muslin-clad river girl used up the last exposure.

They got back to the house by another route, through a somewhat severely classical garden, peopled with very excellent statues of heathen gods and goddesses.

'Tubby doesn't like this,' she said; 'he calls it the Lemprierium. I caught him one day trying to shoot the fig leaf off that Apollo with an airgun. I punished him by having him strip, gumming a great fig leaf on him, and making him walk about here for two hours: each time he passed the Apollo he had to apologise to it and kiss its behind. The others did laugh; you know what Tubby's figure is like.'

Charlie was prepared to be surprised at the house, but he was more than surprised. Very large, an old Elizabethan mansion, slightly built on to and modernised, it was from without the embodiment of stately grace while within it provided the most up-to-date comfort. Charlie remembered that Tubby's father owned many factories in Lancashire, but they must do pretty well to keep this up; the old man himself had a bit of a reputation for chorus girls.

They went cursorily through the house. It was not furnished at all like a tart's house, but rather like that of a great lady of fashion. The servants were certainly rather comic opera, and a prettier lot Charlie thought he had never seen. The menservants he encountered were French, bar the very staid old butler.

They came at last to a little boudoir overlooking garden and river.

'Now we'll talk,' said Maudie. 'First of all, give me that camera; I'll have the pictures developed.'

The white-clad page-boy took the machine.

'Firstly, Charlie Osmond, I know all about your skill as a photographer. Well, I'm mad on it myself, and I'm pretty good, as you shall see directly.

'Now, what I want you to do is this. I know you're not too well off-pardon my being blunt. I want you to look after my photography and find my models for me. You'll have to use a lot of tact, but you'll have a thundering good time.

'Why I want you is that I must have a gentleman; I can't have an ordinary professional photographer. I couldn't stick working with him, and Tubby wouldn't like it. My great hobby is pictures of girls, in the nude, of course, and that's why I have my own pussy shaved: they have to have it done too. They are shy at first, but soon get used to it. We have quite lively parties. But come along, you shall see the studio first before you decide.'

Maudie unlocked a curtained door.

'This room I do keep under lock and key,' she said.

It was a huge octagonal room, glass roofed, with an admirable north light. One end of the octagon was a complete small theatre with, explained Maudie, a large plant of scenery and every facility for producing all classes of stage plays.

'Wait till you see some of 'em,' Maudie went on. 'We've got some pretty wits among our members-we call it a club. It's supposed to exist for the practice of the higher photographic arts, and the exhibition of real life on the stage. It is damned real, too, I can tell you.

'Our finest bit of realism was a play which lasted, on and off, for nearly a year. It started with a courtship, rivalry, seduction-dark man, dark night, and that sort of thing, you know-of course in full view of the audience. Then he married her, and we ran through the first nine months of their life together, their lusts and their quarrels. How they both were untrue, and how she gradually became larger in condition till her belly was bang right up and she finally pupped in full view of the audience.

'Of course we were lucky in having a girl who was not only a very good actress, but happened to be like that, and was strong enough to play right through. It was Miss -,' naming a well-known celebrity.

Charlie started.

'Yes; that's how she spent her time when the papers said she was touring in Italy. Oh, she is a brazen bitch.'

But to the photography. Bar a number of photos lying on a big table on the carpeted dais at the other end of the room, there was not much evidence of photography at all. No cameras, no pictures on the walls-these were entirely covered with what seemed to be a patchwork of little curtains.

' Voila: hey, presto!' exclaimed Maudie, pressing a button at the side of the proscenium.

The walls altered as if at the touch of a fairy's wand, and a most gorgeous vista of photographic voluptuosity met Charlie's astonished and delighted eyes. Photos of every size were there, very many of them coloured, and most beautifully coloured.

There were no paintings except a life-sized oil of Maudie herself as Diana. That had been hung on the line at the Academy. Charlie remembered it well now: it was signed by a well-known French portrait painter, in fact the greatest of them all, and the discoverer of genius in many an Englishman.

But this picture, magnificent though it was, was quite dwarfed by the variety and beauty of the photos.

First in numbers came the nudes. They were none of them of the blatantly crude, erotic, fucking, all-ends-up type, but they were-well-not the sort that Aunt Lavinia ought to see.

There were many single nudes, very nearly always the model being Maudie herself. For this she apologised.

'You see, Charlie,' she said, 'I have a paucity of models. This GREAT IDEA is only its infancy yet; that's where I'm looking to you for help. Tubby's no good. If I left him to get me models he'd bring women like cart horses. Tubby has strange ideas of female beauty-why he is so infatuated with me, I can't think.

'No; I want more girl models for the single figures. It doesn't matter so much for the groups, as long as we have good principals.'

The single figures were very beautiful. There was a complete set of Maudie's life-Maudie in her bath – Maudie drying herself under the trees-Maudie in varying stages of dressing-Maudie riding, cycling, rowing, and in various gowns. The nearest approach to anything very suggestive was Maudie with only her stockings and shoes on, but every scrap of jewellery she possessed.

There were a number of pretty girl pictures, but with the same models again and again.

'We must have more flappers,' said Maudie, vehemently.

The groups, however, were of the more surpassing interest: very many depicted events in the world's history and biblical subjects were quite prevalent too. For instance, we had Susanna and the Elders. A lovely Susanna, mother naked, admiring herself in the well water, and the most lascivious-looking Elders admiring her too; in the middle distance, a charming girl and boy, quite naked, were playing prettily with each other. The scenic effects were splendid. Maudie confessed that she had the help in that line of a very well-known French actor-manager, and that an English actor-manager had put his scenic stock at her disposal.

Potiphar's wife was well treated. A naked Mrs Potiphar had just rent the garment from the fleeing Joseph, who, with one hand attempting to conceal his parts, was rushing from the room. Mrs Potiphar, who blazed with jewels, was of a pronouncedly Egyptian type, sinuous and wicked-eyed. In Joseph, Charlie had not the slightest difficulty in recognising a prominent young stock-jobber. Where had he been in London all this time, and never heard of this place and their goings-on? he wondered.

Samson and Delilah-God bless my soul-it was the famous wrestler, with very little on, and what a Delilah Maudie herself this time. In Samson Agonistes, Samson was similarly unencumbered with clothing.

In the fight between David and Goliath, the giant had been, by some ingenious photographic trick, made to look a very real giant, and his John Thomas was a thing like a quarterstaff, his balls like melons. A sweetly pretty little David stood boldly forth in the foreground, aiming the sling.

There were some pictures of the historic intimacy between David and Jonathan, which left little to the imagination.

We have missed the earlier episode of the Garden of Eden. Adam and Eve were very frankly naked and unashamed in several positions, and there were the dearest possible Cain and Abel.

The scene where, after the fall (which, by the way, was realistically treated), the man and woman get themselves clothed was admirably arranged.

The strange behaviour of Lot's daughters, when they sat in turn on their poor old father's prick and got themselves in the family way, was reproduced in detail, as also was Onan's encounter with his sister-in-law, when he deliberately spilt his seed on the floor.

King David and Bathsheba on the roof, and later the same pair in bed, were fully illustrated.

Ancient Greece and Rome were imaginatively represented, especially the mythology of the former. A swan ('One of the king's from the Thames,' giggled Maudie) was on top of Leda, this time Maudie again, and Jupiter enveloped Danae in a most cunningly contrived shower of gold. The chance to show Venus anadyomene, and all the other gods, and goddesses plausibly naked, was fully utilised, but perhaps the best composition was Vulcan's revenge on the guilty lovers. Tubby figured always as a very tipsy Silenus.

In fact, everything in history of a picturesquely indelicate flavour was ruthlessly exploited.

Charlie was loud in his expressions of praise.

'This must all be very valuable,' he said.

'Tubby's papa offered me a good deal above a bit; said he wanted to present it to the Manchester Watch Committee.'

Apart from the historical groups, which, of course, included Lady Godiva, there were some very charming allegorical pictures. A humorous one was 'Fecundity', in which Tubby and a portly dame were surrounded by sons and grandsons, daughters and granddaughters, all dressed like Adam and Eve.

There were amusing modem pictures too-of life behind the scenes, river pleasure parties-and many clever snapshots.

'Well, that'll do for the present,' said Maudie; 'come and lunch. I'm rippingly hungry, and after lunch we'll have to get ready for Tubby and Aunt Lavinia.'

'I don't want any lunch, or Tubby, or Aunt Lavinia,' grumbled Charlie. 'I want to go to bed with you for the rest of the day.'

'Oh, you'll see lots of me in the future. I think you see the possibilities of our GREAT IDEA. This is only a penny peepshow at present. I, with your help and Tubby's money, am going to make it world-famous.'

Lunch was simple, but very delicate. After the salmon cutlets there was just a duck and salad, and a light savoury. Only hock cup and Grand Marnier with the coffee.

Two new maids Charlie had no difficulty in recognising as the originals of girls in the photographs, and in the page he recognised at once the boy David.

'Now'-Maudie lifted an admonitory finger-'this is the lie.

'Firstly, regarding your presence here. I knocked you down in Kensington last night. You were unconscious, but not bad enough for the hospital, so I brought you here.

'To Aunt Lavinia, I am the widow of a Polish count, and I knew Tubby abroad. That's all. Ah, I think I hear the car.'

The hum of the motor drew nearer, like the sound of a fury flying on the wind. Charlie fidgeted uneasily, and mechanically turned face downwards one or two very outre photographs. Aunt Lavinia mattered financially very much indeed, and could his charming hostess be trusted?

Maudie was perfectly calm. As the scrunch of the wheels on the gravel denoted the arrival, she gave a final little twirl to a kiss-curl, and said to Charlie: 'Kiss me for luck.'

It was Aunt Lavinia.

The door swung open, and before the footman had time to announce them, Lady Lavinia and Tubby were in the room.