The Perilous Life of Jade Yeo (4 page)

It is ridiculous!

I will not be disturbed. There's absolutely
no reason why I should see him. Paris is a city of some
considerable size, and I am not very large. I shall sink into the
crowd. Probably he has forgotten all about his kisses and his silly
talk. But it does not matter even if he hasn't, because I shan't
see him.

Ravi writes, "I enjoyed your description of
the charms of Paris. I have never been, but I must acquire an aunt
of means and prevail upon her to take me there. I feel I should be
at home: as with Paris, what you might call a leisurely approach to
excrement disposal, and a consequent distinctive aroma, were
characteristic features of my hometown."

It is such a comfort to have a friend who
does not mind talking about these matters. At home one's digestive
system was the property of every passing aunt and uncle; here in
Europe one never ever speaks of such things.

Hardie came to see me.

I don't know how he found me out. Perhaps he
is some sort of clairvoyant—a Theosophist—a qigong master. Perhaps
he asked a medium.

I am in a daze. I will try to set things out
in order.

I was in our hotel room, reading. Aunt Iris
had gone out to meet one of her friends.

(Aunt Iris is an odd fish: even though she
makes at least three trips to France in a year, the only French
person she ever goes to see is her tailor, and all her friends in
Paris are English people. I suppose it is because she can only say
"too expensive" and "the silk, please" in French. Perhaps I
shouldn't blame her, but I have already learnt to say "chocolate
cake" and "pigeon" and "where is the station?" in French, and I
have only been here a week.)

But I digress. I was reading Charlotte
Bronte, and Jane was being serenaded by Mr. Rochester. (I see the
source of all my problems: a Bronte was completely the wrong thing
to be reading, unless it were an Anne. I should have been reading
George Eliot.) A knock sounded on the door and I said, "Come in,"
without looking up, thinking Aunt Iris had returned early.

"This is just how I imagined you," said
Hardie softly. "Sitting in the sunlight with a book—don't move! You
were perfect."

I had leapt about two feet in the air and
then scuttled behind my armchair.

"I beg to disagree: I think I am even better
here," I said. "The chair hides all my problem spots. The feet—the
stomach—the knees—"

Hardie was looking amused.

"I won't pounce," he said. "There's no need
for you to hide from me. I shan't do anything you don't want me to,
I promise."

"That's all well and good," I said, not
moving. "But I don't trust you as far as I can throw you." I
considered my arms. "And that wouldn't be very far! No, you can say
anything you like, but don't you think I don't know what you mean
just because you are using words that mean different things from
what you really mean."

"There's your felicitous way with language,"
Hardie remarked. "Will you believe me if I say I simply want to
talk?"

"No!"

"Very wise," said Hardie. "But I am telling
the truth—part of it, at least. A talk is one of the things I would
like to enjoy with you. May I sit down and try it?"

I glared at him, but he kept standing there
at the door with that mild courteous look on his face. His lips
were quirked in that daydream smile, but his eyes were clear and
serious.

"You may," I said. "But order us some tea
first. The beverage, and the buns. And you must pay or Aunt Iris
will toss me into the Seine."

He did it without a murmur—not quite enough
to restore him to my good graces, but he ordered hot chocolate as
well, which did. It came in gleaming metal jugs with white foam on
the top, and I poured it out and sat there with a bowl in my hand
until the heavenly smell went all the way through my head and
cleared it out. I forgot and smiled at him.

I should have hated him if he had made some
comment about it: "There, that's better", or something to that
effect. But he only smiled back.

"Do you like chocolate then?" he said. I
liked him for asking, not stating it. But I was in a contrary mood,
so I said:

"That is a silly question. Like asking one
whether one likes sunshine, or flowers, or babies."

"Babies, at least, are not universally
popular," Hardie pointed out.

"People who dislike babies are fools, unless
they hate everyone," I said firmly. "Babies are nothing more than
little small humans, only they're pleasanter and better-smelling
and more attractive than your average adult."

"You've never been kept awake by a hungry
infant squalling at an ungodly hour of the morning," said
Hardie.

"Oh, as if you have," I said. I'm sure Diana
Hardie cultivates a pure artistic passion for feeding babies at
three in the morning!

Hardie paused a moment, his face working as
if it did not know what expression to wear, but then he grinned and
inclined his head.

"A hit," he said. "Where did you get that
sharp tongue?"

"Is honesty sharpness now?" I said. "I can
never understand the English. We Orientals are meant to be
inscrutable and mysterious, but whenever I say what I think, the
way my mother brought me up to do, the English fall about swooning.
I can't imagine what you must be like by yourselves. How does
anything ever get done if none of you say what you mean?"

"We muddle along somehow," said Hardie. "I
take it a forthright manner runs in the Yeo family, then?"

"It is nice when you ask questions instead of
assuming things and pouncing on people," I observed. "Yes, I
suppose so. My mother is a great talker, and she is not very good
at subterfuge. She has a grand mind that will not be trammelled by
little things like etiquette. I like to think I am like her."

"You are fond of your parents," Hardie said.
He poured me some tea. "An unusual affliction."

"Do you think it's an affliction to like your
parents?" I said.

"It seems an inconvenient feeling when you
live so far away from them."

"When they are all the way over in China, you
mean?" I said maliciously.

"Malaya, I believe," said Hardie. He saw my
look and laughed. "I do apologise. I asked Ravi about you. You see,
I'm interested in you. I should like to be your friend, and not
make you leap behind furniture every time I appear. I thought if I
spoke to someone who knew you, I would get a better idea of how we
could arrive on better terms."

"What did Ravi say?" I said.

"Not a great deal. Nothing bad, if you were
worried," said Hardie. "He refused to tell me why you left Malaya,
however."

Everyone asks this. But I was beginning to
like Hardie despite myself, and I thought I wouldn't mind telling
him. (Of course, I'd liked him enough to kiss him before. But one
may like someone enough to kiss them without liking them enough to
confide in them. The two are quite different emotions.)

"It's not a very interesting tale," I said.
"I came to study at one of the universities here. And then I
started writing, and found I could make enough by it to keep
myself. That was exciting—you see, before that everything I'd had
was given to me by my parents, so it was refreshing to be able to
do things for myself."

"They were fond parents, I take it," said
Hardie.

"Oh yes. My mother and father are excellent
creatures," I said. I hesitated. "I should have gone home and tried
writing for the
Straits Times
, if they would have me. But
then this blasted marriage business came up."

"Marriage?" said Hardie.

"Yes. My mother and father think it would be
rather a good idea if I were to marry the son of one of his
business friends," I said. "They would never force me. But they are
so tedious about it. There is no turning aside to talk about one's
walk to the library, or the iniquities of one's landlady, or one's
trips to Paris. It all comes back to the son. And he's fallen in
love with me, the gudgeon. And he is kind, and reasonably
good-looking, and would look after me—"

"A romantic hero, in short," said Hardie.

"And my mother is convinced that I harbour a
secret passion for him, only in my girlish naivete I don't know
it," I said. "It is a bother. My parents write and say: you had
better come home soon to marry him, or he will marry someone else.
I say: I shan't come home until he has married someone else. They
respond: well, you had better come, he won't wait for you
forever—and so on, without end. My mother and father have very
focused intellects. And they've never grown out of the habit of
treating me like a delightful baby that doesn't know what it
wants."

Hardie looked at me. It was coming on to
evening and a soft dying light came through the windows. His face
was half ivory and half deep purplish shadow, and his mouth was
tender.

"What do you want?" said Hardie.

I said what my parents always hate hearing me
say.

"I would like," I said, "some excitement
before I die."

I kissed him.

Let me try to put down what happened as
unblushingly as I can. Perhaps I will never engage in the activity
again, and I shall have to go off this recollection of it for the
rest of my life.

We kissed a while—Hardie very gentle and
restrained, I trying to work out what I was meant to do with my
teeth and tongue and lips. In ordinary kissing one aligns one's
lips with the kissee's lips, and presses them together, but
in—well—I can't think of a better term—in sex kissing the insides
of one's mouth is involved, and it is quite difficult to make it so
the respective lips are aligned. One folds one's lips on top of the
other's. But caution is required: if anyone's lips stray too far
beyond the mouth it gets very damp, and one feels as if one is
being eaten by an excessively friendly lion.

When he got too excited to stop at kissing,
Hardie picked me up and put me in his lap and put his hand up my
skirt, kissing my face and my mouth and the hollow of my throat,
and parts lower than that as well. How warm my face is! It's
strange how embarrassed I am now, writing this down, when at the
time I didn't even think to blush, but took his hand and showed him
where to touch.

He has great big hands. The skin was rougher
on the top and the fingernails were blunt (good job they were—I
wonder if he cut them in advance). They were soft, except for
writing calluses. Oh I do love men's hands.

Hardie put his fingers inside me. That hurt a
little, but it was somehow exciting too—it was such a novel
sensation. I thought I ought to do something other than shiver and
sigh, so I tried opening his shirt and touching his chest (having
observed that he seemed interested in mine). But I am not sure if
he liked it. He did take it as a cue to lay me down and take my
blouse off and kiss my breasts.

I have to say that it is very pleasant for
one's bosom to receive flattering attention after years of its
inspiring no warmer emotion than maternal disappointment. Pa's side
of the family runs to flat-chestedness, so Ma should really have
been prepared for my shape—or rather, my lack of one. But instead
she nurtures the hope that some day, perhaps at the age of thirty
or thereabouts, I will blossom into voluptuousness.

Oh dear, it doesn't seem right to be talking
about one's parents when one is describing being debauched. I must
try to focus my mind.

When he had been kissing my bosom for a
while, both of us breathing very fast and heavy as if we were
running a race together, I decided to take initiative and undid his
trousers. Hardie laughed a low wobbly laugh and murmured something,
but I was too busy looking at his parts to listen.

The male member is a peculiar thing. Of
course complaints can be made about the female parts as well, but I
think there is something rather pretty and charming about the mound
of Venus and the soft crinkly hair that covers it, like grass on a
hill.

Hardie's member, which presumably does not
deviate wildly from the average, was a dark pink cylinder of flesh,
which bulged out into a sort of knob at the top. It was covered by
a veined skin out of which the knob emerged on occasion. This
member and his testicles were a different colour from the rest of
him, which is a pale doughy hue. It created a singular effect when
most of his clothes were off. I felt rather tender of him, he
looked so absurd and vulnerable.

The skin on the male parts is very soft, and
one is not meant to try to strip the shaft of its outer skin, for
this makes the possessor say, "Ouch!"

After this Hardie took my hand away, and
kissed me, and settled down between my legs. I helped him push his
way in. It was a little painful—I am still sore—but I did not mind
it.

There was something very primal about the
whole thing. That is a silly obvious sort of thing to say—but
people are so sophisticated about sex. They say such a lot about
it, or they don't say anything, so that it becomes something
mystical and elusive. But the act itself was so wordless and
unsophisticated and basic. Hardie could have been any man. I could
have been any woman. And yet at the same time it was so personal,
because one is so much in the moment. There was no distance because
there was no thinking—no more than one thinks about what one's body
is doing when one is in the WC.

Hardie is different when he is not talking.
He was gentle and flustered and earnest. I liked him better than
I'd ever liked him before. When we were done, much quicker than I
would have liked, he was embarrassed and apologised: "Sorry—sorry",
without looking up.

"I don't mind," I said, though I did rather.
You'd think a married man and habitual philanderer would do better.
"Was it all right?"

He was all tousled and sleepy, like a
boy.