Belle - Lesley Pearse [115]
Some of the younger men, on the other hand, could make her feel dirty. They could be rough, uncouth and very insensitive to her feelings. They often acted like they thought she should be grateful they’d picked her, and occasionally she’d get one who would claim she wasn’t worth the money. Martha said a proportion of men always did that as they felt diminished by having to pay for sex, and she shouldn’t take it personally. But it was hard not to.
In much less than two years, she’d gone from barely understanding what sex meant to knowing more than she wanted to. She knew now that no two penises were the same; she’d seen huge ones, tiny ones, bent ones and diseased ones, and every other kind in between. She’d learned the tricks of tightening her internal muscles to increase men’s pleasure and make them climax quicker. She could even take them in her mouth and look as if she was loving it when she really felt like vomiting.
Some men wanted real lovemaking, others just quick release. Some wanted to believe she was really a lady, while others wanted her to act like a wanton hussy. She had developed the ability to sense which they wanted just by the way they looked at her down in the parlour. She slid from lady to hussy so often that mostly she no longer knew which was closest to her real character.
Belle knew she wasn’t the same girl who had come out from England. She didn’t have romantic daydreams any longer, instead she took all she was told with a pinch of salt. She had developed a certain cynicism and she could be hard too, especially to men who came close to seeing the girl she used to be.
England and all those she loved there seemed a distant blur now, like looking back on a dream. Her seventeenth birthday had come and gone, and she still hadn’t written a letter home because she knew there was nothing she could say that would make her mother and Mog feel better about her disappearance. She thought it was best that they believed she was still in New York as she had been when she’d sent a card, and that she was having a far better life than she could have had with them.
Yet she couldn’t help but scour the newspaper for English news. Unfortunately the American papers only wrote up an English story when it was something really newsworthy and important, like when King Edward died last May. That had been covered well, with pictures of his funeral, and Belle cried when she saw one with Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament in the background and remembered when Jimmy took her there.
Mog would have been there in the crowd somewhere to watch. Even though she didn’t like crowds, nothing would stop her seeing a procession, and she’d thought King Edward was a good sort. Sometimes there would be a few lines about the suffragettes too, the force-feeding of them in prison or the latest thing they’d done to push their cause. That was enough to make Belle cry as well, for Mog had always said she wished she had the guts to join them.
Yet it was the coronation of George V back in June of this year which really made her homesick. That was the kind of story from England Americans liked, and every paper and magazine was full of it. She could remember when Edward VII had been crowned, the excitement, the bunting and flags going up. Mog took her to watch the procession in Whitehall and she’d never forget the gilded coach and everyone cheering. They’d had a street party that day, someone wheeled a piano out, and the dancing and drinking went on most of the night.
When these feelings of homesickness came upon her, Belle tried to tell herself that her life here was far better than in England, but the debt to Martha was always there in the back of her mind. Common sense and a love of figures said the money had been repaid months ago and that Martha was a greedy, conniving witch who was taking her for a fool.
Belle had enough money saved to leave town, though it wasn’t enough to get back to England, but it was said that Martha had spies everywhere and word would get back to her the moment one of her girls