Woman on Woman

by Hilary Chale

  “Seems a shaky proposition. A sort of social contract, or just masochism?”

  “Or not wanting to seem a teacher’s pet?”

  “I don’t see how that could arise, nobody else knew.”

  “Whatever it was, I very much doubt if she perpetrated her pranks in order to be caned. Most of them ended with a wigging and lines, as she very well knew they mostly would. The swimming pool was the only certainty, when you come to think of it.”

  “Not as certain as all that. She might have been let off or postponed so as not to show the welts to the assembled dotings.”

  “True.”

  “Well?”

  “I said that I would have thrashed her. It wasn’t very appropriate, but I couldn’t very well do nothing. She nodded and then she astounded me by saying what I think now I subliminally expected ... she said:

  “Why don’t you thrash me now?”

  “All the same, I bet it shook you?”

  “It certainly did. It made me blink! All sorts of thoughts raced through my head. Was she serious? Had I anything to do it with? Where? How? Across the rather elegant jeans which she was wearing or on the bare? Actually, I could momentarily only grimace unbelievingly. She said, ‘I’m quite serious’ and went on, that I might even be doing her a favour ... a sort of exorcism, I suppose she meant.”

  “Feelings of guilt?”

  “I said that, but she wasn’t sure. She wasn’t, apparently, feeling at all guilty about that young man, not in the usual sense. It was something to do with being caught and not punished. I’m not sure if I understand it. Punishment after detection seemed important to her.”

  “If she were caught, she wanted retribution?”

  “Something like that. Risk taking perhaps ... she had not been caught very often, and that did not bother her at all. Perhaps she was making some sort of subconscious bet with herself. She told me about several escapades which had never been traced ... D’you remember the time when all the lights in the area went out?”

  “That was her, was it?”

  “Yes.”

  “A la Kipling.”

  “You know my big studio. I took her in there. I still haven’t furnished it properly, but there’s an old office table which I sometimes work at in the summer. I told her to get ready while I found a cane.”

  “Did you have one?” Jessie demanded suspiciously.

  “Yes, actually I said ‘instrument’ ... several ... and a lot of old punishment books were sent over from Porchester Hall by mistake, because they were in a cricket bag of my father’s. So I left her in the studio while I rummaged in the attic. It didn’t take long.”

  “Don’t they use them at Dothegirls?”

  “Oh yes, but the place is properly equipped, so there’s no need to add to their stock. By now I was entering into the spirit of the thing. I really would have done her good and proper at school, so I pulled out the fiercest of the canes in a bit of a daze. It was almost a four-footer. Then I went downstairs.”

  She began to fiddle with her cigarette packet and to feel under a cushion for her lighter. After a few moments she resumed.

  “When I got into the studio, I found that she was naked except for her stockings and bending comfortably over the office table. I hadn’t expected her to be quite as ready as that and I stopped to look for a moment; but I made no comment and neither did she. I simply followed the school custom and said how many and rolled up my sleeves.”

  “How many?”

  “Twenty. I had thought about it on the way downstairs. Twelve, plus one for each year since she left. She was looking away, as she always did. Unfortunately I was wearing very long skirts and couldn’t take a run, so I followed the Golden Rule.”

  “Overlap the bottom by a few inches and then take half a step back?”

  “And half a pace to the left ... her bottom was beautiful ... even better than at school.”

  “You always liked them,” Jessie interrupted, “it must have been a temptation.”

  “What! Mostly in navy knickers? You old pussy fancier! Though of course I can’t say I didn’t sometimes enjoy it. Even teachers are human.”

  “How human were you?”

  “Very. I marked the floor round my shoes with chalk to keep the place, and then let her have one and went and looked. A very satisfactory red welt. After that it was every fifteen seconds by my watch. I tried to put five side by side, one below the other and then returned to the top and did it again and so on.”

  “Same principle as twice threes.”

  “But I’ve never done anything quite like it before. She wasn’t exactly passive. She didn’t say anything, but naturally she moved a bit and occasionally blew out a sort of sigh. Five minutes is a long time and the red zone across her bum got angrier and swollen.”

  “I’m surprised you didn’t cut her, or did you?”

  “And them, dammit, at the fourteenth stroke, the telephone rang in the hall. I jolly nearly didn’t answer it, but she said ‘it’s all right’ and I went. WRONG NUMBER of course! She had stayed put, not moved an inch when I got back. You know, there is something gorgeous about a caned bottom! No wonder they all look at themselves in mirrors. Then I picked up the cane again from the table and said, six of the best to come.”

  There was a silence which seemed to Jessie to continue interminably. Eventually Gayle roused herself from her abstraction and said, “it did something to me.”

  “Did you fall for her?”

  “I fairly gave her those last six. You should have heard the echo ... quite like the gym.”

  “Yes but did you?”

  Again Gayle ignored the question.

  “When it was over, she stayed a moment where she was and then straightened up and said ‘thank you’. I said there was some Witch-Hazel in the bathroom and she picked up her things and went naked up the stairs. That huge staircase window, if anybody had been passing they would have got quite an eyeful.”

  “Was that all?”

  “All! Wasn’t that quite a lot?”

  “I was being literal.”

  “Oh! Not quite. When she came down, clothed and her old direct self, I made some more tea and she perched on the arm of that large armchair ‘for obvious reasons’ she said. I restrained myself from asking if she felt better. She talked about it pretty animatedly. She said it had been a remarkable experience. It had given her a sort of intense euphoria. She wondered if it was unique or repeatable. ‘Hardly unique’, I said. ‘Sixteen and at school is one thing, twenty-five and earning one’s living, quite another’, she replied.”

  “The difference between compulsion and free will,” Jessie hazarded.

  “I asked her what she meant by ‘repeatable’.”

  “You, of course, wanted to do it to her again.”

  “Of course ... sometime. She didn’t reply directly for once. We talked about corporal punishment a bit. She was obviously thinking round it. She said ‘I wonder how many adults experience it’. I thought not many. She asked if I had ever done it to anyone else; ‘after all’, she said ‘you keep a cane here’.”

  “That set you a dilemma! You didn’t want to say ‘no’, and ‘yes’ could have made your intentions too obvious.”

  “I told her that having a cane here was a lucky accident.”

  “Lucky!”

  “She said that everyone had the odd thing which they were ashamed of and many never found their way out.”

  “That’s quite right. We all have the odd thing, at any rate.”

  Gayle signalled agreement with her eyes.

  “So what happened then?” Jessie said after a moment.

  “Nothing very much. She had to go. We made some rather effusive good-byes and she got into her car.”

  “Carefully?”

&n
bsp; “As you say, one is apt to be careful getting into a car afterwards.”

  “It sounds as if you’re speaking from experience!”

  “Not recent,” said Gayle.

  “And then?”

  “She drove off.”

  “Are you expecting to see her again?”

  “I’ve got her address.”

  “It sounds as if you are.”

  “Well, yes ... sometime or other. She’s an entertaining person. I haven’t really thought about it, not beyond making sure that I can get in touch.”

  “Making sure?”

  “Obviously I applied my mind to it. One would, wouldn’t one? I mean, a bottom surrendered ...”

  “Offered!”

  “... Is not at all like a pound of apples at an unmemorable green-grocer.”

  Gayle looked at Jessie speculatively. Then the speculation hardened.

  “You know, Darling, it’s about time you took your knickers down, otherwise you’ll be getting jealous.”

  “I suppose you’re right,” Jessie said as if it were the most natural remark. She started to drop them.

  “In the studio?”

  “Yes, the cane’s still on the table.” Gayle held the door open for her friend.

  “What’ll it be? The usual?”

  “You can hardly call it ‘the usual’,” Jessie said, as her skirt went up.

  “Long time no see ... we may be middle-aged, but we’ve still got a thing or two ... bend over.”

  Jessie felt the light touch of the cold cane on her bare buttocks, “several years,” she said, “but speak for yourself.”

  The cane whistled in the air and she felt the familiar hot surprise of the first stroke.

  “Nothing like it,” she said as Gayle studied the effect.

  “In my study at Porchester.”

  There was a pause while Gayle looked again.

  “Have you chalked the floor?”

  “Yes.”

  The second stroke made her buttocks quiver.

  “Do you remember why I thrashed you? You’re going to get twenty, by the way.”

  The third stroke fell on her posterior and made her writhe.

  “I thought I might.” She gripped the edge of the desk for the fourth, “fair’s fair.”

  The fifth came like lightning.

  “Yes, it is rather.”

  Gayle moved out to examine the five close parallel stripes on Jessie’s haunches.

  “Do you remember?” she repeated.

  “It was twelve of the best that time,” Jessie said, catching her breath as the sixth whipped across her and continued in a strained voice, “after supper.” Seven. “Go on,” Gayle said sternly, giving her the eighth stroke into the middle of her flaming stripes, “or I might start again,” and gave her the ninth at once without waiting for the fifteen second interval.

  “I had a row with Kathleen Stoddard.”

  “You did indeed,” and again the cane whistled in to her naked rump, “and?”

  “I didn’t walk the girls with her.” It was difficult to think with each new injection of pain.

  “What was the row about?”

  “Er ...”

  “Perhaps this will help.” The thirteenth rolled the agony up her body.

  Again Gayle left her place to examine her work and then Jessie felt the new touch of the cane as she took aim for more.

  “Wait a second,” Jessie said pleadingly.

  “It won’t count if I do.”

  “All right ... I thought one of the girls ... one of the girl.”

  The cane flashed in the sunbeam and cut into her curves.

  “Now it’s coming out.”

  And then it cut again.

  “Has a crush on her.”

  Involuntarily her big bottom had shrunk from the coming stroke.

  “Hollow your back and stick your tush out so that I can do you properly.”

  Jessie did her best and the cane seemed to enter her body before she felt it on her behind.

  “If you don’t tell me before the twenty is up, you’ll have to have more, won’t you?”

  “Yes, I suppose so.”

  “No ‘suppose’ about it.” Again the cane struck Jessie’s reluctantly willing buttocks.

  “I was jealous ... oh, please.”

  “Jealous? The cane is the best cure for jealousy, isn’t it?” Eighteen. “But one stroke doesn’t count, so you’ve got three to tell everything.”

  The cane seemed to rip her apart, as if she were exposing her most sacred intimacies. The thought was mother to the act. She opened her legs slightly and tried to concentrate.

  “Let it come,” Gayle said and then the cane whistled again, “only one more ... who was the girl?”

  “It was Susan.”

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