Second Romantic Lead

I've told you the story of the night I waited so long to fuck my wife and then, when she returned home and I made love to her, I discovered – I knew – that, just before – perhaps minutes or just an hour or less before – she had been unfaithful to me.

That didn't make me want her less. On the contrary, I wanted her more. My lust, already great from the long wait, was blown up to uncontainable heights by jealousy – and by the intense arousal I had from knowing that someone had been so recently enjoying the delights of her lovely little dooverlackie. While I almost ravished her, I wondered what it had been like for him and how she might have wriggled and squirmed in the passion of his embrace.

When I told you the story, I told you that she had returned still wearing her panties. Why was that of any significance? It wasn't of course, except in the context of what I learned later.

My wife had been pretty bored, one way and another, for the past several months. I'd been working hard on my novel and it was into that writing that I poured my passion rather than into my relationship with her.

So she tried to find some extra-curricular activity – some innocent activity – that would keep her occupied and interested until I came round to appreciating her beauty and her romantic ways again.

To cut a long story short, she ended up joining a repertory – a dramatic society that put on shows of established plays – more of the Oscar Wilde than the Shakespearian variety – and provided a respectable way for the "ladies" of the community to fill in their time.

What she realised quickly was that she had exchanged boredom for spiteful pretension and backbiting. The drama was in the catty relationships between the members of the cast and those who helped with the productions rather than with the splendid drama they tried to present to the public.

It was on a night that a scene in such a drama was played out that she returned to me with her panties still on.

The play she'd been rehearsing was due to be presented in a week's time. As the time got shorter, tensions rose, tempers got frayed, emotions were more intense.

When the time came to go home on that famous evening of my lust and jealousy, she wanted to forget.

She wanted, she told me later, some diversion, some "adventure."

For women, adventure almost always means something sexual, either in its entirety or to top an adventure off - to seal it, if at all possible, with a loving fuck.

In this instance, she wanted – as an adventure - to climb a tree.

Strange for a grown woman but true.

A particular tree - just one special tree she passed twice daily, on the way to the theatre and back.

It had a complexity of branches and there was a strength in them that appealed to her.

A male strength?

A phallic attraction?

Whatever, she wanted to climb "her" tree, hold its branches, sit on one or more of its thicker joins, slide down its arms so that they rubbed - excitingly? - between her lovely legs.

An adventure? A diversion?

She left the warring gaggle and went out into the dark and up a small rise to the tree.

She climbed.

She felt herself wholly alone – and safe.

Here she could unwind and forget – perhaps the neglect that her husband showed her; perhaps the sleazy selfishness of the theatre crowd.

Then, with a start, she realised that someone was climbing up after her.

A young fellow who was playing a sort of second romantic lead.

He was as buffeted as much by the cast of cat-snarlers as she was.

He must have followed her out of the theatre, seen her climb her tree and decided to join her.

When she turned and saw him, she pretended anxious surprise. She cried -

"Oh, it's only you."

In relief, she threw her arms around him and squeezed.

He held her. He kissed her. She pressed herself against him.

Here was adventure.

The darkness.

The tree.

The phallic symbolism.

Now the phallus - the real phallus - pressing against her body.

He was reaching between her legs....touching her...feeling for the hungry lips of her neglected little dooverlackie.

Could they really do it up here? In the tree?

Only if he held her in his lap

He did. Seated comfortably, he lifted her.

She spread her legs. He lowered her on to his phallus, drew aside her panties and thrust.

It was not him - not the second romantic lead. It was the tree. The handsome tree, strong and secure - comforting and noble - making love to her by proxy.

She screamed with joy, as she felt him thrust ...and thrust ...and the joyless weeks without love were at last coming to an end...

"Sssshhh....."

It was the only "word" he ever spoke until he completed her "adventure," carried her down from the tree and, at her car, kissed her on the lips and said -

"Au revoir."

She liked that. He would see her again.

But she never did it in the tree again.

When she came home to me, she had her knickers on.

Why was that important?

It wasn't really, until later.

She told me about the tree.

How she wanted to climb it.

As an "adventure."

She didn't tell me she was fucked up there. Not until much later.

But I knew she had been. I didn't need to be told.

The feeling as I embraced her and as she enfolded me that night, so soon after the second romantic lead had been there, was just too powerful. That night I'd been both jaloux et excité -jealous and excited.

The next time I passed the tree - I passed it often - what did I see?

Fluttering from a midway branch was a pair of ladies' lacy knickers.

I knew they weren't my wife's. They weren't her style.

I knew anyway they weren't those she was wearing the night she came home to me after her adventure in the tree.

That night, she brought her knickers safely home.

So the panties in the tree belonged to someone else.

How often, I wondered, had the tree aroused an overwhelming desire in some female pelvis?

How many acts of congress had the tree accommodated, how many lovers enfolded with its many arms, how many had it taken on to one or other of its many laps?

How many had forgetfully left their knickers behind as an involuntary offering to their accommodating arboreal lover?

On the other hand, how many, in the urgencies of union, had, like my wife, not tarried to take their knickers off before screaming with joy as the handsome tree made love to them by proxy - of some second romantic lead or the like?

How many wives have, in desperation,

sought a proxy lover because their delightful little dooverlackie, neglected and untended, is hungry for some loving nurture?

That raises the age-old question of just how common and universal a phenomenon is the proxy lover? How often does the woman close her eyes and imagine that her true love - distant, unavailable and perhaps unaware - is embracing her? Her actual partner is no more than a dildo, his penis no more than an instrument to bring her to physical orgasm while her mind and spirit embrace someone else.

It has happened with all generations. Annie Maria Baxter was exiled from her home in England to the wilds of early 19th century Tasmania. Perhaps, at some time, she had a genuine affection for her husband but, if so, it quickly died.

As in so many cases, it was the woman who nourished their early love and who wanted it to endure; it was the man who caused it to die.

Her husband was a British Army officer, a lieutenant when they married.

Before they left England, at an Army Officers' ball, she met another young officer with whom, her marriage already beginning to fail, she fell deeply and permanently in love. He was posted to South Africa. They wrote but they never met again. She became increasingly estranged from her husband who, in Tasmania, became and remained much more interested in hunting kangaroos than in caring for or attending to the emotional needs of his wife.

They continued to live together and he continued to exercise his conjugal rights. She continued to love her handsome officer in South Africa and it was he whom, in her marital embraces, she imagined to be holding in her arms, her husband serving as a proxy and, as the years passed, less and less able to give her the physical relief that he, in claiming his rights, no doubt managed, at least in some degree, to extract from her.

Annie Maria had three children. All boys. Each unlike the others and each remarkably unlike his putative father.

Most nights she spent with her husband and slept in the same bed. Many nights he went hunting and sometimes stayed away for several days and nights together.

When he was away, Annie Maria usually stayed at home, sleeping in the marital bed by herself and waiting for his return. She had servants, mostly convicts transported from England, so, though her life was lonely, it was comfortable enough.

However, civilisation was meagre. Social occasions were few.

Sometimes she was invited to dinner or to a dance or musical evening. When her husband was at home, they went together. When he was away, she sometimes went alone; but she was usually well chaperoned.

Sometimes, she went with a group on picnics and there were special occasions when the Governor and his lady were in town and she invited Annie Maria to have morning or afternoon tea with her at Government House in Launceston.

The Governor's wife knew better than anyone that the Governor's lady and Judy O'Grady are sisters under the skin.

She gathered around her some of the finest officers of the New South Wales Corps, to honour her as First Lady and, so it was assumed, to ensure her personal security.

She liked tall men, not too well muscled but gracious and charming, reserved but audacious.

The morning and afternoon teas were for ladies only and they were served by convicts, mostly men although occasionally someone from the Female Factory or from a convict transport newly in harbour was selected for the Vice-Regal staff. That selection was usually made by the Governor himself who was sometimes scandalously accused of anticipating that they would provide him with very personal services. Some of them probably did and were suitably rewarded. When one or other of them left the Vice-Regal employ, she was well-placed with some rich, free settler who fancied her or she was provided with a congenial husband and a generous grant of land.

The military aides were not in direct attendance at the morning and afternoon teas but they were close by and it was when she was taking a stroll in the gardens of Government House that Annie Maria met Daniel.

He was not as handsome as her beloved in South Africa - at least not in her eyes. No one would ever replace him in the deepest recesses of her heart. But she was attracted to Daniel and wanted him from the first moment.

That night there was a ball at Government House. Some Governors banned the Viennese waltz from Vice-Regal balls and soirees as being indecent; but this Governor and more especially his wife loved it. She adored the sight of the young officers, in their splendid uniforms, swirling their partners across the floor and holding them close - almost as close, the Governor's lady thought, as though they would make love.

That night, Annie Maria and Daniel were the most handsome, the most elegant, the most vivacious couple on the floor. Their eyes that they focussed so uniquely on one another, were full of love and, the Governor's lady thought, of longing. She imagined herself being again as young and beautiful as Annie Maria and feeling Daniel's lithe and strong young body pressed against her own.

Annie Maria became her proxy. Daniel would make love to Annie Maria but he would really be making love to her.

How to contrive it?

When there was a lull on the dance floor, the Governor's lady summoned Annie Maria over for a chat.

"You are looking lovely tonight," she said, "and you dance so beautifully."

"Thank you, Your Excellency." Annie Maria gave a little curtsy. "Your gracious hospitality makes us all feel more beautiful than we really are."

"I'm arranging a picnic tomorrow - on Mount Hastings. Will you come?"

"Oh, Your Excellency, that is most kind of you but, as you know, my husband is away..."

"That's of no consequence. You must get out and have some healthy mountain air and recreation. And..."

She smiled and looked conspiratorial.

"We'll have Daniel to chaperone us..."

"It was the most beautiful day," Annie Maria later told her diary, "and it was the most wonderful picnic that Our Creator ever contrived..."

After they picnicked as a group, some wanted to rest. Others went for a walk through the forest of eucalypts that surrounded the picnic ground.

Daniel suggested he take her to "see some of the wild life" and she eagerly took his arm and went off, laughing and dancing, with him.

She thought she was alone. She thought they were alone. She had the perfect chaperone. The Governor's lady had told her so.

Australian forests are mostly bathed in sharp, clear sunlight. There is nothing of the "dark and gloomy wood" to which Annie Maria was used in England.

She felt excited and cheerful - "more happy than I ever felt ere this," she told her diary.

Daniel asked her to be still and pointed across a narrow vale or cleft to where some wallabies were resting, warming themselves in a patch of sunlight.

Somehow they became aware of the human presence. They sniffed the air, the joeys squirmed back into their mothers' pouches and they hopped off to find another patch of sunlight where they could be more on their own.

"Oh, what a pity they've gone," Annie Maria mourned.

"Don't worry, we'll find some more."

Daniel took her consolingly in his arms.

"I promise," he said.

He bent to kiss her on the forehead.

She lifted her face so that his lips met hers.

He touched her bodice.

Silently, he lifted her and lay her on the greensward between the trees.

She had hoped .... hoped for what she was shy of putting into words even in her own mind...

But she had hoped for "this" - and, though she was conventionally covered on the outside, she was carefully prepared for Daniel....underneath.

She felt him as he came to her, so strong, so much to be loved. At the same time, she thought of another, unconsummated love and, momentarily, felt unfaithful that, unlike her husband, Daniel was no proxy.

"Just this once," she told herself. "Just this once..."

As Daniel embraced her, she was far away - far from the wilderness into which, as an eighteen-year-old girl, she had been thrust, far from the husband whose indifference abused her even more than his unfeeling embraces.

It had become her habit to close her eyes when her husband made love to her. It made it easier to imagine her true love was with her.

Her eyes were closed now; but something - it was perhaps no more than a faint rustling sound - caused her to open them.

Running towards them was a little spiky-backed animal that she would have called a hedgehog. It was not so much frightened as surprised and, a yard or two from them, it stopped and looked....looked at what they were doing...

She wanted to tell it they wouldn't hurt it; they were just making love and soon they'd leave the forest to it and the thousands of other little creatures who inhabited it.

Then she closed her eyes again.

She felt Daniel's movements growing more urgent, his convulsions starting.

An ecstasy flowed through her that she'd never known with her husband - never known with anyone before.

She held him as tightly as though she'd never let him go, tried to draw from him every last mite of love, as eagerly she pressed his body as deeply as she could into hers.

When she opened her eyes, the little hedgehog had gone. Daniel's spasms ceased.

She knew the echidna, as it is really called, had brought her luck.

She knew she had conceived.

With her husband, she'd never wanted a child. If she'd been able to bear the child of her beloved in South Africa, how wonderful that would have been. But she knew that her husband's role as proxy could never extend so far.

She never wanted it to.

She knew that Daniel too could never be so entire a proxy. But she could have his child. She would have his child. With his child, yes, she would be content.

From nearby, hidden by the trunk of a mighty gum, two eyes quite different from those of the little hedgehog, had been watching.

That observer knew exactly what was going on between Annie Maria and Daniel. As they had moved together and loved together, she had felt her own crisis of love, as though Daniel had been with her too.

Now Daniel was standing. He buttoned himself, and offered a kerchief to Annie Maria.

Then he took her by the hand and lifted her to her feet. He took her in his arms once more and kissed her. For several minutes, they held one another, dreamily, in silence.

Then, arms linked, they walked together back to the picnic ground.

"You look as though you've been enjoying yourselves," the Governor's lady told them.

Annie Maria didn't say so but she thought the Governor's lady, for whatever reason, looked radiant too.

Annie Maria had done what so many women do. She had torn away the chastity belt that her society tried to impose on her. She had opted for a "quickie" - and to bear the child of the man of her choice.

It is only the woman who really knows who the real, biological father is.

Daniel was the first but he wasn't the last. Annie Maria had three children, as I've said, none of them like the others and none like their putative father, and Annie Maria dearly loved them all.

She was well content.