Love, Let Me Not Hunger by Paul Gallico Read Free Book Online Page B

According to her family, sin was inherent simply in her being there, but Lilian was old enough and smart enough to know that the exciting part was what went on after dark in the cramped confines of the wagon, when Jackdaw Williams and Rose shut the door and put out the light. And this thrilled and excited her. Sometimes during the night ear-splitting screeches from the jackdaw came from the darkened living wagon, and Lilian wondered whether that was when it was all going on, and what it was like.
    The two older boys, Jacko and Ted, had managed secretly from time to time to escape from the sexual prohibitions which had been laid upon them, though they still paid lip service to them in the presence of their mother.
    They had come to terms with what was left of their normal sexual needs by taking on any glamour-struck town girl whenever the opportunity offered itself. There were plenty of dark places behind the tober in the shadows of the wagons and lorries where the garish lights of the circus front did not penetrate. And since they would be away to the next town an hour or two later there were no complications or consequences to be considered. The fact that they left a number of pregnancies behind them during the course of a summer’s trouping they could not know, and if they had known they would not have cared.
    For Toby Walters the coming of Jackdaw and Rose became a torment. From the moment he first laid eyes upon her, the slender figure in the blue cloth coat, fox-coloured hair beneath the beret, reflective eyes, and the child’s mouth of innocence, knowing that this disarming appearance was but the outer covering of one who must be a veritable Jezebel of lewdness and iniquity, he had wanted her for himself.
    Twenty-one years of age, he had been saddled by his family with virginity through fear. Subconsciously Toby had leavened the unwholesomeness of their restrictions with a measure of poetry and concocted an adolescent world in which girls were good or bad, men decent or rotters. A good girl kept herself pure for the man she was going to marry, a good man did the same for the girl who would become the mother of his children.
    Undermining these illusions was his natural virility, which spent itself in night dreams that frightened and worried him. Often by day he was assailed by shaming desires and further harried by the vivid earthy nature of the circus where humans and animals as well were thrown together in cramped, close quarters. This brought him close to the fetishism of undergarments, thighs, odours, the bodies-in-tights of girls and performers all around him and from time to time at night those sounds emanating from the thin partition which divided the quarters of Pa and Ma Walters in the big living wagon from those which he and his brothers and sisters occupied.
    It was the patent availability of Rose which tortured Toby. She was there and there was no escape from the implications of her presence in the clown wagon. No subterfuge was put up as to her relationship with Jackdaw Williams. They were living together which meant that at night—any night, every night—it was happening. The dirty old man was using her, enjoying her, finding himself able whenever he wished to do so to relieve those wire-taut tensions, swellings, and cravings which likewise possessed Toby, repressed and forbidden.
    Until the coming of Rose these desires had been mere flickering of heat lightning upon the horizon, an apprehension kept and controlled. There were girls all about him in the show, attractive ones indeed, members of other acts, but they were dangerous unless one was prepared to marry them in the sense that if one fooled around, one could get them “into trouble” and oneself embroiled with their families. And there were married women, and some of them ever so often acted pretty randy towards him, as the phrase went. But here the stern code of life in a small, tightly knit circus community was even more forbidding. One did