Chapter 4: Damian, Arrival at Stanton Reach, Malaya

“Damian and Jane, this is Bradford Blandin, our plantation overseer,” Jim said, as we descended from the motor car that had carried us down the long, tree-shadowed drive from the main road to the big house at Stanton Reach. “But perhaps you remember him from your childhood.”

The drive from where just our rubber plantation land had started at the muddy track that passed for a main road seemed like it had gone on forever. Jim already seemed right at home here, though. Jane and I had remained in George Town on the western coast of Malay, north of our lands, when Jim had gone on to the estates in Rantau Panjang to prepare the house for family habitation.

I didn’t remember Bradford from my childhood, I must say. And looking over at Jane, I could see that she didn’t. But, in contrast to Jane, who was set on rejecting any knowledge of Malaya, which had set wrong with her from the moment our tender touched shore in George Town, I would have liked to be able to say I remembered someone like the man who was now standing before me.

Bradford was younger than Jim, perhaps in his early thirties. He was dark, and handsome, and brown as a berry from, no doubt, years of working in the fields in the tropics. He was slim and wiry and so well muscled that the veins in his arms ran just below the surface of the skin, having no meat to shield them. For some reason the sight of those veins sent an electric current charging through my body. I couldn’t imagine him looking more unclothed if he had been naked, and my eyes kept stealing to the veins as they ran up under the sleeves of his shirt—and I wanted to touch them, to follow them, to see where they went. I was reminded of Antonio’s undulating tattoos and how they aroused me—and I had the same response to the ruggedness of Bradford. He was wearing a cleaned and pressed khaki shirt and trousers, and he had sandals on his brown feet. The look of his naked toes also gave me a little charge.

Above all else, the looks he gave me were ones of sexual interest.

Even in the weeks of the journey from the Horn across the Indian Ocean and then followed by another month in George Town, where Jane refused to let me wander alone, I had not forgotten the night with Antonio and the heights of unquenched arousal that he had taken me to. I had been in a perpetual state of arousal since that moment that I’d only been able to relieve when I was alone, in my bunk, at night. And then it was nothing like what Antonio had aroused in me. Mr. Thorpe had fucked me and I had liked it, but he hadn’t sexually aroused as much as Antonio—and now Bradford—had.

I would not deny it now that I had had a taste. I lusted for men. I wanted to do what the poems of the older boys of Summerville told me could be done between men. But I wanted to do it with men—men older than me—not with younger men my own age. Rugged men. Exotic men. Men of mystery and sensual power. I wanted to be dominated and treated roughly. I had a long time to think about it as I was locked in my cabin while crossing the Indian Ocean, left to pleasuring myself, not able to come anywhere close to the heights Antonio had brought me. Antonio would have satisfied me, would have quenched the fires burning inside me. I was sure of it. If only we had not been interrupted.

I was charged and in a state. The look of Bradford Blandin aroused me. The look of Jane’s Jim aroused me, possibly even more, because I’d had years to build up an interest in Jim Feathergill. But even as I thought that, I knew it was unthinkable. Jim was my dear sister, Jane’s, husband. He was as taboo for me as it could get. But maybe that was why he attracted me more now than ever before.

I slitted my eyes, and the hand I laid in Bradford Blandin’s was trembling. His eyes took on a look of lust, and he gave me a second, more intense look. I wanted him to know that all he need do was ask. I hoped that neither Jane nor Jim saw what was going between Bradford and me in those looks. I don’t think they did.

The house at Stanton Reach was large, but certainly not as large as either of our country houses in England. But it was exotic. All made of wood, weathered gray now, although as he escorted us around the periphery of the building, Jim was saying that he would have it whitewashed straight away. And then he looked at me and smiled, and I knew who would be doing the whitewashing. He had told me in no uncertain terms that I was accompanying Jane and him back to Malaya to grow up and become toughened. From the outside, the great house was one story, all columns and a deep veranda on all sides. Jim told us that this was needed to keep the house as cool as possible, as were the glass-paned floor-to-ceiling doors to the outside, in all the rooms, instead of the usual windows.

Down the slope of lawn, we could see a small lake with a white-painted summer pavilion at its edge and across the lake a bungalow. Jim told us it was the overseer’s bungalow, that this was our father’s first house on the plantation. I did not remember any of this beyond a gleam of recognition of the great house and a stronger hazy memory of the summer house—of playing in it with a native nanny. But it was to the bungalow across the lake that my eyes and thoughts drifted, and as Jim droned on about domestic issues with Jane, I let my imagination drift to the veranda of the bungalow and inside, to the heavy teak, mosquito netting-draped bed of Bradford, the overseer. He was lying on the bed, naked, and my eyes went to the veining running up his arms and then suddenly his arms were tattooed and he was Bradford and Antonio rolled into one. And he was beckoning to me and lifting me with strong, veined hands at my waist, binding my wrists over my head, and lowering me onto his hard, jutting cock. And impaling me and sending waves and waves of ecstasy through my body.