Chapter 1

Samantha

Gerald had not had a happy week. Thank Heaven Saturday was here at last! He wandered over to his bedroom window and looked out lazily over his large garden, a garden resplendent in the early summer sun. It could not be said that those trim borders and perfectly manicured lawns were his own handiwork. He was far too busy (and impractical) for that. But the gardener had made a splendid job of putting his, Gerald's, vision into effect. It looked exactly as he had pictured it two years ago when he first moved into the house of his late aunt, whose sole beneficiary he had been. He sighed happily.

Then something happened and he gasped, shaken out of his daydreams. His beloved long-haired white cat, Samantha, jumped silently onto the window ledge beside him and rubbed her purring litheness against his side.

"I wish you wouldn't creep up on me like that!" he said. But he stroked her affectionately all the same, grateful as ever for her companionship. Dear Samantha. It was good that she was around, for a change!

And that was part of the problem with Samantha. She was not around half as much as he would like. In the last few months she had been increasingly absent from this large house that they shared. She had once been gone for three days and he had begun to despair of seeing her again when she reappeared, as affectionate as ever, and acting as though nothing had happened.

He picked her up and held her against his face, rubbing his cheek into her soft fur. She purred happily, but Gerald sensed that the cat's attention was not focused entirely on him. She was looking out of the window, as if expecting to see something. He looked and saw nothing at first. And then a ladder appeared in the garden of the house on the other side of his garden wall. Gerald put Samantha back on the window-sill and watched as the ladder moved towards the neighbouring house. He gasped in astonishment as the person holding the ladder came into view. It was She! Or was it Her? He thought a moment or two and decided that it was, grammatically, She. So She lived next door and he had never realised.

Gerald had only met Her once. She had accidentally trodden on his foot as they pased each other in the County Stores in the local market town. He had apologised profusely, despite being the injured party and She had smilingly told him it was entirely Her fault!

Since then he had seen Her coming an going a half dozen or so times, but he doubted that She had seen him. It was usually at the weekend in the town that he spied Her and he had begun to live for the times he saw Her. One day they had been sitting a couple of rows away at a concert in St Mary's church and She had been with an older woman. At least She wasn't with a man, he had thought. Although how such a total wet blanket - afraid of his own shadow - as he was ever going to have either the wit or the nerve to make contact with this unapproachable beauty was beyond him. Once again it looked as though he was going to have to worship yet another goddess from a safe distance!

Gerald was an excellent archivist, in charge of a whole Department, but he was not much of a Man of Action in the Real World. In fact he loathed the Real World. When not at work he was happy to potter around his house, sit reading in his lovely garden and stroke Samantha. Two weeks a year he would spend in Italy, immersing himself in Renaissance art and architecture while Samantha languished in a cattery. Sometimes he reflected that it really wasn't much of a life for a man of thirty five.

And now, She was there not a hundred yards away, climbing up a ladder and looking none too steady as She tried to reach an open widow in Her attic. She must, obviously, have got Herself locked out of Her own home! Poor girl. And another thing struck Gerald as remarkable and somewhat unexpected. She was not wearing a stitch of clothing!

It soon became apparent that the Young Lady's attempt to gain entry had started to go wrong - badly wrong. The ladder moved sharply and She froze, obviously terrified to move either up or down. A faint cry could be heard. And then Gerald felt a sharp pain in his hand. Samantha had bitten him!

Bitten him! The sweet and gentle Samantha? That paragon of feline virtue? The cat that all his friends commented on so favourably, telling him how lucky he was to possess such a loving animal, when most cats were wild and unpredictable creatures, as likely to scratch and hiss as they were to purr? What was happening today?

He looked down at the cat and saw a look on that usually impassive face that shocked him. It was the most eloquent expression he had ever seen on any quadruped! It was a mixture of anger, pleading, disappointment and contempt.

"Can't you see that you must Act?" Samantha seemed to be saying. "So much depends on your Acting in a Decisive Manner for once in your useless life! Go and rescue Her, you wimp!"

Another and more painful bite from the strangely agitated Samantha caused Gerald to do something very unusual for him - unique, even. He acted in the decisive manner demanded by the occasion. The wall was not too high for him to climb, he decided. And it was a very long way to go around to the front of Her house by more conventional means. By the time he had gone around that way, She might have fallen with consequences for Her fair and delicate frame that were too ghastly to contemplate.

As he stepped out into his garden Gerald saw a piece of material lying on the ground. It was a bikini top! He absentmindedly picked it up and stuffed it into his pocket.

"I wonder how that got there?" he thought, as he ran to the wall and climbed up and over.

Frieda

Frieda Antonia Feathersonhaugh (pronounced "Fanshawe"), was a singularly lovely young woman. She had always been that way, right from day one.

"What a lovely baby, Mrs Fanshawe!" her mother had early on been informed by the other ladies of her acquaintance. And the other ladies had been right.

"What a sweet little girl!" they had enthused as the babe developed into a golden haired child. And they had been right!

"But that wonderful fair hair will darken in a few years! Such a pity!"

But here they were wrong. Very wrong. Just about as wrong as any one could be!

Frieda's hair was as fair and golden now as it had ever been. And she was twenty one.

Whenever she looked at those glorious tresses in the mirror she was, in her excusable vanity, reminded of a verse from one of the Psalms.

"Sweeter also than honey and the honeycomb. More to be desired are they than gold. Yea, than much fine gold."

Miss Roberts, Frieda's Gym Mistress at St Hilda's Academy for Genteel Young Ladies, had hungrily slavered over Frieda's burgeoning womanhood when our heroine had been one of her pupils. Lusting Miss Roberts had watched Frieda develop into, by mouth wateringly exciting degrees, a Big Girl and in All the Right Places. Miss Roberts, consumed by frenzied desire, had endured many sleepless nights as she angrily and uselessly railed against the gross injustice of a system which denied hard working and dedicated educators the right to seduce and ravish such sweet young things. But Miss Roberts valued her job and the fat pension at the end of it. Miss Roberts was a practical woman. She had to be satisfied with other things.

But Miss Roberts never forgot the delectable Frieda, or altogether abandoned hope of Attaining the Object of her Lustful Desires! We are all of us allowed to Dream, are we not?

Virginally innocent Frieda might not have noticed Miss Roberts's admiration. She might have been blissfully unaware of the older woman's yearning for her sweet young body, but the other girls did notice. One of them, a girl of whom it would have been a great and mendacious understatement to call "plain", was a fervent admirer of Miss Roberts. Ethelberta Harrison, niece of the Prime Minister and cousin of the Secretary of Sate for the Environment (whom she greatly resembled), would have given twenty years of her life for just five wonderful minutes with the athletic Miss Roberts. But Miss Roberts, blinded by lust, had eyes only for the unattainable and golden haired Frieda!

"You cow!" snarled the angry Ethelberta, one day in Summer. " I hate you, you bitch!"

"Why, darling Ethelberta?" simpered the startled Frieda. "What have I ever done to upset you?"

Frieda's lip quivered as she said this and her voice faltered.

"Miss Roberts loves you!" hissed the furious Ethelberta.

"Miss Roberts? Are you joking or what? She's just the gym mistress, Ethelberta. Just a teacher. She's just someone my Mummy and Daddy pay to educate me - just a common servant, really. She doesn't love me!... Does she? Golly, how utterly gross!"

"Oh! What a total arsehole you are, Frieda! Get with it, Frieda! Of course she loves you! She's a dyke, like me, and you are the purest piece of sugar on two legs this school has seen in fifty years! And I'm going to fight you for her. Put 'em up, Frieda! Let's see what you're made of!"

"But I like you, Ethelberta. I don't want to fight you and I don't know how to fight. I go to Japanese literature classes, not martial arts like you. Please don't make me fight you! Please, Ethelberta!"

But Ethelberta was too enraged by jealousy! She knocked Frieda to the ground in front of a horrified mistress. (Not Miss Roberts).

Ethelberta was expelled the next day, after being given a severe caning, and Frieda enjoyed a happy time for the rest of her days at St Hilda's. The pure young maiden was still innocently unaware of Miss Roberts's continuing and ever increasing determination to possess and ravish her sweet young body.

Frieda and her friends would never know that Miss Roberts had a spy hole allowing her to see into the showers. Never did Frieda stand naked under the floods of hot water without a trembling Miss Roberts watching as the silvery rivulets cascaded over her adolescent firmness.

And finally Frieda left school, a year or two earlier than most. She was a clever girl and went up to Cambridge aged a mere sixteen to pursue the study of Oriental Languages. She secured a First after only two years. All her fellow students averred to the end of their days that they had never known a girl who had less interest in Life! But everybody loved her. She had not a single enemy all the time she was there!

And then came a Very Traumatic Experience involving Nudity.

Max

Frieda was twenty one when she acquired Max. It happened a few months before she met Miss Roberts (for the first time since leaving school) and shortly after leaving Howard so spectacularly.

Howard was a young man, Miss Roberts was a thirty something gym mistress with a toned and magnificent body and a lust for Frieda's virginal purity. Max was a King Charles Spaniel. Of the three, Frieda was to come to prefer Max by far. Max was no trouble at all!

Howard seemed pretty promising to start with. Frieda met him at work. She had a job now that she had completed her education. Her knowledge of Japanese language and literature was being put to practical use. Frieda was a writer/translator.

Sadly for Frieda, her knowledge of Nipponese high culture was not what her employers were looking for. Frieda had soon discovered that life in the real world was a mundane and boring affair! She spent her time translating instruction manuals from Japanese into acceptable and comprehensible English. She readily admitted that her work was necessary and useful in a world whose household goods were mostly of Far Eastern manufacture. Thanks to her excellent work, many electronic devices found their way into the homes of hoi polloi furnished with instructions of such comprehensive accuracy and crystal clarity that only an idiot would come to grief after reading them (Plenty of idiots did come to spectacular and even fatal grief, but please, don't blame Frieda!)

One advantage of having such a boring job - Frieda was not by nature a technologically inclined young lady - was that she understood how to service, assemble, dissemble, reassemble and repair pretty well every household appliance in existence. Not only did she translate the user's instructions leaflets, but also the more complex manuals for service engineers. There were times when she considered going into business as a repair and maintenance engineer, but the thought of acquiring the formal qualifications she would need deterred her.

Howard was a Graduate Trainee at the same company. He was a tall young man a few years older than Frieda. They went out a few times to social events and one night Frieda invited him back to her flat just for a Coffee (She seriously meant it, too!)

There she experienced, for the first time, the Act of Love. And jolly nice it was, she decided! Howard was over the moon about his conquest. To have actually found and deflowered a real genuine virgin who was well over the age of consent - in this day and age - was no mean feat and he boasted of it for weeks.

Three weeks after her initiation into womanhood she was invited by Howard to go for a drive down to the coast where he promised her an idyllic day on a sandy beach, side by side with the Man of Her Dreams and with a hamper containing chilled sparkling wine and a variety of mouth watering snacks to sustain them through the day.

Frieda was not to know that Howard had in mind to repeat his manly entry into Frieda's womanhood, this time in the open air and under the benign eye of the summer sun. She would have found this delightful enough had the couple been able to find a private and secluded spot. But a Shock was in store!

When they had parked the car and walked a half mile to the beach, Frieda was struck by something odd about the bathers lying at roughly two yard intervals all along the beach. On the downward scramble she was too busy getting down to the golden strand to notice more than the precipitous nature of the descent. Once on the beach, though, she noticed that many of the people were naked. Howard - fiend that he was - had brought her to a Nudist Beach!

Poor Frieda had never known such fear and embarrassment before. What was she to do?

She extracted herself from the Beach Horror with surprising ease. For a while she was incapable of action, being stunned at what she was seeing. In all directions lay people of all shapes and sizes and most age groups not one of whom was wearing anything at all.

Families were there, Mothers and Fathers allowing their sweet young children to see them in all their Nakedness! She was speechless for a while as Howard led her to a spot where there was room for them both to lie down and spread their picnic blanket on the sand.

She watched as Howard undressed, exposing his Manly Parts to the gaze of all and sundry. Not that All and Sundry seemed all that interested, which was odd because Howard's Manly Parts were remarkable, or so Frieda thought. She looked up and down the beach and Howard's Manly Parts seemed more remarkable than ever!

"Come on, Freddy!" said Howard as he noticed his girlfriend's seeming reluctance to follow suit and bare her Heavenly Beauty to the elements. "You know you want to!"

But a horrified Frieda knew nothing of the sort. This was such a disappointment. Howard had made love to her only weeks ago in the privacy of her own apartment and this had been such a wonderful experience, not least because of its privacy. It had been something for just the two of them, two young people in love and hidden from the world. But THIS, this public sharing of their bodies with a Vulgar Multitude, was horrible - quite Horrible.

"Want to do what, you pervert! Strip off in front of all these people? You must be joking! PERVERT!" She was screaming in a way that surprised herself.

Then she looked around at the masses of innocent naturists and pointed in their general direction. Her voice became a few decibels louder.

"PERVERTS! That's what you are! Perverts! You should all be arrested."

She was in danger of becoming hysterical, but just as her terrifying fury was about to consume her she became calm. She saw the car keys, lying on the picnic blanket. She bent down and seized them and ran from the scene. In minutes she was in the car and driving back to London, a sad and disillusioned lady. Howard, needing to dress before he could pursue the fleeing Frieda, arrived at the car park just in time to see his BMW and with it his Frieda becoming a mere speck in the distance.

She never did find out how he made it back home and she never really cared. He came around to collect his car next day and was subjected to a tirade of unladylike abuse, most inappropriate coming from the lips of a gentle maiden who had been expensively educated at a Very Good School. Not that Frieda was a maiden any longer, of course. But she remained virginal in spirit if not in fact.

So that was the end of Howard. Shortly after this contretemps Frieda decided to avoid the office as much as possible and work from home, only coming up to London a couple of times a month for meetings, through which she mostly daydreamed or slept. The Japanese technical manuals arrived by post and Frieda sat in her drawing room and translated them. She had moved to a village a few miles from the county town and rented a house for a year, with the option of an indefinite extension if she wanted it. She loved it there and had never been so happy - although it was a little lonely sometimes.

Then Max arrived.

It was Frieda who called him Max. After months of boring translation, naming her newly acquired dog was the first truly creative act in a very long while. It was surprisingly easy, really. She just looked at the little fellow and said "Hi, Max!" Simple as that. Such is the way with the creative process. Such is the nature of genius!

As I may have mentioned in an earlier chapter, Frieda had acquired a considerable amount of expertise when it came to servicing and maintaining electronic equipment. She could fix any problems in her own household and one day was able to put her friend Tracy's television to rights. Tracy was impressed. Impressed and very grateful.

I said that Tracy was Frieda's friend. This is not entirely accurate. She was more of the nature of a home help -a stout lady of twenty five, who needed a bit of work in order to provide for two children, the result of separate indiscretions with two men, one Indian and one West Indian. Tracy was no bigot! Frieda admired her for that, and for the thoroughness with which she kept her house tidy. Some weeks after hiring her, Frieda lost Tracy's services for eighteen months when that lady was convicted of various offences, ranging from shoplifting to trading in illegal substances, and her two little darlings taken into care.

Max was a direct result of Tracy's gratitude. Tracy talked a lot and Frieda's skills with household appliances soon became well known among her friends on the run down estate where she dwelt. One way and another Frieda began to help out a number of Tracy's friends and Max was payment for one of her jobs. A little while after acquiring Max, an interview with a truculent and aggrieved Service Engineer whose trade was being adversely affected by Frieda's freelancing, persuaded her to stick to her writing in future. I'm not saying that the man was threatening, but Frieda decided it was better to be safe than sorry.