Never.
Do you like men?
Doesn’t everyone?
Have you ever wanted to make love to a woman?
Catherine thought about it long and hard. She had had crushes on other girls, on women teachers but that had been part of growing up. Now she thought about making love to a woman, their bodies intertwining, her lips on another woman’s lips, her body being caressed by soft, feminine hands. She shuddered. No! Aloud, she said, ‘I’m normal.’ But if she was normal, why was she lying here like this? Why wasn’t she out somewhere getting laid like everyone else in the world? Perhaps she was frigid. She might need some kind of operation. A lobotomy, probably.
When the Eastern sky began to lighten outside the dormitory window, Catherine’s eyes were still open, but she had made a decision. She was going to lose her virginity. And the lucky man was going to be every maiden’s bedside companion, Ron Peterson.
Noelle
Marseille – Paris: 1919–1939
She was born a Royal Princess.
Her earliest memories were of a white bassinet covered with a lace canopy, decorated with pink ribbons and filled with soft stuffed animals and beautiful dolls and golden rattles. She quickly learned that if she opened her mouth and let out a cry, someone would hurry to hold and comfort her. When she was six months old her father would take her out in the garden in her perambulator and let her touch the flowers and he would say, ‘They’re lovely, Princess, but you’re more beautiful than any of them.’
At home she enjoyed it when her father lifted her up in his strong arms and carried her to a window where she could look out and see the roofs of the high buildings, and he would say, ‘That’s your Kingdom out there, Princess.’ He would point to the tall masts of ships bobbing at anchor in the bay. ‘Do you see those big ships? One day they’ll all be yours to command.’
Visitors would come to the castle to see her, but only a few special ones were permitted to hold her. The others would stare down at her as she lay in her crib and would exclaim over her unbelievably delicate features, and her lovely blond hair, her soft honey-coloured skin, and her father would proudly say, ‘A stranger could tell she is a Princess!’ And he would lean over her crib and whisper, ‘Someday a beautiful Prince will come and sweep you off your feet.’ And he would gently tuck the warm pink blanket around her and she would drift off to a contented sleep. Her whole world was a roseate dream of ships, tall masts and castles, and it was not until she was five years old that she understood that she was the daughter of a Marseille fishmonger, and that the castles she saw from the window of her tiny attic room were the warehouses around the stinking fish market where her father worked, and that her navy was the fleet of old fishing ships that set out from Marseille every morning before dawn and returned in the early afternoon to vomit their smelly cargo into the waterfront docks.
This was the kingdom of Noelle Page.
The friends of Noelle’s father used to warn him about what he was doing. ‘You mustn’t put fancy ideas in her head, Jacques. She’ll think she’s better than everybody else.’ And their prophecies came true.
On the surface Marseille is a city of violence, the kind of primitive violence spawned in any waterfront town crowded with hungering sailors with money to spend and clever predators to relieve them of it. But unlike the rest of the French, the people of Marseille have a sense of solidarity that comes from a common struggle for survival, for the lifeblood of the town comes from the sea, and the fishermen of Marseille belong to the family of fishermen all over the world. They share alike in the storms and the calm days, the sudden disasters and the bountiful harvests.
So it was that Jacques Page’s neighbours rejoiced at his good fortune in having such an incredible daughter. They too recognized the miracle of how, out of the dung of the dirty, ribald city, a true Princess had been spawned.
Noelle’s parents could not get over the wonder of their daughter’s exquisite beauty. Noelle’s mother was a heavyset, coarse-featured peasant woman with sagging breasts and thick thighs and hips. Noelle’s father was squat, with broad shoulders and the small suspicious eyes of a Breton. His hair was the colour of the wet sand along the beaches of Normandy. In the beginning it had seemed to him that nature had made a mistake, that this exquisite blond fairy creature could not really belong to him and his wife, and that as Noelle grew older she would turn into an ordinary, plain-looking girl like all the other daughters of his friends. But the miracle continued to grow and flourish, and Noelle became more beautiful each day.
Noelle’s mother was less surprised than her husband by the appearance of a golden-haired beauty in the family. Nine months before Noelle had been born, Noelle’s mother had met a strapping Norwegian sailor just off a freighter. He was a giant Viking god with blond hair and a warm, seductive grin. While Jacques was at work, the sailor had spent a busy quarter of an hour in her bed in their tiny apartment.
Noelle’s mother had been filled with fear when she saw how blond and beautiful her baby was. She walked around in dread, waiting for the moment that her husband would point an accusing finger at her and demand to know the identity of the real father. But, incredibly, some ego-hunger in him made him accept the child as his own.
‘She must be a throwback to some Scandinavian blood in my family,’ he would boast to his friends, ‘but you can see that she has my features.’
His wife would listen, nodding agreement, and think what fools men were.
Noelle loved being with her father. She adored his clumsy playfulness and the strange, interesting smells that clung to him, and at the same time she was terrified by the fierceness of him. She would watch wide-eyed as he yelled at her mother and slapped her hard across the face, his neck corded with anger. Her mother would scream out in pain, but there was something beyond pain in her cries, something animal and sexual and Noelle would feel pangs of jealousy and wish she were in her mother’s place.
But her father was always gentle with Noelle. He liked to take her down to the docks and show her off to the rough, crude men with whom he worked. She was known up and down the docks as The Princess and she was proud of this, as much for her father’s sake as for her own.
She wanted to please her father, and because he loved to eat, Noelle began cooking for him, preparing his favourite dishes, gradually displacing her mother in the kitchen.
At seventeen the promise of Noelle’s early beauty had been more than fulfilled. She had matured into an exquisite woman. She had fine, delicate features, eyes a vivid violet colour and soft ash-blond hair. Her skin was fresh and golden as though she had been dipped in honey. Her figure was stunning, with generous, firm, young breasts, a small waist, rounded hips and long shapely legs, with delicate ankles. Her voice was distinctive, soft and mellifluous. There was a strong, smouldering sensuality about Noelle, but that was not her magic. Her magic lay in the fact that beneath the sensuality seemed to lie an untouched island of innocence, and the combination was irresistible. She could not walk down the streets without receiving propositions from passersby. They were not the casual offers that the prostitutes of Marseille received as their daily currency, for even the most obtuse men perceived something special in Noelle, something that they had never seen before and perhaps would never see again, and each was willing to pay as much as he could afford to try to make it a part of himself, however briefly.
Noelle’s father was conscious of her beauty, too. In fact, Jacques Page thought of little else. He was aware of the interest that Noelle aroused in men. Even though neither he nor his wife ever discussed sex with Noelle, he was certain she still had her virginity, a woman’s little capital. His shrewd peasant mind gave long and serious thought to how he could best capitalize on the windfall that nature had unexpectedly bestowed upon him. His mission was