Descent into Chaos

Oxford Initiation

The dream keeps recurring, the reliving of that first time that was all too real. I have no idea why the other young men had zeroed in on me. Perhaps I wasn’t quite as proficient as others were on the rugby grounds, and I know that I didn’t have some of the family background that they could boast—that I was there at Oxford at the sufferance of a patron—and perhaps it was because the lessons came too easily to me—more easily than to some of the more prideful of them.

But in the dream, of the reality that would not leave me, they are swirling around me in the club house after a match, in the changing room outside the steamy showers—more ominously than they did in real life, a sensation informed perhaps by what actually happened to me subsequently. They are jeering me and snapping their towels and prodding and poking me, hemming me in and jostling me into the blind-ended area of lockers separated by a long bench bolted to the damp-wood floor.

He pushes through the crowd, my senior, the one assigned to help me fit in at Oxford. They scatter as he churns through them, with a “piss off” here and a “leave ’em be” there. Sitting down beside me on the bench, he waves them all away and wraps his arms around me and rocks me, protecting me from the threatening swirl. I’m trembling, traumatized, not knowing why this is happening to me—why I can’t fit in. I’ve been warned that this is the way at these institutions, a centuries-old custom. To get along, you have to go through fire. I was told it steels you and that this was why I was being sent here—to be steeled for better things, a rosier future.

He is patting my arms and chest, and in the haze of the dream—just as it was in real life to the recollection I have permitted myself—he moves to running his hands over my naked body. I have no idea when the transition occurs—when it moves to predatory, dominating, from comforting. In each dream I try to will myself to isolate that moment when I could have done something, could have escaped this—at least then. Trying to focus on my own role, on how much of what happened was because I welcomed it. But by the time I realize it—and when I’m well past resisting it—he has a grip on my penis and a firm hold with his arm around my shoulders. And our lips are joined, and I, in spite of myself, am moaning and snuffling as I come in his hand.

I’m embarrassed, mortified. I struggle to arise afterward, but he just smiles and says it’s his turn. And then I notice that we aren’t alone—that the others are back. Not nearby but hovering on the periphery, grinning, their eyes slitted, their hands on their own penises.

I babble and cry, wanting to be anywhere but there, not understanding—not wanting to believe it is happening, although in the dream it is happening more vividly—the sensations more pronounced—than anything in the later reality that, after all of these years, I have numbed myself to drive out of my mind except for those dark, lonely, primeval nights when the dream steals in and overwhelms me.

The wood surface of the club room bench is cold and scratchy on my back, and I flood my mind with the concern that I not get splinters in my back—trying to force out the image, the reality, of him hunched over me, straddling the bench below me, spreading my legs with a painful grip on my ankles. Smiling down into my face, as much a sneer and a leer as a smile. Telling me to relax and enjoy it in a faraway voice, as if from the bottom of a swimming pool.

The pain, the excruciating pain. The attempt to rise, to escape. The others now coming closer, though. Two holding down my shoulders, two holding my legs, his hands on my waist and belly, pinching at my nipples and squeezing my balls. The curdling cry slicing through the mushy hubbub, and the realization that the cry out is mine, trailing off in sobs as I am filled and stretched—and, irrevocably taken, deflowered in ever-deeper thrustings.

Moaning and writhing as he moves inside me. The pain lessening, but not the feeling of violation and the embarrassment. And now the embarrassment changing to the shock of realizing that there is a change in my moans and groans and pants, and that my hips are moving with him, that my hands are gripping his arms—not to push him away, but to keep him inside me. The shocking realization that I want him—that I don’t want this to stop—the basis of his subsequent power over me. Building up to a second explosion from inside me.

The face looking down into mine changes, as does the feel inside me—the size and movement and angle of it, the vigor of the stroking, the feel of the hands clutching my waist or hips—and the sound pitch of the heavy breathing on top of me. I have opened my legs for all of England, known by any and all who want to share in my humiliation and subjugation. Past pain and shock. Numb.

It just goes on in waves and waves and waves until, with a gasp, my eyes fly open and I sit up in whatever lonely flat bedroom or hotel efficiency I am in at the moment, sweating and in full arousal. The mercy is that when I lie back again, and take my engorged cock in my hand, and slowly sink into relief and sleep as I stroke my myself, I dream not that dream, but of a riot of colorful tropical flowers opening to the warm sun—and to a feeling of contentment and peace.

When—if ever—will he lose his hold over me—and what will my life be when and if I regain control? And thus was my initiation into a whole new, disturbing world by Alister Cullingworth, who had supposed to have been my protector at Oxford.

Welcome to Rhodesia

It had been a grueling combination of flights over two days into Rhodesia, but here I was, in the lobby of Salisbury’s Meikles Hotel, waiting for Section Officer Gavin Coetzer to drive down from Morris Depot along The Avenues to take me out to Alister’s farm. I pulled at the tops of my long socks, still being self-conscious about the art of wearing bush shorts as every-day attire, as the well-oiled routine of the fine old hotel swirled around me, just as it had for over a century, and just as it seemed, against all sense and odds, to intend to do for another century.

But I knew better.

That ostensibly was why the Foreign Office in London had sent me out here. They couldn’t figure the rebellious Ian Smith regime out. Was he really trying to save Britain’s interests here, or was Rhodesia, as he suggested, descending into chaos because Smith was being isolated? A bit of truth in all, I had found, although there wasn’t much question that Rhodesia was headed toward chaos in any event before we saw the dawn of the 1980s. The vibes for native African independence were just too strong. No economic reasoning was going to win out over the thrust for freedom and independence.

But the real reason I’d been sent was because of the influence of the Earl of Devon. Lord Clarence had already decided where Rhodesia was going, and he didn’t want his son sinking into that pit. It was my misfortunate to be on duty on the Africa desk and not only to have been at Oxford with Lord Clarence’s son, but also to have once been engaged to the wife of said son, Pamela Cullingworth. Both of these were memories I could well have done without, although both are what had dominated my life since.

“I have only slim hopes that Alister will respond well to you on this subject,” Lord Clarence had told me when he had levied the duty on me. “I will not blame you, of course, if the effort is fruitless. But I . . . we . . . must try. We have never been close, Alister and I—have barely been in contact for years. But he is my son—my only surviving son—and you cannot underestimate what the importance of having sons is in my family.”

I felt pity for the old man upon leaving his office. If the only hope of my family wrested on the shoulders of a son such as Alister, I would be distraught as well. I knew that Lord Clarence’s other two sons had died childless.

Although I wouldn’t say that I would have been miserable with Pamela, we were both marrying for convenience. Although I was head over heels in sexual thrall in her sway, I also was confused at the time about my own sexuality and disturbed about her control of me, and I would have slowed the process to marriage if her connections were not so helpful to me. I am not proud of that, but such were the times and the nature of an ambition to fit in above my station.

For Pamela’s part, she was a distracted lass and treated me like a donkey—to extremes, in fact, at the time. Even her father, who was a stuffy, self-important Earl even in those days, was trying to marry her off as quickly and as well as possible to avoid scandal. She’d become inconveniently pregnant—although she mercifully lost the baby—which simply wasn’t done in her circles in those days. And, worse, the man in question was an Indian—an Indian from Delhi. I rather suspected she seduced the poor lad just to stick it to her father’s world.

She probably was bent on marrying me at the time for the same reason. I held the Oxford degree but not the Oxford class.

For my part, I had a double reason to marry. From the time of a tumultuous event at Oxford, I had grown unsure of myself, confused about what I truly wanted—underneath what I knew I should want, what society dictated I was to want. And Pamela was the first woman to give me sexual confidence of the preferred heterosexual variety.

She had taken me up as a cause of some sort, plucking me away from my first job in the bowels of the Foreign Office and trotting me out in royal society, where I was shockingly out of my element. My family was on the rise—but nowhere near the heights at which Pamela was displaying me. I know now that it was all part of her rebellious stage, a “screw you” to the London establishment and her father. But I was smitten. And when I was invited down to her family’s country house for a first weekend and she took me into the greenhouse and let me—no seduced me to—fuck her, I felt my life flowing into place—a safe place—for the first time in my adult life.

The conservatory was humid and hot from the tropical flower collection of Pamela’s mother, and we fucked in a riot of color under the bougainvillea and amidst orchids, where I had only intended a kiss and a tentative fondle. But as I was fumbling, she unzipped me and worked my cock with her hand until I was overwhelmed and ran my hand under her skirt, only to find she was wearing no panties and was already wet and willing for me. She gave me all of the right encouragements, and I was able to perform satisfactorily, which erased years of doubt and made me so grateful to her that I followed her around like a puppy dog, asking her to be mine constantly until, with a laugh, she said, “Yes, all right, if you like.”

Another, related, reason for wanting to be married was to serve my ambitions in the Foreign Office—to stave off an even more sinister scandal than Pamela had become embroiled in. I had fallen into one of those too much love on top of too much hate situations at university. Alister Cullingworth was a senior man at my university, two years ahead of me and the son of an Earl. Alister was insufferable because he was the son of an Earl, just as Pamela could be unthinking and rebellious because she was the daughter of an Earl. But Alister was even more insufferable because at that stage he was the third, “left out,” son of an Earl. His life at university had been one of trying to make up for this and forcing the rest of us into his entourage and thrall. And he had the most maddening—and mad—ways of exhibiting this. I bent my will to rejecting his controlling ways on me after that first branding of me by him and had felt well—but falsely, it seems—shed of him at the end of Alister’s next-to-last term.

Before that time, I had, for a time, only a matter of days really, until he had lost interest, come to be held in thrall to him—in ways that shamed and confused me and left my life in tatters until, as my Foreign Office career started, I found what I thought was love and the promise of fulfillment with Pamela.

I was wrong, however, in thinking that winning Pamela’s hand was an answer to either my problems or my confusion.

“Ready to go, sah?” the blond-headed, beefy, thoroughly Afrikaaner Gavin Coetzer said to me from the lower stoep, the Afrikaner version of steps, up to the veranda of the Meikles Hotel entrance. The query was accompanied by a sharp salute and professional click of his highly polished heels. And very nice heels they were too. I was instantly aroused by the man in ways I didn’t seem to be able to shake no matter how hard I fought them.

“Yes, of course, Gavin,” I answered, “and do call me Brian. I’m not even all that officially here.”

“Yes, sah . . . Brian.” And then Gavin gave me a grin that showed that he was quite willing to dispense with the niceties for this little jaunt of ours—a jaunt that had played on me like a toothache all of the way from London. I liked his smile immensely.

“I do hope you don’t mind going out to the Cullingworth farm, Gavin. I know it takes you away from your police duties.”

“Yes, it most certainly does,” Gavin said with another grin, as we climbed into the dark-green Land Rover. I was teasing him, of course. I knew he’d be glad to get away from the regimental spit and polish of the British South African Police barracks for the three days I planned to stay in Beatrice.

Beatrice, a good fifty miles south of Salisbury on the road to Johannesburg and straddling the sometimes Umfuli River, was the nearest town to the Cullingworth farm that had some semblance of a hotel. I had no intention of being housed by Alister and Pamela, and I needed somewhere I could hole up for two or three nights while I attempted to cajole a disaffected son to do what he’d never do if he knew that was what his father wanted him to do. This, even though it was obvious to anyone with eyes and good sense to know that Rhodesia was on the edge of a disintegration that could bode nothing but danger for a British expatriate landowner trying to eke out an existence there.

As we turned off the highway to Johannesburg and started to bounce across the hard dirt road into the Cullingworth homestead, I could sense the tension in Gavin despite his free-flowing, loose discussion. This was a dichotomy that had hit me repeatedly during my investigations on the Rhodesian situation and that would continue to assail me at every turn: the seeming informal, slow flow of life in an unending pattern in a Rhodesia that was, at the same time, one match away from an explosion. This is no better symbolized than in the hot, arid conditions that were starkly contrasted with the riot of color and the variety of flowers that wilted in the afternoon sun each day but that were rejuvenated and full of hope again the next morning.

I could tell that there was some sort of match ready to be lit under Gavin’s tail as he not so cleverly quizzed me on my relationship with Alister Cullingworth and his wife, Pamela, the deceptively delicate and high-strung beauty queen that Alister had overpowered; snatched from both the afternoon teas in British palaces and, not incidentally, me; and taken off to a rougher, cattle-raising life in the dusts of Africa. I remember being amazed for several years that Pamela had neither returned on her own to London, nor succumbed in the African veld. But, with Pamela, one never knew.

I still, after all these years, didn’t know if Alister snatched Pamela from me or if Pamela snatched Alister from me. I only know I had taken the brunt of the game—probably from, and intentionally by, both of them.

Above all, I continually wondered—and dreamed—whether and when Pamela left Africa and returned to England, it would be to the London society she previously had rejected—or to me, who she also had turned away from—or perhaps to some other endeavor altogether than caught her fancy. I wanted her as much now as I had when Alister, knowing how much I wanted her, had taken her from me.

After an initial, shocking encounter and a few days of dalliance, at the university with Alister I had tried to avoid him. But in his last term, he decided that I was his project for the year. He pursued me, more subtly than his first “by right” taking when I first entered Oxford, alternating between the personas of torturing bastard and comforting best friend, until he had worn my defenses completely down.

And then one dark, rainy afternoon, he had gotten me drunk and fucked me on the narrow bed in my tower chambers, bringing me back through my own surrender to where I had been determined to leave off him. I’m sure he saw the afternoon as some sort of fulfillment of a campaign of reassertion of domination. But at the time, having suffered many nights of confusion and indecision and forbidden want, I saw it as a liberation, and for weeks I joyfully spread my legs for him upon demand. The euphoria was short lived, however, as rumors started to spread, as they do at Oxford, and they were easily accepted, as also happens at Oxford. We muddled on past my leaving Oxford and entering the Foreign Office, however, me deciding constantly to put an end to it—and yet answering Alister’s whim and need whenever he snapped his fingers. Alister was above such a scandal, but my family was still very much on the make in London society, and I didn’t have to be told that I needed to scotch the rumors.

Even in the Foreign Office, Alister’s position in society would make his proclivities invisible, even as they would damn someone of my background.

Thus, the convenient engagement to Lady Pamela. Her family was relieved that at least my family had money and was on the ascendance, and my family was delighted to be rubbing sex organs with the entrenched nobility and to be able to tell themselves that this meant I wasn’t really “that way”—at least after I’d been able to work my way out of that inconvenient stage.

And that, more than any other reason, I supposed, was why Alister had decided that he must possess Pamela—because I had her and because he no longer had me. I couldn’t think of any kinder word for Alister’s acquisition than “possessed.” At least that was my take at the time. In calmer times, I had to acknowledge that perhaps it was all just another one of Pamela’s bird flipping statements to all that was noble Britain—and to me as well.

“So, you and Alister aren’t all that good friends, then?” Gavin said after I made my views of Alister as well known as I felt was politic.

“Oh, no, Alister has always been an ass. And he was very much a bother at university.”

“Quite.” Gavin said, putting a succinct finish to his view of Alister as well. “And Lady Pamela?”

“Oh, we knew each other at one time. It’s her I’m here to see, actually. At the behest of her family, but please don’t say anything about that until I have. I can’t say that I have much hope of success in what I have to tell her, however.” Lord Clarence had made quite clear that no one but Alister was to know I was here on his behalf, and the use of Pamela’s family concern—even though I could tell Pamela’s family felt well rid of her and her embarrassments—was just a convenient conceit.

More important, I had no intention of telling anyone here fully what Pamela—and Alister—and I had once had.

With that, Gavin’s tension seemed to evaporate, and we became quite good friends while bumping down that road. He had an open, winning personality—and a magnificent body, well worked and deeply tanned by service in Africa—and I was drawn to him—drawn to him in ways that I would have to guard against, unless I chose to succumb to them out here in darkest, remote Africa.

I couldn’t claim that I hadn’t reach the point of tension that I didn’t succumb—secretly and in the dark—to my urges for another man even in London. I just had been discreet and increasingly rarely indulging enough about it not to make scandal. And I had resorted to camouflage.

After Pamela left me, I had gone with women and men alike—very discreetly, of course. As I gathered years and seniority in the Foreign Office, I learned how to keep my private life private. I had never since come as close to marrying as I had with Pamela, but I made sure I was seen with desirable women in public, and I went home with them and spent the night having sex with them. And I enjoyed it, and some women I stayed with for as much as a few months. I did not consider that we were making love, though. Making love was something I came closer to with the men I met outside of the public eye and brought to my own flat for the night. In neither form of coupling, however, did I feel completely fulfilled and satisfied. There was always something missing. At times I assumed it was Pamela; at other times Alister.

Increasingly I had come to see that it was some form of emptiness and self-protection against being so deeply hurt again in me.

I put myself on guard as we drove through the arid land. Gavin Coetzer was a man I would have been willing to take back to my flat if we were in London. But we weren’t in London, and I would be frustrated and confused enough just in being with Alister and Pamela together—realizing now that I was this close to seeing them that I wanted them still—both of them.

There was one brief moment of embarrassment when I mentioned children, having heard at one point that Pamela was pregnant.

“No, alas, no small ones in that household,” Gavin had responded. I felt he was going to go on and say something in addition, but he did not.

For some reason this brought forth in me a long-forgotten memory of what Pamela had said to me in the conservatory during our first coupling. I had fumbled as she spread her legs for me and mumbled that I had not come prepared. She had given me a funny look and murmured that after her Indian interlude that was not necessary. We never used protection, and although it worried me at the time, we never had a repeat of her Indian embarrassment. Regardless, I sweated the engagement, and once the nuptials were inevitable, tried to rush the marriage that never came.