The Call of the Flesh

By Faye Rossignol

Go west, young man... to cruise the watering-holes of Europe with money in your pocket and sensationally sexy women on your arm might be considered enough for most young men. But Freddy "Smiler" has appetites that even the lascivious Kitten cannot satisfy – a sensual ambition that extends beyond the Old World and takes him to the New. In America he meets girls like Heidi, whose amorous ignorance is outweighed by her eagerness to learn, and the flaxen-haired Miss Carron, whose speciality is punishment, and the exotic Belle, a girl with desires as wild as the country she comes from. Lured by these and many other irresistible beauties, is it any wonder that Smiler must answer the call of the flesh?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Faye Rossignol
• Release date: Sep 16, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311270078

Faye Rossignol

Faye Rossignol - who is (or was) she?Search for Faye Rossignol on Google and three attractive ladies bearing her name are listed (at the time of writing, which is 2014). None of them is "our" Faye Rossignol, which suggests that the name is, in any case, a nom-de-plume. "Rossignol" was French slang in the 19th Century for the female pudendum - and our Faye would most certainly have been aware of that! In fact, little or nothing is known of the life (or possible death) of this female (or was she male?) writer. Her seventeen manuscripts were discovered on Saturday, September 19th, 1988, just after dawn. They lay in a skip filled with builder's rubble in London's fabulously wealthy and upmarket Eaton Square. Despite that, it is clear that they were not simply thrown out at so much junk; they were intended to be discovered and, eventually, to achieve the publication they so richly deserve. How can we assume that? For a start, they were heavily wrapped in a waterproof oilcloth before being completely heat-sealed in two layers of heavy-duty polythene; and the outer layer was of the UV-resistant kind so that they would have survived exposure on a garbage tip, even in direct sunlight, without degradation. And they were carefully placed right on top of a full skip - in plain view of any passer-by of average height. Whoever dumped them was probably still in Eaton Square when they were spotted and rescued. Alas, the luck that any bibliographer might have enjoyed ended right there and then.They contained not a single handwritten word that might have helped trace them to the hand that wrote them. Each manuscript was neatly typed using a daisywheel printer, so we know that the writer had access to the primitive word-processors of the early-to-mid-eighties (and it would surely have taken that many years for "Faye" to have written all seventeen volumes). The paper was in standard A4 sheets of various brands, all widely sold throughout the country. In short, there is little hope of tracing "her" through either the paper or the method of printing.Various names have been suggested for the true author, including the satirist William Donaldson (1935-2005) and the politician the Right Honourable Enoch Powell (1912-98). Donaldson (most famous as the author of The Henry Root Letters) is suspected because he once lived in a brothel run by his girlfriend in the nearby Fulham Road and because of the prankish nature of the manuscripts' discovery. And Enoch Powell because anybody taking a late-afternoon stroll around that part of Belgravia in the 1980s and '90s was almost certain to see the British Warm overcoat and the black Homburg hat that both clad the man and trumpeted his sartorial fanfare; one saw them well before those large, limpid, ice-pale eyes loomed out of the circumambient fog of fashionable London, mesmerizing pedestrians to step off the kerb and lower their gaze until he had floated by. He was the very spirit of the place, and perhaps death itself has been unable to prevent his apparition even today? Of the two, we must lean toward Donaldson or some satirist poured into a similar mould. The addresses given by "Faye" in various Introductions in the books - Bushey Arches ... Bushey Park ... Much Hadham ... Crouch End ... Effingham (all genuine places in England) - point to that sort of humour, which is too playful for old Enoch.But perhaps Faye really is a woman after all. Many of her most ardent fans would dearly love to have it proved. A Scarlet Woman? Here one can paraphrase the doggerel about the Scarlet Pimpernel:They seek her here.They seek him there.Her fans they seek "Faye" everywhere.Has she a hole or has he a pole?That damned elusive Rossignol!When all's said and done, we are left (most fortunately) with the writing. Despite its subject matter, the literary merit of "Faye's" work was soon recognised by, it so happens, a beneficed clergyman in the Church of England. He, however, wishes to remain anonymous. Indeed, everyone connected with the rescue and publication of "her" works, is by choice anonymous. The media feeding-frenzy that would be unleashed were even one of them to be named in public would divert all attention away from the books, whose merits are great enough for them to speak for themselves. If "Faye" herself desired to remain unsung, how could lesser mortals muscle in openly by name and bask in the light that "she" had shunned? It would be unconscionable. In short: Shallow-minded seekers after any sort of "celebrity" link must learn to grow up and content themselves, instead, with these seventeen bright jewels of modern erotic fiction.(Shortly after www.Fayerossignol.org/asm went online an anonymous surfer submitted an image found among items left by his late father, who operated a photo booth on New York's Coney Island. Its attractions included a six-foot image of Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa, with a hole where the face would be. People would poke their heads through the hole and have their photograph taken. The name, place, and date were then added to the print. ["And," our surfer adds, "Dad made a fortune for supplying pictures with falsified dates to most of the adulterers in New York."] If this is, indeed "our" own dear Faye, it is the only known picture of her to have surfaced so far.)

Book preview

Chapter 1

After Kitten and I left Leeds we drifted around the watering holes of Europe for two or three years, until the summer of 1900. We went from Baden-Baden on the edge of the Black Forest to Karlsbad in Bohemia to Deauville in Normandy, practically within sight of the English coast. It was a world that has now vanished beyond recall; the only passport we ever needed was a simple gold coin.

We each practised our own profession, I as a card player, she as a very, and I do mean very, high-class courtesan – the only kind that was tolerated in those august establishments. She could receive as much as a hundred pounds a night from a single lover. I will not say she charged that much, because the last thing a courtesan of that class would ever talk about in those days was money. She left it entirely to the taste and discretion of her lover (whom she chose very carefully, of course); however, it would have been an unwise lover who gave her less than she thought was her due! [The reader should multiply all the currency values in this book by fifty to get approximate equivalents for the 1990s – FR].

Naturally, at those rates, she did not receive a lover every single day; in fact, she rarely pleasured more than three or four gentlemen in a week. But even so, after three years, she was wealthy enough to retire and live off her income for the rest of her life. By then, though, it was far too late. She was addicted to her profession – or, rather, to the glamour that surrounded it. She enjoyed the old four-legged frolic ... working the hairy oracle ... feeding her dumb glutton ... taking the starch out of a fellow ... giving softest for hardest ... and all those other facetious felicities whereby we disguise the greatest felicity men and women can know together; she enjoyed even more the showers of gold that made her pleasure respectable. But most of all she enjoyed the glittering occasions – the costume balls, the perfumed air, the powdered flunkeys, the sybaritic banquets (at which she would merely nibble at half a dozen superb dishes), the fine wines (which she would sip and leave), the gifts of jewelry and costly furs, the marbled bedrooms, the silken sheets ...

In short, she adored being pampered – and what woman doesn’t! I can remember several occasions when I entered our bedroom and found her sitting naked before her looking glass, gazing alternately into it and at a little hand-mirror held between her parted thighs; and then she would look up at me in wonder, saying, "How can that squashy little hole down there and these few pounds of flesh be worth so much! It isn’t possible! It’s just a dream, isn’t it, Smiler? I’m going to wake up and find myself back home – in trouble once again for nodding off during the sermon! And then she’d burst into laughter – that infections tinkling laugh of hers – and add, Just think what I’ll be able to tell them, though!"

It was a marvellous life for both of us. Despite the high style in which we chose to live (well, had to live, really, or we’d have been thrown out of the spas), I made enough money to keep both of us, without touching a penny of hers. A professional card-player can make money in two ways – by cheating or by mathematics. Fools cheat and end up full of bullet holes or knife wounds – and that’s if they’re lucky. Wise men learn the odds on every possible hand – and the quite different odds of making up a good hand from one full of rubbish; they remember the cards that are shown or gone; they cultivate an eye for cheats and a sixth sense for the ways in which amateurs bluff; they carry a pistol; they bribe whomsoever must be bribed in order to armour their backs ... and simple human folly takes care of the rest.

I enjoyed the spas of Europe particularly. Aristocrats are as ineffectual at cheating as they are at most other things in life and, when caught, they will pay almost anything not to be exposed. As I say, I did very well during those few years!

Nonetheless, I began to see what Kitten meant when she gave up the life of a high-class fille de joie at the most luxurious house of pleasure in Paris, and exchanged it for the less certain life of the freelance courtesan. At the Maison ffrench she had virtually been guaranteed four lovers a day and an income of well over two thousand pounds a year. And in those days the maisons de luxe of Europe operated a carrousel of their best girls, so that in the ten years up to her twenty-eighth birthday, she could have worked in all the capitals and large cities of Europe and retired with a nest-egg of around thirty thousand pounds. Conservatively invested, the income would have enabled her to live in a six-servant house in a fashionable part of London without ever opening her legs for money again – not bad for a girl whose father had thrown her out, penniless and friendless, at the age of sixteen!

But Kitten had turned her back on those prospects precisely because it was all too cut-and-dried. Ten years of rising late, of making her body clean and sweet and ready for service, of going down into the salon, of smiling and subtly parading her charms, of waiting for a gentleman to murmur, Mam’selle?, of taking him upstairs and coaxing him to try one of the spécialités de la maison, of taking off her clothes in a room where she had disrobed a thousand times before, of spreading her legs and writhing and gasping with a pleasure she had counterfeited ten thousand times before, and then going down into the salon again, and smiling and subtly parading her charms, and waiting for yet another gentleman to murmur, "Mam’selle?" ... she simply could not face it at eighteen years of age – when twenty-eight seems to border on senility.

And I, as I say, began to feel the same about trotting around the same endless circuit – Bad Homburg, Aix-les-Bains, Bad Ischl, Bad Ragaz, Meran-Merano, Lake Balaton, Marienbad – fleecing aristocratic fools who differed one from another in nothing but name, staying at the grandest hôtels, eating the most sybaritic meals ... it became more tedious than I could bear.

But what d’you want to do instead? Kitten asked.

I drew a deep breath and asked her if she really wanted to know. She said she wouldn’t have asked the question otherwise. So I told her: I want to go round the world. I’m told it’s full of pretty girls with yellow skins and bronze skins and brown and ebony and tan and russet and milky pale ... My ambition is really very simple: I want to screw every one of them who’ll let me in.

Pros?

Pro? Amateuse? As I say – whoever will let me in.

How wonderful, Smiler! she said flatly. Well, I hope you’ll be very happy.

Won’t you come with me?

"And do what? Are you going to screw them à trois each time?"

No, but you said yourself before we left Leeds – you wanted to see the world – and you have the profession that will let you do it.

And so I shall, she said. But now I intend to do it in style. I shall retire at thirty and see the world in luxury. However – don’t let me stop you from enjoying yourself. You go ahead and scout the way for me. I’ll see you in ten years!

And so I left her – it was at the Eugénie Spa in France, I remember – rather a tearful farewell, but we were both stubborn people.

Halfway across the Atlantic I began missing her so much that I wrote to say I had modified my plans. I would travel for roughly half the year and spend the other half on the European spa circuit with her. And that is more or less the life I led until the Great War put an end to the old way of life for ever.

So in this volume of my memoirs I shall ignore my numerous – but repetitive – amorous adventures in the great spas of Europe and concentrate on my erotic encounters in the wide-open spaces and among the wide-open girls of America.

* * *

Those adventures began in 1900, less than one day out of Liverpool on my very first voyage. Belle, the girl in question, was neither yellow- nor ebon-skinned but a deep-golden mixture of both, having a Chinese mother and a Negro father. They must have been handsome in their own right, too, for she was without doubt one of the most breathtakingly beautiful and seductive young ladies I ever met. Yet it was not my eyes that first drew me to her so much as my nose.

Let me explain. When a man’s stiff ferret plunges in and out of a girl’s juicy cunny hole it exposes thirty square inches or more of hot, reeking skin to the atmosphere. Soon it fills the room with the heady aroma of lust, a compound of passion-wet vagina and excited spermspouter. Enter any brothel in the world, from Iceland to New Zealand, and it’s the first thing that hits you – the delightful perfume of debauchery – and with it you may also sense the subtler bouquet of the tens of thousands of male ejaculations that have gone before you. And that was the very fragrance which assailed me within hours of boarding the Odysseus, pride of the Opal Line.

I was travelling first class for I hoped to pluck a few unearned guineas from the idle young men who were then beginning to cross the Atlantic in some numbers. It was the first evening on board and we were steaming down the Irish Sea, making for Queenstown, near Cork, our final landfall before the crossing. I was taking a stroll or two round the promenade deck, working up an appetite for dinner, when that unmistakable fragrance thrilled my nostrils. I stared about me in rising bewilderment for there was no obvious source of the aroma. At last I stared over the rail and saw an open porthole just three feet below the deck on which I stood. A moment later I heard a man cry out in the throes of his passion, which was soon joined by a silvery feminine laugh.

A deckhand passed me at that moment, went a few paces beyond, turned, looked all about, and then joined me, a salacious grin splitting his features. Interested, Guv? he asked, pointing laconically at the deck between us. Want to get down there?

Yes, I replied. "Believe me – if that’s what I think it is – once I’m there I’ll know how to get up!"

He laughed. You ask the first-class purser for the key to the fog-locker. But there is another way. He walked off, jerking his head for me to follow him. He led me to a door labelled Emergency Helm. Inside was a massive winch and a hatch in the floor. He lifted the cover easily enough and pointed to a steel ladder leading to the deck below. I can’t stop no longer, Guv, he said. "But you’ll find her down there – a corking little beauty, name of Belle. Have a word with her maid and she’ll, er, fit you in somehow!"

If my geography was right, I realized, the room at the foot of the ladder must be next door to the room from which the perfume and laughter had come. I put my ear to the bulkhead and heard at once the unmistakable sounds of a fornicating couple going at it hammer and tongs. Belle clearly wasted no time between customers.

I peeped out and, finding the passage empty, strolled up it in search of the maid. She was in the room beyond Belle’s, with the door wide open – a fat, jolly matron addicted to marshmallows and penny dreadfuls. She began shaking her head before she spoke. Sorry, honey, tomorrow night at eight is the first I can fit you in.

I whistled and pulled a glum face.

"Usually I got two gals working the Odysseus, but one of ’em took sick in Liverpool and poor Belle’s working solo this voyage. She’s doing four an hour, twelve hours a day and I cain’t ask her to go harder nor that."

I had suddenly lost my appetite to be granted the favour of a fifteen-minute ride the following evening and become one of the three hundred and fifty customers she’d be pleasuring over the next seven days. I’ll let you know, I said when she held her pen poised above that first empty line in her appointments register.

She grinned. Whether you does or whether you doesn’t, honey, it’s still gonna be filled.

That’s what I was afraid of, I said to myself as I made my way back to the promenade deck.

And, if the deckhand had not spoken of Belle as being so pretty, I might very well have forgotten the whole incident. But his words came back to me as I rose from the card table at two that night – with my fare already recouped in my winnings. Feeling in need of some fresh Atlantic air, I took a stroll around the deck. When I reached the spot above Belle’s cabin I took a good sniff, but the perfume was gone. I glanced over the side and saw her porthole was darkened. Asleep, I guessed.

I tried to imagine what it must be like for a girl to turn over and compose herself to sleep in the bed where, during the previous twelve hours, not counting mealtimes, something over four dozen men had screwed the tail off her – and try not to think of the morrow, when it would all happen again. It would be around twenty thousand pokes each day – actual thrusts of hard gristle up into that soft yielding canal in her belly. But it was far beyond my comprehension – and, I think, that of any man.

At the very stern of the ship I paused in wonder at the massive power of the propellers, which churned up a mighty wake of phosphorescent water; it is only by studying minutely the eddies, and the eddies within eddies, and the further eddies within them – and then by reminding myself that such hithering and thithering will go on, day and night, for the next seven days – that I can hope to grasp the vastness and grandeur of the ocean.

While thus engaged I became aware of an occasional glow beneath my feet, and sparks, and a fleeting sensation of mistiness ... Someone down there was smoking. A whiff of Turkish tobacco confirmed it. I craned my neck, for the stern sloped inward beneath me and was just able to make out the smoker in the light of a single, rather dim electric bulb. I guessed at once that it was Belle, enjoying a quiet gasper at the end of her working day.

I was seized by an impulse to join her. I don’t know why. I had no desire to add my four hundred thrusts to the twenty thousand-odd her poor abused vagina had already suffered that day; all I had in mind was a friendly chat and a small cheroot. I remembered the way the deckhand had shown me and, finding the coast clear, arrived at the lower deck in half a jiffy. Rather than go directly outside, however, I crossed the rope store and had a quick look out through the porthole.

It was a quick look that turned into rather a long gaze, for she had meanwhile thrown away her cigarette and slipped her dressing-gown or kimono off her shoulder – leaving herself naked to the waist. She was still leaning against the rail, facing toward the ocean, so all I could see was her back, but from the movements of her arms it was pretty obvious that she was caressing her own bubbies.

Belle’s back, let me say, was a finer erotic feast for sore eyes than a fully frontal view of ninety-nine out of a hundred other women, so it was some time before I realized I’d be able to see more of what was going on if I returned to my former position on the deck above.

By the time I arrived, however, it (whatever it was) was over and done with; I saw her button up her gown and return to her cabin. But the split-second view I gained of her glorious bubbies was enough to bring me back to that same vantage the following night at the same hour – that is, two in the morning. And what I saw was both moving and sad.

First she enjoyed a cigarette, lingering over each puff. She did not inhale but she let each mouthful slowly out through her nostrils, enjoying every bit of the flavour and bouquet. Then she slipped her gown down to her waist and caressed her bubbies for about ten minutes, raking her nails over her nipples, pinching them gently, furling them over until they were swollen and gleaming. Then she would slip her right hand down into her fork and (though I could not see it, of course) diddle herself gently and sweetly to a modest sort of orgasm.

I remember my Uncle Tommy (who is, in fact, only a couple of years older than me) telling me that he had taken one girl’s virginity on the very night her father had died. The girl herself insisted on it, he said by way of self-defence; it was her only way of coping with all that sorrow and tension. I could not help remembering that tale as I watched young Belle’s lonely drama – which I did for the next five nights.

On the final night, realizing I had nothing to lose, I went down to her deck while she was still enjoying her cigarette. Then, while she wriggled out of her gown I slipped across to her, silent as a panther. Don’t turn round, I said as I slipped my hands gently round those glorious bubbies. Allow me.

Much to my surprise she obeyed. Later she confessed to me that her immediate thought was that I had a weapon of some kind, so she froze with fear. The moment I began to caress her bubbies, though, she didn’t care whether I had an entire regiment of artillery at my command. She just closed her eyes and let it happen.

I was careful to do exactly what I had observed her doing over the past several days. I was greatly surprised at the size of her clitoris, however, which, in its excited state, was as large as a baby boy’s pizzle. I toyed with it very gently until she thrust it urgently against the fleshy part of my tormenting finger, at which I made it flutter like a hummingbird and brimmed her over into the finest orgasm of the week – probably the only true one, too, though she had by then spread her thighs for more than three hundred and thirty men! Then she turned round and clung to me as if ashamed to show me her face, and wept freely – while I petted her back and told her everything was all right.

At length she calmed down and offered me a cigarette. I told her my name and said I was going to spend some time in New York before moving on I knew not where – and that I’d like to see her when she wasn’t working. She was not in the least bit curious as to how I came to be there and knew precisely what to do; I think she lived in a world where the oddest experiences just fell out of the sky.

She made no promises but when I disembarked the following day – about £200 richer than when I had embarked – she was waiting on the quayside, smiling and exchanging greetings with just about every other passenger who passed down the gangway. When Belle smiled, hearts stopped and the earth dithered on its course; she really was a most astoundingly beautiful girl. The moment I drew level with her she took my arm and led me off toward customs, saying there would be a room for me in the lodging house where she usually stayed, down in the Bowery area. A wave of masculine jealousy swept us off the quayside.

We took a cab. On the way I asked to stop off at a bank and lodge my winnings, which, at the rate of seven dollars to the pound came to some $1,400 [multiply dollar prices by twelve to get rough modern equivalents – FR]; I deliberately let her see them – so that I could observe whether it made any difference in her attitude to me. I was happy to see it did not, though a partial explanation came a moment later when she paid in her own earnings for the crossing, which came to more than $2,000. No wonder her interest had been mild, her gaze somewhat superior!

I asked if she crossed the Atlantic often. She told me it was seven days on, seven days off. The seven-day crossing, she added with a grin, was perfectly suited to a girl’s natural calendar.

Her lodging house proved neat, clean, and unpretentious – a pleasantly anonymous sort of place. My room was next to hers and had, I noticed, a connecting door. I thought I was home and dry. I hastily unpacked my few belongings and then knocked gently at her door. She was already in her kimono when she opened it to me and her curtains were drawn. She gave me the most devastating smile and said, I shall now sleep for forty-eight hours, Smiler, dear. Call again at this hour in two days’ time and then we’ll go out and paint the town red.

But what am I to do meanwhile? I objected.

She pushed my nose gently, as if it were a starting button, and said, You’re a big boy now. I’m sure you’ll find something!

As I turned disconsolately away she added, with a hint of mischief in her voice, The young lady in the room opposite yours – Miss Carron – she will prove of especial interest, I’m sure.

Curiously enough, as it turned out, I should have discovered Miss Carron entirely unaided.

* * *

I spent the rest of the day doing the usual things any tourist does in New York. There were only one or two skyscrapers then, and by modern standards they hardly scraped the treetops, but they were modern wonders of the world to our unjaded eyes. It was after supper that evening and I was thinking of going out to a burlesque house where, someone on the ship had told me, there was a good selection of very pretty girls. It was now more than a week since Iron Jack had gone nosing up inside a bit of girlish snug and I was beginning to feel faint with the strength of my lust. I was just going down the stairs when I heard the unmistakable sound of a girl sobbing.

With each downward step it grew louder. When I gained the lower landing I realized it was coming from somewhere up the passage, from the room immediately beneath Miss Carron’s, a young lady I still had not met. I arrived outside the door to the room just as it was flung open by a petite and pretty young woman with flaxen hair and icy blue eyes. During the second or so that it took to open and close that door I had a view of one of the maids of the boarding house, a strapping, buxom German girl called Heidi who had waited on us at dinner. She was lying face-down across the bed, with her feet on the floor, sobbing her heart out. Her skirts were thrown up over her torso and her generous derrière was red and bleeding.

Were you trying to spy through the keyhole, sir? the flaxen-haired goddess demanded sharply. She was out of breath and flushed with excitement.

I think that Iron Jack must contain some special antenna concealed inside him, an antenna that is perfectly tuned to whatever waves of lust female flesh emits in a state of sexual excitement. Of course he can hoist himself from flaccid slumber at the sight of any good-looking female; but when he senses she’s lusting for a good stretch and a hot filling, he sings out ding-dong like the clapper of Big Ben and wages a worsted war with the tailor who made my trousers and imagined he picked a good, strong cloth. And Iron Jack went ding-dong-wow! the moment I set eyes on the panting female who emerged from that room of punishment.

Eh? I gasped as I straddled to rearrange my tailoring without making it too obvious to her.

You were! she said even more sharply, raising her hand to strike me. Only then did I notice she was brandishing a birch.

I raised my arm and said, No ... please!

For some reason she smiled broadly and said, Oh well, you can always get more, you know. All it needs is money. And she patted me on the chest