The Apprentice

by Carrie Williams

  I can’t look him in the eye, I’m so excited to be near him again. I step forwards, legs like slush despite the taut binding of the stockings. A wet patch is blooming in my saucy little knickers.

  ‘Sir?’ I say, chin down, still not meeting his gaze.

  ‘Why so slow?’ he repeats, and I shake my head.

  ‘I’m sorry, sir.’

  ‘Sorry is not good enough.’

  ‘Sorry,’ I say again, unable to stop myself.

  ‘Stop saying sorry,’ he shouts but, when I look up, I can tell he’s finding it hard not to laugh. The corners of his lovely mouth are twitching, and around his eyes his skin is crinkling. I cast my eyes back down, aware that if one of us succumbs to laughter then the other will too, and that will be it.

  ‘What was it sir wanted of me?’ I manage.

  ‘I want you to polish my shoes,’ he says, and I suppress another urge to laugh as he feels in his jacket pocket and pulls out a handkerchief, which he tends to me. ‘Here,’ he goes on. ‘Make them shine.’

  I kneel at his feet. His shoes are, as you’d expect of a man of his standing, very fine – of chocolate-brown leather, they look handmade. The handkerchief, too, is of the finest linen and smells faintly of lavender and something spicier, more exotic. It’s crisp and neatly folded, perhaps even ironed, although my mind falters at the thought of James doing any ironing at all. Does he have a maid at home? I wonder. In my mind’s eye I see a gorgeous brunette, dressed as I am now, standing before him, a teetering pile of freshly pressed shirts in her hand, a come-hither look in her eyes.

  Not daring to raise my eyes, I bend forwards, rump in the air, and begin to rub at the supple leather with one hand, watching as its dullness slowly gives way to shine. I polish and polish, my own reflection becoming clearer, and then I switch to the second foot and repeat the process.

  ‘How is that for sir?’ I say at last.

  He leans forwards as if to inspect them, but his eyes, I see, are fast on the cheeks of my arse, which is high up where I’m bent over his feet.

  ‘Very nice indeed,’ he says.

  ‘Is there anything else I could do for sir?’ I realise that the stress is dissipating and that I’m really rather beginning to enjoy this. I don’t look at Anne, however, worried that doing so might break the spell, make me start feeling self-conscious again. Novice though I am, I’m already beginning to understand that I have to fully enter into the role if this is to work, shuck off my real self for a time, as much as I can.

  ‘There certainly is,’ says James, and my heart leaps as I hear the unzipping of his fly.

  ‘More polishing?’ I say, biting the inside of my cheek.

  James groans.

  I stand up, bend forwards over him, so that my hair trails down over him and my cleavage is on full display.

  ‘If sir will allow me …’ I rest one hand on his shoulder. With the other I reach inside his open fly and delve around. His cock springs into my hand and he lets out another moan.

  ‘Jesus,’ he emits.

  Lifting one leg and then the other, I climb astride him, holding his prick in my fist through the opening of his trousers. Tugging gently but then ever more insistently, I look into his eyes.

  ‘Is that all right for sir?’ I ask. But the mischief in his eyes, the laughter he’s been struggling to sublimate, has ebbed away, replaced by a seriousness. He’s frowning, jaw set. He doesn’t want to come yet; he knows he has to fight it but doesn’t know how.

  I cease my wanking motions, tuck him back in, tenderly.

  ‘If sir doesn’t mind me saying,’ I tell him, ‘this room needs a good going-over.’ For some reason, my voice has taken on a bit of a Cockney, Eliza Doolittle twang.

  I bend to pick up the handkerchief that I tossed to the floor, flashing him a full-on view of my arse in all its heart-shaped glory. Then I start to prance around, dabbing at the bookshelves and the various work surfaces, half-heartedly, not at all seriously, just enjoying the effect that I must be having on James in this outfit.

  Of course, there are two pairs of eyes on me as I do this, but I can honestly say, as I reflect on this later in my room, that at this moment I’m not thinking of Anne at all, am barely even aware of her presence. Everything is directed towards James, and for a few minutes at least I am able to pretend to myself that this is between him and me, that we are autonomous beings.

  I rise up on tiptoe and contort, reaching high, bending low, ensuring that he gets alluring views of me from all manner of angles. Anne has one of those small ladders that you see in some bookshops, and I step up onto that, reach for the uppermost shelves, swishing the hankie around. Then I climb down, sit on the steps with legs akimbo as I attend to a heavy glass paperweight, rubbing the cloth over it intently.

  After a while I start to get lost in my actions, half-believing in myself, in the scene that I have been creating. But then James coughs lightly, and I look up.

  ‘Good work,’ he says. ‘You’re very thorough.’

  ‘I take pride in my work. I like to give satisfaction. Is there … Is there something else I could be doing for sir?’

  He points down and past me. ‘There are some shelves,’ he says, ‘that I think you’ve missed. I can still see some dust.’

  I pretend to look where he’s pointing. ‘Oh, I’m so sorry about that, sir. I’ll tend to it immediately.’

  ‘If you would.’

  I turn round and, as I do so, I hear him stand up. The floorboards creak as he moves across the room towards me. At the feel of his hands on my bare shoulders, I shiver with desire.

  ‘There, down there,’ he says, starting to ease me down. I sink slowly to my knees beneath the feather weight of his touch. With my hands I grope for the steps, bring myself down to them and drape myself over them. My arse is up in the air again.

  I feel James’s hands rest on my cheeks, enclose them with damp palms. He wants me, I think victoriously.

  With one thumb he reaches in between my cheeks and pulls aside the ribbon of the thong. His thumb pad rests on my sphincter. I push back and spread my legs wider, wanting him inside me.

  ‘I can still see the dust.’ I hear Anne’s voice, and her presence comes rushing back into the room like a storm rolling in across the sea. ‘Come on, girl.’

  I shake out the handkerchief, which has been crumpled in one of my clenched fists, and stretch it towards one of the lower shelves. James is still grasping at my arse cheeks, his hold harder and harder, his thumb taunting my little pink rosebud. As I swoosh the hankie around, I hear Anne rasping orders: ‘Harder, faster. Come on, come on. It’s still not clean. What’s with you today?’

  ‘I’m trying my hardest,’ I hiss, unable to keep the silent deference required of a maid. My act is breaking down, my mask slipping, as my desire for James begins to overwhelm me. I want Anne out of here, I want this costume off. I just want to be with James now, the real, unmediated James. I want to stop pretending and for this to be for real.

  But Anne keeps pushing. ‘The floor,’ she barks. ‘It’s filthy. Polish it.’

  She gets up and stamps across the room. Spit spatters against the floorboards beside my hand. ‘A bit of elbow grease wouldn’t go amiss,’ she says. ‘Come on, girl. Or do I have to do it myself?’

  I scrub furiously at the floor where she spat, watching as the hankie turns brown with the wood stain. My bum is jiggling wildly. I chance a look over my shoulder and see that James has his cock in his hand and is bringing it towards me. My pussy throbs.

  He enters me, but Anne allows me no respite, standing there beside me, chiding me to do it better, more thoroughly, pointing out bits I have missed. All the while that James is fucking me, the satinesque baton of his prick gliding in and out of me, I have to carry on, doing Anne’s bidding, submitting to her ridiculous demands. I’m appalled and yet oddly stirred by the situation, as if it calls to some fundamental duality in me.

  As James’s thrusts become faster, deeper, more intense, I cease the p
lay-acting. I just can’t hold it together, whatever Anne may think of me. Sensing me flag and lose heart, James eases himself out of my pussy, then wraps his arms around me and turns me over. I sit on the top rung of the little ladder and he kneels between my legs. I look at Anne, pleadingly.

  Let me have him, my eyes say to hers. I have no more shame, no more pride. I just want him.

  Her smile is thin, ungenerous, like pale milk, but she nods her assent, as if she knows that I’m on the brink, that I won’t go on with this if my own desires are consistently deferred. And it’s then that I realise that maybe Anne’s not as in control of this as I thought she was. Perhaps, just perhaps, Anne is starting to need me as much as I need her – need her in order to be with James. What lies beneath her need, its underpinnings, are unclear to me, but suddenly I smell fear on her, the fear that I might turn round and throw all of this back in her face. I may be the maid, the acolyte, but sometimes the apparent underdog has more power than he or she realises.

  I think of the film The Servant, with Dirk Bogarde. And then I think of The Maids, a play with which Anne must be familiar, being French. It’s a long time since I’ve read it, but I remember the basic plot: two housemaids, sisters, ritualistically killing their employer while she is out, taking it in turns to play her. Does Anne realise that I felt like killing her just now, when it seemed as if she wasn’t going to let me have my way? I wouldn’t have, of course, but I would have killed this little set-up stone dead, would have walked away this time.

  She stands back, and now she’s only an observer, as James drives himself into me to the hilt. I lean back against the crammed bookshelves, arms spread out on either side of me to steady myself. As he thrusts and thrusts, he pulls down my bra, liberating my breasts, and buries his face in them. I feel the exquisite chafing of his pubic bone against my clit, and I hold the bookcase tighter until my knuckles are bloodless. For a few minutes we continue like this, and then I push James up and off me, assertive now. I force him down onto the top step and impale myself on his prick where it strains up for me, my freed tits in his face. Now he’s resting back against the shelves, his arms similarly outspread. His eyes are closed, as if in prayer or supplication. There’s a sort of beatification on his fine, chiselled features. I want to kiss him, but I daren’t, despite my newly acquired assertiveness. I’m afraid of letting Anne into our intimacy.

  Or am I deluded? Can there be any intimacy in a set-up such as ours? James and I exist only in this strange little universe created by Anne. Outside it he and I, as a couple, don’t exist. What I feel to be intimacy is only a fantasy, a dream of life as it could be. In my real life, I would never have met James, never have spoken to him. Our lives were so far apart, we might as well have lived on different planets. We are thrown together by chance and circumstance, by Anne’s mighty will and the fantasies that fuel it. Without her there’d be none of this.

  James’s hips are bucking beneath me, his rhythm losing itself as he grows close to the edge. I watch his face and, seeing his eyeballs roll beneath his lids, his mouth fall open, I feel so incredibly hot that I know I’ll come soon too. I bring my hand down to my clit, press hard and then start massaging it. Leaning back and away from James, one forearm lassoed around his shoulder and neck for support, I ride him helplessly, sobs issuing forth from my throat as I start to come, my whole body shuddering on top of him. As he comes too, with a roar that frightens me even as it excites me even more, I turn my head – I’m still not sure whether I meant to or if it was a reflex – and open my eyes.

  Anne is watching us – of course she’s watching us. But as I sit up and fall forwards onto James, wrapping both arms around his neck, she’s already turning away, as if something else has caught her attention. For a moment she stands stock-still, as if lost in contemplation, or as if she’s lost the thread of her thoughts, and then she walks over to her desk, takes hold of her mouse and calls her computer screen back to life. She sits down, peering at the screen, then she speaks at last, absently, as if called away to more urgent matters.

  ‘You may dress,’ she says. ‘And then you may leave, quietly.’

  She turns her head towards us then, but her eyes are empty. ‘You are dismissed,’ she says.

  Out on the landing, it takes me a few moments to realise that we are alone, James and I. Of course, Anne could be behind the door, listening, but something tells me that she has, for some reason known only to herself – or perhaps not even to her – loosened her hold. I think she’s still at her desk, gazing at her computer screen, sucked back into the inner world where she goes to make her fiction.

  But I’m taking no chances, and neither is James: we walk down the stairs in silence, jumping at every squeak of the boards, as if we were misbehaved children trying to make a getaway. Only at the very bottom of the stairs, in the ground-floor hallway, does one of us break the silence. To my surprise, it’s me: I’m overflowing with desires and questions and the need to express myself.

  ‘I have to see you,’ I whisper urgently.

  James smiles secretively. ‘You’re seeing me,’ he says, spreading his arms. ‘I’m here, right in front of your very eyes.’

  I step into his arms, bury my head in his shoulder. His linen jacket smells manly but clean. I think I perceive notes of vetiver.

  ‘You know what I mean.’ My voice has a wounded tone to it. Why won’t he take me seriously?

  Above my head I feel his head shake, his chin grazing the top of my head.

  ‘What?’ I step back and look up at him, tears already pricking my eyes. I blink them away. What was it I said about keeping a check on my emotions?

  He shakes his head again. ‘It simply won’t do,’ he says.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Anne …’ He trails off.

  ‘But what can she do? She can’t stop us seeing each other.’

  ‘She could fire you.’

  ‘I don’t care. I would be with you.’

  This third shake of his head is vehement where the others were gentle.

  ‘I’m sorry, Genevieve,’ he says, looking into my eyes kindly. ‘It’s beyond me.’

  He’s making for the door, and my thoughts are racing. What can I do to make him change his mind? Without knowing what all this means to him, how and why he got involved, I can’t appeal to his reason. But I’m mystified as to why he is so resistant to the prospect of us being alone together. Nothing during the encounters we have had has suggested that the primary interest for him is ‘performing’ in front of someone else. No, that’s not how he gets his rocks off. Is it all about subservience then, submitting to Anne’s orders? If so, then it’s not really about me and I should forget about him.

  He opens the door and steps out into the still-bright day. I want to follow him, ask him to walk in the park with me, to talk to me of his dreams and his fears. I want him to tell me how he came to be where he is, alone yet implicated in Anne’s web. Talking might make him realise that this is not the only way, that there is an alternative.

  But before I can formulate the words, he’s pulling the door closed behind him, and I’m left standing in the hallway, suddenly gloomy now the light’s been shut out.

  The house is quiet around me, as if I were the only one here. I make myself a cup of tea in the kitchen, walk slowly upstairs. Passing Anne’s study I hear the clicking of her keyboard. I feel a stab of irritation, and of envy. How dare she manage to switch off from what’s just happened, tune in to her fiction? And why must I remain so enmeshed, so unable to crawl out of the mire?

  Upstairs I stretch out on my bed and relive the whole incident in my mind, from the moment Anne summoned me inside her study to my hearing James’s voice as I stood behind the screen. Then I start to giggle as I remember kneeling forwards, arse in the air, to polish James’s shoes. Giggle to think of the way he shook slightly as he struggled not to laugh. The fun we had, for a while. The absurdity of it all. It seems like something from a raunchy film.

  Then my mind spins
forwards to his parting shot: ‘It’s beyond me.’ Why does Anne have such power over him, and me none? He seems closed to persuasion, and I am hurt by that, after what we’ve been through together. It’s not just sex that we’ve been having after all. It’s an intimate dialogue that takes us somewhere deep, somewhere deeper than I’ve ever been before. I can’t speak for James, but I don’t think it’s all about sex for him either.

  I pick up my notebook. Yesterday I covered several pages with my musings about Anne, James and the boy – about everything, in short, that’s happened to me since I’ve lived here. Then there were the pages of notes inspired by the people I saw passing the window as I sat nursing a latte in the coffee shop. I run my eyes over them and am heartened by what I read. There are some good ideas there, it seems to me. One or two things that even suggest themselves as short stories. I put little asterisks by them. Suddenly I feel better, taken out of myself into a new realm of possibilities, a realm where I have ultimate control. What fun, I think, to be a writer. No wonder Anne is so hooked on control.

  I look back down. I’m thinking of starting a short story. But first I want to empty my head of everything that’s happened today. Call it a kind of cleansing, a spring clean.

  I grip my pen and begin writing.

  9: Girl Alone … ?

  THE NEXT MORNING I wake feeling good, despite James’s refusal to see me outside of the bizarre threesome that exists between him, Anne and me. I wrote in my diary for a good couple of hours yesterday, describing events in as much detail as I could to give some context, then exploring my feelings. I tried to see events from everyone’s perspective, to give myself more distance from them – Anne’s and James’s motives are, of course, obscure to me, but then so are my own sometimes. Yet getting it all out of my system helped enormously, granting me some sort of catharsis.

  Afterwards, the words kept flowing, this time in the form of a little vignette that started to take shape, the beginnings of which might turn out to be a short story – or perhaps even something longer. Certainly, the character intrigues me. She’s a version of myself, of course, but someone more daring than me, someone who knows what she wants and isn’t afraid to go get it. Which gets her into all kinds of hot water. I haven’t gone further than a couple of pages so far, but I’m excited to have started at all. I feel like I’m on the threshold of something big, something that may determine how the rest of my life unfolds. Perhaps, after all, I will be a writer.