The Apprentice

by Carrie Williams

  Suddenly he freezes, and I know he’s trying not to come again, so that I may have my moment. I want to carry on too, but I know I’m not far away, that I can’t hold off much longer. Feeling him halt, Celine too pauses, but a minute later they both start up again, and this time it’s like a great wave rolling in, crashing over me before I’ve had chance to get away. As I come, they both carry on thrusting, and then it’s like a rip-tide effect – just as I feel I’m reaching the crest of my orgasm, I’m dragged back again, and again, pulled under by the waves, until I’m breathless, afraid I won’t make it out again.

  At last, when I feel I’m failing, one last wave rolls in and bowls me down. I lie panting on top of James, Celine in turn on top of me, and we are all still.

  The room is dark when I awake. I’m alone, or at least for a moment I think I’m alone. Then I see that, although James and Celine are no longer in the room, there is a figure on the other side of the bed, and that figure is Anne. She’s not sleeping, but her eyes are unblinking. She’s staring out of the window, into the amber glow cast by the street lights, and she looks old, and tired, and lonely. She’s not thinking about me, that’s clear. I might as well not be here.

  I feel a stab of guilt. Perhaps seeing us all enjoying ourselves so much made her feel worse, rather than better? But then, why would she put herself through it, if that were the case? Not for the first time, a twinge goes through me, the instinct to hug her, to hold her, but in a daughterly rather than a sexual way. She looks like someone in need of comfort.

  It’s like she’s read my thoughts, for she turns to me now, says, ‘It’s not how you think.’

  ‘Then what?’

  But she shakes her head, pushes herself up and reaches for her box, grabbing the items that have been used tonight, where they are strewn across the bed, and throwing them inside, any old how. She’s impatient to be away.

  ‘You may stay,’ she says. ‘It’s all been paid for. Enjoy it.’

  ‘Are you s–’

  ‘Of course.’ She eyes me dispassionately. ‘And if you need anything, call room service. I trust you not to take advantage.’

  With that, she’s away, her box swinging at her side. Away into the London night, in the back of a speeding cab, with all those things that she’s seen going round in her head. And to what purpose, to what end? To fuel her own private fantasies, which she will enact, alone, in her room until dawn bleaches the sky outside her window?

  I lie there, unable to sleep, running it all through my mind, until finally, realising I am unable to beat the insomnia, I get up, order myself a lavish hot chocolate from room service, and get my notebook out of my bag. Belly down on the bed, I write up the evening’s adventures in explicit detail. Doing so excites me but also makes me feel as if I own them in some way. Otherwise, these experiences risk being Anne’s alone. By writing them down from my point of view, I am not merely an actor, I’m a collaborator, a co-author.

  The room-service waiter rings the bell and I call for him to come in. I don’t even bother getting up off the bed. I hear him in the living room, clearing the coffee table to make space for the tray, and it turns me on to lie here stark naked while he waits on me. I’m tempted to call him to the door of my bedroom and, if he’s fit, to lure him in and fuck him senseless. But I won’t. I’m too tired, even if I’m wired and sleepless. I’ve had well in excess of my quota tonight and more would be greedy. So I titillate myself with the thought, for a moment, and then I let it go and carry on writing. Who knows, maybe the fantasy, the germ of an idea, will provide a subject for one of my little vignettes or for a short story?

  Check out isn’t until noon, so I luxuriate in a deep bath while waiting for my Continental breakfast to arrive. I write a bit more in my diary, and then I go down and hand my room-swipe in at reception, smug in the knowledge that I don’t have to pay a penny. When I’ve done that, I stroll across Mayfair and across Hyde Park back to Bayswater. The breeze takes the edge off the heat, and it’s a perfect day for a walk in the park.

  I slow down by the Italianate fountains near Lancaster Gate, take the fork that leads to the Round Pond instead of the more direct one alongside the Bayswater Road, which would take me home. I realise then that I’m tarrying, reluctant to return to Anne’s. Last night feels like the culmination of everything, as I had thought it would. So what awaits me there? Will I be expected to pack my bags and leave? If not, do I even want to stay? The money is good, the workload minimal. But suddenly it doesn’t feel right any more. I won’t take money for nothing.

  I force myself in the direction of St Petersburgh Place. If there’s one thing I’ve learnt above anything else in the last week or so, it’s that we must face up to our fears, otherwise they become bigger, unmanageable – obstacles to our happiness and development. I was afraid of my appetites, but now I know that I was incomplete when I didn’t act on them, when I shut them away so firmly that I barely even knew they were there. They have led me to some dark places, but those dark places were inside myself, and I needed to explore them if I was to find out who I really am.

  Of course, I’ll change some more, plenty. I’ve not discovered a static ‘me’ who will last all my life. But I’ve opened the door to a more honest Genevieve, one who accepts herself in all her contradictions, in all her unruliness, with her strengths and her weaknesses. People pay a fortune in therapy, spend years talking to shrinks, without getting an iota of the self-knowledge I have.

  I feel grateful to Anne as I insert the key in the lock and let myself into her hallway, and I feel sorry for her too. All this growth in me has been, in some respects, at her expense, and not only financial – she is still the sad, lonely fantasist she was at the start. But then that’s her choice. She’s a grown-up and if she can’t see her voyeuristic addiction as the dead-end that it is, that’s her problem. I can’t help her there.

  I head upstairs. I’ll pack my bag, and then I’ll go downstairs and ask Anne if she wants to share a farewell drink with me. I don’t want this to end in acrimony, and there’s no reason why it should. I’m sure Anne meant last night to be the end too. There was such a sense of finality to it. And the fact that it happened outside of her house was surely symbolic. But I want to make sure, so I’ll suggest a drink and we’ll have a little chat and then I’ll go calmly, without a drama. Where I’ll go I don’t know, but I’ll deal with that when I come to it. Something will turn up.

  It doesn’t take me long to pack, with the few possessions I have. Setting my bags on the bed to collect later, I walk down the stairs towards Anne’s room. The door is ajar, which is unusual. I rap gently and when no answer comes I poke my head around the door. The room is empty, but I can see that there’s a document open on the screen. When I step forwards and look closer, I see that, wherever Anne has gone, she left mid-sentence. That seems to me an unusual thing to do. I doubt she’s just popped to the loo or to make a coffee – surely she’d finish her sentence if she was doing that? Then I hear voices from the back garden, and I twitch back the curtain and see her talking to the window-cleaner. She’s gesturing up at another first-floor window, and I guess she’s berating him for not doing his job properly.

  I turn back to the screen. Anne is intensely secretive about her work, always locking her study door. I know because I’ve tried it a couple of times, when I’ve known she’s not there. I’ve also – I might as well admit to it now – searched the laptop for anything of interest, looking at ‘Recent Items’, inside files within files, and even in the ‘Trash’ folder. I suppose that makes me a bit of an arsehole, but it was only really out of interest. Anne has been such a heroine to me for such a long time, I just wanted to find out more about her and her work. I wasn’t planning to use it against her.

  It’s the same impulse that takes me back to her screen now. She’s fed me only titbits about her new book, her work in progress, and suddenly I have the opportunity to find out more. I lean forwards, scan the lines with my eyes, all the while listening for the voice
s outside, ready to bolt when I can no longer hear them.

  As I begin to read, I start, and then a chill runs through me. It’s last night, what’s written there – everything that happened to me, and James, and Celine. All the permutations of our play, our lovemaking. The characters have different names, but they look like us, and talk like us, and fuck like us. Exactly like us.

  I read the paragraphs that are visible on the page on the screen, and then I scroll back and forth, to the preceding page and then the following page. There’s no doubting it. Glancing over my shoulder, reassuring myself Anne is still out there, I go to the start of the document and read the title: The Apprentice – An Erotic Memoir, by Anne Tournier. Then I look at the first few lines. A girl, my age, arrives at a novelist’s house for a job interview. I sit down, feeling faint. It’s true what they say in the reviews: Anne’s inspiration has dried up. She’s used me, taken me as the subject of her new novel. Her novel on how people can be changed, bent to others’ wills. I’ve been more than a puppet – I’ve been a guinea pig, a lab rat. And so have James and Celine, or were they in on it all along?

  Anger surges through my veins like pure alcohol. I stand up, fizzing, exploding, with a ringing in my ears. I want to kill Anne. How dare she do this? Thinking back to the interview and her bizarre line of questioning, I realise now that it was all planned in advance, a set-up. She can’t even claim that it just happened – that she started writing up events once they’d been set in train. No, it was all calculated, coldly and robotically. She wanted a subject and she went out and found herself one. What a fucking fool I’ve been.

  I want to run down the stairs and into the garden and slap her thin, harsh, passionless face, tell her how disgusted I am. I thought she was a voyeur, essentially harmless, engineering things but playing no part. Whereas there she was, running to her desk, typing it all up, her work of so-called fiction. At what point was she going to mention it to me? When it was on the bookshelves, reviewed in the Sundays? Or was she counting on me being too humiliated to make a fuss about it?

  Fists clenched, I stand seething, making a huge effort not to run down to the garden and scream at her. But then, suddenly, something cold comes down over me, like a refreshing blast of icy air. My blood stops fizzing, the clamour in my head ceases. My revenge has spelt itself out to me, and it tastes so sweet, so fucking sweet.

  I walk upstairs, calm now, chuckling nastily to myself. Taking my bags, I go back down, shooting a glance into Anne’s room. I was careful to leave the document open where I had found it: she won’t know I’ve seen it.

  Then I head down and into the living room. Through the French window I can see that Anne is still outside, arguing with the window-cleaner, gesturing impatiently. She’s so controlling in everything she does. No wonder she doesn’t have a lover: no one would put up with her for a month. There’s no warmth to her. It’s all cerebral. Everything goes on in her head. I pity her. But still I want revenge.

  I leave her a note, something low key, bearing no trace of my real feelings:

  Anne – thanks for everything. It’s been fun. But it’s time to move on. I think you realise that too. Fond wishes, Gen.

  Outside on the doorstep, I stand for a moment, my bags at my feet, and take in the soft summer breeze, like a heady blast of freedom. Seeing a black cab drop someone off further down the road, I turn and post my keys through the door. I walk down the steps, stride across the pavement and hold up one hand. The cab pulls into the kerb. I step up to the window. I still don’t know where I’m going.

  12: Aftermath

  I END UP, weirdly enough, at Nate’s in Brighton, sleeping on the sofabed in the living room of the shared house where we once lived together, trying not to listen to him and his Danish bird humping in the bedroom next door. Not that there’s anything between us any more, but it doesn’t seem quite right hearing him yelling out for another woman in the way that he once did for me. He comes the same, it seems, for her as he did for me. It makes me feel interchangeable. Which I am, I suppose, in a way. But one doesn’t need to be reminded of the fact.

  Anyway, I mustn’t complain. It’s so kind of him to have offered, after I rang him in tears. Vron – surprise, surprise – wouldn’t have me. In fact, she was so adamant I couldn’t go back to her that I started thinking about the gorgeous Somali guy and of how she had seemed triumphant when I hadn’t scored with him, and I began to wonder if she wasn’t jealous of me, her baby sis. But that’s all by the by. Nate offered me a place to kip while I sorted myself out, and I gratefully accepted. It even turned out that I get on well with Anne-Mette. We have stuff in common, after all.

  I even find myself, one drunken night over a bottle or three of cheap wine and one of Nate’s spaghetti bologneses, telling them all about what happened with Anne and co. Not in lurid detail, but the bare bones of it – how it started and how it evolved, with me performing ever more outlandish, uncharacteristic acts while Anne looked on, always so impassive, until I realised why: that she was observing me as one does a specimen in a jar, ready to use me as the subject of her new novel.

  Nate, throughout the conversation, looks stunned. He can’t believe this is the staid girl he went out with, and I feel almost guilty, as if I have betrayed him. I find myself addressing Anne-Mette more than him, and avoiding his eyes, not wanting to see hurt there, or judgement, or a mixture of the two.

  She is riveted, I can tell – curious and excited too. Afterwards, alone on the sofabed, I stop feeling guilty when I hear Anne-Mette squealing next door. I’ve turned them on with my talk, and they’re in for a fun night. Just as long as they don’t ask me to join in – that would just be too weird.

  I put my plan into action right away. Felicitously, one of Nate’s friends, Pete, went into web design after uni, and I get him to design my own basic website. While he’s doing that, I type up the diary entries I kept while I was at Anne’s, editing them as I go along, tightening up the writing, adding a few details. Within a week, we’ve got something up – my own blog, relating the whole saga from my own point of view. I’ve trumped Anne, got there before her. It’s up on the internet, dated, for all the world to see – she can’t publish her book, in the form that I’ve seen it, without being found guilty of plagiarism.

  Of course, I keep it anonymous. I’ve got my future to think of, after all. My future as a writer, but also as a girlfriend, a wife, a mother. This is not necessarily something I want everybody to know about. On the other hand, I’m proud of my writing, of my insights, of the whole project. Proud of the fact that I don’t overdramatise things, sensationalise or cheapen my experience, but represent things in their true light. And that includes not portraying myself as some kind of victim. Sure, I was tricked into it, lured into Anne’s web under false pretences. But I came out of it all with so much. And I was no saint. I took her money and hospitality in exchange for very little work. I spied on her, or tried to. I tried to go behind her back. I admit, publicly, to all those things, as well as to my other shortfallings and to how naive I was before I got involved with her.

  I enjoy writing it, but when it’s done it’s done, and I don’t think about it too much, nor do I expect anything to come of it. It’s out there, that’s the important thing. People can read it or not read it – I’m not forcing anything upon them. But I feel that my experience might be of interest to certain people, and that writing about it has helped me to make sense of it. It’s not all about getting in there before Anne.

  But what I don’t expect is for the blog to take on a life of its own. I don’t even understand how it happened – I guess it must have been one of those word-of-mouth phenomena. All I know is that just three weeks after putting it up, I hear from Anne-Mette, who’s heard it from a friend of hers, that it’s the talk of London. But that’s just the start of it: a week later my blog is mentioned in the Guardian books page – it seems that literary London is going crazy trying to guess the identity of my voyeuristic literary mentor.

  Of cours
e, I covered my tracks. Anne became ‘Charlotte’, Bayswater became Notting Hill. James became a jazz critic and not an art historian, while Celine – well, I never even knew who Celine was anyway, how Anne knew her or why she was prepared to do the things she did. But she became Lauren, for what it’s worth. And I became Olivia, which is my middle name. A little bit risky, but it added a frisson of excitement.

  I was very careful not to give anything away, despite the fact that nothing was slanderous. But I respect these people and their right to privacy, even Anne, even after what she did. I’m overjoyed and flattered that so many people are reading me, but I’m apprehensive too. What if someone does work it out, if it’s not watertight? I have a few sleepless nights worrying about the repercussions, which culminate in my deciding to take the blog down and forget about the whole thing altogether.

  I’m just about to walk to Pete’s house to tell him this, since he only lives a few streets away, when my mobile goes and it’s a woman called Janine Longfellow of R&K Literary Associates in London, asking for Olivia. My heart races. I wonder how she’s traced me. Taken unawares, I’m unable to concoct a cover-up, and I say, when she asks, that yes, I’m the author of www.apprenticeblog.com.

  ‘Great,’ she purrs. ‘Listen, I’d love to take you out for lunch sometime. You’re not free today, are you?’

  I tell her I’m not in London but in Brighton, and she replies, ‘Not a problem. If you’re free, I can be there for lunchtime. Do you know the Sevendials?’

  I do know the Sevendials, but only from hearsay, not from experience. I could never afford to go anywhere like that. Suddenly Janine Longfellow is looking like she’s got a serious proposition to make. When I’ve put the phone down, the first thing I do is call Anne-Mette, who’s already left for work, and ask if I can have a ferret through her wardrobe to find out if she’s got anything halfway decent I can borrow.