by Anna Maxted
She couldn’t help herself, she was sobbing, and she knew her face was ugly, crumpled, red.
The head waiter’s expression was granite. ‘It seems to me, sir,’ he said in a voice of ice, ‘that your companion is extremely upset and needs to be taken care of. Please, madam’ – he turned to her with a gentle understanding that made her want to fall on him and cling – ‘the meal is on the house, and I apologize for any unintentional upset. Please try to enjoy the rest of your evening.’
With a final muted glare at Martin, and a sharp nod, he retreated, and his staff with him.
‘Thank you so much,’ she whispered, and steeled herself to walk steadily out of the room. But once she was out of their sight she fled down the sweeping stone spiral staircase and when she hit the spikily chill air of an English winter, she kept running.
‘Wait, wait!’
She ignored him, until he grabbed her shoulder and forced her to stop. Then she hit him across the face. ‘How dare you! Say sorry, say sorry!’ She knew she sounded like a brat, but she couldn’t help it. But he would say sorry for being so … vulgar, and they’d kiss, and make up, and go home to their separate beds.
It was their normal routine.
‘No,’ he said, in quiet, cold fury. ‘No, Claudia, I won’t say sorry. And don’t slap me again because I will slap you harder. We have been seeing each other for two years, and we have been engaged for a fucking year, and you still won’t let me near you! I am so fucking sick of being made to feel like a dirty old man by you. I’ve got nothing to lose by acting like one. I am so tired of being lied to, of you and your many headaches, migraines, stomach cramps. It’s all shit, Claudia. It is not my style to trick a woman into groping my cock at dinner but I said I’d test you and I did, and you know what, you fucking failed! And I ask myself, why the hell are we engaged to be married because you clearly find me repulsive!’ He turned and walked away.
She stared after him.
It was an utter disaster, and it was all her fault.
She wanted to run after him, beg forgiveness – but what would be the point? No excuse but the real one would do, and the real excuse would blow their relationship to bits.
All her shit, getting in the way.
The relationship was over, even before anyone else knew they were engaged. Wait till Jim, associate editor, Martin’s immediate junior, found out. Jim, an arrogant, talent-free misogynist, hated Claudia. He could barely contain the curl of his lip on sight of her. He probably imagined she was shagging Martin senseless every night, and why wasn’t she shagging him?
If Jim found out, a flood of malice would burst its banks. He’d leak it to Private Eye and make her look like a slag. And then the papers would pick it up – her own included – because it’s news if a supposed heiress marries a civilian, especially if he is seventeen years her senior.
And then Daddy and Innocence would explode with rage. Daddy, because he’d hate the idea of Claudia doing … what she wasn’t doing. Also, he liked to be the man with the youngest wife.
Innocence would find something to snipe at. When Claudia was fifteen, Innocence had returned, drunk, from a break in rehab. Swaying across the ballroom swigging lager from a can, trailing fag smoke and fox furs, her stepmother had warned Claudia against ‘diluting the bloodline’. These days, Innocence had pink hair and talked less about bloodlines, but Claudia knew she’d disapprove of Martin. He was gorgeous – she’d want him for herself. But of course, none of this mattered now – her dreams of irate parents and twisted colleagues were mere fantasies because now her relationship with Martin Freshwater was doomed.
She took a cab home, put on her softest, oldest, frumpiest pyjamas. Months ago, in a mad burst of optimism, Martin had bought her a pink La Perla baby-doll nightdress. It silently reproached her from inside its box on a high shelf. She sighed, and heaved on a puffy coat. ‘JR. Piddle. Let’s go.’
Then she noticed a white envelope, no stamp, shoved under the front door. Not another house party. These people were impossibly jolly. She ripped open the envelope. Then she read the contents. A chill crept up her spine like an insect, and she froze where she stood.
Claudia,
I write as a friend. You need to end your relationship with Martin Freshwater now. Nothing good will come of it, only agony and misery.
I am sorry.
PARIS, WINTER 1997
Jack
‘Meet me under the Eiffel Tower,’ she had said to him, as a joke. It was a dangerous joke. This wasn’t the plan. Maria had one mission to accomplish with Jack Kent, and could not be distracted by lust. She’d been surprised and horrified to find him so sexy. It made her feel like a predator. It was crazy to get involved. She had to do the job and remain detached: there was a higher purpose here. All those furtive years of spying, the elaborate effort made to train in the hotel business, had been for one reason only, and finally the time had come.
She was required.
She had questioned the morality of what she was doing, many times. But she had justified it to herself more often. The sequence of terrible, incredible, possibly inevitable events that she had covertly witnessed over the last year had proven her right.
And she was risking it all for a bit of sex.
A bit of sex would have been excusable, but she knew it would be more. There was a fierce and undeniable attraction. It was hard when they were together not to touch. She would not lay a finger on him, but he was always finding an excuse to put a hand on her shoulder, or arm, and when he did, she felt a bolt of desire ricochet through her, and she knew it was mutual. She had pushed him away, like a prim little miss, more than once. But it was only a matter of time. She was that saucy minx who said ‘no’ when she meant ‘yes’; she was a tease, and when she was rejecting his attempts to kiss her in the linen closet, her breath quick and shallow, it was nothing but a long, slow seduction. He knew it, she knew it, and it filled them both with a fire of passion that would have to be expended … soon.
But worse than this, she liked him. He had this hard shell, but she could see that he hid inside it, because he was scared of his capacity for love.
It could get in the way of achieving her goal. It didn’t have to, but it might, and she was mad to take the chance.
She sighed, lit a cigarette and gazed up from beneath a huge arch at the iron latticework. The tower itself gave off a golden glow against the night sky. It was truly romantic, and bizarrely beautiful.
She knew it would be tonight. The beginning – and possibly the end.
‘Close your eyes and come with me,’ said the voice that thrilled her, and she felt him propel her firmly through the crowds. ‘Trust me,’ Jack whispered, and she felt his cheek brush hers as he pressed her into a cab. She breathed in the heady scent of his aftershave, lemony, musky, potent; she relished the feel of his hands on her arms. She allowed herself a quick peek at his hands, imagined the feel of his strong, tanned fingers inside her … He was wearing a baseball cap – the papers loved slapping him on the cover, he was an easy hate figure and had a lot of enemies. The media would pay big to catch him out, and every reader understood the code of a married man pictured with ‘a close female friend’.
They didn’t know the half of it.
She wondered if they’d find out.
It was an amazing turn-on, letting him guide her.
‘Merci,’ she heard him say to the driver. They walked on gravel for a time and then he lifted her into a seat. ‘Don’t open your eyes,’ he murmured, and she didn’t. She knew exactly where they were, but it didn’t matter. This evening had a momentum all to itself, and she would let it carry her. She felt the whoosh of cold air on her face as they rose higher.
‘Now kiss me,’ he breathed, and he leaned over her, strong and tall, and she let him dominate – just for a few wicked, indulgent hours, she would let him control her. She was glad she was sitting down because her knees felt like water. His kiss was music; it was poetry. She was a practical girl who did what she
had to do to get by, but now her head was a whirl of dizzy rapture and she vaguely recalled out of nowhere a shard of verse from her schooldays – Shakespeare, or that other bloke – something about a kiss that would suck out your soul. Oh God, she would give hers gladly. Perhaps she already had.
When they finally, reluctantly broke apart, and she opened her eyes, they were rising over the glorious spectacle of the Champs-Élysées and the Arc de Triomphe, over the City of Lights itself. She felt that if she leaned forward, she could touch the Obélisque de Louxor. It was both curious and bewitching, an enormous and unashamed phallic symbol, proudly bestowed on one country by another. Oh, Maria. She had one thing on her mind tonight – and it was the wrong thing.
He was stroking her face. She couldn’t meet his eye and he gently lifted her chin and made her look at him.
‘Would I be right’, she said in a teasing voice, ‘to say this is the first time in a while you’ve been on a Ferris wheel?’ Right now, joking around was the only way she could cover herself.
‘It’s strange,’ he said. ‘I look at you, and I want to take you on every Ferris wheel in every city in the world.’
She attempted a feeble joke, but the words stuck. She shivered, and he pulled her closer. She huddled up against his shirt. It was the quality of the shirt, the luxurious feel of its butter-soft cotton that did it. She felt a brief stab of hate, so fleeting it was gone before she could chase it away, a reflex to his comfortable life. Oh, she knew he had suffered, yet it didn’t matter: he could buy anything he wanted, he had bought anything he wanted, anything and anyone. He had no clue of the struggle and fear that were a daily part of so many normal people’s lives.
Most of his ill fortune had been self-inflicted. She was an expert on the subject of Jack Kent. He had worked for his money and his power and success, but there was the flipside. He had lied, cheated and – most pertinent to her – he stole. And he felt hard done by! Jack didn’t know he was born.
He was holding her hand. She could feel his fingers stroking the underside of her wrist and it was making her crazy.
‘Please,’ she said, and she was almost begging.
They barely made it to the suite. The sex was desperate and loud and animalistic; she was sobbing with pleasure and pain – ‘More,’ she gasped, ‘more’ – and he was almost delirious with lust, groaning her name over and over; oh God, he was a work of art, and he was so fucking good, it was as if he was worshipping her with his dick. She wanted him everywhere at once, she wanted to say the words but she was too delirious, too greedy for his lips, his hands, his tongue, the feel of his firm, powerful body underneath her, on top of her, behind her. Oh God, let it never end.
Maria was a chaste sort of person, at heart.
It was just the other places …
The fifth time, just before dawn, they did it on the stone balcony. ‘I want to fuck you before the whole of Paris,’ he snarled in her ear, and she purred with delight, rubbing her pert behind against him and feeling his dick harden. She let him screw her from behind – a good metaphor for their relationship, once, she thought – and then she gently eased herself off him, turned around, wrapped her legs around his and, while he could easily bear her weight, pushed him inside and to the floor, writhing around on him as he gazed up at her, a sloppy, sex-sated grin on his handsome face.
‘What’, he murmured, ‘would you do if my wife walked in?’
She arched an eyebrow. ‘You mean,’ she said, ‘what would you do?’
She was bloody exhausted. But she couldn’t get enough. And this wouldn’t last for ever. Who knew if it would last the day?
At 9 a.m., they collapsed on the high bed. Her whole body throbbed and she felt soft and bruised and rubbery, as if she’d been deboned.
They drank red wine, gazing into each other’s eyes, and fed each other roast chicken. She was starving. She felt like a savage. Fuck, eat, sleep, fuck again.
Jack dropped a chicken bone on the silver plate and it landed with a tink. He rolled over, until he was pinning her to the bed. ‘Maria,’ he said, his eyes full of laughter. ‘My God! Have my children!’
With supreme effort, she pushed up and rolled over, so that he lay on his back and she pressed down on him. ‘Jack,’ she said. ‘My darling Jack. I have.’ She paused. Her heart was hammering so fast she could hear it reverberate around the room like a drum roll. ‘At least, I have had one of your children.’
She leaned back on her heels and turned her face this way and that. ‘Can’t you see any resemblance?’
NEW YORK, FEBRUARY 1998
Emily
A lot of teenagers who ran away hadn’t a clue. They nicked the keys to their dad’s Rover, chucked a change of underwear in the back and invariably drove the car into a ditch. Emily had the maid pack six Louis Vuitton suitcases, ordered her driver to take her to the airport in the Bentley, and borrowed her mother’s pilot who took her in the Learjet to a private airstrip in Manhattan. You had to keep it glamorous. There was no point running away to somewhere less fabulous than home.
She checked into the Paramount. It always amused her not to stay in one of her mother’s hotels. She quite liked the brownstone on the Upper West Side, but not the white grand piano, or the exact replica on the ballroom ceiling of Michelangelo’s frescoes in the Sistine Chapel. Mummy was so proud, having commissioned it herself, and Emily didn’t have the heart to tell her that the 1993 version of ‘The Last Judgement’, with Innocence as the Virgin Mary, was widely agreed in New York to be the most vulgar piece of interior decor in the city. Also, if she’d run away to the brownstone, she’d be found, which was not her object.
She wanted to have some fun. Also, Timmy was in New York. He was working on Wall Street, JPMorgan Chase. She thought it sweet that he wanted to make his own money when he was going to inherit Scotland. Well, more or less.
She hadn’t seen him since the blow-chunks job, almost a year and a half ago. Oh my God, that was, like, the most embarrassing moment of her life. She’d fled to her bedroom, passed out on the floor and woken fifteen hours later. Quintin had taken care of all the mess – later, she understood that Élite Retreats had picked up the bills for two busted arms and one fractured leg and settled five lawsuits. Ice rinks and alcohol were so not a good mix.
Actually, Timmy had written to her since. Obviously he was cool with her – she’d been right to refuse him sex. The blow job, up to the point of final impact, must have been exceptional. She hadn’t replied to his letters, unlike all the other girls he was no doubt writing to. There was nothing the upper classes loved more than a good letter – you couldn’t pass one in the street without receiving a thank-you note. She’d been mortified by their last encounter – throwing up was so childish – but now, she had recovered her composure, she was a year older, a year more alluring. It was time to hook up.
He wasn’t going to get laid this time round either. Nearly, but not quite. And she wasn’t going to call him, they were going to bump into each other, purely by chance, as he left his office. Century 21 was close by. Apart from Topshop, Emily did not care to shop at a store which had fewer than two assistants per customer, and the idea of a sort of jumble sale store with bargains made her want to leap in a hot shower. Still, Timmy wasn’t to know that, and it was a fine excuse for running into him.
She held her breath, burst into Century 21, grabbed the first item nearest the door, paid for it, secured a bag, and left, purple in the face. She then disinfected her hands with a spray. Then, still shaking the invisible dirt out of her hair, she summoned her driver. It was freezing, and her black suede red-soled Christian Louboutin boots with the six-inch heels weren’t made for walking.
Sixty Wall Street, aka the world headquarters of JPMorgan Chase, was a great big cock of a building. It towered into the crisp blue sky, tall, thick and self-important. God, she loved New York. She loved New York and she loved New Yorkers. Rude? They were city people! Smart fast busy city people who spoke up for themselves. Not like Londoner
s, God bless them. She was absurdly fond of London but compared to New York’s bigger, brasher, shinier skyline, it was a little old lady, and as for rudeness, Londoners beat New Yorkers by miles. They didn’t shout, they muttered, which was worse. Emily had never actually been on the London Underground but according to Quintin – who regularly visited his mother in Acton – people did not give up their seat for a pregnant woman, pretending instead to be engrossed in their newspapers. The London tube system was full of standing, tearful, pregnant women. Well, that was just sick. Emily hadn’t ridden the subway in New York, either, but she liked to imagine that if any commuter tried to pull off that kind of crap here, no pregnant New Yorker would stand for it. Papers would be ripped from faces with a bellow of, ‘Hello! I’m standing here!’
New York was like an adrenalin shot to the butt, it made you feel you could accomplish anything. It lifted you up, it loved life, it was the city that said, ‘Sleep when you’re dead.’ Emily winced in pain and snapped the heel off a boot. It was OK, she told herself; she had seven more pairs at home. Then she hobbled over to one of the great black square pillars and pretended to inspect the damage. Guys like Timmy were hypnotized by a damsel in distress. They liked their strong women incapacitated; it made domination less of a struggle.
Although there were worse ways to pass her time than staring at an endless stream of men in suits, she did not enjoy standing on one leg for over an hour in the biting cold, and cursed Timmy for not appearing. She’d grab a hot chocolate and come back tomorrow. She looked in her compact mirror – her nose was pink and numb with the cold. You have no idea, Tim, she thought to herself, how far I’d go to get you.
On day three, her patience was rewarded.
‘Em? Hello! What a gorgeous surprise! What brings you to this neck of the woods?’
She waved the slightly dog-eared Century 21 bag, and waggled the snapped heel in his face.