Strangers in a Garden

by Deanna Maclaren

  As they got out of the taxi, she blurted, ‘Hugo, I can’t.’

  He hustled her up the short flight of steps. He rang Marla’s anonymous bell.

  ‘It’s Philip.’

  ‘Hi Philip!’ The voice was husky and friendly. ‘Come on up.’

  A buzzer sounded. Hugo pushed her in and the door closed behind them.

  Now she was commited, Laura attempted to regain a measure of poise, some sophistication, making small talk about the carpet in the lift.

  Hugo ignored this.

  On the third floor, the door was open.

  ‘Hello Philip!’ Like he was a long-lost friend.

  This was Vera, the maid. Despite Hugo saying he’d never fuck her in a million years, Laura had expected someone pert, in a sassy black and white uniform, like pictures she’d seen of Lyons corner house waitresses. But Vera was tall, scrawny, with badly-cut curly brown hair. She was dressed in slouchy slacks and a baggy pale blue cardigan.

  Vera was pleasant, but made no attempt at a charm offensive. Laura supposed that was Marla’s job.

  ‘This is Sue, Vera.’

  She smiled at Laura and said to him, ‘Marla’s running a little late, Philip. She’s just freshening up. Do you mind coming into the sitting room for a moment?’

  On the coffee table there was a half finished cup of tea and a Denby plate containing white bread crusts and crumbs of cheese. Glossy magazines were strewn on the table, but no newspapers. Perhaps it wasn’t politic to remind clients of girls who kissed and told.

  ‘Would you like a drink, Philip?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Yes,’ Laura said. ‘A brandy please. Large’

  Vera looked at Hugo. He nodded. She left the room. Then she said, from the door, ‘Marla’s ready now Philip. I’ve taken Sue’s drink through.’

  Laura gathered from the way she kept repeating his name that Vera didn’t believe it was his real name, but it didn’t matter. She wondered why, if she’d chosen Sue, the maid had chosen Vera.

  They followed Vera’s uninspiring form down the hall, the magnolia walls hung with bland landscapes.

  The bedroom door was open. Gradually, the bed came into view, a large bed, covered in quilted satin.

  Suddenly, the bed was obscured by Marla.

  Like the maid, Marla was far from what Laura had expected. Her experience of prostitutes came from TV or films. The street girls wore short tight skirts and never seemed to be able to afford stockings, even in the harshest weather. Further up the scale, the posher girls tossed expensively waved hair and glided through hotel lobbies in couture suits, later peeling off wisps of luxury lingerie to reveal enviably toned bodies with all-over tans. They were mostly young, on the game through homelessness or to provide for their drug habit, their young children, or to get through college. The few older ones were either raddled, addled or mumsy.

  Marla was in her forties and, well, a big girl. Her flesh billowed over the top of the black basque and her thighs amply filled the fishnet stockings. She wasn’t wearing knickers and Laura saw that what she had down there wasn’t something you’d call a pussy. This wasn’t a toy. This was a serious piece of equipment.

  Her legs narrowed to dainty ankles in shiny high-heeled red shoes, and her face was a delight, full of fun and unjudgemental, welcoming warmth. The face of a real woman. A woman you liked immediately, and who you very much wanted to like you.

  Hugo had disappeared to the bathroom. ‘I like your basque,’ Laura said to Marla.

  She looked pleased. ‘I’ve got lots. Kneeling, she tossed back her platinum blonde hair and slid open a drawer of the dressing table. She pulled a selection of basques onto the carpet. ‘I have to cut them about a bit sometimes. Most clients want my breasts fully exposed but I need to give them underwire oomph.’

  She surveyed Laura. ‘Not like you. Yours are big and firm.’

  Laura considered her enveloping sweater. ‘How can you tell?’

  Marla laughed. ‘I can tell.’

  They were kneeling in giggly complicity over the mounds of black and red lace, ribbons and bows, when Hugo returned, saying briskly, ‘Now come along, let’s get on,’ and Laura appreciated he had to keep an eye on the time. He wasn’t paying Marla all this money for them to sit and gossip.

  Marla stood up. ‘Your brandy’s here, Sue. Would you like to use the bathroom, it’s ensuite. No? Well come and sit by the dressing table. Make yourself comfortable while I sort this naughty man out.’

  She said teasingly to Hugo, ‘After more sex are you? I’ve never known anyone like you for sex. Don’t you ever do any work?’

  He had his wallet out. ‘Sue’s here to watch, so I thought we’d put on a little show for her.’

  Graphically, with no embarrassment, he told her what he wanted, starting with ‘big handfuls of breasts’ and ending with ‘then take the condom off and I’ll come on you.’

  Marla murmured something to Vera. As Hugo counted out the notes, Vera left the room and returned with a red handled cane. She put it on the dressing table, picked up the money and disappeared.

  While Hugo undressed, Marla spread a large, spotlessly clean white towel on the bed, thus answering Laura’s first question – how does a call girl keep the sheets clean? Answer, you don’t actually get in the bed.

  Marla sat at the end of the bed, her generous legs spread wide, facing the mirror on the wardrobe door. Hugo knelt behind her and went through a similar routine to what he did with Laura, except he was much rougher with Marla’s breasts and made no attempt to tease her to orgasm. Laura wondered if Marla would fake it but no, though she gasped and wriggled and pouted saying, ‘Oh that’s good, you know how to do it, look at my nipples, big and hard like you. God I’m wet, so wet.’

  Laura took the opportunity to study the room. The bed, with its satin cover, dominated all of course. Like the towel Marla had spread, the cover was immaculate and she could see the flecked grey carpet had been recently vacuumed. The tightly-drawn curtains were cheap velvet in a rather nasty pink. Laura imagined Marla sitting in her lounge in a flowered dressing gown, nibbling chocolates and listening to Pat Boone as she ticked off the curtains and towels she wanted from the catalogue.

  Laura was sitting near a long white melamine dressing table, displaying a vase of fake roses, a flask of water and a glass, baby oil, tissues and a home-made collection box like she’d seen in the newsagent’s for the paper boy’s Christmas tip. Marla’s box carried the message, ‘My maid works very hard for us. Please remember her.’

  She jerked her eyes away from the red-handled cane lying next to the collection box, and paid attention to the shoes. They were lined up neatly all round the edge of the room. Expensive shoes in leather and supple suede, in all colours, lots with bows on, all with dauntingly high heels. Laura didn’t think Hugo was a shoe fetishist, but she supposed in Marla’s job you had to cater for all tastes. The wardrobe no doubt contained an impressive selection of uniforms – nurse, schoolgirl, policewoman – though it intrigued her that the serious stuff, the whips and canes, were obviously kept elsewhere under Vera’s charge, and only brought in at Marla’s request. Laura was just extending her picture of Marla in her flowered robe choosing catalogue curtains, to include Vera cosily in the armchair polishing a leather paddle, when Hugo’s voice cut sharply through her reverie:

  ‘You can put the thing on now.’

  He lay on the bed as Marla reached for the top right dressing table drawer, which Laura saw was crammed with packets of condoms.

  The condom was in its packet but Laura noticed the wrapping had been loosened, so she wouldn’t have to waste time fiddling. She put the condom in her mouth and expertly rolled it down onto Hugo’s cock. He had his eyes closed. Laura was watching her closely, waiting for Marla to look at her, grimace, roll her eyes. But there was none of that. She concentrated purely on Hugo, making little cooing noises, looking and sounding for all the world as if all she ever wanted to do was play with his penis. She was a pro all right.r />
  She played with him for quite a while, strumming her fingers up and down his dick, teasing his balls as he lay smiling slightly.

  Then he said, ‘All right. Get the weights on.’

  ‘Four or two?’ asked Marla.

  ‘Just two today. Sue probably hasn’t seen this before. I don’t want her to think I’m being cruel to you.’

  Marla bubbled with laughter and opened the deep third drawer of the dressing table. It contained a weird assortment of body jewellery, dildos, nipple chains, handcuffs and some glittery things that could have been clip-on ear rings but obviously weren’t.

  ‘Let me do it myself, Philip. You snap them on too hard.’

  Hugo swung himself off the bed and as Marla gently clipped the glittery orbs on her nipples, he talked Laura through it:

  ‘They’ve got weights on, do you see?’

  He turned Marla to face her. Her nipples, pinched by the clips, were starting to pucker up red. Suspended from the orbs were lead weights, dragging at her heavy breasts. Without being told, she bent over the edge of the bed, presenting her voluptuous backside to Hugo.

  ‘Pass me the cane,’ Hugo instructed Laura.

  She shoved the object at him and he said, ‘Now come and sit on the bed so you can see. I’m going to give her six strokes. As the cane lands, she’ll jerk her shoulders up. It’s involuntary. But as she jerks up, the pressure from the lead weights increases, making her nipples scream.’

  Laura was no pyschologist. She had no idea what Hugo had against women’s breasts that made him inflict indignity on hers and pain on Marla’s.

  She croaked, ‘So if you use four instead of two…?

  ‘No, not four on the breasts. The other two go on her labia. But not today.’

  Thank God for that, thought Laura.

  ‘Legs together, Marla. Bottom high. That’s good.’

  She turned to him, smiling, even coquettish. ‘Not too hard, Philip. Please.’

  He whacked the cane down. She gasped. Her shoulders heaved, her breasts dragged under the weights.

  ‘Again.’

  ‘And again!’ Hugo’s voice was harsh.

  Marla took it. Laura accepted that she was paid to take it, but wondered what she was thinking. She didn’t look at Laura or round again at Hugo. She just fixed her eyes on the white towel.

  ‘Open your legs. No wider. Come on.’ He had the cane between her ankles, forcing her legs wide.

  She said calmly, ‘These are expensive stockings, Philip. You’ll have to pay extra if you ladder them.’

  Her cool astounded Laura. She had a backside striped red, she was humiliatingly exposed and yet she was planning tomorrow’s jaunt to Selfridges to buy more fishnets.

  Hugo gave her the final three in such a frenzy, she fell forward on the bed, clawing off the dreadful weights.

  ‘Now suck me.’

  Reluctant to sit on the bed so close to the action, Laura went to the bathroom, and lingered. When she came back, Hugo was coming over Marla’s breasts and she was sighing with apparent delight, rubbing his semen into her purple, swollen nipples. They both seemed in excellent spirits, with Marla going on to chat about a successful trip to the races.

  ‘Picking up new business were you?’ Hugo said kindly. ‘That’s where I met Marla,’ he told Laura. ‘Not one for horses and betting myself but it was a corporate thing for one of the companies I’m involved with. Marla was standing at the rails in a stunning hat and we got talking. I said something like do you come here often and she said I don’t have time. I’m a prostitute.’

  Marla shrieked with laughter. ‘You should have seen your face, Philip!’

  He glanced at the clock on the bedside table. ‘Time’s nearly up. Have you got someone else in the lift?’

  She shook her head. ‘Not till this evening. Lovely man flying in from Jersey. One of my regulars.’

  Her eyes slid to Laura and back to Hugo. He said casually, ‘You know, Sue, I’d love to see Marla suck your breasts. Wouldn’t you like that? She’s very good at it. Very gentle. Lovely mouth. You’d like that wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Sod it,’ Laura said. ‘We’ve got loads more gin but no tonic.’

  ‘Never mind. I’ll have it with water.’

  This was Laura’s sister-in-law speaking. Penny, who rarely finished a glass of wine, was lurching round her kitchen on a Monday morning, sloshed on what was always referred to as ‘Laura’s gin.’

  ‘Now, I want the full nitty gritty. Don’t leave anything out.’ Penny said, as Laura poured gin over the ice and held the tumbler under the tap. ‘So he pays the maid. What was she wearing?’

  Laura described Vera’s baggy cardigan attire.

  ‘Does she ever join in?’

  ‘Hugo says not.’

  ‘How many clients does Marla see in a day?’

  ‘Haven’t a clue. Hugo worked it out that ten a day at fifty quid each, five days a week is around £25,000 a year. But she’s got rent to pay and Vera’s wages and, er clothes and things.’

  Penny giggled. ‘And why did you, you know – what made you decide to join in?’

  Thanks to this morning’s newspapers and TV news ‘updates,’ Laura could see this was a question she was going to be asked for the rest of her life. And she could never publicly give an answer because she agreed with Hugo and Peter that ‘no comment’ was the only possible response.

  Laura only answered Penny because she was drunk and wouldn’t remember and wouldn’t understand what she was talking about anyway.

  ‘It was the bathroom. It was when I saw Marla’s bathroom.’

  Marla would tell you at every opportunity that the bathroom was ‘ensuite.’ Her pride in it was manifest. The ivory-coloured bath matched the ivory double handbasin. The gold fittings were top of the range. Round the mirror were set theatrical lights. There were heaps and heaps of neatly folded white towels, along with bathrobes, shower caps and a hairdryer. Laura thought her choice of shampoo could do with more thought. Considering her profession, was it tactful to have a shelf of Volumescence and Curly Wirly?

  But what endeared her to Marla, what made her relax in the certainty that this couldn’t be a place of harm or danger, was that in the midst of her glitzy bathroom lived her family of fluffy animals. Dozens of them, furry elephants, rabbits, tigers, pink velvet pigs and scores of tiny Teddies inhabiting what looked like specially designed shelves above the loo and round the window.

  So when she went back and Hugo asked her to join in, she thought what the hell, and took her top off. Marla rang the bell and instantly, Vera sidled in.

  ‘Do you want to settle up with Vera now for the extra, Philip?’ Marla’s tone was pleasant and brisk.

  ‘Fifty’ said Vera, handing Hugo his jacket.

  As Hugo took out his wallet Laura gestured towards Marla and said to him, ‘I don’t want to do anything to her. And I don’t want you fucking me with her watching.’

  ‘No of course not,’ Hugo said, passing Vera the notes. ‘She’s just going to play around with you a bit, see how you like it. If I can come again she can suck me off.’

  He gave Vera an extra £50 and said, ‘bring three glasses of champagne, would you.’

  Poor Vera, Laura thought. Clearly it wasn’t etiquette to offer her a glass of bubbly. Though she suspected Vera would be swigging back the rest of the bottle in the kitchen.

  Laura was sitting on the edge of the bed, unlacing her boots. Marla whipped the towel off the bed and disappeared into the bathroom, returning with a new towel. She murmured, ‘I expect you’d like to freshen up, Sue.’

  Laura was a mite miffed at being ordered to go and wash. She considered she was perfectly clean, thanks. But as she splashed around amidst the ivory splendour, Laura began to get an understanding of the subtle shifts in power in a situation like this.

  First off, Marla gets you to like her. You feel you’re good chums, you’re so safe with her you can ask for anything you want. Then comes the business transaction and it’s that
which turns her from a friend into a servant. Laura had already exercised a verbal superiority – ‘I don’t want to do anything to her. I don’t want you fucking me with her watching,’ she’d said to Hugo, as if Marla was the downstairs maid. But now Marla had reclaimed some ground. This wasn’t Laura’s pad, it was hers. She had her rules, things she would or wouldn’t do, and if she wanted a visitor to go and wash, then you went and washed.

  When she idled back into the room, a bathrobe slung round her shoulders, Marla’s lyrical appreciation of her body – ‘She’s lovely Philip, oh Sue I really envy your figure’ – was cut short by the phone ringing.

  ‘I’m sorry, Philip. I’ll have to answer it.’

  He said testily, ‘Where’s Vera?’

  ‘Gone to get the champagne you wanted. We’re just ordinary working girls, Philip. We don’t keep crates of Bolly under the sink. And it might be my gentleman from Jersey. He might need to talk to me.’

  It was fascinating the change in her voice when she picked up the phone. Her normal accent was agreeable enough, West Country with a south London edge. But the guy on the phone was obviously a new punter, not the chap from Jersey, so she was suddenly into a selling job.

  Her voice oozed soft seduction with an up-market spin.

  ‘Oh, you’re a friend of David’s? Good. He’s a very nice man so I’m sure you are too. Marla? Well she’s a very attractive girl in her late twenties.’ Marla winked at Laura. ‘She has a lovely personality and a bust measurement of 36. It’s £50 an hour and that can include oral, light domination, tie and tease and of course she’ll dress however you want her. She doesn’t do anal. No, you can’t spank her until we know you a little better. I’m sure, being a gentleman, you understand.’

  Vera came in with the champagne and disappeared again.