Autumn

by Vina Jackson

  ‘Ah, it’s you,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know you were expected.’

  I stumbled over the words. ‘I should have called beforehand,’ I mumbled by way of apology. Did she live here with him or had she just spent the night?

  ‘He’s in the bathroom,’ Alissa said. ‘He wouldn’t have heard the doorbell. I barely caught its sound in the bedroom,’ she added, pointing to her state of undress, silently reproaching me for having visibly pulled her out of bed. ‘Anyway, come on in.’

  She turned on her heels and I followed her in, closing the door behind me. As we walked down the narrow corridor which led into the living areas of the loft-like apartment, she negligently raised her arms and pulled her fingers through her hair in a vain attempt at straightening her wandering curls, and the shirt she had slipped on pulled up, revealing the lower orbs of her arse. They were evenly tanned and a similar shade to her legs. I knew her flash of added flesh was quite intentional.

  ‘Business, is it?’ she asked me.

  ‘Sort of …’

  I thought she was leading me to the main room where Antony and I had previously tried to work, but we took a turn to the right and walked straight into the bedroom, behind a door that I had never seen opened before.

  Unlike the rest of Antony’s apartment which had functional clear and clean lines and almost brutalist and impersonal furniture, the bedroom was a jumble of untidiness, caused by the scattering of women’s clothing, most of which Alissa had been wearing when I had spied her arriving the previous afternoon, and sheets and blankets hanging from the bed at curious angles. I could smell sex in the air, a musky odour underpinned by the fruity back note of Alissa’s perfume. Her scent was overpowering, too rich and floral for my tastes.

  She indicated a chair in one corner from which a thin pair of silk panties dangled and invited me to sit.

  ‘He won’t be long,’ she said, and threw off the man’s shirt she had been wearing. Her breasts stood impossibly high with a hint of unnaturalness and my eyes were inevitably drawn to her bush, which was dark and luxuriant and untamed.

  She slipped between the remaining bed sheets which had not been shed across the floor.

  We kept on gazing at each other in silence.

  ‘He’s shaving,’ she finally pointed out, nodding at the door to my right leading to the en-suite bathroom.

  ‘Oh.’

  I was aching to ask a thousand questions. About the exact nature of their relationship, how long she had been with him, how and where they had met, even unhealthily about the way they liked to fuck, well, more precisely the way he liked to fuck, but of course remained quite mute.

  Beyond the bathroom door, there was barely any sound reaching us, no buzzing of electric razor or even the faint splash of water in a sink.

  We waited, an undeclared state of war now in operation between the two of us as to who would break the silence first. Provoking the other into saying something she might regret later.

  Somehow they didn’t seem a match. I had come across many unlikely couples and they were not that way, I just couldn’t picture them together. Antony was undoubtedly a man of strong passions whereas Alissa had a brittle artificiality, as if she was always playing a role, faking emotions, manipulating. And I was increasingly convinced that her tits, teasing me, hard brown nipples on wanton display above the bed sheet negligently pulled up only so far as her waist, were not real. They seemed too round, too solid, gravity defying, somehow lacking in personality in their smooth, peachy perfection.

  Finally, the bathroom door opened and Antony walked out. He wore just a white towel around his waist. Oblivious of me, he stepped briskly towards the bed and shed the towel as he was about to join Alissa then realised that I was present. His buttocks to me, hard, carved, muscles tight like a runner. He looked round with surprise, although he made no gesture to cover himself and I noticed his cock was long and thick and already at half mast.

  ‘You should have warned me, Alissa,’ he said, looking reproachfully at her, then at me.

  He finally bent over and retrieved the shirt of his she had been wearing earlier and slipped it on. The purple pink of his glans could still be seen below it, but he appeared to be oblivious to its undeniable effect on me.

  ‘I must apologise,’ he said. ‘I had no idea you were here.’

  ‘I should have called,’ I said.

  ‘Maybe you should have.’

  He was not circumcised. That was the only thought that came to my mind.

  ‘She claims she’s here on business,’ Alissa said, with a gleeful look of mischief lighting up her delicate features. ‘A bit early for that, don’t you think?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I replied. I was probably blushing all over. What had come over me? I should never have come here unannounced this early in the day. Also realising I was jealous of Alissa. Madly imagining myself in that same bed with Antony. My mind was in a whirl.

  ‘Was it something important?’ Antony asked.

  The careful speech I had rehearsed while cycling all the way here evaporated. All the talk about how the money was unimportant to me and how he should just leave me out of the equation and adapt the book with my noble blessing and that I felt unable to contribute to the project in the way he had hoped for.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  His eyes drilled into mine.

  Did he sense my confusion? Or my desire?

  I felt I had to say something more.

  Alissa intervened.

  ‘Antony, don’t you realise you’re confusing the poor girl, with that lovely cock of yours on display? Maybe we should move on to another kind of business altogether and she could join us in bed? Might prove fun, the director, the actress and the fiddle player?’ She made it sound like the beginning of a dirty joke.

  He still didn’t cover himself up.

  I was rooted to the spot.

  ‘Actually, I came along because I think I’ve come up with a wizard solution to integrate the music into the play,’ I somehow blurted out. It felt as if someone else entirely was speaking. I was even using words that wouldn’t normally enter my head. Wizard? What the hell?

  Almost ignoring me, he looked down at the young woman in his bed.

  ‘I think it’s time you should leave, Alissa. Didn’t you mention you have an audition in Swiss Cottage later in the morning?’

  Acknowledging her dismissal, she reluctantly rose out of the bed and petulantly stormed into the bathroom. Antony and I, left alone, wallowed in embarrassed silence. Having washed her face, she returned, still provoking us with her nudity and gathered the items of her clothing which she had dispersed across the bedroom floor and dressed.

  So, she didn’t live with him. If she had, she would have changed into other clothes from her own closet or another room, I decided.

  I felt a surprising sense of relief.

  She left, gratifying us both with a faint peck on the cheek.

  ‘Enjoy yourselves, kids,’ she said with a touch of departing bravado.

  Her high-heeled steps click-clacking in the corridor faded in the distance. Antony looked at me.

  ‘Whatever you wanted to discuss, maybe now is not the right time,’ he said. ‘I guess there will be a lot to say …’

  ‘Yes,’ I nodded.

  ‘I have some appointments in town soon, with an impresario and a casting director whom I’m thinking of bringing on board.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Can you possibly make it tomorrow? As early as you wish. I’d love to hear your new concept.’

  ‘That would be good.’ He walked me to the door. It was an effort as we parted to shake his hand in a professional manner and not impulsively take hold of his dangling cock.

  Now I had 24 hours to come up with an idea.

  He was dressed when I arrived the following morning. Which was a good thing. Autu
mn had arrived overnight with a vengeance and London was cocooned in a curtain of greyness. The breeze had a cutting edge and I’d come by cab instead of my bike.

  Despite the weather, I felt on fire, thoughts and tunes and unformed melodies and sketches of swirling images dictated by the music raging through my brain. I’d been up all night. My bow arm was aching and the wrist on my right arm felt as if it had been passed through a blender, my chin felt sore, my limbs barely holding me together against a sense of total physical and mental exhaustion.

  As soon as I’d got home following yesterday’s ambiguous confrontation at Antony’s, I’d gathered all of my violins, a pile of partitions and downloaded a whole selection of classical pieces to my iPod and had determined to come up with some form of concept that would catch Antony’s attention. Charm him into acceptance or submission.

  I’d attempted to match actual existing pieces to some of the scenes he was hoping to stage in the play and had verbally outlined to me but none of it truly worked. The analogies I’d dreamed up in my restricted imagination were dull and uninspired and all I could come up were clichés, even when I ventured experimentally way beyond my own performing repertoire. It was discouraging, but also a challenge.

  Overdosing on caffeine as night fell and I had pulled the curtains in my study closed, it came to me in a flash of understanding. I was trying to match images with mere sounds. It was the wrong process altogether. What I had to summon was the mood, emotions. It was so self-evident I could have screamed.

  I’d closed my eyes and recalled that night when, spooned together in bed, Dominik had under cover of darkness begun speaking of the section of the book he was then working on in which one of the owners of the Bailly came to realise that the instrument was cursed. The way he spoke, his dark, mellifluous tones and the passion that visibly gripped him as he did so had been hypnotic and touched me so deep, held me locked in his spell. That was what I had to recreate.

  And, right then, images of wonders I imagined I had witnessed on the island surfaced in my mind, rising to the surface, the tenderness and the roughness of the embraces, the lazy copulations, the war-like battles of bodies, the untrammelled passion travelling between the couples, threesomes and every single wonderful combination of genders, sizes and shapes and electric fucks I had been privileged to watch in my waking dream. The music that seemed to rise from the mass of writhing flesh, the invisible warmth wrapping itself around the beach and the jungle. The fleshy caresses of the vines that had ensnared me, how desire had carved its brand into the landscape and the air. Although I no longer could distinguish between what I had experienced or imagined. Had I actually seen others, Lauralynn, Viggo, strangers at play?

  A spark was born, deep inside me. Tentative at first, then furiously growing in intensity. I’d picked up the Bailly and begun playing the principal melody from ‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice’ but instead of slavishly following the partition, after a while, I began to improvise, doodle almost, surrender to the flow of the music until I had embarked on new shores, landed onto the solid sands of a completely new tune, which was part Dukas and part Summer Zahova, and it felt just right. Self-evident. I continued playing, improvising and in front of my eyes I began to picture the scene developing, the likely actors moving around the stage like dancers in a trance, the set itself spinning on its axis to the rhythm of my playing, the colours waltzing, the bodies floating on air, the beat hypnotic and exotic.

  I disconnected from reality and reached the zone.

  Played.

  On and on.

  A man’s hand grazing my nipples.

  Andante.

  The slap of a palm against my rump, drawing exquisite and instant pain.

  Allegro.

  My earlobe pressured by the squeeze of teeth, quickly followed by a soothing tongue exploring its hollow.

  Moderato.

  Warm lips lingering, foraging between my thighs.

  Furioso.

  The welcome slow sting of an orgasm welling up inside me.

  I drew my breath. Dropped down to the desk and picked up another page of Antony’s notes; another scene. Instinctively drew the first notes of a Mussorgsky melody and as my imagination continued to flow freely, I veered sideways into a bridge borrowed from another Russian composer I couldn’t quite identify on the spur of the moment and diverted to a new musical road. Glazunov, Glinka?

  The room around me disappeared.

  I was back on the island, my eyes and my senses overloaded by the emotions of pleasure, the unending portraits of desire.

  Pizzicato.

  That ineffable feeling of being penetrated after agonising foreplay, the sensation of being opened, filled.

  I was in a bed and a man was holding me tight, controlling me, orchestrating with acute talent the patient rise of my lust from its infernal depths.

  But in my unbalanced state, I could not distinguish who the man was.

  Dominik?

  Antony?

  The devil stranger from the Kentish Town sauna?

  A composite of all the men I had known, who had known me Biblically? Identikit lovers blurred by the winds of past times?

  The final act of the play, in a contemporary setting, a theatre of war playing in the background and I set on my musical search with the vibrant echo of a Mahler symphony ringing in my ears, pastoral tones veering into war-like staccatos, or was it Shostakovich? The music painting battlefields, epic combats on fields of ice in broad, aggressive strokes.

  Oh yes, it felt good. And it felt right. This is what the project should sound like. A different musical mood for every act. A parade of emotions that would bring it all to life.

  By the time I’d conjured up the right emotion for each of the scenes and acts we had already talked about, I was sweating with excitement.

  There was only one problem. Could I recreate all these sounds and aural moods again, record them in a studio? I didn’t think so. In a recording setting I knew all too well I would be unable to evoke all those emotions with the same energy, the same fire.

  There was only one way.

  It was crazy.

  Quite mad.

  And an irresistible challenge.

  I would volunteer to play the music, improvise equally, on the occasion of every performance.

  It was unheard of.

  All the more reason to propose such an aberrant solution.

  Antony buzzed me in downstairs and his front door was already open when I emerged from the lift.

  I walked in.

  ‘This is what I want to do,’ I said and set my violin case down, opened it and took out the instrument.

  He watched me.

  He was wearing his customary jeans and a white T-shirt that swam over his lean body, inviting stray hands to run up under the hem and over his chest … Did he have a drawer full of identical tees?

  I was so hot and feverish when I had left my Clapham flat that I had hurriedly pulled a thin summer dress from the closet, not taking the outside weather in consideration. I walked over to one end of the large room he led me to so that the meagre rays of sun breaching the bay windows would backlight me. And I played for him. Prefacing every piece with a brief verbal indication of the scene it should match. I knew that standing playing where I was, the dress was almost transparent. I hadn’t memorised any of the improvisations I had come up with in the slightest, but it was no problem. I seized the original, inspirational melody and glided away unconcerned on the wings of song, twisting and turning as the music and my violin travelled in strange directions, one way streets and boulevards, oceans and landscapes.

  Antony’s smile broadened.

  When I finally completed the ultimate piece and drew my bow away from the strings, my arm hanging limp by my side, Antony rose to his feet. He stepped forward and took the Bailly from my hands, laying it gently down on the pad
ded leather chair behind us. I was still swaying back and forth in time to the rhythm of the now silent jumble of melodies that were still playing on in my imagination.

  His mouth was on mine before I could speak. The hunger in my body responded instinctively to that in his, as if our flesh spoke a common language known only to a few. The well-matched, the lusty, the desirous few who ache, always to be touched, to fan the flames of a furnace that burns without pretext and without pause. I pulled up his T-shirt and gripped the smooth, bare, hard plank of his torso.

  Immediately his hands tugged at my dress. His attempt to pull it over my head failed when the narrow cut of the waist intercepted with the barrier of my breasts. He fumbled with the buttons once, twice, then inserted his fingers into the gap between two of the buttonholes and ripped it open. Three hard tugs before a large enough tear was created for it to fall to the floor in a clatter of scattering cheap plastic fasteners. I wasn’t wearing pants, or a bra, and had shaven my mound totally smooth in the shower the previous evening, a petty, angry response to the sight of Alissa’s full thatch.

  I jutted my chin out proudly. Expected him to take a step back, view me in all of my provocative nudity, make some comment or raise an ironic eyebrow acknowledging that I had arrived at his apartment without any underwear on and freshly shaved. But Antony was evidently a man of action, no voyeur. His hands were gripping my breasts, pulling my already hard nipples with the same violent impatience that he had applied to undressing me. I groaned and he tugged my nipples harder, pinched, twisted.

  ‘You like that,’ he said. There was no note of approval or otherwise in his tone, it was a simple statement of fact.

  ‘Yes,’ I replied, but could not master the same bland note. My voice was breathy, full of desire. Had I wanted, out of any sense of shame, to hide my desire I would have been unable to do so. My body made it impossible to be anything besides what I was. A woman of passion. Some might say a slut, and let them say it. Sex was woven into my make-up as deeply as the moon and stars make up the night sky, and I could have no more severed myself from my libido than from my own shadow.

  I pulled him against me, hard, unbuttoned his jeans with one swift movement and grabbed his uncut cock. It was wonderfully long and thick and growing harder by the second. I closed my fingers around his shaft and ran my cupped palm along the full length of his dick, then pulled the skin backward and forward, revelling in his growing rigidity. A droplet of pre-come was gathering at his head.