Domina

by L. S. Hilton

  ‘Come here.’

  ‘You want me to?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, I do.’

  He slid into me, and maybe it was the weed, or the lovely simplicity of it, but we were both laughing. I held him still inside me for a moment, listening for the throb of his blood, then wrapped my thighs tight round his back, taking his weight on me and slowly circled my hips against him, one, two, three, until he groaned and I thought I might lose him, but he flipped me back over, holding my ankles until I was practically standing on my shoulder blades and then he slammed his length up me in one quick shuddering stroke and kept at it, until I was there again and told him to go faster, and I felt my cum start deep, behind my cervix, and he held me so tight there was only his cock moving and I came the way I’d pretended to with Stahl, head back and screaming for it.

  ‘Where do you want it?’

  ‘On my tits. Now.’

  The first gush hit me between my ribs, then I felt the heat of him dripping over my nipples. I rubbed my fingers in it and had a lick, took a palmful and rubbed it over my clit.

  ‘Yummy.’

  ‘Feels like your cunt was made for my dick.’

  ‘Tell me that when you fuck me again.’

  So he did.

  6

  Venice is a city of sophisticated pleasures, but teenage lovers hadn’t figured prominently during my time there. By the time I returned to the Campo Santa Margherita, the memory of my anonymous toy-boy had almost erased the contempt I felt for both Stahl and myself. Almost. There had been something uncontrolled and pointless about the whole business, which had only been exacerbated by the irritation of the long journey home, necessitating a ferry to Barcelona, another to Genoa and then a train ride across Italy’s thigh. The thing was, I still felt spooky about airport security. The last time I had flown commercial was to Rome, mostly because I had left the dead art dealer, Cameron Fitzpatrick, in the Tiber and skipped the city with a stolen fake. This latest trip had made me stiff and irrit-able, and despite my attempts to busy myself with the new show, my failure with Yermolov still left me disgruntled. The Danish girl, Liv Olssen, had agreed to sell me all ten of her Unlikely Bundles series, and I was looking around for some pieces to contrast – or ‘dialogue’ – with them. It was necessary to have a handle on the semantics, however much art-speak made me puke in my present mood. None of my usual routines felt soothing. I was jumpy, restless though I’d only just got back. I checked Facebook more frequently, half fearing a message from Angelica Belvoir and then feeling an irrational sense of disappointment when there was nothing but the usual anodyne feeds. I was tempted to get in touch with her, as Elisabeth, but I needed to temper my need for information against the danger of drawing attention to myself. Frustrating though it was, I had to let it lie.

  Time was something I generally experienced in practical increments, but though I was running harder, working more assiduously, I felt . . . impatient. I just didn’t know for what. About the only thing that cheered me up back then was Masha’s company. I didn’t mind that her memories were fake. She had invented herself, just as I had, and who could blame her for wanting the world to be more glamorous, more exciting, than her pinched reality? I certainly knew the feeling. I loved her stories, loved her neat black body in its too-big chair, loved the swirls of smoke curling defiantly into her bouffant. I hadn’t ever known my grandparents, but maybe I would have liked a granny like Masha.

  After my weekly bout with the impossibilities of mutating Russian nouns, we smoked and chatted as we usually did. Obviously Masha liked a gold-filtered Sobranie; I usually picked her up a pack on my way to class. When she had oofed into the easy-chair with her strong milkless tea, I asked her if she had ever heard of Pavel Yermolov.

  ‘He is disgusting man.’ We could have spoken Italian, but Masha liked to practise her English, which was clear, if eccentric. She claimed to have picked it up from a famous lover in the 1950s – sometimes he was an English composer, sometimes an American writer. Once it was Stanley Kubrick, but then I think she remembered he spoke Russian.

  ‘Why so?’

  ‘He has done terrible things to my country. Him and those brigands.’

  ‘What did he do? Yermolov.’

  ‘I know for a fact he is killing people.’

  ‘Pravda, chto li? Is that the truth?

  ‘In Moscow, years ago. Yermolov was wanting to build new apartment block. All the tenants in the old block, he is killing them. One by one. Every day, one. Until the people were so frightened they gave away their homes for nothing.’

  ‘He offered me a job,’ I said thoughtfully. ‘I turned it down.’

  ‘This I am gratified to hear. Rapists, all of them.’

  I didn’t pay too much mind to Masha’s accusations, particularly as she’d never actually been to Moscow. The story was the kind of sinister gossip that swirled around every wealthy Russian. I tried to prompt her again, but by then she was away, into all the wrongs that had been done to her beloved people. I was content to listen to her distinctly individual version of European history, punctuated occasionally with a highlight from her past repertoire. Her voice was ravaged by time and fags (she’d gaily taken up smoking when she left the stage), and though even in her heyday she’d only made it as far as the Fenice chorus, I thought she still sounded marvellous.

  *

  That evening, as I returned to my flat in the last of the evening’s heat, Masha’s words returned to me. ‘Rapists,’ she had said, ‘brigands.’ Strong words. The almost eerie calm with which Yermolov had dealt with the trespasser, the memory of his arachnoid hands . . . I could believe that he would erase anyone who got in his way. Maybe that was why I had found him compelling, why I was still irritated at my own failure to impress him. My speculations were interrupted by the buzz of my personal phone in my bag. It was Steve, who’d put me in business in ways he didn’t even know about. After the unfortunate business with James that summer at the Hôtel du Cap, I’d blagged my way onto his boat on the Mediterranean. In return for my stealing information from the study of one Mikhail Balensky, Steve had helped me to open a Swiss account with the cash I’d taken from poor old James’s wallet. Only 10K, but it had felt like a fortune to me back then. The account had been the useful thing really – it was where I had deposited the money from the sale of the fake Stubbs which had lost me my job at the House and started me off as a dealer. I still bought for Steve now and then, so I thought he might be asking after a contemporary piece, but his WhatsApp message read: Just got tickets for Burning Man! Awesome! Carlotta asked me to invite you to her wedding.

  As far as I could tell from his intermittent messages, Steve the billionaire hedge-funder had recently noticed that it was time to start Giving Back. Or at least he’d finally cottoned on to the tax advantages of philanthropy. Still, Carlotta’s wedding was news. When we’d met on Steve’s boat, she and her spectacular tit job had been engaged to a lugubrious German named Hermann. Was he the lucky groom? I messaged back: Awesome! When and where? His reply came straight back, unusually, as a single text conversation with Steve could sometimes take weeks: Monaco. Saturday. Dinner Friday night. Tomorrow evening, then. Typical of Steve to assume people could just hare between countries the way he could.

  As if in reaction, my work phone muttered. Sodding Facebook. Sodding Alvin. Hey Elisabeth? Where did you go? You missed a crazy-fun party!!! I should stop by your gallery some time. Ciao x

  Why didn’t we just wear ankle tags like American convicts and be done with it? That was my evening shot. Lying face down on the kilim I’d brought with me from Paris, I banged my head thoughtfully on the wool a couple of times. It had come up beautifully, considering. It would be laborious to take yet another train via Milan across to Nice, but I would appreciate the time to read, and if Alvin was going to pop by, I had no intention of being home. I messaged Steve for the blushing bride’s details, called up the Trenitalia site and booked myself back to the Riviera.

  *

 
Carlotta’s ‘rehearsal dinner’ was to take place at the Joël Robuchon restaurant at the Hôtel Metropole. Since I’d turned down Yermolov’s 100K, a bit of an economy drive was in order, so I’d taken a room in a simple place over the French border at Cap d’Ail, but the taxi driver who took me from the station in Nice warned me that I would be better off catching the bus to Monaco proper, as some weird tax law put the cabbies off from entering the principality between six and eight p.m. Carlotta’s dress code was ‘Riviera Chic’, whatever she thought that meant, and it felt a little odd to be waiting at a scruffy bus stop in a delicate, flower-embroidered Erdem gown. However, the ride itself was a revelation. When the white bus eventually pulled up, none of the female passengers so much as glanced at my full-length ruffles, probably because their collective get-ups made them look like a hen night on the razzle in Selfridges. Monogrammed Saint Laurent purses jostled against quilted Chanel clutches, rainbow-ribboned Alaïa corsetry competed with Balmain gold zips, and no heel was less than four inches. It was only when I began eavesdropping on the pair behind me, an older woman busy on her iPhone and what was obviously her stunningly beautiful daughter, that I realised all of these woman were whores. Second-rank, obviously, since they didn’t have apartments in Europe’s dreariest tax haven, all of them en route for the night shift. The mother behind me was patently her child’s pimp, arranging the evening’s programme of jobs in clear, unembarrassed English, while the girl stared placidly out of the window beneath her cape of straight ice-blonde hair. As the bus contorted itself around the high corniche roads I closed my eyes and listened in to the chatterings of this exotic aviary. I could have been back in London, in my old job at the Gstaad Club, hearing the same negotiations between beauty and money that had once been the backing track of my nights. The difference was that these girls were serious professionals. Across the aisle, two more blondes were discussing the merits of various contraceptive pills to stave off menstruation – ‘The thing with the Saudis is, you bleed, you’re out’ – while a curvaceous brunette cooed sweetly to her john while rolling her eyes and making puking motions at her giggling friend.

  That could have been me, I was thinking. That could so easily have been me. For years I had trained myself to become a professional of beauty, had believed that talent and energy and brains would carry me to a real career in the art world. And then I had learned that it wasn’t enough, that the only thing my boss Rupert had a use for was my body. So I had used that, had played the world in which I found myself at its own game. But it would have been so easy for things to have gone the other way; I couldn’t dismiss that.

  Carpeted corridors and unknown faces waiting in anonymous suites, the trick and the folded bills, the hot-tub grind and the slow crawl home in the searing dawn. I felt my wallet burning through the soft leather of my bag, the neat wad of fifties, the credit cards, the keys to my beautiful Venetian flat, but for the first time those talismans failed to throb with their customary reassurance. I didn’t feel grateful not to be part of this world; I felt removed, abstracted, the pale chiffon of my dress encasing me like a shroud. The cheerfulness, the resignation of these girls just left me feeling lonely.

  Well, plus ça fucking change. Pull yourself together, Judith. I had friends, didn’t I? Several, in fact. I was going to meet Carlotta and Steve, and I’d never seen Monaco. As the bus released its tottering workers I twitched off the feeling and stumped up the hill to the Metropole, dodging a Ferrari, a luminous orange Bentley convertible and something that could have been Johnny Hallyday to reach the sunken portal of the lobby. Carlotta was attending her guests at the door of the restaurant’s private room in a fluttering Pucci slip, slashed down both sides for good measure. The vast rock I recalled seeing on her left hand had been replaced by an even huger arrangement in yellow diamonds. Looking more closely at the bald, bespectacled character bemusedly clutching her hand, I noted that Hermann had also been replaced, possibly by his grandfather. Carlotta blinked at me doubtfully for a few seconds before falling on me like a long-lost sister. We did a bit of screeching and air-kissing, during which I whispered in her ear, ‘Who’s the lucky boy?’

  ‘Franz,’ she hissed back. ‘He’s Swiss.’

  ‘What happened to H?’

  ‘Oh, he’s in prison now,’ she trilled airily, pouting over my shoulder at another arrival.

  I presented my gift, a set of delicate Venetian lace napkins, which were plonked onto a display table among a pile of branded carrier bags. Whatever matrimony held in store for Carlotta, she was never going to find herself short of an Hermès ashtray.

  Steve was peering through the waxy petals of a sinister puce orchid, poking as ever at his phone. His transformation from brutal capitalist financier to New Age crusader was signalled by a move into cargo pants and a thin red leather thread tied around one wrist. Otherwise he looked much as usual – that is, sheeny and awkward. I dodged around an ivy-entrailed column into his sightline.

  ‘Hey, gorgeous,’ was his greeting. Back on the Mandarin, Steve had known me as Lauren, my middle name, which I’d started using as an alias at the Gstaad Club and then for quite a few other things. I’d been obliged to tell him that I’d changed my name to Elisabeth for professional reasons, to give myself a bit of cachet, but although we’d spent a summer sleeping side by side on his boat a few years ago, I doubted he remembered the original version.

  ‘How’s tricks?’

  ‘You know, crazy. I just came back from an Ayahuasca retreat in Peru. Awesome.’ Always a bit late to the party, Steve. ‘You want to see a video?’

  ‘No, thanks – if we’re about to have dinner.’

  I couldn’t think of anything amusing to say about hallucinatory vomiting, so I asked about his charity. The last time we’d met, at Istanbul Contemporary before the summer, Steve had told me about a foundation he’d started which aimed to lift three million people out of extreme poverty in three years. I wondered if he’d invented an algorithm to keep count.

  ‘Fantastic! We’ve provided tablets for a hundred thousand children in Somalia!’ he replied proudly.

  I did think they might have preferred lunch, but I kept that to myself; it would have confused him. I took an exuberant cocktail from a passing waiter, just as another woman reached towards the tray.

  ‘Sorry – after you.’

  ‘No, please, after you.’

  We bumped our noses awkwardly into spirals of carved watermelon, before I introduced myself.

  ‘I’m Elisabeth, an – um – old friend of Carlotta’s.’

  ‘I believe we’ve met.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I don’t believe so.’

  ‘Forgive me, my mistake.’ She looked at me curiously. ‘I’m Elena.’

  ‘Are you bride or groom, Elena?’

  ‘I know Franz from St Moritz. My husband and I have a place there.’

  ‘How lovely.’

  Elena was a couple of decades off Franz’s vintage, and she must once have been beautiful, but her face was a collage of Botox and filler that might have been entitled ‘Fears of the Trophy Wife’. Her lips had been pumped so far beyond their natural limits that they threatened to fall off her jaw like cushions from a sofa, while her original cheekbones were lost under two plump apples of plastic that squashed her green eyes into feline currants. From a distance she could have passed for thirty; close up she was ageless as a gargoyle. Hers was a face I had become accustomed to in Venice, peering startled above sable collars or Fortuny foulards, the most shocking thing about its wilful malformation being how ordinary it had become.

  When I had last met Carlotta she had been one among a thousand Riviera girls, just a step up from the tarts on the bus, clawing her way to security one shellacked fingernail at a time. Her prospects had improved with her ascent to marital respectability, but I doubted that she was the first, or even the third Mrs Franz, and though the other wives were now obliged to welcome her as one of their own, the question in all their eyes was ‘Who’s next?’

 
I dragged my attention back to Elena and asked if she would be attending the reception tomorrow evening.

  ‘Yes, I’ll see you at the party,’ she remarked as she drifted off. Her accent was Russian, but I didn’t feel confident enough yet to attempt any conversation in her language. I rejoined my hostess, who had momentarily loosened her grip on her fiancé.

  ‘Congratulations!’ I enthused. ‘I’m really happy for you.’

  ‘Well, Franz is seventy, but he’s, like, really into me, you know?’

  ‘How could he not be, darling?’

  ‘And he’s no bother, if you see what I mean. You should get yourself a nice old one.’ She leaned forward confidentially. ‘Less trouble. We’ve got a house in Switzerland – we’re there November through February. You should come visit! And, like, a flat in Zurich, and the beach place here. He’s not so bad,’ she added speculatively ‘And the boat, of course.’

  ‘Of course.’

  She took my hand and squeezed it. ‘Thank you for being here. You’re, like, one of my closest friends. It means a lot to me.’

  Looking round the forty or so people picking their way gingerly through the swarm of orchids, I wondered how desperate Carlotta must be for mates if she counted me as a close one. I imagined I’d been summoned just to make it seem she had some actual girlfriends – predators of her type tend to hunt alone. Still, I was quite fond of her, in a way. I admired the honesty of her ruthlessness, if not her taste in restaurants.

  *

  However, when we assembled the next evening at Franz’s home, I gave Carlotta a silent cheer. Franz’s house, set on the shore beneath the famous ‘Rock’ that incorporated the palace of the Monaco royals, was an exquisite creamy deco pavilion, with a slim entrance hall which cut into a hexagonal drawing room, opening in turn onto a garden overlooking the shore. I clocked a pair of Louis XV marquetry commodes and a Max Ernst from his surrealist period before the harassed-looking wedding planner ushered me upstairs. Carlotta was standing unselfconsciously naked among about ten of the women from the previous night, who were struggling with varying degrees of grace into flesh-coloured Eres body stockings.