'And what does that mean? That I should start relying on you? Jenny Dolly thinks that you're the devil incarnate!'
Craig threw his head back and laughed. 'She wishes I were! Then she could sell me her soul, and get back her chateau at Fontainebleau and her seven-strand pearls!'
Pepper slowly sat down next to him. She couldn't keep her eyes off him. She understood everything he was talking about, and yet she knew that she couldn't have done. She knew that 'Gordon' was Gordon Selfridge, who owned one of the world's most successful department stores, on Oxford Street, London. She knew that Jenny Dolly was one of the Dolly sisters, two pretty young Hungarian singers who had taken Gordon Selfridge's fancy, particularly Jenny, to whom he had proposed dozens of times; and on whom he had spent a fortune before his gambling habit sank him so deeply into debt.
She held her head in her hands, staring at Craig and trying to make sense of what was happening to her. She didn't feel ill; she didn't feel frightened. She simply felt as if she were missing something important, as if she had picked up a conversation halfway through. She knew that she had intended to come here, but she couldn't remember why. Something to do with mirrors? She couldn't be sure. There were mirrors everywhere: she could see herself sitting on the sofa a hundred times over, her face in her hands, her cigarette smoke trailing.
'Mr.-?' she began, but she couldn't think of his name. He sipped whisky, amused. 'You don't have to call me Mister.'
'Then what do I call you?'
'The same thing you called me the first time I met you. Lover-to-Be.'
'I called you that? How crass can you be? I must have been drunk!'
'Probably. But you looked as though you meant it.'
'Where was I, when I made this improbable promise?'
'You don't remember?'
Pepper took her hands away from her face and half closed her eyes. 'The funny thing is that I do. It was outside the Hotel Metropole in Cannes. I was talking to the Duke of Westminster and you came out of the door and I said, "Look at him. That's my lover-to-be." '
Craig slowly nodded, but he wasn't Craig at all. Pepper stared at him and stared at him and then she knew who he was; and who she was, too.
'I'm crazy,' she said. 'I'm completely crazy. How much champagne did I drink?'
'Enough to float the Duke of Westminster's yacht.'
'Oh, God. I keep making a solemn promise to myself to stop drinking and stop dancing and stop gambling.'
'What would you do? Take up mah-jongg? Drinking and dancing and gambling is all you do.'
She leaned across the sofa and laid her hand on his knee. 'That's not quite all, my darling. I have been known to eat and bathe and wax my legs and occasionally sleep. But not soundly.'
He looked back at her and gave her a smile that she had never seen on any man's face before.
'I think you and I have a whole lot in common,' he said. 'What sign were you born under? Taurus?'
'Aries, couldn't you guess? Aries the Impossible. Aries the Irrepressible.'
'Aries the Erotic?'
'Oh, well, that's it!' she shrieked. 'Any man who talks like that, he has to be a Virgo!'
She threw her head back; and it was then that Craig slid towards her, and in one sinuous movement took hold of her waist and leaned his head forward and kissed her on the throat. Her first reaction was to sit up straight and twist herself free. But the sensation of his lips touching her bare neck was completely paralysing; as if his tongue were spiked with curare. She sat with her head back in a kind of trance, while he kissed her cheekbones, and all around her ear-lobes, and his tongue-tip followed the curve of her jaw until it discovered her slightly-parted lips.
She opened her eyes wide and his face was so close that it frightened her.
'You're beautiful,' he said. 'Your eyes are silver, like the moon.'
'Hey diddle-diddle, the cat and the fiddle.'
'I don't mind if you tease me. I can take teasing. I can take anything, from a tongue-lashing to a whip-lashing. The question is, can you?'
He was so close that she found it hard to focus on him. His breath smelled of something strange, something sweet and Oriental, as if he had been eating cachous. He leaned forward, and breathed into her ear, 'Would you do anything for me?'
'What do you mean by anything.'
'I mean anything. Anything I asked you. Would you let me spank you for example.'
'Spank me? What for? I haven't done anything wrong, have I?'
'You must have done something wrong! Perhaps you've been insolent. Perhaps you've eaten too many soft-centred chocolates. Perhaps you've had impure thoughts.'
'I never have impure thoughts.'
'Do you want to see my penis?'
'Is it really so special? I thought that penises were like Chinamen, can't tell one from the other.'
'That's an impure thought, don't you think? And you've just had one.'
'You're just trying to trick me.'
'No, I'm not. No tricks, no illusions. What you see is what you get.'
She turned her head away, and shrugged. 'I haven't seen anything yet.'
'Well, that's insolence, don't you think? That deserves a spanking.'
She said nothing for a long while. Their faces were so close that they were almost nose-to-nose. They could feel each other's breath on their cheeks. They could feel each other's warmth.
'Do you want to spank me?' she said, and her voice was nothing more than breathy ventriloquism, as if somebody else had said it, somebody standing close by.
Without another word, he dropped back into a sitting position, then forced his hands beneath her thighs, and swung her over his lap. She tried to struggle, but he was immensely strong. She had never come across a man as strong as this. He twisted both of her wrists behind her back and held them together so tightly that she felt they were clamped in a vice. Her breasts were squashed against his leg, and she had to wriggle herself ferocibusly until they were free.
'Let me go!' she screamed at him.
'This is what you wanted. This is what you asked for.'
'Let me go you son of a bitch!'
'Now, that's another transgression! That deserves at least three extra paddles!'
'If you don't damn well let me go I'll scratch your eyes out!'
'Six extra paddles!'
She kicked and bucked and tried to throw herself off his knees onto the floor. But he was so powerful that he held her firmly on his lap, and there was nothing she could do to get herself free. She kept trying to think of those self-defence classes she had attended, but then she wasn't sure that she had attended them at all, or even what they were. They must have been a dream: she must have imagined them. The only classes she could remember were dance classes, in Paris, and Madame Valmeuse standing in the shafts of sunlight in her dusty black dress smacking her hands together and shouting, 'Un-et deux!-et trois!-et plie!'
Craig took hold of the hem of her thin linen dress and dragged it up at the back. She kicked and thrashed even more wildly, but he slapped the back of her thighs so hard that she stopped, shocked, and had to wheeze for breath. He pulled her dress right up to her waist, and she could hear the seams tearing.
'Bas-tud!' she gasped.
'Bastard, am I? You've been dying for this! This is what excites you, isn't it? This is what all women like! A good hard spanking, and then a good hard ride! That's all you want; that's all you dream about. Forget all that Ladies Home Journal nonsense about romance.'
'You damned pervert!'
He smacked her, very hard, on her bare bottom. She shouted out, and tried to twist her head around so that she could bite his knee or his wrist or anywhere.
'That's one for calling me a pervert,' he told her. Then he smacked her again, and her bottom felt as if it had been set alight. 'That's two for calling me a bastard.'
'Let me go!' she raged at him, with tears in her eyes and her teeth clenched. 'I'll have you arrested for this! I'll have you locked up in jail!'
He
smacked her again, and then again. 'That's three for wriggling; and four for threatening me. Oh... and five for calling me a son of a bitch. I nearly forgot.'
The fifth time she screamed. But the sixth time she let out nothing but a low gasp. Something was happening to her; her bottom still burned but it burned with a strange, spreading warmth. She felt humiliated, and she felt hurt, but somehow both the hurt and the humiliation were exciting. To have herself forcibly exposed like this, and to be punished simply for one man's amusement, went deep to the darkest core of her sexual feelings. She had daydreamed about scenarios like this, but she had never imagined that she would experience it for real.
'Bastard,' she repeated, and waited for the next smack.
'Haven't you had enough?' he asked her, and even though she couldn't see his face she could tell that he was smiling.
'Bastard-bastard-bastard!'
Still he didn't smack her. She squeezed her thighs together, and tried to press herself against his thigh, and that gave her some sensation between her legs; but what she really craved was another smack, and then another.
'Don't tell me you've grown to like it so much already?' he taunted her. He trailed his fingertips over her reddened bottom, down between the cheeks, almost to the place where she wanted him to touch, but then he took his fingers away again.
He released her wrists, and said, 'There… you're free to go. If you hate me so much, if you think I'm so much of a bastard and a pervert, far be it from me to keep you here against your will.'
Without a word, she rolled off his lap and knelt on the floor in front of him. Flushed, perspiring, she frantically unfastened his belt and tore two buttons off his shirt in her hunger to get at him. She pulled open his pants and took out his penis, which was huge and hard and upcurving, so engorged that it was almost maroon. It was more like a bloodstained tusk than a human organ.
She looked at it for one long moment, stroking it slowly up and down with her fingernails. Then, with a slow diving motion of her shoulders, she buried her head in his lap, so deeply that she momentarily gagged; and that was where she stayed, her hooped earrings swinging and jingling as her head bobbed up and down; while he sat back on the sofa with an expression of benevolent disdain, and occasionally fingered her hair, or touched her shoulder.
'Don't be too long,' he told her. 'Gordon and Nico are coming around this evening, for dinner and a few hands of cards.'
He inspected his nails. He yawned. But after a while he began to tense, and to grip the seat-cushions. When he eventually ejaculated, he clutched her hair fiercely so that she couldn't break free, and there was a look on his face of such malicious triumph that it was just as well that she couldn't see it.
FRIDAY, JULY 16, 7:24 P.M.
Effie was walking back from the river when Norman drove past, his Charger burbling noisily and blowing out smoke. He leaned out of the window and called, 'Hi! How's it going?'
She had to shield her eyes against the sinking sun. 'I'm fine, thanks, Norman. My feet are pretty much healed up. I thought Craig was with you.'
'Craig stayed up at the house while I went to buy some supplies. Brads and stuff.'
'Are you going back there now? Hold on, I'll come with you. It's time I started to get involved.'
Norman waited outside Pig Hill Inn for her while she changed into jeans and a lumberjack shirt. He played Nirvana at top volume and ignored the frowns of passers-by who had to walk through the dense exhaust of his idling engine. As soon as Effie had climbed in, he roared off along Main Street, leaving behind him a cloud of smoke that wouldn't have disgraced an atom bomb.
'I guess the house should be liveable-in by Christmas,' said Norman. 'The pest control guys are coming a week Wednesday; the roofers shouldn't take more than like a month to weatherproof the worst sections of the roof. The glass guy is taking measurements and working out some costings. And Monday - guess what - they're going to start, like, clearing the loggias and cutting down the kitchen garden.'
'It's not the sticks and stones I'm worried about,' said Effie.
'Well, I know,' said Norman. 'Mom told me what really happened with your feet.'
'And what do you think about it?'
Norman drew back his hair with one hand, and looked at her in surprise. 'What do I think about it?'
'Well, sure. It's all so strange. Don't you have an opinion? I mean, do you believe in it, or what? What do you think's happening up there?'
'I don't know. I haven't, like, really thought about it. The only opinion that I ever get asked for is what mix of sand and concrete they should use, or maybe how to stop their sash window from sticking. I guess my generation isn't so spaced-out as yours. You know… we're not kind of looking for the same things.'
'I know you don't believe in ghosts… but you do believe in psychic vibrations, don't you? And what about those organic buildings you were telling us about, that rebuilt themselves?'
Norman shrugged. 'I'm totally open-minded. If something happens - if I can see one in front of my eyes - then sure. A whole lot of people have seen all kinds of weird things, haven't they, and they can't all be lying. Like old Henry Sneider, and his Magic Barn. It's there, I've seen it, and I believe it. I guess you just have to remember that I was brought up on all of that occult stuff that mom does; and I guess I take all it for granted. Most of it's hokum, like some of those spells she cooks up. Great for constipation but that's about all. I mean she's the Laxative Queen of Putnam County, that's what my friend Marty calls her. But as for psychic vibrations… I don't know. I know mom can really feel something bad in Valhalla, but to tell you the truth I've never seen anything or felt anything, and some times you have to wonder how much of it is down to the place, right, and how much of it is down to what's going on inside of your own head.'
'What are you trying to tell me? You think, she could be imagining these psychic vibrations?'
'Who knows? It's a possibility.'
'But I've seen them, too. And heard them. And look what happened to my feet.'
Norman turned into the sloping, narrow road that led up to Valhalla. 'Listen, don't get me wrong. I really don't know.'
'You think I imagined these cuts on my feet? I almost lost my toes.'
'I don't know, Mrs. Bellman. I've heard of spontaneous bleeding and things like that. People going blind for no-reason that anybody can think of. But whether it's something to do with Valhalla, I truly can't say. I don't think you should worry too much. Once we get that house weatherproof and warm, and cut out all of that dry rot, you're going to love it. And when it's fully restored, I can tell you, it's going to be amazing.'
As they drove up the hill, under the darkening shadows of the trees, Effie fell silent. It seemed that Norman was so excited by the prospect of restoring Valhalla that he was quite prepared to dismiss his mother's fear of it as nothing more than hysteria. What had happened to his tart defence that 'she's entitled to have her opinions' - and that 'people who can't sense psychic vibrations are suffering from mental gangrene'?
Effie may not have been able to count on Norman as an ally - she had known from the moment she had met him how much he had dreamed of restoring Valhalla, and Craig had given him the opportunity to do it. But she had felt that he was sensitive and sympathetic, and that she could rely on him.
Now she wasn't so sure. She was beginning to feel that Valhalla was nothing more than male vanity and male aggression, transformed into bricks and slates and stained-glass windows; and that every man who came close to Valhalla would eventually succumb to the moral licence it gave them, just by its very existence. A very big house for a very big man.
'Your mom's going to cleanse the house for me,' she said, as they drove past Red Oaks Inn.
'Well… she's in demand for that kind of thing. She cleansed a house in Peekskill last year. They said they kept seeing these transparent faces, floating in the hall.'
'Do you think she can? I mean, do you think it's possible?'
'To cleanse it? I guess. So
long as there's something to cleanse in the first place, apart from dirty floors.'
'You seem so sceptical all of a sudden.'
Norman changed gear to climb up the last steep slope. 'Listen, Mrs. Bellman… I don't get regular work. Valhalla's been my passion since I was small. Now I got the chance to work on it. Like, give it back its glory.'
'The way I feel about it, it was never glorious.'
'Depends on your definition of glory, I guess.'
They drove through the gates of Valhalla and jolted down the long, curving driveway. Behind the trees, the house came into view, with the setting sun burning behind its rooftops.
'Hey, that's your mom's pick-up,' said Effie. 'Don't tell me she's started her cleansing already.'
'She never said a word to me.'
Norman parked the Charger right up behind Pepper's battered blue Chevrolet pick-up, with all its peeling moon decals along the sides. They climbed out, and Effie listened, and for the first time she heard the wind moaning softly through the rooftops, the gentlest of dirges through the chimney stacks. She shivered, although it wasn't cold.
They climbed up the steps. The front door was closed, but when Norman tried the handle they found it wasn't locked. He opened it, and it swung back in total silence, as it always did. A perfectly-joined door, on perfectly-balanced hinges. Inside, it smelled the same. That odd aroma of camphor, and menthol and aniseed. Spicy, but stale, like opening Tutankhamen's tomb and finding a crisp, bandaged mummy.
They crossed the hallway. The light in the broken windows was beginning to fade. For some reason this gave Effie a strong sense of urgency, as if they had to complete their business here before it grew totally dark. Then she thought: Dracula. It's a memory from Dracula. Everything had to be done before the sun dropped below the horizon.
She looked up at the galleried landing, and the coat of arms with all its heraldic symbols on it. Bobbin, dice, dragon and skull. The four quarters of Jack Belias' life. And its legend, Non omnis moriar - 'I shall never completely die'.
The windows grew darker and darker, and Effie's feeling of panic began to increase, although she kept telling herself that everything was fine, everything was under control. She was here with Norman; and Pepper was here, too. Before his accident, she would have been reassured by Craig's presence, too.
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