Desire

by Mariella Frostrup

“And the dogs, of course?” Alexis teased.

  “Yes, and the dogs, of course,” she agreed, laughing, and went below to change.

  The bathroom aboard the felucca was large and included a bathtub for two, a dressing room and a pair of washbasins. The fittings were white, while the entire bathroom was in beige travertine marble. All the towels were mustard-yellow and there were kilims on the marble floor.

  After she had bathed and put on fresh makeup, she slipped into the magnificent nightdress he had bought her for this night.

  Isabel looked at herself in it and realized what great erotic feelings and fantasies Alexis must have about her. The nightgown was elegant but evoked a feeling of base sexuality. Her nipples and the dark flesh around them protruded through the openings in the lace, and the slits up the side exposed her thighs, hips and legs. It was, without question, a nightdress to tantalize the sexual appetites of a man. When she put the peignoir over it and pinned the diamond dragonfly at the closing under her breasts, she realized that she did not feel like Isabel at all, but like some sexual object designed, prepared and ready for her man to use.

  She was deeply excited. This would be a night of pure sexuality. Tonight she would use Alexis as the sexual animal that he was, and together they would reach new heights, as husband and wife.

  She sighed and went to the safe for her diamond earrings. She would wear them this evening.

  When Alexis came for her, she was looking out of the oversized portholes to the banks of the river. She could see fires twinkling in the distance.

  He looked at her and said, “I cannot believe we have done it, and you are my wife.”

  He could not help but take each of her nipples in his hands and roll them around with his fingers. Then they went up on deck together.

  The felucca looked an absolute dream. It was totally silent on board except for the sounds of the Nile lapping up against the boat, and Rita and Winston, who were on the raised deck lying among the cushions, snoring away.

  The deck was lit by lanterns, and under the huppah of flowers a large bed had been made and covered in silk embroideries. It looked like the most magnificent four-poster bed in the world with its canopy of glorious flowers above.

  Towards the stern of the boat a sumptuous table had been laid. There were quail in a casserole of rice, several different salads and fruits, along with cheeses and baked ham. And for dessert – the wedding cake.

  When they cut their wedding cake, both their hands were on the knife. They repeated their vows exactly as they had under the huppah, only hours before. She knew then that he loved her in a way that she had never been loved. It was all that she had ever wanted.

  They kissed each other, their mouths tasting of the sweet and rich wedding cake. They went up and lay among the cushions on the raised deck. They found set on one of the small ivory-inlaid tables a jug of hot, sweet coffee, and a pair of small cups on a tray. Alexis poured for them, and they sipped and smiled at each other lovingly.

  He leaned back, took a box from one of the tables and prepared a few lines of coke. They sniffed them and floated off together as the boat rocked them gently. Occasionally they could hear laughter above the cicadas’ symphony, somewhere in the distance. They lay on their backs looking up at a ceiling of stars, like diamonds thrown helter-skelter on black velvet.

  They were silent now for a very long time. He pulled her up to her feet, undid the dragonfly and took off the peignoir. He undid his kaftan and dropped it where they were standing. He picked up a large box from among the cushions and put one arm around her waist; they started down the stairs. He moved his hand from her waist to the cheek of her ass and walked her that way to the bed under the huppah.

  He put the large box and the small box of coke down among the cushions and looked at her, taking her in his arms. His cock was huge and erect. With one hand around it, he lifted it and offered it to her; with the other he held his scrotum.

  She dropped to her knees, ready to make love to him, but he caught her as she was going down and he lifted her. She could feel his erection pushing against her, he held her so tight to him.

  “No, do nothing now,” he told her. “I want to take you, make love to you, be tender and cruel to you and keep doing it for a long time. You must not touch me yet. Later, much later, I will give myself to you. It will be different for you tonight. You will be very tight. I will play on you, work on you, open you wide again.”

  He took the little box of coke and put his fingers in it and rubbed it on her nipples and then put a bit on the tip of her tongue. It made her feel instantly sexier as he went down and sucked the coke off her nipples. All the time his hands were moving over her hindquarters, separating them and pushing them together. Finally he lifted her nightdress over her head and then caught her breasts as they fell into the palms of his hands.

  He put his finger inside her, and she was wet. He pushed up as high as he could and found her very tight. Reaching over to the large box, he took out a small jar of cream, and rubbed it high up into her vagina.

  Isabel was longing to have him. She knew her smallness excited him so that he grew to even larger proportions. She could feel the throbbing of his blood pumping in his penis.

  Alexis moved himself slowly along the outside of her genitals and then between the wet and slippery lips. Finally he dipped the very tip of it into the small opening of her vagina. She was amazed at how small the opening was. She wanted him so much, but now she was afraid that he would never get it into her. He was tender with her about it and treated her as if she were a virgin bride. He slowly managed to get the head of his cock inside her.

  With his arms under her armpits, he drew her up towards him, her legs high up now on his shoulders. He kissed her, and when he saw her passion rising, he let her down gently on the cushions. Then, pulling her legs even higher on his shoulders, he felt her wet orgasm running over the knob of his cock. Suddenly he rammed as hard as he could up through her, and she screamed from the pain.

  Although Isabel had screamed, at that very same moment she was flooded with an enormous orgasm. That first scream was not the only one that came from the felucca that night. It was as if she had been a virgin. Whatever the old woman had done, she had done well for the both of them. Alexis had her many times. They slept in between and were never satiated.

  The sun came up and the lanterns were still burning when Alexis lay looking at the sleeping Isabel. He wanted to see the sun rise on the Nile with his wife, and so he woke her by gently spreading her legs and licking her like a pussycat.

  She woke from his tongue and lazily sat up. She kissed him good morning while he slipped her nightgown over her head. He lifted her breasts and adjusted them in her gown by drawing the nipples into the holes cut through the lace. Then he cupped her breasts in his hands and smiled at her. He found her peignoir where they had dropped it the night before, and he helped her on with it.

  She took his kaftan and dressed him, tying the strings on the side. Then they went together to the bow of the felucca and, stepping up on the small raised platform, sat on some cushions and watched the sun rise.

  They heard the sounds of early morning – birds, and the rustling of small animals on the banks of the river. Far up the Nile, in the magnificent sunrise, they saw a felucca in full sail. The sun was up about half an hour when they heard voices and turned to see the dinghy coming towards the Mamounia with the crew, Gamal and Doreya.

  Alexis said, “Come, let’s pick up our things from under the canopy and go to bed below.”

  She picked up the cocaine box, and in the larger box he put the jars of ointments and the other accessories they had used. He noticed a few bloodstains on the cushions, and for all his Western education, the Arab in him came out and he felt a kind of pride. He quickly turned Isabel away from seeing them, but it was too late.

  Isabel looked at him and said, “We have to be the most depraved, debauched couple in the world,” and had the good grace to blush.

  “Yes,
aren’t we lucky!” Alexis roared.

  They laughed and then hurried down to the cabin before everyone arrived on board.

  Isabel was awake, that is, her mind was awake, but her body was asleep, and her eyes were still closed. She was feeling very lazy and sensual. She felt herself moving up and down and round and round with her pelvis, hardly moving the rest of her body. She opened her eyes and realized that she was moving with Alexis’s cock. She closed her eyes again and reached out her arms to pull him against her. They kissed, and he said, “Good morning, my lady wife.”

  Isabel opened her eyes again and smiled up at him. They rolled together on their sides and faced each other as he kept pumping in and out. He had her coming now in stronger orgasms, could wait no longer himself. He let go and flooded her. Isabel squeezed hard on him, and he felt himself held there by her. They kissed while they were together like that and then lay there and dozed.

  Much later Alexis woke and unfolded himself from Isabel and went into the bathroom. He ran the bath and filled it with a wonderful scent and soap bubbles while he shaved. Later he went back to kiss Isabel awake, then dragged her out of bed and into the double bathtub with him. She had only just enough time to wrap a towel around her hair and brush her teeth while Alexis ordered breakfast for them.

  When they finally went up on deck and were greeted by some of the crew and Gamal, they realized they had slept the day away. It was five in the afternoon. They sat in their simple white galabias on the beautiful felucca that was in full sail, making great speed up the Nile. Isabel adored the movement of the boat, and loved watching the crew at work. They were all smiles and happy to be traveling up the river.

  From THE SWIMMING-POOL LIBRARY

  Alan Hollinghurst

  Alan Hollinghurst is the author of five internationally-acclaimed novels, The Swimming-Pool Library, The Folding Star, The Spell, The Line of Beauty and, most recently, The Stranger’s Child. Winner of the 2004 Man Booker Prize, the E. M. Forster Award and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, he was chosen as one of the twenty Best of Young British Novelists in 1993. Set in 1983, The Swimming-Pool Library describes the bohemian lifestyle of the promiscuous Will Beckwith, a young man of aristocratic descent, who spends his days gorging on culture and young men, and frequently picking up boys at the Corinthian club.

  The Brutus Cinema occupied the basement of one of those Soho houses which, above ground-floor level, maintain their beautiful Caroline fenestration, and seemed a kind of emblem of gay life (the piano nobile elegant above the squalid, jolly sous-sol) in the far-off spring of 1983. One entered from the street by pushing back the dirty red curtain in the doorway beside an unlettered shop window, painted over white but with a stencil of Michelangelo’s David stuck in the middle. This tussle with the curtain – one never knew whether to shoulder it aside to the right or the left, and often tangled with another punter coming out – seemed a symbolic act, done in the sight of passers-by, and always gave me a little jab of pride. Inside was a small front room, the walls bearing porn-mags on racks, and the glossy boxes of videos for sale; and there were advertisements for clubs and cures. In a locked case by the counter leather underwear was displayed, with cock-rings, face masks, chains and the whole gamut of dildoes from pubertal pink fingers to mighty black jobs, two feet long and as thick as a fist.

  As I entered, the spotty Glaswegian attendant was getting stuck into a helping of fish and chips, and the room stank of grease and vinegar. I idled for a minute and flicked through some mags. These were really dog-eared browsers, thumbed through time and again by those rent-boys who had the blessing of the management and waited there for pick-ups; curiously incredible stations of sexual intercourse, whose moving versions, or something similar, could be seen downstairs. I looked at the theatrical expressions of ecstasy without interest. The attendant had a small television behind the counter which was a monitor for the films being shown in the cinema; but as there was no one else in the shop he had broken the endless circuit of video sex and was watching a real TV programme instead. He sat there stuffing chips and oozing, batter-covered sections of flaky white cod into his mouth, his short-sighted attention rapt by the screen, as if he had been a teenaged boy getting his first sight of a porn film. I sidled along and looked over his shoulder; it was a nature programme, and contained some virtuoso footage shot inside a termite colony. First we saw the long, questing snout of the ant-eater outside, and then its brutal, razor-sharp claws cutting their way in. Back inside, perched by a fibre-optic miracle at a junction of tunnels which looked like the triforium of some Gaudí church, we saw the freakishly extensile tongue of the ant-eater come flicking towards us, cleaning the fleeing termites off the wall.

  It was one of the most astonishing pieces of film I had ever seen, and I felt a thrill at the violent intrusion as well as dismay at the smashing of something so strange and intricate; I was disappointed when the attendant, realising I was there and perhaps in need of encouragement, tapped a button and transformed the picture into the relative banality of American college boys sticking their cocks up each other’s assholes.

  “Cinema sir?” he said. “We’ve got some really hot-core hard films...” His heart wasn’t in it so I paid him my fiver and left him to the wonderful world of nature.

  I went down the stairs, lit by one gloomy red-painted bulb. The cinema itself was a small cellar room, the squalor of which was only fully apparent at the desolating moment in the early hours when the show ended for the night and the lights were suddenly switched on, revealing the bare, damp-stained walls, the rubbish on the floor, and the remaining audience, either asleep or doing things best covered by darkness. It had perhaps ten tiers of seats, salvaged from the refurbishment of some bona fide picture house: some lacked arms, which helped patrons get to know each other, and one lacked a seat, and was the repeated cause of embarrassment to diffident people, blinded by the dark, who chose it as the first empty place to hand and sat down heavily on the floor instead.

  I had not been there for months and was struck again by its character: pushing open the door I felt it weigh on sight, smell and hearing. The smell was smoke and sweat, a stale, male odour tartishly overlaid with a cheap lemon-scented air-freshener like a taxi and dusted from time to time with a trace of Trouble for Men. The sound was the laid-back aphrodisiac pop music which, as the films had no sound-track, played continuously and repetitively to enhance the mood and cover the quieter noises made by the customers. The look of the place changed in the first minute or so, as I waited just inside the door for my eyes to accustom themselves to the near dark. The only light came from the small screen, and from a dim yellow “Fire Exit” sign. I had once taken this exit, which led to a fetid back staircase with a locked door at the top. Smoke thickened the air and hung in the projector’s beam.

  It was important to sit near the back, where it was darker and more went on, but also essential to avoid the attentions of truly gruesome people. Slightly encumbered with my bag I moved into a row empty except for a heavy businessman at the far end. It was not a very good house, so I settled down to watch and wait. Occasionally cigarettes were lit and the men shifted in their seats and looked around; the mood faltered between tension and lethargy.

  The college boys were followed by a brief, gloomy fragment of film involving older, moustachioed types, one of them virtually bald. This broke off suddenly, and without preamble another film, very cheery and outdoors, was under way. As always with these films, though I relished the gross abundance of their later episodes, it was the introductory scenes, buoyant with expectation, the men on the street or the beach, killing time, pumping iron, still awaiting the transformation our fantasy would demand of them, that I found the most touching.

  Now, for instance, we were in a farmyard. A golden-haired boy in old blue jeans and a white vest was leaning in the sun against a barn door, one foot raised behind him. A close-up admired him frowning against the sun, a straw jerking between his lips. Slowly we travelled down, lingering where
his hand brushed across his nipples which showed hard through his vest, lingering again at his loose but promising crotch. On the other side of the yard, a second boy, also blond, was shifting bags of fertiliser. We watched his shirtless muscular torso straining as he lifted the bags on to his shoulder, traced the sweat running down his neck and back, got a load of his chunky denim-clad ass as he bent over. The eyes of the two boys met; one close-up and then another suggested curiosity and lust. In what seemed to be very slightly slow motion the shirtless boy ambled across to the other. They stood close together, both extremely beautiful, perhaps eighteen or nineteen years of age. Their lips moved, they spoke and smiled, but as the film had no sound-track, and we heard only the cinema’s throbbing, washing music, they communicated in a dreamlike silence, or as if watched from out of earshot through binoculars. The picture was irradiated with sunlight and, being fractionally out of focus, blurred the boys’ smooth outlines into a blond nimbus. The one in the vest appeared to put a question to the other, they turned aside and were swallowed up into the darkness of the barn.

  Where did they get them from, I wondered, these boys more wonderful than almost everything one came across in real life? And I remembered reading somewhere that a Californian talent-spotter had photographic records of three thousand or more of them ranging back over twenty or thirty years and that a youngster, after a session in the studio, mooching through the files, had found pictures of his own father, posed long before.

  In the meantime there were other arrivals at the cinema, though it was difficult to make them out; while the sunlit introduction had brightened up the room and cast its aura over the scattered audience in the forward rows, the sex scenes within the barn were enacted in comparative gloom, allowing the viewers a secretive darkness. I tugged my half-hard cock out through my fly and stroked it casually.

  One new entrant tottered to the deserted front row, which in this tiny space was only a few feet from the screen. There was a rustle of papers, and I could see him in silhouette remove his coat, fold it neatly and place it on the seat next to that in which he then sat down. The rustling recurred intermittently, and I guessed he must be a man I’d seen at the Brutus the very first time I went there, a spry little chap of sixty-five or so who, like a schoolgirl taken to a romantic U picture, sat entranced by the movies and worked his way through a bag of boiled sweets as the action unfolded. A fiver from his pension, perhaps, and 30p for the humbugs, might be set aside weekly for this little outing. How he must look forward to it! His was a complete and innocent absorption in the fantasy world on screen. Could he look back to a time when he had behaved like these glowing, thoughtless teenagers, who were now locked together sucking on each other’s cocks in the hay? Or was this the image of a new society we had made, where every desire could find its gratification?