by Don Boyd
By now, Emma was reading a beautiful passage in English from The Prophet. She had removed her zipper jacket. She wore a tight black and grey body stocking under a flimsy, short black skirt, covered with a transparent, gossamer sheath which looked like a veil, and her only concession to colour – red high heels with red leather anklet straps. She struggled through the poetry and then finally broke down, staring out at the congregation, helpless. Sobbing. Hugo stood up and ushered her back to her seat, as Xavier replaced her at the lectern.
“This man is a creep!” Archie whispered, incensed.
Margot looked down at her husband’s shiny black shoes and squeezed Elvira’s hand until the blood drained from her fingers. Xavier waited until Emma was re-seated comfortably.
“I first met Paolo when he came into my classroom at a small boarding school in Edinburgh.”
His voice oozed a quiet, reverential charm. Almost in the fashion of second-rate television pundits, he gave certain words an unnecessary emphasis, which added to the theatricality and pretentiousness of his address.
“He came straight up to me and in perfect French told me that it would be a waste of time to attend my classes but he would like me to teach him how to sing the songs of the French pop star Johnny Halliday and recite the poetry of Verlaine. I laughed at him and told him that his voice sounded more like Edith Piaf – he was not much more than a little boy – I explained that Verlaine’s poems were complicated, and unsuitable! ‘Piaf was a collaborator!’ he hissed back at me and at the end of the first lesson he stood up in front of the class and sang in perfect French a poem by Paul Verlaine which had been turned into a song by Claude Debussy.
“The poem is en français…”
Xavier’s voice was smooth and his French accent impeccable.
Dans le vieux parc solitaire et glacé,
Deux formes ont tout à l’heure passé.
Leurs yeux sont morts et leurs lèvres sont molles,
Et l’on entend à peine leurs paroles.
Dans le vieux parc solitaire et glacé,
Deux spectres ont évoqué le passé.
‘Te souvient-il de notre extase ancienne?’
‘Pourquoi voulez-vous donc qu’il m’en souvienne?’
‘Ton Coeur bât-il toujours a mon seul nom?
Toujours vois-tu mon âme en rève? – Non.
‘Ah! Les beaux jours de bonheur indicible
Ou nous joignons nos bouches! – C’est possible.
‘Qu’il était bleu, le ciel, et grand, l’espoir!
‘L’espoir a fui, vaincu, vers le ciel noir.
Tels ils marchaient dans les avoines folles,
Et la nuit seule entendit leurs paroles.
Margot looked at Hugo. He was impassive. Emma tearful. Paolo’s mother, Alicia, was looking down. Eusebio stared ahead. Xavier stared out at the coffin. Even the purr of the air-conditioning unit seemed to be holding its breath. And then another mobile ‘phone, or perhaps the same one, began to ring incessantly.
“Paolo!” Robert quipped in a loud voice. He had moved up to replace Xavier to speak. The congregation laughed except Margot, Elvira and the girl with the yellow dress who stood up abruptly, slid through the length of her row and marched up to the lectern as Xavier was about to leave it. She slapped his face with her left hand, her right hand, and then walked slowly out of the chapel. Xavier stood there silently for a moment or two with as much dignity as anyone might muster under the circumstances, before walking back to his seat while Robert replaced him at the lectern. He mumbled a few awkward words of apology about his joke and spoke a simple prayer in Latin and quickly walked out in the direction of the girl with the yellow dress. The priest returned to the microphone, shrugged sympathetically at the family and began a blessing which ended in a chanted rendition of the Dresden ‘Amen’! Paolo’s body descended into the bowels of the crematorium and the congregation ambled slowly out of the auditorium.
Who was the girl in the yellow dress? Nobody seemed to know. Robert had followed her out – he obviously knew her. Every funeral has its idiosyncrasies. At this cemetery the procedures largely varied according to the status of the family involved. Money, of course, could intervene. As far as Paolo’s family was concerned, there were no issues on either front but his mother and stepfathers had made their wishes very clear. Everybody was invited to the memorial site at the top of the hill. As soon as the congregation had discovered this, a phalanx began to form behind a tractor and an old-fashioned, small, glass-covered hearse which had been attached to it. The kind pulled by horses in the nineteenth century. Four officials with yellow boiler suits emerged from the side of the crematorium, carrying the coffin which had now been sealed.
“I thought he was going to be cremated.”
“Paolo hated the idea of being burnt.”
Archie looked anxious. Margot ignored him at first. She was looking for Xavier who had vanished. She caught Laura’s eyes. She acknowledged her gently with a smile and mouthed, “See you later.” This gave Margot her excuse.
“I am so sorry but I have a client this afternoon, Archie. I can’t make the wake. But I need to talk to you.”
“A client today?”
“I can’t let her down. I made a promise. She has insisted that it had to be today.”
“You must at the very least come to the burial. It would be regarded as unacceptably disrespectful not to. I can give you a lift back into town after that.”
“I will come to the burial but I can walk back to my office, thank you…”
A small motorcade wound up the steep hill to the Lorca family memorial mausoleum, a small chapel looking out towards the Mediterranean. Paolo’s mother’s grandfather had built this before the First World War. There was a small, private burial ground nearby with a few crosses and a fresh open grave. The wind had become stronger, whipping up a series of dust flurries. A mechanical crane lifted the coffin tastefully off the trolley which had been hitched to a motorised hearse. Four more yellow-suited cemetery officials carried it efficiently over to the small throng around the grave. They lowered it awkwardly and then, to the family’s stunned incredulity, the coffin refused to descend. The gravediggers had misjudged the size of the coffin. They tried every angle; they tilted the box and managed to lower a corner into the grave, but everything they tried was doomed to failure. It just didn’t fit. Finally, Eusebio whispered something to the priest, who in turn whispered a few sentences to the pallbearers and they carried the coffin into the small chapel. Margot used this diversion as her opportunity to leave and hugged each member of Paolo’s family. She kissed Archie, who repeated his offer to drive her to her office.
“I will walk there, thank you, darling.”
I know that at some stage I will have to tell Archie everything. Not yet. But the beautiful girl with the yellow dress… and I need to talk to Robert.
Chapter Twenty One
Laura was waiting outside the building in the square. Margot noticed that she had applied some pink lipstick and was playing with her wristband, the way Muslims play with worry beads when they are anxious. She followed Margot upstairs. When they had settled down opposite each other in her room, Margot looked more carefully at Laura’s left wrist. She was wearing a simple cord bracelet, a replica of the one Xavier had cut from her own wrist. She tried to disguise her feeling of nausea.
“I love your bracelet. Did you make it yourself?”
Laura was startled and fingered it nervously. “No, no! It was a silly gift from a sweet little girl who made it at my daughter’s school.”
Her first lie. Margot knew it.
“I know… I know. I suppose you think that it looks suspiciously like the remnants of some shady relationship!” Laura unnecessarily volunteered with a laugh. That part of her answer was possibly true.
“No! I would never dream of second-guessing anything about you at such an early stage! We need time.”
Margot was now pretty certain that the man who had become her obsession was t
he same man her new client had come to talk about. She asked Laura if she would mind if she went to the bathroom. It sounded like a feeble excuse. She grabbed her mobile phone and went into the small cubicle, where she sat and collected her thoughts. She was shaking and couldn’t help thinking back to the last time she felt like this, in Xavier’s apartment. She sent a text to Archie, asking him to be at home early. She washed her face and returned to Laura, who seemed to have accepted her superficial reason for needing to leave the room so soon after they had sat down. Had she been a therapist, she would have guessed something was up.
“Okay. Sorry about that…”
“Please don’t worry. My plane to London doesn’t leave until nine tonight.”
“Are you going on holiday?”
“Business. Our annual conference is always in April. That’s why I had to see you this evening. Thank you. I know it must have been difficult after that funeral.”
And then rather nonchalantly she asked the obvious question that anybody at the funeral would have asked: “Who was that woman in the yellow dress?”
“I have no idea. I have never seen her before.”
“Do you know Xavier? That man the strange girl in the yellow dress slapped at the funeral?” Margot was impressed. Butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth.
“Robert Eliot, the editor of the local ex-pat rag, introduced me once at the opera. But no, not really…”
Laura didn’t flinch, but there was an awkward pause. And then Laura laughed imperiously. A little too heartily.
“Robert! Oh, of course, that Robert! Robert once tried to seduce me at a party! He is spectacularly unattractive. I have always had the upper hand in all my dealings with the opposite sex. I remember reading a story by an Italian writer, Moravia I think, describing the kind of relationship the young woman at the centre of his tale, a story about madness really…” and she faltered, “…a relationship she was having with her father who was for her the ideal lover, but only in her fantasy life… I don’t know why I am telling you this.”
Here was the familiar pattern. New patients enjoy passing on information which has no relevance on the surface. A subtle way of boasting about their intelligence or their intellectual prowess. Margot made a note of this, but was really desperately trying to hide her horror at the significance of the rope bracelet, although she still had no hard evidence. Did Laura really think she had negotiated her way out of the trap that she had stupidly set up for herself by bringing up the incident between girl in the yellow dress and Xavier? Perhaps she had thought that by raising the subject, it would deflect any possible thought that she knew Xavier. Margot encouraged her to carry on talking.
“And your father?”
“I have kept my father at arms’ length in the same way that the woman in the Moravia novel did. I hated the idea that he should have in anyway spoilt my relationships, my dealings with men. I suppose I bought into all those early feminist theories which were so chic when I was at Oxford. But to tell the truth, I had always believed that I was beyond even that kind of simplistic politicisation. I wanted to be me.”
The eight-minute rule: everyone she knew who had been to Oxford or Cambridge always dropped this fact into their opening salvos, and always within the first ten minutes!
Laura had a strange, disjointed way of talking. She would pause and wait a couple of beats as if she was expecting an answer or an interruption. Margot kept silent during these pauses.
“And in that way, any man who posed even the tiniest threat, through his sexuality or any other peculiarity of his masculinity… any man who has tried to destabilise me or threaten my need to be in control… any man, all men like that have been the object of immediate scorn from my point of view, of contempt… or have just been just completely ignored. I go cold with these types. I know they are going to be trouble and I give them a very wide berth. I have always chosen to be with men who were happy to submit to my terms of business… Does this all seem rather cold to you?”
She recognised all these elements of Laura’s somewhat cerebral self-analysis and identified with her desire to buck the clichés of male domination without the usual annoying, pseudo-feminist political rhetoric. Nothing new!
“Having said all that, I have no desire to be a dominatrix! No masochistic tendencies ever show up when I am making love, having sex. I like to give pleasure as much I like to receive it… My partners never complained, and in my husband’s case, our sex life has been and still is great – loving… Sensual… full of regular orgasms. He is a great lover and he always says that I am too, which I believe because he so clearly enjoys it… I have never liked the idea of pain much, being hurt during sexual interplay… Spankings are not for me… no German shepherd fantasies. When so much of it is so pleasurable anyway, what is the need, or the point in having somebody hurt you? Never got it! Understood it existed, powerfully, but never got it, personally…”
Margot had heard variations of this story before and knew what Laura was leading to. At Chicago, she had spent time reading around what were loosely called gender issues and sexual denial. She had spent one long, agonising summer reading the somewhat impenetrable theories of the French structural psychologist Jacques Lacan, who believed that women had become irretrievably sexually subjugated by men. Lacan saw conflict even in the signs used outside public toilets to delineate the entrance to the separate facilities for men and women. That summer, Margot had embarked on an elaborate mission to analyse women in this context. Interviews with victims of domestic violence. Visits to meet convicted rapists. Case studies about men who visit dominamatrixes. She spent a two-week period attending the trial of a pimp and then privately interviewed all the prostitutes who had testified against him. And then there were the many ‘ordinary’ women, suffering in secret because they chose to turn their fantasies into reality, victims of extreme forms of sexual deviation. Violent fantasies. Bestiality. Rape fantasy and simulation. Sado-masochism. Role-play. Many of these women Margot interviewed had happy, fulfilled marriages and successful careers. They just lived duplicitous secret lives. Her new client was quite probably another example.
Laura then, quite suddenly, changed tack and began to ask Margot a series of almost rhetorical technical questions… almost as though she knew that Margot had not been particularly surprised by what she had been telling her. It was time she moved to the next stage. She was going to dip her toes into murkier, less penetrable waters.
“Am I allowed to ask you personal questions?”
“You can ask them but I am very unlikely to answer them if they are about me. You are the client. I am analysing you here! But ask away, so long as you know that I will obviously want to know why you want to know these things.”
The tension was unbearable.
“Is our body, and I mean the female body, designed to accommodate hardcore sex?”
“What do you mean by hardcore?”
“Perverse, unnatural hard core sex. Anal penetration, for example?”
“I am afraid that my psychotherapeutic experience in that area is limited but I know a little about the psychology.” She concealed her experience with as much insouciance as she could muster.
“You have never had anal sex?”
“What are you trying to establish, Laura? Are you interested in my own experience, and if so, why? Obviously many women have pleasure from anal sex.”
“I am looking for some common bond if you like… And what about rape… or a rape fantasy?”
“Again I am trying to understand why this is important to you…”
“What would you say if I told you that I have been raped voluntarily every week of my life for the last six months?”
Margot quickly absorbed the almost laughable shock value of Laura’s confession.
“Rape is a criminal act and I would have thought that the concept of rape per se makes the idea of it being voluntary somewhat contradictory.”
“If a man is threatening to kill you…” Laura paused, as if col
lecting her thoughts, “…and you agree to allow him to fuck you involuntarily, I would call that rape, wouldn’t you?”
“Yes, I probably would. But every week of your life?”
“Sometimes I see him twice a week.”
“Threatening to kill you twice a week?”
“I suppose the word is ‘rape’… He rapes me every time we meet each other and part of that is a violent threat… I suppose the word ‘kill’ is a little melodramatic. But that is what it feels like to me. He petrifies me.”
“I am sorry, Laura, but I am not quite taking this in. You meet this man twice a week. And during the course of the time you spend with him, he rapes you? Why do you meet him if the rape seems almost voluntary?”
Margot realised that this was an important question and at the same time the first truly prurient, non-professional question. She wanted to know her answer so badly. Laura paused. She continued to stroke her makeshift bracelet.
Margot was also rummaging through the database in her mind; she kept remembering Freud’s patient, the eighteen-year-old Dora. Margot had never really bought into his convoluted arguments about Dora’s compliance when she confessed that she had been raped by an older man, the husband of her father’s mistress. Freud maintained, needless to say, that Dora must have wanted him to ‘rape’ her and let it happen, albeit involuntarily, on the surface. And if she took Freud’s scientific analysis to its extreme, Laura would be trying to seduce her right now. Freud believed quite seriously that he was the object of Dora’s desire during his sessions of analysis with her. Dora had wanted to seduce her father’s friend and in turn seduce him. Transference! But of course, in Freud’s case, the analyst was a man and the last thing Laura was doing right now was in any shape or form some deeply disguised form of lesbian seduction! Superficially, his theories about Dora’s secret desires and sexual frustration might certainly apply to Laura but this would take hours of therapy to analyse conscientiously. And Dora brutally abandoned Freud early in her analysis, incensed by his patronising assumptions. Innocent dreams about her misplaced jewellery box, a gift from her father, became according to Freud, incestuous desires and repressed sexuality. But Margot was hooked. She realised that this patient represented a new departure. Laura had ignored her last question, or had no answer for it.