“This is all so sudden,” Sylvia managed to blurt out, one hand convulsively clutching her throat. “I don’t really know if –“
“We understand,” John Taylor said soothingly, “But when Miss Tate called, we immediately sprang into action. Now then, may I suggest you have a quick peek at a few magazines and storyboards that I’ve brought with me to get a feel of what we suggest?” He guided Sylvia towards a table that he had spread his papers out on. “Delicious scent, by the way, Mitsouko? Yes, I thought so…”
I watched entranced as John Taylor wove his deceit. I estimated that within an hour Sylvia would be his. And I was right. And he didn’t even use the eye drops, but then, I had done all the spade work.
The team of painters were moving furniture and wrapping china and glass. John and Sylvia were sitting on the hall stairs with a colour chart on their laps looking very matey. Bella had attached herself to the youngest of the painters, a rather charming Irishman called Fiachra, which left Hal free to follow me around the ground floor. I’d moved into the music room, sweeping the silver framed photographs off the piano when he caught up with me.
“I say Flora, isn’t this all going to cost rather a lot?”
I smiled at him. Really, out of the mouths of babes…
“Yes, of course. But just think of the result! A beautiful new home, albeit with a period of chaos and irritation.” I said gaily, looking with disinterest at the black and white faces peering at me from the fake art-deco frames.
Hal looked blankly at me.
“A pearl is an irritant within the saline silk of an oyster. To be calm in a storm can be a release, Hal. That’s what I am providing here, a shake-up, a move, a jostling of ideas, a new habitat, a change of energy.” I lay my hand on his shoulder. I could feel his young warm flesh leap to reach the touch of my hand.
“Do you understand?” I said, slowly stroking his back.
He allowed himself the luxury of staying in my power for as long as his blush took to travel to his face, and then the exquisite feeling of excitement and confusion dragged his body away.
“Um, yes, I see… well, I think I see,” he added courageously.
“That’s all that we can ask for Hal. Now then, let’s find a home for these extremely tedious photographs and then I think you and I should go out for the afternoon.”
He jumped nervously.
I smiled.
“Well, John Taylor is taking your mother shopping for a few things. Bella is helping her new friend Fiachra the painter and then I’m sure will do something yeasty with Maria in the kitchen, your father is at work, Maria will undoubtedly be busy making milky sweet tea all day for invading hordes of painters as well as instructing Bella, so you and I have the afternoon all to ourselves.”
A few glancing memories swept across my mind. Other afternoons, other young men. A jumble of images fought their way through my mind. Silky hair lapping down a smooth almost hairless chest caressed by linen sheets, a slim naked brown torso twisted in a bolt of purple fabric, an open mouth raised to mine revealing milk white puppy teeth, how long ago? How long indeed. Perhaps far too long. But I had to be careful, I reminded myself. Peaking too early was always a danger and then I would have a love sick puppy on my hands. But, then again, the Ambles were proving themselves to be very malleable. Perhaps the timing was right after all?
“Where are we going?” Hal asked with an air of forced politeness.
I weighed the possibilities. Could I let myself indulge in the play of the flesh this afternoon? And if so, where?
“Do you know Mr Isaacs? He lives in Limehouse.” I asked, knowing that Hal couldn’t possibly know that monster of venal intrigue.
“Um, no, no I don’t,” Hal said, showing that he had been searching his memory by screwing up his brow in concentration.
“But of course you don’t, how could you?” I said.
Rule Number Five
“Copulation is the act of an animal. Seduction is the art of a
woman. But there is nothing to stop the latter taking tips from the
former.”
Archie Amble was having a bad day. He’d had an even worse night. He had suffered from acid indigestion, heartburn and insomnia, not to mention acute social unease at the hands of the Elvis impersonator at that ghastly Chinese dive. He wouldn’t be at all surprised if he had food poisoning. To cap it all off, the spare room that he’d been delegated to had a terribly draughty window that had let in a thin icy breeze that had coagulated somewhere around his left ear.
He smoothed the pink sheets of the FT spread on his desk and sighed heavily. He sipped at his coffee, noting with distaste that the china cup was not quite clean. With the amount of money that everyone was paid in this financial institution, he thought, there really was no excuse. None. Normally he would have been on the phone complaining and sorting out the problem. But not today. He was too tired. He flicked on his computer and stared at the day’s market leaders. Not good. Another sigh issued from his mouth. He stared at his diary. No inspiration of cheer came from there, either. A round of meetings, a lunch with two senior (but junior to him) heads of department where he would be expected to be avuncular yet wise and indulge in a glass too many of claret, and an afternoon wrestling with an impenetrable report.
It was all that bloody woman’s fault. Flora Tate. Who was she anyway? More to the point, how the hell had she ended up in his house, let alone commandeering his bedroom? He knew damn-all about her. What did she do exactly? On impulse he googled her.
Nothing, other than the same articles that Sylvia had shown him earlier.
Well, some sort of family tree from New England dating from 1822 mentioned a Flora Tate but obviously nothing to do with her. And there was some ridiculous web site about sexual problems that he glanced but cursorily at.
Flora Tate. Flora Tate. Hmm. Good looking woman, no denying it, no idea where she comes from though. Archie wasn’t used to feeling even the slightest of irritations and the novel sensation confused him. A slight ache in his ear and an itchy warm feeling in his groin made him sigh and groan simultaneously. He had the uncanny feeling that Flora could somehow see the scuttling thoughts in his mind, like mice skittering behind a skirting board, and he didn’t enjoy the sensation at all. He sighed again and tried to concentrate on work.
Ten miles away Sylvia Amble was having a surprisingly hectic day. John Taylor was whizzing her around London in his silver Mercedes, taking her to all the shops that she had only ever seen in colour supplements. He was well known in these elite haunts, and the owners of the shops pressed them to tiny cups of mint tea from Moroccan coloured glasses, or sips of icy vodka from silver thimbles. She learnt more in three hours from John Taylor than she had in years. She now knew where to buy a genuine Tibetan prayer wheel, how to source the finest silk, where to get amber, and what cottaging actually meant. He’d found the time to take her for a coffee in Bar Italia where he had many friends whom he had ignored, preferring instead to sit with her and talk to her about the colours that he dreamt of and the mother he missed. When John Taylor dropped her off outside her brilliantly lit house (brilliantly lit because of the severe wattage that builders use and the bare, curtain-less windows) in the chilly early evening, and roared off giving a cheerful wave, a piece of her heart went with him.
Bella Amble was in heaven. She had made snitzen with Maria and distributed the sticky, sweet fruit bread to all and sundry. Fiachra had pronounced it a treat, just like her. He had also confided that the job would take ages. Bella lay on her bed after the builders had gone, turning the pages of a cookery book, wondering what delights she could woo her beloved with on Monday. Perhaps by then the spot on her chin would have gone, too.
Jack the gardener spent the afternoon puzzling over the arty photographic book that he had been given. He brought it back to the Ambles along with a stack of ham and pickle sandwiches. He sat, in his garden shed, looking at grainy black and white pictures of other garden sheds and marvelled at the s
heer lunacy of the gentry. He should have been sweeping the gravel at the very least, but the weather was cold and grey and the nasty cough he had made the shed seem very attractive.
Maria Kandinsky surreptitiously gathered the remains of the snitzen together in a parcel of silver foil, ready to take to her room where she could nibble on it later. The Ambles would have been horrified at the thought that Maria was underfed, but that wasn’t the case at all. She just liked the feeling of illicit snacking. It helped her to remember the terrible days of hunger that she had endured as a child. And anything that Maria could dredge from her memory of her hard childhood made her happy. She frowned when she thought of Flora Tate, and had a nagging feeling that she had encountered her before, but didn’t know where or when.
The Ambles house had taken on an unaccustomed air of chaos and dust. It was the dust of years ago that had been unleashed with the upheaval of removing the carpets and pictures and heavy furniture, that had, up till now anchored the dust where it was invisible. Step ladders, rolls of plastic sheeting, tins of paint and boxes of tools were stacked neatly enough against the bare walls. Boxes of knick knacks were piled in the hallway. The piano was standing alone and unloved in the middle of the room, leaving Marmaduke bewildered as to where his bed had gone. He eventually settled outside Flora Tate’s room, turning three times on his imaginary long grass, to make a bed.
Meanwhile, over at Limehouse, I was introducing Hal to Mr Isaacs. I felt very sure of myself. I knew how Mr Isaacs looked to Hal, indeed, how he looked to all of us. His voluptuous face was classically proportioned into one of those visages that belonged to the sixteenth century perhaps. He would have been quite at home being a Vatican spy, or perhaps the power behind a doge’s throne in the murkier times of Venice, where loyalty was severely tested and found wanting most of the time. Needless to say, Mr Isaacs and I saw eye to eye over nearly everything.
With very little talk he ushered us into his Spartan office, and then unlocked the back door, to reveal a damp and chilly courtyard. Hal and I followed him in single file, my heels clicking on the broken paving stones. A few clammy ferns clung to the high sooty brick walls, but otherwise the courtyard was bare. The humming of a large refrigeration unit could be heard, and the twitterings of some brave London sparrows, but that was all, even the traffic noises were muted. Mr Isaacs unpadlocked a sturdy looking wooden door at the end of the courtyard, and stepped back to allow me to enter first. We were in yet another office, but oh how different this one was. A small mahogany desk and an abacus were the only real sign that any commerce went on here. Otherwise it was all red. Plum coloured walls, layer upon layer of Persian rugs, a damson coloured velvet chaise longue, and a vast, intimidatingly vast, mirror that only I knew to be a two-way affair. It was like stepping into a nomad chieftain tent on the steppes. An incongruous looking steel door was set in the middle wall of this riot of colour, from which the hum of the motorised unit grew louder.
Mr Isaacs (we had never been on first name terms, and in this life never would be) motioned for Hal and I sit on the chaise. Of course, sitting on a chaise has never, in all the history of that particular piece of elegant and opulent furniture been an option. One lolls or reclines like a well fed pasha and Hal and I were no exception. I saw that Hal was very silent looking almost frightened. He was, for all his outward polish that comes from good schooling and a polite family, nevertheless a very nervous young man.
“I say Miss T- Flora, what are we doing here? I mean –“
“Oh, I am so sorry Hal, haven’t I explained who Mr Isaacs is? He’s my furrier.” I smiled reassuringly at Hal laying a soothing hand on his young warm arm.
He looked blankly at me.
“He’s your what?”
Do they teach them nothing at all at school these days? Honestly.
“I buy, well, borrow perhaps might be a better way of describing it, all my winter furs from here.”
They were very special sorts of furs too. A long time ago there had been an uprising of British sentimentality about the wearing of furs, culminating in a mass bonfire in Trafalgar Square. Mr Isaacs had been there too. Some think he may have engineered the whole thing. Whatever the truth, and we can be sure that we will never find anything out from clever Mr Isaacs, he was now the owner of the rarest, most luxurious, furriest furs in the whole of the British Isles. Mink, Ocelot, Sables, Tiger, Leopard, Bear, Wolf, Ermine, Beaver, Seal, Astrakhan, even the humble sheared sheepskin hung in perfect order in the vast humming cold store behind the steel door. Every hue of pelt from the most midnight of black to the palest of grey, from the living warmth of gold and the boldness of white were waiting in the frosty manufactured air. Hung like immaculate corpses in an abattoir they awaited the soft flesh of a human to inhabit them again. And, before anyone should judge me on the wearing of furs, let me state here and now that yes, it’s a bloody business, and no, these were not new coats. These animals had perished a long time ago. And really, it wasn’t so bloody a business as a butchers really, and oh, how we all love our roast beef on this island (even with the outbreak of terrible diseases amongst cattle, the consumption of roast rib of beef has not declined in four hundred years.)
Mr Isaacs tilted his head and appraised me in an intimate, yet curiously detached manner.
“Hmm, now then, let me see. As beautiful as ever, Miss Tate, I think your complexion has grown paler perhaps? But the light here is so deceptive… What furs will you be wearing this winter? Let me think now… mink perhaps? Or is that too obvious? We shall see, let me retrieve some for you to try. In private, of course.” He spun the steel wheel on the door and pushed it open, disappearing into the chilly depths.
I smiled encouragingly at Hal. “Thank you so much for giving up your afternoon to me Hal, I find a man’s opinion so helpful in these matters.”
Hal opened his mouth and closed it again very quickly. I continued quickly, not letting him reflect that he’d had no opportunity to not accompany me.
“And then there’s the matter of the light, as Mr Isaacs so rightly said. One can never be sure of what one sees oneself in the mirror, don’t you think?”
Hal nodded, obviously not knowing what I was talking about. And indeed at Hal’s age who can blame him?
I let the silence descend upon us as we awaited Mr Isaacs’s return, giving Hal the opportunity to take his eyes away from me and wander the room. I saw him glance around, hardly taking in the rare fabrics or the Russian icon that glinted provocatively in the corner, and he settled his gaze upon me again. So be it. I can hardly be held responsible for a young man gawping, can I?
Mr Isaacs threw a pile of pelts on the floor, for a second or two if one looked quickly it seemed that the pile of furs was alive, and a medley of unsuitable animals was writhing on the unlikely floor of a Persian rug. One blink later and the world turned back into normality.
Mr Isaacs bowed his way out of the room, avoiding looking into my eyes with the practiced ease of a card sharp. I knew only too well that he would quickly make his way to the room next door and, sitting bolt upright on a hard kitchen chair, would sit transfixed before the two way mirror. There would, no doubt, be a box of tissues at his feet.
I stood up, pushing Hal gently back into his seat. And I began to undress. Sometimes it’s the best bit of the whole day. That first revealment. Oh how I loved it. A frisson of pleasure threaded through me.
“Don’t worry Hal, I’m not about to seduce you,” I said sweetly to him, to put him at his ease. I saw a glimmer of fear, followed swiftly by disbelief flick over his face. I bit back a smile. Oh the young. How little they know about the pleasuring of the flesh.
I stood in front of Hal unbuttoning my sheer black dress. There must have been twenty or so tiny jet buttons, fashioned into acorns, down the front of the dress all anchored together with twenty tiny silk lassos. I slowly slid each jet acorn through each silk loop whilst staring at Hal as I did so. He shifted uncomfortably.
“Oh, I’d make yourself comfortabl
e if I were you. This could take some time,” I said, reaching down for the last jet acorn which was level with my navel. I slid one shoulder out of the dress, and glanced in the mirror. My left breast looked as white and vulnerable as a swan’s neck against the black material. I then shrugged the other shoulder and the dress slipped to my hips. I stepped out of it, and threw the dress over the back of an armchair.
“You know Hal, I hope you don’t mind me doing this? But I find that furs really have to be tried on over naked flesh. But perhaps I’ll save your blushes by remaining semi clad? What do you think? Although I think it’s foolish to be embarrassed by the human form, don’t you?”
Hal was beyond answering. He was staring at my breasts and my hardening nipples. I brushed my fingers gently against them.
“Erectile tissue is very sensitive to temperature, isn’t it?” I said conversationally.
Hal’s eyes travelled down my body taking in the black lace garter belt and the black silk stockings. I never wear knickers. Frightfully common to my mind. I kept my high heeled black shoes on – a touch déclassé perhaps – but I couldn’t resist.
I slowly turned round, revealing my plump white buttocks that held a pearly dimple in each one.
“Now then, the silver mink first, I think, don’t you?”
Hal nodded slowly, unable to talk. He slid his hands helplessly towards his crotch and gave a faint groan. Just what Mr Isaacs was probably doing behind the mirror, but to probably more effect.
Fur after fur was shrugged on and off my shoulders. Coat after coat piled up around me on the floor. I turned and posed, and turned and pouted with every new coat. I flounced and flaunted. I paraded and pranced through the pile of furs. I could see in the reflection of the mirror that a pulse was visible in my neck, throbbing and jumping. The heat of my body had brought some colour to my face and a sheen of sweat across my brow and breasts. The smell of my warm flesh inside the cold furs soon pervaded the air. It was a living animal smell, dusky and musky. I flared my nostrils in delight. Glorious. Simply glorious. I had on a long silver fox fur, and was opening it and closing the coat, admiring my reflection, when there was a strangled cry from Hal.
Before and After Page 5