Although Trilby is tone deaf, she is susceptible to hypnosis, another of Svengali's dark arts. Under his power, she performs in a trance. They travel across Europe, making their fortune, until Svengali has a heart attack during a concert in London and Trilby, as she sings on, is shown to be talentless without the maestro's influence. Having been acclaimed in high society and lived among the élite, Trilby O'Ferrall returns to her former role in the laundry, aware that her only gift is her fading prettiness, the fate of most women.
The moment he left the warm sheets and the door clicked shut, I had that feeling you get when you are lost in a strange town and night begins to fall. I curled into the chair where he had watched me undress with my book of cuttings, tears seeping into my eyes. My hands trembled and I squeezed my fists together, hurting my finger as I did so. I could see the tremor of my heart through my skin and was tempted to crawl into the darkness of the closet.
Car lights flickered across the wall. The man on the art-deco lamp puffed on his cigarette. A helicopter rattled the windows; they are always there, watching, filming, reading our wretched emails. I had suffered panic attacks before, but not for a long time, and I couldn't work out why it was happening now. He wanted to return for breakfast, have lunch, take me to be inspected by his sister. What was I panicking about?
I stood beneath the hot needles of the shower and the creature in my chest slowly grew still. I dried myself in front of the mirror, my reflection veiled in steam. I dream sometimes of flying solo in the fastest jet ever seen, or riding in a rodeo, bareback on a stallion, or grilling small fish for friends on a shady terrace in Spain. We live the life we live and I often wonder what it would be like to live another life far away beyond the window, somewhere warm with long sunsets.
It was raining again, continuous streaks slanting down in razor slashes, as if the banks and City buildings were an aberration to be razed like Sodom and Gomorrah. The sky split with lightning. I counted the rolls of thunder, one, two, three, four miles west along the river, where my parents were making their plans for the evening; when love goes, kindness stays.
After dressing in old things, I made an omelette, opened the bottle of wine and the phone buzzed with a text as I filled the glass.
-Missing you already xx
A smile lifted my lips and I hated myself for being so pathetic. I keyed in my reply.
- Only two kisses?
- For now. And here's two more xx
- x
The exchange made me instantly happy, ridiculously so, and I remembered Lizzie had left a message. I called back.
'Hi sweetie, it's me,' I said.
'I thought you must have died. How's lover boy?'
'Not sure yet. What are you doing?'
'I'm meeting Ray at ten.'
'Fancy a drink at Jacques first?'
'I could manage that,' she said after a pause, and I caught a hint of reluctance; a benevolence. 'About nine?'
I poured the wine down the sink, took two bites from the omelette and went to look at my shoes.
*
Jacques is a champagne bar in Dean Street close to Groucho's, haunt of TV people and screenwriters, intense men with wild eyes and thumbed scripts in shoulder bags. Pink, scene of my capricious youth, is nearby. So is the French House, where George Orwell wrote items for the BBC during the war and Francis Bacon, in the years following, entertained friends and hangers-on. He said the job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.
The job of the writer, then, is to pose questions, not answer them. You enter a novel as you enter a house of strangers, not knowing who you may meet or what might happen. Like a mirror maze, you must follow the reflections and distortions to the secrets veiled by the words. Bacon also said, Champagne for my real friends, real pain for my sham friends.
It was in Jacques where I often sat on a high stool at the bar plotting my stories. A skinny girl in tight clothes writing in a notebook has a magnetic pull on those in the shadows. I was conscious of this, conscious that the man or woman who drew up the stool beside me would inevitably ask the same question: what are you writing? Writing is like a religion to those who don't practise, an act of faith for those who do.
On the occasions when I did accept company, it was only with those who had gone beyond the predictable, restless souls with an air of abstraction, of ambiguity.
You're not searching for a publisher, are you?
I'm not searching for anything.
Aren't we all searching for something?
Perhaps I've already found it?
You wouldn't carry a notebook if you had.
I would, on hearing the right code, accept the gift of a glass of champagne with the understanding that I would be travelling somewhere that night in the back of a black cab.
Was a glass of champagne my price; does every woman have her price? It's not as simple as that. It is the promise of novelty more than danger that makes my pulse race and I have suffered the consequences. There are men who can't resist kicking the heads off flowers. The white wall calls out for graffiti. Our ancestors sacrificed virgins to appease angry gods and the angry men who invent them. Abusing a casually met girl is the natural response to those primordial genes, a pleasure seldom but sometimes shared.
The bar in Jacques forms a long arc, allowing those perched on stools to see who is present at the zinc counter and who, with the benefit of the mirrors behind the bar, sits at the tables or dances on the polished wood circle of the dance floor that holds in paler wood the silhouette of a seahorse. It is where, on somnambulist nights, I have resisted the flutes of champagne offered by men with primitive desires and danced alone to my private thoughts.
Valmont places a glass before me and slowly pours. He is that rare thing, a quiet Australian; he is originally from Lyon and is making the customary pilgrimage back to Europe. He has never asked what it is that I write in my notebook.
'Bonne année.'
'Bonne année.'
He fills a shell-shaped dish with almonds, another with green olives. The music is soft, guitar and piano, a fusion, unidentifiable. I adjust my hair, flicking a loose curl back into the nest, a mannerism men at first find amusing and quickly tiresome.
I set my phone on mute, swivel in my seat, glass in hand. I adore these moments, the champagne bubbles fizzing; time suspended.
The lights are amber and grow like strange fruits with tulip-shaped blooms from the high ceiling. The walls are decorated with old black and white images of Paris blown up and vaguely distorted, the Eiffel Tower, the Seine with barges laden with coal, the bridges and street lights.
A girl sits alone in the corner, the amber light making a halo above her head. She wears a sleeveless white dress with thin straps quite like my own. The dress sparkles with sequins and her wide lips open like a fish as she tilts back her glass. She places the empty glass down on the table as a tall man with dark hair and a moustache paces across the dance floor towards her. He looks determined, uncompromising. I can't hear what he says, they are too far away, but the girl nods her head as he speaks and I can imagine his words as he lowers himself into a chair.
He turns to face the bar; he has the eyes of a cobra, black as obsidian, and clicks his fingers in the way of confident men from faraway places. Valmont, without hurry, carries a bottle and a bucket of ice to the table. He opens the champagne, the deep-throated pop of the cork like a canon from the 1812 finale. He pours two glasses. The girl smiles. She has blue eyes, a pretty retroussé nose. Her skin is luminous, the firmness revealing her age, eighteen, perhaps, her arms like streamers of white ribbon flashing in the semi-darkness. Her blonde hair is gripped in a chignon, and a ring with an ice-blue stone sparkles on her finger. She is Russian, most probably. They have appeared like a new species of orchids, tall sullen girls hard to read, sleek as new cars.
A smile lifted my lips as I recalled suddenly the way Tom had removed the bandage from my fractured finger and checked the movement. Like a watchmaker. I admired the look in
his eyes, lively, concentrated, without guile. He made love aware of my every motion, the steady articulation of my legs, a rower in a skiff, the roll of my back, the way I opened myself fully to take him inside me.
After making love, making love with the same man rarely recaptures that sense of vertigo and wonder, the magic of it. With Tom, this man of whom I knew nothing, a stranger with tousled hair and soft hands, each touch of his flesh intoxicated me in a way only satisfied by more of the same. I could smell his smell about me even now. His tone, when he spoke, was deep, melodious, like the plucked strings of a cello, a voice used to being listened to and obeyed. There is a word in Italian: stucchevole, so delicious, so exquisite, just a little can be too much. I was besieged by a yearning, a craving, a burning desire. My heart had opened like one of those mysterious flowers that only bloom at night.
Love and sex have never been confusing to me. I have Roger Devlin to thank for that. That summer's day at Black Spires had not left me with a sense of loss. On the contrary, I had driven back to the office with a sense of well-being. My dream of selling the house had been a delusion. Once you undo one button, the light comes on. You leap from the diving board. Mr Devlin had spied the misty island of my deepest instincts. There were no strings, no promises. Our lips never touched. It was just sex. I had turned virginity into a fetish, a phobia, and cast it aside with a sense of relief and liberation.
I've done it, I thought, I've finally done it.
As we passed through the tunnel of overhanging bushes into the sunshine, he ran his palm over my bare leg.
'You're something else,' he said
And I thought: I'm not, but I will be.
'Thank you,' I replied, and he took a photograph of me in profile.
'I'll send you a copy,' he added, but never did.
I dropped him at the station and the rest – the rest is fantasy.
They say after your first time you feel different and it's true. It's like getting over a long bout of illness. That night, I kept running upstairs to look at myself in the mirror. My lips seemed to be fuller and my cheekbones rose over the hollow of my cheeks; I ran my fingertips along the ridges of bone, the shape anticipating the mask waiting in the future. I was about to begin a journey and the butterflies in my tummy were like tiny fluttering hands packing a suitcase. Yesterday I was a girl, I thought, a child. Now I am not. Five years of anxiety and exams had washed away on the tide of Mr Devlin's raucous climax. My eyes sparkled like the lawn after being watered by the sprinkler and contained an expression impossible to interpret. I had rather enjoyed parading half naked in front of the gardener without knowing why. Now, I knew why.
I adjusted the mirrors, pulled off my clothes and studied myself from every angle. My spine had bowed, pushing out my bottom, and I had grown an inch taller. The last pubescent traces of baby fat had slipped from my cheeks and chin and seemed to have gathered around my breasts. I couldn't resist turning and squeezing my nipples, they were pert, delicate, the colour of coral, and tingled as if with the minute stabs of a thousand needles. Was I pregnant? I didn't even care. The lips of my sex were moist and, when I touched myself, my fingertip had the fragrance of the sea on a sunny day. It was the long hot summer of 2003. I was deeply tanned, quite beautiful, I thought, a small vanity, and felt in touch with my true nature.
The weekend came and there was just one person in the world with whom I wanted to share my secret. I called her. I packed two dresses, two pairs of knickers and a toothbrush in a shoulder bag. I kissed Mother on both cheeks and caught the 6.20 train from Canterbury to London. I stayed with Bella in a flat she shared in Notting Hill with Tara Scott-Wallace, one of the twins from school.
Bella knew the moment she looked into my eyes that I had finally left the cloying confines of Saint Sebastian behind me. She threw her arms around me.
'Esto Quod Es,' she said, and kissed my lips.
It was the school motto - Be what you are.
'I am.'
'A little tart?'
'Absolutely.'
'I am so happy, Katie. Was it that, what's his name, Simon?'
'Noo...'
'Was he a poet? A svelte handsome Lord Byron?' she asked and I laughed; we'd studied him in literature.
'No, actually, he was old with a bit of a belly and a gold chain around his neck.'
'How marvellous, my dream,' said Tara, and we all hugged like we were back again in the dorm.
Bella brushed a curl from my eye, an oddly male gesture that came naturally to her. She had been born with feminine charm and masculine determination in equal measure. She had once written an essay on all the things Romeo and Juliet had done wrong and what she would have done to bring the Montagues and Capulets together. I have a photograph of her in costume in the school play and study it when I have to make a difficult decision. I try to work out what she would do, then do the same. She had from the age of fourteen always been conscious of her innumerable talents. She had waltzed into school after living in Italy and proceeded to seduce everyone, each to their needs. She knew what she wanted and exactly how to go about achieving it, the opposite of me, the opposite of Tara, languid, gamine, with big brown eyes and perfect features, identical to Saskia, her twin, two dolls straight from the factory. They were my rivals, my mentors, my oldest friends.
Tara and I watched Bella perform at a gig that night, her career was just starting, and after the show they took me to Pink in Wardour Street, where I would come to learn that where sex with a man carried an air of menace, sex with a girl was like slipping into a bath of bubbling water.
I had been cloaked in the shadows of my family, class, education, my own secret ambitions. A little membrane had snapped and my eyes had opened. I understood why Mr Drew was offhand with me, men will either fawn over a young girl or feign disinterest. I knew why Mother was constantly on the verge of a nervous breakdown. She was a beautiful woman who must have missed afternoon sex with strangers and was forced to find her pleasure among the bridge players and golfers of rural Kent knowing, no doubt, that Daddy, an Orientalist, was with a girl half his age practising his language skills. People adore sex but take it far too seriously, an error I had no intention of making.
8
Black Dwarf
My one concern after driving away that day from Black Spires was waiting for the letter I knew was coming to finally slide through the brass flap on the door and fall to the doormat. Like a death row prisoner, it was like waiting for a reprieve or a death sentence, that something not merely personal, but universal, was suspended within the contents of that letter.
When I arrived home each day from Drew Butler, I searched the places where Golo hid the mail and took my disappointment with me out into the garden to catch the last of the sun. The trees on the horizon at this time of day were bronze like statues and a pink and pale blue glow illuminated the sky. It was, we would learn, the hottest summer on record. I was as brown as teak. Old people were dying from dehydration, the environmentalists warned us that global warming was destroying the planet, and there was a ban on garden hoses, which Mother told the gardener to ignore.
Now, ten years later, when everyone talks and texts nonstop on their smart phone, the very notion of waiting for a letter seems like a literary device. I started to imagine the communication was lost in the post, or had never been sent in the first place. In an unkind moment, I did wonder if the missive had come and Mother had hidden it for reasons that would never be fully explained and would be put down to the onset of menopause.
Then it arrived, a pale dun envelope with a smudged stamp, and I had that feeling I imagine parachutists have the second they pull the rip cord, a tug, a lurch, fear and relief. It was Saturday morning, hot already. The French doors were open. Golo had left the letter on the breakfast table and I heard as I reached for it what I'm sure was a nightingale. I rushed back upstairs, the envelope in trembling fingers. I peeled back the gummed flap, a war bride opening a telegram. Destiny doesn't run in straight lines. I had r
eached a crossroad, and the contents of that letter would send me in one irreconcilable direction or the other.
Mother poked her head around the door. She was in her dressing gown, velvet slippers with embroidered initials, no make-up.
'It's come?' she asked and I nodded.
'And?'
'I haven't looked yet.'
'Best get it over with.'
I pulled out a sheet of paper with a crest on top, glanced at the words in the first paragraph and tears welled into my eyes. I ran into her arms.
'You got what you wanted,' she said.
I sniffed back my tears. 'I worked for it, Mummy.'
'We all know that,' she said, and shook herself free. 'You must call your father, and Matthew.'
'I will.'
She always wore heels. In her slippers, I was taller, I realized.
'Well done,' she said.
'Thank you.'
She left the room, closing the door. She was pleased for me, I knew that, even if she was unable to show it. I glanced back at the letter, the words fizzing like a struck match. The touch-paper had been lit that day. My life was starting; Mother's was in stasis. She had achieved and acquired the things she had wanted and was aware that there were other landscapes she may have crossed. We set out on a certain course. It is hard to change direction, harder still to turn back down a path littered with regrets. We get one life and I wanted to do everything, be everything I could be. Be myself. At school, there had been moments of boredom and melancholy. Now, I was free. I stood at the open window. The sky was a shade of blue that doesn't visit England often and the lawn was as green as an emerald.
It was mid-afternoon for Father. I could hear the pleasure in his voice when I called him. Fresh tears filled my eyes and it occurred to me that I always cried when I was happy and was stoical when sad; the English way.
Katie In Love: full length erotic romance novel Page 8