'Yes, yes, of course, I…'
'Seven-thirty, then. Oh, yes, you can return Bataille if you're finished with him.'
'Yes, wait. What shall I wear?'
He laughed. 'My dear, you must be beau, chic, elegant. Always.'
He hung up and I sat in my room with a feeling that I had found something I didn't even know was lost. I felt breathless and light. One puff of wind and I would have floated away. I laid on my back staring at the map of Italy on the water-stained ceiling. I stretched out my arms and legs as if they were connected to elastic and I was being pulled in two directions. I took deep breaths until the little bird in my chest settled. Beau, chic, elegant. Like Ruth Raphael.
*
I am a Capricorn – organized, pessimistic, good at climbing walls. December had completed the 12-month cycle of the planets and I wasn't ready for the next one. I had enjoyed being eighteen. Eighteen straddles the threshold between being young and grown up. The figure 8 is aesthetic, infinity on its feet. I saw the 9 in nineteen on my birthday cards as a tadpole, a dark sperm carrying alien DNA, the word – nine – in tune with the grating sound Matt made grinding out broken chords on his new Fender.
Daddy was home for Christmas. Uncle Douglas was drinking the wine cellar dry with Mother, and Mother was so sparky and pleasant it occurred to me that of the two brothers she probably thought she had married the wrong one.
I should have been happy, but I wasn't. The Black Dwarf was in my brain and in my bed. I dreamed I was drowning and what flashed before my eyes wasn't all the things that I had done in my life but all the things that I had wanted to do and had not yet done. I put on a false face, a mask, and didn't go to Midnight Mass with the rest of the family. Try not to do anything too pagan.
Christmas passed with presents and there was that dead time that takes you to New Year's Eve with its cracker of false promises. Douglas, a writer, famous in a small way, observant as a nun, caught me one morning coming down to breakfast as he was climbing the stairs.
'Ah, there you are. What have you been up to?'
'Just reading.'
'You can read with that racket going on?'
Matt was already practising. Douglas looked at his watch. It was about eleven o'clock.
'Come here a moment, I've got something for you.'
I followed him into his bedroom. He opened a drawer, removed a little wedge of £50 notes from his wallet and folded them into my dressing gown pocket.
'Go and buy something wicked, it'll cheer you up.'
'I can't take this,' I said. I held £300 in my hand to give back to him. 'You've already given me a present.'
'A bunch of books. What good are they?' He slipped the money back into my pocket and lowered his voice as if to relay a secret. 'When money goes it comes. When money stays death comes.'
'I like that.'
'It may even be original. I've got to the stage when I can't remember what I've written and what I've pinched.' He sighed. 'How's Cambridge, by the way?'
'Quite hard, actually. It's easier at school when they tell you what to do. Now, you have to decide everything for yourself.'
'That's the thing with decisions, you decide one thing and never know what might have happened if you'd tried something else. Now,' he said, 'go and do something frivolous.'
He gave me a hug and the Black Dwarf loosened his grip on my throat.
I was about to leave his room and stopped. 'Douglas, how did you decide to become a writer?' I asked, and he laughed.
'I didn't decide. I can't do anything else.'
'That's not true.'
'My dear, it is. Your father got the brains. Now, go on, and bloody cheer up.'
I waved the cash. 'Thank you.'
'A mere bagatelle.'
A smile slipped about my cheeks. I skipped breakfast. I showered, pulled on a pair of jeans, caught the 19 bus that Mother takes to Peter Jones and got off at Shaftesbury Avenue. I had no plans. But when you are not looking for anything you always find something you didn't know you needed.
My blue trainers with red laces led me down Old Compton Street and into the shop where I had made my first acquaintance with the mask. I descended the stairs to the basement and was drawn to the mannequin in the corner wearing a white lace uplift bra, tiny briefs tied at the sides with bows and white stockings with elastic tops and matching bows like garters. I tried the set on and my black mood lifted as I stared at myself in the mirror. There's nothing like white to clear away the black.
I went to Selfridge's in Oxford Street where I bought a sleeveless white dress that fitted snugly over my hips and buttoned up the front to a high collar threaded through with red ribbon to match the red buttons. I found a pair of red patent medium-heels and when I studied myself in the mirror at home I wondered when I would ever wear anything quite so chic, quite so elegant, quite so beautiful?
Oliver Masters obviously knew the answer to the question before I did. That day of our dinner I laid out the costume on my bed, the dress to one side, the underwear like a figure beside it. I went for a long walk and my feet felt as if they were barely touching the ground. The day was cold but I didn't feel cold. I felt numb. I watched a couple kissing under a bare tree. I read for pleasure in the afternoon and fell into a strange sleep over the pages.
There was no shower, which I missed. I took a bath, washed and blow-dried my hair and gazed at the clothes laid out on the bed, pure, white, according to Bataille, an invitation to be sullied. I dressed slowly, as if I were being watched. I smoothed the lace panties up my legs, snapped into the bra, the stockings with bows, the red shoes shiny as jewels. I paraded around the tiny space in the empty room with that wanton feeling you get when you are doing something illicit. It was the beginning of my romance with pretty underwear and dressing with the curtains open.
There wasn't a long mirror and I could only see sections of myself by standing back and twisting at odd angles. I leaned forward over the sink to paint my lips in a shade of red that complimented the ribbon in the dress. There was a look in my eyes I didn't recognize and I watched my reflection as I pushed the cap back on the lipstick. I cleaned my teeth, dried the toothbrush and dropped it in my bag where it took on the look of a cuckoo's egg in a blackbird's nest.
He was waiting at the Great Gate. We climbed into a black Jaguar with a wooden steering wheel. It had belonged to his father. I sunk into the leather seat, knees together, cherry red lips unsmiling. The girl in the mirror. Life has patterns. Each act is another pebble thrown in the pool and the ripples spread and join, grow and diminish. Everything is linked by cause and effect. You are what you think, and what you think, if you think about it long enough, becomes real.
The car revved and the gears grated. The lights picked out trees and signs and silhouettes. I would like to say that I felt like Marie-France when she rode through the country lanes beside Kamarovsky, but that would be a slip in time.
We arrived at an old farmhouse converted into a restaurant that stood on the edge of the river. I watched a shooting star cross the sky and explode into dust. It could just as easily have been Earth, I thought. Life is short and fragile. We sat in an alcove beside lattice windows like cracked mirrors. There were two red candles in silver holders on the table, a white linen cloth, silver condiments and cutlery.
I had been carrying Eroticism and gave it to him now.
'Bataille,' he said. 'A whole new world.'
'Yes.'
'We live in a lukewarm bath of complacency and tedium. There other realities we can reach for. Don't you agree?'
'Yes, I do.'
'Are you agreeing to be agreeable?'
'I am agreeing because I agree.'
'So wise for one so young. Then,' he said, 'perhaps you have an old soul.'
He was seducing my mind. But I had known that was going to happen. The mind is just another organ fixed to the whole landscape of the body, the red lipstick, the white tights with garter bows. I had been…not afraid, not nervous. I wasn't sure. I
was wrapped in a moment of madness. His eyes strayed down to the book and an odd, twisted smile crossed his features. He tilted the cover towards the light.
'A little accident?' he said.
'I was in that wine bar, Slice of Melon. Do you know it?'
'It looks like fingerprints,' he said without answering my question; I recalled Mother's rule to never to explain nor apologise, but the words slipped out.
'I'm awfully sorry.'
'So, the Katie Boyd imprimatur will remain in my library and I will think of you every time I reach for the book. Was that your plan?'
'If it was, it was subliminal. Sometimes we do things without knowing the reason,' I said.
He placed the book on the shelf in the alcove and I was saved by the waiter.
'Monsieur, Mademoiselle?'
'I am going to order for us both, is that acceptable?' Oliver said and did so before I replied, a volley of French I could barely follow.
We clinked glasses and sipped white wine. It wasn't cheap. I could taste the difference. He asked me about Christmas and I didn't avoid the truth. I said I had been depressed.
'Christmas provides that promise.'
'I usually enjoy Christmas. My father is always home…'
'Your father?'
'He's stationed in Singapore at present.'
'Military?'
'Civil Service.'
'One of those keeping us safe from unknown threats and dangers,' he said. I didn't respond. 'Is it a new dress?'
'Yes.'
'It suits you. You must always dress simply. Nothing showy.' He laughed. 'I could say the same about your prose.'
'You have read my essay?'
'We will come to that later.'
'You liked it?'
He smiled. 'You are looking for compliments. Don't be vain, Katie,' he said and my name sounded strange as it left his tongue, like it belonged to someone else.
We ate soup with bits of fish floating on the surface. The waiter kept refilling our glasses, buzzing back and forth like a fly, archetypal with a moustache and dinner suit. The restaurant was half-full, or half-empty, the conversation in the background like a rippling pool below the beams of the low ceiling. He had been in France, visiting his mother during the holidays and had used the time to do some research. He was working on a book about Napoleon's fiction. During his conquests, Napoleon kept a mobile office pulled by four horses. At night, while his soldiers slept, he entered the office, sat at his Louis XV desk on a padded chair and wrote unspectacular novels. He ruled half of Europe, but dreamed of being a great writer.
'He had passion without gift and no understanding of the gulf between literature and philosophy.' He paused. 'Literature is the question without the answer. Philosophy is the answer without the question.'
The waiter slid into view with the main course. Stuffed pigeon in burgundy with small bones. I pushed the food around my plate and drank with inexplicable thirst. Philosophy, writers, thinkers, painters. My head was spinning; no, not spinning, it was an open closet filling with new accessories. He admired Duchamp, thought Richard Hamilton under-valued and Picasso over-rated. He enjoyed French writers, and considered the only good writers in English to be Indian. He rained salt over his food.
'I'm trying to harden my arteries,' he said.
'Why?'
'I have a bet with a scientist who abhors salt. Whoever lives longest will win £20.'
'How will they collect their winnings?'
'It is a surrealist bet.'
His eyes flicked from his food to me and back again. 'How very droll that you should plaster your DNA over my Bataille.'
The candle flames danced. The waiter loitered. I felt like an actress in a play. I knew, I had known since the first time I was alone in his office, how the plot would unwind to the dénouement and had done everything to stay in character.
'My essay?'
He ran his hand through his curls. 'The writing's competent, a few too many run on sentences. The comma is a sign of hesitancy. The full stop shows clear thinking. He who hesitates…' He broke off, then asked: 'Tell me, Katie, are you the maiden?'
'Yes,' I replied.
He smiled. He finished the wine in his glass. 'You understand her role?'
'I understand the role as Bataille sets it out.'
'We shall drink to that.'
We tapped the rims of our glasses. I felt a wave of contentment, not happiness, exactly, but an insight into my own stupidity. It is never wise to fret over the past or the inevitable. I had been fretting over both.
He waved away the menu when the waiter returned and ordered coffee. He stood, went to the coat rack and returned with a parcel wrapped in newspaper.
'Here,' he said.
He dropped the parcel on the table. It was book-sized. I picked it up and gave it a shake.
'A tennis racket?'
He laughed. 'Do you play?'
'Sometimes.'
'Be careful. If you play against me, you'll get a thrashing?'
'I didn't get anything for you. Was I supposed to?'
'You are not supposed to do anything except be yourself.'
The newspaper wrapping the parcel was a page from Le Monde. Inside was A Spy in the House of Love, a novel by Anaïs Nin.
'In English,' he said.
'Thank you.'
'It is not a course work. It is for your education. You can fingerprint this one as much as you like.'
We drank coffee. I was aware of the other diners watching us as we left the restaurant. The night was black, icy, the view hazy through the windscreen. The engine throbbed beneath me. It was like entering the future, my gaze focused on the light ahead not the darkness behind. I felt a moment of giddiness, as if I were fleeing a crime, but that was probably just the burgundy.
We crossed Nevile's Court, climbed the stairs, went Indian file along the corridor. The rows of prints gleamed like eyes as we passed through the Berber tent to his bedroom with its big four-poster bed and oak furniture. He lit the table lamp, peeled off my coat and I stood passively as he slowly worked his way down the column of red buttons at the front of my dress.
17
Truth & Lies
The music from the funfair followed us on the wind as we crossed Albert Bridge and found a cab on the Embankment. We could see the strings of lights across the river, the big wheel like a giant clock, the silent chimneys of Battersea Power Station. We sat close, and I felt a terrible impatience every time we stopped at a red light.
We shed our clothes on the living room floor as we hurried for the bedroom and made love with the tree branch drumming the window. Our bodies were growing to know each other, they knew things our minds were still processing, and slid together like oil on oil. He kissed my brow, my nose, my lips, the hollow of my throat, kiss after kiss as if he were unzipping a tent flap before climbing inside. We made love again, and tears welled into my eyes.
'You're crying,' he said and I smiled.
He licked away my tears. I rolled flat on my back, my head resting on his arm. The light from the lamp in the next room created a feeling of space and distance. I could hear the pulse of a heartbeat and wasn't sure if it were his or mine.
In the House of Mirrors I had caught a glimpse of the girl I had been that night in the restaurant with Oliver Masters, candles reflecting in the windows, a finger-stained book. I remembered the car beams flashing in the trees, my knees together, pale as pearls below my coat, and I remembered Sibylle Durfort hanging her last show before driving off the road and breaking her neck. I watched his fingers run through the red buttons on my dress. It fell to the floor and I stepped forward as he took my hands. His eyes ran over my lace underwear, white stockings with bows; a Christmas gift.
Like the stillness before the storm, there was a pause, a theatrical moment, the last chance to turn back. He then sat on the stool at the end of the bed and bent me like a folding lamp over his knees. He slipped his fingers under the elastic and drew my panties over my bottom
. His hand thundered down on the soft flesh and I felt a pain like no pain I had ever felt before, a searing burn threaded through with shame and humiliation. He hit me again, a second time, and a third, a fourth and a fifth, and just as Georges Bataille had described in Eroticism, the pain warmed my sex and became an inexplicable pleasure. As his hand came down one more time, my insides melted and my entire body went into spasm. I gasped for air. My heart exploded like a flower. I squirmed on his broad knees and he stroked my bottom as if I were a small bird that had been trapped and was now ready to be released.
How much of my story was false-memory, embroidery, a confession? It's hard to know. There is a kind of truth in a well-told lie. When we look back, we don't see things as they were but how we would like them to have been. Every mother's son was particularly bright at school. The past has a knack of rearranging itself. Was I casting a stone into the lake of the future? Was I testing him? Was I competing with Marie-France?
We had made cheese on toast and sat in the living room drinking tea from big white mugs. I was wearing his sweater.
'I suppose you got an A for the essay?'
'C, actually,' I said. 'It only happened that once. Oliver's a fan of Duchamp. He doesn't repeat himself.'
'And you still use his first name.' It was a statement, not a question. He put his plate on the floor. 'It was a typical display of power over weakness.'
'That's not entirely true.'
'What part of it isn't true?'
'I always knew where it was going. I wanted to go there.'
'That's because you were nineteen, you're five minutes out of boarding school, you want to gulp down new experiences. Having fantasies is natural. Your teacher taking advantage of that is abuse, whatever way you look at it. He was treating you like…like an object.'
'The female contradiction,' I said. 'We've got two forces in our heads. Half the time, we splash on the war paint and dress like objects. We want to be desired. And sometimes, we want to put on an old pair of jeans and be left alone. Wasn't I adorable in my little red kilt?'
'It was the damaged finger that really got me,' he replied. 'You are doing the exercises?'
Katie In Love: full length erotic romance novel Page 20