Fascinated
Page 14
‘I believe I broke his legs,’ says Webster.
‘Actions speak louder than words,’ says Valentine.
‘It was nothing more than he deserved,’ says Conrad, charging his glass and draining it with a single swipe, making the bracelets chime on his wrist. ‘But Talbot never forgave him.’
‘He never forgave you for cheating him out of a fortune,’ Valentine reminds him.
‘He never had a head for business,’ belches Conrad. ‘He’s an egg roll short of a picnic.’ He smiles, raises a hand to his head and tenderly strokes his scalp, dreaming of distant days.
‘Whatever the reason,’ says Valentine, ‘since that time he’s directed all his anger at Webster.’
‘He’s no trouble,’ says Webster modestly.
‘No trouble?’ shouts Conrad, reaching again for the bottle. ‘He could have killed you that night in the Garter Club when he caught you in the thunderbox!’
‘He was lucky,’ admits Webster, licking gravy from his fingers.
‘He nearly finished you with the Cocker brothers.’
‘They took me by surprise,’ says Webster.
‘I want it finished!’ shouts Conrad, banging his fists on the table and making the maids take flight. ‘Damn and blast him! Go out and fetch me his head on a plate. Take Frank with you. I want Talbot strung by his short-and-curlies. When the world is rid of that man we’ll all sleep sweeter in our beds at night.’
‘Haven’t you had enough to drink?’ says Valentine, watching him drain the dregs from the bottle.
‘A few glasses of wine!’ roars Conrad indignantly. ‘There’s nothing wrong with a few glasses of wine!’ He lets the bottle drop from his hand and roll across the table. ‘I’m an old man. I need the comfort.’
‘You look like you’ve been boozing all day,’ Valentine accuses him.
‘You’ve never seen me drunk!’ explodes Conrad. ‘Never!’
He pulls himself from his chair, looming large in the candlelight, and struggles to keep his balance on the treacherous and billowing carpet that makes him plunge from foot to foot in a clumsy, mocking dance.
‘Dawn never begrudged me a drink!’ he burbles, now fast dissolving into self-pity. The blood drains from his face. His bangles clatter. He grabs at the table for support as he feels the floor disappear beneath him.
‘Catch him!’ shouts Valentine.
But it’s too late.
Conrad hits the ground with a roar of surprise and a flurry of petticoats and then, unable to find his feet, is content to remain in a heap and glare at the distant ceiling.
‘Bugger it,’ says Webster, stuffing his mouth with bread. He leaves the table and kneels beside Conrad, slipping a hand down the front of his dress to feel for the old man’s heart.
‘Put him to bed!’ orders Valentine, helping the maids clear the table. The meal is promptly abandoned. The candles are snuffed. The dishes are whisked away to the kitchen.
Frank volunteers to lend a hand taking the drunkard away. Conrad is spread on the floor with his legs thrown apart like a ravished matron. The dress, pulled up to his waist, reveals a pair of torn lace panties and the snags on his nylon stockings. His eyes are closed. A string of spittle shines on his chin.
‘There was treacle tart for pudding,’ grumbles Webster as they pull the old man to his feet. Conrad moans and rocks on his heels. Webster folds him over his shoulder, where he hangs like a set of saddle-bags, his arms and legs loose, his cocktail slippers hanging by the hooks of his toes.
‘Fetch his handbag,’ wheezes Webster.
Frank finds a small beaded bag lurking under Conrad’s chair, retrieves it with a sweep of his hand and follows Webster from the dining room.
‘I want to talk,’ whispers Valentine, catching his arm as he reaches the door.
‘Where?’ He pauses briefly but she slips past him, eyes downcast, flicking her hair with a quick movement of her satin fingers.
‘I’ll be in the hothouse.’
Frank overtakes Webster shuffling up the marble staircase. ‘What does he keep in this bag?’ he says, turning it in his hands as he fiddles with the clasp. It feels as heavy as a brick.
‘The last time I looked,’ puffs Webster, ‘he carried an attack alarm, an automatic and a can of Mace.’
‘Why?’
‘He’s afraid of being molested.’
The master bedroom is hot and dark with a stifling smell of mothballs and perfume. The bed is a high brass contraption, decked with flags and canopies, elaborate as a funeral carriage. The lamps that flank the bed are fashioned from coloured glass moulded in the shape of urns containing bundles of garden flowers. The room is stuffed with flowers. The carpet is a field of crimson leaves overlaid with ribbons of marigolds. The curtains are printed with roses the size of cabbages.
On the wall above the bed a portrait of Dawn rising, naked and tumble-haired, from a heap of brocade cushions. She grins at the camera, eyes half-closed, head tilted back, and fondles her breasts in her hands. She’s wearing an old-fashioned corset and a rope of polished fake pearls. She is sprawled on her back, feet raised, kicking the air, inviting the viewer between her fat thighs, as if her cunt were a chart of the heavens, a cannibal’s whiskery mouth, a witch’s mad, mesmeric eye. The photograph has been coloured like some Victorian valentine. Smoky shades of rose pink, amber, jade and amethyst. The gilt wood frame has been decorated with swags of carved anemones.
Webster leans forward and spills Conrad onto the bed, laying him out like a corpse on the floral counterpane.
‘I don’t like to see him so drunk,’ he says sadly. He pulls off the cocktail slippers, unclips the stockings, dismantles the petticoats, unwrapping his unhappy employer with the brisk efficiency of an undertaker.
‘What made him start drinking?’ says Frank. He turns away from the sight of Conrad’s belly as it rolls loose from the dress and stares instead at his own reflection in the dressing-table mirrors. The top of the dressing table is covered in jars of stale make-up, perfume bottles and a set of silver brushes. A pair of panties dropped in a heap against a lacquer jewellery box.
‘He drinks because he’s bored,’ says Webster, trying to bend Conrad’s arms into the sleeves of a black nylon nightie. ‘He’s bored and he’s lonely. And he’s getting old. It’s time he got out of here and found a place to sit in the sun.’
‘What’s stopping him?’ says Frank, watching Webster in the mirror.
‘He won’t leave the house. He doesn’t even walk in the garden. He’s been living in the shadows so long the sunlight would probably blind him.’
‘Why do you stay with him?’ probes Frank. This house feels like a fortress built to contain a madman’s dream, its dungeons haunted by the lewd leviathan of a wife.
‘I don’t know,’ sighs Webster. ‘We understand each other. We’ve grown old together …’
Frank picks his way downstairs and steals into the jungle hothouse. The moonlight streams through the canopy, bleaching the cobbled path and starching the undergrowth that leads to the ornamental pond. There is silence but for the splash of water and the mutterings of mice. The heat from the steam pipes fogs the ground and rolls in the roots of the trees.
He follows the path as far as a glade where velvet moths with luminous eyes have gathered to feast on waxen flowers. He stands patiently, listening, waiting for Valentine to emerge from the forest. He can sense her watching him from the shadows, catches a trace of her poisonous scent through the soft smells of jasmine and stephanotis.
After a while she steps into the clearing from the gloom of a thicket. Staring. Suspicious. Her long hair loosely tied in a knot.
‘Did you put him to bed?’
Frank nods. ‘He’s sleeping,’ he says, to reassure her, but finds himself whispering, nonetheless, knowing they’re trespassing in Conrad’s secret sanctuary. Who guards this kingdom while he sleeps? Crocodiles with diamond collars. Vampire bats, folded neat as black umbrellas, keeping watch for him in the trees.
‘I think he’s gone to roost,’ says Frank. A frog as big as a bowler hat crawls from its lair in the shrubbery. Somewhere behind them, maddened by moonlight, cicadas have started their frenzied singing.
‘Let’s walk.’ She slips her hand through his arm and presses herself against him as they venture deeper into the jungle.
‘Did you ever trade tales with a caravaneer in the deserts of Afghanistan?’ she says, when they’ve strolled a little way through a corridor of giant ferns.
He screws his face into a frown, serious, thoughtful, pretending to tick through a thousand adventures and voyages, as if he’s a seasoned traveller, a veteran of the wilderness, a man who has been to Belize in search of the golden jaguar. ‘I’ve had a honeymoon in Nice, a weekend in Amsterdam and a business trip to Birmingham.’
‘You’ve been to the south of France?’ The news is greeted with wild amazement. He might have said that he’s sailed around the Rings of Saturn alone in a short-sea schooner.
‘Yes.’ He pauses, pleased with himself, sucking at the heat of this tropical night.
‘Tell me about it!’ she says, eager as a child demanding stories of serpents and castles.
So Frank tries to describe the town and how, in the early morning light, he would climb the hills behind the medieval streets to look down upon the Bay of Angels where yachts drifted on a placid sea already shining like molten glass and how, in the glaring afternoon, he lingered in the shade of pavement cafes, feasting on seafood and chilled white wine, to emerge through the pungent twilight to join the strollers on the shingle shore; and how at night the sky seemed as soft as soot, astonishing after London where night never fully penetrates the city’s murk, and in this darkness an avenue of floodlit palm trees along the Promenade des Anglais. And he remembers his room at the Hotel Negresco, and Chinese rugs on the floor and the big carved bed with its canopy and rose-pink sheets; and the view from the balcony and the great glass dome of the Salon Royal. And he remembers the hordes of American students, the Parisians on parade and the shuffling old Africans who tried to sell him souvenirs from plastic shopping bags. And Jessica is somewhere down on the beach, laughing and flirting, dark as a gypsy with mocking eyes, but here his memory fails him.
‘I want to see it,’ says Valentine. ‘I want to see the great tombs of Giza and the burning ghats of Benares and the ice flows of Baffin Bay. I want to see San Fernando and Tierra del Fuego. Pukapuka and Tonga. The Tasmin and China Seas.’ The land beyond the security fence, beyond the iron hand of the city, is a world of lakes and palaces, cannibals and camelopards, mermaids and monopodes.
‘What happened to Afghanistan?’ he says as she takes his arm and they’re strolling again on the winding cobbles.
‘I want it all, Frank. Everything. I have to get away from here. Don’t you understand? I’m suffocating in this house …’ She turns to him, squinting, her face blurred with tears. She tries to swallow back her frustration, snuffles and blinks as the tears spill down. Her throat is flushed. She attempts a breathless, sobbing laugh and wipes her cheeks with the back of a glove.
‘But you’re free!’ he protests. ‘You’re free to go anywhere in the world.’ He can’t comprehend how she might regard herself as a captive, suspects her of raising obstacles to prevent her from taking the risk of breaking loose from the family. It’s different for him. He’s worked all his life at the treadmill, making just enough money to keep himself working, dreaming of having the freedom to pick and choose how to spend the days. The freedom to stay at home. The freedom to travel abroad. Time can be bought and sold but only the rich can afford it.
‘I can’t even leave the house without an escort,’ she says sharply.
‘Tell him you want to take a trip,’ says Frank. ‘He wouldn’t want to stop you. Where’s the harm in it?’
‘You think he’d let me out of his sight?’
‘Have you ever tried to face up to him?’
‘I once tried to run away,’ she confesses.
‘What happened?’
‘He sent Webster after me.’
‘How old were you?’
‘Seventeen.’
‘If we can find you a ladder perhaps we can get you over the wall. You could make another dash for freedom.’ He looks up into the treetops and imagines fireflies swarming, trails of sparks in the canopy.
Valentine sniffles and grins. ‘You’re lovely,’ she says and places a kiss beneath his ear. Her mouth is hot and red as a pomegranate.
‘That’s what you say to Webster.’
‘That’s different.’
She stretches forward and grasps the back of his head in her hand, staining his face with kisses, pecking at his eyes and nose, the edges of his mouth.
‘Isn’t this rather sudden?’ he whispers, pulling away, not daring to respond for fear she is leading him into a trap. ‘We hardly know each other.’
‘I’ve changed my mind. Shut up and kiss me.’ She grinds herself against him. Her hands pull frantically at his shirt.
He hesitates, splits open her mouth with his tongue, sliding quickly between her teeth. She tastes of sorrow and wine. The black dress, fine as cobweb, rumples beneath his hands as he gently works at the buttons. One. Two. Three. The dress falls apart with a shrug of her shoulders, slithering over the tips of her breasts, loiters for a moment around her hips before fainting away at her feet. She is left wearing nothing but a pair of black lace panties and her long satin evening gloves.
‘Quickly!’ she whispers. ‘Follow me!’
Frank squirms from his clothes with the speed of an escapologist as Valentine disappears again. He hurries in pursuit, pushing through a screen of tufted grasses, scrambling on tree roots and trampling orchids. His bare skin prickles with excitement. His cock grows heavy and stiffens, a tusk in the glimmering moonlight.
He finds her waiting for him beyond a tangled curtain of creepers. She is kneeling in a tussock of moss beneath the shade of a sprawling shrub that spills its flowers like confetti. The shrub clings to fragments of a granite column, half-submerged in the vegetation. The knucklebones of a giant sleeping in the warm, black earth.
‘Come here,’ she whispers and beckons him forward.
He stands over her and hangs his head, watching as she takes his cock in her hand, fingertips fanned along its barrel, and guides the end of it into her mouth. Her fingers are tapping a tune, dainty yet deliberate, as if she were learning to play the flute.
‘Lovely,’ she murmurs. ‘Lovely.’
She closes her eyes and suckles, her black hair flopping around her shoulders, her breasts loose, her buttocks propped against her heels and spread like a swollen valentine heart. He cries out, trembling, and gathers her fallen hair in his hands, twisting it into a rope which he holds away from her face while his cock slithers loose from her bulging mouth.
‘Do you know what would happen if he found you doing this to me?’ she whispers, tapping the flute against her chin. He remains connected to the cushion of her lower lip by a quivering silver thread.
‘He’d kill me.’
‘That’s right. You remember. I’m glad you were paying attention.’
He stares as she laps at him with her tongue, probing and pressing, nibbling with her teeth, as if she were teasing herself with some delectable morsel before seizing it again in the melting heat of her mouth.
Flowers, small as sequins, cascade against the curve of her back. A lizard with astonished eyes watches them from a crack in the granite. But tonight no ghosts have gathered to mock him.
He remains hypnotised, drugged by desire, while she makes a slobbering feast of him until, as he feels himself losing control, he tries to pull away. But she stops his retreat, wraps her arms about his thighs, grasps his buttocks and jerks him forward, driving him deeper into her throat. He moans and floods her mouth, grabbing at her arms for support as she gulps at his spurting milk, still holding him fast, murmuring encouragement, sweetly squeezing
him with her tongue.
For a time they remain locked together, her arms draped around him, her head pressed warmly against his belly, and he gently combs out her hair with his hand, slow and comforting, as if she were clinging to him in grief.
At last he shivers and sighs, saturated with pleasure, and kneels before her, kissing her face, lifting the weight of her breasts in his hands.
‘Let’s stay out all night,’ he says, nuzzling at the hollows of her neck. He glances down at her breasts, the ripe softness between his fingers, the dark halo of a stiffening nipple.
Valentine laughs and cradles his head. ‘Are you hungry? We could steal some food from the kitchen.’ The idea of it fills her with delight. Creeping through the sleeping house with her arms loaded with fruits and biscuits.
He lifts his face to kiss her throat and the slope of her shining shoulders. ‘We’ll never find our clothes again.’
‘They can’t be far away,’ she says, climbing to her feet and sweeping the fallen flowers from her body.
‘No. Stay here,’ he says, catching her wrist. ‘I want you naked in the moonlight.’
She grins, pulls at her panties, slips them down her long, white legs and casts them away with a shimmy and kick of her feet.
He picks up the scrap of lace, crushing it against his face like a nosegay. Valentine stands before him, still wearing the long satin evening gloves, confident and smiling, her skin shining opalescent against the darkness of the jungle.
‘You don’t look very impressed,’ she says, mocking him, grinning at the stump of his wilted cock.
He pulls her down, seeking her laughing mouth with his tongue, sneaking a hand between her legs as a wedge against her thighs. She struggles, pulling his ears, bucking to unsaddle him until, with a quick sleight of hand, he sinks an inquisitive finger into the slippery well of her cunt. Then she moans and stops fighting, arches her back and shuts her thighs around his fist.
Slowly he works open her legs but Valentine screams and flings him away. As he tumbles to earth she springs shut, rolls herself into a ball and hides her face in her hair.
Frank scrambles to his knees, startled, staring around, and there, from a crack in the broken granite, a face is glaring back at him. It’s the face of a wild demon, punched through a frame of thorns and leaves. The eyes are shocked and staring, the eyebrows shot into bristling exclamation marks. The crapulent features are twisted and swollen, inflated by some internal rupture of hot and poisonous gases. The mouth is an empty, sagging purse. The veins stand out from the nose like a fantastic growth of coral.