Objects of Desire

  For a moment Anoushka hesitated, but only for a moment. ‘May I speak to the doctor, Mrs Winkler?’ There was hesitation on the other end of the line. ‘Yes, Mrs Winkler, it’s Anoushka Rivers.’

  Mrs Winkler was all courtesy as she always was. ‘So nice to hear from you. I hope you’re well?’

  ‘Yes, very well, thank you.’

  ‘I don’t know that the doctor’s available …’

  How many times had Anoushka heard that and accepted it as truth when it hadn’t been? she wondered. ‘I do know that the doctor is available. He’s reading the night charts.’

  ‘Then you must know too that he doesn’t like to take calls during that time.’

  ‘Frankly, Mrs Winkler, I don’t give a damn! Tell him I am on the line and insist on speaking with him. It’s very important. As important as his reading the charts.’

  Several seconds passed and Anoushka rolled her eyes at Page and Sally whom she insisted should remain with her. Then suddenly she heard his voice. ‘Hello, Anoushka, I hope you’re well?’

  This was only the second time she had spoken to him since their separation and subsequent divorce. It did knock her a bit off balance, but she quickly regained her poise. ‘I’m very well thank you, Robert.’

  ‘What is it you want?’

  ‘I don’t want anything. This is a courtesy call.’

  ‘Oh.’

  Why had she never noticed when she had been married to him that he had nothing but contempt in his voice for her? She heard it now, so crystal clear, and hated him a little bit more for it. ‘Robert, I spoke with the boys earlier and as a result have decided to fly over for Parents’ Weekend and to be with them on their birthday.’

  ‘I don’t think that’s a good idea, Anoushka.’

  Now the voice had on its best bedside manner. The one he always used to talk her round to his way of thinking in some matter. Not this time, buster, she told herself, but what she said was, ‘I don’t care what you think, Robert. I think my boys have the right to have both their parents with them on Parents’ Weekend and their birthday, separated as we are or not.’

  ‘Divorced, Anoushka, divorced!’ It was true, the divorce came through when she had been travelling in Sicily, but she tended to forget that. She ignored the correction.

  ‘You’ve left this a bit late. How typical of you. Arrangements have been made.’ There was more than annoyance in Robert’s voice. Was it fury?

  ‘Arrangements can be rearranged. Look, Robert, I don’t want to get heavy about this but I do have it in writing, remember, visiting rights, any time I want to see my boys or the boys want to see me. I don’t think this is an unreasonable visit and I’m sure you don’t really.’

  ‘No, of course it isn’t. But I doubt that you will find any place to stay within fifty miles of the school. The inns and hotels will have been booked by the parents months ago. And then the party … it might be painful for you. It’s in the house. They wanted a barbecue and all their friends from Lakeside and the school. I’m flying a dozen of the boys back just for the night.’

  ‘It sounds wonderful for them. Tell them to bring sleeping bags. We’ll need two of the guest rooms.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘I’m coming with some friends, the women who will be playing host to the boys when they’re with me on holiday.’

  ‘That would be awkward.’

  ‘Why, Robert? We have two sons we both love very much, and we don’t want to create a tug of love situation or do anything to mar their happiness, do we? For their sake we’ll be civil to one another, nothing more than that, and therefore you will open the house to me and my friends so we can be part of the birthday celebrations you’ve planned for them. I would expect to do the same for you on their next birthday.’

  ‘And Rosamond?’

  Anoushka chose to ignore the question. ‘I won’t like being there any more than you will like having me in the house, but yes, for our sons’ happiness, I dare say we will be able to manage.’

  ‘I don’t like this, Anoushka, not at all. I concede your right to be at the Parents’ Weekend, even to be with them some time on their birthday, but to crash in on a party Rosamond has been planning for months …’ Here he hesitated for a few seconds then continued, ‘That’s so unfair of you.’

  ‘Unfair! To stand up to Rosamond and remind her that they have a mother, and no matter how much she crawls into their lives I will still be there? Yes, I suppose it is unfair of me not to lie down and die for Rosamond so she can take over even my sons as she has taken over my husband and my life.’

  ‘You see, there will be scenes. Is that fair to the boys?’

  ‘No, you’re wrong there, Robert, there will be no scenes. I wouldn’t ruin the boys’ weekend for the world.’

  ‘Why do you and your friends insist on staying in the house? It’s my house and I don’t want you and some strangers in it.’

  ‘My friends are not strangers and don’t insist on staying in the house. I do. I want the boys to understand that you and I, Robert, no matter what our differences, will be together in bringing them up. That they live with you and Rosamond but I am welcome there as their mother and in Lakeside, and am not just some reject, some lowly untouchable who has been made to wander the world. I want them to see I have a life and friends, and am not the lonely woman you shipped off into exile, as I so stupidly agreed to.’

  ‘Anoushka, you don’t have friends. I have never known you to have a real friend in your entire life.’

  She tried to keep her anger within bounds, but that last remark cut deep because it was so true. She had never had or wanted anyone but him from the very first time they met. ‘Robert, you’re a real prick, and I have had enough of this conversation. I’ve told you what I want. You see that I get it.’

  ‘And if I don’t?’

  ‘Oh, I suggest you do, because if ever you hope to see those precious antique coins of mine again, either in your hands or in trust for the boys, you’d better come to terms with me.’

  ‘That’s blackmail.’

  ‘Yes, it is, but at least I don’t use my sons to get what I want.’

  There was a long pause. No matter how many antique coins Robert might receive as gifts in the future, he knew that to lose even one irreplaceable coin was tantamount to disaster. He stressed, ‘No scenes. Do I have your word on that?’

  ‘You have my word, Robert. I didn’t have to call and tell you that I’m coming, but I’m glad that I did. Believe me, I will treat you better than you have done me. Don’t tell the boys. I want it to be a surprise. I’ll call the headmaster myself.’

  Anoushka disconnected before Robert had a chance to say another word, placed the instrument on the table and her hands over her eyes. She felt quite exhausted.

  ‘I think that’s called playing hard ball. You were terrific,’ said Sally.

  Anoushka removed her hands. There was no sign of distress on her face, all anxiety was gone from her eyes.

  ‘How do you feel?’ asked Page.

  ‘Just great. I’m going home.’

  Later that evening the women walked down from their house and through the pretty narrow streets to a small taverna in a large walled garden. The proprietor placed a table and rickety wooden chairs in a quiet corner, against a wall hung with a trumpet vine.

  They ordered lamb chops cooked over a fire of charcoal and sprigs of rosemary, a salad of tomatoes and feta cheese, dressed in a rich extra virgin oil and torn leaves of basil. A bottle of red wine was placed on the table and they sat in silence, listening to the sounds of the night all round them and a guitarist playing early Hadsadaki, music from before the ’67 Junta took over Greece.

  Anoushka leaned her chair back against the white-washed garden wall. Page thought she looked lovely and relaxed in the candlelight, the trumpet vine draped all round her, its elongated cream blossoms partially closed for the night but still looking as if they were waiting for Gabriel to come blow them. They had not spoken s
ince they had given their order to the proprietor and seemed quite content just to be there. Sally poured the wine.

  Apropos nothing Anoushka said, ‘My mother was forty years old when I was born. That was in St Petersburg. Not the city you see in black and white movies, still magnificent and in its glory as it was at the turn of the century, but a skeleton of that beautiful and glamorous place. She was a doctor, extremely beautiful and refined-looking, glamorous for a Russian. She was resented by her colleagues for all those reasons and for her aristocratic background, though she was a staunch communist. My father was a painter, not a very good or successful painter but a man who believed unequivocally in communism. He was well in with the regime and the power brokers of the party who bought his paintings. I never knew him. He died when I was eighteen months old. Cirrhosis of the liver.

  ‘We were poor, middle-class and poor. Imagine a doctor being poor. Only in the Russia my parents loved could that be possible. But that’s the way it can be when you are not politically correct in the Soviet Union, or what was then the Soviet Union. The regime of my father’s time had gone, a new one was in place.

  ‘Four years after he died my mother met a man, a rising star in the party. He worked in the diplomatic service: Serge Kuznitzikoff. He was completely besotted by my mother. She was charismatic, and now when I think of her I realise what a sensual and flirtatious creature she was. She could have been an actress in the old style, a blonde Garbo, a Dietrich. He moved us from the dreary back two-rooms we lived in, in a once famous palace that we shared with seven hundred other people, to a dacha just outside the city. A new life began for us. He doted on my mother and me.

  ‘As he advanced in the party, so did our standard of living. My mother had more success in her work but finally gave it up for Serge and me, to be with us. I called him “uncle” but I always thought of him as my father.

  ‘At the beginning, when he started travelling abroad, we didn’t go with him, and our life at those times was very empty. You see, he was our world. We yearned for his love and protection. I could hardly wait for him to come home, to feel the touch of his hand, to have him pick me up and kiss me, to be caressed by him. I felt so bright and alive when he took me by the hand and showered all his attention on me. My whole world revolved round Serge. He spoiled me, and so did my mother.

  ‘By the time I was eight years old we were travelling with him wherever he went. And lived with him in the cities where he was posted: London, Paris, New York, Tokyo.’

  ‘Hence your ease with languages,’ said Page.

  ‘Yes,’ said Anoushka, and refilled their wine glasses.

  The balmy night and the scent from the trumpet vine, the odour of roasting meat and rosemary, the music, all seemed to add to the nostalgia of Anoushka’s story.

  ‘Serge was a diplomatic trouble shooter, a very important man who knew where a great many skeletons were buried, and in whose closet. That meant that we lived on the fringes of the official diplomatic service and were able to keep a degree of privacy. People did not want to ruffle Serge’s feathers. He had power, a quiet, discreet power, but power nonetheless. And that was a good thing because he never married my mother.

  ‘He was a handsome man, tall, broad-shouldered, heroic-looking, what every child wants her father to be. He was, too, very ambitious for me to be educated and cultivated, a fitting companion for him in his old age. There were private tutors, no bad schools for me. Abroad there were private schools, but never for long. We seemed only to get settled when he was re-posted. He instilled in me a love of reading, something that kept me apart from other children, I learned to like my own company and that of those I loved, no others’. We were free spirits, Serge and my mother and I, behind the prim and proper image: the coarse plebeians the party liked to portray themselves as.

  ‘From early childhood, I have nothing but fond memories of men, having grown up in Serge’s arms. Being petted and caressed and loved and coddled by him, first as a child and then as an adolescent, instilled in me a love for him and for all men. The scent, the feel of a man’s skin, his touch, a kiss … it’s excited me as far back as I can remember. It was natural, naive of us maybe, the three of us, my mother, Serge, and I, to think it was not out of the ordinary to want each other carnally as much as we did. We bathed together, sometimes slept in each other’s arms. We were a part of each other’s sensuality and probably didn’t realise it until it was too late to turn back.

  ‘When I was twelve my mother became ill and Serge became even more my world. As my mother slowly receded from life I began to take her place, was more his companion than she was, became the woman at his side. We were in Paris. La Traviata was at the Paris Opera House and Mother was too ill to go. She insisted that I take her place. It was horrible – I was happy that she was ill. I can remember it even now, a child in love with her mother’s lover. That night was the first time I realised it, the night of La Traviata. She lent me her favourite Balmain gown and her best jewellery, and sent me to her hairdresser to have my hair put up for the first time. She made up my face and pinned camellias Serge had sent me in my hair, and then she presented me to him.

  ‘My mother and Serge were sensuous libertines who had handled their love of all things erotic with discretion, and until that night I had had no idea about their active sex life and how it had affected mine. They had been priming my libido for years. I was, by the night of the opera, an erotic soul in search of sensations to satisfy my sexual drives. They had known that I was ready, what I craved, even before I did. All those years they had been teaching me the excitement of the sensual, wanting me to know every nuance of the beauties of the sexual experience. I had been yearning for it for years and they had until that point been able to satisfy my yearnings, but I had come of age, things had to change.

  ‘That night after the opera and supper at Maxim’s we returned to the flat where we were living and Serge took me into his bed and we had sex for the first time. It was the most exciting night of my life. He was wonderful. I could not get enough of him. He was an exquisite teacher and I the most compliant and willing of pupils.

  ‘My mother and Serge had been decadent, depraved in their lust for each other, but they loved each other as well. My mother gave me to Serge because she loved me and knew that he would never harm me and that we would make each other happy in bed. That he would be a wonderful first lover for me. Five weeks after that night my mother was dead. I was fifteen years old.

  ‘Serge and I were a well-kept secret, party politics and all that. We were passionately in love, a teenage girl and a man still handsome and virile but old enough to be her father. The party could have had him shot for a scandal like that.

  ‘Regimes change and Serge must have sensed his power would soon be fading. We had had four blissful years together. A return to Russia? Our relationship could not survive there, we both knew it. And he saw changes and great problems ahead. I had spent most of my life living abroad with Serge. He was worried about my future and could not see it back in Russia. We had always spoken about a time when a new love would come into my life and had promised each other that if that happened we would never let what we were stand in my way. But neither of us ever believed we would let it happen.

  ‘And then, one last time, fate stepped in. Serge was given a posting in Egypt, to Alexandria. I was as usual with him as his step-daughter and a part-time personal assistant, but of course was really there as his lover, the light of his life. Our sex life took a new turn in Alexandria. Serge became friendly with several of the town’s more erotic games players. Whereas we had been able to fool everyone else, we were not able to fool these men. Serge could not bear for any scandal to taint me and my future. A sheikh from one of the Gulf States became besotted with me and courted me. He was not the first, but Serge took him seriously as a prospect for my future. He wanted a new and better life for me.

  ‘Sex was easy for me, it was natural, something I yearned for and had been brought up to believe was an essential par
t of my being. I agreed to meet the sheikh. But it was clear that no love was involved here. I was a sexual possession to be played with, an object of desire to be purchased.

  ‘He was to have been only the second man I ever had. But something extraordinary happened that very first night we were to consummate this erotic courtship of his. He liked me even more than he wanted me. Found me vulnerable and in need of something better than he was prepared to give. Strangely, that made him angry.

  ‘He didn’t want to have me as a friend, nor to feel anything for me that didn’t fit his fantasy. He knew he could not do right by me or Serge. That night, supposedly the night, he had some friends and some willing ladies to dinner.

  ‘I was introduced to one of the men, my host’s doctor, Robert Rivers. Even as a young man Robert had a successful career and a certain degree of fame. He was handsome with an incredibly attractive personality, and I fell instantly in love. As did Robert. Now, when I look back at that meeting, I can see why. Young, virile, and handsome, under the influence of his host and exotic Alexandria, a straight-laced serious New England doctor, having been handed over a young woman as a gift, a depraved gesture he could not refuse. A young woman with the looks and manners of a proper lady yet sexually free, a girl experienced in all things erotic. We made love only hours after we met, and had a sexual encounter never to be forgotten. Robert never had a chance, he was instantly seduced.

  ‘Hours later we still could not keep our hands off each other. A mere slip of a girl had set this experienced man sexually free as he had never been before. When had a man like Robert Rivers ever been handed a sexual slave? In books, in films, in men’s fantasies, maybe, but this was real life.

  ‘The sheikh lent his beach house in Mersa Matruh to Robert, and there we stayed. Sex for three days and three nights. We ate into each other’s sensual souls. From there Robert was to go to the South of France for a month’s holiday. He took me with him. The holiday over, he was still besotted with me and the strange life I had led. I was devoted to him. We couldn’t bear to be parted, and when he learned that, if we were, I would go back to Serge for whom I still had a deep attachment, he went mad with rage. Robert deplored even the idea that I would give myself to any man other than him.