Katie In Love: full length erotic romance novel (22 page)

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?'

'I always do as I'm told, well, nearly always,' I said, and was glad to see his smile.

'What you say about contradictions,' he went on, serious again. 'You've come to that conclusion as a woman, not when you were nineteen.'

I heard the ping of an email arriving and thought what an evocative sound Apple had found for their laptops, sly and intrusive. I looked back into his eyes.

'Don't they say you should try everything once?'

'Everything except hurting people,' he replied; he started counting on his fingers. 'Everything except making arms, selling arms, putting arms in the hands of warlords, making wars because it's good for the corporations…good for the banks.' He paused. 'Don't you have a job in a couple of days?'

'A hedge fund seminar.'

'A what?

'I'll have to iron my black suit.'

'Black suit. Why do you think they build their banks to look like temples? Money's the new religion. They want you in black like nuns.'

'Nuns in short skirts, and they like a bit of cleavage…'

'Disgusting. Don't go.'

'I have to pay the rent. My bank hates me as it is.'

'Cancel it, Katie. Write an article. Do something else. Don't take their blood money. You're too good for that.'

He stood and crossed the room. I was sitting at my narrow desk below the window and rose into his arms.

'You know I'm off in a few days.'

'Don't go.'

'I have to…'

'I have to earn money waitressing.'

'It's different.'

'Why?'

'People are relying on me,' he said.

We kissed. I clung on tightly and felt bereft. I had watched birds in the park walking on the thin ice and felt the same, shaky, cautious, the ground cracking beneath me.

'You're not angry?' I said.

'About what?'

'My moment of dissolution.'

'At university?' he asked and I nodded. 'Bloody angry. I want to know how come it's always the wrong people who get into power? The narcissists, the psychopaths, the abusers – blokes who make a fortune in business and swing round the revolving door into politics for the hell of it?'

'It's the way it is. It's always been the same. What can we do?'

'What we can. You know what the Buddha said, you can't change the world, only yourself.'

'Is that what you're doing?'

He shrugged. 'I don't know what I'm doing half the time,' he said, an odd admission, or a concession, I wasn't sure. He kissed my nose and changed the subject. 'Now I know why you write erotic books, and so well. They get you off balance. You think they're about one thing, but there's a lot more going on. You have real talent.'

'Thank you.'

'I mean it. You make the characters so real, I can't help thinking they are all you.'

'They're not me, they're reflections of me.'

'That's why you wanted to go to the House of Mirrors, to look for yourself?'

'Tom Bridge, you are getting to know me too well, and you know what happens when that happens?'

'No, what happens?'

'People get bored.'

'We won't let it.' He stood back, holding my hands. 'Have you ever thought about writing other kinds of books?'

'Now you sound like my mother,' I told him and he laughed.

We were quiet for a moment. I could hear the heat pipes humming, the wind in the eaves.

'Do you want more tea?' I asked, and he shook his head.

'No. I want to go back to bed.'

Reading Bataille had opened my vocabulary to words like taboo, transgression, orgy, lust, temptation. My tutor had introduced me to Anaïs Nin with that Christmas gift wrapped in
Le Monde,
and at the spring break I had a tattoo inscribed on the back of my neck. It intrigued him. He ran the tip of his tongue over the spirals. I was a girl who had learned how to let go and Tom, with all his passion and energy, was able to let go, too. We made love recklessly, continually, as if time were running out.

Days clicked by like snapping fingers. Were the skies as blue as I remember? Did Mr Patel really keep up his New Year optimism? I recall seeing unlikely smiles on my face in shop windows, and realised that after my shower each morning I had neglected to clear the steam from the mirror. I had forgotten to check to see if I were too fat or too thin. I grabbed things from the closet without worrying if this shade of that colour went with that shade of another colour. We played what I call boutiques. I cat-walked my clothes and Tom helped me decide what to keep and what to take to Oxfam.

'A documentary team's going to turn up at some poor African village,' he said, 'and all the girls are going to be dressed for the Kings Road.'

'Kingsland Road,' I reminded him.

'You live here, but you belong there.'

'So I'm frivolous and a bit snobby, am I?'

He laughed and held his hands up defensively. 'No, I'm joking, I take it back.'

'You do know my cupboards are bare?'

'Doesn't it feel good?'

'No, I feel naked.'

'We're going to take a look at the shoes next.'

'Not in this lifetime,' I said, and he opened the wardrobe door.

He then stretched out on the bed. I cat-walked in low heels, medium heels, sandals, pumps, boots, espadrilles.

'I can't really tell when you're dressed, take everything off.'

We made love in the closet, on my swivel chair with the laptop pinging on the desk, in the bathroom with bankers watching from their glass temples. We made love with the clock ticking and the sun pallid in the winter sky.

We went to clubs, restaurants, bars, plays. We stood in the spooky light of the Rothko show at the Tate Modern and walked over the Millennium Bridge to see if it swayed. We climbed the 528 steps to the dome of St. Paul's and tried the acoustic trick of the Whispering Gallery. You mumble words against the wall, they rise up the dome, and you can hear them clearly across the other side of the gallery. He waved across the vacant space, turned away and cupped his lips.

'Katie Boyd, you're beautiful.'

'Tom Bridge, you're a flatterer.'

'Katie Boyd doesn't like compliments.'

'Oh, yes she does.'

'I love you, Katie Boyd.'

'Does that mean I'm paying for lunch?'

'Yes, and I'm hungrier than a pigeon.'

I laughed. There was a lot of laughter. Tears and laughter. We ran around the gallery into each other's arms like movie lovers. I led the way down the stone stairs worn thin by the long tromp of humanity, and I thought about those three words wondering what they implied. In Spanish you say
Te quiero,
which means both I love you and I want you, a safety valve. The French say
j'adore,
sensual, sexy, evasive. I love you is a carving on an old tree, like something made of plaster standing in the rain; girls kiss and squeal
love you
to their friends when they hate each other.

He gave me a sea shell from Sri Lanka and I could hear the waves slipping over the beach when I held it to my ear. The shell was patterned like a tortoise with two rows of blunt shiny teeth. I kept it in my bag with my iPhone and lip gloss. I called and cancelled my waitressing job, though Tom most mornings took the tube to the Médecins Sans Frontières offices in Saffron Hill. There was an Ebola epidemic in West Africa. Syria and Iraq were disintegrating. In South Sudan, 25,000 people in a refugee camp were sitting in floods of water from the monsoons. Blistering heat and biblical rains. Tom thought God weird to keep punishing the same region over and over again, but then, he didn't believe in God.

When we met at his office he had aching shoulders from carrying the weight of the world and I watched his spine grow straighter as we continued our pilgrimage. Another play, a Helmut Newton show of erotic images from the sixties. Like a camel taking on water before crossing the desert, he was filling up on culture, on London life, fusion food, strong beer from new breweries. At night we made love and slept and made love again, the moon peeping through the blinds, the sun rising with an X to stamp on the calendar.

*

Lizzie wore red. Her colour. Ray was long and gangly hauling himself out of the chair to shake hands. He looked awkward, hesitant, a sergeant dining with a doctor, a rank thing, the omnipresent whiff of class. We carried two bottles of wine, some red tulips flown in from warmer places.

'I hate it when people bring flowers. You have to stop what you're doing and go and find a vase.'

'They match your dress,' I said, as she turned away.

Ray got busy with the corkscrew.

'White to start?'

The cork popped and he poured the wine, filling the glasses on the coffee table. I admired the simplicity of Lizzie's flat, white cabinets free of photographs, a solitary abstract covering one wall. There was a narrow shelf containing two white china elephants supporting a modest row of books; once read Lizzie gave them away because authors, she believed, want to be read not lined up to gather dust like tombstones.