Lady of Fortune (23 page)

The appearance of London's residential suburbs had changed dramatically since the introduction of the safe electrical elevator. Londoners had never been flat-dwellers, and even now they disdainfully refused to live over shops and other commercial premises, the way that Europeans often did. But the ‘lift' had made it possible for developers to put up in Fulham and Kensington and Chelsea huge arrays, of five-and six-story mansions and courts and buildings, and let them out to the middle-class and the wealthy. Quite suddenly, it became fashionable to have a four-bedroom
pied-à-terre
in town. Apart from saving on the enormous cost of a full-scale London house, flats provided the sons and daughters of country aristocracy with somewhere to escape from the supervision of their parents, entertain their friends, and be as licentious as they liked. The ‘lift' had brought with it a social upheaval, as well as an architectural revolution.

Dougal closed the gates of the elevator behind him, and
rose to the fourth floor. The interior of the building smelled of new carpets and furniture polish. The lift whined, clattered, and eventually jolted to a stop. He slid back the expanding gates, and stepped out. Number 24B was along the corridor, on his right, past a solemn steel engraving of the late Queen.

Prudence was waiting for him. She was dressed, very prettily, in an evening gown of coffee-coloured satin, sewn with panels of dark brown embroidery, and topped with an openwork bodice, cut very low, so that the warm swell of her large breasts was tantalisingly exposed. Around her neck she wore a five-strand pearl choker, and there were pearls in her chestnut-brown curls.

Dougal stepped into the hallway, and took off his hat. ‘No servants today?' he asked Prudence.

‘Monday's their day off.'

‘Ah. Good. And your friend?'

Prudence took his scarf, and helped him off with his soaking-wet overcoat. ‘I'm afraid my friends had to go out. Patricia's mother is feeling unwell. The influenza, I think, so they took her some fruit and a packet of Imperial Granum.'

Dougal glanced towards the half-open door of the living-room. He could see the end of a red plush sofa, a table crowded with bibelots, and a glass lamp held up in the outstretched arm of a naked bronze nymph.

‘You mean we're alone?' he asked her.

Prudence nodded. Then she said. ‘You're not frightened, are you?'

‘Frightened? Of course not. It's just that it's not really customary in Edinburgh for a gentleman to call on a young lady, and stay with her, unless they have a chaperone.'

Prudence held out her hand. ‘Come inside and have a glass of sherry. This is London, not Edinburgh. I'm sure I can trust you not to compromise me.'

‘Well, all right,' said Dougal, uncertainly. ‘What time do you expect your friends to come back? I've reserved a table at Williams for eight-thirty.'

Prudence led him into the living-room. It was a large, heavily-decorated corner room, with a view four floors below of Wrights Lane, wet and narrow and cluttered with parked hansoms, their hoods shining dully in the lamplight. She said, ‘The sherry's on the table. There's fino, and amontillado.'

Dougal, conscious of his wet shoes and the dragging cuffs of his wet trousers, went across to a small table on which two decanters stood in a brassbound tantalus. Next to them was a sepia photograph of a plump woman who obviously believed she looked like Lily Langtry, the way she had wildly thrown her head back to have her portrait taken. He asked Prudence, ‘What's yours to be?'

‘Amontillado, of course.'

‘Of course?' asked Dougal.

‘Dry, but developed,' said Prudence, and when Dougal turned around to look at her, she gave him a bright-eyed smile.

‘Very well,' he said, smiling back at her, and unstoppering the decanter.

‘Jack was here not long ago,' said Prudence. ‘You must only just have missed him.'

‘I walked from Knightsbridge. I felt like clearing my head.'

Prudence arranged herself on the heavy-legged mahogany sofa, spread out her coffee-coloured skirts among the braided cushions, and then accepted her glass of sherry. ‘You're not worried, are you?'

‘Worried?' asked Dougal, still standing, with one hand behind his back. ‘Why should I be worried?'

‘Jack thinks you may be suspicious of the East African Railway scheme.'

‘I'm not suspicious,' said Dougal. ‘I'm just exercising professional caution. Jack doesn't have any cause to be concerned about it.'

Prudence straightened out her skirt with long, pearl-pink fingernails. ‘He seems to think your sister may be stirring up trouble. Making up stories to put you off.'

‘Och, Effie's a Watson! Wealthy but wary, as my father used to say. We may have been born with silver spoons in our mouths, but the first thing we did was send them off to be assayed.'

‘That sounds like an old family joke,' said Prudence.

Dougal nodded. ‘Aye. But you don't have any reason to fret about Effie. She's only seventeen, and I think all this million-pound banking business has gone to her head a little.'

‘Sit down,' said Prudence, patting the sofa beside her. ‘I can't bear to be
loomed
over.'

Dougal pulled up his coat-tails, and sat down beside her.
He was feeling warmer now, less shivery, and more at ease. She was quite right, Prudence, when she said there was no need to be worried about being chaperoned. This was London, after all, and he was twenty-five years old, and quite capable of behaving himself. He had kissed plenty of girls, of course, and apart from his initiation at the hands of Miss Maidment, there had been Queenie McKay, the daughter of one of his father's clerks, and a great deal of panting and petticoat-lifting and urgent caressing with Ruthie Waterton, whose father owned Waterton's Colonial Stores in Princes Street (where the discerning shopper could purchase anything from an ‘Arctic' brand footwarmer to a 10-lb tin of goat's-butter).

Prudence held out her hand, and Dougal, hesitantly at first, took it, and laid it on his, a small white hand over a large red hand.

‘Do you know what my mother told me?' Prudence asked him, gazing down at their intertwined fingers. ‘She said that I should never hold hands with a boy until I was engaged to be married to him. Women are queens, she said, and should never fail in their queenly dignity. I would as soon have let a boy hold my hand when I was young as pick up a snake! She said that holding hands acts directly on the nerves of the body, and makes them morbidly sensitive! You will end up being diseased, and weak.'

Dougal narrowed his eyes at her, and said, with a small grin, ‘I can't see any signs of the disease yet. How are you feeling? Bad? Worse?'

Prudence arched her neck back, and sighed with exaggerated delirium. ‘I believe that I'm actually feeling quite sumptuous. Do you know something, I adore your Scottish accent. I could close my eyes and listen to it all night.'

She brought her head up straight again, and stared at him, in case he had missed the point about ‘all night'. He looked back at her with caution, unsure if she was teasing him or if she really meant it.

‘Prudence,' he said, with the faintest hint of a question in his voice. He leaned forward, still holding her hand, until their faces were only inches apart. They stared at each other closely, their eyes flickering quickly from side to side the way lovers' eyes do. Then Dougal bent forward a little more, and kissed her.

Her lips were moist, and tasted of cloves. He ran the tip of his tongue around them, and then sensitively parted them, so that he could lick at her teeth. She wasn't shocked by ‘French kissing', as most young girls would have been. Instead, she let his stiff tongue slide into her mouth as deeply as it would go, and she breathed steadily and passionately through her nose as if she were swimming through a summer tide. He held her bare shoulder with his left hand, slipping his fingers beneath the openwork strap of her dress, and smoothing her skin around and around.

‘Dougal,' she whispered, close to his ear, ‘you don't know much I've desired you, ever since I first saw you.'

‘But Jack –'

‘Oh God, Jack! Jack won't mind. Jack loves you, too, like his own brother. Oh God, Dougal, don't let's wait.'

Dougal looked towards the half-open living-room door. His blood rushed noisily around his head. ‘But your friends? What time will they be back?'

‘They won't. They've gone for the whole night. Oh, Dougal,
please
.'

Dougal couldn't believe what was happening. He felt as if he were drunk: that odd sensation of being here and yet not being here, those intermittent fadeouts of consciousness and those losses of wilful strength. But with one shoulder strap already hanging loose, and her dress so low that Dougal could see the edge of her cream satin-covered corsets, and the way it cupped her breasts so that they bulged out of her bodice, Prudence was already unfastening his necktie, and tugging it away from his celluloid collar, and unbuttoning the top few buttons of his shirt. She panted and kissed and sighed continuously, and occasionaly pulled at his blond clock-spring curls and murmured, ‘Dougal. You gorgeous animal, you.'

They kissed each other fiercely, and clawed at each other's clothes. They rolled off the sofa on to the burgundy-coloured carpet, until they got stuck against the legs of a weighty spoonback chair. They rolled back again, trying as they kissed to wrestle off the last of their clothes. Soon, Prudence was wearing only her corset, her garter belt, and her black stockings. Dougal was completely naked.

He lifted himself above her. He paused, panting for breath. Then he reverently dipped his head first to the right, and then
to the left – to kiss with open-mouthed kisses the wide pale-pink nipples of her breasts. Prudence moaned, and tossed her head from side to side, and spoke his name over and over again in a hot, low, Ethel Barrymore whisper. ‘Dougal, Dougal, you beautiful animal. Oh,
Dougal
!' She touzled his hair, and squirmed her legs beneath him, and clung on to him so tightly at one time that her fingernails dug red furrows across the muscles of his arms. ‘Oh, Dougal, don't deny me! Oh, Dougal!'

He knelt on one knee, picked her up unsteadily in his arms, and carried her through into the nearest bedroom. She pushed the door open with her black-stockinged feet. The bedroom was decorated in blue and white; with wallpaper like blue Wedgwood pottery and a white lace bedspread on the bed. On a small painted-pine dressing-table stood a blue china jug and a blue china bowl, and an oval mirror surrounded by blue china roses. Dougal laid Prudence down on to the bed, kissed her, and then climbed on to the lace beside her, holding her face so close that he could scarcely focus on it, just a blur of dreamy blue eyes and creamy white skin. He kissed her again and again.

‘You must think so badly of me,' murmured Prudence. Her brown curls, smelling of lavender and London fog, lay across his face like a soft and frondy mask. He traced along the line of her shoulder with his fingertip, her warm fragrant shoulder, and then he held the weighty softness of her breast in his hand, and felt the nipple rise up to tickle his palm, touch his lifeline, brush his heartline. His penis surged up against his thigh, its head congested, and dark as a plum.

They made love twice while the evening passed them by, while tiny clocks whirred and chimed unheard in other rooms. Someone upstairs was singing ‘Tell Me, Pretty Maiden', from last year's hit musical
Florodora
. Someone in another flat was practising scales on the piano, over and over again, up and down. In the hallway, there was the bumping and squeaking of carpet-sweepers, as the cleaners polished and swept up the buildings for tomorrow. The bed-springs in the blue and white bedroom let out a lewd and persistent complaint, but that only excited Dougal all the more. To think that other people could hear them, and know what they were doing. To think that everybody in this whole block of flats was listening to Dougal Watson and Prudence
Cutting have illicit and energetic intercourse.

In the oval, rose-bordered mirror on the dressing-table, he glimpsed Prudence's face, flushed and grimacing. Then he saw his hand on her breast, his fingers digging deep into her white bare flesh. Then nothing but tangled sheets, and a blur of brown hair. But near the end, as Prudence mounted him, her fingers painfully entwined in the blond curls on his chest, he saw in the mirror the two pale moons of her bottom, rising up and down, and his own glistening shaft, actually plunging into the brown tangle of her hair, and the vision of that would remain with him for the rest of his life, framed in blue china roses.

Later, he stood by the window staring out at Wrights Lane, taking pinches of snuff. Prudence came in from the bedroom, her hair brushed, wearing an embroidered robe of turquoise silk, beneath which her breasts danced a complicated jiggle. Jink and diddle, they called that motion in Edinburgh, the way Prudence's nipples moved beneath the silk. It was the way that people danced to the fiddler's elbow, here and there, with a kind of tremulous, hesitant, starting dance.

Dougal, in his trousers and his undervest, his suspenders hanging from his waist, turned and smiled at her, and reached out his arm. She slithered up close to him, and kissed his cheek.

‘You've been taking snuff,' she said, tapping the tip of his nose with her finger.

‘Sneeshin, we call it in Scotland,' said Dougal, and held up his small silver snuff-box. ‘And this we call a sneeshin-mill.'

She kissed him again. ‘You're beautiful,' she said.

Dougal touched her hair. ‘I'm only as beautiful as you've made me,' he said. ‘I didn't believe that things like this could happen.'

‘Of course they can happen. They happen all the time. Men and women fall in love; sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly. There isn't a woman alive who wouldn't swap places with me, if she could, and do just what I've done.' She kissed him once more. ‘Love has struck me like lightning. I can't help it. It's an act of God. And, anyway, who can jump out of the way of lightning? Not me. Not that I'd want to.'