The Girl Behind The Fan (Hidden Women) (25 page)

It will be over soon, is what I told myself. It will be over soon.

I counted in my head, one jab at a time. He was so excited. He could not go past a hundred, I was sure. He would not be able to control himself. But he did go past a hundred. At a hundred and twelve he withdrew, but only to turn me over so he could stare at my breasts as he rode me. Bang, bang, bang. He fucked me so hard that the bed knocked against the wall. My eyes drifted up towards the ceiling, to the tiny hole through which I had received my education. I wondered if Elaine was up there even now, seeing how I handled my new role.

Two hundred, two hundred and one.

Four hundred and seven . . .

At last the Duc exploded into me with an enormous bellow. It was so loud and so startling that I did not have to pretend my distress. I cried out as he collapsed on top of me, squashing the breath right out of me and scratching my neck with his beard. He was oblivious to the fact he was suffocating me with his gross, old man’s chest. At last, he grew soft and rolled off me again. My tears would be contained no longer. I sobbed openly. I sat up and clutched a sheet to my breast. The sheet below me was stained with blood just as Arlette had planned. Seeing it, the Duc smiled broadly, but then he remembered himself and stroked my face in a gesture of pity for my loss.

‘Be quiet, my darling. Do not cry. You have given me a very great treasure today. I shall make sure you are recompensed.’

I continued to cry.

‘Today lovemaking must seem to you to be a brutal thing, but you will grow to like it just as much as I do. I have never met a woman yet who did not come to beg me to do to her what I have done to you.’

I stared at him. He was repellent and I did not care if my eyes showed it, but he did not notice. He was too busy telling me what a great lover he was.

‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘One day soon you will find yourself waiting by the door for me to arrive, so eager to let me have you that you’ll start unbuttoning my tunic in the hall.’

He took my chin between his thumb and forefinger and made me look at him. He held my face there until I offered him a smile. It was now that I needed the skills of an actress.

‘I must go,’ he said. ‘My wife is expecting me this evening. She has invited her sister to dine and I must play the part of the good husband. The evening will be interminable,’ he continued. ‘But now that I have our little secret to think about, I will be able to bear any amount of talk about hairstyles.’

‘I am glad,’ I said.

‘Oh yes, you have given me plenty to think about. I shall be thinking of your sweet soft skin as I carve the lamb this evening. With every sip of wine, I will think of the taste of your tender pink lips.’

He kissed me slowly. I think he thought it was romantic.

It seemed like an age until he had finally gone. The moment the door closed behind him, I ran to the jug of water that Elaine had prepared for me. It was almost, but not quite, cold. I washed myself thoroughly. I scrubbed myself until I was sore. The jug wasn’t enough. I begged Elaine to help me draw a proper bath. I only wanted to get rid of the smell of him. Vile man. All that talk of how he would think of me while he was dining with his wife! I wanted nothing more than to put him out of my head for ever.

Arlette returned from the opera a couple of hours later. She called me into the salon and asked me how the evening had been.

‘What did he give you?’

The Duc had given me a pearl as big as a blackbird’s egg. When I showed Arlette she laughed and clapped her hands.

‘You clever girl!’

‘How much do you think it’s worth, Arlette?’ asked Elaine.

Arlette picked up the pearl and held it between her thumb and forefinger. She turned it this way and that, as though she were a jeweller. When it came to it, she had probably handled more jewels than most of the professionals in Paris. She knew what she was talking about when it came to diamonds, rubies and emeralds but pearls were her very favourite of all.

‘I have never seen anything quite like this. See how it glows red and pink in the firelight. The surface is completely without flaws. It must be priceless. Did he tell you anything about it?’

‘He said it came from Italy. It was once the property of the most notorious lesbian in Venice. The Duc’s father ripped it from her hands when Napoleon took the city.’

‘She must have been a very special lady to have such a pearl. It’s worth millions of francs in my view. And now it belongs to the most wonderful young woman I know.’

Elaine raised an eyebrow.

‘You will have your own pearl soon, Elaine. If you can only learn to be a little more ladylike.’

Elaine lifted her skirts and blew a raspberry.

‘This is wonderful,’ Arlette turned back to me. ‘You have captured the poor man’s heart. I know he could not believe his luck when he heard you were a virgin. I can’t believe our luck that he believed you!’

I took the pearl with me to my room and set it on my nightstand. If Arlette was right, then as soon as I could, I would sell that pearl and use the money to leave this life.

I was glad that I had deceived the Duc. He deserved it.

Chapter 35

Steven’s birthday arrived and, as promised, we were going to the Crazy Horse.

The Crazy Horse is a Parisian legend. The Moulin Rouge and Les Folies Bergères may be on every daring tourist’s ideal itinerary, but when it comes to exotic dancing that might actually be considered faintly erotic, the Crazy Horse has the market cornered. It was Steven’s first choice when it came to finding somewhere to celebrate his birthday and I didn’t refuse. I found I was as keen to see behind the doors of the famous club as he was.

That Wednesday night, I met Steven on the Champs Elysées and we found our way to the address. From the outside, it looked faintly seedy. It was in a basement. We made our way downstairs and a waitress showed us to our seats. I’d booked a table near the stage and a bottle of champagne. I’d had no idea at the time of booking quite how close to the stage our table would be.

The waitress opened the champagne – which was named ‘Tsarina’, in a suitably romantic way – and poured us each a glass. Steven toasted me. I toasted his birthday. He seemed very pleased with his birthday treat so far.

After about fifteen minutes, the show opened with a pastiche on the changing of the guards outside Buckingham Palace. I was shocked that there was no real preamble to the nudity. The girls were wearing bearskin hats and little else. I was mesmerised by how similar the girls were; the eight women on the tiny stage were as alike in height and body shape as octuplets. I had heard that the girls at the Folies Bergères were weighed before each performance and that straying outside a very narrow band of acceptable size could result in dismissal. The same policy must have applied at the Crazy Horse.

Not only did the girls look astonishingly similar, they moved as though they were puppets controlled by one long string or like parts of a large clock. Tick tock tick tock. No one out of step.

I glanced at Steven. He settled back in his chair. He lifted his champagne to his lips and watched the action on stage.

Each tick-tocking step revealed a little more. Beneath the tiny skirts that circled their waists, the girls wore skimpy black triangle-shaped merkins, so that they even had matching pubic ‘hair’. When they turned to the side, and you could see their buttocks, it was clear that the attention to detail continued. Their buttocks even jiggled in time.

‘What do you think?’ Steven whispered.

I told him I thought the show was surprisingly tasteful.

The classic costume of the exotic dancer, the tiny lingerie and the sky-high shoes, had never looked so classy. I suppose it helped that the shoes were Louboutins and the tiny costumes were being worn on bodies so sculpted and toned. Their perfection made the whole thing seem slightly unreal.

A lone girl came out onto the stage next. She was dressed in nothing much, as had been the rest of the dancers, but her long limbs were covered in body paint that emulated the stripes of a tiger. Her set looked like a cage. But the bars of the cage were not metal; they were made of some kind of elasticated rope, which enabled her to use them as a sort of trapeze.

As she wrapped herself in the ropes, even at one point allowing one of them to go round her neck, I felt myself growing unaccountably anxious. I glanced at Steven again. His focus was fully on the stage. I could see the intensity in his eyes that let me know he was turned on.

The girl danced as though her life depended on it. She embodied the caged animal with nothing to hope for, who expended the last of its energy in an attempt to break through and escape. Though what was on the other side?

While Steven watched the dancer, my mind was suddenly elsewhere. Marco was a caged animal. For whatever reason, he felt he had to be hidden away. By trying to persuade him to leave his confinement, was I putting him under unbearable stress?

On stage, the girl made one last attempt to escape her bonds and ended the routine in a beautiful attitude of despair. When the music stopped, she collapsed dramatically against the set, her chest heaving powerfully with the exertion of her acrobatics. Another curtain came down before we could see her untangle herself. The air of mystery was maintained.

We finished the bottle of champagne as the dancers went through their paces. Some of the routines were playful. Others looked painful. Everything was completed with a polish and professionalism that, for me at least, somewhat lessened the erotic potential.

I wondered if Steven felt the same.

‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘That was the best show I’ve seen in Paris so far.’

‘A bit different from
Carmen
,’ I agreed. ‘Those girls are so amazing. How do they find so many dancers with exactly the same body shapes and sizes?’

‘Dedication,’ said Steven. ‘Now. Your place or mine?’

I told him that I had an early start. It wasn’t entirely untrue. Greg Simon was keen to see some more material and I had promised him a more up-to-date synopsis by the end of the weekend.

‘OK,’ Steven kissed my hand and flagged down a passing taxi. He stood on the corner and watched me as I was driven away.

Back at the apartment, alone, I was haunted by the memory of the dancer in the cage. Her desperate thrashing had reminded me of Marco, trapped by a psychological cage of his own making. But she also reminded me of myself. Her physical discomfort echoed my own mental state. On one level, my situation was clear-cut. Marco had not contacted me since I returned from Venice. He had not initiated contact since I left Venice the first time round. I had forced my way into the Palazzo Donato a second time and he had eventually asked me to leave. There was nothing left to hope for as far as he was concerned. Steven, on the other hand, was only to keen to see more of me. It should have been a no-brainer. There was no need for me to continue to mourn Marco Donato. I could have ended that night in Steven’s arms. But much as Steven was on his best behaviour, attempting to remind me of the man I had fallen in love with, his affectionate attention was somehow falling short.

I wanted the man who could move me without laying so much as a finger upon me. I still wanted the man who had seen me differently and drawn me with such tenderness. I still wanted Marco.

Chapter 36

Paris, 1841

How quickly life can change. Last February, I shivered in a garret with nothing to my name but the clothes I stood up in. Twelve months later, I had more clothes than I could ever have wished for and all of them in the very latest fashion. As a young girl, I had always wanted an Indian shawl of my own. Now I had ten. They were matched to my outfits. In fact I had so many I had grown slightly blasé about them, draping them over chairs as though they were old blankets. When the Duc bought me a small dog to keep me company when he wasn’t around, I let the puppy have an Indian shawl to line his basket.

When it came to diamonds and pearls, I had enough jewels to fund a campaign in Prussia, including a tiara by Monsieur Fossin as expensive and beautiful as anything the Empress Joséphine might have worn. I had my own house – not quite the Champs Elysées palace that Arlette and Elaine had predicted but a big house as different from the room I had once shared with my mother as Heaven is from Hell. I had a cook and two maids. I had my own carriage and my own man to drive it. I had my own horses – two lovely chestnut-coated beauties. The Duc told me he had chosen them because they matched my hair.

But the question on everyone’s lips when a kept woman walks into the room is what exactly she has to do to keep her position. Well, believe me, I worked as hard for my riches as I had done when I took three jobs to keep Remi and me in our miserable garret.

I was expected to be available to the Duc at all times. He would arrive unexpectedly, in the middle of the day or the middle of the night, and I would need to be ready to receive him. Contrary to Arlette and Elaine’s wild hopes when I first took the Duc’s fancy, I was not allowed to fill my house with friends and feed them fine wines on his budget. He told me he did not want to have to cross paths with anyone he had not personally invited.