The Pleasure Quartet (25 page)

‘What do you mean?’ Thomas asked.

Iris had realised what my intentions were before he did.

‘No,’ she pleaded, her teary eyes gazing at me. ‘Not while you’re angry.’ Her voice was quiet, barely even a whisper.

Naked but for the shiny boots, in the dim light of the room, her pale skin glazed with sweat, she seemed so small and vulnerable. My heart dropped. But I would not lose my resolve.

‘Drop your damn trousers,’ I ordered Thomas.

He loosened his belt and pulled the cream-coloured suit trousers down and stepped out of them. He was wearing checked boxer shorts in shades of blue.

I nodded. ‘Those too . . .’

Without a sound of protest, he obeyed.

I had half-feared he would be erect and this would stimulate my anger even further, but his cock just hung limp and useless there, like an anonymous extension to his body which no longer held
any power. Over Iris. Over me.

He kicked off his shoes, without unlacing them and made to take his dark socks off.

‘Don’t,’ I said. ‘Keep them on.’

He, or the protocol surrounding the scene, had allowed Iris to keep her boots on. I could do no less, I reckoned. Aside from the fact that I felt there was something profoundly ridiculous about
a bottomless man wearing socks.

‘All of it. Everything,’ I said. ‘Except those socks.’

Thomas shed his jacket, then his shirt and necktie.

He was left with only a thin white vest which stopped just above his navel.

‘You can keep that,’ I said. I was seething, determined to humiliate him.

Now in the shadows, Iris was silent.

His head bowed, Thomas walked over to the saw-horse and positioned himself across it, his arse raised and offered. I tried to retain my composure as I raised the whip. It felt lighter than I had
expected.

August 10th, 1935

It has been six months now since I joined this strange circus of erotica. Already I have visited more countries and fascinating cities than I could previously identify on a map, but I
couldn’t tell you anything about them, since my circumstances are so unreal that I sometimes wonder if I have woken in a dream, or just lost my mind.

In July, we travelled all the way from Brest to Vladivostok, leaving the train only once, to swim in Lake Baikal. ‘The sea!’ I cried out, when at last we stepped from our
carriages. Hilda laughed at me. ‘It’s only a lake,’ she said. ‘Shall we swim in it?’

I have become so accustomed to nudity that the sight of her body ought not to have moved me, and yet it did. There was poetry in the curve of her arse, I swear. Her red hair hung over her
breasts, just her nipples visible, as if peeping out from between stage curtains. Her bush was red too, and so thick and curly. When she emerged, water dripped from each strand, and I wanted to
drink it.

Later, I did.

September 12th, 1936

Back in London again. I do miss this beautiful city and all her contradictions. My purse is full enough that I could buy a room of my own now, never mind renting one, and yet I feel nostalgic
for my old home and so am bedding down in the Princess Empire. Today I wandered all of my old haunts. Covent Garden and Piccadilly Circus and the Strand, soaking up the smog and the traffic jams.
Westminster and St Paul’s, and the view from London Bridge, that murky ribbon of water that keeps floating on without a care.

I have a few days leave before I am off again.

I even considered tracking down my old friend Gladys, and telling her that there is a place where we can be free, and I’ve found it. I always thought her to be so worldly compared to
me. I was wrong. And yet I am jealous of her domesticity. To have a permanent home and a permanent lover – can such a thing exist without entrapment? I always wanted nothing but the freedom
to roam, and now I long for the safety of a cage.

Working with the Ball, and the myriad of unusual people who make up the enterprise – the whores and the subs and the dommes and the gymnasts and the dancers and the sluts and the just
plain strange folk – I am surrounded by kindred spirits. We are all of us hungry for something. Money, notoriety, family, sex, love, a place to be oneself. Here we apparently have it all. And
yet I haven’t found happiness. I wonder if there is more happiness in loss, because those like Gladys always have the hope that there is something more, something other to strive towards.
They live in the knowledge that if they could only indulge their one secret greed then they would be content. But for those of us who have sought to quench our thirst, only to discover that one
kind of hunger, once satisfied, fed, only begets another,I fear that contentment can be but a dream. We drink from a river that leaves behind it a drought.

As to what we do, that is another matter altogether. We seek pleasure, chant its wonders, perform, play, all things that the common man would frown upon but none of us have any shame. It is a
continuous celebration.

We succeed in making the holy spectacles of bodies in motion an ever fantastic representation, assisted in no small part by the rope wranglers, the magicians and all the shadowy denizens who
run the Ball. I am, of course, not a part of the elite, of those who determine its annual climax. Apart from the night when everything turns into sheer beautiful madness, I only see them from afar:
the dazzling images on the body screen of the Mistress, the budding beauty of her Mistress-in-Waiting, the muscular energy of the stallions they have attached themselves to . . . Yet again here I
am part of the chorus, but it’s a whole universe from the life I lived before.

At times, I wonder what it would be like to be like them. But the feeling always passes. Being a companion of the Ball, on the road with it, preparing for it, participating in it, immersing
myself in its folly, is reward enough.

Listen to me, diary! So full of foolish melancholy. How I envy those born with simple minds and hearts.

I think I will go dancing.

January 1st, 1937

I met a man last night. New Year’s Eve and I was standing alone, watching the fireworks over the Thames from Blackfriars Bridge. I had both hands stuffed tight into my pockets to ward
off the cold, since I had earlier left my new fur muff – the one that I bought in Paris! – in a café by the riverside where I had stopped to eat an early dinner of pie and
mash.

At the moment he passed, my face was turned away from the celebrations, and staring at the young girl who adorns the drinking fountain on the North side of the bridge. Temperance, they call
her. I had stood on that spot many times without really paying any attention to her small and graceful figure. There was a note of sadness in her face, and I wondered if she wanted to cast her
water urn aside and dance in the fountain, instead of be forever tasked with filling it for others. A silly daydream.

‘A penny for your thoughts?’ he asked me, and gave me quite a fright. I jumped a few inches into the air and straight away pulled my hands from my pockets.

He wore a tan fedora, and a navy wool suit. His tie was the colour of fresh butter. Under one arm, he carried a newspaper, tightly folded. His hands were encased in dark blue leather
gloves.

At that same moment, it began to snow. It was like a sign, something that would happen in the movies.

We stood still for several seconds, just looking at each other.

He was about six foot tall and lean, with short dark blond hair that had been combed back, besides a cow-lick that threatened to drop forward on the right side of his forehead. His eyes were
neither brown, nor blue or green, but a mixture of all three. He was clean shaven without any sign of shadow, and had a dimple in his chin.

‘Don’t mind if I smoke, do you, while you think about it?’

‘No, of course not.’

He shifted his newspaper from one side to the other, pulled a cigarette and lighter from his breast pocket, and carefully cupped his hand over his mouth to protect the flame.

He offered me a smoke. I shook my head.

‘I was wondering if the lady Temperance here would rather be paddling in the fountain, than filling it.’

He laughed.

‘I suspect she would. Though maybe not in this weather.’

He wiped away a snow flake that had landed on his eyelashes.

I blew on my hands to warm them up.

‘You must be frozen,’ he said. ‘Take my gloves.’

I have them still.

February 16th, 1937

We stayed in bed for three days and did nothing but talk, smoke cigarettes and make love. He has a little maisonette overlooking Blackheath, but also likes to fuck me in the basement of the
Empire – strange, strange, wonderful man. He likes the ropes, and the costumes, and the thought that we might be chanced upon by one of the staff. He wants to do it on the stage, in front of
an audience. Just once, he says, just once after dark and we’ll pretend there’s a crowd watching. Wicked man, I told him, you’re wicked! But he insists that he is not so wicked as
I.

He sells pianos, and hasn’t any money. The flat belonged to his parents. He has no children either, nor any previous marriage.

‘Why have you never married?’ I asked him.

‘Why haven’t you?’ he asked me back.

‘I never met a man I wanted to marry.’

‘Until last month,’ he teased.

He is the most beautiful man that I have ever seen nude. I light the candles around the bedding, and he sits nude on the coverlet, reading, his cigarette dangling on his lip. And I just watch
him. The way the shadows flicker across his skin. I lie next to him and trace my finger over every inch. Muscles like a strong man, but not so beefy. ‘Lifting pianos,’ he told me, when
I asked him how it is that he has the physique of Adonis.

He hails from Europe, he says, his foreign accent ever so faint. Came to this country a few years ago. He is well-educated but will not speak of his past and he evades my inevitable
questions. I don’t follow the newspapers but it is impossible to remain unaware of the torment and climate of fear holding the continent in its grip. There are terrible rumours, turmoil, talk
of war. Having lost two brothers and seen the break-up of my own family because of the Great War, I can’t but wonder why people never learn from experience.

The other night, I snuck up the stairs to where the costumes are kept and slipped into one of the chorus outfits – petticoats, bustier, stockings and all, and we played a game,
pretending that I was a dancer, and him a punter, and that we were meeting and making love for the first time. He lifted my skirts and buried his face in my bush and licked my clitoris until I
climaxed into his mouth, and then he just kept on licking. At first it hurt, but he refused to let me push him away, and after a time, I felt the joy rising inside me again.

He gives me even more pleasure than I am able to give myself.

I told him that, and he made me wait a whole week without touching myself until I saw him again, and I thought that I would die without an orgasm.

In a few weeks, I must return to the Ball and engage in the preparations for its next manifestation. It will be in Bristol, so I will not be far from London and we can still see each other on
my breaks from training.

I have resolved to tell him all about the Ball. I am confident he will accept the news of its existence and my connection to it and not spurn me as a result. As to my life before that, I
remain unsure.

June 1st, 1937

Robert, Robert – how I feared that I would lose you when I told you what I have been.

For so long I told myself that the past didn’t matter. He didn’t need to know. Or that he did know, he must know, for what kind of woman knows the things that I know, and does the
things that I do? Certainly not a virgin. Definitely a whore.

I told him everything. I even told him that I had once sucked a man’s cock in exchange for new soles on my winter boots.

He laughed.

He laughed and he stroked my hair and he said, ‘Do you want to know all the things that I have done?’

His first time with a woman, he said, he was thirteen years old, and she was twenty-two. She taught him how to lick a woman, how to make them orgasm. She was married. ‘I told her I was
sixteen,’ he said. ‘I doubt that she believed it.’

He told me that he has been with a man too and I asked him to tell me everything. Everything. And I lay next to him as he spoke of their first meeting, how he felt when their lips met, the
way his partner’s body pressed against him, the sensation of being on his knees for another man’s cock. I touched myself while he talked, and when he was done talking, he sucked my
nipples and I kept on playing until I peaked. We fucked twice that night. The second time, he rode me, and hugged me so tight against him I could barely breathe. I didn’t want to
breathe.

He says he wants to see me when I am part of the Ball. Assures me he will not be jealous. States that even with another man, or women, or multiples of men, I will be a thing of beauty, a
creature who comes alive with the tide of lust.

What a wonderful man.

December 20th, 1937

It has nearly been a year since we met, and still we cannot bear to be apart from one another more than a week at a time. I cannot live without his body joined with mine. I want to drink him
as soon as I wake. Sometimes when he is sleeping, I wriggle down to his hips, and I rest my cheek on his thigh, and I lick and suck his cock while it lies still and soft and so trusting, curled
against the pillow of his balls. I love the way that he comes to life in my mouth. Then groans, and opens his eyes and sighs. And when he is hard enough I slide on top of him and fuck him quietly
until he wakes, and tells me that it’s the best kind of morning, when the first thing he feels is my pussy on his dick.