A Rage to Live (21 page)

Kane was still at the piano playing when he saw her walk from the bedroom into the sitting-room. He continued to play for several minutes more but his eyes never left her. When he stopped playing, for a few seconds the music lingered in the air. Kane closed the piano lid. He rose from the chair and walked not to her but away from her, to the fireplace. There he stood for several seconds looking at her.

He had a prodigious appetite for sex and women, but not for love. For him sex was like romance: it was all in the chase, the consummation. Had to be short-lived to keep it exciting. But this Circe somehow kept him enthralled. Sexual opportunists like Kane keep going as long as the going is good and they are not bored and it doesn’t get complicated.
It was still good for him and his Circe, he was not bored and so far nothing was complicated. He walked towards this sexy lady who had learned so quickly how to excite lust in him and swept her off her feet and into his arms. He asked her, ‘Been happy with me?’

‘Unimaginably.’

‘Good.’

It happened so quickly, was so wild and passionate the way he turned on her. He bit her lips hard, and there was violence in the way he handled her. His kisses were all but terrifying. He pulled her head back by a handful of her hair and bit into her neck. He used his hands to slap her hard round her breasts and bottom, then covered her stinging flesh with kisses that devoured. He used his teeth to leave a mark. Kane was male lust out of control.

She tried to get away from his violent lovemaking, a struggle she lost. He tore her nightgown open. She gasped, astonished at his anger. He grabbed for the shoestring straps on her shoulders. One broke and the gown fell away from her to hang loose. Not satisfied, he tore at it again and again until it hung in tatters by the remaining shoulder string.

Seeing her naked seemed to add more passion and fire to his quest to possess her. It was as if he wanted to devour her the way he hungrily went for her breasts, sucked hard, pinched, and slapped her about. He wanted to kill her with lust.

It was too much for Cressida. She tried to pull away from him but he was too quick and pulled her even tighter to him. He lifted her beneath the bottom and clasped her to him, and she hung on to him with arms wrapped round his neck, legs gripping him hard round his body. He had at last triggered the violent passion Cressida possessed and she turned on him, bit into his face and shoulder. She pummelled him with her fists and sucked on his nipples, drawing a drop of blood. Now it was Kane who was squirming with pain and the pleasure that can come from a dark and wild sexual nature.

Incredibly strong and agile, he pulled her off him and spun her round, holding her with her back to him in a tight grip. He marched her to a chair where he forced her to lean over it. He tore the remnant of her nightgown away and threw it across the room. She heard the sound of his zipper. ‘No,’ she pleaded, ‘not like this.’

‘Oh, yes, just like this. Not a word, keep very quiet,’ he demanded. Once more she tried to get away from Kane, not because she didn’t want him, but because she didn’t want him like this, without love. He slapped her and she tensed up. That excited him more. He had her pinned down and penetrated her with one mighty thrust. She called out, not so much from pain, or shock, nor at being taken against her
will, but from the exquisite sensation of being filled so completely by a man, the man she loved. Once inside her, Kane’s rough treatment no longer mattered. He fucked her with the rage of passion. She began to cry. She could no more hold back her tears than she could her orgasms.

She was his, dominated by him, his sexual passion, his penis. Kane had turned Cressida into a sexual animal who yearned for the taste of a man’s come, to be riven into oblivion. Four days ago unthought of desires. Cressida was torn between the despair of a fuck without love and wanting to be fucked. His every thrust was aimed to penetrate deep, to fuck her hard and fast, again and again, without pause. It was as if their very lives depended on their copulation. He wanted to fuck her to death.

Where was the tenderness and the foreplay that he had taken such pains to show her the first time he took her virginity, when he sodomised her, when he taught her to enjoy oral sex? Certainly not here. But here and now she was learning that animal sex, even when at first thrust upon her against her will, though never right, could bring yet another kind of sexual excitement when she was in love. He had forced her by the sheer power of loveless sex to open up to him, to relax, give in and enjoy their mutual animal lust. All resistance fell away and she learned to love Kane too for the beast in him. Her orgasms were triggered by her riggishness, his lust, and her love. She had been turned from virgin to sexual animal by a master.

He ceased being Kane Chandler, her childhood love, and did indeed become that Minotaur, half animal, half man. It was to that Minotaur that she called out obscene ravings, pleaded for debauched and depraved sex to excite her to streams of long and strong orgasms. All in the name of the god Eros. Cressida wanted to be devoured by a creature half bull, half man. All this was most certainly not from the mouth of Cressida, but from the Circe of the Picasso who had entered her psyche and would remain there forever.

Her Minotaur obliged. They were gone, lost in lust and depravity. It was several hours of sexual madness before Cressida, exhausted, fell into a deep and dark sleep. The last thing she heard was Kane telling her, ‘I love you for this, that you gave yourself to me so completely.’ The last thing she felt was his tender kiss on her bruised lips.

Cressida’s eyes were still closed when she heard the birds singing. Felt the warmth of sunlight on her face. She opened her eyes and the brightness of the day made her place an arm over them. It was not remorse so much as a sense of guilt that came over her, triggered by memories of the night before. She arched her back and it ached. She stretched her legs and felt the soreness between them. Contracting her
muscles, an erotic need that felt incredibly sexy, she imagined that she was clasping Kane’s penis, rampant and hard and deep inside her. She came, a small wake-up orgasm. She removed her arm from her eyes. She felt wrecked.

Now quite awake, she realised the hardness of the floor beneath her. She opened her eyes. He had placed a pillow under her head, a sheet of silk and a cashmere blanket over her. She had been asleep on the floor between the piano and the windows overlooking the lake. Cressida sat up. She saw the remnants of what had been her lace nightgown. Ruined. She felt sad that she would never wear it for Kane again. That suddenly served as a warning to her that something was amiss. Something was quite wrong.

Cressida threw the blanket off. A second warning: stains on the beautiful bed linen, a remainder of the sexual violence of their lovemaking the night before. Cressida found it odd that she could not conjure up a vision of her lover, Kane, only of her other lover, the Minotaur, and of the Picasso painting down to the very last detail.

There was the silence of foreboding, broken only by the sound of the birds singing outside the window. She rose somewhat stiffly from her uncomfortable bed on the floor. The room seemed the same, romantically beautiful, and yet it was not the same. Where was Kane?

Cressida wrapped herself in the thin cream-coloured cashmere blanket and gathered up the stained sheet. Embarrassed by it, she placed it in a leather waste basket and walked into the bedroom looking for Kane. He wasn’t there. She knew in her heart that he was not out walking. That he simply was no longer there. She felt her knees go weak and saved herself from falling by sitting down at the foot of the bed. She dropped her chin on to her chest and took deep breaths, many of them as deep as she could, trying very hard to stop hyperventilating. Panic was close at hand. In time she was able to bring herself under some sort of control. Enough at least to raise her head and breathe if not normally, then very nearly so.

The Picasso was gone. Cressida looked at the space where it had been. Her hands began to tremble. ‘He wouldn’t do this. Kane, you wouldn’t do this to me,’ she said aloud, wanting to believe that. Hours went by with her sitting on the edge of that grand bed, her mind a blank. She sat there for as long as it took to work through the shock she had sustained.

She found the envelope on the pillow, her pillow, on the side of the bed they had declared was hers. She looked at it for a long time, not really wanting to know what it said.

She had been abandoned before, by Rosemary, her brothers, Kane when she was a mere child, and by Byron for most of the year. She was
a veteran at handling that. Composed now, she picked up the envelope. Two thousand dollars in hundred-dollar bills. That she did not expect. She came near to fainting. It took a considerable effort but she walked from the bed, envelope in hand, to the
chaise longue
, and stretched out on it. She removed the letter from the envelope and read:

Not even his name. That was all Cressida could think. No love, no thank you for a wonderful time, not even his name. An initial and a tip. She ran to the bathroom and was sick.

Kane did on occasion think about his interlude with the young girl he’d picked up on the Rue de Seine in Paris the day he bought his first Picasso. But it was years later, in the arms of yet another young girl, a very clever, possibly brilliant concert pianist, ambitious, adoring of him, and yet without a vestige of real love for him, that Kane realised he missed that girl he had dubbed his Circe.

That girl had had a genuine love for him that he had enjoyed, and he realised he was beginning to scan the faces in a crowd, in every audience, on the street, in a restaurant, looking for her. He wanted her. That wasn’t quite true: he wanted her and her love. He had had a taste of it, but had thought at the time: This is an acquired taste, and I don’t know that it is one I want to cultivate.

Now he knew he had missed something special that he might never find again. She and her love had somehow cast a spell on him and he had not found anyone else to dispel it. For years he expected one day to look up and find her there. It never happened. All sorts of other kinds of love replaced the one he had abandoned so ruthlessly.

Instead he replaced her with Valentina and Nancy and settled for volatile relationships rather than love, and never satisfied his appetite for casual affairs and expensive ladies of the night. In time he stopped scanning faces for a glimpse of that lovely girl he’d turned into an erotic lady, and was content and happy with the life he’d created for himself, which remained always very much for him and no one else. But the girl
long forgotten had stirred something in him, and now his perfectly ordered life was being tested once again, this time by the beautiful woman who had broken into his beach house.

TOMMY BEACON-PHIPPS

Chapter 17

Tommy Beacon-Phipps was trapped. He knew it, his sister Victoria knew it, and Cressida Vine, the girl he expected to marry, knew it. That was why he drank to excess. He surrounded himself with people and could not spend any sustained length of time alone in his own company. He lived dangerously, on the edge all the time. He played with his own life as if it were a game of chance, the turn of a card. That was how he made forty million dollars and created a successful brokerage firm in his own name, and was now semi-retired, all before his thirtieth birthday. It was also why he was not eligible to marry any of the string of women who chased after him.

He shared a handsome New York town house just off Park Avenue in the upper sixties with his sister all the time, and his girlfriend Cressida some of the time. The three were inseparable most of the time. In their social circle, that spanned the east coast of the States and criss-crossed the Atlantic, they held the reputation of being best friends, the least complicated, and the most fun.

Tommy was one of those special people, handsome, amusing, generous – sometimes to a fault, fiercely successful in business, social, and financial terms, but private, very private, secretive even.

Wealthy from birth, he understood money and power as only someone born into a conservative, white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant background can understand these things. Like Cressida and Vicki, he was brought up with that very special kind of security that comes from belonging to a clan. He was one of those rare few born at the top, into privilege and wealth, and not having to fight his way up the social ladder, could have been one of those playboys who did nothing with his life. In fact, he did make an enormous success of it. And so, as many of the people who did business with him and frequented his house asked themselves, what was wrong?

A working playboy who parachutes out of planes for fun, hang glides, flies microlites, sails, races cars, a downhill skier who thrives on the big chance, the bigger challenge, and always takes it, that was Tommy. But never for the limelight. The personal danger involved was always the hook for him. The limelight was something he
assiduously avoided, would go to uncommon lengths to keep out of.

It became increasingly obvious to those who admired and loved Tommy that as the years went by he was harder and harder to understand. Less communicative, except on a very superficial social level. The gossips believed all that would change when he finally married Cressida Vine. The story that went about was that he had loved her ever since she was a very young girl. It was a romantic story that everyone loved. How he’d waited for her to grow up. Waited for her through her University years. How, in her third year at Yale, they had become lovers. And now still they waited, the three of them, he, his sister and Cressida, until the time was right for Vicki to move out of the town house and Cressida to move in as Mrs Tommy Beacon – Phipps and make babies.

Why then, with all this going for him, was Tommy trapped? Why his addiction to danger, dangerous living and alcohol? What was burning away in the man?

Tommy was not totally self-destructive. He knew how to pull himself back from the brink. He had tremendous reserves of willpower to draw on. He was also very good at keeping round him those who knew how to keep him emotionally and physically propped up. Dr Clore, whom Vicki dubbed Dr Instant Feelgood, was at the end of a jog and a B12 cocktail, shot intravenously every morning that Tommy was in New York.

Dr Instant Feelgood believed he knew what was wrong with Tommy Beacon-Phipps. Too much money, too much success, too much family background, and not enough hard knocks. Tommy was spoilt and weak. Dr Instant Feelgood despised weak characters and dark secrets that took over a man’s life. The morning concoction drawn into a fat syringe and plunged through a long thin needle that slipped smoothly into Tommy’s vein was the essential feel good wonder of modern medicine. It helped, sometimes even for a longer period of time than the next morning injection.

He was a wise and clever doctor who knew that his shots were life – saving to some, and to others nothing more than a mere crutch to lean on. Tommy fell into the second category. Dr Instant Feelgood was a better diagnostician than most. He knew about the dark side of people’s nature. That that could be a disease too. And that was what was wrong with Tommy Beacon-Phipps. He had a dark side, a secret that was eating away at his life. There could be nothing else because doctor and patient had covered it all. Business, money, sex, they had all checked out as problem free. Tommy had demons that he didn’t live well with. Or a demon. That was his problem, his only problem.
The doctor’s advice: ‘Embrace your demon, get on with your life and stop drinking.’

Other doctors had warned him to stop drinking too. Tommy had no intention of taking their advice, not so long as alcohol still worked for him, and it did. ‘You might as well tell me to stop fucking,’ had been his only answer.

‘But you won’t get cirrhosis of the liver from fucking, Tommy,’ had been the doctor’s reply.

Instant Feelgood had spotted him as a man with a strong libido. Tommy had sex as frequently as possible. It was one of the more important things in his life. Tommy wanted sex all the time. Some of his closest friends, who saw the high-priced hookers discreetly come and go, knew it. Cressida and Vicki guessed that he might not be as faithful to Cressida as he pretended to be. Cressida chose to turn a blind eye to the possibility. She and Vicki, who confided everything to each other, on this one subject said nothing.

Tommy kept the sexual side of his life secret, or as secret as a womaniser can. His reputation as terrific in bed was only one of the many attractive things about Tommy Beacon-Phipps that ensured his popularity with women who all thought Cressida Vine the luckiest girl alive to be adored by Tommy and to be the woman he would one day marry. They often speculated, as did their men friends, at how terrific Cressida must be in bed to keep his love.

Tommy, Cressida, and Vicki, a trio with a rage to live and have a good time, yet they were always somehow that little bit remote from the social whirl. People looked at them with envy for the solid relationship they had with one another, the loyalty. They were a
fait accompli
and that was why they kept going as they were, never making that final commitment to break up the trio and become a duo with a best friend.

Tommy was almost never in New York in the summer. He made it a point only to fly into the city from his house on Martha’s Vineyard when absolutely necessary: a business problem that could not be solved by telephone, fax, or someone from the office flying to the island off the coast of Cape Cod to see him. Or maybe to spend an evening having sex with Cressida, or to pick her up and fly her to the summer house for the weekend. It was a bargain they’d struck because Cressida insisted on keeping the job he despised. He considered it a dead end job that she was wasting her time on, and was scathing about her having the last two weeks in August for a holiday. No more, no less.

Though Tommy wanted Cressida, he did not want her all the time. Only when it suited him, which was in fact a great deal of the time. He
liked her, insisted on her being on his arm, as his woman for all the world to see. He liked her in bed. That was what had brought him to New York in the heat: business, a meeting the afternoon before with a Japanese industrialist, and then to return with Cressida to the Vineyard. Vicki, who was spending the summer as she always did in his house in the Vineyard, arrived in New York with him. The three went out on the town then Cressida and Tommy, leaving Vicki with friends, went home to make love.

Tommy and Cressida had a somewhat odd history of sex happiness together. For years he had pursued a sex scene with Cressida to no avail. He was tender and very patient with her but concerned that she might be frigid, until they at last had the full sexual experience when she surprised him. She was fantastic.

She had made him wait three years after their first grand tour of Europe, that time when he and Vicki had left her in Paris to go off to Petra, before she at last succumbed. He would ask her time and again, why, when she was so highly sexed, had she insisted on repressing her sexual desires? He never received an answer.

Their relationship changed after they became lovers. For Cressida it became easier; in many ways more emotionally complicated for Tommy. But he kept that side of it well hidden from Cressida. He just drank more, and found it very sad that as good as the sex was between them, they both knew their passion was for others. Who the others were didn’t matter. What did, was that it was not for them. Time, friendship and sex, a history like that, well, neither one had the courage to throw it all away. Cressida because she had no one else. Tommy because he did.

At eight o’clock in the morning they kissed goodbye on the corner of Park Avenue and Sixty-ninth Street and she went to her office. Tommy jogged for his morning jab from Dr Instant Feelgood. At ten o’clock he was back home and called Cressida at her office. ‘Last night was wonderful. You’re wonderful.’

‘You drank too much, Tommy. Why?’

‘What’s wrong, Cressy?’

‘I don’t know, Tommy. I don’t think I make you happy.’

‘That’s ridiculous. More important, do I make you happy?’

‘More than anyone else.’

‘Then that’s all right then.’

‘Is it, Tommy?’

‘Come to lunch with me? I’ll prove it to you.’

‘I can’t. I told you that earlier. I have a luncheon date, a new client, an important meeting.’

‘Where?’

‘Here, in the dining-room. I won’t be out of here until after six this evening.’

‘Sorry. Vicki says for you to wait there for her, she’ll pick you up and you can come home together.’

Tommy put down the receiver and took a deep breath. He closed his eyes for several seconds before he turned round. It was verified.

‘We’re free, we’re safe. We have the whole day to ourselves. A whole day alone, no watching eyes, no commitments, just you and me and no play acting. We can be ourselves and in love.’

Tommy double locked the door to the basement and they walked upstairs from the kitchen. He double locked the front door. Hand in hand, they entered the drawing-room where he picked up a bottle of Krug champagne, she took two Lalique crystal glasses, and he swept the woman he loved off her feet. He kissed her passionately. She tore open her silk dressing-gown and he buried his face in her breasts and licked them. Theirs was the laughter of children. They took the two flights of stairs to his bedroom two at a time.

A glorious day in her arms, making love with lust unbounded. Hours later she told him, ‘I have to go.’

From the moment she said it, she felt sorry she had spoken. It was always easier on both of them if she just rose from the bed and dressed. That was enough of a declaration of separation. Words always made it more difficult to part. All life, all happiness, seemed to die in him. Tommy was suddenly another man, tense and nervy.

‘These last hours have been wonderful. I love it when we’re here alone in this house, not pretending to be anything other than what we are.’

‘You always say that when we’re here, or in the fishing shack in the Vineyard. When we’re in our pied à terre in China Town, sailing, making love in a tent on a Himalayan mountain. You
always
say that,’ she teased.

‘That’s my point exactly. We are only really happy, that down deep happy, when we are alone together. All the rest is pretence, or at best another kind of happiness, another kind of love and sex. Less rich, less pure. Only
we
are real and right.’

‘Right?’

He ignored her question. ‘Run away with me. We can start again some place in South America or Mexico where no one knows us. Anywhere. These stolen moments, the years, haven’t made it easier. Once we thought they would. We were wrong.’

‘And give up your life? The houses you love, your business, the parents. What would it do to them, your friends and Cressida? The scandal. We would never survive it. There’s no way either of us can
handle that, Tommy. We have chosen the only way out for us and we have to live with it.’

‘There
is
another way, I’ve got it worked out. We’ll just vanish, create a wonderful world of our own and be happy in it. Other people have vanished and their families learn to live with it. Ours will too.’

‘It will never work. We’ll learn to hate each other, and I couldn’t bear that. We’ve loved each other too long and too well for that. I would rather die than lose your love. It’s an impossible situation and we will have to live with it and love each other more for the impossibility of our lives. For what we suffer to stay together.’

‘I love you more, I seem always to love you more, and that makes the duplicity of our lives almost unbearable for me. Unless you’re tiring of me?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous. You are my love, I can’t live without you.’

They kissed. In her arms the whole world fell away. He kissed her again and again and caressed the body he loved so much. Theirs had always been a fierce sexual attraction, right from the first when they came to accept they were meant for each other body and soul. Their lust for each other had not dimmed a fraction after so many years of making love. She was all things erotic for him, his goddess, his love, his whore, and he could never get enough of fucking her.

‘Oh, you
are
wonderful. What bliss, what happiness,’ he told her. Once again he felt her soft, moist labia part and he entered the woman he loved. Swollen hard with lust, his penetrations were slow and lazy caressings made inch by inch until he filled her completely again and again. She seduced him with her own sexual ardour, tightly gripping and releasing, gripping and releasing on his moving penis. She came, a slow and sensuous orgasm. It had always been like this for them, a one to one sexual passion overridden by love.

Outside their sexual couplings, their lives went on as if no such lust for each other had ever entered their minds. A pact had been made long ago that they would keep their public and private loves separate. Their affair was to be their own special secret until the day they died. Together they manipulated a life outside in order to save themselves. The love that could never be was the only love they knew. The rest, the other so-called loves of their lives, existed and were accepted. But Tommy and his lady knew they were not, and could never be, anything near the love they felt for each other. When they talked about lovers they called them ‘fluffs’, because they were relationships so light. The skim, the residue off the real thing, so unimportant they could blow them away with one small breath, and remain as they were, solid for each other in real undying love.