Body and Soul (7 page)

He placed her hand on the hardness in his trousers. Eden unzipped them and, fondling him with her hands, slipped from his lap on to her knees before him and fed him slowly, lovingly, into her mouth, caressing him with its moist warmth and sucking him deep into her throat. Afterwards she rose slowly from the floor and left him sitting there in a lustful state.

Several minutes later Sotiri heard the glorious sound of the cello wafting through the house. She pulled at his heartstrings with her playing. Was it Bach, Beethoven, French court music of one of the kings of France? He had no idea. He only knew that she was playing it for him. She was telling him in the best way she could more of herself and what he should expect. It was not what he wanted to hear. He wanted her to confess all-consuming love for him. He wanted
her
, not a mere taste of her.

As youth and the arrogance of it took him over, he was certain that one day he would win her as his forever. She had seduced him as no other woman had ever done and he was convinced he could woo her to him as Garfield had done once. That she would grace his life with her love and passion. He would gain from her the will to fight on for the best life had to offer with no holds barred.

Sebastian entered the kitchen and saw the sexual state of his friend. He smiled and watched Sotiri fondling himself. ‘You poor bastard,’ was his only comment as he poured himself a cup of coffee.

With much difficulty Sotiri covered his passion for Eden and asked Sebastian, ‘Why poor bastard?’

‘Just listen to Eden playing – everything else in life comes second to her. It’s always been that way with her. You haven’t got a chance of anything more than what happened last night. Do yourself a favour and leave it at that. I’ve known her for years and I don’t expect you will get a second taste of sexual madness from her.’

‘You are forgetting her years with Garfield.’

‘Don’t tell me you’re pitting yourself against him? You don’t really think you can compete with their relationship.’

‘I have youth and better looks on my side than Garfield ever had. I am as intelligent and as good at my work as he ever was at his. Eden is looking for passion and love and I am going to give them to her as he never did.’

‘Don’t be too sure of that. Eden loved him enough to give up heart, body and soul to him. Theirs was a love affair that happens once in a lifetime, if you’re lucky. It burned them both out. You are more than fifteen years younger than Eden. She’ll send you away to find a younger woman. She’s no fool. It would be a mistake to think that she can’t distinguish between love and sexual love. In that she is as much like a man as you or me.’

‘I want her! I will have her! Will woo her until she is mine!’

‘Good luck, you’ll need it. I have seen her enslave a man who loves her without even trying. His name is Max Kerwood and he has loved her for years. He’s her agent and devoted suitor and that’s what he will always be. They have been together professionally for more than twenty years and still, she hasn’t given in to him. Unless she wants you as her true love, her Garfield, you haven’t a chance to win her to you. The world is full of men who have wanted and missed capturing Eden for their own. She is a woman who picks and chooses who she wants. She has the innate belief, like most men, that she has the right to choose her own partner. We’re not speaking here of some wallflower waiting to be plucked by Mr Right. My advice is to listen to her if you don’t want to suffer in a one-sided love affair. She’s a heartbreaker who doesn’t even know it.’

The two men sat for some time listening to the music. Sebastian wanted to weep for the sheer beauty Eden was able to create. Sotiri sensed he was experiencing moments of greatness and knew he was out of his depth but an obsessive desire to possess Eden Sidd had already taken him over.

Aloud he said, ‘She has genius, and what is genius but sustained passion? One day she will love me with that same sustained passion she has for her music.’

Eden was playing for both Sebastian and Sotiri. In gratitude or thanks for what she was not quite sure. A night of lust was certainly not the reason. Eden felt no need to do that and trivialise what had been an erotic frenzy shared equally by them all. The return of passion, then, of adventure to her life? That might be a possibility. The confirmation of her being still a thrilling and attractive human being? It could even be that. Being plucked from the shadows of invisibility into the limelight where she’d dazzled and enjoyed herself as the Eden of her youth and beauty had done? Maybe so. Or possibly for all of those reasons she played, for them.

Eden felt herself bursting with confidence, a happiness with herself and what life had in store for her. The woman sitting in the Frog’s Hollow tea room was barely recognisable now. A matter of a few days and the reality of her life was changing. She was grateful and full of wonder that she should have another chance. Her heart sang, soared to the stroke of her bow as it crossed the strings of her cello.

Chapter 7

In the days that followed Eden’s night of sexual excess with Sebastian and Sotiri she walked the hills of Hydra, sat for long hours in the port drinking coffee or a glass of wine, and allowed a world she had once been prominent in to seep back in to her life. The community of foreign residents she had known for years were now older as she was. They still had the passion to live and let live on the island of their dreams, however. Behind the wrinkled faces youth and energy were still at work in most of them. They were an example to Eden of how not to give up and get on with living a full and enjoyable life. They had managed, as she had not, to combine solitude and fun and even in some cases careers – George Pender the painter, Leonard Cohen the singer-songwriter, several famous authors. They were living lives that were satisfying and where they were still making contributions to the arts and mankind.

Sotiri followed her around sniffing at her sexuality and she was flattered and succumbed to nights of his love and their debauchery. Each day she regained her strength as a woman and an artist and spent more hours playing her cello until she realised that she was practising with more determination and more creative flair with each hour that passed. Eden was making herself ready but for what she was not sure. Not until she called Max.

‘I’m making a comeback,’ she announced.

‘Why am I not surprised?’ was his reply.

‘I don’t know because I am. Will you put the wheels in motion?’

‘How much time do you need to prepare yourself?’

‘Six months should do it. And you to get us engagements?’

‘I don’t know off hand but I’ll get on to it at once. This is thrilling! Your public has been waiting for this a very long time. We could kick off with a venue designed specifically for your return. You choose the place. It will be a sell out in the same way Pablo Cassals’ return to playing in public was. That was in Puerto Rico and the world went there to hear and see him. You have no idea how long I have waited for you to make this call.’

The tenderness in his voice brought tears to her eyes. Max had loved her and her genius for so long and so faithfully. His support strengthened her now even though she hardly needed it. Her confidence had returned. It was then, at that moment, that she saw something else with startling clarity. Eden had never before understood that it was that devastating loss of confidence Garfield had inflicted on her that had driven her from the world’s concert halls. She had always rationalised her retreat from the spotlight as stemming from exhaustion, a need to find herself, a desire to compose.

Eden Sidd’s retreat of the last ten years ended one rainy lunchtime in the Frog’s Hollow tea room in Tetbury. She was reincarnated in Hydra in the arms of two men.

Garfield Barton was sitting alone at a table in the Deux Magots reading the
International Herald Tribune
. It was one of those grey rainy days, cold and nasty for springtime in Paris. But no matter the sheets of rain pounding on the empty tables and chairs outside, the puddles on the pavement and stream of water swiftly swirling down the street against the kerb, nothing could detract from the sight of the spring flowers: bright yellow daffodils, displays of hyacinths and tulips in stunning jewel-like colours, chestnut trees in full bloom. Garfield gazed through the plate-glass window on to the street. For several minutes he watched the chic Parisian women struggling against the weather under their silk umbrellas. Young and old alike were attractive to him. He was always on the look out for women whom he might enjoy and at the same time use to his own advantage.

He looked away from the view and caught the attention of the
waiter with a click of his fingers to order a second espresso. This was part of his morning ritual: he’d wake up and his wife would bring them both a cup of morning tea and climb back into bed with him. They barely spoke to each other. Then Claudine would remove the empty cup from his hand and demand, with no great subtlety, her morning fuck from her husband. They had stopped making love years ago but the day was always that much sweeter for Garfield when he began it with morning sex. It was like adrenaline for him. She then drew his bath – something his first wife had never done – and he would bathe and dress. Claudine would vanish into her morning room where she would make calls. She was very social. Garfield would make his breakfast, walk to the Deux Magots having picked up a newspaper, spend the next hour or so in the cafe then walk to the Rue de Seine and enter the gallery at about midday. This would be his routine every day for the length of his exhibition at the Ramboulais Fils Gallery on the Rue de Seine. He almost never went to his studio to work when he was exhibiting.

Garfield had been a familiar face in the Parisian art world for twenty or more years so it was not unusual for artists, many of them famous, dealers and collectors to stop by his table for a gossip or a query as to how his exhibition was going. He had many acquaintances in the international art and music worlds, some he even considered friends. He was still passionate about all the arts and always looking for the opportunity to combine them with his own art form.

Garfield saw his creative persona as his entrée into high society. He had always thrived on being the artistic soul in the class that could afford to patronise art and artists.

He was handsome, a gigolo on a grand scale whose entire existence had always been bound up in furthering himself and no one else. He did it still with a charm, discretion, a pretence of humility, that never failed to enchant. His art was everything to him, his passion, his true love. Or so he led the world to believe. In fact there was nothing he would not do to further his own career, nothing he would not use, no one he would not manipulate, seduce, to get what he wanted or where he wanted
to go. Garfield Barton was a natural born whore.

Early on in life, on his first trip to Europe the year he’d graduated from Yale, he’d met in Florence a struggling young painter, an Italian homosexual, clever and without a vestige of morals, not at all good-looking but with an abundance of old world charm. Dante Esposito was streetwise, an interesting painter, intensely ambitious. Just what Garfield most admired. They became partners in the struggle for fame and fortune in the art world, working the patrons and benefactors they targeted as a gay and straight friend struggling for their art and nothing else. They were good at it, the best. They charmed themselves into all the right circles and there they stayed, befriending the rich as well as the poor who crossed their paths, devious and clever in their drive to reap rich rewards wherever possible. Love never figured in their affairs, except possibly between the two of them.

Together they owned the house in Hydra that Garfield had received as part-settlement from the divorce with his first wife and a palazzo in Venice. That was where Dante was now as Garfield sat reading his paper in the Deux Magots.

He folded a page back. The first thing he saw was an announcement of his own one man show. It was small, an inch by two inches, but Cecile Ramboulais had at least done what she had promised: a one man show, a dazzling vernissage, advertisements, a stunning brochure … and she had managed to sell five paintings. He was delighted. Those years of courting the sixty-five-year-old dealer had at last paid off for Dante and himself.

When it came to hustling the art world and both European and American high society, Garfield’s having married a second time and fathered a son was no hindrance to him. If anything it added a certain gravitas to his image that he used adroitly to his advantage. Claudine turned out to be another Dante in Garfield’s life. She, too, pimped for her man, and cared little about the way he lived so long as she remained Mrs Garfield Barton, and he loved and was good to their son.

Yes, life was very good for Garfield at the moment. Always a struggle but very good. Once more he turned the page of the newspaper and there it was: a quarter-page photograph of Eden.
It quite took him aback. This was the first time he had come across her name in print in the last ten years. He almost never thought of her, so intent had he been on blocking her out of his life, out of his mind. His first reaction to seeing her face in newsprint was a flashback to having sex with her, how he could dominate her with it and the erotic world he drew her into. She had loved him beyond measure. He had left her because her love nearly ruined his life. Her success, her talent, her passion to live life to the fullest, her lust for him, had seduced him as he had never been seduced before. He had imagined her to be the well he could always draw from, that she would sustain him in everything without question and forever, that they were bound together as one and no one could break them asunder. That she would understand his and Dante’s devious philosophy on how to live. Garfield had believed he could corrupt her into accepting their methods of winning and reaping their just rewards. She had, after all, managed her own path to fame and fortune.

He had always assumed she had done it by using every trick in the book as they had. Eden had fooled them both. Because of Garfield’s years with her he nearly lost Dante as his ally and only true partner in life while the women he hustled resented his being with the beautiful cellist and he nearly lost their support too.

Garfield studied the photograph for several minutes, absorbed in it. Eden could still do that to him, even in newsprint, and he hated her for it. Bile rose in his mouth and he gagged on it, hating her the more as he remembered how she had fooled him. He had had a grand passion for her and she had cheated him. Had seduced him to believing she would lay down her life for him. And though she did in one sense, she had not in another; had failed to make him the star attraction she already was herself.

He closed his eyes to block her from his sight but that was even worse as his mind tantalised him with memories. The excitement of orgasm with Eden charged his body. Memories of sexual ecstasy, the power he’d had to make her come in floods of sweet excess, made him gasp.

Once more he snapped his fingers for the attention of the waiter and ordered a Pernod. He found his hand trembling as he
added a long splash of water to the lime green liquid. As soon as it turned milky he drank from the glass. The bite of aniseed awakened his taste buds. He imagined the taste of Eden Sidd, so sweet and salty on his tongue. After reading the large print under the photograph Garfield tore the page from the newspaper, scrunched it into a messy ball and dropped it under the table where he kicked it sharply away from him with the toe of his shoe.

Garfield often thought of those great years when he had been with Eden – they were some of the best of his life. It had been Hydra, Paris, New York, a constant social whirl where all doors in the art world were held ajar for him and the woman on his arm. He never, however, thought about Eden as a human being in her own right, an artist with her own agenda, but rather blocked her out, pretended she had no real substance as Eden Sidd but only as a sensual, exciting, faceless woman who’d adored but ultimately cheated him, used him when he was so certain he was using her and could leave any time he chose.

A scene flashed through his mind: that fatal phone call, Dante calling from Venice. ‘You must leave her today or all will be lost for us. The Contessa will make over her palace to her niece unless you come home and stay with her here. She longs for your love – and the sex, of course – but she is growing impatient. Don’t be stupid! You have allowed your cock to rule your head long enough. Eden Sidd may be a sexual delight but that’s all she’s been or will ever be. She’s not one of us, just pretending to be. When it comes down to it, she hasn’t the money or the courage to live as we do. She wants you all to herself. She’s ruining you. You have forty-eight hours more left to play with her then, I warn you, it had better be over.’

Dante had of course been right about Eden. Garfield had owed her no explanation and when he walked out on her never gave her one. She’d had her problems: the tragic death of her mother and father had been an enormous loss to her, plus financial worries and a career she had been distracted from when love had moved in on her. Yes, he had had the best of Eden and now there was nothing left. The well had run dry. It was
over. Time to move on. He never gave it a second thought and was gone within twenty-four hours of Dante’s phone call.

Garfield paid his bill. After turning his collar up against the wind and the rain, he walked swiftly from the cafe through the flooded streets to the gallery. He was drenched through to the skin by the time he entered it. There was no one there except Cecile and her assistant. She took Garfield to her flat above where she towel dried his hair, cared for and attended to him as he remembered bitterly that Eden had never made such loving gestures towards him. That was, of course, not true, merely a selfish stretch of the imagination so that he might dislike her that little bit more. Hold her in contempt of his heart.

Cecile kissed him on the cheek, then his lips. She removed his wet jacket and shirt and, drying him off with a fresh warm towel, she caressed his chest and kissed his nipples. He gazed deeply into her face, so well cared for for a woman her age. But her eyes gave her away. They were old eyes, dimmed by age, hardened equally by success and disappointment. He knew what she wanted, what price he must pay for her devotion to his work, her passion to keep him as friend-painter-lover. He unzipped his trousers and turned her over the back of the easy chair, plunging into her forcefully. He fucked her deeply, roughly. She begged him to slow down, he was hurting her, but he placed a hand over her mouth and continued. He felt her give in to her orgasms. They came repeatedly and swiftly and Cecile was lost in ecstasy, moving to the rhythm of his every thrust.

Garfield was lost in the acts of hatred and sex. In his mind he was having sex with Eden, dissolving her into a puddle of need for him to fuck her to death, which in fact was almost how it had been between them. He could not, did not want to, stop. He continued for a considerable time before he came into Cecile with a powerful orgasm. Release sent him collapsing to the floor still holding on to Cecile who was crying: from fright, pleasure, pain and gratitude.