Her Hungry Heart (14 page)

Barbara and Mrs Peabody were instilling taste in Mimi. Good taste that became the norm for her, and that would last all of her life. Mimi was fast becoming a stylish, pretty young thing with a unique seductive charm. Often Barbara thought, not unlike her father.

What delighted Mimi most was that Barbara loved her, respected her as her friend. Barbara thought of places to go, things for Mimi to see and do. If herself unable to give Mimi all the attention Barbara considered she needed, she sent Ching Lee to accompany her. Barbara was good not only to Mimi but to Sophia too. She included her in many things where she thought Sophia would be comfortable. Barbara saw Sophia as just the woman she was, a mother-figure, companion to an extraordinarily charming and interesting child who was growing up fast. A boon to Mimi’s life.

Mimi travelled to Easthampton, Long Island to visit Barbara in her house there. It was Barbara and her friend Brandon who taught her to swim in the ocean, Barbara who took her out on a yacht, and it was Barbara who made her understand the things in a woman men liked, because there was always a man in Barbara’s life. A man in love with her, a man who wanted her. That became the norm, was expected as far as Mimi was concerned. The impressionable young girl realized that that was what she wanted too, what she would one day have. Mimi flowered, life was very sweet. Only at night in bed, thinking of her father, how happy he would be to know that this was her life, did she feel a pang for the years that had been so cruel to her, the years that had almost overwhelmed her. Remnants of those years existed for Mimi, habits she would never shed, insecurities that she sensed would never go away. But she was good about the past. If she felt herself reliving those dark years, that they were overwhelming her, she blocked them out, put them far away from her, and thought about now, nothing either side of now. She hardly thought about the future, except to include her father in it.

For two years now she had been taking tennis lessons at Barbara’s club. Today she sat on the sidelines and watched Barbara play tennis with one of the club’s pros. Mimi was aware of the men watching Barbara. As of late several boys
had been looking at Mimi in the same interested way. She liked that. It always made her pull her shoulders back and stick her now developing bosom forward. With a tilt of the head and a twinkle of the eye, a cool but sure manner, she charmed them, childishly seduced them into wanting to get closer. She had learned those gestures from Barbara and smiled as she performed them now to an admirer.

Barbara lost, tossed her racket up into the air, then caught it and ran towards the net to shake her opponent’s hand. Several men rushed on to the court and surrounded her, looking for a game. She charmed her way past them, all smiles, still shaking her head. ‘It’s unbelievable,’ she told Mimi. ‘One stupid fault and then another, and I simply lost my confidence and blew the game. Don’t ever do that, Mimi, never lose your confidence. Fight on.’

She slipped her hand through the young girl’s and wiped her face with a white towel. They went down to the locker-room to change.

They left the River Club to go to East 65th Street to stop for coffee with Brandon. He was Barbara’s latest boyfriend, and Mimi liked him very much. They window-shopped along Madison Avenue and stopped in front of a window. Barbara was attracted to a black evening dress. ‘What do you think, Mimi?’

‘It’s beautiful. Sexy.’

Barbara turned to look at her. ‘Sexy? Mimi, what do you know about sexy?’

‘Sexy’s what attracts men. You’re sexy, Barbara, and I certainly want to be.’ She began to laugh. ‘Brandon must think you’re very sexy.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘The way he looks at you, and he’s always touching you.’

Barbara felt herself going pink.

‘How does it feel to be sexy, Barbara?’

‘Mimi, I had no idea you thought about these things.’

‘Of course I think about these things, Barbara. All us girls
do. We talk about it at school all the time. But I must admit, most of the time we don’t know what we’re talking about.’

Barbara began to laugh.

‘Can I ask you about sexy?’

‘Well, I guess so, Mimi. You’ve asked me about everything else. I doubt that Sophia talks about sexy.’

‘Oh no, I don’t think that she talks about sexy,’ giggled Mimi. ‘How does it feel when Brandon kisses you? I’ve seen him do it, and your eyes go a little bit squiffy, and the way you slip your arms around his neck and lean into him. Does that make you feel good? No, it must make
him
feel good.’

Barbara tried to keep herself under control. But it was difficult. She kept wanting to burst into laughter. ‘Yes, it does,’ she managed without a laugh. ‘It makes me feel warm, tingly, it’s nice. Some day you’ll know that feeling, a long time from now – at least I hope it will be. You stay a girl for a while longer, Mimi. Has a boy ever kissed you?’

‘Oh, yes, Pierre’s kissed me, and Max. He was teaching us how to kiss. Then, at a school-friend’s party, Bob Chalker kissed me and bit my lip. He went all funny when I kissed him back the way Max taught me to do it. But nobody’s kissed me like Brandon kisses you.’

Mimi felt very adult talking to Barbara about sex and men, it quite excited her. ‘Once,’ she told Barbara, ‘Juliet and I took our panties down and we lay on the grass and opened our legs. Pierre and Max investigated us, and Max told us what men and women do together, and how wonderful it felt, and how much we’d like it. But he couldn’t do it to us because we were too young. His fingers felt good there, though. I always think when Brandon kisses you and touches you, you must feel like I felt that day when the boys played with us.’

Barbara was speechless. They walked in silence for some time before she was able to recover herself enough to tell Mimi, ‘If ever you’ve got any questions about sex, you come to me, promise?’

‘Yes.’

‘If there’s a boy who wants to do that again with you, come and tell me and we’ll decide what you should do, okay?’

‘There’s nothing wrong in it, is there?’

‘No, there’s nothing wrong in it, it’s lovely. Men will want to do that and much more, like caress your breasts, kiss them. You’d like that wouldn’t you, Mimi?’

‘Oh, yes, I like the feeling. Do you?’

‘You mean, Max managed that as well?’

‘Yes, but just a little bit, as an illustration, he said. He said we were no fun because we were too under-developed both in mind and body. Max had a real crush on you, Barbara. He said you were the perfect sexy lady. That he thought you really liked making love with a man. Do you, Barbara?’

She began wondering how she had become embroiled in this conversation, but thought she had to see it through with honesty and consideration for Mimi and her obvious need to know about sex. ‘Yes, very much. And so will you one day, but you need not be bothered with that now. Forget sex, Mimi, for a couple more years anyway. But if it comes your way, promise to come to me and we will talk about it?’

‘Or Brandon?’

‘Yes, or Brandon.’

‘I like Brandon, I like the way he loves you. It makes me feel good.’

That was so sweet. It made Barbara want to weep that Mimi should be so innocent, so loving. The child deserved so much to be happy. There was something valiant about her. Maybe that was what drew people to her.

They were at Brandon’s town house and, as she watched Mimi rush up the stairs, Barbara hoped that Karel could get back soon, before he missed her entire childhood.

Chapter 12

It was three o’clock in the afternoon. The sky was black, the streets so dark they were lit by lamps and car headlights. New York City was having one of those cold November rain-storms that drive people off the streets. The water swirled in streams down the streets towards the overloaded drains. It was level with the pavement. The cars trailed plumes of water as they sped over flooded tarmac. The avenues were awash. A wind that rattled the cars blew out any umbrella that opposed its ferocity.

Barbara could barely see the terrace through the downpour driven on alarming gusts of wind. Rain cascaded against the window panes. A roll of thunder rang in her ears. A dazzle of lightning lit up the sky. The spectacular duet was repeated again, and yet again, in various parts of the sky. Streaks of lightning, in pairs now, exploded simultaneously, one over the park, near Central Park West, the other over the zoo. Immediately a streak hovered over Columbus Circle and, seconds later, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, another almost directly over her own building. Awesome pyrotechnics.

Barbara was too mesmerized by the show to move sensibly away from the window. She was wrapped up in the excitement, the danger, the passion of the angry elements playing havoc above the earth. The room was dark, lit only by firelight. She was warm and safe with a box-seat at nature’s display, and she forgot everything else. How long she had been standing there she had no idea.

Then quite suddenly the rainstorm blew itself out. The dark was split by a streak of yellow sky. In moments the streak widened, the afternoon turned bright with sunshine. Barbara pressed the palms of her hands against the windows. The glass was cold. She felt the chill. She pressed her forehead against it and closed her eyes. It wasn’t often she felt such disquiet of the heart as she did now. The shock of the cold against her warm skin, would that jolt her out of it?

She had awakened that morning from a deep sleep feeling a restlessness, an
angoisse,
that had been haunting her all through the day. Why this dreadful unease? What was happening that made her feel such inner disruption? She sensed that was what was happening to her. Something deep within her was stirring, an emotion that had obviously long been dormant. It had been interfering with her painting all day, until she felt compelled to leave her studio and forget work. A lost day. From the studio she had gone to the library and had chosen a novel to escape into. It worked for a short time, but her concentration was shot; no hope of enjoying a novel that day.

Lunch out. A trip to the Cedars Bar to talk art. Someone would be hanging out there on a day like this. Take Mimi on a shopping-spree? She posed those suggestions to herself. None seemed incentive enough to get her on the move and out of the house.

Restless and sexy, that was how she felt. She opened her eyes and marvelled at nature: the sight now of her terrace sparkling under a winter sunshine. She rubbed her cold hands, yet had to raise one to shade her eyes from a bright sun that had streaked quite suddenly through her drawing room windows to tint the room a buttery yellow. The little heat there was from it felt good. Barbara walked to the fire to warm her hands.

She felt a strange awareness of her own body. She seemed inordinately interested in her own physicality: her limbs,
her breasts, her round voluptuous bottom, the beauty and sensuous seductiveness of her cunt. She was unused to such self-absorption, such passionate admiration of herself and her sexuality. It excited her. It was as if she were picking up on one of her lovers’ lustful yearnings for her. She felt an aliveness in herself, a sensuousness that was thrilling. So much so that she felt the need to play her own lover and caress herself as her lovers did.

Barbara was a sexy lady, but rarely had she so hungered to be riven by a man, or felt so receptive to that special erotic love that is uncommitted and delivered by a lover who breaks all rules for lust and love.

In the bedroom she stripped off her clothes to study herself in front of the full-length, sixteenth-century Venetian mirror. It was as if she were seeing herself for the first time, lascivious, downright raunchy, extremely sexy flesh and emotion all rolled into one. She was a kind of lewd yet sophisticated object of sexual desire, in her high heels and ivory stockings held to her thighs by lacy black garters, a long strand of pearls draped carelessly over and around one breast. Her long blonde hair was swept back to reveal a face coolly beautiful, yet hot with desire.

She felt such tremendous yearning in herself to be touched. To have a man caress her, respond to the fire that was burning in her loins. Who is that stranger I see so hungry for carnal love? she asked herself. She found it difficult to square this sexually hungry woman, this sensuous feline femininity, with the other sides of herself. Had she never looked closely enough at that aspect of herself before? Had she never understood that the woman reflected in the mirror was as important to her as she was to her lovers? It was as if that part of Barbara had flowered for her, just her, for the first time and she could admire her sexuality with a new respect and pride.

She took one of her breasts. Cupping it in the palms of her hands, she stroked it lovingly. The nimbus round her
nipple puckered under her caress, the nipple grew erect. She experienced a sweetly different pleasure from her own caress. She ran her hands over her hips, her thighs, and bent forward, hands on her waist, to watch the movement of her full, rounded breasts, felt their weight as she swung herself slowly from side to side, and caressed once more those breasts, her arms, her neck. The sensation of being both lover and receiver of her own lust for sexual sensation was different, another kind of sex.

She sat down on the end of the bed. Her own reflection contemplated her from the mirror. She raised her arms out and slowly fell backwards. The movement in her limbs felt good. She raised her legs one at a time into the air, stretched them straight and stroked them. Lowering them, she bent them at the knee. Her feet were flat on the bed. Even that felt sensuous, very sexy. She caught herself up short, less embarrassed by her behaviour than surprised by it. She told herself, this is ridiculous. But in her heart she knew that it was not.

With hands on her knees she pushed her legs far apart. There in the mirror was the reflection of the inside of her thighs: that exquisite line where leg meets buttocks, the long seductive crack, that place of mystery and pleasure, hidden in the short, silky curls of blonde hair adorning a mound aptly named after Venus. The sight excited her as a magnificent, raunchy, painting by Schiele might. Her portrait in a sixteenth-century Venetian frame.

She was as if mesmerized by the voluptuous display of female genitalia. She wanted to see more, to feel more. She parted the outer lips with her fingers. Shocking the excitement she felt at the touch of the soft, pink and moistly fleshy inner lips of cunt. But this did nothing to dispel her restlessness, her sexual hunger. Yet this extravagant admiration of herself was enjoyable, liberating even. No replacement certainly for sex with a man: simply something other, not to be denied. Sex, right now, in the afternoon.
There were any number of men as hungry for that and her as she was for one of them.

Normally she would have had no qualms about calling for one, but on this strange day she did. Instead, she climbed into a bath of scented oils: tuberose and jasmine. She luxuriated in the satiny smooth hot water, the steam swirling from it. There was her work, her lover, Brandon, whether to marry him or not, to absorb her thoughts.

So many reasons to do it. They were incredibly well suited to each other. He was a fine painter, far better than she would ever be. Maybe a great painter. Only art history would confirm what the American art world already believed. As she did herself. Not in itself a sufficient motive for marrying him – but along with the many other unignorable reasons …? He was sexy, with a superior intelligence which he used, ever constructively, in his work as well as for art. A thoroughly intellectual painter, distinctively cerebral, an abstract expressionist, spokesman for the less articulate of his fellow artists. He was as much the master of the creative word and thought as he was of the paint-brush.

And the sex with Brandon, that was good enough. Understatement. It went beyond good enough. He was a passionate and imaginative lover. He adored her. Admired her work. They were the beautiful couple of the art world. Other things, many, recommended marriage between them. Not least that he was wealthy, with old West Coast money. So he understood her own position as a rich girl struggling for survival in the art-game. That was the way it was until you had ‘been discovered’, made your reputation. But … he had a bad track-record in marriage. Two former wives and five children to prove it. He was reputedly a devoted husband, an inordinately sensitive and loving father, altogether wrapped up in his marriages – until domesticity took over his life and smothered him. Then, almost too late, he would bolt. There was, too, his drinking. Brandon Wells
was a serious drinker. Alcohol was important to him.

But for the moment none of those things seemed to imperil their love affair. He was obsessively in love with Barbara. She liked that, and him. Enough? she had to ask herself. And then, maybe domesticity would not suit her over a period of time any more than it had suited him. That had to be another consideration.

Her concentration was too fragmented to pursue her possible future with Brandon Wells. Once out of the bath, she dressed in a long cashmere cardigan, the colour of cognac, that reached to her toes. She closed the many small horn buttons down the full length of the dress, and pushed up the sleeves. It felt sensuous against her skin, excitingly soft, deliciously decadent and rich. She sat at her dressing table and clasped around her neck several strands of pearls: long ones that reached to below her waist, short and medium strands of various shapes and sizes. And in her ears large baroque oriental pearls. Bored with her own restlessness and inability to do anything else, she carefully made up her face, brushed her hair. She was not displeased with what she saw. Aloud she told the face in the mirror, ‘Well, at least I am one of those women that does it for me.’

In the drawing room again, she decided on a drink. No ice, and no Ching Lee to bring it. He was out with Sophia and Mimi. She smiled. They had become a somewhat odd trio who enjoyed each other’s company. Barbara thought about them, and then about Mimi. She took great pride in her friendship with the charming and precocious child. It had done them both good, the child and she had a delightful and uncomplicated friendship. Mimi was influenced by Barbara, her charm and her beauty, her ambition to learn and create and to experience all that was on offer. To Mimi she was someone to emulate. And Barbara found in Mimi a child struggling to put her past unhappiness behind her, and be reconciled with life and all it had to offer. That excited in her an affection for the child. Something else: the
joy of turning a beautiful, damaged child into an elegant swan of a girl.

Though Barbara and Mimi saw each other, it was never too frequently. Thankfully life had taken on new dimensions for Sophia and Mimi: New York and its over-the-top life-style, in the four years they had been there, had swept them along in its orbit. Barbara had watched it turn their timid, sedate way of life around. Thinking of that strange duo, Sophia and Mimi, brought a smile to her lips. She felt suddenly better, less restless. She mixed herself a strong whisky and soda and walked to the window to watch the Japanese pines dance to the wind, the puddles on the flagstones ripple. She drifted off to a mental no-man’s-land, and felt, for the first time that day, the contentment that was the reality of her life. How good it felt to be back to normal. That restlessness, like the storm, had blown itself out.

The stillness of the room, its quiet and tranquillity, with only the faint sound of the wind whipping across the terrace, beating against the windows. She liked that: safe and warm while the world pounded at her door. The harsh bark of the intercom shattered the calm of the room. She jumped, put her hand on her heart and chastised herself aloud.

She placed her glass on a table and answered the telephone. ‘Miss Dunmellyn?’

‘Yes, Melvin.’

‘There’s a man here wants to deliver some flowers. Shall I send him up?’

‘If it’s flowers, Melvin, send him up.’

What a day, she thought. Without warning, a wild, first-class, violent, disruptive storm. ‘Storm,’ she said aloud. ‘Storm Warnings.’ And then to herself, ‘Not a bad title for a series of paintings. For an exhibition.’ What a sensational show they would make. She had something, ideas about painting were happening in her head. ‘Storm warnings.’ And, as a part of it, the storm itself.

She often talked out loud when a strong idea was taking possession: ‘Brewing, active and black and wild, the aftermath, the sun, the future, eternity. And always lingering in every canvas a sense of the storm. The very storm that she had just experienced, that had shaken her more profoundly than she had realized. Large canvases, huge canvases, larger than any she had ever painted before. Great slashes of power in paint and colour, texture and form.’

She was lost in thoughts about painting the series. She heard the elevator. She’d found a pad and a pen and was quickly jotting notes, not to lose any of the ideas. Without looking up, she told the delivery man, ‘Come in. I’ll be with you in a minute.’

She heard his footsteps on the marble floor, but was too distracted to pay attention to him. He would simply have to wait. The man laid the long, clear, cellophane box wrapped in a huge white silk bow on the hall table and waited patiently.

‘Just leave them there on the table.’ She looked up. He was wearing a fine grey felt hat with a grosgrain band of the same colour around the crown, the brim pulled down. It was wet from the rain. A Burberry trench coat tied, not buckled, at the waist.

Her first reaction was to place her hand over her mouth, to take a deep breath and try to calm herself. She did, of course, recognize him at once. She tried to still her racing heart. Barbara was overwhelmed with gratitude that he was alive and safe and standing in her flat. She had not realized until that moment that he had been a constant factor in her life. In all those years she had barely given him a thought, except on rare occasions when she saw something of him in Mimi. There had been, as he had predicted, no love story for them. No middle or end. Only a beginning that had gone nowhere, simply been suspended. She had accepted that she had given him up from the moment his plane had
soared into the dark sky that cold January night in New Jersey.