Her Hungry Heart (34 page)

He was a magnificent lover. She came several times before they came together in an orgasm that seemed to go on for ever. She had to put a hand over his mouth to silence his wails of pleasure. Exhausted, lying wrapped in each other’s arms, with only the sound of a warm breeze rustling the tall grass, the leaves of the old oak, he whispered his sense of how divine an erotic find she was. Mimi felt she
had never had sex before where she sensed such love and tenderness, mixed with violent passion. Alexander gloried in her body, and devoured it with a hunger for erotic pleasure at least as strong as hers. He had bitten into her flesh and sucked on it and left her with love bites and bruises, marks of the power of his adoration.

They helped each other to dress. And then he asked her: ‘Stay with me, here in Prague. We could be happy together. We are each other’s destiny, Mimi. Don’t tell me you didn’t sense that.’

‘I don’t know. You must give me some time. I’ve never felt so close to anyone as I do now to you. But my head tells me that’s madness, that we’ve known each other only a few hours. Give me time. Let me work out my grief, my freedom, to see where I go from here.’

‘They’ll be looking for you, Mimi.’

‘Don’t you want to talk about this?’

‘No, it’s all been said.’

‘Best we say goodbye here, Alexander. I couldn’t bear to do that in front of all those people.’

They kissed passionately, promising each other another beginning when the time was right.

In the car on the way back to Prague she told Barbara, ‘It gets worse, it doesn’t get better. At first he was dying, and I thought that was the worst, but then there was the funeral and the service at Saint Patrick’s – and that was terrible because of all the tributes from the world he lived in that I knew nothing about. But even then he was still with me, so long as he was in that coffin and I knew that it was there and the final step hadn’t been taken. Then I thought the worst was when his coffin was unloaded from the plane in Prague. After the service I felt him somehow swept away from me by all those people. There seemed nothing of him left for me. Now he’s sealed in the crypt and he is more gone than I ever dreamed he could be. I somehow don’t think I will ever recover from this loss.’

‘It will take a long time,’ Barbara told her, placing an arm around Mimi’s shoulders and kissing her tear-stained cheek.

The two women returned to New York and to their lives, lives that no longer included Count Karel Stefanik. When he had been alive and such an important factor in the women’s lives he had had that certain way of relating to them in a manner wholly that seemed personal and private. He had never become involved in their other relationships. That made it easier for them to get on with their everyday living.

Barbara had been less overwhelmed in Czechoslovakia. It had all been beyond Mimi’s comprehension, and that was precisely what revealed her lack of understanding of who and what Karel really had been. Suppose he had been a voyeur at his own funeral: he would have found the events natural, as Barbara had, despite knowing relatively little about his political life. But she did know the heart and inner soul of her long-time lover, her almost husband. It was evident to Barbara that Mimi’s eyes had been opened as never before during this forty-eight hours in Czechoslovakia. A time both dreadful and extraordinarily wonderful: dreadful for their shared loss and the emotions that went with it, magnificent with the hope and love extended by all those strangers.

Barbara knew instinctively when they carried his body into the chapel that she, only she, had seen him and loved him totally, with all his faults and all his goodness, his selfishness, together with his libidinous nature, which had led him away from her. That, at the very end of his life, he loved her beyond all else, as she did him. That he had died with her name on his lips, and with his last breath reminded her how much he loved her, bound her to him for eternity. His death, therefore, was much harder on her than on Mimi.

Mimi’s pain would go on for years now that her eyes were open. She would be forced to see what her father was not:
the image she had created of him, believed and lived with until his death. The same image that had forced Karel and Barbara to keep their relationship a long dark secret, so as not to disillusion her. Mimi lost a father, a man she loved but didn’t know or understand. No one wanted to make light of the loss that she had sustained, least of all Barbara. Possibly because Mimi had the relationship of love with her father that both father and daughter wanted. The love they had for each other suited them: it had covered up all the flaws in their relationship.

On her return from Prague, Barbara, alone at last, with the funeral behind her and Mimi back in the bosom of her family, was struck with grief. It began to sink in that Karel would never walk through the door again, that their lustful hearts would never be sated by each other again. Not even once more would their erotic souls flow together. She knew he was dead, buried, gone. Yet in her heart and mind he was still with her – body and soul. His presence was right there with her, as strongly as if he were still alive. It was obvious to Barbara that neither of them had yet been able to render Karel into nothing more than a spirit that she could carry in her heart for all eternity while yet achieving a life without him.

They had yet to say a final goodbye, to set each other free. Death alone doesn’t do that. There was but one place where she felt they could release each other to go their separate ways so that his spirit might be finally set to rest and hers emotionally freed from Karel.

Some weeks after they had left their island, she returned. She knew in her heart that this was where he would have wanted her to say her final farewell to him, in the privacy of their secret erotic world.

Jay had never felt that Karel’s presence interfered with his marriage. He was a factor in Mimi’s life, one that Jay accepted readily and respected. He understood her closeness with her father, and she had slotted her love for
him into their relationship quite neatly. But now that he was gone, Jay recognized how private their love had been, still was. Mimi hardly talked about him. She neither dwelt upon his death nor used him, as some fixated, doting daughters do, as a paragon to be held in posthumous awe.

Jay sometimes thought that he grieved more over Karel’s death than Mimi or their children. He watched and waited for some sign in her of how much she was repressing her grief, expecting it to issue in some sort of emotional breakdown. But this never happened. He found it very odd that they should not discuss her intentions about the house off Fifth Avenue, Karel’s important library of rare books, his possessions, what she intended to do with the remnants of her father’s life.

But Jay would find that odd: he came from a family who talked incessantly about themselves and their lives. Not so Mimi. Silence was one of her great charms, the mysterious silence she hid behind, that still, after years of marriage, bound him to her. Mimi was never wrapped up in anything to the exclusion of all else. She had a facility for handling her life as it came along. Even among New York women, who need to be sharp, quick and clever, eager to experience all that the city has to offer, Mimi could seem unique.

Because of Mimi, Jay had the selfish marriage he wanted with her, and a family life rich in love and affection around him. She attracted his children as she had always lured men and women alike with her charm and vivacity, that same mysterious charisma Jay had married her for.

His older children, who were now grown-up adults living lives of their own, floated in and out of their home as if they still lived there. All the children, his ex-wives and Claire and Rick, made a large loving family that Jay adored and knew would never have existed but for Mimi. She had become the matriarch of Jay’s household, this woman he had married as a young girl.

She had managed that in much the same way she had
managed her role as a respected art agent and the hat atelier, one day at a time, step by step, grateful for every little reward. She and Jay were growing old together in their Manhattan life as well as their family life. It was as vibrant and exciting as the best of Manhattan lives can be. Each of them had their career, and they had a family to be proud of, and they carried on building, always constructing something, creating something. That act of creation in the city of New York, where the competition is the keenest in the world, kept them young in spirit, on their toes, and always involved with the living. The dead have very little place in a Manhattan existence. Either you live hot or die a slow, cold death.

Mimi did not sell the house off Fifth Avenue, nor did she change her schedule, even though her father was dead and gone. She went there every morning to breakfast with Sophia. The only change she made was to close her office in East Fifty-Seventh Street and to move her art agency to Karel’s house. For a year she did nothing about the house or her father’s things. Then she realized that, with her extended family, the best thing to do would be to keep it as an annexe to her and Jay’s home. The overflow of children and friends could stay there. Jay could use one of the rooms as his own small study. The house came alive with their family living in and out of it. Out of respect for Karel’s exceptionally fine library Mimi hired a curator. Now it could be opened to the public by appointment. Reading areas were created for scholars. Collectors came from all over the world. Though it had not been her intention, she turned it into just the sort of place he would have appreciated.

The library was so successful that Mimi expanded her own small art dealership by putting on permanent exhibition her father’s paintings and those she dealt in. Again, visits were by appointment only. It became a very special place, difficult of access, only for those interested in
rare books and fine works of art. That rare combination of a private family home and a private museum.

Strangely, after Count Karel Stefanik’s death, Mimi seemed to grow more like her father with every year that passed. Sophia was getting old now, but she remained the constant companion and friend she had always been. Only now it was not just to Mimi but to her children as well, all of the children in fact, who drifted in and out of Sophia’s culinary kingdom just off Fifth Avenue. They were a close-knit family and knew how to ride the everyday changes that come with family life, how to shift gear quickly, take up a new adventure.

Not long after Karel’s death, Jay sensed that, like her father’s, Mimi’s libido would eventually demand that she add lovers to her already full life. That would remain always a suspicion, one he chose to banish to the back of his mind. He actually did not want to know whether it was true or not. There seemed no point: they had everything they wanted together in their marriage. It was as solid and unshakeable as any marriage could be. And so he kept his suspicions to himself.

But Mimi did not take on any lovers. She was busy trying to work out her life. And she was waiting for Alexander Janacek to substantiate his claim that they were each other’s destiny.

Chapter 26

‘I want you for myself. I want you for entirely selfish reasons. And that’s the truth of it.’

When the convoy of cars escorting Mimi and Barbara from the funeral service back to Prague had pulled off into a slip road on the outskirts of the city and stopped, those were the words Alexander had whispered in Mimi’s ear. He had taken his place in line just as the others had, to embrace her, to place a kiss on each cheek, and to wish her God speed and farewell. But what he had wanted was to kidnap her, lock her away in his house in Prague and continue what had begun several hours before under that oak tree in the field. It had excited him to think that she was standing there still wet with his seed, that he had marked her for life with his lust. That their sexual encounter was but a beginning he had no doubt.

He had wanted to say those things to her at the Café Lipp in Paris when she had dazzled him with her presence, when the intrusion of
her
world snatched her away from him. How cruel love can be, how hurtful. He had remembered everything about her. She had remembered nothing of him.

He had been neither disturbed nor surprised, He had been young, too besotted with her and in awe of the Count to pursue the married, older and very chic Mimi.

For months after they had met that first time in Paris, he had considered seeking her out because he wanted her so badly and because she had been other things as well: so very
young in spirit, flirtatious, sensual as hell, interested in him. He hadn’t missed that fleeting moment that can happen between a man and a woman, striking an erotic spark. There had been that and more, that imperceptible something that can make a woman the grand passion of your life. The great love. It was no delusion. Alexander was not a man to delude himself, and most especially not about women.

They were each other’s destiny, he knew it then, he knew it now. Back then it had been quite easy for him to place his passion for Mimi in a corner of his heart and not to suffer unrequited love. He considered love, in this instance, to be merely dormant, needing only the right time and the right place to awaken from its deep sleep.

The wait had been long, but it had been worth it because on the day he had held Mimi in his arms she had come alive to him. She had recognized something in him that she could give herself to, as possibly she had never done with any other human being. There would be no turning back from what they had found in each other that afternoon.

He suspected that she had been all her life a peripheral and mysterious figure to the men who loved her. As she had been to him until that day. With the death of her father and her return to Czechoslovakia, and while in Alexander’s arms, she had faced her deepest feelings. He had no doubt that what Mimi had learned from the shattering experiences of her childhood was how to keep one’s distance. Now that was over, made redundant in one embrace.

Alexander Janacek carried within him several deep-seated notions that he lived by and wrote about. Life was timing, destiny, history. Love was a complex emotion made so by the outside world interfering with the erotic, sexual passion, every man and woman’s libido. The rage to live, to be free, for politics and power, was combined in his life and work. Europe and England had for years appreciated his mastery of those elements in his books, and only recently in literary
America he was fast becoming the rising star.

Mimi’s sensuality, physical beauty, her hungry heart, those were the things that he had been instantly attracted to. But there had been more, that female essence that men who love women fall in love with and feel the need to possess. There was erotic passion between them, yes, but in time there would be more, love for each other being the most powerful thing that would bind them together, the thing that would govern their lives.

That last time he had seen her, she had pressed his hand hard, caressed it briefly with her fingers, in acknowledgement of his whisper. And her violet eyes had seemed almost to smoulder, so warm was her gaze when she mouthed, ‘Thank you.’ Releasing his hand she had placed hers over her heart. And then he had moved on. Having lost himself in lust with her, he had sat in the back of the Citroën between two friends, reliving what it was like fucking Mimi with such wild abandon, while the car sped down the slip road away from the woman he loved.

She had been booked on a night flight to Paris. It had not occurred to either of them that she should change her plans. The timing had been wrong. Emotionally, politically. So anxious had she been to leave Prague and not get caught up with the red regime that still ruled the country, he doubted that she realized just how momentous their sexual encounter had been. She would. When she was back home in New York in the bosom of her family, where she felt safe. She would know it then, and would act upon it. A smile had crossed Alexander’s lips. He had delighted in imagining Mimi’s reliving their sexual extravagances and the pleasure she would yet again derive from them. While he could understand that she might have fears, he could understand more that they each of them had to change their lives before they could come together, never to part. And he had had no doubts that they would do just that.

That evening he dined with his friends at a small
restaurant on the river several miles from Prague. They were well known there and had been expected. They drank a great deal of wine and ate roast duck and red cabbage and potato dumplings as light as air. Each of the men spoke eloquently about Karel Stefanik. They were the last to leave the cosy yet rustic restaurant, a wooden building in a small wood. Very drunk and full of love for Count Karel and all he represented, for their country, and Alexander for the Count’s daughter, to travel to Prague was impossible. The men managed to squeeze themselves into an old rowing boat and the restaurant’s proprietor rowed them for ten minutes from the dock to a small wooded island the size of two double tennis courts in the middle of the river. It was there in Alexander’s dilapidated three-hundred-year-old fishing lodge that the men spent the night. By candlelight they talked politics and poetry and women until the sun was high in the sky and they all went to sleep.

That next afternoon Alexander rubbed the stubble on his chin as he walked through the courtyard to the eighteenth-century stables behind what had once been his family’s town house. Now that it was occupied by the Embassy of the Soviet Union, he had long ago ceased to think of it as home. He climbed the iron staircase and walked across the balcony. Before he could place his key in the lock, the door was flung open. ‘You might have called?’

‘Oh.’

‘Oh? Is that all you have to say?’

Claudine was not shouting. She wasn’t even angry. Claudine never shouted, she was never angry. Or if she was, she was clever enough never to let him know about it. They understood each other. Any sign of unhappiness on her part and he would send her away. She had only tested him once, many years ago, and he
had
sent her away and she had found life without him unbearable.

‘Are you upset with me, Claudine?’

It was the tone of his voice. She was frightened by it. But
she dared not lie to him. ‘Yes, a little.’

‘Why?’

She hardly knew what to say. How many nights had he stayed away? Not just one but several at a time, sometimes for weeks and never called. She had for years accepted that he had his freedom and his women and that all that held them together was that he liked her best of any of the others who came and went in his life.

Alexander removed his jacket, never taking his gaze from Claudine. He loosened his tie, took down his braces. He went to her and placed an arm around her shoulders. He kissed her on the cheek and together they walked through the sitting room, through the bedroom, to the bath. Alexander sat down on the edge. He watched Claudine turn on the taps.

He had met her in Paris when she was nineteen and one of Dior’s favourite models. She was wealthy and spoiled and pampered, the only daughter of a French industrialist. She played with her modelling and life in the same way she had played with her toys when she had been a child. Greedily, she grabbed the things she wanted and the moment she was bored with them abandoned them for something new. Alexander was the exception to her rule.

She had been, and was still, sought after by men because of her sensational good looks. A beauty with raven-coloured hair and skin the colour of cream, with dark sultry eyes and an aquiline nose, and an amazingly sensuous mouth whose upper lip looked as if it had been stung by a bee.

Alexander coveted her body, so slender and yet curvaceous. He liked fucking Claudine. When he had first met her she had been sexually frigid. But Alexander adored women and everything sexual about them. He had the ability to ruin women for other men because he was a courageous, adventurous, even dangerous lover who made enormous sexual demands on them. Women complied willingly because he was kind, generous, honest. He could
even be selfless with them. Alexander was a virile sexy man, a sensitive artist and poet with them. What woman would not give everything to a man such as that? Certainly Claudine did. He was the man who taught her to enjoy sex. It was that which kept them together. Sex and love on her part, and the power she derived from running his day to day life. It was Claudine who kept the world at bay so he could work. No little thing for a dedicated writer. It was not an easy arrangement. What made it workable was that she lived in Paris and he lived in Prague. She was known as his on again, off again mistress, but liked to think of herself as his muse. But everyone knew his work was his life. In order to keep the position Claudine had carved for herself in his life, she gave him his freedom and accepted the love affairs that he conducted openly. As the years passed and he became more successful she was less and less inclined to give him up. He had suggested she should many times. They finally agreed upon a close friendship that included sex and the acceptance that it would one day have to end. At the right time, in the right place, no matter the reason or the consequences, he would send her away and Claudine would not resist.

The bath was nearly full. She had been moving around the room, collecting bath towels for him and a sponge. She put fresh essence of pine in the water, laid out his terrycloth robe and slippers. He had been watching her, admiring her elegant good looks. She was wearing blue jeans and a white silk shirt with large voluminous long sleeves. He was watching her and wanting Mimi.

He rose from the edge of the tub, and taking her hand led Claudine from the bathroom into the bedroom. He sat down on the edge of the bed taking her with him. He caressed her hand and told her, ‘Claudine, we are coming to the end of this love affair.’

She went visibly pale. She saw it in his gaze. This time it was a fact, not an idea. ‘Are you certain about that?’

‘Yes, very.’

‘But it’s not over yet?’

‘It should be, Claudine. It’s only a matter of time.’

‘And how many years does this new woman have invested in your life? I have ten. Doesn’t that count for something?’

He rose from the bed and, standing in front of her, told her, ‘I have no intention of having a scene about this. We promised that when the time came to leave each other there would be no unpleasantness.’

‘How long have you known?’ she asked, quite calm now.

‘Less than twenty-four hours.’

‘And when does she move into your life?’

‘Not for a long time. She has a life to change, and I have things to do. It doesn’t matter how long it takes, the point is she will be here, and you have to know that when that happens there will be no other women in my life. The last thing I want is this to come as a blow to you. That’s why I am telling you now. So you can ease yourself out of my life. It was bound to happen, Claudine. We were never each other’s destiny, and you know that as well as I do.’

He placed an arm around her. She leaned against him. They were silent for several minutes and then she spoke. ‘What about the book you’re working on?’

‘That’s where all my energy is directed, not her. She will come to me when she can, and until then I have my work and many changes of my own to make. I want to be ready for her.’

‘Do me a favour, don’t tell me about her.’

‘Fair enough.’

‘One question?’

‘Go on then.’

‘Your other women, will they be told?’

‘No, there’s no need. They know I make no promises, there is no future, only the present and fun. I had to tell you because you have woven yourself into my life in spite of having known all these years that it would one day end for
us. You mean a great deal to me, Claudine. As you have rightly said, in ten years we have a history.’

And from that day on Alexander was swept away on a tide of creative writing such as he had never experienced before. He secluded himself as best he could from world recognition on a scale he had never dreamed possible. But not from the politics and world events that were affecting his country. It was all happening, a lifetime of dreams was coming true, and he was right there in the middle of it. The timing was right, destiny at work.

Czechoslovakia had its Velvet Revolution. For the first time since the Second World War the Communists were vanquished. And he knew as freedom swept through his country and the rest of Eastern Europe that it was time for him to do something about Mimi. Nearly two years, and so many vast changes in his life had given Alexander everything to bring her home to. Now they had a new world to build a life on. The one his mentor Count Karel Stefanik had believed in but never lived to see.