Maestra (22 page)

There’s a device called anamorphic perspective. An object is painted on a slant, so that its true identity is only revealed when you view the picture from exactly the right point. The most famous example, perhaps, is Holbein’s
The Ambassadors
, where a white smear in the foreground of the portrait becomes a human skull. There’s a worn patch on the floor of the National Gallery, to the right of the picture, where you have to be to see the conceit. But I think that all great painters create a form of anamorphism. You have to stand in the correct place, and suddenly it’s as though you have fallen into the picture. Briefly, you exist in two states, inside and outside, a quantum trick. Neither state can exist in isolation from the other. So there I was in Rome, in Matteo’s bed, doubled.

‘
Ciao, cara. Ciao bellissima
.’

‘
Ciao
,’ I whispered, against his throat.

I tried to put some warmth into my voice, stroked a hand idly through his hair. It wasn’t Matteo’s fault, he was sweet enough. He fetched a glass of water but I shook my head, snuggling into the duvet and pretending to doze off. I was still wearing his sweater; it made me feel more naked as he spooned his body around my bare thighs. I waited until his breathing softened and then my eyes flicked open like a horror film vampire. I counted down slowly from a thousand in Italian, then in French, then in English, gently lifted the arm holding me and slowly, slowly, wriggled out of the bed. I left the sweater, grabbed my jeans and boots. I’d been planning to hold my knickers against his face when he came, letting him inhale me as he let go in my cunt, but I’d been too busy thinking about how sexy it would be to murder him to recall that little trick. I went half-naked down the staircase with my heels on the edge of the tread and pulled on the rest of my clothes in the hall, beneath the hazy glow of the Turner. I could see the lights of Bellagio below and started down at a jog. My room key was behind the desk at the hotel. Matteo hadn’t asked where I was staying. Even if he wanted to find me, I’d be gone by the time he woke up. This wasn’t how it was going to be, I told myself, this is how it is, now. I had been overwrought, it was just my brain playing games, a technicolour dreamshow of stress. Nothing more, nothing to worry over. There was no moon, it wasn’t late and I knew I wouldn’t sleep. I would pack my things, pay the bill, ask for a cab at 5 a.m. to drive me round the lake to the station. I needed to be stronger than ever now; just a few more days, that was all. Matteo had been a mistake, I thought, irritated. What was I, a fucking junkie? There would be time enough for that, so much time. Just the next thing then, and the next and the next, until I had finished in Geneva.

19

In about 1612, in Rome, Artemisia Gentileschi made a small drawing of Danae, the princess of Argos, to whom Zeus made love in a shower of golden rain. It was a startling choice for a female apprentice who was heavily chaperoned whenever she left her father’s house. Artemisia’s
Danae
wouldn’t be much of a beauty by contemporary standards, her flesh too pale, her belly too pouting. Even reclining, audaciously displaying her nudity, there is a touch of doubling to her thrown-back chin. I loved the picture because, unlike most examples of the subject – a popular choice for seventeenth-century soft porn – it is witty. Danae’s eyes are closed in ecstasy, but not quite. Beneath the languor of their lids she is appraising, glancing slyly at the number of gold nuggets tumbling on her compliant flesh. Her right hand entwined with marmalade-gold hair rests on her substantial thigh, but the muscles of her forearm are clenched, her fist is tight as she clutches a handful of loot. Danae is making a fool of the god who believes he has bedazzled her; she is laughing beneath those knowingly lowered lashes at the viewer, at the man who cloaks his own need to gaze at her nakedness in the respectability of a classical subject. This is what we are, Danae is saying; even when we play the nymph you have to fill our cunts with gold. But it is not cruel, the teenage painter’s laughter. She is sharing her giggles, inviting us to see what erotic cripples we are. If Danae had a cartoon bubble spilling from the peachy purse of her mouth it would be saying, ‘OK, then, big boy. How much?’

It was a good thing to think of, that picture, as I sat in the lobby bar of the Hotel des Bergues in Geneva. Unlike other European cities, it hadn’t become a necropolis in August. Inside, the air conditioning might be purring discreetly, but out there under the sullen Swiss sky, the city still throbbed with the hidden gleam of money. I remembered reading the memoirs of a famous call girl, who said that if you want to find the hooker in a smart hotel, look for the woman in the conservative suit. I remembered my poor little flop of tweed, a lifetime ago at the Ritz with Leanne. Obviously, I thought wryly, destiny had just been biding her time. This new number was courtesy of Steve, an investment made from the pre-fall collections on my last visit: Valentino in the lightest navy wool, softly yet rigorously cut, plain high Jimmy Choo sandals in black. Hair up, no jewellery, mani-pedi in pearly beige. I looked so like a banker I had to be a whore.

I ordered a glass of Chenin blanc and scanned the room. A couple of Arab guys at the next table, giving me the glad eye, an ancient exiled-dictator type with an implausible blonde, a group of German women with laptops scowling at her, two youngish men in jeans and IWC watches drinking vodka tonics. No good. Hedgies wear jeans. I needed someone dressed like me; I needed a banker. So I took myself and my copy of the
Economist
to Quirinale for dinner and ordered fresh foie gras for the hell of it, and scanned an article on North Korea while I waited for the music in the adjoining bar to start up, the aggressive house that Eurotrash need to know they’re having a good time. I ordered a
mousse au chocolat
with jasmine syrup for the hell of that, then slid over to the bar and abandoned the pretence of reading. The place was filling up. Two women in black suits occupied the next stools, standard blonde and brunette combo, though by the look of the brunette’s over-large hands and the slightly taut set to her jawline I thought whoever
she
ended up with might be getting a surprise extra. Within minutes they had annexed a couple of suits, and were soon halfway down a bottle of champagne, laughing and tossing their highlights and generally acting like they were absolutely thrilled to be in precisely that stuffy bar with its lame DJ and lamer floating candles in ice troughs, with precisely those fascinatingly witty men, while their luckier colleagues were doing bad Russian coke on the Riviera. I gave it ten minutes and then I asked the doorman to get me a cab to the Leopard Lounge.

There, I ordered bourbon. No one was bothering to pretend that this was anything other than a meat market. A gaggle of D-list teenage models, lingerie catalogue level, with a gay fixer in white Dolce jeans and a couple of ageing-player types whose hair looked like it had crawled off the seating of their doubtless slightly crappy boat. More blondes with varying degrees of tit job, more four-inch starched collars, more Rolexes, more lasered teeth and undead eyes. The two hedgies I’d seen at the Bergues getting loud and brawly on vodka, a girl in leather-look skinnies on either arm. Girls everywhere, Grazia’d up and ready to do anything. Girls alight with the hope that tonight might be the chance, the springboard, the moment that would make the dawn horrors and the bad blow-jobs worthwhile. Girls like me, once.

Geneva is a small town, full of young single men with money, and two and a half per cent of its population is engaged in the sex trade. I wasn’t overly concerned with competition, but by eleven thirty I was beginning to feel a bit desperate. I couldn’t risk another bourbon. The list I had made back in Como was spinning like a juke box behind my eyes: Rupert, Cameron, Leanne, Moncada. How long did I have? If I couldn’t swing this I’d have to get what I could from the bank and make a run for it. How much cash could I legally get away with carrying? It could only be a couple of days, and at this rate I’d be lucky to get any money out of Osprey and myself out of Europe before one of da Silva’s colleagues came looking for me.

And then, because sometimes, just sometimes, if you close your eyes and wish really hard, life can be just like a movie, he walked in. Fiftyish, greying, not too handsome but sheeny with money, wedding band, Savile Row, Bulgari cufflinks (excellent – not aristocratic and a bit insecure), shoes and watch
impeccable
. Especially the shoes. If there was one thing I wanted never to see again if this little European tour came off it was another fucking tasselled loafer. He was alone, which meant things had gone badly and he was having a drink, or that things had gone well and he was having a drink. Either way, he was having it with me.

20

It wasn’t until we were back in my hotel room and I’d poured him the drink and not asked for the money up front, that it began to dawn on Jean-Christophe that I wasn’t a hooker. And even after he’d spent fifteen minutes with his face in my cunt, and about three banging me from behind with suitably orchestral encouragement, and I’d fluttered and shivered a bit in his surprisingly hairy arms, he still couldn’t quite believe it.

‘So, I wasn’t exactly expecting that.’ He spoke French.

‘Is this the part where I tell you I’m not usually this forward, it’s just that I really couldn’t help myself?’ I wriggled free and got up from the bed naked to fetch a glass of water, ensuring he could get his first proper look.

‘Well, I do really like you,’ I went on, ‘but I’m a grown-up and games bore me.’

‘I see.’

‘But I’m not the clingy type. You can stay if you want.’ I got back into bed and arranged the duvet around myself. ‘Or not.’

He slid his arms back around me from behind, holding my breasts and biting the nape of my neck. This might not have to be such a chore.

‘I have to be at the office in the morning.’

‘What’s your collar size?’

‘Why?’

‘I’ll call the concierge and see about a clean shirt. He’ll like a challenge.’

*

Jean-Christophe did stay, that night and the next. Then he asked me if I would join him in Courchevel for the weekend. The season was on my side, I thought. Not only were the wives safely tucked away
en vacances
(I wondered whether Madame Jean-Christophe was amusing herself with the tennis coach at Cap d’Antibes or assiduously starving in Biarritz?), but also, for all my many gifts, I didn’t actually know how to ski, which could have proved awkward for Lauren the nice English art dealer to explain had it been winter. Lauren was the kind of girl to be childishly delighted, but not excessively impressed, when Jean-Christophe’s Jaguar turned into the General Aviation sector at Geneva airport. Obviously I’d never flown private before, but now I could see Carlotta’s point. Twenty minutes in the Sikorsky helicopter, exclaiming over the sublime views of the Alps gleaming below us, and we were touching down in 1850. The kind of thing that could corrupt a person for life, really.

We were to stay in a chalet borrowed from Jean-Christophe’s old schoolfriend. His own place was in Verbier; I imagined that this was a longstanding arrangement which suited the pair of them. I had a poke around while he finished off his Friday-evening calls to the office. It wasn’t one of the gazillion-euro glass-walled palaces that the Russians were constructing on what in winter were the pistes, more a solid family home, three bedrooms, everything in wood, decorated in a mixture of shabby Alpine chic with a few mediocre but pretty pieces of Oriental art. The beds were made up with colourful striped Basque linens. The only glamorous touch was a cedar hot tub built out on a wooden deck, with views right down the valley. There were tatty paperbacks and family photos, the friend with his highlighted wife and his three wholesome blond children on the slopes or what looked like tropical beaches. The daughter looked about ten years younger than me. I wondered what her life was like, about her boarding school and her clothes and her holidays, about what it would be like to grow up that secure, that safe. No doubt she probably spent her days smoking fags and bitching to her friends on Facebook about how crap her existence was.

Jean-Christophe apologised that he couldn’t take me to La Mangeoire, the restaurant which turned into Courchevel’s most expensive night club at ten thirty, but I assured him prettily that I’d much rather do something simple. We changed into jeans and cashmere sweaters and walked hand in hand through the town, stopping at a small bistro where the owner obviously recognised Monsieur. Jean-Christophe asked politely if I thought
raclette
was too heavy, and I answered politely that it was just cold enough, up here, to make it a delight. So we carved oozing cheese from what looked like a medieval torture instrument onto thin shards of cured ham and venison and drank a bottle of Burgundy. I quite liked Jean-Christophe, though obviously not as passionately as I pretended to. Unlike James, he had nice manners, and an easy store of chat which mostly revolved around travel. He didn’t ask many questions, but I made a point of telling him briefly that I had plans to start my own gallery. Towards the end of the bottle he reached for my hand across the table and kissed it.

‘
Mais, que tu es belle
.’

I wanted to giggle. In another life this might have been all that I dreamed of. Distinguished older man, exclusive location. Jesus. As it was, I was counting the minutes until I could get him safely settled in the hot tub. So we strolled back, and I did a bit of exclaiming at the beauty of the stars, which really were extraordinary, touchably luminescent, and I ran ahead of him indoors to fetch a bottle of champagne and two glasses and fiddle with the buttons, so that when he came out onto the terrace I was already naked under the deliciously steaming water with my hair trailing sleek along my back. Jean-Christophe joined me, lit a cigar and let his head fall back and we were silent for a few minutes, sipping and staring at the night. His fingers swam towards me, reaching idly for my nipple, but I sat up a little straighter.

‘Darling, I want to ask you something.’