Objects of Desire (27 page)

Anoushka stood up and refilled their coffee cups. Sally said, ‘Hold it, don’t begin yet!’ and rushed off to return with more croissants.

‘As delicious as these are, my mother would have disapproved,’ said Page. ‘She used to make the most mouthwatering croissants ever. My mother was a cook, and my father head gardener on a Long Island estate. The north shore. I was the only child born below stairs in that household, and so was spoiled rotten by the servants and the owners as well. The Van Meers were real Long Island high society. Old, old money, one of the first Dutch burgher families to settle in New York. Conservative.

‘Mrs Van Meer was a wonderful woman, extremely nice to me. She was a keen gardener with a passion for flowers, and it’s really thanks to her and my father that I have the same love. When I was no more than five years old she had me helping her with her flower arrangements which were always spectacular. Of course then it was holding a flower at a time while she talked out how she was going to use them. I adored her. She was an absolute beauty and so sweet, she drew everyone to her, had a power over people. I wanted to enchant, as she did, and followed her about everywhere, and at any time I could.

‘She had five children of her own. They were my
playmates. I grew up with them. I had the run of this marvellous estate and not quite the run of the house. It was an idyllic childhood. She saw a kind of beauty in me that she was always wanting me to make the most of. My mother and father, the other staff in the house and on the estate, tended not to know quite what to do to add to my life, they just let her bring me up.

‘Though I was an only child, I was never lonely, I had the Van Meer children to play with. They learned tennis, I learned tennis. They learned to sail, I learned to sail, swim, and so on and so on. One of the boys was called Bradley and was four years older than I was. He had known me ever since I was born. He was my god, my best friend, and we fell in love. I was five years old, he was nine.

‘We were inseparable, growing up together running wild and free until he was sent away to school. That made little difference to me, I had the other four for friends. Though I missed him, so did they. We kept him with us by talking about him all the time, and reading his letters over and over again. He would write to us about the world outside the Van Meers’ estate, every letter for us was an adventure story. The moment he came home, he was in the kitchens looking for me and off we would go together as if he had never been away.

‘We took a great deal of teasing from everyone, but never minded, we were one big happy family. I learned what it was to be adored, to be loved, to have a man passionate over me from Brad Van Meer. It was he who made me understand how my body could excite a
man. He liked to make love to it. It was so innocent and natural, this craving for each other’s flesh, discovering our sensual natures. We used to take all our clothes off and I used to lie back in the long grass in the south field and he used to caress me, kiss me, lick my little budding titties, suck on my nipples. We thought it very adventurous when he discovered my cunt and licked and kissed it. The excitement I felt made me squirm with pleasure, his made him erect. We woke each other up to the sensual and sexy. I was nine years old. It got better at ten, and at eleven years old I knew how to use my body to excite him and keep him enthralled.

‘I suppose something of the sensual, like a strong perfume, told people not what we were doing but that we were passionate children just waiting to grow up. Everyone teased us for our togetherness, above stairs and below, and were charmed by our children’s love story. We didn’t care, it was true and we were all children together having fun.

‘But his mother, Beatrice Van Meer, and her flowers and fondness for me, were more important to me than puppy love and sex. I used to work with her in the garden whenever she had the time, and fetched and carried for her all over the house while she worked on her arrangements. She taught me everything about flowers and arranging them, about how to dress, manners and how important they were, what was beautiful and what was vulgar. She loved me.

‘When other girls came into Brad’s life it never
worried us. We knew we were drifting apart and accepted that one day other men would take his place in my life, other women mine in his. Though we still had erotic passion for each other and had sex together at every opportunity, which by the time I was seventeen had taken on adventurous and experimental overtones, it was love and respect for me that held him to me. It took a long time, that drifting away from each other, until only sexual togetherness remained. He was sexually possessive about me, wanting always for me to have nothing to do with any sexual encounter that was anything less than what I had known. It was he who produced my first dates, my first lover, other than himself.

‘ “You don’t take the cook’s daughter out unless she’s something special, ravishingly beautiful, interesting and sexually exciting,” he kept telling me, and so I went out into the world of men and sex with great self-assurance, knowing very well how to enthrall men. I liked beautiful young men, and when they professed love, life became even sweeter than it had always been. Suitors were plentiful, romances came and went. After university, where I read English Literature, I opened my first designer flower shop and started to travel. Life was unconfined and exciting.

‘I had an education and a talent with flowers, a relatively good head for business but no real money behind me. I was interested in success and money but soon realised that one is easier to achieve than the other when you are out there all alone. I was not
averse to taking advice. Early on I realised the sort of men who could further a girl like me, and those who were attracted to me, were one and the same type: educated, successful, well on the way to their Swiss bank accounts. Money makes money. I listened and learned and acted on tips adoring swains were happy to give me. The wealthy always like their friends to have their own wealth, it makes them secure. And frankly, I found these men romantic and just as easy to date as poor ones.

‘By that time I understood my looks and sexual charisma, and that those two things could probably get me anything I wanted, and so using them became part of my psyche, as I suppose it always had been ever since I was that little tot who could charm the Van Meers. I always felt quite whole and secure in myself and so, not so strangely, I never needed to look for
the
great love, never really quite believing that it did exist. Nor did I have that urge most women have to find a fabulous catch for a husband. Love and romance just happened for me, I never had to make an effort.’

‘How lucky you are, Page. It seems to me I’ve been chasing after the right man all my life. After a while it gets demeaning. Would that I could have been more like you,’ said Sally.

‘For me it was different. That chasing after a man for love happened only when I saw Robert and wanted him. I never stopped running after him even after he had married me. Sally’s right, it is demeaning, only I was so stupid in love I never realised it. Sorry for the
interruption, Page, do go on.’

‘One early-September, I suppose, just about the time you were having babies, Anoushka, and you, Sally, were probably just an innocent Lancashire adolescent, I felt a real need to get away from it all. The glamorous New York, London, Paris life that I would flit in and out of to work on floral commissions, the fun of those cities, my sex life, had somehow slipped into high gear and I needed to distance myself from it all, get back to some basics. I was desperate to be alone, go off by myself and lie down somewhere in the sun. To look at the sea, steep myself in it, swim naked for long distances, do nothing more than empty my mind.

‘It was rather a matter of: is this all there is, what my life is always going to be like? As good as it was, as great as it was, I somehow felt that I was missing something, that there had to be more. My world seemed too narrow, small. I knew a Dutch broker for the best pure white tulips you can imagine, and I remember he told me that once he ran away to Greece and the place healed him. He had not known he was sick until he had been healed by the simple life he lived there. It was the best holiday of his life. I called him and he arranged for me to rent a house, one he had seen just a few days before he was leaving the area. He said, it had magic.

‘I rented it. It was a primitive little white house with bright blue shutters and a porch with a reed roof for shade. Two rooms, a bed, two chairs, a table. No electricity, oil lamps, the bare bones of a kitchen, set
all by itself in the centre of a cove on a white sand beach about twenty feet from the water. A sea that glossy posters promise, clear and clean, and the colour sometimes of emeralds, other times of sapphires twinkling under a hot, hot sun.

‘You could reach it only by boat or by scrambling down some steep hills thick with scrubby bushes and covered with olive trees, a few peach trees, several lemon and orange trees all heavy with fruit at the back of the house. The scent of the place was glorious. It smelled of the sea and the sun, wet sand, ripe fruit: lemons and peaches, oranges and figs, olives. A little Eden, and yes there was a kind of magic to the place. It was remote, a very special and secret place. It was on the mainland, the Peloponnesos. If you were to sail a direct line across the water you would arrive at the island of Hydra. It was, however, too far to see with the naked eye.

‘It was not an easy climb from the back of the house to the top of the hill and then you had to walk for some distance through more olive groves to the tarmac road that took you to the nearest village large enough to have shops where you could buy supplies. It was still the Greece of old, for the romantics of this world not the cheap package tourist. The owner of my hideaway lived in a larger house about a mile up the beach. He kept a small sailboat anchored two coves from the house, which I had access to.

‘I never wore any clothes except at night, when the sun was down and cooler air moved in, and then
nothing but a thin cotton batiste sarong. I used to spend hours in the sea, floating with my face up into the sun, swimming out as far as I could and back, diving to the bottom and swimming underwater then up again to float and rest until my energy returned. On to the sand to bake in the sun and then back again to cool off in the water. It was that kind of holiday, simple, without artifice.

‘I had been there for about six days. It was unusually hot for that time of year, well into the nineties. I was walking naked out of the sea when I saw him. He was on some rocks several feet above the sand on the promontory that formed one side of the cove. He too was in the nude. I should have been surprised but somehow I wasn’t. His hair was very blond, streaked white in places from the sun. At first sight I thought he was a young boy in his early teens. He had such a young and vulnerable face, incredible brown, soulful eyes. He was lying on his side watching me. Then I saw his was not the body of a young boy. It was the mature body of a virile, exciting man. He had broad, broad shoulders and was very slim. Not at all a muscular body except for his thighs, which looked strong. He had wonderful arms, so strong, and large hands with slender fingers. He looked sensitive, and though not beautiful or particularly handsome he had a male charisma that was almost mesmerising. I thought him a romantic poet, a writer of some sort, a painter. It was the face, so young and bright and yet boyish, innocent even. Or if he wasn’t he wanted to be.

‘There was no towel on the beach for me, no robe or shirt to cover myself with. I felt no embarrassment and neither did he. You could see that from the way in which he was looking at me. Instead of walking away from him to the house, I walked towards him and the rocks. It was instinctive. He raised himself first to a sitting position and then stood up. Without haste, he scrambled down. I remember thinking he had fortitude. Those rocks were burning hot under his bare feet and on the sand it was hardly better. He walked towards me. Oh, his smile – slightly crooked, it warmed my heart and was somehow exciting and full of promise.

‘I loved his body, found it incredibly sexy. And the way he moved: a walk with a slight rolling gait. I found it difficult to direct my eyes away from his penis. It was flaccid and even in that state large by any standards. He was circumcised and I was transfixed by its beauty. It was incredibly erotic the way it swayed slightly from side to side as he walked, revealing at times a beautiful scrotum. He was like a young god cast down upon the earth, come to play with me. He was thrilling in the same way you would find an early Grecian statue of a young man carved from the finest piece of white marble exciting. So perfect, so god-like, yet innocent.

‘I wanted him before he even said hello. And I knew that he wanted me. His eyes were devouring me. I had never seen a man hunger for me in the way this man did. I could imagine him sucking on my nipples, caressing my breasts. He licked his lips and smiled
broadly. He was close enough to take my hand in his. He did, and raised it to his lips and kissed it. Still holding it in his, he turned me round to face the water and together we walked into the sea.’

There was a catch in Page’s voice as she told of her first sight of Oscar, and she had to wipe the corner of one eye. The tears were there but they were not sad tears, merely a mask of immense emotion which was not wasted on her girlfriends. Anoushka reached over and handed her a glass of water. Page took no more than a sip. She could not have stopped telling her story even if she wanted to. Years of silence now ended, it spilled forth like a glorious waterfall.

‘The sun burned us from above, the sea cooled us from below, the water caressed us. I remember thinking fancifully that I was being baptised, blessed by something beyond reason or mere faith. He never let go of my hand, not even when the water was over our head. We began to swim, each of us only using one arm. Then finally he released me and we continued to swim together far out from the shore. When we stopped swimming we floated on our backs until we were rested and then he pulled me into his arms. The water was up to our chins. He placed his lips to mine and his kiss was the most gentle I have ever known. His hands caressed my breasts, my hips, my bottom, and he drew me close to him and impaled me on him.