The Maestro's Mistress (37 page)

In the room beyond, Celia,
brimming with anticipation and curiosity, waited for Dr Denton to bring her the
tape of the interview which she would then transcribe onto the word processor.
Usually he brought tapes through straight away. But to her disappointment this
did not happen.

When she slipped in with the cup
of coffee she always offered her employer at this time of the morning, she
noticed that he was in the act of dropping a cassette into his personal brief
case, with its secret locking code.

Georgiana looked forward to her
visits to Dr Denton with all the excitement and eagerness of a child
anticipating a visit to the Christmas pantomime. She sensed that she was on the
brink of some great discovery.

Towards the end of the fourth
appointment she told Dr Denton about this strong intuition and asked him what he
thought it meant.

‘Only you have the key to answer
that question,’ he said. He looked along the line of her body, tracing every
known and admired hollow and curve. Today she wore an oatmeal Chanel-style suit
with a cream blouse. It struck him that one could truly love a woman who was so
perfectly beautiful. Whatever truly loving meant.

She smiled. ‘You love to
tantalize,’ she said.

‘By not answering your
questions?’

‘Yes.’

‘Does that make you angry with
me?’

‘Maybe. No, I don’t think so. I
don’t think I’ve ever felt angry with you,’ she added.

‘You have one more session
remaining of the five we planned, Georgiana. Are you any nearer finding out
what it was you were searching for?’

‘No.’ A shadow passed over her
face. ‘I need you to give me more time.’

‘Do you want to talk about your
young lovers?’ Dr Denton would certainly like her to talk about them some more.
Her descriptions of the various encounters had, quite frankly, pitched him to
dizzy heights of vicarious satisfaction.

‘No.’ She frowned, concentrating
hard.

He waited. The red light glowed.

Her eyes stared up at the
ceiling, dazed as though in a trance. ‘I thought I wanted Saul back. I dreamed
about him at nights. After I had been with those young men, I often dreamed of
Saul.’

‘You dreamed of making love with
him?’

‘No! Never that. I couldn’t! No.
I still couldn’t.’ Tears brimmed in her eyes, sliding across her cheeks, making
a glistening trail.

Dr Denton placed his hand over
hers. ‘There’s no need to be afraid, Georgiana. You will never have to make
love again with Saul if you don’t want to.’

‘I was afraid of Saul,’ she said.
‘I was terrified.’ Little pants and gulps accompanied the words.

‘Yes.’ Go on, go on – you’re
getting there. Nearly, nearly.

‘He never hurt me. He never
shouted.’ Her head turned slowly. ‘I was so afraid.’

‘You  felt that Saul had total
control over you. Total control of your feelings.’

‘Yes.’

‘He did that to you through the
power of his will.’

‘Yes.’

‘Saul is a very powerful man. An
exceptional man.’

‘He swallowed me up into his
thoughts and beliefs. He covered me with his body and went deep inside me.
Pushing and pushing. I felt as if I was suffocating. And then I must give him a
child.’

‘Ah, yes. Giving Xavier a child!
But you were terrified of having a child, weren’t you, Georgiana? Of swelling
up and becoming ugly. Of getting lumpy veins and stretch marks. And suffering
pain. All of that was horrible to contemplate.’

‘Yes. Oh, yes.’

‘All of those things made you
afraid, Georgiana. But most of all was your terror that Saul was swallowing you
up and crushing you. That is why you couldn’t enjoy sex with him. Why you could
never enjoy sex with him, not even now. Even after your good times with those
young men.’

‘No, I couldn’t.’  She gave a
long sigh as though the words had brought great relief.

‘The young men were good for you
because they were in your power. You had control over them.’

He permitted a long pause. He
wondered if he had gone too fast for her. It was seldom helpful to heap on too
much painful insight all at once.

‘Georgiana,’ he said, calling her
gently back from her reverie. ‘In the past you used to be terrified of losing
Saul because you thought that without him you would lose everything.’

‘Yes, yes!’

‘You thought that without him you
would have nothing. If you could not have a child, and you could not keep Saul
then you would
be
nothing.’

‘Yes.’

‘But you know that isn’t true any
more. You don’t need Saul any more.’

‘No.’

‘Georgiana, listen to me.
Listen!’ He touched her shoulder. The glaze over her blue eyes softened and the
brightness returned.

‘Tell me the truth,’ he commanded
softly. ‘Was the real reason for your coming back to talk to me a wish to get
Saul back? Did you lie to me before?’ He knew he was straying from the impartial
professional to the personal.

‘I did believe I wanted to get
Saul back. I’d always believed that.’ She breathed a sigh of huge weariness. ‘I
couldn’t let him go.’

‘No, you couldn’t let him go. But
that is a very different thing from wanting him back.’ Firm now – the
professional clinician speaking.

‘I’m growing old,’ she said after
a time, taking him by surprise.

‘You’re still a very beautiful
woman.’

‘Yes. I think I always will be.
But I’m alone, all alone.’ She turned to him in appeal. ‘I’m so frightened.’

Dr Denton found himself stabbed
with feeling – an unusual and quite pleasant sensation. He felt himself drawn
once more to Georgiana Xavier. They were suited. Emotionally they were
compatible. Denton knew himself to be a man lacking in deep emotions. He had
never felt the huge surges which stirred other people in connection with books,
poetry and music. He had never been moved to tears by a great symphony, a
sublime painting or an immortal sculpture.

It was perhaps the act of sex
which had been the prime emotional experience of his life. Sex with a
procession of discreet, married mistresses who had their own lives to lead and
would never make passionate demands or psychological claims on him. They had
left him free to devote himself to the furthering of his career and the
accumulation of money and a comfortable life-style.

He was by no means a cruel or
heartless man. The misery of his clients had often jarred his feelings and
wearied his spirit. But he had never found himself on the brink of some desperate
personal crisis or breakdown as he had seen happen to a disturbingly high
proportion of his colleagues in the helping professions.

Georgiana was shallow, self-centred
and basically still a child,  emotionally. Yet she was not vicious - she had
little calculation in her nature and virtually no malice. Even when pushed to
the limits of her limited endurance she had not been prepared to commit a
violent act.

Georgiana, in fact, was most
pleasingly bland. Like him she preferred the even keel to the pitching and
tossing between soaring heights and plunging depths. And like him she was
alone, being propelled relentlessly into a cold future.

He took a tissue from his box on
the desk and gently blotted her damp cheeks. Reassuring her that he would not
be long, he went into the reception office and left Celia in no doubt that she
had most certainly earned the bonus of finishing work early for once in return
for all the times she had stayed late.

As Celia closed the front door
behind her Dr Denton returned to the couch, sat behind Georgiana’s head and
then leaned down to press his lips on hers.

She sighed. She arched her back
and her hips burrowed against the leather of the couch in a languid, inviting
manner. Dr Denton placed a hand on her waist, stroking her for a while, before
transferring his attentions to the smooth globes of her knees and the long
sweep of her inner thigh.

All the time he was talking to
her. Rhythmic, soft phrases; words of praise, comfort and reassurance. Over and
over, soft, caressing, tender words. He invited her to send her mind down a
sweet-smelling grassy staircase. Long flights of steps leading further and
further down. Deeper and deeper into a walled garden filled with cream lilies
and purple iris.

‘So still, so peaceful,’ he
whispered to her, his hand moving slowly upwards.

Georgiana felt herself lapped in
a wonderful sensation of security. There was too, a sense of all this having
happened before. And it was then that the flash of realization came to her.
This was the key; the means to unlock the mystery of her presentiment. Dr
Denton himself was the key. He, the person, the man.

She opened her eyes and stared up
at him as he climbed onto the couch and straddled her hips. She held out her
arms to him and then clasped them around his waist. She murmured in pleasure.

As Dr Denton entered her with
gentle authority, he thought about the cottage in the little village in
Cornwall. The scene of Georgiana’s childhood idyll – and of her ultimate
humiliation and rejection. He could smell once again the curious blend of
Georgiana’s lily-of-the-valley fragrance and the sour earthy smell of vomited
baby food and soiled baby clothing.

In his mind’s eye he saw Xavier
erupting grimly from the cottage clasping his child against him. How Xavier had
hated his wife on that day.

He saw the limp Georgiana
stretched out on the bed. A woman who had blotted out the horror of her fall
from grace through a momentary flight into denial and unconsciousness, a state
a lay person would call madness.

And he, Dr Denton, had taken it
on himself to initiate the start of the healing process through the hypnotic
suggestiveness of his caressing voice. He had spoken to her of the beauty of
the sexual act, of the way it could offer pleasure and consolation. He had
reassured her that there was nothing to be afraid of, that there would be no
brutal invasion, no pain, no risk of any kind – and no guilt.

Slowly and tenderly he had
continued his treatment with the application of techniques more physical than
talking. In time he had slipped inside the covers with her, slipped softly
inside her body.

He had set her on the road to
recovery.

Now, as he thrust into Georgiana
all these years later, he reminded himself that there were certain secrets
which must never be shared, not even between a doctor and his patient.

CHAPTER
33

Roland Grant had mailed Tara with
the full details of the nominations for Jupiter Music Award whilst she was at
the ski lodge in Salzburg. She had looked through the names of the other
short-listed artists and been surprised to see one which instantly conjured up
old memories. That of Bruno Cornwell.

Bruno was up for an award for
best newcomer of the year with a disc of his newly formed choir, The
Renaissance, performing fifteenth and sixteenth-century church music for
unaccompanied voices.

On returning to England, Tara had
bought a copy of the disc and listened to it whilst she was driving, music and
speed always seeming to blend together so well. She was enchanted by what she
heard. There were just ten voices, five male, five female. They blended
together in a unity of sound which had breathtaking purity and stark ethereal
beauty.

According to the accompanying
notes on the CD cover Bruno Cornwell had spent a number of years digging out
yellowed and fusty-smelling manuscripts in the music libraries of London,
Florence, Venice and Paris. Motets and anthems that had been written centuries
ago to be sung in  Europe’s great cathedrals and monasteries for the glory of
God.

In forming his choir Bruno had
taken the unusual step of including mature female voices for the higher
register parts, moving away from the traditional practice of using boy trebles
or counter tenor singers. Tara judged that a shrewd move. The female singers he
had chosen had many qualities in common with those of a boy treble – all the
clarity and purity, but with no trace of distortion in the fortissimo high
notes. And of course with female sopranos he was not going to lose sleep
wondering which young boy’s voice was going to break next.

As Tara listened she became convinced
that the sound produced by this mixed sex adult choir was not only unusual but
most pleasing and innovative. Most other directors of early music had chosen to
stick with authenticity and exclude female singers as a matter of course.

‘Well done, Bruno,’ she kept
saying to herself, smiling as the music permeated the car. And what a
master-stroke to choose William Cornish’s
Salve Regina
as the initial
track. It was a perfect hook into the rest of the album; a work of sonorous and
dramatic splendour with a hefty dash of Tudor flamboyance.

Listening later on to the ringing
and jubilant
Sing Joyfully
by William Byrd, Tara guessed that Bruno
could have a runaway best seller on his hands. She saw the disc leaping up the
classical music charges and sitting perched there for quite a while.