The Silver Chain (12 page)

I force myself to move away from him. The exhibition continues on the walls down the corridor towards the lift, except these are blown-up photographs of Roman frescoes. At first they look as if the subjects are dancing or praying, and I wonder if this is a totally separate theme, but then I see that the men and women are standing, sitting and lying in various positions.

‘The
lupanare,
’
Gustav says in a low voice behind me, like the commentary of a
son et lumière. ‘
From Pompeii. The frescoes should give you a clue what the
lupanare
was.’

Very faint, cracked figures, painted in terracotta and black over ancient bricks. At first they look as if they are dancing, or praying, but no. They are copulating, rutting, humping, in every position under the sun. Here is a tough man gripping a slender girl’s thighs while she stretches out gracefully and he takes her from behind. There is a woman with elegant coiled hair straddling a man as he reclines on cushions, her breasts pert and terracotta coloured, the nipples sharp cherries dotted on with the tip of a paintbrush.

‘It’s like a menu, see? All the services you could get for your
dinarii
,’ he whispers into my ear. ‘Or perhaps the pictures were just designed to get them horny.’

There is such a heavy silence in the gallery that I am being sucked right into the ancient paintings. Another pair of lovers, or punters, kneel up and go at it face to face, togas slipping to the floor. A man simply poses for his own enjoyment, staring into the middle distance as he displays his thumping erection. A girl solemnly lowers her face into a man’s groin. Another woman, naked and with her legs open, sits on the bed with them, staring directly at me. The same attitude as Rapunzel, the Parisian whore with the long red hair.

‘Do you think they were still in here when the lava came?’ I am leaning against him, now. The etchings are so delicate, yet so businesslike. The theme of giving pleasure for money smoothly reproduced, but going back centuries. ‘Were they petrified exactly as it found them, you know,
in flagrante
?’

‘Some of them would have been, yes. But what a way to go.’ Now both his hands are resting on my hips. He’s stepped over the first of a series of lines today. An intricate game of hopscotch. But his fingers have been inside me now. He’s taken hold of me. I still ache down there, and I’m aching for much, much more.

I am too turned on by the pictures, by everything that has happened, to stop him. He runs his hands over my hips, down my legs, tugs the soft jersey dress.

‘Imagine coming to your favourite whore, paying your usual, getting her to service you every which way on the bed, hot, tangled, no clue what is erupting outside on the mountain, just what is erupting inside these walls, the client lost inside his whore, pumping his life away.’

He runs his fingers up under my dress and sinks them into the soft flesh of my butt cheeks above the stockings, stroking where he stroked me before. I push against him as the shivering starts and yes, there it is, the hardness straining into my back. Gustav Levi wants me.

‘They wouldn’t have stopped, would they, even if their hearts were clattering with fear?’ I dare to bring my hands onto his hips to keep him there as my nipples go rigid inside my dress. ‘They would have gone on and on, don’t stop until I come, whatever it is can’t touch us in here–’

‘That’s right. Safe inside the
lupanare
.’ His voice is a groan as my hand runs over the definite bulge. I fold my fingers lightly round the shape of him. ‘Everyone at it like there’s no tomorrow.’

‘But you and I have tomorrow.’ I close my eyes, swallow, squeeze very lightly. I feel the jump and swell of his response. ‘And tomorrow you can tell me what you think of my portfolio, Mr Levi.’

‘You make that sound so dirty. I’ve managed to corrupt you in a few short hours. Oh, God, this is like taking a hot meal from a starving prisoner, but not now, Serena.’ He pushes me gently away, my dress draping unhappily back into place. ‘Not now.’

I turn to look at him and he is standing where I left him, his hands hanging loosely by his sides.

‘You’ll see I’m not as sweet as you’re painting me when you see what’s in my portfolio.’ I smooth my hands down over my legs, fan them out over the throbbing area where he touched me. ‘My work was becoming risqué long before we met! Easily as erotic as these.’

He fiddles his jacket closed as if trying to button up the red-blooded part of him. He takes my arm and leads me down the corridor towards the lift and presses the down button.

‘Yet again you’ve whetted my appetite, Serena. Actually I’ve seen at least one very sensual picture on your camera. The one of the couple kissing in the rain? Where is that?’

‘Pont Neuf in Paris. Not a very original location.’

‘But exquisitely romantic nevertheless. His hand right on her backside, pushing her against that lamp post on the bridge? Shocking? No. Sexy? Extremely.’

‘Wait until you see my Venice series.’

His eyes flash black fire as he steps towards me. ‘Tell me more, you little minx.’

‘They are classified until we both sign. Yes? Then my portfolio will be your portfolio.’

I rip open the envelope, take out the one-page contract, skim the contents until I get to the figures
50:50
. He stands there as if his stuffing has been knocked out. I laugh softly and reach into his jacket. What a way to pitch my work. I may as well have thrown a dart directly onto the bull’s eye.

I let my hand brush against the smooth Egyptian cotton of his shirt, feel the thumping of Gustav’s heart inside his chest, and as he looks down in surprise I reach into his inside pocket and draw out the heavy silver fountain pen he used earlier.

‘How did you know?’

‘You’re not the only one who watches people like a hawk.’

I can’t believe my own cheek. He laughs as I rest the paper on the wall and sign on the dotted line.

There’s another pause between us. These pauses get longer, and more intense, yet they’re easy pauses. I’m happy in Gustav Levi’s silences. The relief of making a decision is like the lifting of a weight. The frisson of anxiety that I might have signed my life away, done something disastrous, is like the flicker of a distant torch about to run out of battery. And easy to dismiss.

It’s only till Christmas.

‘Your work is marvellous, Miss Folkes, and you are going to make millions. I can’t believe how lucky we are to have discovered you!’

As the lift doors start to close him off from my view, I realise that he’s said exactly what I was praying someone would say to me. He truly is the answer to my prayers.

A satisfied smile, shining with possibility, spreads across his face and behind him an aeroplane cuts a swathe through the velvety evening sky as it starts its descent to Heathrow.

SIX

It’s the tall dark mansion on the corner of the square, somewhere in Mayfair. The one the witches swerved past on Halloween night because they were too scared to bang on the knocker to trick or treat. The one he started to walk towards that night then changed course to walk me to that cocktail bar. The one that is now being battered by gusts of wind as a storm revs up and tips buckets of rain over me as I struggle up the hill.

I should have known that’s where Gustav Levi lives.

What I didn’t expect when he invited me to his house tonight to celebrate our long and happy association was that no-one would answer the door. I ring the bell and bash at the knocker for a few minutes, getting wetter and wetter, before the door swings open apparently of its own accord. I hesitate. It doesn’t creak on its hinges, but it’s pretty Hammer Horror nonetheless.

I follow a trail of bright lights set into the edges of the floor, the treads of the stairs curving up into the shadows upstairs, enticing me from the darkened, red-lacquer-painted hallway down another flight of stairs into the basement, and the second thing I didn’t expect was that I’d find the man of the house in a vast, quartz kitchen wearing chef’s whites and breaking eggs into a huge glass bowl.

‘Ah, you found us.’ He looks up at me with a boyish grin and starts whisking so energetically that he has to follow the bowl across the counter. ‘And so we come back to the square where it all began.’

‘Us?’

‘My household. My underlings.’ He waves the whisk vaguely. ‘Usually you’ll find all sorts of people coming and going here. But tonight it’s skeleton staff, you might say. I’ve even let Dickson off tonight.’

‘Dickson?’ I look around.

‘My chauffeur and pilot. Doubles up as my chef, too. But a man’s got to find a way of relaxing when he comes home from running his empire and sealing deals with startling new talents he’s picked up in the street. So I’m cooking tonight.’

To cover the sudden chill of awkwardness I walk around the kitchen making a show of examining everything. It really is state of the art, with several ovens of various sizes and at least six gas rings the size of hub caps on the oversized central hob. What did I think Gustav was going to be cooking? Toe of frog and eye of newt?

‘So you didn’t pick me at all. You live right here in the square. You were just taking a constitutional that night and happened to bump into me.’

He shakes his head calmly. I see what’s different about him tonight. He’s had his hair cut. It’s sweaty with his culinary efforts, but it makes him look tidier, more formal, but somehow safer. And it means I can see his eyes clearly, and tonight they are very bright. ‘Believe what you like, Serena. I picked you, as soon as I saw you.’

‘You thought I was a boy.’

‘
Touché
.’ He grabs at the escaping bowl and we both start to smile. ‘But very soon you’ll see that we’re a perfect match. In fact, I can’t wait to get started.’

‘On the exhibition? Or on me?’

He allows himself a brief chuckle. ‘Both. Although the exhibition I believe is nearly ready for lift off. It’s the other part of the contract which is beginning to feel a little like the blind leading the blind.’

‘The sex part, do you mean?’

‘I love that you’re so direct, Serena. Was I really that explicit?’

‘You didn’t have to be. You started off by touching me, remember? Very intimately. I took that as, I don’t know, an introduction to what you have in mind?’

He puts down the egg whisk and rubs at his hair. Now that it’s shorter it stands up in black spikes and makes his face look more open. ‘I confess you caught me on the hop. Once I’d met you and seen the work stored on the camera, I wanted to do something to keep you here. Otherwise I feared that you would simply vanish into thin air. Or someone else would snap you up. So I thought of doing it this way. Making it personal as well as professional. Having said all that, I’m not sure I thought it through.’ He neatly rips a huge paper bag and releases a cloud of flour. ‘I think it’s a case of suck it and see.’

I turn my back on him before he sees me blushing, and walk as calmly as I can to the end of the kitchen. The scraping of my feet sounds intrusive on the underheated floor. Through the big doors I can see, in the long thin moonlit paved garden, small trees and rose bushes in pots being bent and buffeted by the rain and rising wind. I lean my forehead on the glass.

I’m well and truly trapped in his web now. Gustav’s designers and printers are working all hours. The pictures have already been selected for enlargement and framing, and the railings leading along the street towards the front door of the Levi Building have been cleared to display the publicity poster we’ve chosen for my exhibition. It will show the crocodile of mini witches caught by my camera on their way to the party, lit by the streetlamps and halted in their tracks by the little one falling over. In the next day or so that image will be developed, enlarged, elongated and fixed to the railings, the witches waiting in their various impatient attitudes under the melancholy statue for the little one to right herself.

‘No going back now, Serena.’ Gustav rubs the foil from a pat of butter round a couple of ramekins. ‘We’re on the slippery slope.’

‘I like you barefoot,’ I remark as he dances from what the chefs would call the
mise en scène
over to the fridge and back again. ‘And I like those dark jeans. You were wearing ones like those the night we met.’

‘I’m flattered you remember.’ He stops buttering and whisking and looks down at himself. Holds the white apron out comically like Little Bo Peep. ‘You like it rough, Serena?’

I bite my lip. He does too, biting down the shocked smile we share at the naughtiness of his remark.
Yes, I like it rough
, I think to myself.
Or I will when I try it.

‘The suit distances you, that’s all. Makes you unreachable. Maybe first impressions are the ones that stay with us?’

He frowns as he ponders the question. Ponders me. ‘I think I like you every which way, Serena. Though I’m glad the tomboy is beating a retreat.’

‘I can be all things to all men. But yes. It’s kind of fun, and kind of pervy, dressing as my cousin.’

He laughs lightly and turns to a tray on the counter. I nearly tell him I also prefer him with his arms showing, because I love his strong hands and what I know they can do, and his strong forearms with the ropes of muscle. But I say nothing.

‘Have a drink,’ he says. ‘Shaken, or stirred?’

I pick up a glass of vodka martini from a tray on the counter and once again relish the slow burn of it down my throat. I hold the glass up and watch how his movements sparkle and undulate through the clear liquid.

‘Dip these nachos into the tzatziki. I’m willing to bet you haven’t eaten anything today.’

I hitch myself onto a stool and drain the entire glass. Take another one. ‘You’d be right. The cupboard is bare at Polly’s flat. I had a sandwich at the gallery today. So what’s this going to be? Pavlova? Mousse? Meringue?’

He moves the bowl along the counter to sieve the flour into the eggs. ‘Double baked cheese soufflé, if you must know.’

I watch the way the muscles in his arms flex as he whisks.

He catches me looking. Stops whisking and holds the bowl over his head to check the whites are done. ‘And if you’re lucky, maybe a taste of my famous Coquilles Saint Jacques.’