Those Wicked Pleasures (4 page)

Emily stood up and had her daughter turn around. The Oleg Cassini strapless white chiffon dress was wrapped tightly around the bodice and the waist and then eased off the hips into luscious soft folds to several inches above Lara’s well-turned ankle. Her feet were shod in burgundy satin ballet-slippers.

Emily had to fight the impulse to pull the dress higher up on Lara’s bosom. She had not, as she would remark later to Henry, realised Lara had become so ‘chesty’. Nor was she thrilled with the red shoes. She had chosen white satin ones, but could not be bothered to discuss why Lara had rejected them. Her daughter’s sometimes flamboyant touches in her dressing were a little too flash for Emily and her set. She would get one of the boys to say something about the advantages and chic of underdressing. But not tonight. She touched the long natural silvery blonde hair, so soft and silky, and smiled. Could have been angel’s hair with lights behind it at Christmas. It endeared her daughter to her even more. Emily loved Christmas and all its traditions, all that glitter. That smile was certain praise from her mother, and Lara felt loved and beautiful.

‘You seemed very thoughtful when I came in. Instead of a penny, these I think. They should be worth your thoughts. They were your great-grandmother’s. Have them, Lara, they will suit you. Now lift your hair.’

Emily clasped a five-strand choker of perfectly matched pearls, real pearls with a lustre rich and luminescent, held together by a long slim bar of diamonds set to look like lilies. She adjusted the choker so the lilies were set directly under Lara’s chin. It accentuated even more the girl’s long slender neck. Both women looked at Lara’s reflection in the mirror and were well pleased. But all Emily said was, ‘I think we must ask Pa to buy you a pair of diamond
studs for your ears. Small, mind you. You will need them now that the Season will be open to you.’

Lara was astonished by her mother’s extravagant gesture. The dress and now the pearls and a suggestion of more. The Season open for her? Could that at last mean an end to her life of Emily and Elizabeth’s hand-me-downs? A dress allowance all her own? What fun. Except of course that she had no idea even of how to shop. What a ninny, she thought. You don’t know how to fuck or shop.

‘Well, Lara?’

‘I was thinking, Mother, that I have lived a very blinkered life.’

‘Self-involved, I think, dear. But then, most children do. What has brought on this revelation?’

Unable to explain, Lara covered herself by telling only half of what she was feeling. ‘Tonight. All this hullabaloo at the museum – I suddenly see how important it is. How important we must be as a family. I only thought of us as “just my family” before, I have never thought or cared about what anyone else might think, or for that matter if anyone ever thinks about us at all. I have just taken us for granted as being us, if you know what I mean, Mother.’

‘Well, not exactly. I find it hard to believe that you have been so naive that you had no vision of the Stantons …’

‘I think that might be true, Mother.’

‘You surprise me, Lara. But you look lovely, my dear. Downstairs in half an hour at the latest.’

Emily Stanton turned to leave, and Lara called out: ‘Thank you for the necklace, Mother, I will return it in the morning.’

‘Oh, I think not, dear. A gift, shall we say, to mark this occasion.’

Unbelievably, this was the first thing Lara had ever read about the Henry Garfield Stantons. She was both riveted, and slightly appalled.

Chapter 2

It was one of those very private events that every glossy magazine, whether for the arts or the style-mad public, would kill to have an exclusive on. One of those evenings that is talked about casually among the select few. Kept a hush-hush art establishment occasion, so as not to offend those benefactors who would never be fêted in such a manner. Satisfying the family’s request for no fanfares had been as much the object of the evening as saying thank you to Henry Garfield Stanton. A glass wing created by one of the world’s finest architects at the cost of sixteen million dollars was indeed a gift to challenge gratitude. An exclusive evening walk-about for the family and a few friends, followed by a dinner: it seemed a modest enough show of appreciation. That was what Emily Dean Stanton wanted, and that was what she was getting.

The Indian summer evening was perfect. The city’s towers of steel and glass shimmered with lights that shone like diamonds. The sky above was a bruised blue and mauve streaked with pink. There was hardly a breeze, but although warm for September, still autumn loomed in the air. Henry Garfield Stanton, his house guests and his family, a party of twenty-odd people, walked the several blocks from the Stanton mansion up Fifth Avenue to the museum.

At the corner of Seventy-Fourth Street they merged
with the Faynes, Henry and Emily’s life-long friends, who had decided to walk to the reception from their 1901, English-Renaissance, limestone Park Avenue ‘palace’ (often referred to by Sam as ‘China House’, because his grandfather had brought light to China by way of kerosene and been one of the major stockholders with John D. Rockefeller).

The attractive group, a gaggle of New York’s elite, in a flutter of understated couture evening gowns, summer furs and family jewels, English-tailored dinner jackets and black silk bow-ties, walking arm in arm in groups of two and three, crossed the street to walk along the edge of Central Park. When Sam Fayne fell in next to Lara and handed her a cluster of white moth orchids, David whispered under his breath: ‘Remember, all it takes is a look, a touch of the hand, and he will give you all you’re hungry for. Trust me to be right.’ She swung round to glare at her cheeky, mephistophelian cousin, but together they simply burst into laughter. Refusing to share the joke, Lara slipped her arm through Sam’s, smiling up at him in a new coquettish way. Arms entwined, they approached the Metropolitan Museum of Art aglow with light against the night sky.

This splendid warehouse of art, a rich and exciting if not confusing mélange; grand and controversial, often elegant, sometimes banal; this palace in the manner of Versailles that from its beginnings in 1880 has offered regal acres to display the wares within, which are without peer. The flight of stairs up to the entrance seems no more grand than many others, and yet is more effectively impressive than most. The Stanton party climbed the stairs now with enthusiasm for the evening to come.

The main hall is still one of the great spaces of New York, and probably the only place in the city that suggests the visionary neo-Roman spaces of the seventeenth-century
Italian draughtsman Piranesi. It is designed to overwhelm, and rarely fails.

The party’s voices and footsteps resounded in the hall and barrelled through the corridors, accentuating the quiet, the unpeopled stillness imposed upon the museum by the great art treasures. The voluminous space, the magnetic power of real beauty, true perfection, was intoxicating. It consumed the sixty-odd people and the minimal number of museum guards. It dwarfed them, conferred insignificance on them amid all that was timeless, priceless.

The guests dispersed to the various galleries. With maps of the museum to guide them and two hours before dinner in the new Henry Garfield Stanton wing, they began their search like children on a treasure hunt. The party broke up into groups of three and four. Lara with David, Henry and Emily. Sam with Max and Luan and Mr Lee and Elizabeth.

The echoes were now eerie, muffled sounds from different parts of the building. It was mysterious and exciting, scary but thrilling, all those artistic wonders from so many civilisations looming out of the dark. There was no escape from the pervasive sense of timelessness. It generated a schizoid feeling of being and not being, of reeling back through time while rooted in the present. There was something else, a kind of high, an elation, such as Lara had never felt before.

It had to do with the impact of first walking among the stone dignitaries of ancient Mesopotamia in one gallery, then being accosted by life painted in the abstract by a Rothko or De Kooning in the next. Or of being swallowed up as if into the sun by a Matisse, a Picasso, that burned into your soul, sent the heart and the feet racing to yet another gallery.

The Etruscan figures in a brooding half-light, the
Kouros that whispered in the dark, the prancing Hahn horses, the Ming vases, the Ching paintings, Renaissance portraits … rich and vibrant images. Who were those men and women, and who painted them, and were the likenesses real? There was always that paradox: not all likenesses are portraits, nor all portraits likenesses. Individuality, idealisation, flattery and generalisation, how were they interwoven by the artist to create these masterpieces that had for centuries drawn men into their world as they gazed? The old masters, the Giottos and Titians and El Grecos, a feast that grew from a feast. All that and more, like the huge Poussin that enticed you into a landscape as romantic as anything earth could offer heaven.

The museum at night, without the viewing hordes of daytime, captivated its guests with the richness of its wares. And now the small groups broke up and for the most part wandered around the acres of galleries alone, enjoying quick, deep flirtations with the art treasures of their choosing. A unique experience, as unexpected by each as it was disturbing.

An hour into the viewing, Lara wandered back down the main staircase. Her footsteps echoed off the marble and resounded against the vaulted ceiling. It was sensuous and exciting to be there seemingly alone in the half dark, surrounded by such grandeur, hearing footsteps from nearby, echoed whispers that drifted on the air. Each moment promised a crossing of paths with one of the other treasure hunters.

Lara was caught up in the power of perfection and beauty everywhere she looked. She revelled in it. Twice that day she had felt real power, and she liked the feeling. Now, for the first time, she began to understand the compulsion the Stantons had to perfect themselves. Her own striving to be a winner. Excellence and the
satisfaction it can give. These works of art, the sex she saw in the afternoon, had shaken her awake.

She gravitated to the Egyptian Gallery. The huge space was in darkness, with only the odd statue and showcase of Pharaonic gold and jewels dramatically lit. The carved figures, whether life-size or towering above her, were monumental. The room dramatic, ethereal. Tomb-like, it reached out to impress the power of life and death upon Lara. Ancient Egypt, the Pharaohs, their queens and ministers, their gods, their humanity and inhumanity, the nether world they believed so passionately in, came alive for her. She trembled, as if someone had walked on her grave. A sound from somewhere further on. Stealthily she followed it, lured onwards by the exotic and a mystery in the shadows of an ancient kingdom. She stopped and hid behind a gold-encrusted chariot. She had no wish to blunder in on anyone for a second time this day.

Caught by the edge of a shaft of light, and sitting between the feet of a colossus of the god Isis, were Max and the beautiful Luan. There were whispers of affection, of love even. Lara felt betrayed, and alone, and then amazed when Luan said, ‘How strange you Stantons are, having to pretend you love. You don’t love me, you want me. Admit that, and you can have me, right here and now.’

‘You see through me.’

‘That’ll do as an admission. It gains you admittance to me.’

She stood up, lifting her long red crepe-de-Chine skirt to above her waist. A seductive, wicked smile broke across her face. Max began to laugh. ‘Here, now? You’re mad. What if someone walks in?’ His hands caressed her tantalisingly exposed bottom.

‘The danger of being caught – having you right now
at the very moment I want you – that’s quite a turn-on for me.’

He was already out of his jacket, folding it and placing it on the base, between the gigantic god’s feet. ‘Do you always walk around without panties, ready and waiting for cock?’

‘Always. I’m a sexual opportunist, a libertine,’ Luan said with a sensual tension now in her voice.

He was quick. He spun her around, had her on her knees, on the jacket, her back to him, arms outstretched clinging to Isis’s limestone legs. In this shadowy and mysterious place she was like a sacrificial offering upon an altar. Roughly he spread her legs as far apart as he could, raised her naked, rounded buttocks to suit him. Long slim cunt in a shaft of light. With one powerful, deep thrust he burst into her. ‘You are a glorious whore.’

‘And don’t you love it, Max? Don’t all four of you Stantons just love sex with reputable lady whores like me?’

Another thrust and she answered him with a cry of delight. Standing behind her this big and handsome man, like the god Eros himself, emanated sexual power, a kind of animal lust. He moved slowly, wholly in and out of her. She gripped him with her cunt and released him, and they fucked as one.

‘You’re delicious, sublime,’ he told her in a voice husky with passion.

She laughed and begged, ‘Deeper, faster.’

Max, like a modern-day satyr, his rigid cock prising its way into this woman, looked even more animal-like, moving first into the spot-light and then into the shadows. Mounting her from the rear, hands gripping tight on the slender hips, theirs was an erotic encounter made, it seemed, even more vibrant for being enacted between the legs of a forty-foot stone god. The statuesque remnants
of a civilisation preoccupied with death and the afterlife gave their close stony watch to the scene.

They were gone now, lost to their lasciviousness. Max clasped a hand over Luan’s mouth to silence her blissful protestations and tightened his grip on her as he increased his pace. He would have her as she had never been had before. That was the determination expressed in his actions. Lara caught the wild look in her brother’s eyes. His face was pure lust when the light touched it. Muffled moans of ecstasy now from Luan, words of passion laced with filth from Max.

He looked like one of Picasso’s lusty men, or one of his beautiful hirsute beasts that fuck luscious ripe women. She had visions of the artist’s erotic drawings: rampant bulls with their human faces and great dramatic twisted horns, wielding enormous cocks, that Picasso liked to draw fucking voluptuous open-cunted maidens; masterpieces of their kind. Lara’s memory of Picasso’s blatant erotic pictures peppering the walls of Max’s study in Cannonberry Chase were vivid to her now. They troubled the awe with which she looked upon her brother’s lust.

She was no longer shocked by what she was seeing. Her new realism about sex and her own needs had mostly stilled all that. But it could do nothing for the jealousy she felt. She had no Max. There and then her will to taste the erotic in all its many phases was confirmed. To drink from it, and have her thirst quenched. To indulge her own appetites and never to be hungry for sex again. That was surely the way to go in this exciting process of growing up, entering the world of the adult. Her own libido now flared up, pounding in her ears. To play the voyeur seemed no role for her.

She slipped out of her shoes and quietly padded back through the Egyptian Gallery and into the hall. Inflamed
for the second time that day by the sight of such raunchy sex, Lara tried to compose herself. She felt as if life was swallowing her up, and to survive she had to stand back and be quiet. She found a haven in the shadow of a marble pillar. For some minutes, the exquisite silence of the great hall, the voluminous emptiness of such a vast place, became as sensuously meaningful to her as the sex she had just seen and was yearning for.

In those few minutes Lara learned about pockets of quiet – true quiet, where desire and needs no longer exist, where the mind becomes empty. And she understood at once here was one of the great healing powers the world had to offer. There was a faint sound, voices and footsteps, from somewhere on the balcony high above her across the hall. Laughter, and then she saw her father and mother walking together arm in arm.

Lara rarely had the chance to observe them like this, objectively, from a distance. Emily looked her beautiful cool and stunning self, her father handsome and big and dashing. Clearly he was still besotted by her mother. Maybe for the first time Lara understood that. There was something in the way they were walking together. She watched them go to the marble balustrade, lean over and look down into the hall. Her father raised her mother’s hand to his lips and kissed her fingers. And Emily – had she never seen her mother lead her father on, play the femme fatale, before? Use her powerful icy beauty to dominate Henry? Emily could use her quiet, introspective character to cast a huge net that caught them all. She could ration her approval and her affection as if they were diamonds.

As Lara watched from below, she could trace similarities between her mother and herself. The proud and sensual, reserved, almost prudish quality that Emily had. That perfect high-society snob beauty, flickerings
of which Lara had seen in herself. She recalled what a school chum, Garry, had once said about being introduced to Emily, the doyenne of society.

‘She’s a cross between Marlene Dietrich and an older Grace Kelly. She’s so Grace Kellyish she shimmers.’

Lara had laughed and said, ‘You’re movie crazy, and quite wrong. And Mother would hate that description of her, and ban you from ever seeing me again if she heard you. She thinks movie stars are common, no matter how many pairs of white gloves they wear in public.’ Tonight Lara wasn’t so sure Garry had not been spot-on.

She watched Henry and Emily embrace and laugh about something, and walk on. Lara had always been envious of her father’s and mother’s relationship. Pangs of envy assailed her now. She wanted them to love her as much – no, more than they loved each other. She craved their total love and attention. She knew they loved her, her brothers adored her, her sister doted on her, they all spoiled her. It made no difference. The pangs of envy were more like fangs. They bit hard into her soul. She wanted more, always more, everything. Lara smiled to herself. To the grand and empty room she announced in a whisper, ‘This is no easy passage, this being an adolescent on the verge of becoming a woman.’