Fire After Dark

by Sadie Matthews

  I’ve got this job, and I’ve got Dominic. Could life be any better?

  In the late afternoon, I get a text.

  Hi, what time do you finish? Do you want to go for a drink after work? Dx

  I send back a reply:

  Sounds great. I finish at 6. Bx

  The answer flashes up a moment later:

  I’ll meet you outside All Souls on Regent Street, by the BBC. 6. 30 x

  ‘Good news?’ James asked, one finely shaped eyebrow raised over the top of his gold-framed spectacles.

  I flush and nod. ‘Mmm.’

  ‘Boyfriend?’

  I flush even deeper. ‘Um . . . no . . .’

  ‘Not yet,’ he finishes with smile. ‘But you’re hoping.’

  I must be crimson by now. ‘Sort of. Yes.’

  ‘He’s a lucky man, I hope he’s treating you well.’

  I have a flashback to just how well Dominic treated me last night, and get that rush of excitement, like I’ve just dived off a high board towards a pool very far below. I nod again, unable to trust myself to speak.

  The gallery closes at six, and it’s such a short walk to the church Dominic suggested – James tells me how to get there – that I’m there with plenty of time to spare. The church is obviously old, built in dark golden brown stone, and I loiter in the circular portico with its ring of columns, looking out at Regent Street. Traffic hums busily past the imposing facade of the BBC which stands next to the church. I’m quite happy watching people going past but I’m eager for Dominic to arrive all the same. It feels like waking up and remembering it’s Christmas, or the day of a special treat – a delicious anticipation of pleasure.

  In the end, I’m reading some of the information on the church noticeboard when he arrives, and I jump as I hear his voice say, ‘Beth?’

  ‘Hello!’ I whirl round, beaming. ‘How was your day?’

  Dominic looks beautiful as usual, this time in a dark navy suit, elegantly cut even to my untutored eyes, and he smiles at me as he drops a kiss on my cheek, his hand touching the small of my back. ‘Very good, thanks, how about you?’

  I start to tell him about my first day at the gallery as he leads the way across Regent Street and westward into Marylebone. Dominic listens but doesn’t ask much. He seems a little preoccupied.

  ‘Are you all right?’ I ask, concerned, as he leads the way into an atmospheric wine bar with a vaulted stone ceiling and tables tucked discreetly into alcoves. Candles flicker in mercury glass holders, casting strange shadows on the walls. He doesn’t answer until we are sitting down in our own separate alcove, and he’s ordered drinks for us both: glasses of cold Puligny-Montrachet. When he does speak, I realise at once that he’s not really meeting my eye.

  ‘I’m fine,’ he says. ‘Honestly.’

  ‘Dominic?’ I put my hand on his and for a moment he clasps it, but quickly releases it. ‘What is it?’

  He stares at the table, frowning.

  ‘You’re worrying me. Come on, what’s up?’

  The waitress arrives with our drinks and nothing is said until she’s gone. My stomach is clenching with nerves. Why is he so cold and distant? Just this morning he was warm, flirtatious, intimate. Now he’s put up a barrier, I can feel it. ‘Dominic,’ I say when we’re left alone, ‘please tell me what’s wrong.’

  At last he lifts his eyes to mine and I’m horrified to see that they’re full of sadness and apology. ‘Beth,’ he says slowly, ‘I’m so sorry . . .’

  I understand everything instantly, with a punch of horror. ‘No!’It comes out before I can stop it. Fury races through me. He’s not going to do this.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he says again. He’s interlaced his fingers and is staring down at them, his face creased as though he’s in pain. ‘I’ve been thinking about this all day and—’

  ‘Don’t say it.’ I don’t want to sound too pleading but I can’t help it. ‘You haven’t given us a chance.’

  He looks up at me again. ‘I know, but that’s the point. I can’t give us a chance.’

  ‘Why not?’ I feel as though I’ve been caught by an avalanche, engulfed by a powerful force that’s spinning me around, but I tell myself that I must stay calm. ‘What we did last night was amazing, incredible . . . Am I just a stupid naive girl, or does that kind of experience happen all the time for you? I thought it meant something, that it was special to you—’

  ‘It was!’ he breaks in, looking agonised. ‘Christ, it was. It’s not that, Beth, I wish it was.’

  ‘Then what?’ The thought that’s been lingering at the back of my mind, the one I’ve been steadfastly refusing to entertain, pops to the fore. You know why, it whispers to me, almost gleefully. You’ve seen what he doesn’t know you’ve seen . . . ‘Is there someone else, someone you haven’t told me about?’

  He closes his eyes and shakes his head. ‘No. No.’

  ‘Then . . .’ Come on, whispers that evil little voice, don’t play dumb. You know more than he thinks. Tell him.

  I want to shout back at it: But I know it wasn’t him, he had no marks on him!

  Perhaps she’s very clever at not leaving marks, wheedles the voice.

  Oh God, I never thought of that . . . Everything seems to be collapsing around me. When I speak, I sound tentative, almost afraid. ‘Is it because of what you and Vanessa do together?’

  Now I’ve shocked him. He freezes for a moment, then his mouth opens as if he wants to say something but can’t think what.

  I draw on all my courage and say, ‘I saw it.’

  ‘You’ve seen what?’

  I thought he might be angry with me, but the look on his face is more baffled now. I stop, uncertain, but he’s staring right at me, his gaze boring into me. He looks stern, his eyes taking on that icy quality I’ve come to dread.

  ‘Beth, I want to know. What have you seen?’

  The images flash into my mind: the crouching man kissing the implement, the rhythmic movement of the woman’s arm, the vivid shadow theatre of the beating.

  ‘I saw . . .’ My voice drops low again, and now I’m the one who can’t meet his eye. ‘Saturday night. I saw from my flat into yours. The curtains were drawn but they’re transparent with the light behind them and . . . I saw you and Vanessa. At least I think it was her. I don’t know.’ I look up into the beautiful depths of those black eyes, flecked with gold light from the candle, and wish I didn’t have to say what I’m about to say. ‘I saw her beating you. First, over her knee like a naughty child, then in a different position and after that, I saw her whip you with a belt while you lay on that strange stool you’ve got.’

  He’s staring at me and I would swear that he’s gone pale.

  ‘I saw it,’ I repeat dully. ‘I know what you do together. Is that why you want to finish with me before we’ve even had a chance?’

  ‘Oh, Beth.’ I can see that he’s searching for the words. ‘Oh, God, I don’t know what to say. You saw this in my apartment?’

  I nod.

  ‘And you assumed it was me and Vanessa?’

  ‘What else am I supposed to think? It’s your apartment. I’ve seen you in there together. Who else would it be?’

  He thinks for a moment and then says, ‘Okay, I think I know what’s happened here. You’re right about one thing. The woman you saw was Vanessa. She has a key to my apartment, you probably guessed that when she came in the other night. But . . .’ he fixes me with a steady look ‘. . . the man was not me. I can promise you that.’

  ‘Then . . . who do you allow to come into your flat like that, to be hit?’

  ‘Well, I don’t really allow it, as such. I mean, I don’t like it. But Vanessa knew that I was away that night and she has a client whose particular fantasy is to be a wealthy tycoon dominated in his plush flat. She’ll have taken him there to give him the scenery to play in.’ He shakes his head. ‘I haven’t forbidden it, but I’ve told her I want her keeping work out of my home. She presumes quite a lot on our old relationship.’
>
  I’m confused. ‘Wait – her client? Her work? Vanessa’s a . . . prostitute?’ I can’t believe it. Beautiful, polished, sophisticated Vanessa is a hooker? It doesn’t seem possible. Why would she need to do something like that?

  Dominic breathes out, a long whistling sigh, and leans back in his chair. ‘Oh my goodness. The proverbial can of worms has just been well and truly opened. I can see that I’m going to have to be straight with you here.’

  ‘I’d appreciate that, really,’ I say, a touch of sarcasm in my voice.

  ‘All right. I was going to tell you about me, but we’ll start with Vanessa.’ He picks up his wine glass and takes a sip, as though needing a boost of courage from the alcohol. I lift my own glass, cold and beaded with condensation, and take a gulp of the clean, minerally white wine. I have a feeling that I need courage too.

  Dominic sets his shoulders, clasps his hands together, and looks at me. ‘First of all, Vanessa isn’t a prostitute, not in the way you think of a prostitute, anyway. She does charge for her services, but she rarely, if ever, has sex with her clients. She offers a different kind of service altogether. Vanessa is a professional mistress and dominatrix, and she specialises in offering people with certain needs a private and safe space in which they can live out and enjoy their fantasies.’

  I don’t say anything while I absorb this. I’ve heard of dominatrixes but only as figures of fun in films and stories. I’ve never really considered that they exist in the real world. That’s what Vanessa does?

  Dominic continues. ‘Most people think of sex and romance in a very straightforward way – generally, it’s one man and one woman, getting naked and have straight sex. Vanilla sex, as they say. Of course, you’ve probably seen the men’s magazines in newsagents, the ones that deliver the fantasies pretty much accepted as male: big colour pictures of bare tits and open fannies for men to wank over.’

  It’s so odd to hear these words coming out of Dominic’s mouth, and he says them with a kind of cold scorn that makes it even more disconcerting.

  He leans forward and focuses on me entirely. ‘But many, many of us are not like that. That isn’t our fantasy at all. We need something else, and we don’t want just to imagine. We want to live it.’

  He’s saying ‘we’. He must mean himself. Oh my God. What’s he going to tell me?

  ‘You remember that basement bar, The Asylum?’ he says suddenly, and when I nod, he continues. ‘That bar belongs to Vanessa. In fact, the whole house above it belongs to her. It’s where people go to enjoy their fantasies and satisfy their needs without fear. It’s a safe house, really. She created it for people like her.’

  I take this in, remembering the submissive people in their cages. ‘She’s a dominatrix . . .’ I say, puzzled.

  ‘All doms need subs, or nothing’s going to happen,’ he says and for almost the first time that evening, he smiles. ‘The top and the bottom. The yin and the yang.’ Then he looks thoughtful, evidently calling up scenes from his past. He continues after a moment. ‘Vanessa and I met in Oxford when I was studying there. I liked her at once, there was an incredible attraction between us. I’d just come back from America and knew nobody, so I was delighted to meet a woman like her. And she was very unusual in her attitudes. It wasn’t long before she introduced me to her . . . tastes. It started playfully enough. She began tying me to the bed during sex, getting me aroused and stringing me out for a very long time, tormenting me almost with her techniques – and I liked it very much. It wasn’t long before she introduced objects into the bedroom: scarves, ropes, blindfolds. She liked to gag me, blindfold me, play her games with me. Then she introduced me to spanking. Gently at first – some sharp raps on the buttocks with her hands – and then more seriously. She brought in paddles and belts, she began to spend longer spanking me than she did anything else, and she loved it. God, she loved it.’ His eyes glitter with the memory.

  So he’s no different to the man on the stool after all. I don’t like the feeling I get when I imagine Vanessa and Dominic having sex: it’s part burning jealousy and part secret arousal at the thought of him stretched naked on a bed, being taken to the edge of pleasure. ‘And . . . you? Did you love it?’

  He sighs again, and takes another drink. ‘It’s so hard to explain if you haven’t done it. It sounds unbelievable, I know, but pain and pleasure are very closely linked. Pain doesn’t have to be the worst thing in the world – it can stimulate and excite and make the pleasure very, very intense. When it ties in with certain fantasies or leanings that already exist in your psyche – the desire to be controlled, say, or punished, treated like a naughty child or a saucy girl who needs taming – well, then it can be simply explosive.’

  I try to imagine this but still I can’t understand how being hit, being hurt, can be fun. At least, I don’t think it can for me. I don’t think I have punishment fantasies. I’m sure my fantasies are love fantasies.

  Dominic goes on, evidently keen to get the story off his chest. ‘I was willing to go only so far along that road, but Vanessa wanted to go further. She had a desire to enact full-scale flogging on me, but I wasn’t keen. I liked her games up to a point, and after that they did nothing for me. And then we found the Club.’

  ‘The Club?’

  He nods. ‘A secret gathering of like-minded people. The Club met in an old boathouse near the river that looked nothing from the outside but inside was devoted to the art and practice of flogging. It had all the equipment that is difficult to keep in a private home: spreader bars, crosses, racks and so on.’

  I gasp. A torture chamber? My God, aren’t we trying to stop this sort of thing, not encourage it? Does Amnesty International know?

  Dominic sees my expression. ‘It sounds bad, I know. But it’s all consensual. Nothing is done without the floggee wanting it. My first experience there was mind-blowing. I saw a man flogging a woman, seriously flogging her.’ He has a faraway look in his eyes and I know he’s seeing it again in his imagination. ‘She was chained to a St Andrew’s Cross – you know, a cross like an X – fastened by her feet and wrists, and he used seven different instruments on her, beginning lightly with soft horsehair and ending with a heavy flogger they call the cat o’ nine tails – except this had about twenty – by which time she was almost in pieces. It was amazing.’

  I can see the image in mind: a woman screaming in agony, her back a mess of welts and blood, a man crazed with power, thrashing out at her with all his strength. And this is meant to be fun?

  ‘And when did they have sex?’ I ask tentatively.

  Dominic looks surprised. ‘Sex?’

  ‘There is some of sexual activity, isn’t it? Or I am completely missing the point? So when did they have sex?’

  ‘The rules of the Club forbid intercourse or penetration unless members are in private and agree that as part of their scene. But a lot of people get sexual pleasure without what you might think of as sex. Sex is flogging; flogging is sex. Or it isn’t. It all depends. The relationship and the power exchange between the participants is often enough to give the release they crave.’

  I stare at him. He’s right: I’ve never imagined some of the things he’s telling me. ‘So you became members of this club?’

  Dominic nods. ‘Vanessa adored it. It was the scene she’d been looking for, she’d found her family. The Asylum is an offshoot of the Club, but a little more elaborate because it caters for more than simple domination.’

  ‘There’s more?’ I ask faintly.

  Dominic laughs. ‘Oh yes. There’s a lot more. But let’s not get side-tracked. I’m trying to explain why I would never be that man you saw in my apartment.’

  ‘Why not?’

  He looks me straight in the eye. ‘Because when I saw that flogging, I knew then for certain that I did not want to be manacled to the cross, taking the bite and the sting, the vicious punishment of the instruments.’ He pauses for a second and says, ‘I wanted to be the man with the whip. I didn’t want to receive it. I wanted to de
al it out.’

  I don’t know what to say. I stare at him, my eyes wide.

  Dominic sighs, his expression suddenly defeated. ‘I didn’t intend to tell you about it like this. It’s come out all wrong.’

  I hardly hear him because I’m busy making connections in my mind. ‘So that’s what you meant when you said that your needs and Vanessa’s were not compatible.’

  He nods, slowly. ‘Yes. I’m afraid so. You can’t have two dominant personalities in a relationship, not when it forms a vital part of the sexual dynamic. But, more to the point, we weren’t in love any more. The relationship had run its course and we became what we were meant to be – friends. And our exploration of the scene bound us very tightly together.’

  ‘With handcuffs, by the sound of it,’ I say tartly, and am a little wounded when he starts to laugh. ‘I wasn’t trying to be funny. This is all very strange for me.’ I lean towards him, looking intently at him. I should have known that a man this beautiful would be anything but straightforward. ‘So you’re telling me that you need to flog women?’

  He takes another drink. Am I making him nervous?’ This is odd for me, Beth, because you know nothing of this world, and things that are quite normal for me are going to sound bizarre to you. Believe it or not, there are lots of women who get great pleasure from being submissive. And I get a great deal of enjoyment from controlling them.’

  I don’t know what to say. I’m trying to picture this man, so outwardly normal, wielding a whip across the back of a vulnerable woman. I’m filled with a mixture of anger and sadness, but I don’t really understand where those emotions have come from. Before I’ve decided what to do, I’m stumbling to my feet, pushing my chair back across the stone flags with a harsh screech. ‘So I can see why you want to end it,’ I say, my voice trembling. ‘I suppose last night wasn’t enough for you. I thought it was amazing but I suppose that without beating me to a pulp, it just wasn’t any good for you. Well, thank you for letting me know.’