History of a Pleasure Seeker

by Richard Mason

  Jacobina was a woman who had lived her life correctly, even strictly, but this was because she had gradually lost the imagination to conceive of it otherwise and not the result of any great interior piety. Her youth’s sole act of rebellion had been to accept the proposal of the cunning, boisterous Maarten Vermeulen, when she might have made a titled alliance. This had been rewarded by her husband’s runaway success. But she had not been very impulsive since and Piet’s arrival made her rather regret this.

  Jacobina had gone to bed on his first night quietly proud that a handsome young man had stared so saucily at her. The next morning she was horrified by what had happened and resolved to censure any future impudence. At first she was relieved when no opportunity to do so arose. For several weeks she rehearsed the chilling speech she would deliver when Mr. Barol made protracted eye contact with her again. When he did not she grew rather indignant, and her contradictory emotions annoyed her. She began to embroider a great deal, which gave her something to do with her hands in the evening while Piet and Maarten sang duets at the piano. During these impromptu performances, she found herself noticing the young man’s physique and contrasting her husband’s unfavorably with it. After one evening of particular study, she began to imagine Piet naked, and then to do so with a frequency that alarmed her. She rejoiced when Constance set out to seduce him, because any incorrectness on Piet’s part would get him dismissed and remove the temptation forever.

  But Piet Barol did not behave incorrectly; and just once or twice she thought that it was at her, rather than her charming daughter, that he looked with the hunger she felt and tried not to show. She dreamed about him for the first time a month after his arrival, and in the dream he put his strong young body at her disposal. She woke from it aroused, and when Maarten had left she dismissed Agneta Hemels and spent the morning in bed, defying the prohibitions of her youth and pleasuring herself until the lunch bell sounded.

  It was the custom of the household to attend church together and to sit in the same pew—for on Sundays all men are equal in the eyes of God. One Sunday near the end of May, Jacobina woke from a dream of wild abandon that chimed with the cheerful weather and made her wish, as Agneta did her hair, that no one, not even God, were watching her.

  She found the servants waiting in the hall and Piet’s smell provoked a spasm of longing. To have the fantasy companion of the night incarnated in all his earthly glory was an unfair temptation on the Sabbath morning. She turned from him and got into the Rolls-Royce, calling rather sharply for her daughters. Maarten was already in his seat and said “Good morning, my love” with a tenderness that painfully stimulated her conscience.

  The clash of unsatisfied desire and self-reproach put Jacobina in a filthy temper. She said nothing during the short drive to the Nieuwe Kerk and once there hurried through the throng, bowing briefly to her friends, and sank to her knees in the Vermeulen-Sickerts’ pew. But Jacobina was not praying. She was thinking about Piet Barol, and the sound of his deep, happy voice inquiring after Mrs. de Leeuw’s rest made it hard to banish the image of him, bare chested and ready, that had followed her from her sleep.

  The choir came in and the minister after them. During the first hymn she permitted herself the briefest glance in his direction and caught his profile, his dark brows and blue eyes, his full red lips parted in song. A wild, impulsive wish to touch him, if only for an instant, came over her. She redirected her attention to the hymnal but the thought persisted. Piet’s resonant echoing of the prayers sustained it. She threw herself into atoning for her sinful flesh but this did not cleanse her—because a secret voice, from deep within, told her that she did not sincerely repent.

  The sermon drew on the Beatitudes, as recounted in the Gospel of St. Matthew. Of the eleven people in the Vermeulen-Sickerts’ pew, only Maarten and Piet listened to it with any attention, and both automatically evaluated themselves against the standards it outlined. Neither man considered himself poor in spirit, but only Maarten accepted that this might bar him from the kingdom of heaven. Piet was not sure he believed in the kingdom of heaven and wondered whether he was the only one in the congregation to harbor such doubts. No. According to Didier, Louisa Vermeulen-Sickerts was a passionate atheist.

  He looked at her and understood from the quick movement of her head that she had been looking at him, too. He had not yet found a way into her affections. He had been too distracted by the dangers of Constance’s infatuation to risk a full assault. Louisa was exquisitely dressed, in a tailored linen coat of her own design that made the dresses of the other women look ostentatious and foolish. Since his second day in the house, when he had resisted the impulse to hate her, he had been struck by the confidence of her taste. Louisa’s small straw hat this morning shamed the millinery of the women around her, which was heavily burdened with flowers and dead birds. It was Constance whom the young bucks had watched as the party walked up the aisle; but the true beauty of the family was the grave, inscrutable Louisa.

  His attention returned to the sermon. “Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth,” the minister was saying, and this was a point with which Piet emphatically disagreed. It seemed obvious to him that the strong took advantage of the meek and left them nothing. It was better to assert oneself against Fortune, as Machiavelli advised, and as he himself had done so profitably.

  As she heard the words “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God,” Jacobina snapped to attention rather crossly. She had spent much of her life being pure and had not seen God yet. Her childhood nanny had been a devout Catholic, and from her she had absorbed the idea that sins are precisely quantifiable, with calibrated penances capable of removing their stain forever. As a little girl, she had secretly said a hundred Hail Marys every Saturday morning to atone for the gluttony she would display as soon as she received her pocket money, which she spent on hard, brightly colored sweets she did not share. Rising for the Eucharist, she wondered whether she might now make a similar bargain with God and win the right to think sordid thoughts without regret. Nonsense, Jacobina, she said to herself, but the censoriousness of her tone was undermined by the sight of Piet’s buttocks as he waited to receive the Host.

  When the service was finished she greeted the minister more absently than usual and was so flushed that Maarten asked if anything was wrong. “I’m perfectly well,” she said; but in fact she felt afraid because she had decided to touch Piet Barol, come what may; just a little touch that no one would notice. The opportunity arose as they waited for the car, because Piet happened to be standing in front of its door as it drew up. She held out her hand to him quite naturally to be helped in. His grip was firm and dry. When she leaned against his arm, she saw his bicep swell as he took her weight. “Thank you, Mr. Barol,” she said, and their eyes met, and in that meeting was the knowledge of what had gone before.

  “Je vous en prie,” said Piet.

  It was insanely stupid—Piet knew this as he spoke the words, but spoke them anyway—to refer, however obliquely, to the hidden undercurrents of his first interview with Jacobina. As he followed the Rolls-Royce on foot with the other servants, he understood that he had acted dangerously, and yet … He watched Jacobina emerge from the vehicle and ascend the steps of the house.

  She was undeniably an attractive woman.

  He went into the hall feeling reckless. Fortunately he had Egbert’s prayers to attend to, and he turned to this chore with relief because he knew it would calm him. Egbert’s refusal to leave the house required Piet to take him through the morning service before Sunday lunch, except on the first Sunday of the month when the minister called in person to give him the sacraments. The boy was in his bedroom, his face so red Piet thought he might have a fever; but Egbert was perfectly well and red faced only because he had spent the morning in an ice-cold bath.

  Between the child and the young man a wary ease had arisen, the result of Piet’s scrupulous refusal to ask Egbert to explain himself or behave as other children did. This
was convenient in many respects, but the persistent avoidance of frank discussion had prevented them from becoming friends. Piet knelt on the floor and asked Egbert to open his prayer book. Together they went through the service, and the boy sought the Holy Spirit’s aid so fervently Piet felt sorry for him. He read him the Beatitudes, giving no hint of his own views, and when they had finished he sent him to his father’s study to receive a homily.

  He was on the landing outside Egbert’s room, about to go to his own, when Jacobina emerged from her bedroom. Piet had loitered perhaps a little longer than he ought to have done, daring Fate; and Fate had not only called his bluff but doubled its money because Jacobina was wearing the dress of apple-green wool she had worn at their first encounter.

  “Good afternoon, Mr. Barol. Will you be lunching with us?” Before changing, Jacobina had written a check for fifty guilders and asked Agneta to take it to the Civic Orphanage in the manner of a medieval merchant buying a papal indulgence. The money was drawn on her own account and had come from her father, not her husband.

  “I should be delighted to, mevrouw.”

  Monsieur la Chaume had outdone himself. They ate turtle consommé and corbeilles Polonaises, followed by larks stuffed with pistachio and foie gras. The Château Neuf du Pape, of which Piet had three glasses, made the pursuit of pleasure seem obligatory. There was a wildness in the way Jacobina laughed at Constance’s jokes that combined with the message of the dress she had chosen to tell him that he need only make a sign. The invitation, delivered so tracelessly, added a helping of flattered vanity to the assortment of delights offered by the elegant room, the fine food and the deference of the servants.

  As Didier bowed, looked into his eyes, smiled, refilled his glass, and bowed again, Piet marveled at how far he had come from his father’s dank and gloomy house, cleaned once a week by a woman with dandruff and chilblains. He thought contemptuously of the morning’s sermon and of the poor fools who exchange their worldly ambitions for the vague promises of heaven.

  A gâteau de trois-frères appeared and an exquisite champagne jelly, in which white elderflowers were magically suspended. Piet had watched the jelly being made, layer on fragile layer, the day before. He plunged his fork into it like a barbarian at the gates of Rome, destroying the labors of others for no better reason than this: he could.

  “Some champagne, Monsieur Blok,” said Maarten, who was in excellent spirits. He did no work on Sundays and was looking forward to a pleasantly drunken nap. “My dear, I insist you take some.” He stroked his wife’s hand. “You haven’t been yourself all morning. It’ll settle your digestion.” He waved at the butler, in unconscious imitation of the rich men he had envied in the days before he could afford to be commanding with sommeliers. “Let us have the Moët Brut Impérial, 1900.” He turned to Piet. “A superlative year, in my opinion.”

  Thus pressed, Jacobina did take a glass of champagne. When Louisa announced that she and Constance were out to tea with the van der Woudes, and might stay to dinner, she had another. Though her life was enviably luxurious by any objective standard, she nevertheless believed quite sincerely that she rarely did anything to please herself. Because the sight of her husband had the power to weaken her resolve, she rose and went to the window; and thus the party broke up.

  Constance and Louisa went upstairs to change. Maarten summoned Egbert to read aloud to him. The servants cleared the table. As the household dispersed, Jacobina announced to no one in particular that she should see to the flowers in the schoolroom and went into the house next door with a thudding heart.

  She had not been two minutes in the room when Piet knocked at its door. “I wondered if you needed me, mevrouw.” He entered without her leave and came halfway across the carpet towards her. “If so, I am entirely at your disposal.”

  The similarity between this declaration and statements made by the Piet Barol of Jacobina’s dreams was startling. “There is a very great deal you might do for me,” she said.

  “I had hoped there would be.”

  They looked at each other in silence. Now it was Jacobina who smiled, and when Piet did not look away, she felt embarrassed. But he was not, and his look conveyed this. She walked past him out of the room and climbed the stairs, wondering if he would follow. When he did, she took a key from a vase on the landing and let them both into her aunt’s bedroom and locked the door behind them. But now the spur of her impulsiveness died, leaving her nonplussed and at a disadvantage. What if this young man has no idea? she thought.

  But Piet Barol had every idea.

  Two weeks before his seventeenth birthday, a similar exchange of bold glances had earned him his first invitation to the bed of a thirty-four-year-old mezzo-soprano whose husband was a visiting lecturer at Leiden. This lady had asked Madame Barol if she might hire her son to practice with her at home and had practiced with him at will, with no instrument but the human body, for the remaining nine months of the academic year. She had curbed Piet’s uninventive, youthful exuberance and taught him the virtues of rhythm and pace while insisting on chivalric standards of discretion.

  Jacobina’s locking of the door was all the license Piet required. The blame would now be hers if pleasure were succeeded by recrimination. He had never before encountered a woman as tinderbox ready as Jacobina Vermeulen-Sickerts and was slightly unnerved by the suddenness of his success. He fell to his knees before her, as the mezzo-soprano had liked him to do, and lifted the hem of her apple-green dress. Jacobina neither objected nor looked at him. He kissed her ankle in its white silk stockings and this touch, too, was permitted. It was highly effective. Abruptly abandoning all consideration of the consequences, Jacobina sat, almost collapsed, on the chaise longue.

  “Remove my shoes,” she said. “Lentement.”

  With extreme delicacy, Piet liberated Jacobina’s feet. Very slowly he ran his fingers up her calves, behind her knees, to the lace bands of her suspenders. This made her shake, as it had the mezzo-soprano. He loosed her stockings with studied reverence, but in truth he was uncertain. He had no idea what she would permit, and it seemed to him that she was not very clear on this point either. He hesitated, considering his repertoire. Then, with an animal growl that was indescribably pleasing to Jacobina, he pushed her skirts over her knees and put his head beneath them.

  Jacobina’s childhood nurse, Riejke Vedder, who had lived with the Sickertses until her death at the age of seventy-eight, had been far more beloved by the Sickerts children than either of their own parents. Jacobina had been the last of the brood and her favorite. For the first six years of her life, until a drizzly English governess challenged Riejke’s exclusive rights to her attention, Jacobina had not spent a single waking moment beyond the range and sight of her nurse.

  Riejke taught Jacobina to focus and crawl and speak and walk; and then to read and wash and count and go to the toilet by herself. She loved her with the unchallengeable enormity of the simpleminded and religious, and the responsibility she assumed over her was total. “Ugly language” was banned and included all but the most discreet euphemisms for any private place below the belly button. Faced with the occasional necessity of referring to these shameful regions, Riejke had devised a language that suited the needs of practical communication while remaining inoffensive. Thus, Jacobina’s young vagina became her “little kitten,” her bottom “the strawberry patch.” Every evening before bed, Riejke told her charge to take her little kitten for a walk and Jacobina rose obediently and squatted over the chamber pot and peed and returned to her bed without fear of wetting it. On family picnics, when privacy was harder to achieve, Riejke would ask Jacobina whether she needed to “visit the strawberry patch” or could simply “walk her little kitten” (which, in extremis, could be done behind a bush).

  As a consequence, Jacobina had grown up with a sense that the most intimate and rewarding part of her body was somehow independent of her, a little furry animal to be walked and cleaned and sometimes played with—but cautiously, because it
might scratch or bite. She knew this was nonsense, and yet her nurse’s prohibitions remained compelling and in her own mind she still remembered to walk her little kitten before taking a long journey and was revolted by the sight of strawberries on a chocolate cake. Her husband had once made a pet of this kitten, and on one mortifying occasion had put his tongue into it, and then withdrawn it, bright with embarrassment. But for ten years he had not touched her there or anywhere else, and nothing he had ever done compared with the sensations Piet Barol now produced.

  Piet’s mentor had taught him well and he was rewarded for finding his rhythm by a clenching of Jacobina’s legs around his neck. This sign of favor removed the last of his doubts and he began to find the encounter as rewarding as she did—because there is nothing more flattering to a young man’s vanity than the knowledge that he is capable of pleasing a woman.

  Jacobina had no previous experience to prepare her for the currents of delight that radiated from Piet’s tongue as it traced dwindling circles toward a place she knew existed, but for which she had no name. When she saw he was entirely lost in his devotions, a blissful serenity overpowered her; rose and fell away, to rise again as the light beyond the curtains faded and she forgot the discomfort of the chaise longue and the protestations of her conscience and the mediocrity of her aunt’s pictures and everything else in the world except the smooth scratch of Piet’s chin against her thighs and the warmth of his lips.

  When Piet slid a thick finger into her, pressing upward with authority, her horsewoman’s legs clenched around his neck so violently she thought she might choke him. He persisted, as every part of her tightened; and then she was twisting urgently and he knew that the end was near. It was announced by a shrill, high gasp and a gush of hot liquid over his face, which cooled as it ran down his chin. He remained on his knees as her convulsions subsided and when they had he wiped his face with his handkerchief and smiled—a respectful, happy smile that conveyed a becoming gratitude.