As Charlie Wright moved around the room, I jutted out my hips and turned to peer over one shoulder with expressions that were arrogant, alluring, provocative. The click, click, click of the camera was like a metronome beating out a steady rhythm and lulling me into a sense of…a sense of what I'm not sure, but when he asked me to pull my blouse off one shoulder, I didn't hesitate. I was living in the moment and wanted to be and do and feel everything that had always been risqué, out of touch, too old for me. After all the exams, the confines of school, the fights with Simon, I wanted to live my own life. Lots of confused feelings were rushing around my head as the camera kept clicking and Charlie Wright's deep voice encouraged me.
'More. More. That's it. That's lovely, that's perfect,' he said. 'Grace, undo another button on you blouse, it'll look nice.'
And I undid another button, leaning forward to reveal my sun browned breasts like a model in a magazine.
'Beautiful. Beautiful. I am going to buy this house, Grace,' he said.
'That's…that's great.'
Perspiration coated my skin. My underarms were wet. This was the connection, the pull of destiny. If Charlie Wright bought the house, I'd get thousands of pounds in commission. I'd be free of my father, free to do whatever I wanted. I kept posing, turning, thrusting out my hipbones. I didn't know what to do with my hands and, when I gripped them behind my back, I realized I was pushing out my breasts. He stared into my eyes. I smiled. He looked serious.
'Grace, will you do something for me?'
He didn't say what. He just looked at me and I nodded.
'Of course,' I said.
'Take your top off for me.'
The words came from his mouth like a coil of silver smoke and seemed to hang there as if in a bubble.
Take your top off for me.
It was such a simple sentence. Such a simple request. My tingling nipples were tingling even more. I wanted to release them, give them air. The sweat on my back turned cold and made me shiver. The silence stretched. I was a rabbit caught in the headlights of his amber eyes, immobile, terrified, excited.
'Take your top off for me.'
He said it again, his velvety voice deeper and darker like the words were no longer a wisp of smoke but words whispered from far away. They reached me like a recording that had been slowed down.
Take your top off for me.
Just as I often knew what my father was going to say before he said it, I had known Charlie Wright was going to ask me to take off my top. But the for me tagged on to the sentence was puzzling, and the politeness of the request made it difficult to say no without seeming disrespectful, childish even. I felt flustered, embarrassed. And I felt energized, too. I had willed this. I must have known something was in the air when I removed my bra that morning. I had been thinking wanton thoughts and he had read my mind. Was I so obvious? Was it too late to stop?
'I can't do that,' I finally mumbled.
'Grace?' He waited.
'Yes.'
'I won't tell you again.'
'But…'
He took a deep breath. I sensed rather than saw the faint shake of his head. The disappointment. I was no more than an overgrown schoolgirl with my head full of cheap fantasies, a pathetic little virgin. That's what Simon had said, and the words rang through my head like a funeral bell. I had failed. I would never sell Black Spires. I wouldn't be able to cope on my own. I was doomed.
'Please,' I said, but my will had gone.
He raised his brow, the upward motion acting as a spring that resonated from his bright eyes to my arms. It was quite uncanny, a stage trick, a radio wave. As his brow went up and his eyes flashed, I wriggled my arms out of the narrow sleeves, raised the cotton blouse over my hair and ran the material down my left arm to my hand. I realized I had been holding my breath and let out a long sigh. We stood there in the silvery light, my breasts standing out firm and full, my nipples hard and painful, pink and shiny with the rush of blood.
I dropped the blouse on the floor. He took several pictures, but they weren't very good. I wasn't posing, just standing there.
He clicked his fingers and pointed.
'If you please.'
I went to speak but my mouth just fell open and nothing came out. My breasts were already on show, sun bronzed and pretty, throbbing with the beat of my heart. Breasts are everywhere. In every newspaper and magazine, on television and the sides of buses. But my skirt?
'My skirt?'
He nodded. 'If you please.'
'But…'
'Before we lose the light.'
His words whizzed through my brain like a charge of electricity and, even as I determined to shake my head and say no, I reached for the snap and lowered the zip. I wriggled my hips and my breasts faintly swayed as the skirt fell in a pink pool about my feet. It was warm in that sunny room, perspiration veneered the split in my bottom and my knickers were damp. I could smell my own arousal and realized with shame that the obscure pleasure of that moment came, not from any expectation of what might take place, but simply from exposing myself.
'Very good,' he said.
My pink knickers fitted snugly, the elastic stretching like a bridge from the supports of my hip bones in such a way that, had Mr Wright leaned forward, he would have got a glimpse of the dark little forest of hair nestling below.
He adjusted the camera.
'Those, too,' he said.
His voice was a chant, whispering my own inner desires. Each time he asked for more, I gave more, my blouse, my skirt. I was on a slippery slide. There was no way to get off. I didn't want to get off.
'Mr. Wright…'
'The light, Grace, it's important.'
'Can't you just…'
He didn't reply. He adjusted his camera. I stood there, skinny and naked except for my pink knickers. He snapped his figures and I slid my thumbs into the elastic. I drew the damp material over my hips, revealing my pubic hair, over the round cheeks of my bottom and down my long legs. I pushed them to one side with my toe. I was naked. I was free. I felt terrified and I felt completely and totally alive.
'Good girl. Lean over the table.'
And I did. I spread my legs and bent over the polished surface of the narrow table between the tall arched windows. The camera clicked and captured my most intimate parts, the crease of my bottom, my throbbing breasts, my glazed eyes, my inner dreams and fantasies. I was naked with a stranger in a big haunted house, alone, miles from anywhere.
'That's lovely. Nice. Very nice. Push forward. Come on now, push out that cute little ass. Nice. Nice. Give it to me. Give me more.'
I climbed up on to the table. He didn't need to tell me how to arrange myself, you just know these things: on my hands and knees with my bottom pushed out, my breasts hanging like udders. I wiggled like a dancer and the more I wiggled the more the camera clicked and the wetter I got. I could feel contractions and I wanted to touch myself.
'Lay back, Grace, legs up, that's nice. That's nice.'
He was reading my mind. I spread my legs and my palms with stretched fingers went automatically to my breasts. My nipples were on fire. I turned the little buds and squealed in pain and the pain turned to a strange and marvelous pleasure. I ran my right hand down my side, across the bony curve of my hip and into my pubic hair. My pubes were drenched. There was a musty, musky smell in the air, the smell of sex. As I slid my fingers inside my wet crack and nursed my clitoris, teasing it like a cat with a toy mouse. The juices gushed from me, hot and sticky, and the camera kept clicking, keeping up the beat. I threw my head back, and through my orgasm I rose clean off the table and would have fallen I'm sure had Charlie Wright not lifted me in his arms.
He carried me to the bed. I was gasping, rocking back and forth, a gush of hot fluids burst from me in a tide and coated my thighs. Nothing like this had ever happened before. I had masturbated, lots and lots of times, but imagining Simon finally doing it had never hit the spot and Charlie Wright had touched something in me waiting desperate
ly to be touched.
He turned the video lens to face the bed. I wasn't watching him, I was drawn to the eye of the camera, struck by its ability to capture this moment. There was doubt and confusion in my head, fear too. I would think about it all later. I would remember always. But now, I laid back on the mattress and watched Charlie Wright remove his blue shirt, his white trousers, his undershorts. I watched his long hard cock spring to attention and I arched my legs to allow him to enter my body.
There was no ceremony, no kissing, no foreplay. I was sopping. He entered me immediately, pushing hard and jerking upwards at the same time. The rush of pain as my hymen snapped brought a tear to my eye, and I thought about the camera, how it would preserve that instant, that small tear, the look of pain and pleasure that spread over my features as I pulled him up inside me, filling me, completing me, the light crossing the room and turning slowly to shadow.
Charlie Wright never did make an offer on Black Spires. I dropped him at the station and I never saw him again – although that's not strictly true. I have seen his naked back and white bottom many times. The video he shot found its way on to the internet and, if you search the dark recesses of the web, you can watch me losing my virginity over and over again.
Betrayed
Part II
Was it a just coincidence that a year to the day when I lost my virginity, I was sitting in a champagne bar in Knightsbridge called Dick's wondering if I'd been set up by my friend Camilla?
Or, more likely, by Quentin Quoyle with Camilla's connivance?
Camilla Hunt had gone to my school and had started at Cambridge a year before me. She was the only person I had told about my experience with Charlie Wright and she'd said it was the most romantic thing she had ever heard.
What I didn't tell her was that after that long hot afternoon performing for the camera, I had gone through what I thought of as my wild period and slept with every boy I knew and every boy I met. I studied the geometry of soixante-neuf, the heady rush of oral sex, the heart-pounding, decibel busting eruptions of multiple orgasms. In parks, the backs of cars, in the living room with my parents upstairs asleep – the fact that I might get caught adding a charge to the proceedings, I made up for lost time and gave myself to shameless promiscuity.
A pathetic little virgin, my ex-boyfriend had called me, and I thought, poor Simon, if only you knew.
By the time I arrived at college, my exploding hormones had calmed down and I was, I felt, worldly enough to deal with the obsessions of Quentin Quoyle, my tutor, a tall gangly don who dressed in black collarless suits with Indian cheesecloth shirts, wore his hair in a ponytail, dark glasses, even in winter, and carried an ebony cane with a silver sculpture of an art deco nude as a handle.
At my first tutorial, he had insisted that I drop the Mr. Quoyle and just call him Q. He gave me a book by Georges Bataille entitled Eroticism, and we spent every subsequent tutorial discussing the underlying sexual basis of faith and philosophy to death, transgression, taboo, mysticism and religious ecstasy.
'My dear, it is all erotic. Everything.'
'I beg your pardon?'
'Unlike the day-to-day sexual activity of those people out there,' he said, waving his arm to indicate the universe. 'Erotica is a psychological quest independent of the natural goals…which are?'
He paused, I stammered, and he continued.
'Ephemeral pleasure, reproduction and the chink of cold hard cash, a potential that passes through the mind of every woman at some time in her life.'
'Is this part of the course?' I mumbled.
'It is at the heart of life,' he replied, drumming his ebony cane on the floor to make the point. 'Where did you go to school?'
'A convent…'
'A convent?' he roared.
I nodded my head.
'Then you should know what I'm talking about,' he shot back, glancing at a sheet of paper that must have contained my name. 'Grace Goode. Mmm. Very interesting.'
He looked up and studied me more closely.
'I'll start by quoting Bataille: eroticism is assenting to life to the point of death. Now do you understand?'
'Not really.'
'And you can add to that something explained by the Marquis de Sade: there is no better way to know death than to link it with some licentious image.' He paused. 'The erotic underpins the entire structure of civilization. You cannot understand life, you cannot appreciate philosophy, unless you understand erotica. That is where we shall begin.'
He then gave me a reading list, including further works by Bataille, de Sade, Sigmund Freud, Simone de Beauvoir, Karl von Clausewitz, Saint Theresa of Avila and EL James. It was the oddest list I had ever seen and I imagined this curious group sitting together in a chamber lit by candles debating the difference between erotic and pornographic and concluding that one has class and the other doesn't.
'The universe has come of age. The twenty-first century is the Age of Hypocrisy. Nothing is how it seems. Nothing is sacred. The world is a market. Everyone and everything is for sale. Bankers cheat. Politicians use truth and lies as interchangeable sides of the same false coin. The corporations will steal your eyes to sell you a white stick. They know, as Machiavelli tells us in The Prince, that acknowledging the value of others imposes limits on our capacity to strip others of their resources by sucking the blood and crushing the will of everything that stands in their way. If a corporation were a breathing being, it would be a psychopath. How do we mere mortals deal with the slings and arrows of this outrageous misfortune?'
'I'm not sure...'
'Then you have come to the right place.' He sat back, staring at the ceiling, then back at me. 'You know what Sartre said?'
'Hell is other people.'
'Well done, Grace Goode. That's a start.' He paused to give his cane a couple of thumps. 'All life is metamorphosis. Everything you are and everything you have ever thought, perceived and believed in will change, must change. You do not attend my lectures for education but edification. You are a comatose grub. At the end of three semesters, you will open your wings and become a butterfly. Do you understand?'
'Not entirely…'
'How does the butterfly begin life, Miss Goode?'
'As an egg,' I said with a shrug.
'Thank you. An ugly little nondescript egg that hatches into an unpleasant larva, sometimes called a nymph, incidentally, or, more commonly, a caterpillar that eats and eats like an obese girl until it bursts and becomes…' he paused.
'A chrysalis?
'Thank you, a hideous black shell concealing a cocoon where a slender body with big bright eyes and spindly legs develops, where the finest silk is woven into wings until the shell cracks and from the morass, magic appears.' He leaned forward and stared into my eyes. 'That is what I intend do with your mind. Take that grubby little larva between your ears and transform it into a butterfly.'
That's just how I felt in Dick's, like a butterfly, a Red Admiral, the words of my tutor fluttering through my mind.
Camilla had told me to wear something sexy and I was feeling self-conscious sitting there on a high stool in a low cut red dress that was way too short in heels that were way too high. There were mirrors on every surface and wherever I looked, there I was, in endless reflections.
We were meeting to celebrate Camilla having finished her second year and me, to my relief, having got through my first with satisfactory, rather than good grades. Camilla had been in the year above me at school, and when I arrived at college, she had taken me under her wing as my mentor and guide through the fetishes of Mr. Quoyle, whose fixation was a belief that in every woman was the subconscious desire to sell herself for, as he put it, the chink of cold hard cash.
He was totally eccentric, but an incredible teacher. He had opened my mind and through his guidance I had come to see that I could be whoever I wanted to be, that I wasn't one solitary person, but all those different people in the mirror's numberless reflections.
It was mainly men in the bar –
that's why it was called Dick's, I suppose, but there was a sprinkling of women dressed like me, close to naked with too much makeup and bare legs tanned in the July heat wave – it had touched 100 degrees Fahrenheit on the first day of the month, a record by all accounts.
I paid £15 for a flute of champagne and, as the barman poured it, a girl further along the stainless steel counter raised her glass as our eyes met; she was a natural blonde with a tiny waist and prominent breasts presented in a green dress that rippled and sparkled like fish scales. She didn't smile, but gave a little shrug as if to acknowledge something, although what exactly I wasn't sure.
The barman moved away and I turned back to many mirrors. My lips were that shade of red that said danger, my green eyes looked glassy like old bottles, and my dark hair in the ivory lights had a gloss that made me feel, I don't know, sexy, I suppose. Even my expression was different: relief, perhaps, being back in the real world beyond the quads and punts and Footlights of Cambridge.
With the first sip of champagne, the bubbles went up my nose and I instantly felt giggly. I sent Camilla a text, drank my drink faster than was sensible, and sat there telling myself not to spend another £15 refilling my glass.
I turned towards the pianist. He had polished skin like the black keys on his piano and sat hunched over as if to guard a secret. He was playing a jazz-flamenco fusion, something slow and melancholic that reminded me of the cante hondo performers I had seen in Madrid. In two days, and I would be leaving to join friends with a cortijo, a smallholding, in Andalucía, and planned to spend two weeks walking, reading and swimming in the warm waters of Cabo de Gata before returning to work for the rest of the summer back at the estate agents in Canterbury. Father had insisted. Father paid the bills.
My phone played three notes from the William Tell Overture to announce the arrival of a text.
Will call in a mo. Hang on. C
As I looked back at the pianist, I realized that there were two men in the corner staring at me, studying me, like you might study your image in a shop when you're thinking of buying a new dress. One of the men stood. He made his way towards me, nodded as he approached, but, at the last moment, passed by and stopped beside the blonde along the bar.
LAID & BETRAYED (Getting wrong with Mr. Wright) Page 2
