The Diamond Ring

by Primula Bond

  Our footsteps ring on the hard floor as we walk to the bottom of the stairs. I peer down. I can just make out the Victorian-style geometric pattern of terracotta blue and white mosaic tiles. Gustav takes the first stair then changes his mind, doubles back and calls the lift instead.

  Panic rises like boiling milk inside me. ‘That feather, Gustav. Maybe it’s not a taunt, or a threat. Maybe it’s an admission of defeat.’ I hop from foot to foot as he punches the buttons on the old-fashioned lift. We hear the thick metallic clunk far above our heads. ‘His way of apologising?’

  ‘You’re not going to deflect me from this conversation, Serena. Pierre and I spent five years not speaking to each other, letting the misunderstandings fester. If we get this out in the open, especially with you here as well, we can clear the air. It’s the only way.’

  Gustav puts his arm round me to usher me into the lift and closes the squeaking scissor gates. The lift creaks upwards, passing landing after deserted landing until we reach the top.

  ‘At least ring the doorbell to warn him,’ I whisper, though the building is silent as the grave. ‘We can’t just turn up unannounced!’

  ‘Watch me.’ Gustav shakes out a key and shoves it into the door with a decisive rasp. ‘You know perfectly well that I deal best in situations where I have the advantage.’

  ‘We know you’re here, Pierre!’ I call out as the door swings stickily open. I’m still clinging on to the last vestiges of hope that a couple of seconds’ warning will keep him on my side.

  There is no answer. Gustav pushes away from me into the warm, musky darkness.

  So this is the love nest.

  I hover by the door, waiting for Pierre to show himself. I fear that instead of admitting to Gustav that he tried to seduce me, and that in any case I rebuffed him, he’ll stand there, gloating over the feather and all the havoc it’s caused. How he danced with me in Venice. How eager I was. How far he got. How far he wanted to go.

  I feel the sour draught from the stairwell licking across my face as I wait in the dark entrance of the flat. I’m a trespasser. If I go inside, the rip tide will suck me back to that night. How can I ever explain my dirty excitement, how I relished the roughness of this strange, silent faux Gustav, how I lifted my skirts for him, opened my legs, his breeches open to display the extent of his excitement, that peacock feather dancing above my head, how I was begging for it, oh, how close we came to destroying everything?

  Gustav is crashing about somewhere in the flat. I venture inside and feel my way down a hallway. An internal door gives as I fall against it, and a light switches on.

  I’m standing in a black-painted bedroom strewn with clothes and shoes and belts, as if someone has just upended a suitcase. There are no pictures on the walls. Only a series of red-lacquer-framed mirrors. The ceiling is also totally mirrored. A black-painted carved bed dominates the space. It’s unmade, with scarlet pillows dented and punched and scarlet satin covers slipping off the mattress as if someone has just woken up and thrown them back. Hanging off the posts are handcuffs, whips, long chiffon scarves, executioner-style leather masks and muzzles as well as bejewelled and feathered Venetian masks.

  There’s a scent in the air, but it’s not Pierre’s heavy, headachy scent, which I would know anywhere. It’s floral, with an exotic eastern tang of lemongrass and something else. The nostril-pricking aroma of female excitement. Gustav will be able to smell it, too. Maybe even recognise it.

  I stare at the bed and remember what Pierre told me about this very room. As we sipped those strong fig cocktails in the Gramercy Hotel, he described the scene nearly six years ago when Gustav found his wife sitting on his brother’s face – just as she had threatened to do if Gustav ever crossed her – and threw them both out. After a few days in a London hotel, Pierre and Margot had come to New York and lived in this flat. She had kept him here for six months, tied most of the time to this very bed.

  A draught of cold air rushes over my face. The thick curtains billow and I cross the carpet strewn with discarded underwear and stockings. But as I lean out to shut the window, the night air clutches at me. The hot, cluttered room behind me is shoving at my back, urging me to plunge into the dirty alleyway below.

  Don’t be ridiculous. Polly’s in my head again. It’s not haunted. It’s just a bachelor bedroom done out with a tasteless penchant for Chinese brothel motifs. Which is odd, given Pierre’s a designer—

  Well, it feels haunted to me. I close the window and lean my forehead on the glass. I miss Polly. I wish she was right here, like when we were kids, telling me what to do next.

  There’s a tiny creaking sound. The door to the double wardrobe, painted in shiny red lacquer, is half open. I go to push it shut, but an internal light flicks on.

  I expect to see a jumble of Pierre’s trademark leather jackets and jeans hanging there, but instead there’s a rail of immaculate men’s shirts, arranged through the colour spectrum from jaunty pink through deep blue to snowy white. Each sleeve has a sharply ironed crease and is buttoned to the neck.

  The clean laundry smell of starch contrasts with the sluttish mess and manky scent of the rest of the room. The shirts sway under my fingers on their smooth wooden hangers. The last one is a white dress shirt, such as you would wear for a wedding, and as I separate it from the others I see that a silver grey cravat is tied round the wing collar, fastened with a simple silver pin.

  It glistens in the light dancing from the tasselled lampshade above my head. I can’t resist pulling the shirt closer to look at the tiepin.

  This doesn’t belong to Pierre. Because engraved on it are the entwined initials GL.

  ‘My brother has obviously moved some of his dancers in here. Two or three, judging by all this paraphernalia. So it’s group sex he’s into now!’ Gustav calls from up the hall. ‘None of his stuff is in evidence, but there’s knickers, make-up, theatrical costumes everywhere. The place is a tip.’

  Where have I seen those initials before? I know they stand for Gustav Levi, but where have I seen that style of engraving? I turn the pin over, and a cold hand claws at my heart.

  Across the back is the tiny inscription M and G. Forever.

  Gustav is in the corridor, muttering something about a wasted journey, but I can’t move. This is the loving inscription from a bride to a groom, promising permanence. Encapsulated in those curly silver words is their relationship, their marriage, their life. When he was her groom. Not mine.

  Everything Gustav has told me about her, the things Pierre told me about Margot and what she did to him with her whips and handcuffs; it all comes back to me. Those deep voices merging with story after story, trapping me in this overheated, over-furnished, stinking reminder of Margot Levi and the sexual power she had over both the Levi brothers.

  When she had reduced Gustav to a debauched, diminished figure after five abusive years of marriage, Margot took Pierre. Her willing, besotted prisoner. She was the cougar. He was nineteen, easy meat. He’d lusted after her all the time she was married to his brother, fantasised about her when he heard them moaning in the night, and when at last he had her to himself, he probably thought it was for ever too.

  PL and GL.

  I let the shirt nestle back softly against its fellows and close the cupboard. I step backwards and fall back on to the bed. Margot was insatiable, Pierre told me. She couldn’t get enough of him. She would straddle him, or get him to take her from behind, several times a day, tying him, whipping him, drugging him either with dope to make him hornier or Viagra to make him harder, teaching him everything she knew about her world of punishment and pain, the world she once shared with Gustav.

  GL.

  Pierre couldn’t resist tormenting me with the notion that Margot’s particular brand of poison still flowed in Gustav’s veins, too. That after living with, and being married to, a mesmerising, demanding dominatrix like her, no woman would ever be enough for him.

  The woman they both loved once writhed on this bed. I can see her
black hair twisting like wire, the nodules of her spine flexing as she knelt up, impaling herself on the hard length of her sex slave. GL, or PL.

  It’s the same image that tortured me in the chalet in Lugano where Gustav took me last winter. I blundered into Margot’s boudoir, thinking it had been cleared, but her stuff was everywhere. Her leather basque and boots invited me to try them on. Her collection of whips hung on their hooks, ready to deliver punishment. In my confusion that day I thought I might become stronger by dressing myself up in Margot’s clothes and in a way I did because, although Gustav went mad with anger when he found me, the anger turned, very quickly, into lust, and that’s the night when he first fucked me.

  I know where I’ve seen those initials before. I yank open the wardrobe again. The same style of engraving was on the silver cufflink I found in the master bathroom in Lugano. Gustav declared that a cufflink without its pair was worse than useless. He told me that he had disposed of it, along with every other gift from Margot.

  I snatch at the sleeve of the white dress shirt. One cuff is unfolded and bare. Fastened in the other is the missing link.

  This place feels like a shrine to the unholy trinity of GL, PL and M. And I don’t belong.

  I used to feel excluded like this as a child. Every day I came home from school to be ignored by unloving parents, knowing that in other families my friends were being welcomed into warm homes full of light and food. All I could do was stand in the darkness outside.

  But I’m an adult now. I’m going to marry Gustav. I’m supposed to be in control.

  ‘Why is Pierre storing your shirts here?’ I slam the cupboard shut. ‘Your wedding shirt, for God’s sake?’

  There’s no sound. Not even from the street outside. Nothing, then the creak of floorboards. I peer down the dark red painted corridor.

  ‘Pierre’s not at home, Gustav. This feels all wrong. Let’s just get out of here.’

  Still he doesn’t answer. But the peacock feather that was in his pocket floats through the air from the room opposite the front door and drops to the floor.

  ‘I’ve been counting the days till you were in my boudoir again instead of that freeloading brother of yours. Or should I say our boudoir? Cat got your tongue, Gusty? I always did have that effect on you!’

  A woman’s throaty voice, perforating the silence. The accent has a Germanic rasp and she pronounces his name ‘Goostie’.

  A pair of spike-heeled red sandals steps through the open front door. The brief hope that they are attached to a harmless young dancer flickers and dies. A dancer wouldn’t be able to afford Jimmy Choo.

  I’m about to meet the third member of the triumvirate. My legs give way beneath me and I crumple in the doorway.

  The pointed toes stop right in front of me. She is wearing red stockings with a silky sheen. They crease very slightly as she lifts her foot.

  ‘You like the shoes? Sexy as hell, aren’t they? A little fetish, no? Gustav gave me these, when we got engaged.’

  One pointed toe hooks itself under my chin.

  ‘Stand up straight.’ The voice segues from a croon to a snarl. ‘Slouching there like a slut.’

  My face is levered upwards, leading my eyes up the long, skinny legs, past the red stocking tops and under a black trench coat where I catch a glimpse of a bare, waxed snatch glowing white in the shadows.

  Margot Levi stamps her foot back on the floor. She puts her hands on her hips in an aggressive, questioning gesture as she swivels to face Gustav who is now standing in the corridor behind her.

  He takes an unsteady step nearer. ‘Don’t you dare speak to Serena like that!’

  She throws her head back and laughs. It’s a deep, rattling sound which seems to suck the breath out of her.

  ‘Still so angry and masterful, Levi. You used to leap to my defence in just that way!’ Margot points at me. ‘She too pathetic to stand up for herself? No, don’t answer that. I can see she’s just out of nappies! God, you two have goaded me for long enough.’

  She is wearing a black beret just like mine. She pulls it off and tosses it with perfect aim on to a coat hook. Her black hair is plaited into cornrows, which she quickly coils into a bundle at the back of her head. A collection of dreadlocks falls over and conceals one side of her face, but the slanted black eyes glitter through the screen of hair. The cheekbones are still razor sharp and painted with the same theatrical matt white foundation she wore the first time I set eyes on her.

  Margot has been creeping round the edges of our lives for weeks. Pierre made out I was going mad, but I’m certain now that she was dancing with him at the burlesque theatre the day I did the commission.

  She tips her head sideways, the better to study me, and slowly starts to unbutton her coat.

  Why on earth did I think I could avoid Margot for ever? I’ve seen her face repeated a hundred times over in the sketches that lined the walls in Lugano. I’ve seen her in a video she uploaded when I stupidly left my iPad at the theatre after that same shoot. She filmed herself holding a wedding bouquet of edelweiss, those almond-shaped eyes blinking flirtatiously.

  This is for you, Gustav darling. Remember these pretty bridal flowers? Remember this wedding music? Remember me?

  And it was her I saw at the Weinmeyers’ Venetian ball, dressed all in white with a gold mask, watching me. Watching Pierre as he pranced about in green velvet and peacock feathers and came to claim me.

  ‘No greeting for the love of your life, Gusty?’ she demands, pulling the black trench coat off her shoulders. She’s not topless underneath, thank God, but wearing a scarlet, sheer, see-through blouse and a red leather skirt.

  ‘You wouldn’t know true love if it took you up the arse!’ Gustav growls in a voice I don’t recognise, slamming her against the wall as he pushes past her. ‘I’d hoped I’d never breathe the same air as you again.’

  He pulls me against his chest. I can hear his heart drumming crazily. Despite those ugly words, I realise he’s not just trying to protect me. I’m a shield protecting him.

  ‘Ah, my love, you have no idea. You see, we’ve been sharing the same air for months now. I know for instance that you have a silly flag hanging from that telescope on top of your apartment building. I know you kiss goodbye at the corner of the Dakota building every morning when you go your separate ways to work. Touching.’ Margot lets out a harsh sigh. ‘And when I’m not watching, I’m eavesdropping. Because my minion planted a bug in your apartment on New Year’s Eve, oh, and another in your gallery when the builders were in there. You’re going to be late for that reservation at La Lanterna, by the way!’

  ‘Go back to your desert island, Margot. Get out before I do something we both regret.’

  His words hiss out, half-smothered in my hair.

  ‘Oh, Gustav. What’s happened to you? You never used to scare so easily.’ She laughs quietly behind us. ‘I’m not here to harm you. Why would I? I adore you! We were bound to come together again eventually. And you know how beautiful it is when we come together.’

  The floorboards creak. The front door slams shut. Gustav groans and holds me so tight I can’t breathe.

  And then Margot must have moved into another room, because music starts to play. Edith Piaf warbles in an old, scratchy recording from what must be the sitting room. Heavy curtains rattle shut across the window, the metal rings jostling and clattering. The French sparrow declares, quietly at first, then louder as the dial cranks up the volume, that she regrets nothing.

  ‘As for ordering me out? Impossible, I’m afraid, since this is my property, acquired from you in that very generous divorce settlement.’ There’s the pop of a cork being drawn from a bottle and the heavy chink of crystal glasses. ‘Oh, by the way, Gusty, did you like the peacock feather? My little visual joke? I went to all the trouble of posting it myself, even though your little tart was, ah, distracting you at the time.’

  Gustav lets go of me and marches stiffly into the next room. ‘And?’

  ‘And it work
ed! You’re here, aren’t you? My pet, come to heel. And it’s not just any feather, my love. It’s the feather in your little brother’s cap.’

  I hurry after him, dreading what she’s going to say next. ‘So if Pierre didn’t send it, how did you get hold of it?’

  Margot has arranged herself like a queen on an oversized armchair upholstered in purple brocade. She is brushing the feather against her face. She turns briefly in my direction, glancing at my breasts, then turns back to Gustav.

  ‘I came here straight from Venice. There was no sign of Pierre or any of his things, but I found this feather. Lovingly arranged in that vase.’

  We all look at a delicate flute on the mantelpiece, twisting and turning in waves like a whirlpool. It’s hideously ugly, veined with rainbow colours, but I recognise it as Murano glass.

  ‘So where is he?’ Gustav has reached her side of the room and stands over the big chair, the gas flames licking greedily at his legs.

  ‘My little puppet?’ Margot waggles her fingers like a clown. ‘I couldn’t care less.’

  Everything about her, the white face, the red slash of lipstick, the cruel amusement, the ironic musical backing track, is reminiscent of The Joker. Neither Gustav nor I can speak.

  ‘He’s served his purpose. Six years ago he helped me humiliate you, Gustav, and now he’s helped me again.’ Margot’s eyes slither in my direction but fix on the golden locket, not my face. ‘All it took was a call from me supposedly out of the blue last autumn, when I heard this ginger-haired tramp was worming her way into your life and into your wallet. He was shocked and pretty hostile at first. We’d both abandoned him, after all. But once I applied the soft pedal and promised that I was a changed woman, that it wasn’t him I wanted, that I was simply heartbroken after six years without you, Gusty, he was ready to listen. He told me he was leading a normal life, chasing normal women, but that’s pure bravado. It was only a matter of time before he was crawling between my legs for an encore. Anyway, the breakthrough was when I told him I knew where to find you. He admitted he missed you desperately but hadn’t the bottle to start searching, and that was my cue. I convinced him that this little tart was in the way and he would never get close to you without my help.’