by Primula Bond
‘I noticed the first time Pierre called you “G”, during that awful row before Christmas. You’d not seen each other for five years. There was so much hurt, Margot had done so much harm, all of it was pouring out of both of you, but when there seemed nothing else to say Pierre reached out to you. He called you “G”. One tiny letter, but it shows how close you were. Are. It seems to calm him every time the temperature between you starts to rise.’
‘And it’s yours to use, too, whenever you feel anxious.’ Gustav starts to touch each bump of my vertebrae with the tip of his tongue. ‘So let’s focus on today, and why we’re here. Thanks to that call from Château Cine, Serena Folkes is back in her voyeur’s saddle.’
I let his words soothe me. ‘Tell me more about these sexual shenanigans, then. These dangerous liaisons.’
‘The clue is in the title, and as a cadeau for my clever fiancée I have acquired an original edition of the book the film is based on.’ Still kissing me, he produces from behind his back an ancient book with a yellowing jacket. ‘I sneaked off to a sale at the antiquarian bookshop yesterday. Only a handful of copies were available and they went like hot cakes. Philandering Frenchmen buying them for their petites amies, no doubt. But I’ve also bought a convenient translation so you can research the story in the car going to the location.’
‘I’m not your mistress, buster! I’m your fiancée!’ I slap at him. ‘But thank you.’
He holds the book away from me playfully. ‘It’s a naughty, twisted, sexy tale full of scheming and intrigue between older characters, who set out to corrupt their innocent young counterparts. But it’s a complicated ensemble. Before the studio limousine whisks you out of town to the château where they are filming, you’ll need to read the cast list to work out who’s who, and who is going to do what to whom.’
‘Hmm. Maybe I’d better do some homework now. They’ve commissioned me to do what I do best, which is turning stalking into an art form. I’ll just be lurking in the shadows as the film takes shape. The filmers filmed. This shoot shouldn’t be too difficult if all they do is stand around plotting and then have sex!’
‘And you know what will happen if you don’t blend into the background?’ Gustav hands me the little book. ‘They’ll want you to join in!’
‘Honey, I’m trying to be serious! Today it’ll just be me and my camera.’
I open the book and look at the list of dramatis personae. Gustav has drawn a tiny sketch of my face alongside the date and the words Serena. Ma chérie. Ma femme.
I smile up at him, speechless for a moment. He kisses me again and pads away across the thick, luxurious carpet.
He reaches for his clothes, which in last night’s haste were left crumpled over a chair. ‘I still feel a little regretful that instead of being your rich lover bringing you on a dirty weekend, I’m just here as your hanger-on.’
‘So allow me to enjoy pulling rank over you, Monsieur!’ I put the book down. There’s a sudden flurry of rain ricocheting off the overhanging roof. The tulips out on the balcony boxes, apparently driven fresh from Amsterdam every day, bend their heads under the shower. ‘Although I may not be able to concentrate on my work if you’re lounging beside me in that biker jacket and scruffy jeans.’
‘These jeans, do you mean?’ I turn to see what he’s talking about, and see him bending to pull one black trouser leg up over his tight boxers. My stomach lurches as the part of him that delights me, night after night, is packed away.
‘Why are you putting those smart ones on? They turn you into Gustav the entrepreneur, not Gino the bag carrier. I liked it at that hilarious Robinson family shoot when you pretended to be my sexy Latino assistant, doing all the heavy lifting, and ended up watching me being fingered by the daughter of the house! Aren’t you coming to hump my equipment?’
‘Not today, chérie. I have to go out of town for a meeting with some Italian associates.’
‘Another meeting? You never said. When will you be back?’
He pauses as he’s about to do up the trousers. ‘Late, signorina. They want me to take the high-speed train down to Florence to view the site. We’ve been discussing this project for weeks now. But don’t look so despondent! Tomorrow I have a much more exciting appointment with a certain jeweller in the Quartier Latin. He has some very special measurements to take.’
I run across the room, jump into his arms and he staggers with me back to the enormous queen-size bed. ‘Our wedding rings! Oh, my God, Gustav! It’s really going to happen! When can we do it? When are we going to get married?’
He rolls on top of me and starts peeling the fluffy towel away from my flushed, damp skin. As my breasts are revealed and the nipples sharpen into tight points, I grab at his waistband and start undoing the button of his jeans.
‘I don’t want to rush anything, but hey, why not sooner rather than later? Can you think of any significant dates? How about Halloween?’
‘The anniversary of our meeting! That would be amazing! But five months isn’t much time to get things organised!’
‘We could just elope.’
I smile as I grow heavy with desire. ‘Our life is one long elopement!’
He kicks the trousers away and lets me pull off the clean boxers. Oh, God, there’s nothing like a super-luxurious hotel room with a panoramic view over the rooftops of Paris, a historic wine cellar far below, and a sparkling blue bathtub big enough to practise your lengths, to turn you on.
And talking of lengths. My lover’s hardness springs free, jabbing into my stomach as I wrap my thighs around his hips and pull myself up against him, feel the tip of him nudging at me.
‘Gustav Levi, even if we elope I can’t get married without a dress, can I? Polly would kill me if I did it in jeans or a bikini. She has her heart set on making the wedding gown, and I don’t feel happy about planning anything until we’ve mapped out her part as seamstress, but how can she if I’m in Paris and she’s in Marrakesh?’
Gustav fans his hands out over my bottom and pushes me hard against him. We pause for a moment, breathing softly into each other’s faces, taunting each other to see who will move first, who will crack and give in.
‘A minuscule complication, Serena. One I’m sure you’ll fix somehow. But for now? Let’s shut that beautiful sexy mouth of yours.’
His black stare rakes over me as he pulls his haunches back. I wait, luxuriating in the way he devours me with his eyes. He pauses. He’s not going to be gentle. He’s still loving, but he’s rarely gentle these days. He rocks his hips against me and slides straight in, straight up. The rain patters more insistently against the window. The poor tulips dip their heads in the spring storm as my fiancé and I arch and move in delicious slow rhythm.
I ease myself across his thighs, press closer to him so he goes in deeper. My muscles tighten around him. His hands loosen slightly on my hips as his face softens. We are totally enclosed in this circle of love and luxury. So gentle, so familiar. So real.
His black eyes glitter with fresh fire and he moves faster, banging me against him in a spiral of excitement until his eyes half close with the effort of holding back. The release comes quickly and we fall together into the snowy sheets.
The studio limousine takes me away from Gustav and away from the magic of the hotel, out on to the bustle of the Champs-Élysées. We drive along the north side of the Seine for a while, past the spot near Notre Dame where I took the photographs for my Parisian series of young lovers that the Weinmeyers now have in their house. Or did have, before they installed the ruined Baker Street footage.
But instead of crossing over the famous river, we plunge underneath it, and when we re-emerge from the tunnel we have left all those landmarks behind us. We are in another land, the land of grey, flat banlieues, where even the telephone lines seem to sag with boredom.
I get out the summary of Les Liaisons Dangereuses and stick my iPod in my ears.
I wanna kiss you in Paris.
I read a little about the story then cl
ose my eyes and think of the big, rumpled bed Gustav and I have just climbed out of. How many hours will it be until we can be back there again? When I look up again about forty minutes later, the car is driving slowly along a nondescript village street. There’s no apparent life except a couple of teenagers trying and failing to kick-start their mopeds. The rain has stopped, but the clouds hang heavily over the landscape as if waiting for an excuse to puke up a fresh load.
‘On arrive!’ declares the driver as two enormous black gates set in a long grey wall at the far end of the village street open electronically. We cruise up a long, straight gravel drive policed on either side by dark green topiary clipped into the shapes of cockerels and spaniels and flying fish.
The château is a mini version of Versailles. The large grey bricks are seamed with watermarks, but the pointed turrets give the building an impressive, majestic air. I tuck the book into the pocket of my faded denim jacket and get out of the car. I stare up at the long, blank windows, and the château stares back at me. The driver waves me up a set of stone steps extending along most of the façade and leading to the main double doors, which are standing open. I walk through a cold stone porch and straight through an internal courtyard. On the far side is another door, this time modern, double height and glass.
I’ve arrived in an echoing stone hallway complete with sweeping double staircase, a number of ominously closed doors and a glassed-in corridor leading away into the distance, offering more glimpses of garden. It’s all very cool and grand, but still no one appears to greet me. If it wasn’t for the coils of black cable snaking between arc lights, several unmanned film cameras balanced on enormous gantries, and the rows of overloaded electrical sockets, I would think I’d come to the wrong place.
‘Excusez-moi? Are you lost?’
A door on the left of me opens just as I’m lifting my hand to knock, and a slim girl appears beside me with huge brown eyes and crimson-dyed hair cut in the kind of gamine crop only French girls like her can carry off.
‘Bonjour. Je m’appelle Serena Folkes,’ I say, holding up my camera case. ‘Je suis ici pour photographier Les Liaisons Dangereuses?’
‘Ah yes. They are filming now. Well, they are always filming.’ She waves a clipboard over the cold deserted hall and beckons me to follow her. Today I’m wearing a leather miniskirt and cowboy boots, and a striped Breton sweater which keeps falling off one shoulder. She runs her hand down my arm. ‘T’es très française!’
As she opens the doors, a wall of breathy, sexy music hits us. It’s the lowdown, gravelly, slightly jungle beat of Madonna’s Erotica complete with moaning, persuasive voice and orgasmic sighing. I’ve just been listening to it on my iPod. It winds into your ears, right down into you, makes you want to sway, until you remember that you’re not dancing in an underground nightclub in the early hours, but toiling in a château in broad daylight. More studio lights are set up in here, filling the room with an artificially bright glare so that, although it’s raining outside, it looks like a hot summer’s day in here.
The girl leads me across the back of a rectangular, parquet-floored salon with pale gold and gilt walls whose cornices and coving are alive with vines and cherubs clambering all over the walls and ceilings. The room shares the proportions and period detail of the ballroom at the Palazzo Weinmeyer in Venice. The bright gold of the figures picks up the artificial sunlight being beamed around the room. When this is screened, the scene will be bathed in a warm, golden glow, like an advertisement for Hovis or Bisto.
The girl, who I realise is holding my hand now, puts a finger to her dark-painted mouth. I can’t see past the next semicircle of cameras grouped halfway down the room. Various cameramen in nondescript dark clothing are training their lenses or moving their wheeled apparatus towards the far end while a couple of spindly lads lay a train track down the centre of the floor.
The runner and I walk down the garden side of the room where ceiling-height glass doors lead on to an ornate patio and a lawn sweeps down to a lake.
Everyone is staring at a vast stone fireplace with flames the size of a bonfire flickering in the grate. It’s all very baronial, except that there is no wooden furniture, tapestries or aloof aristocrats. Instead, there is a huge TV screen above the mantelpiece, as wide as the chimney breast itself, showing what looks like a window spattered with raindrops, and grouped around the fireplace is a set of very modern, low-slung white leather sofas.
Instead of the aloof aristocrats you’d expect to see striking poses in tailcoats and powdered wigs, I can now see two men, one on either side of the fireplace, leaning pugnaciously out of their leather chairs and having a blazing row. One is handsome and silver haired, and wearing faded jeans and a washed-out cotton shirt. The other is in a kind of sharply tailored tawny mod suit with a tie-less white shirt buttoned up to the neck.
The silver-haired man picks up a bottle of red wine from a big glass table stacked with other bottles, cakes and candles, and starts waving it around as he snaps and snarls at the younger man. Everyone else in the room stands very still, arms crossed. Just watching. I make a face at the girl.
‘Maybe this wasn’t a good day to come!’
‘Not rehearsal. This is real. Real shoot I mean.’ She smiles, waving her clipboard at the actors. ‘The cameras roll twenty-four seven. Like documentary. But also like reality.’
I glance back at the set. Cool idea.
The runner girl nudges me. ‘That’s the Vicomte de Valmont, the old guy, the one who makes all the trouble in the story, and he’s fighting with Comte de Gercourt.’
I glance at her. She’s clutching the top of her clipboard and staring at the grey-haired man. He has filled his glass so full that red wine spills on to the wooden floor.
I lean closer and whisper. ‘You’re going to have to explain the plot to me again.’
‘All you need to know is that they all want to have sex with each other. At least, that’s the simple version of the story.’ She blushes, then pulls me behind one of the cameras and points at a third person I hadn’t even noticed. ‘And there’s Cécile, the innocent character. That’s the one they all want. Even the women want her.’
The male characters may be after Cécile, but at the moment the character is being ignored. She is young, around the same age as me and my new friend the runner, and she’s perched at the end of a third long sofa which faces the fireplace and the blank TV screen with the raindrops. She is dressed in a long grey overcoat and thick black tights, and the knees in those tights are pressed tightly together. Her white fingers are hooked round her knees and drawing them towards her so that her feet in their polished black loafers are lifted off the ground. She has an angular, pale face with not a scrap of make-up, and pale hair the colour of sand pulled behind a drab grey Alice band.
She reminds me of Sister Perdita, the little nun whom I stalked and watched in her secluded convent in Venice last year, flagellating herself in her cell to atone for her sins.
‘She doesn’t look as if she should be in a film about sex. She looks like a nun!’
‘C’est ça! Très bien!’ The runner girl starts to smile but tips her clipboard over her mouth to hide it. ‘She has come out of the convent to be married, but the old guy, Valmont, has a bet with his ex-mistress that he can take the little nun’s flower.’
Now it’s my turn to snuffle with laughter. The runner girl is about to pull me away when the screen above the fireplace, unnoticed by the arguing men, suddenly illuminates, sending a dazzling white glow over the room, and there is Madonna, enacting the sunlit sexual fantasies she recorded in her infamous book of twenty years ago. She and her acolytes are writhing and dancing and moaning as she sings the lyrics to Erotica. The screen is alive now with a stream of artistic, erotic footage, part blurred, part paused, part sharply in focus. Mostly in monochrome. Girls pressing together on a windy beach, mouths on each other’s necks and faces, but eyes on the camera. Two naked men bending over a stripped girl in a school gym.
&n
bsp; Do as I say.
Below the TV screen, the two men are standing. They have their backs to the fireplace, so they are not seeing the bodies arching on the screen above them. They pay no attention to the thrusting breasts, the bondage straps wrapped around pert buttocks, the opening mouths and those greedy tongues poking and licking as the music suggests all kinds of naughtiness.
I begin to see how reality and fantasy can merge within a film set, especially with the surreal touch of highly sexual music distracting them even when they are not speaking. I want to capture this concept. A film within a film. I notice that a cameraman is placed on a slightly raised platform at the side of the room, filming the filmers.
The watchers watched.
I bend to open my camera case, and as I do so a crumpled photograph flutters out of an inner side pocket. It’s the picture of me and my cousin Polly taken at the top of the Rockefeller Center last January. It shows us supposedly balanced precariously on a construction girder swinging out over the rooftops of New York City. Polly must have tucked it in there when she came to the Serenissima gallery’s opening night to say goodbye.
I smooth out the creases. They run symbolically between the two of us, the white paper showing through the cracked image, like the graphics of a zigzag dividing a once happily married couple. The worst weeks of my life were when Polly and I fell out over that misunderstanding about Pierre. Now, looking at her white, pinched face pictured on that day up the Rock, I experience an overwhelming urge to be with her.
I grab my phone and send her a text. She rarely gets a signal from her Moroccan retreat, but I desperately want to communicate with her anyway.
Am somewhere near Paris, standing in a château full of mad people pretending to act out an old epistolary French novel, who wouldn’t know real life if it bit them on the bum. Still. Am being paid. Wish you were here, Pol. U OK?
I press ‘send’ and glance around me. Everyone, except the dancers gyrating in the video above our heads, is standing completely still. The crew are fiddling with knobs and switches on their equipment, murmuring to themselves. The runner girl is staring at me. The two men by the fire are watching the young nun girl, and the young nun is watching the screen.
