'May I take my jacket off?' I asked.
'I beg your pardon?'
'My jacket, it's...'
'Take off anything you want.'
As he read through the last pages of what I realized was my essay, I studied him in profile. Oliver Masters had a large head with curly dark hair threaded through with silver streaks, a nose like the prow of a Viking ship, and a jutting chin that supported a clipped beard that he fondled as he concentrated, his focus like a snake before it strikes its prey.
I had on various occasions watched him striding across the medieval cobbles of Trinity, but it was the first time I had seen him up close, the first time I had been alone in his presence. I felt like the mouse beguiled by the cobra, terrified and lured as if by a gravity. My tutor was wearing a voluminous white shirt, faded denims with split knees and his bare feet crossed at the ankles seemed inexplicably large and intimate.
He turned back to the first page of the essay and read in a staccato voice.
'Hell Is Other People.'
He looked up. I tried a smile and my shoulders rose in an agreeable shrug. He glanced down again at the pages on his lap.
'You are Catherine Boyd?'
'Yes, I am...'
He looked surprised. 'You have from the two million words penned by Jean-Paul Sartre chosen the most renowned and overused quote as the title for your first assignment. Intriguing,' he said before reading the opening paragraph. 'Jean-Paul Sartre was born on 21 June 1905 and died on 15 April 1980. A novelist, playwright and critic, he is best known as an existentialist philosopher who famously refused to accept the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1964.' He paused. 'Why?'
I felt a moment's reprieve as I reeled off the answer. 'He believed writers should remain independent and awards would make them a part of the establishment.'
He sighed. 'I mean why are you writing this twaddle?'
My mouth turned dry and my voice became a whisper. 'I'm not sure what you mean?'
He shook his head. 'Sit down,' he instructed. I did so, at his feet, and looked up into his brown eyes; they were huge, like two holes in space. 'Where did you attend school, may I ask?'
'Saint Sebastian's...'
'Ah, yes, in Broadstairs,' he continued, as if it confirmed some principle. 'Nuns believe they can beat knowledge into girls, but that's not discipline, it's restraint. It doesn't open the mind. It closes the mind. What you have done with this…this essay, Miss Boyd, is show me what you know. I don't want to know what you know. I want to know what you think.'
He dropped the papers on the floor beside the sofa and shook his hand towards the corner of the room. 'Go and get the blue binder on my desk.'
The leather cushion where I was sitting was soft and low, awkward to rise from. My skirt ran up over my thighs as I scrambled to my feet and a flush bloomed on my neck as I realized that he was staring at my open legs. I found the folder he wanted, he wiggled his fingers, as you might to a waiter unnecessarily refilling a wine glass, and I sat again.
'Are you comfortable?' he asked.
'Yes,' I replied, though comfortable was the last thing I felt. I felt foolish and out of my depth, hair glossy with conditioner, unsuitably chic, all the experiences of that long hot summer wiped clean from my hard drive.
He opened the binder and read in a faintly mocking tone.
'Jean-Paul Sartre was a misogynist fart, an alcoholic faux-Marxist riddled through like Swiss cheese with envy for his lover Simone de Beauvoir and his nemesis Albert Camus, both better writers, and in the case of Camus, also a better goalkeeper.' He took a breath. 'Well.'
'It's...it's interesting...'
He waved away the remark and went back to the text:
'It was Søren Kierkegaard who proposed, fifty years before Sartre's birth, that it is not society or religion, but the individual who is responsible to give meaning to his own life. To achieve this, we must live with sincerity and passion, what Kierkegaard called authenticity. In a classic illustration of style over content, Kierkegaard's themes were so ravaged by Sartre there is a belief that he, Jean-Paul, is the great existentialist, not merely a lumpen farmer furrowing someone else's field.' He sniffed. 'Odd use of the word lumpen, but at least there is something here to amuse me.'
He tossed the essay on the floor, on top of my own, smothering it, and nursed his large hands with a moment's melancholy.
'I'm sorry,' I began, and he held up his palm.
'Here enter no hypocrites or bigots, as Rabelais once remarked. Neither is there room for regret,' he said, and leaned forward. 'Zen adepts sometimes spend decades meditating in an attempt to reach a state of satori.' He paused. 'You know what that means?'
'Yes.'
'Good for you,' he remarked; foolishly, I smiled. 'There are times when a great master creeps up on a novice to bash him over the head with a length of bamboo. At that moment, the novice is stunned in a way that he awakens from the nightmare of the mundane to a state of enlightened bliss. A moment's pain can clear the mind of a lifetime of drivel and dross. As Georges Bataille put it, through pain we find the greatest pleasure. You are aware of his work?'
'No.'
'Then we will have to rectify that omission in your education.' He looked into my eyes. 'Do you believe in discipline?'
'Yes, yes I do.'
He sat back and his tone changed. 'My mother is French, you know. When I was seven, she sent me to the school that her father had attended, and his father before him. It is outside Reims in a Gothic building and maintains a Gothic attitude to corporal punishment. If you misbehave, or write a poor piece of work,' he stressed, 'then you are spanked.'
I had been holding my breath and let it out in a gasp. 'Oh!' I exclaimed, and he leaned forward.
'In my honest opinion, a good spanking is exactly what you need.'
His eyes gleamed and his words hung in the air like a phrase in Latin that means something quite different from what you had previously thought it meant. With his prominent nose and inscrutable expression, Oliver Masters had the appearance of an Arabian sheik in a story from Scheherazade and I felt, squatting cross-legged at his feet, like a slave girl trapped in his saffron kingdom. The silence stretched, and I was conscious, as I had been conscious eight weeks before driving to Black Spires, that my skirt had risen up my thighs.
Of course, I didn't have to stay sitting there. I could have protested. I could have stalked out, slammed the slanted door and reported to a higher authority that Professor Masters had made coarse and potentially violent remarks. But I didn't. I was intrigued as well as shocked, attracted as well as repelled. It is one of my qualities or frailties that I can carry twin emotions at the same time and see both sides of an argument. I am aware as I dress that I am doing so to make an impression, or an entrance, that I make the most of the raw material and accentuate the result with patent indifference. I had dressed in soft clingy fabrics to make sure I made a favourable first impression; a woman in a man's world, which academia remains, must call upon all of her assets, and there was another person, another me, gazing from a future not that far distant thinking: you are being seduced and one day you will write about it.
The flames of the gas fire baked the air. The incense carried a heady perfume on its silvery blue smoke.
'Well?' he asked.
'I'm not sure what to say,' I mumbled.
'You are not sure what to say because you are not sure what to write,' he said. 'At school you were taught to learn facts and regurgitate them in a feat of memory. In this place, if I set an essay on Jean-Paul Sartre, I assume you already know the texts. Your task is to amuse me, as well as to try and interpret and extend our knowledge of the subject. Is that clear?'
'Yes, that's...'
He held up his hand and looked fiercely back at me. 'Don't for heaven's sake say as clear as crystal, or day, or drinking water. We want no clichés here...Catherine, is that what they call you?'
'Katie,' I answered. 'Except when someone's angry with me.'
He s
miled for the first time. 'Your education,' he said, pausing, 'begins here.' He tapped the arm of the sofa. 'Do you want to succeed?'
'In what sense?'
He smiled again and again I felt irrationally pleased knowing I had made the right response.
'In every sense,' he said, and carried on. 'Because if you want to, you will.' He tapped the side of his head. 'It is all up here. If you have purpose and perseverance, which I assume you do, you need to combine that with an overwhelming desire to succeed. And what is success? Success is setting goals, making a definite plan and setting out on the journey to accomplish that plan without allowing anything to stop you. Success is finding every facet of yourself and polishing it until it shines.'
He pushed himself up, reached for my hand and pulled me to my feet in such a way that, for a second, our bodies were thrown together. He stared into my eyes.
'Is success that simple? No, it is not. Quite aside from patience and persistence, you require an element of flexibility. It is why the Germans lose wars. When it snows in winter, the willow bends. The oak stands rigid holding the weight of the snow until it's limbs crack and break. Are you an oak or a willow?'
'A willow,' I replied, and he nodded his large head.
'If you do everything that is demanded of you, in twelve months you will be all that you can be.'
I felt breathless, exhausted. My stomach muscles had clenched.
'Thank you,' I whispered.
'Come,' he said.
He kept a grip on my hand as we made our way to the bookcase behind the desk. As he ran his fingers along the spines, my eyes were drawn to the collection of prints that hung in four lines between the bookshelves and alcove. The frames were about the size of a CD case and contained pictures of men and women in pairs and groups entwined in sexual positions that were both acrobatic and so...so carnal, my throat tightened again and the tic in my temple that throbbed when I was nervous began to drill through the skin.
He pulled out the book he was seeking, placed it on the desk, and turned back to me, his eyes glowing in the fleeting burst of sunlight that broke through the clouds and lit the room. He then moved along the row of images so that we could study them together.
'Aren't they wonderful?'
I didn't reply. He stopped as if to urge me to respond, and I looked away, back at the gallery of sexual couplings, each drawing showing how the human form, particularly the female form, can twist and open to be skewered and lanced in endless positions. The further we moved along the four lines of prints, the more prurient they became until, finally, not only humans in mounting numbers, but animals, demons and mythical creatures joined the spectacle in one astonishing and implausible orgy.
'They are copies of illustrations from an edition of the Kama Sutra dating back to the 14th century,' he explained. 'Remarkable, no?'
'Yes, yes, remarkable.'
'You are not embarrassed, Katie?'
'No.'
'Your cheeks are red.'
'Are they?'
His eyebrows went up. 'There is nothing that pleases me more than reddened cheeks,' he said and changed the subject, pointing at the book he had placed on the desk. 'Possessions possess, don't you agree?'
It felt as if I had swam across the Rubicon and was safely on shore again. 'Yes, I do.'
'Do you mean that? Or are you trying to please me?'
'No, I mean it.'
'I don't want you to please me if it is against your will.'
'I won't.'
'That has to be clear. Free Will Rules, OK?' he said oddly, and waited for me to respond.
'OK,' I repeated.
He took a grip on my upper arms and spoke with sudden passion. 'If the existentialists are right, that life is meaningless, and if we acknowledge that, we are better equipped to find pleasure in small things.' He looked at me beseechingly.
'Yes, I see that.'
He let go of my arms. 'I imagine at your school you went to chapel most days?'
'Every single day.'
'And you are a believer?'
I shook my head. 'No. Not really.'
'Intelligent people who claim to believe are either dissemblers, or have some sexual or psychological flaw they disguise behind a mask.' His expression changed. 'Our responsibility is to shed the shackles of our bourgeois inhibitions, live with authenticity and let go of attachments.'
He retrieved the book from the table and gave it to me.
'Thank you.'
'I must now admit to an inconsistency,' he confessed. 'This book is precious to me. It is a signed first edition that I rarely lend out. It is for your next assignment. Your Jean-Paul Sartre is neatly presented with adequate references, a case of care over content, and barely worth a D. Let's see if we can do better next time.'
'Yes, I will,' I replied, his use of the word 'we' buzzing in my ear.
'You will remember everything I have said today?'
'You can be sure of that, Professor Masters.'
'Oliver,' he said, and showed perfect, large white teeth in his smile.
He crossed the room and I followed, the book in one hand, my jacket in the other. He stopped at the door, turned the handle and stared at me with that look people have when they study themselves in the mirror wearing something new. As I made my way out, he tapped my bottom. It wasn't a smack or a slap, just a tap, entirely inappropriate, but I thought of it at that moment as a cerebral rather than physical gesture, a sign that he had invited me on to the high ground where we would both gaze upon the same broad intellectual horizons.
I had bought a black, narrow-lined notebook from Ryman's to jot down quotes and ideas separate from the notes I made for my course work. On the first page I had written: Knowing others is intelligence; knowing yourself is true wisdom. Mastering others is strength; mastering yourself is true power. If you realize that you have enough, you are truly rich.
The words are from the Tao Te Ching, a collection of aphorisms by the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu written 500 years BC, a work I had grown to admire. Asked by the Emperor how he should rule the kingdom, Lao Tzu tells him that he should rule the kingdom as he would cook a small fish. Lao Tzu was quick, canny, brusque and famously did not easily suffer fools. After meeting Lao Tzu for the first time, Confucius is supposed to have said: I would rather be thrown into a pit of vipers than spend thirty minutes in discourse with Lao Tzu.
I felt a bit like that after thirty minutes with Professor Masters, my guide through the first year philosophy module that was part of my degree. I had taken the course at the suggestion of Alicia Pym, an Old Basher who had gone up to Cambridge a year before me. 'Oliver Masters is just so…masterful,' she'd cooed. As the only girl from Saint Sebastian's at my college, I felt obliged to take her advice.
When I made my way back along the passage from his rooms that day, my head was spinning and I had a stabbing sensation in my right pupil, the sign of a coming migraine. I couldn't work out if my tutor's remarks were tiered in subtext, or if such implications were the product of my imagination. What with the heat, the peculiarity of sitting at his feet and those singular ink drawings, all that I had seen and all that he had said were spiralling through my brain like the pale smoke from the smouldering incense.
Rushing back to my room, I slipped on the frosty stones crossing Nevile's Court, cut my knee and tore a hole in my new tights.
'Bugger,' I said.
'Bless you,' came the unexpected response of a thin young cleric who passed at that moment and didn't pause to help me up. I wondered what sexual-psychological flaw was hidden behind the mask of his white collar and realised as the thought drifted through my head that I was already intoxicated by the influence of Oliver Masters.
A statue, of whom I had no idea, was peering down at me with the look of an ancient member of a gentlemen's club still riled that women were allowed in for lunch Sundays. I heard the clock in the medieval tower strike four times, it did it twice, first on a low note, then on a much higher one, a variation from a p
iece of classical music I knew but couldn't place.
In halls, I swallowed two Nurofen Plus and stared at my gaunt reflection in the mirror. My skin was grey and my cheek bones seemed to be breaking through the flesh.
In my honest opinion, a good spanking is exactly what you need.
I said the words aloud to myself.
Did he mean this in the literal sense, or was this some intellectual reference I didn't know or understand? He had called my essay 'twaddle,' then said: 'A moment's pain clears the mind of a lifetime of drivel and dross.'
Pain, yes, but in what sense?
He asked me. 'Do you believe in discipline?'
I do, I told him. But by that I meant the discipline required in study. I don't often agree with Mother's glib maxims, but that time when she discovered the maid had stacked up numerous bags of ironing para mañana, she told her, 'You don't get ahead by falling behind,' which I thought was both witty and true, not that Golo had any idea what she was talking about.
Ah, yes, si, gracias, Misses Boiled.
Professor Masters had declared that 'nothing pleases me more than reddened cheeks,' an image that may conjure up the gaudy makeup highlighting the cheeks of a dancer swirling her petticoats at the Folies Bergère, but I felt confident it was something quite different in his mind.
Or was it in my mind?
Not at all. I had thought of university as an extension of school. It wasn't like that. I was no longer a child sheltered behind convent walls, but a woman familiar with the ways of the world; at least to my own immature perceptions. Before that hot summer of 2003 turned into a golden autumn, I had been introduced to Pink by Bella and Tara. I had walked near naked across the club's pastel-lit dance floor in the mask that had found me in a little basement in Old Compton Street. I had entered dim nooks and niches with women likewise masked to discover, as Bella famously said, it's fun being a girl. I had felt liberated after that day at Black Spires and wasn't sure why I was so shocked to find my tutor setting the stage in much the same way as Roger Devlin when he asked me to remove my shoes and walk barefoot on the grass.
Katie In Love: full length erotic romance novel Page 18
