A Rage to Live (19 page)

The crowd dispersed. Cressida watched the Opera House empty. She said goodbye to those who had shared her box. But, weak-kneed and overcome with emotion, remained in her seat. Only when an eerie silence had settled did she think she should make a move. But to where? She had not the vaguest idea where to go, or what to do. Quite suddenly the house lights were switched off. For several minutes she sat in the dark except for the light in the hall outside her box. It cast a long narrow shaft of light across the small area and missed her, sitting in the shadows. Alone and still living with the power of the evening, the passion of the music, she had no idea of time. It was irrelevant.

At last he was there, a silhouette framed in the doorway. He loomed large and dramatically, as he had always loomed in her life. It was Kane, although she could not see his face, the light was behind him. The face she couldn’t see, how she yearned to see it. Wanting it to express delight in her, excitement for what was to come. He raised his arms and extended his hands to her. It was enough. She rose from her chair and stepped into the dim light filtering into the box from the hall.

‘You would have waited here all night if need be?’

She became brave. ‘All my life.’

This beautiful and now chic young woman spoke from the heart. For a fleeting moment Kane was inclined to kiss her on the forehead and send her on her way. But his libido governed her fate, not the better side of his nature. Sex and this sensual young woman were the order of the night. He wanted her. Wanted to experience the seduction of a sexually repressed young woman who desired him but knew little about real lust or sexual depravity; who yearned for sexual debauchery such as was intimated in the Picasso painting. Part of her attraction was that she made him feel she had been waiting all her life for him to mark her, make her his, that she was there for his pleasure and nothing else. It brought a smile to his lips.

He took her by the hand and they walked from the box through the halls of the Opera House, down the grand staircase and through the doors into the street.

Chapter 15

The rain had stopped. The streets and buildings looked as shiny as satin. Low cloud was racing across the sky to play hide-and-seek with the nearly full moon, sparkling diamonds for stars. The night was dramatic, thrilling. Cressida shivered.

‘You have no coat.’

‘It’s in the car.’

‘Of course. Yves wouldn’t forget a coat.’ He rushed Cressida to the waiting Rolls. Kane’s driver opened the door for Cressida and saw to it that she was seated comfortably in the front seat. Kane slipped behind the steering wheel. After shaking the driver’s hand and thanking him, he swung the car away from the curb and into the traffic.

Kane drove fast and well through Paris. All his attention was on his driving. He did however ask, ‘Cold?’

‘I’m fine.’

Ignoring her answer, he turned up the car’s heater. The noise of Paris by night, the noise of the world, it was right outside the car. But not for Cressida, who heard nothing. For her the world was inside the Rolls. Her heart was racing.

Silence. As the minutes went by the silence that lay between them was fast becoming a problem for Cressida. She knew she must break it, but didn’t know how. The silence seemed to say it all.

They were in the grubby suburbs of Paris, a rough and poor section of the city, before she took courage and turned in her seat to look at Kane. Only then did she realise that he had changed his clothes. He was wearing a cognac-coloured leather jacket, a black, polo-necked cashmere jumper, blue jeans. She found him so attractive she had to close her eyes to try and calm herself. He had been right about her. She wanted him to be half man, half beast. An erotic creature who could transport her into a lustful world where he could tap the very core of her being.

It was as if he was reading her mind. For a brief moment Kane looked from the road to her but said nothing. He unzipped, undid the top button of his trousers. Without another glance at her, he ordered,
‘Move closer to me. I want to feel your body against mine.’

Cressida willingly did as he asked. She placed her head upon his shoulder. Kane took her hand and placed it in his trousers on his patch of curly pubic hair. ‘This will have to do for now,’ he told her.

He
had
read her thoughts. He knew just how sexually hungry she was for him. She wanted to reach round and caress his flaccid penis but every overture he made or hinted at merely served to traumatise her. For the first time since he had taken her over, she felt an element of fright.

Several minutes passed, her hand felt heavy, too heavy even to move a finger. That changed dramatically when he looked at her and said, ‘Surely we have not come this far together for you not to do better than that? I’d like to be fondled, now, right here.’ A few words expressing his desire for her, and suddenly her hand became weightless, her fingers like feathers. She ran them through his pubic hair to the root of his penis, and caressed him.

More bold now, she released him from his trousers. New sensations triggered strong emotions in her. Sexual passion set her on fire, and she didn’t know what to do about it. Instinct took over. She lowered her head to rest it first on his thigh before kissing his soft, sweet-smelling penis. She brushed her face back and forth over it between kisses. His scent, the scent of sex, filled her nostrils. She actually trembled with excitement, so starved was she for sex with Kane. How different this was from fondling Tommy, who displayed at every opportunity the hard and erect penis that neither of them ever seemed to be able to make work for the other’s sexual needs or desires, not even for their sexual fantasies.

All through the concert Kane had been horny for his Circe and that had not stopped. He wanted her now, down on him, sucking him, fucking him with her mouth, her hands, giving him pleasure. But somehow her timid advances were pleasant, quite sexy even. They were working for both of them. Her inexperience was a definite turn on for him. For the moment anyway. He imagined she had had a taste of sex, but not very good sex, once, twice, possibly a few times more, but certainly not enough to satisfy this young woman’s libido. Hers was a hungry, frustrated and repressed sexuality that wanted to be set free. Kane pressed his foot down on the accelerator.

The streets were dark and deserted. Not many people ventured out in a neighbourhood as tough as this one, and especially at this time of night. It was easy to move through this old and decrepit part of Paris. Poverty-stricken for centuries, its crumbling seventeenth – and eighteenth-century buildings had been repaired, converted in the nineteenth century into commercial and residential edifices, mostly
empty and boarded up now. A place for the down and outs, the druggies, and the lost refugees of twentieth-century life. Only one thing had been for centuries consistent here: gruelling poverty. This was one of those Paris districts no one wanted to think about and few would ever see. It was a world unto itself, with its own laws, rules and rulers, judges and juries, who took care of their own. The world of moral and material poverty that populated the books of Celine.
Journey To the End Of Night
, his classic, about people and streets such as these, in another time, under different circumstances.

It was ugly, unpleasant, and more than a little frightening. A far cry from the Paris Opera House and the streets off the Champs Elysée, the Faubourg St Honoré, the Place Vendôme, the Palais Royale. Grand Paris of the wealthy and sophisticated. It was obvious that Kane knew the district well. He sped through the narrow streets that twisted and turned in on themselves, the cul de sacs to be avoided, the one way systems that could be ignored.

The Rolls took yet another corner and then cruised down a dark street of broken lamp-posts. Light poured into the street from a workmen’s café. There Kane pulled up the car and switched off the ignition. He stroked Cressida’s hair and she sat up.

The sounds of good jazz filtered into the street. Cressida looked through the dirty plate glass windows hung with grimy net curtains. People, lots of people. In a doorway next to the bistro, under a dim light, stood a man and a woman, her legs wrapped round him, his back pressed against a dirty wall running with damp. He was fucking her hard and fast by lifting her on and off his cock. It was obscene. Cressida looked away.

On the far side of the street were two prostitutes, one in shocking pink hot pants and a short feather-trimmed jacket, black fishnet stockings, her feet in high-heeled, pointed purple satin shoes. The other was much older, less pretty, much sadder. That sight Cressida too looked away from.

Her eyes met Kane’s. He was watching her, waiting for her reactions. She said nothing. She didn’t have to, he knew that she was shocked, that she had never seen anything of the raw side of life.

‘I discovered this place years ago, on a night not unlike this one. I was taking a short cut out of Paris,
en route
to a place in the country where I sometimes like to stay. This is low-life gangster Paris. Just look at the cars lining the streets, gangstermobiles, expensive and flash, or else the patrons of this place walk in from the neighbourhood. I’m hungry. I’m always famished after a concert. They have the best
filet
of steak and chips, double fried, and a red wine almost as rough as their customers.’

Kane switched on the overhead light the better to look at Cressida. His eyes lingered on her breasts. ‘Hungry?’ he asked.

She had barely spoken since they had driven away from the Opera House. She found it difficult even to answer him. She merely nodded that she was.

‘Good,’ he told her, with a not unkind smile.

Kane removed his jacket while he was telling her, ‘A few years ago I came here with a very beautiful and elegant lady. Young, extremely sexy, chic in a wild, erotic sort of way. She was an anything goes kind of lady, famous for her sexual appetites. I like my ladies to be like that. We drank too much. The music is outstanding and infectious, it gets under your skin. You’ll see. It’s raunchy music. Brilliant lowdown black American jazz – and something else. A little of the bossa nova beat, a bit of Africa. The sort of music I love. Even more than the steak and the scent of danger that lurks in this place. There’s a small dance floor, a few of the couples that come here dance. Those who can’t help themselves. Who get into the music and can’t get out. The ones who want to fuck horizontally to the sensuous sounds are the ones on the dance floor. We danced, my lady and I, and she turned on an awful lot of the men who were there that night. She had a body, and a certain something about her, the way she moved to the music, that suggested nymphomania. She was a very expensive hooker who liked coming on to men. She gave the performance of her life that night.

‘There’s a back room for sex. Picture it, Circe, a room for people there for nothing more than getting it off. It’s very exciting, low, as base as you can get. Life over the edge, dangerous, thrilling. A real and true fleshpot.’

Cressida suddenly found her voice. ‘I don’t think I want to hear any more about that night.’

‘Of course you do. You want to hear everything about sex, especially crazy, wild, dangerous sex, where all control vanishes and you can wallow in orgasm. You’re just afraid to admit it to me or yourself.’ Ignoring Cressida’s protest, Kane continued, ‘That’s where we went, into that back room, and I have been famous and accepted here as a generous stud and an all right musician ever since. So you needn’t worry, you’ll be safe as long as you are with me.’

He slipped the jacket over her shoulders and suggested, ‘Get into this. The men in that place will not take no for an answer if they see you like that. Nudity under silk organza is OK in sophisticated Paris, but here it’s an invitation to rape. Someday, when we know each other better, maybe we’ll come here and use the back room. You might enjoy it. Marianne did … does.’ He leaned forward and kissed Cressida gently on the lips. ‘You would like that, wouldn’t you? Even though it’s
only a sexual fantasy. Eight or nine men, all that cock, taking turns ravaging your cunt.’

Cressida found her voice. ‘Why are you doing this? Trying to frighten me, or just wanting to provoke me?’

‘Not provoke. Why would I want to anger you? Trying to excite is more what I want to do to you. Arouse and seduce you, to me and to all things sexual. I want you to know how glorious it can be to wallow in sexual depravity. You don’t want to be a baby in the sex game all your life, do you?’

‘You’re teasing me. You
are
trying to provoke me.’

‘Well, maybe. The fact of the matter is that no one, not one other person on this earth, is going to have you but me, not for a long while.’ He smiled at her, and she believed herself to be the happiest woman in the world.

Taking her hand in his, he pulled her across the seat and out of the car, and they walked into the smoke-filled bistro, to the buzz of people and the sound of great music. A crowded room of small tables. A long bar, two deep with men and women. A small dance floor where two couples were dancing. But it was the bandstand where it was all really happening. A black African playing the piano, a big American negro on the trumpet, a Norwegian tearing the heart out of a bass saxophone, and a Frenchwoman, a poet on the guitar. The atmosphere was dark and, just as Kane had promised, sexy. The place itself was seedy, dirty, low and exciting, and somewhat frightening. Here an outburst of temper or the flash of a knife would be the norm. A fight over a woman, an insult that broke into a fight, nothing unusual.

But there was too camaraderie and laughter, a generosity of spirit. Half a dozen men and women stood up from their tables to shake Kane’s hand. One couple left the dance floor to greet him. The trumpet player wiped his mouth with a handkerchief and waved it at him. Other people smiled. The owner of the bistro, a short obese man with sly eyes and a broad smile, a scar running across his cheek to his lip, pushed forward to greet Kane and clear a table of people.

Cressida and Kane took their seats and he told her, ‘We won’t stay long. Just long enough for some food and wine, and to unwind from
Tristan
, mellow out with the music.’

They did eat
, filet mignon
, blood red on the inside, charred black on the outside, and the promised French fries, a mountain of them, and enough wine for Kane to pull Cressida from her chair on to the dance floor.

The first time in his arms, Cressida was nearly overcome by being held in his embrace. She found it almost impossible to move her feet. But then the music cast its spell and she began to move with it. She
relaxed into it, gave her soul to it. Sensual, sexual dancing with Kane, who was leading her into that erotic labyrinth he had promised they would dwell in. He took the lead, she followed, as she had never followed any man before. He held the palm of one hand pressed hard into the small of her back, his other hand on her bottom, pushing her pelvis hard up against his no longer flaccid penis. He was indeed a devil in sex. She came, a rush of a warm orgasm, her very first. And in the arms of a man, on the dance floor of a seedy and crowded French bistro. It was the most thrilling sensation she had ever experienced.

He knew it. He pulled her head back by a handful of her luscious blonde hair and kissed her hard and deep and with great passion. A French kiss, open mouths and tongues sucking tongues. When he released her, he dragged her by the arm from the dance floor to applause, whistles, obscene suggestions and loud cat-calls. One man opened his trousers and waved a very large and very erect penis at them. Kane never stopped, merely called over his shoulder, in perfect French, ‘Not tonight. She’s mine.’ Then from his pocket he pulled several bank notes and slapped them on a table as they hurried out.

In the car, still laughing, Kane unbuttoned his jacket and slipped Cressida’s arms free from it. His only explanation: ‘I like to look at your breasts.’ He pulled her towards him. ‘Lie down, try and get a little sleep. We’ve an hour’s drive.’

Cressida did lie down, on her side: knees bent, her feet on the seat, her head resting on his lap. Sleep was impossible. He had teased her to near desperation, certainly to the point where she would deny him nothing, and was willingly, anxiously, his sexual slave, ready to do his bidding. For now, what
he
wanted was everything that
she
wanted. She closed her eyes and pretended to sleep, if for no other reason than to calm herself, try and regain some of the sanity she had possessed before she had seen that Picasso in the window.