The Girl Behind The Fan (Hidden Women) (7 page)

After his very first visit to Arlette’s house, I imagined Remi in the general’s habitual position: on his knees, on the floor, between mine. I had changed into my nightgown. It wasn’t fancy, but it was soft through old age and I imagined it as a silken gown, a present from my ardent artist lover. I got under my blankets and pulled up the nightgown’s skirt. I moistened my fingers in my mouth and then sought out my clitoris. Gently I began to rub.

All the time I played with myself, I imagined Remi’s face between my legs as he ardently licked me towards ecstasy. How wonderful it would be. I could almost feel him sucking and tickling and probing me with his tongue.

As I got closer to the edge, I bit down on my pillow. I knew from the first couple of times I had played with myself that when I came, it would be with a little exclamation. Arlette was in her room downstairs and I suspected that she was as busy seeking after pleasure as I had been, but I did not want to risk drawing her attention to the ceiling and my spyhole with any unusual noise. Perhaps she already knew I watched her. I liked to think that she didn’t though I’d heard some her tell some of her gentlemen friends she found the thought of being watched enticing.

So I came on my own and the pillow accepted my tremulous groans. When they were over, I lay like a beached starfish stretched right across my bed. I was more than ready to fall asleep. As I did, I tried to think of Remi in a more wholesome way. I remembered the way he had looked when he stood by the fireplace. I imagined him turning to me and falling onto his knees, begging me to be his wife.

I had the strangest feeling that it might just happen.

The following day, Remi came back again with Charles and the other fascinating young men. The moment I saw him, I blushed to the roots of my hair, as though he could have known what I had imagined the night before. I trembled as I passed him a cup and he caught hold of my hand to steady me. I had imagined Remi performing the most awful carnal acts on me, but just the brush of his fingertips in real life was enough to make me faint.

‘Augustine!’ Arlette cried out. ‘That’s two coffee pots in one week!’

Chapter 8

I immediately related to Augustine Levert. Though the painting I had found in the museum showed her to be a goddess, her diary showed me the naive young girl, who had fallen on hard times and found kindness in the least likely of places. Reading about her falling for Remi, I couldn’t help but be reminded of Luciana Giordano, falling for her teacher Casanova. How powerful first love can be.

But now, whenever I thought about my own first love, the memory was linked with someone else. With Marco Donato.

When I started researching Luciana Giordano in the Palazzo Donato library, Marco had asked me to keep him up to date with my progress. He said he had always been interested in the young woman’s diaries but hadn’t ever found the time to read them and doubted that he ever would. So, in return for permission to visit the library – which had been closed to visitors for years – whenever I liked, I gave him a synopsis of each diary extract as I read it. It was natural that we would enter into a sort of conversation about Luciana. And from that point, I suppose it was equally natural that we would start to share a few stories about ourselves.

As I’ve explained, we talked about our childhoods. We talked about our schooldays. Then, inevitably, we talked about first love. And first love led us on to talking – still via email – about losing our respective virginities. Mine was a fairly ordinary tale of two middle-class sixth-formers shagging to a soundtrack of New Order while their parents were away. Marco Donato, heir to a shipping fortune, had lost his virginity to his father’s mistress; a voluptuous Sophia Loren lookalike called Chiara.

It was when I read Marco’s description of that encounter that I first realised I might be developing my own feelings for him. I was unaccountably jealous when I thought of the Italian woman, at least fifteen years his senior, who had taken him to her bed. I wanted to know what Chiara had to make her so attractive. I wanted to know how I compared. I knew I couldn’t look like a young Sophia Loren no matter how much make-up I wore.

After that intimate exchange, Marco and I started to correspond more regularly and on increasingly personal subjects. I told him almost everything about the end of my relationship with Steven. Marco was very kind in his response and his kindness went a long way towards restoring my confidence and making me believe that I could not have done anything differently.

With such a warm correspondence in progress, it seemed obvious that we would soon meet in person. I was nervous about that. I’d pored over pictures of Marco online since the first time I saw his name and it seemed he was always accessorised with a supermodel. Like Augustine, putting on Arlette’s clothes and looking at herself in the mirror, I wasn’t sure I could compete. Part of me had even worried when I urged Bea to wear the Dior dress to the ball that Marco would find her more beautiful than I could ever hope to be.

Talking of Bea, following Nick’s revelation that Bea was going to meet her security-guard beau’s mother, I had written to my old friend for more gossip. She had plenty, of course, but the most interesting part of her email to me was where she said that she had asked to be admitted to the Donato Library to see some of Casanova’s correspondence there and had been told in no uncertain terms that the library was
never
open to the general public – never had been – despite the fact that she knew I had been allowed inside.

Bea was frustrated, of course, but my heart beat just a little faster when I read of her annoyance. So the Donato Library was closed again? Marco would admit no one, no matter the importance of his or her thesis? No one since me. That had to mean something, didn’t it? Though quite what, I wasn’t sure.

When I wasn’t working, I spent time getting to know Paris. Over the course of a week, I tackled the Louvre room by room. I shuffled with the crowds to catch a glimpse of the
Mona Lisa
, though I have to admit that when I got close enough to see her, I wondered what all the fuss was about. Compared to Remi Sauvageon’s portrait of Augustine Levert, the
Mona Lisa
seemed flat and plain. I couldn’t understand why her expression had always been thought of as flirtatious or mysterious. To me, it seemed unlikely that she harboured any secret desire for the artist. There was none of the longing that was so obvious in Augustine’s yearning look. Likewise, the
Venus de Milo
was disappointingly familiar. There was nothing new to be learned from seeing her in the flesh, or rather the marble.

I did find some gems, though. I especially loved the pensive dark-haired heroine of Corot’s
La Femme à la Perle
, like the
Mona Lisa
’s
more beautiful sister, inexplicably overlooked by so many. And I loved walking through the rooms that the average tourist didn’t have time to take in. I had a room to myself for at least twenty minutes one afternoon. I wondered how many people had been lost in the museum after hours. I wondered how many had deliberately hidden themselves in a quiet corner to steal a kiss or even to make love, while centuries-old statues watched in mute amusement.

I had been to Paris before but I didn’t get to know it at all back then. The first – and last – time I had visited the city had been four years earlier, when Steven and I came to France to celebrate his thirty-sixth birthday and my twenty-sixth, which was later the same week. Neither of us had much money but we found a small and strange hotel in Montmartre, called La Lumière, where we could afford the smallest room for three nights. We arrived on the Friday evening and barely left our bed before we caught the Eurostar back to London on the Monday morning. Steven said that could be my birthday present to him: a whole weekend of crazy passionate sex. I wouldn’t have said it was crazy, but it was certainly passionate.

Back in Paris for a second time, glancing up on one of my rambles to catch a glimpse of the Sacré Coeur, I was reminded of that long-ago weekend. I wondered if the hotel was still open. When we had visited, the place was on its last legs; a refurbishment was long overdue. Using his best French on the receptionist, Steven discovered that it was one of the few places in the city that still rented rooms by the hour, which perhaps explained the exotic creatures that hung around reception, wearing nightclub clothes in the middle of the day. The receptionist continued to tell Steven that the owner of the hotel was keen to sell.

‘If only I could make him an offer,’ said Steven. He loved Paris and he especially loved the slightly seedy area in which we’d found ourselves.

Four years on I took a detour from my planned itinerary. I ventured up there and saw that the worst – as far as Steven was concerned – had happened. The hotel was indeed under new ownership. It had been refurbished and transformed. I paused by a board displaying pictures of the rooms inside. They were now as chic and bland as any hotel room in any city in the world. The tiny loft room with its peeling paint almost certainly had an en-suite bathroom by now. Would that make it more romantic? The room in the roof had been unbearably romantic to me. It had been unbearably hot as well.

‘No reason to keep our clothes on,’ as Steven had joked.

We had made our trip in high summer and, on our first night there, I had looked out to see swallows diving over the rooftops. It was such a beautiful view. Quintessentially Parisian. I wasn’t to see very much of it.

‘Come over here.’

I stripped off my clothes eagerly and joined Steven on the bed. He paid his usual respects to both my breasts, kissing one and then the other, as was his custom.

‘Neither one must feel left out.’

I giggled and wrapped my arms round his head, forcing his face deep into my cleavage. Steven groaned with delight.

When I let him go, Steven kissed every inch of me, slowly, as though he were savouring the taste of my flesh. His warm lips left me tingling. Moving down to my thighs, he pushed them apart and nuzzled at my pubis. His chin was slightly stubbly. It scratched at my soft skin.

Carefully, Steven flickered his tongue across my clitoris. Then he pushed a finger into me, making me gasp in surprise. It was not painful though and I was soon wet enough to take another finger and another. Just the thought of having my lover inside me made me want to open up.

Meanwhile, I took his penis in my hand, enjoying the familiar weight of it. The skin of the shaft was soft and warm. It had a peach-skin texture. I wrapped my fingers round it and slowly began to move them up and down, establishing a rhythm and feeling pleased with myself as I felt it becoming harder still. Steven closed his eyes and let his head tip back. He let out a low moan that told me not to stop.

I did stop. With my hand at least. Instead, I slid down the bed so that my face was level with Steven’s pelvis. Holding the root of his penis steady, I began to lick him. Long strokes to the side of the shaft, followed by a swirl around the top.

‘I’m not an ice cream,’ Steven protested.

‘You’re just as delicious,’ I said. ‘Though not so sweet.’ I tasted the salty tang of pre-cum.

I moved so that I could take the whole tip of Steven’s penis in my mouth. I sucked, gently and rhythmically. I felt his penis twitch against my tongue as it stiffened still further. Eventually Steven gently pushed me up and away from his crotch.

‘Don’t want to waste a good hard-on.’

He lay back on the bed and stroked himself lazily while I positioned myself over him. I climbed onto his lap and moved so that his penis was pointing straight upwards towards my pussy. Taking him by the hand, I guided him inside me.

When I was on top, I was in control. I could set the pace and to begin with, that day, the pace I wanted was slow. I oozed my way up and down Steven’s cock, feeling every centimetre of his length as he slid into and out of me. Steven closed his eyes and sighed with pleasure at each stroke. He was helpless. He put his hands on my waist but I would not let him change the speed with which I moved on him. He was entirely at my mercy, just as I had been at his when he put his mouth against my clit.

I ignored Steven’s protests that I was teasing him unkindly. I was enjoying myself as I dragged the moment out. Eventually, however, it was too much for me as well. I started to move more quickly. I put my hands on his chest to steady myself as I changed the pace from walk to canter.

And from canter to gallop. I rode him in triumph, while he bucked away beneath me, pushing up, up, up, as deep as he could go. When he came he begged me to stop. The sensation was too great, but I carried on until I had drained him and I started to come myself.

Back in Paris and on my own again, I stood outside the hotel where I’d had such an erotic weekend and tried to work out how I felt. Bea had once suggested that my virtual affair with Marco was a way of avoiding a proper mourning period with regard to Steven. Was she right? If she was, then now, without Marco as a buffer, I should feel the full force of my grief for the love Steven and I had shared and lost. A tear did spring to my eye, but I really couldn’t be sure. Was it for Steven or was it for Marco?

Chapter 9

Paris, 1839

Remi Sauvageon was soon a regular visitor at Arlette’s house and we were always pleased to see him. While Charles the poet earned his keep in Arlette’s heart with a series of ribald rhymes, Remi would draw cartoons for her amusement. He made caricatures of the other young men that were always piercingly truthful and yet somehow still kind. No one ever minded discovering how big his nose was if Remi had made the picture. He could make even a chinless weakling seem heroic.