The Golden Locket (Unbreakable Trilogy, Book 2) (25 page)

‘Bring that with you to the hotel after this! The camera, not the ’tache!’ he replies with a laugh, before backing towards a row of people with clipboards and earphones who are clamouring for him. ‘I don’t just want to dissect my failed love life. I’d like to see today’s proofs, too.’

There are mostly men in the audience wearing frock-coats and stiff-necked shirts, lounging back in their chairs. A few women in very low-cut gowns wear brassy red hair done up like mine, twisted and curled and adorned with jet beads and feathers. Black stockings and a stretch of white thigh glimmer as they cross their legs theatrically under their skirts. There’s even a battered copper bar set up along the side, with a barman shaking cocktails. Every shot I take is already perfectly composed.

‘Did you know the post-Impressionist painter Toulouse-Lautrec is supposed to have invented a drink called the
Tremblement de Terre
?’

A deep voice murmurs into the back of my neck. I freeze for a moment, the camera still in front of me. Pierre has taken me unawares. It seems I always have to be on my guard, on my marks like those dancers. As the girls start to screech and whoop on the stage, rotating their knees and flashing their knickers, I turn slowly round, my ragged skirt swirling round my bare legs.

And find myself in Gustav’s arms.

I fling mine around his neck, practically in tears at what I might have, could have said, thinking he was Pierre. Gustav staggers with me towards one of the little tables.

‘Hey! You been there all along?’ I ask as we scoop up cocktails on our way past.

‘Since you were grabbed by that dresser and she dolled you up in this gorgeous just-ravished-in-an-alleyway get-up.’

Gustav smiles at me, his eyes roving over my costume. Over my face, my pinned-up hair, as if he hasn’t seen me for years. Or as if he doesn’t recognise this painted creature. To add to the confusion, he is dressed in a frock-coat and top hat, just like his brother and all the other men in the place.

‘I’m so happy to see you.’ I tuck myself under his arm. ‘That cocktail. It sounds like a knee trembler!’

‘How about that? Up against the wall. Oh, I wish!’ He kisses me again, sits on one of the bentwood chairs and pulls me onto his knee to merge with the seated, watching audience. ‘But I can’t stay long. I’ve been called up to Toronto for a couple of days. My gallery up there is being transformed into a circus arena for a new show, but they’re arguing about health and safety, whether the girders are sturdy enough to take the weight of the trapeze. Or something like that. Anyhow, I dropped by to see what you and Pierre are up to before I fly off.’

The music suddenly increases in tempo, a contemporary backbeat to a fashion show, and a dazzle of very modern lights, pink, silver, blue, flash on and off, pulsate in time to the music.

‘So long as they don’t make you swallow swords or eat fire!’ I laugh. ‘Now stay right there, because I have to film this.’

The girls change their moves as if a puppeteer has jerked their strings. They gyrate on the stage and then like catwalk models they start to strut out along the runway into the body of the theatre, their hourglass figures sensational as their thighs flex and kick, the design of their corsets allowing a tiny velvet drape of material to cover their modesty.

‘Those post-Impressionists were all sex-mad. They all seem to have lost their virginity with prostitutes, hence their enthusiasm for tarts and showgirls.’ Gustav twirls his false moustache. ‘Pierre says that’s why they’ve set this up for audience participation. Bit risky, I’d say.’

‘Can’t we go outside for a few minutes?’ I wriggle my bottom against him, deep into his lap. ‘If you’re going all the way to Toronto, how about I get you alone in the car and show you what you will be missing?’

But something makes me turn towards the stage. Pierre is still up there. At first I think he’s watching his girls, checking they are moving right, but then I see he is standing just over to the side, watching me and Gustav as we sit entwined on the rickety chair.

Gustav follows my eyes and lifts his hand to greet his brother.

‘
Tremblement de Terre
means Earthquake. It was a lethal cocktail made from half absinthe, half cognac. And did you know that Toulouse-Lautrec was nicknamed the coffee pot?

I press myself up against him, hook my leg round one of his. ‘Because he was short, but with a huge spout?’

Gustav really laughs. ‘Now put your camera down for a moment and dance with me!’ He picks me up to swing me round in the air. I catch Pierre’s dark eyes on me. On both of us. And I realise, from the almost manic grin on Gustav’s face, that he is showing Pierre something. Me. He’s showing Pierre that I am his to dance with. No one else’s.

Gustav licks my ear as he whispers. ‘Pierre says they’ve had a lot of trouble casting someone well hung enough to be
le
coffee pot for the show!’

His arm tightens around me as we continue to spin. The pretend rapt audience of gentlemen around us crane forward in their chairs, adjusting their trousers, not watching us but reaching out to touch the girls’ ankles as they high-kick down the walkways with their feathers and fans. I wriggle out of Gustav’s arms to grab my camera again to catch an under-the-skirt view of the girls’ impossibly long legs. And impossibly tiny thongs, sparkling in the shadows between their thighs.

One of the pirouetting girls reaches down, pushes me aside with a sharp elbow and a wink weighted with sparkling pink eye-shadow and false eyelashes, and pulls Gustav up onto the walkway. He shakes his head in protest as she starts to dance around him, gesturing and beckoning. Now the other men, actors, audience, members of the press, who knows, are being pulled on stage.

It’s just a rehearsal. Any minute he’ll bow apologetically and retreat to me.

I shift forward on the chair, thankful that my camera keeps me busy, but Gustav doesn’t come back to me. Instead he stretches his arms and tries to take the girl into a waltz hold, but she laughs and turns her back, rubbing her backside against him as if he was a lap-dancing pole. Well, this
is
burlesque. As her arms and legs entwine around him like vines, dancing him away from me towards the stage, the music seems to flow into Gustav. As the girl shimmies at him, he shimmies back. When she bumps and grinds, he stamps his feet at her, his hips thrusting like a matador beneath the black trousers and frock-coat.

My chest goes tight with the unaccustomed sensation of jealousy. No other word for it. He’s watched me behave like this with other people, do far worse things, and yet I’m furious with him for making me sit here like a wallflower while he cavorts with another girl. It’s only play-acting, I know that, but these girls are trained not only to move and dance and strip but to focus your mind on one thing and one thing only, and that’s the sex act. This girl is limbo-ing, wriggling and thrusting, pushing out her fanny and tits, her knees spread, showing us all exactly where she would like to be: in bed. With my man.

And all he has to do, oh, God, he’s doing it, is one simple thrusting move, to show exactly what he would do to her.

I’m left on the chair as the other participants, planted or otherwise, dance around them, and Gustav is dragged further away from me. Up on the stage the bright coloured lights are slowly fading. I pan my camera round the theatre, focus for a moment on the swing doors at the side of the auditorium, which have been propped open. I can just see a black-haired woman dressed in bridal white emerging from what Pierre called the divas’ dungeon, and slipping down the side aisle towards the stage.

No one, not even Gustav, is looking at me now. I can’t do anything except go on taking photographs. The tables are being turned. I’m being forced to watch him cavorting with someone else. And despite fantasising about it, I don’t think I like it when it’s happening right in front of me. Or maybe I just don’t like being left out.

Pierre catches my eye from up on the stage. He’s been left out, too. We stare at each other a long time, the two of us isolated by dancers whirling like planets around us. Then the lights are all extinguished so that the theatre is buried in a thick blanket of blackness and silence. A slow, thick, heartbeat rhythm is tapped out on a single drum, actually the wooden flank of a guitar, and then the strings hum into a low, sensual Argentine tango.

The blackness is pierced by pin-sharp bright spotlights beaming on supposedly random markers on the stage. I can’t see Gustav anywhere. He might be one of the couples who are now stalking, elbows out, heads averted, in stiff tango holds in and out of the beams of light. Or he might have been dragged backstage by that randy showgirl.

I stand up anxiously, kicking my chair back with a loud clatter. A pair of glittering black Levi eyes is staring at me, but it’s Pierre. Still up on stage, still in costume. He takes a step towards me, and then a long white arm in a white satin opera glove reaches out of the shadows and grabs him.

The new dancer moves into the spotlight with Pierre, takes his jaw in her gloved fingers and turns him to face her. She is wearing the same costume as the others, low-cut whalebone, floaty tulle, ribbons and hooks, the whole designed to look as if it would fall off with one tug, but although there are slashes of cerise in the silk similar to my costume, hers is predominantly white. As is her face, which is so thickly painted and mask-like it’s as if they’ve used lead to obliterate her features like Queen Elizabeth I.

To render her even more otherworldly a white lace mask casts delicate shadows, swirls and flowers over her features, making her skin almost lizard-like. Beneath it her eyelids and brows are painted black, the eye-liner sweeping out to the edges.

Through the lace her cheekbones are high and sharp, the mouth coloured bright pink. She has an hourglass figure, tiny pricked ears and raven-black hair falling in tendrils beneath a ripped bridal veil peppered with tiny white flowers.

Who is she? She’s horribly familiar, but maybe that’s because I caught a glimpse of her just now coming up from the basement. Is she the one whom Pierre has picked to pleasure him tonight?

I continue focusing on the dimly lit stage. A single violin picks up the tango and her eyes suddenly lock onto mine just before the spotlight above her and Pierre snaps out. And just as suddenly I am grabbed from behind, lifted off my feet and bent backwards in a low lunge. A strong pair of arms stops me from falling as a long, slow kiss takes possession of my mouth, a warm wet tongue pushing open my lips.

A few soft pinkish lights come on in the ceiling, lighting the auditorium slightly, and I squeal with delight that Gustav has reclaimed me. I suck at his tongue, desire mixed with relief surging through me, all stoked by the music and the darkness, and the figures flickering up on the stage. I don’t want him catching sight of the woman dancing with Pierre, because there’s no getting away from the unpleasant fact that she looks very much like the sketches and paintings I saw stuck all over the walls of the master bedroom in the chalet in Lugano – of Margot.

But just as I respond to Gustav, parting my lips for him, showing him I want him, and try to waltz him towards the exit, the pocket of his nineteenth-century frock-coat buzzes against my breast, glowing incongruously. He plants me on my feet to take the call.

‘Don’t go without me! Let me fetch my clothes from up there and pack up my cameras!’ I yell into his ear, clinging onto his lapels.

‘You are halfway through a commission, Serena. Much as I’d love to get my hands on you, it’s impossible!’ He jabs his finger at the phone to cut it off. ‘I have to go. Stay here, finish the shoot and have that drink with Pierre.’

He unhooks me, kisses me again, then lifting his phone in farewell he backs across the room and out into the lobby.

I can’t get my stuff from the wings because the show is drawing to a close. The woman and Pierre are still circling each other in the sensual moves of the dance of love. He is totally mesmerised. Their bodies dip in and out of the single spotlight, the other dancers reduced to prancing silhouettes in the shadows. I lift my camera, but instead of taking more shots I zoom in on the couple to get a better look. In the intermittent light it takes a while, the focus blurring then sharpening then blurring again, like eyes waking from a drugged sleep.

The small film crew on the other side of the auditorium barely glance at the engrossed couple on stage as they study their lighting and sound boards, but one of the cameramen, thinking I’m photographing him, lifts his camera to his shoulder to take a tit-for-tat shot of me.

Now Pierre and his partner are clear in my viewfinder. The woman’s costume is deliberately bridal, I see that now, though ripped and ragged in the manner of Miss Havisham. The little flowers in her veil, threaded in her hair, are tiny and white, and the name comes to me. Edelweiss. The same Alpine flower that Margot held in her wedding bouquet in the most painful picture of all that I saw in Gustav’s chalet.

Pierre looks lost as he and the woman turn sinuously in slow motion, their bodies locked together, her leg up round his hip. I lower the camera. I don’t want to see any more. I shouldn’t be here, because I’m certain now that she must be Pierre’s new woman. I’m standing here looking at the cause of Polly’s heartbreak.

I have to get out of here. The spectacle may declare itself as a show within a show, performers merging with punters, reality blurred.

But this is all too real to me.

To my relief more lights come on. The conductor makes a cutting motion and the music stutters to an unexpected finale. Everyone stops dancing, becoming mortal again as they turn to listen to directions.

The black-haired woman presses her palm on Pierre’s chest to push him away. And as she spins into the shadows at the back of the stage I see that although she has the lithe, immortal body of a youthful goddess, her hand has the spindly fingers of an older woman.

It’s nearly dark outside, and a freezing sleet is falling over Gramercy Square.

I’m late for my drink with Pierre but after the shock of seeing him up on stage earlier with someone so spookily resembling Margot, and the anxiety that Gustav might catch sight of her before leaving so rapidly, I’m actually glad of the delay. The crazy half-hour I’ve just spent, when I was pleasurably waylaid by two of the randy dancers, has helped take my mind off the whirl of the burlesque show, and I now have some extra footage in my camera as well as a guilty conscience.