It was no good. Pulling out of her, he rolled onto his side and tried to hold her close, but it was like hugging an ice cube. Her whole body was locked rigid with anger.
‘I’m sorry, honey. It’s not you. It’s …’
‘Work. I know,’ said Chrissie contemptuously. ‘Until the damn movie’s finished, I should put up, shut up and forget about us having a sex life, right?’
This was hardly fair. It was eight o’clock in the morning and, although Dorian’s morning glory had admittedly turned out to be less than glorious, he
had
made love to her last night, as well as the night before.
‘You know, I think Princess Diana was lucky having three people in her marriage,’ added Chrissie caustically. ‘I only have one person in mine: me. I feel lonelier now than I did when you were in England.’
‘Honeeeey,’ Dorian remonstrated. ‘Come on, that’s not true. You know how happy I am to be home with you and Saskia.’
But even as he said the words, they felt wrong and contrived on his tongue. In fact, the overwhelming feeling Dorian had been aware of since he got back to the Schloss was nervousness. Quite apart from his work worries and bumpy re-entry into the marital atmosphere, inevitable perhaps after such a long stint on location, he was expected to become a father again overnight. Distressingly, he realized he had no idea what to do.
Yesterday, he’d taken Saskia to the local park on his own, after Chrissie insisted she needed ‘a break’ – oddly, given that Rula the nanny had worked the last four straight days since Dorian got back, with Saskia practically glued to her ample hip at all times.
‘It’ll do you good anyway,’ Chrissie had added, reapplying her lipstick as she ran out through the door. ‘You need to bond with Saskia again.’
How he hated that word,
bond.
For some reason it always made him think of the Airfix model aeroplanes he used to build as kid.
Bond the propeller to the wing ….
If only parenthood came with a similar set of easy-to-follow instructions.
But to Dorian’s surprise, the playground expedition had actually been fun. Saskia had matured so much in the last two months, in her language, her expressions, her play; it was a delight to watch her. Dorian had enjoyed it thoroughly; right up to the part where an older child had pointed at him and asked Saskia if he was her daddy, and she’d looked pensive and said, ‘Sometimes.’ That was a long, cold glass of guilt in the face, and all the more hurtful because he knew he deserved it. He’d like to have confided his feelings to Chrissie, but he knew if he did she’d turn the incident against him and he’d never hear the end of it. Unbidden and unwanted, Sabrina’s words in the kitchen at Loxley came back to him: ‘
Your wife’s so resentful she wouldn’t piss on you if you were on fire
.’
Was she right?
Lying stiffly in Dorian’s arms now, twitching with frustration, what Chrissie actually felt was a maelstrom of conflicting emotions. What Dorian read as anger, at him for not keeping it up, Chrissie experienced as acute anxiety: she was losing her looks, her sex appeal, her
raison d’être
.
He doesn’t want me any more. I don’t excite him.
If she no longer did it for Dorian, her adoring lapdog of a husband, who else was going to look twice at her?
Certainly not Viorel Hudson.
Chrissie had spent the week before Dorian’s return (which conveniently coincided with Viorel’s arrival) in a flat-spin panic about her looks – she was terrified of appearing old and raddled next to Sabrina Leon, but knew Dorian would hit the roof if she flew her dermatologist over from LA. So she had had her Botox touched up by some local quack in Bucharest and was convinced he’d made her look like Meg Ryan. When the film crew finally showed up, it was all a bit of an anti-climax. While Sabrina glided about the Schloss looking predictably perfect as she bemoaned her separation from her newly acquired, aristocratic fiancé to anyone who would listen, Viorel flew in from LA looking drawn, and immediately withdrew to his room. He’d spent the days since in a flat, humourless mood; not aggressive, as Dorian complained he had been in England, but gloomy and sullen. Gone was the flirtatious, devil-may-care rake who’d so entranced Chrissie a few weeks ago. Gone also was the spark that she had felt between the two of them the whole time she had been at Loxley. This Viorel was polite, distant, professional and painfully uninterested, at least in her.
Chrissie challenged him about it on the second day. Running into him in the Schloss’s magnificent library, where he was admiring the mind-boggling array of first editions and original folios, she’d slipped an arm coquettishly around his waist. Viorel withdrew as if he’d been stung.
Chrissie pouted. ‘I don’t bite, you know. At least, not unless you ask me to.’
But Viorel hadn’t asked her to. Instead, he’d had the gall to apologize, feeding her some line about Dorian and feeling guilty for what had happened between them at Loxley. ‘It’s not that I’m not tempted,’ he said smoothly. ‘But it mustn’t happen again.’
Chrissie tried to believe him, but the blow to her ego was severe. As always when rejected by one of her lovers, her knee-jerk reaction was to turn to Dorian for reassurance – but now he, too, seemed to be confirming her suspicions:
I’m old and dried up. I’ve been in this place so long I’ve desiccated, like a Christmas orange stuck under the sofa.
The high she’d felt in LA, with Harry Greene and the world’s press paying her so much attention, felt light years ago now.
Part of her wanted to stop chasing it, that elusive bright light, to be content in her marriage to Dorian and make it work. After all, they had been happy once, in the early days. And despite this morning’s lacklustre performance, she was sure he still loved her. But Chrissie couldn’t be expected to make all the effort. Dorian would have to try too. He’d only been home a week, and already his good resolutions about leaving the set on time every day and prioritizing family life were fraying severely at the edges. Last night, he hadn’t emerged from his editing suite until almost ten o’clock. Angry at being neglected, Chrissie had squeezed herself into a sexy red Hervé Léger minidress and heels, secretly hoping that if she caught Viorel’s eye it might reignite their flirtation over pre-dinner drinks. But, after forty-five minutes alone in the Grand Ballroom, one of the butlers told her that Viorel, Sabrina and the rest of the cast had all gone into Bihor to eat. Of course, nobody had thought to include
her
in the invitation. Sitting alone at the kitchen table, again, eating leftover chicken wings and salad for one, it was hard not to feel resentful.
Dorian’s hands were around her waist, caressing the smooth hollow of skin between her belly and her hipbone. She softened, turning around and kissing him on the lips.
‘How about I cook for us tonight?’ she said, her voice low and sultry. ‘I could do my special-recipe lasagna. We haven’t had that in years.’
‘That would be great.’ Dorian tried not to sound as surprised as he felt. Since their first year of marriage, he could count the times Chrissie had turned on an oven on the fingers of one hand.
‘I want it to be just us, though. Tell everyone we need some private time. I’ll have Rula put Saskia to bed. What do you think?’
Dorian was touched. He knew he’d been neglecting Chrissie and that things weren’t right between them. He wanted to bridge the growing gulf more than anything. ‘I think it’s a terrific idea,’ he said, pulling her closer so that her firm, apple breasts pressed against his chest. ‘Things are gonna get better, Chrissie. I promise.’
By four o’clock that afternoon, Dorian was slowly losing the will to live.
It was the first day of shooting Cathy and Heathcliff’s pivotal love scene. This was the moment when, after Cathy’s death, Heathcliff begged her spirit to remain on earth – she might take whatever form she would, she might haunt him, drive him mad – just as long as she did not leave him alone. For Dorian it was the most moving scene in the book, the crux of Catherine and Heathcliff’s tortured love affair. It had to be pitch perfect.
The day began badly. The temperature on set was unbearable, literally and metaphorically. The late Transylvanian summer was punishingly hot, almost a hundred degrees at noon and with the sort of humidity that drained the body of energy like a vampire sucking blood. Today’s scene was being shot in one of the old bell-tower bedrooms, a stunningly romantic backdrop, but one whose only ventilation consisted of a small, stone mullion window. As this was also the only source of natural light, blazing halogen lamps had been strapped to the ceiling, increasing the heat levels in the room threefold. Dorian, like the lighting and sound guys and two cameramen, was working topless and barefoot in a pair of simple cotton shorts. But Viorel and Sabrina had no such luxury. Sweating like a horse after the Grand National in his dark wool trousers and ruffled shirt, Viorel’s face was an oil-slick of smudged make-up. Sabrina, in full corset and crinoline, was even more overheated, although this didn’t seem to stop her from expending what little energy she had left on provoking Viorel rather than focusing on the scene.
At one point she asked for a minute in which to ‘find her centre’.
‘I’m sorry,’ she announced, looking directly at Vio, ‘but I really can’t project arousal unless I’m thinking about Jago. I need to get into the right head-space.’
‘For fuck’s sake,’ muttered Vio, pulling at his sweat-drenched shirt.
They’d done the scene again and again. But the only two emotions Dorian was catching on camera were hostility and heat exhaustion.
‘Cut!’ he shouted, for the third time in as many minutes. ‘What is this, amateur fucking dramatics night?’
Sabrina pouted petulantly and lit a cigarette out of the window. Vio merely stuck his hands in his pockets and scowled.
‘Grow up, both of you,’ snapped Dorian. ‘I’ve seen more of an erotic charge between the three little bears at Saskia’s nursery-school pantomime.’
‘Maybe the three bears had air-conditioning,’ grumbled Sabrina.
‘Yeah. Or maybe they brought their “centre” with them and didn’t need constant validation about their utterly uninteresting sex lives,’ snapped Vio.
Debbie Raynham giggled and he winked at her.
‘I don’t need
validation
,’ said Sabrina furiously, catching the wink. If there was one thing she couldn’t stand it was being the butt of other people’s jokes. ‘Maybe if you played your goddamn part, I’d be able to play mine. Heathcliff’s supposed to be smouldering with desire and distraught with insatiable need. He’s grief-stricken. He wants to fuck Cathy’s ghost, OK, so we can assume he’s got it pretty fucking bad. But all I see is a whiny little boy in a gay shirt getting pissy because he hasn’t gotten laid in the last five minutes.’
‘ENOUGH!’ Dorian’s voice boomed around the room, echoing off the stone walls like a ricocheting gunshot. ‘Enough. Both of you take fifteen minutes, get some water, cool down. We roll again at five. And if necessary at six, seven, eight, two in the fucking morning. We roll until I see some passion.’
Chrissie poured the dregs of the béchamel sauce over the squares of fresh pasta, dipping her finger into the empty saucepan and licking it.
Delicious.
There was something intrinsically erotic about cooking, she decided. The enticing smells and textures; the primitive feel of a waxy onion against one’s palms; the warm, creamy comfort of the sauces, rich and forbidden. She laughed at herself.
I’ve got sex on the brain
, she thought, pre-heating the oven and wiping her hands against the cook’s apron.
The kitchen at the Schloss was a vast room built to prepare meals for a village, not for rustling up a romantic supper for two. In addition to the twenty-foot oak table running down the centre of the flagstone floor, there were numerous sideboards, two six-door cast-iron ovens that looked as though they belonged in a factory, and a ceiling punctuated with sinister four-inch metal hooks, designed presumably for hanging meat, but which would have been equally appropriate props for a bondage movie. But, despite the room’s size and raw, functional décor, or perhaps because of it, it made the perfect setting for the night of seduction that Chrissie had planned. It was still light outside at the moment, but when the sun set and she lit the candles she’d scattered along the deep window ledges, the soft orange glow would transform the space, giving it a mellow, almost ecclesiastical feel. She and Dorian would eat, and laugh, and drink too much of the Châteauneuf-du-Pape ’59 she’d brought up from the cellar. Then she would lie back on the table while he made love to her, too excited to wait until they got upstairs.
I’m getting carried away.
Tearing off a few bay leaves from the sprig on the sideboard, she began chopping them up for a garnish. It was so long since she’d even had to boil an egg for herself, Chrissie was gratified to discover her culinary skills had not deserted her. Particularly since moving to Romania, where labour was so cheap and a large estate like the Rasmirezes’ was expected to provide ample local employment, she’d lost touch almost entirely with the everyday tasks of normal life, and had forgotten how enjoyable they could be. Her lasagna was a thing of beauty, if she did say so herself, with or without the bay leaves.
Carefully pushing the dish forwards into the dark centre of the oven, she set the timer and closed the door with a satisfying thud. If the way to a man’s heart was through his stomach, she and Dorian should be in hearts-and-flowers-ville in forty minutes exactly. But just in case it wasn’t, Chrissie had double-bagged the situation this morning by unearthing a cheap, horrendously slutty French maid’s outfit in a box at the back of one of her dressing rooms.
How incredible that I kept it!
She remembered buying it donkey’s years ago at a costume store in Westwood for Halloween. She used to wear it occasionally in her UCLA days, whenever she wanted to drive Dorian even wilder with desire than usual. If they were going to do a trip down memory lane, they might as well take the scenic route. Slipping it on, she was delighted to discover that it not only still fitted, but made her legs look endless and pushed up her small breasts till they could have passed for a C-cup.
I’m in better shape now than I was in my twenties
, she thought smugly.
I can’t wait to see Dorian’s face when he sees me in it.