Katie In Love: full length erotic romance novel (19 page)

We bought candy floss, whirls of pink sugar on a stick, impossible to eat. Flags and bunting snapped at the air as we made our way towards the gate that would take us back to the Albert Bridge. We paused midway between the Ghost Train and the Tunnel of Love.

'One last ride?' he said.

'Which one?'

'You chose.'

I shook my head. 'I hate making decisions.'

'Is that true?'

'No, not at all,' I said, and he put his arms around me; he stroked my hair and I felt like one of his orphans gathered up.

'You love being contrary.'

'No I don't,' I replied and we both burst out laughing.

'Well, what's it to be?'

He released me and I looked around.

'Neither, I said. 'Come on.'

I led him towards the House of Mirrors. I paid and we snaked through the eerie light, two beautiful creatures from the masquerade, two grotesques from a drawing by William Blake,
tyger, tyger burning bright
. I was tall and short, fat and thin, joyful and sad. All the things that we are, and all the things we imagine we are, appear in the mirrors. I could see again that Andaluz night. I could see myself across the candlelit table with my tutor. I could see myself with Mr Devlin losing my virginity over and over again. The past emerges like the dead rising from their graves. The reflections reflect each other capturing movements and moments, and again I was reminded of
Nude Descending a Staircase,
the genius of it. The placement of each mirror in the maze was juxtaposed against the next, yet isolated, and I got the feeling that I was removed from time, that time wasn't continuous, but omnipresent, not a progression, but a ball of mirrors, that everything that ever was and everything that ever will be were connected by a cycle, by cause and effect.

Just as you have to squeal on the big dipper, you have to laugh in the House of Mirrors. We stood close together, our features elastic in the bowed and bent glass. I saw us as an old couple, withered and sparkly still. We moved on, turned a corner. We had long faces like the figure in Munch's
The Scream
and compressed faces like a half-eaten hamburger. Marie-France appeared and disappeared. I saw myself in Lizzie. And Bella. And Mother. And the Chinese girl in the photograph with Daddy in Singapore. The mask under the mask slips away and in the House of Mirrors the stranger you see is yourself.

15

Death and the Maiden

My tutor's rooms were at the end of a narrow passage lit solely by a leaded window with scratched dimpled glass. The passage led to the back of the building and ended at a wooden door slightly askew in it frame. I gave the door two taps. There was no reply. I knocked again, a little harder, and his voice rang out like Don Giovanni in Mozart's opera.

'Yes, yes. I'm not deaf?'

I turned the handle and entered Professor Masters' den for the first time. It was hot with a gas fire blazing and the winter light filigreed with the curls of blue smoke that rose from the incense burning in a teak holder. He was sitting in the centre of a black leather sofa stabbing the pages of the paper he was reading, a red marker pen gripped in his fingers like a scalpel.

'Just wait a moment,' he said, and waved me towards the alcove on the far side of his study.

Dons' rooms tend to be shabby with ancient dust ground into ancient desks, books ranged like mountains of impregnable knowledge on every surface and two centuries of pipe smoke staining the ceiling. By contrast, Oliver Masters had created from his cloistered space the incongruous feel of a Berber tent with oriental rugs, saffron walls hung with black and white images in miniature frames and no chairs, just beaded cushions marooned around the sofa. The incense smell of dead flowers made me feel giddy and, the longer I stood listening to the scratching sound of the red pen pressing against the paper, the more ill at ease I became.

There was a draught around the window. The garden outside was planted with palms and banana plants wrapped in polythene to protect them from the frost. They appeared in the thin light like a row of beggars below the leaden sky. Like the tropical flora, I was bundled up with just as much care in a grey cashmere v-neck over a blue silk blouse, a grey wool skirt too short for the season, blue tights, black leather boots and a ski-jacket to keep me warm. The weather was bitter, but it was hot in the room and my back grew damp.

'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 smiled 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 14
th
century,' he explained. 'Remarkable, no?'

'Yes, yes, remarkable.'

'You are not embarrassed, Katie?'

'No.'

'Your cheeks are red.'