Katie In Love: full length erotic romance novel (20 page)

'Are they?'

His eyebrows went up. 'There is nothing that pleases me more than reddened cheeks,' he said and changed the subject, pointing at the book he had placed on the desk. 'Possessions possess, don't you agree?'

It felt as if I had swam across the Rubicon and was safely on shore again. 'Yes, I do.'

'Do you mean that? Or are you trying to please me?'

'No, I mean it.'

'I don't want you to please me if it is against your will.'

'I won't.'

'That has to be clear. Free Will Rules, OK?' he said oddly, and waited for me to respond.

'OK,' I repeated.

He took a grip on my upper arms and spoke with sudden passion. 'If the existentialists are right, that life is meaningless, and if we acknowledge that, we are better equipped to find pleasure in small things.' He looked at me beseechingly.

'Yes, I see that.'

He let go of my arms. 'I imagine at your school you went to chapel most days?'

'Every single day.'

'And you are a believer?'

I shook my head. 'No. Not really.'

'Intelligent people who claim to believe are either dissemblers, or have some sexual or psychological flaw they disguise behind a mask.' His expression changed. 'Our responsibility is to shed the shackles of our bourgeois inhibitions, live with authenticity and let go of attachments.'

He retrieved the book from the table and gave it to me.

'Thank you.'

'I must now admit to an inconsistency,' he confessed. 'This book is precious to me. It is a signed first edition that I rarely lend out. It is for your next assignment. Your Jean-Paul Sartre is neatly presented with adequate references, a case of care over content, and barely worth a D. Let's see if we can do better next time.'

'Yes, I will,' I replied, his use of the word 'we' buzzing in my ear.

'You will remember everything I have said today?'

'You can be sure of that, Professor Masters.'

'Oliver,' he said, and showed perfect, large white teeth in his smile.

He crossed the room and I followed, the book in one hand, my jacket in the other. He stopped at the door, turned the handle and stared at me with that look people have when they study themselves in the mirror wearing something new. As I made my way out, he tapped my bottom. It wasn't a smack or a slap, just a tap, entirely inappropriate, but I thought of it at that moment as a cerebral rather than physical gesture, a sign that he had invited me on to the high ground where we would both gaze upon the same broad intellectual horizons.

I had bought a black, narrow-lined notebook from Ryman's to jot down quotes and ideas separate from the notes I made for my course work. On the first page I had written: Knowing others is intelligence; knowing yourself is true wisdom. Mastering others is strength; mastering yourself is true power. If you realize that you have enough, you are truly rich.

The words are from the
Tao Te Ching,
a collection of aphorisms by the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu written 500 years BC, a work I had grown to admire. Asked by the Emperor how he should rule the kingdom, Lao Tzu tells him that he should rule the kingdom as he would cook a small fish. Lao Tzu was quick, canny, brusque and famously did not easily suffer fools. After meeting Lao Tzu for the first time, Confucius is supposed to have said: I would rather be thrown into a pit of vipers than spend thirty minutes in discourse with Lao Tzu.

I felt a bit like that after thirty minutes with Professor Masters, my guide through the first year philosophy module that was part of my degree. I had taken the course at the suggestion of Alicia Pym, an Old Basher who had gone up to Cambridge a year before me. 'Oliver Masters is just so…masterful,' she'd cooed. As the only girl from Saint Sebastian's at my college, I felt obliged to take her advice.

When I made my way back along the passage from his rooms that day, my head was spinning and I had a stabbing sensation in my right pupil, the sign of a coming migraine. I couldn't work out if my tutor's remarks were tiered in subtext, or if such implications were the product of my imagination. What with the heat, the peculiarity of sitting at his feet and those singular ink drawings, all that I had seen and all that he had said were spiralling through my brain like the pale smoke from the smouldering incense.

Rushing back to my room, I slipped on the frosty stones crossing Nevile's Court, cut my knee and tore a hole in my new tights.

'Bugger,' I said.

'Bless you,' came the unexpected response of a thin young cleric who passed at that moment and didn't pause to help me up. I wondered what sexual-psychological flaw was hidden behind the mask of his white collar and realised as the thought drifted through my head that I was already intoxicated by the influence of Oliver Masters.

A statue, of whom I had no idea, was peering down at me with the look of an ancient member of a gentlemen's club still riled that women were allowed in for lunch Sundays. I heard the clock in the medieval tower strike four times, it did it twice, first on a low note, then on a much higher one, a variation from a piece of classical music I knew but couldn't place.

In halls, I swallowed two Nurofen Plus and stared at my gaunt reflection in the mirror. My skin was grey and my cheek bones seemed to be breaking through the flesh.

In my honest opinion, a good spanking is exactly what you need.

I said the words aloud to myself.

Did he mean this in the literal sense, or was this some intellectual reference I didn't know or understand? He had called my essay 'twaddle,' then said: 'A moment's pain clears the mind of a lifetime of drivel and dross.'

Pain, yes, but in what sense?

He asked me. 'Do you believe in discipline?'

I do, I told him. But by that I meant the discipline required in study. I don't often agree with Mother's glib maxims, but that time when she discovered the maid had stacked up numerous bags of ironing
para mañana,
she told her, 'You don't get ahead by falling behind,' which I thought was both witty and true, not that Golo had any idea what she was talking about.

Ah, yes, si, gracias, Misses Boiled.

Professor Masters had declared that 'nothing pleases me more than reddened cheeks,' an image that may conjure up the gaudy makeup highlighting the cheeks of a dancer swirling her petticoats at the Folies Bergère, but I felt confident it was something quite different in his mind.

Or was it in my mind?

Not at all. I had thought of university as an extension of school. It wasn't like that. I was no longer a child sheltered behind convent walls, but a woman familiar with the ways of the world; at least to my own immature perceptions. Before that hot summer of 2003 turned into a golden autumn, I had been introduced to
Pink
by Bella and Tara. I had walked near naked across the club's pastel-lit dance floor in the mask that had found me in a little basement in Old Compton Street. I had entered dim nooks and niches with women likewise masked to discover, as Bella famously said, it's fun being a girl. I had felt liberated after that day at Black Spires and wasn't sure why I was so shocked to find my tutor setting the stage in much the same way as Roger Devlin when he asked me to remove my shoes and walk barefoot on the grass.

I turned the book Professor Masters had given me through my hands as if it were a religious relic.

'Eroticism,'
I said, and said it again.
'Eroticism.'

It was by Georges Bataille, the writer he had mentioned, the writer of whom I knew nothing and would end up knowing everything. His book was first published by Les Editions de Minuit in 1957. What I clutched in my damp palms was the first English translation by Mary Dalwood, published in 1962 by Calder and Boyars. I make a point of reading the copyrights and small print before reading a book and see it as a courtesy, like watching film credits before leaving the cinema and coming away knowing that the best boy was Bill
Sparky
Baker.

The book's single word title
Eroticism
immediately evoked everything louche and vulgar that I could think of, and I was relieved to discover as I skimmed the Introduction that it was not a raunchy novelette, but a history of erotica, taboo, mysticism and transgression through the ages, a study of human urges, passions and the impulses that, according to Bataille, exist in the night of our subconscious like creatures in darkness seeking the light.

He opens his study with this sentence: 'Eroticism, it may be said, is assenting to life up to the point of death.'

I found this baffling and enthralling. I drank a glass of water. My headache had dulled to a faint throb. I read the book from cover to cover without taking notes and was about to start reading it again when I realized I was hungry. My room with its high fluted ceiling and dormer window had turned inky with shadows. More than three hours had gone by and the Nurofen had turned to acid in my stomach.

The sky was black and clear, though starless, and my breath drifted from my lips in feathery coils. The walls of Trinity loomed up like Mount Doom from
The Lord of the Rings,
and I realized as I reached for the simile how it belonged to who I had been in my scarlet blazer sitting exams in the spring, not who I was and might become. My leg hurt from the fall, but the cold was an anaesthetic and I was wearing the same blue stockings, the hole in the knee buttoned by a bloody scab.

I was still learning my way around Cambridge and wandered the winding streets clutching my book like a simulacrum of every scholar who had walked those same streets across the vagaries of the last five hundred years. I was conscious, too, that I was a beneficiary of the college's current updates, a young woman bearing a copy of
Eroticism
after centuries of bent men nursing the Bible, including those, like Oliver Masters, whose intention was to subvert its contents – Bertrand Russell, Francis Bacon, Wittgenstein, they had all pressed the leather of their soles on those ancient cobbles.

The sign
Slice of Melon
over the entrance to a wine bar drew me into a warm expanse of green leather banquettes in raised booths and Madonna whispering about sex over hidden speakers. There were few customers and I found a seat in the corner below a yellow light bright enough for me to return to my book.

The waiter was young, good-looking, off-hand and had an accent from the north of England I was unable to place. In a moment of madness, I ordered a hamburger with bacon and blue cheese, a side of chips and a large white wine.

'How do you want the burger?'

'Five seconds after bloody,' I said.

'Haven't seen you in here before. You a fresher?'

'Yes,' I replied and he turned away.

'One more thing, a bottle of sparkling water, please,' I added, and he waved over his shoulder.

'Right you are.'

I ran once more through all the things my tutor had said and the same phrase kept coming back at me like an echo from the mirror: a good spanking is exactly what you need. What he was actually saying is: a good spanking is what I intend to give you, which was shocking, and all the more so that I wasn't more shocked. I was aware from reading Bataille, and perhaps that was the point of loaning me the book – the precious first edition – that I had been invited into an erotic, as much as a cerebral game, a surreal piece of theatre. On the stage he had constructed, in the scene he was setting, Professor Masters would play the role of the seer with cryptic knowledge, a contemporary Lao Tzu. I was cast as the desirable young woman, or 'privileged object of desire,' to use Bataille's phrase, the acolyte who had more to gain from conceding than resisting the inevitable course of the drama.

According to
Eroticism
, the pursuit of the erotic is to break down
all
barriers – to live so fully, even death loses its grip.

How do you do that, make that leap of faith? How fully is fully? Is sex erotic or passionate, and I wasn't even sure of the difference, the highest goal; the greatest attainment? A lot of girls at my school must have thought so. From the moment their breasts began to grow and their bottoms became rounder, they talked about little else. Like the rats and cats and orang-utans, is our prime motivation reproduction? Bataille says humans are uniquely graced with choice. Once you take reproduction out of the equation, what remains, he says, is bourgeois coupling doomed to ennui, or the uncovering of sexuality as if it were a Spanish onion with endless gossamer thin layers of piquant potential.

The way Oliver Masters had arranged his study with the
Kama Sutra
prints, the burning joss sticks and distinct lack of chairs had hauled me like a little mouse in the talons of an eagle away from my old world of uniforms and Holy Sisters and dropped me like carrion on the far edge of my imagination. He had in his suite of rooms set out to seduce me intellectually as foreplay to a physical offensive, which I now anticipated and would be prepared for when it came.

The sulky waiter returned with the wine and water. He glanced at my book.

'What are you reading?'

I showed him.