Katie In Love: full length erotic romance novel (21 page)

'Never heard of it,' he said, shaking his head, and I felt a need to explain.

'It's a philosophical study.'

'Like the title,' he remarked, and I realized he was likewise a student, probably a bright grammar school boy juggling time working his way through college.

Mother had planned the same agenda for me. Like politicians who have never seen war and blithely send others into battle, she believed work would widen my horizons and, in one respect, at least, she was right: my four weeks as an intern with Drew Butler had not been entirely wasted.

My father was home the first two weeks of September. He was delighted that I was going to his old college and chatted wistfully about his time at Cambridge, years that had shaped his life, although not entirely in the shape he had imagined. Mother had entered his circle like a brightly burning flame in a red dress and they walked down the aisle at the Norman church at St Nicholas in Kent before knowing anything about each other beyond their backgrounds and class, those qualities that had once mattered so much and matter less now that it is solely money that matters. Father only came to realise when they were alone on their ten day honeymoon in Venice that they seldom saw things the same way, but avoided confrontation and set about fine-tuning Mother's decisions, the shapeshifter behind the scenes in marriage as in his career.

One morning, while I was bronzing in the garden, he slipped a book on the edge of my sunbed.

'Lovely day,' he whispered, and continued along the path to the rose arbour.

The book was
The Glass Bead Game
by Hermann Hesse, a sky-blue cheque like a bookmark tucked between the pages.

'I'm so dying to read it,' I called, and he turned with a bow, his long fingers revolving in a swirl like Raleigh with Elizabeth I.

He was inspecting the carnage left by the gardener and became Charlie Chaplin as he hacked his way through the overhanging roses with an invisible umbrella. I laughed until tears ran down my cheeks and it brings a tear to my eye even now as I recall those rare times when my quiet courteous father let go and became himself. Daddy had been briefly in the Footlights, classics paved the road to the Foreign Office, but he had secretly dreamed of the BBC.

The waiter had returned to his place behind the bar where two other young men sat on high stools nursing bottles of lager. It was obvious by the way in which the waiter leaned forward to whisper replies in answer to their questions that they were talking about me. Their eyes kept flicking in my direction and I stared back over my shoulder until they looked away. That night I realized that a girl alone with a book is always an object of fascination.

According to Bataille, corporal punishment is intrinsic to erotica as a corruptor of established patterns. Being dressed is civilized. Stripping naked, especially where it is inappropriate to do so, is a direct challenge to civilisation. Ultimately, the purpose of eroticism is to break down traditional thinking and attitudes in preparation for living life free of rules.

I had been subjected to those patterns of traditional thinking at my strict school and it seemed odd to me that parents and educators are not aware that the firmer the discipline the greater the desire to transgress. Within weeks of leaving school, I was performing a striptease for a complete stranger. From Black Spires to Pink had been a tiny step. I had been funnelled into one pattern and was freewheeling relentlessly into another.

My food came. I asked for another glass of wine and some mayonnaise to which I mixed a splash of ketchup, the marriage a guilty secret for dunking hot salty chips. I ignored the two boys at the bar with their furtive glances. The hamburger dripped, and I can see myself sitting beneath the yellow light with a hole in my stockings in that wine bar ten years ago reading Georges Bataille.

'As often as not, it seems to be assumed that man has his being independently of his passions. I affirm, on the other hand, that we must never imagine existence except in terms of these passions.'

I read the sentence a second time. I wiped my fingers on the paper napkin, and my mind slipped back once more to those weeks in September when Daddy was home. Mother had her bridge and tennis. Matt had formed a band among the rowers they'd called Rowlocks, and was constantly locked in his room with an electric guitar he was hopelessly learning to play. It was immediately after I had danced for Roger Devlin, and it occurred to me that there had been an oedipal element to that sudden urge to shed my virginity with an older man, a metaphorical passion to break the incest taboo, as Georges Bataille would have it. Fast forward ten years and I see myself in the skin of Marie-France floating on the surface of a moonlit swimming pool with the eyes of Kamarovsky watching. As Hesse explores in
The Glass Bead Game
, there is an invisible thread that runs through all things we can't understand and call destiny.

My father never went anywhere without a book tucked in his pocket and it was moving the way he led me those weeks a decade ago through his library as if Hesse, Kundera,
Kazantzakis
and John le Carré were stepping stones leading to his secret world. He said reading releases you from the limits of yourself, and I came to see that my father had always limited himself in pursuit of some ideal he wasn't entirely sure of, that England, his England, had become, in his lifetime, a country he no longer knew.

When I had finished reading
The Glass Bead Game,
we discussed Magister Ludi's quest for the key to perfect knowledge, his awareness in his final hours that death comes before the key is in your hand, that if life has meaning it is found in simple things, in what's happening now, today, that it is the journey not the destination that's important, a maxim so well known it is easily forgotten.

Father then gave me the darker, more abstract
Steppenwolf
, which I devoured, and it was curious that he should introduce me to Hesse's self-doubting cast of characters as I was about to start university. He left me to fathom his intentions, and I began to see that it is not the amassing of knowledge that's difficult, it is dealing with doubt and uncertainty, the curse and goad of the writer, the artist, the fresher flushed from convent into the rosy delights of Cambridge.

I sipped my wine. I was young, naïve, oddly content and suddenly excited to be the maiden from the medieval dance with death, the symbolic sacrifice to my tutor's unheavenly desires. In primitive times, when crops failed, or a volcano erupted, our ancestors placated the gods with human sacrifice, a girl stepping from childhood and, logically, the prettiest in the tribe. As Mother had said, speaking of herself, I'm sure, beauty is a burden, as well as a gift. Beauty puts less desirable women on edge and torments men. The smiling pink lips of a cute girl suggest that unsullied part of her that men want most. The fact that only one man is going to seize the prize provides logic to her slaughter and, paradoxically, while man is born appreciating beauty, just below the surface he carries a predisposition, a gut feeling that beauty should be profaned, scarred, destroyed. There is no more conclusive way to obliterate beauty than in human sacrifice, as Joan of Arc discovered at the hands of the heathen English.

Georges Bataille infers that there is an innate gratification in falling from grace, that the supreme pleasure of love is illicit love, a feeling that you are doing wrong. Add existentialism to eroticism and what do you get? I wasn't sure. But it was something I imagine Oliver Masters understood.

16

The Messenger

I cupped my breasts beneath the quilt and listened to the bells in the tower chime the hours. I was tingling, electric, and my head throbbed from cheap white wine. I would learn one day that life is too short.

Pearls of pale light slid over the walls, oblong fragments shaped by the window. It was the start of my drift to insomnia, stealthy as a cat, it creeps up on you like an addiction. At midnight, I got up, opened my notebook and began to write without thinking about what it was I was writing. At school, words for me had been iron bars that imprisoned thought. Suddenly, it felt as if the pen in my hand was a key to a secret box.

Day was breaking when I turned on my computer. I transferred the notes into my essay
.
Over the coming days and weeks, I phrased and rephrased; cut and slashed. I thought of Georges Bataille as my lover. I was subservient to his tender dominance, his thoughts in my head like a plangent hymn I couldn't stop singing. In the bullring, the terrified bull always returns to the same spot as if it is a place of safety. It is called the querencia. In writing, I had found my querencia. My place, my passion.

My next tutorial wasn't until the middle of November and I felt crushed when it was cancelled. Professor Masters was in London recording a radio programme on how Flaubert had created the first misery-memoir with his novel
Madame Bovary
. The next time I made my way down the corridor to his rooms was two weeks later. He opened the door the moment I knocked. He was wearing a green corduroy suit and an open-necked white shirt, a raincoat thrown over his shoulder. He had an unscheduled meeting he had to attend and was obliged to cancel again. He took my essay, tossed the blue folder I had brought it in on the sofa, and I followed him back down the stairs.

'Bataille?' he said

'Amazing.'

'Amazing,' he repeated. 'Yes, I suppose he is. Of course, the book's a lot more profound in the original. I didn't know if your French was up to it.'

'It isn't,' I admitted.

'Just as well, then.' He paused. 'Home for the holidays?'

'Yes.'

'Jolly good. Try not to do anything too pagan.'

'I won't…'

'And read for fun, not…information.'

I wanted to say more, but I wasn't sure what and the moment passed. He gave a sort of shrugging smile, slid his arms into his raincoat and I watched him march off down Trinity Street. The clock chimed three times, the low and high notes in urgent progression. I had been listening to the bells all night without being able to place the melody and a chill ran up my spine as I recalled the variation from Schubert's
Death and the Maiden
, the title I had given to my essay. The striker chimed, the bells rang out and I was struck by a revelation: it wasn't me who had sat up that night writing my own
Death and the Maiden
, but something outside of me. I wasn't a fount of creative thought, merely a messenger.

Professor Masters had just turned towards Green Street and I set out to follow him. He had a long stride and his pace was so fast I had to run down Trinity to catch up. I slowed as I rounded the corner. I watched him cross into Sidney Street and vanish into the wan light of Hobson's Passage. I lost sight of him as he cut through the crowds. I looked left and right as I left the passage, and caught a glimpse of his broad back in his raincoat as he made his way towards Christ College. From there, he entered the backstreets of the old town and I shadowed him through the maze.

I wasn't totally surprised when he entered the same wine bar where I had sat that night reading Bataille. I waited for a few minutes to catch my breath. I took a woolly hat from my bag to hide my hair, wrapped my scarf to cover the lower half of my face and felt like my father's daughter as I ambled past the bar. My tutor was sitting in a window seat with his back to me facing a woman I instantly recognised.

Ruth Raphael had been at Trinity ten years before me. An expert on everything, she had been on the same radio show as Oliver Masters and her face was familiar from staring out of
The
Sunday Times
every week above her regular column about her brilliant life and other matters. In the photograph she has her hair pulled back and stares over half-moon glasses with that faintly raised-eye expression of people who know secrets. In the wine bar window, her wavy hair fell in dark curls to her shoulders and her brown eyes sparkled as she stared back across the table.

My breath misted through my scarf. I stood there for a long time and felt a stab of envy like a sharp knife which lasted through Christmas and was still smarting when I arrived back at college in January.

Two days after I had settled back, I received an email – Please call me. OM. I did so, on my new BlackBerry.

'I am so pleased you're back. We have to discuss Bataille. When are you free?'

It was rather a silly question, as I was free all the time. 'Whenever it's suitable,' I replied.

'Tonight,' he said. 'Meet me at the Great Gate, seven-thirty sharp. There's a little French place along the river. We can talk over dinner.'

'Dinner?'

'You do eat?'

'Yes, yes, of course, I…'

'Seven-thirty, then. Oh, yes, you can return Bataille if you're finished with him.'

'Yes, wait. What shall I wear?'

He laughed. 'My dear, you must be beau, chic, elegant. Always.'

He hung up and I sat in my room with a feeling that I had found something I didn't even know was lost. I felt breathless and light. One puff of wind and I would have floated away. I laid on my back staring at the map of Italy on the water-stained ceiling. I stretched out my arms and legs as if they were connected to elastic and I was being pulled in two directions. I took deep breaths until the little bird in my chest settled. Beau, chic, elegant. Like Ruth Raphael.

*

I am a Capricorn – organized, pessimistic, good at climbing walls. December had completed the 12-month cycle of the planets and I wasn't ready for the next one. I had enjoyed being eighteen. Eighteen straddles the threshold between being young and grown up. The figure 8 is aesthetic, infinity on its feet. I saw the 9 in nineteen on my birthday cards as a tadpole, a dark sperm carrying alien DNA, the word – nine – in tune with the grating sound Matt made grinding out broken chords on his new Fender.

Daddy was home for Christmas. Uncle Douglas was drinking the wine cellar dry with Mother, and Mother was so sparky and pleasant it occurred to me that of the two brothers she probably thought she had married the wrong one.

I should have been happy, but I wasn't. The Black Dwarf was in my brain and in my bed. I dreamed I was drowning and what flashed before my eyes wasn't all the things that I had done in my life but all the things that I had wanted to do and had not yet done. I put on a false face, a mask, and didn't go to Midnight Mass with the rest of the family.
Try not to do anything too pagan.

Christmas passed with presents and there was that dead time that takes you to New Year's Eve with its cracker of false promises. Douglas, a writer, famous in a small way, observant as a nun, caught me one morning coming down to breakfast as he was climbing the stairs.

'Ah, there you are. What have you been up to?'

'Just reading.'

'You can read with that racket going on?'

Matt was already practising. Douglas looked at his watch. It was about eleven o'clock.

'Come here a moment, I've got something for you.'

I followed him into his bedroom. He opened a drawer, removed a little wedge of £50 notes from his wallet and folded them into my dressing gown pocket.

'Go and buy something wicked, it'll cheer you up.'

'I can't take this,' I said. I held £300 in my hand to give back to him. 'You've already given me a present.'

'A bunch of books. What good are they?' He slipped the money back into my pocket and lowered his voice as if to relay a secret. 'When money goes it comes. When money stays death comes.'

'I like that.'

'It may even be original. I've got to the stage when I can't remember what I've written and what I've pinched.' He sighed. 'How's Cambridge, by the way?'

'Quite hard, actually. It's easier at school when they tell you what to do. Now, you have to decide everything for yourself.'

'That's the thing with decisions, you decide one thing and never know what might have happened if you'd tried something else. Now,' he said, 'go and do something frivolous.'

He gave me a hug and the Black Dwarf loosened his grip on my throat.

I was about to leave his room and stopped. 'Douglas, how did you decide to become a writer?' I asked, and he laughed.

'I didn't decide. I can't do anything else.'

'That's not true.'

'My dear, it is. Your father got the brains. Now, go on, and bloody cheer up.'

I waved the cash. 'Thank you.'

'A mere bagatelle.'

A smile slipped about my cheeks. I skipped breakfast. I showered, pulled on a pair of jeans, caught the 19 bus that Mother takes to Peter Jones and got off at Shaftesbury Avenue. I had no plans. But when you are not looking for anything you always find something you didn't know you needed.

My blue trainers with red laces led me down Old Compton Street and into the shop where I had made my first acquaintance with the mask. I descended the stairs to the basement and was drawn to the mannequin in the corner wearing a white lace uplift bra, tiny briefs tied at the sides with bows and white stockings with elastic tops and matching bows like garters. I tried the set on and my black mood lifted as I stared at myself in the mirror. There's nothing like white to clear away the black.

I went to Selfridge's in Oxford Street where I bought a sleeveless white dress that fitted snugly over my hips and buttoned up the front to a high collar threaded through with red ribbon to match the red buttons. I found a pair of red patent medium-heels and when I studied myself in the mirror at home I wondered when I would ever wear anything quite so chic, quite so elegant, quite so beautiful?

Oliver Masters obviously knew the answer to the question before I did. That day of our dinner I laid out the costume on my bed, the dress to one side, the underwear like a figure beside it. I went for a long walk and my feet felt as if they were barely touching the ground. The day was cold but I didn't feel cold. I felt numb. I watched a couple kissing under a bare tree. I read for pleasure in the afternoon and fell into a strange sleep over the pages.

There was no shower, which I missed. I took a bath, washed and blow-dried my hair and gazed at the clothes laid out on the bed, pure, white, according to Bataille, an invitation to be sullied. I dressed slowly, as if I were being watched. I smoothed the lace panties up my legs, snapped into the bra, the stockings with bows, the red shoes shiny as jewels. I paraded around the tiny space in the empty room with that wanton feeling you get when you are doing something illicit. It was the beginning of my romance with pretty underwear and dressing with the curtains open.

There wasn't a long mirror and I could only see sections of myself by standing back and twisting at odd angles. I leaned forward over the sink to paint my lips in a shade of red that complimented the ribbon in the dress. There was a look in my eyes I didn't recognize and I watched my reflection as I pushed the cap back on the lipstick. I cleaned my teeth, dried the toothbrush and dropped it in my bag where it took on the look of a cuckoo's egg in a blackbird's nest.

He was waiting at the Great Gate. We climbed into a black Jaguar with a wooden steering wheel. It had belonged to his father. I sunk into the leather seat, knees together, cherry red lips unsmiling. The girl in the mirror. Life has patterns. Each act is another pebble thrown in the pool and the ripples spread and join, grow and diminish. Everything is linked by cause and effect. You are what you think, and what you think, if you think about it long enough, becomes real.

The car revved and the gears grated. The lights picked out trees and signs and silhouettes. I would like to say that I felt like Marie-France when she rode through the country lanes beside Kamarovsky, but that would be a slip in time.

We arrived at an old farmhouse converted into a restaurant that stood on the edge of the river. I watched a shooting star cross the sky and explode into dust. It could just as easily have been Earth, I thought. Life is short and fragile. We sat in an alcove beside lattice windows like cracked mirrors. There were two red candles in silver holders on the table, a white linen cloth, silver condiments and cutlery.

I had been carrying
Eroticism
and gave it to him now.

'Bataille,' he said. 'A whole new world.'

'Yes.'

'We live in a lukewarm bath of complacency and tedium. There other realities we can reach for. Don't you agree?'

'Yes, I do.'

'Are you agreeing to be agreeable?'

'I am agreeing because I agree.'

'So wise for one so young. Then,' he said, 'perhaps you have an old soul.'