Surrender to Mr. X (10 page)

But a lad of sixteen with a family connection vouched for by Max, offering his mother's ring in payment is a different matter, and one should not prejudge individuals, certainly not on grounds of race. Max said he'd had a word with management and they were okay with my being at lunch in the main restaurant, even though I was staff. They, too, were rather nervous at having the young man in the suite on his own: they could depend on me to sound him out and make sure he was the kind who would behave, and wouldn't ask his friends round for some noisy all-night party.

Max would get the ring to his friendly fence, and I'd get a quarter of its proper value, no doubt. Somewhere around £1500, he reckoned. He'd take a 20% cut: I'd get the rest. It is always safer if goods in lieu change hands, certainly than checks or credit cards: all transactions are so closely monitored these days, so barter comes into its own.

I keep emergency clothes in Max's office—vocational girls can find themselves in need of a quick change of appearance at short notice. I put on a prim little white
blouse and a pink suit: very fresh and young looking. I felt rather good. I had slept more than I had for years the night before, had had an excellent breakfast, and had mysterious adventures with Alden to look forward to. I don't think you could quite describe me as being “in love” but something was making my eyes glittery and my skin peachy. I thought the lad in 404 was rather lucky.

The table was booked for one o'clock. Max took me up to the boy's suite at half past twelve. He was tall, coltish, good-looking, pleasant, half-deferential, half-conceited—a typical product of those more expensive schools. He had big hands: the one wrapped round his champagne glass looked as if it might break it. He spoke in perfect English with the accent of the jet-setting classes: English upper class with an American drawl flecked with occasional slang from the black inner cities. He shook my hand formally, said he was grateful to meet me. He'd thought we should meet briefly before lunch so that if either of us changed our minds we could take leave of one another straight away. He was immensely courteous and condescending.

I said for my part that I thought he lived up to his name—Hasan—which means handsome. He asked me what Vanessa meant and I said “butterfly,” and he said he liked that; I was colorful and charming. So it seemed fairly certain that the afternoon would go as planned.

He confessed that he had not made love to a woman
before and that it was not in his culture to do so. He nevertheless did not wish to have to go back home a virgin and ignorant of the ways of the world. He did not want to have to be dependent on his father and the gossip of boys for knowledge. He had seen a few porn sites at school but they seemed to him crude and disagreeable, and they turned him off. He preferred to do things properly or not at all. He had seen the body of one of the house matrons at school: she would display herself naked before a window at night for the benefit of the boys, but she had been fired.

I thought if this was the pattern of the new Arab princeling, peace on earth might yet be achieved. He hesitatingly asked me if I could just quickly take my clothes off so he knew better who he was talking to over lunch, so I did. Not a strip tease—we were short of time, after all—but clinically, as if I were at the doctors. He studied me from back and front, and touched my breasts.

“I had not realized quite how different a woman is from a man,” he said. “In this country they try to be the same thing, but I don't think they will have much luck: it's not the will of God.”

His religion was right: he could understand the need to keep a woman well covered. The naked female body was quite definitely an incitement to lust. He delicately and reverently put a finger into my clit, just half an inch, and then withdrew it.

“Paradise is at the feet of the mother,” he said, and
asked me if I had children and when I said no, said he was glad because soon he would be dishonoring me, but sorry, because someone as beautiful as me should be busy reproducing from an early age. He then excused himself rather hastily and went into the bathroom for five minutes and I put my clothes on again.

He tripped over his adolescent feet on the way down, thus spoiling the illusion of total competence, but even then he just smiled benignly and said he was afraid his age made him clumsy. He hoped to grow out of it and had been assured that he would.

What did we talk about? We agreed to only have one course, the sooner to get back to 404. He had a posh version of fish and chips and mushy peas and I had a salad. I drank champagne: he, mindful of his religion, drank Sprite from a champagne flute. He moaned a little about this and that, as teenagers do, mostly about his parents. Once he got home tomorrow he would have to spend a lot of time sitting next to his mother while she tried to push nuts and sweetmeats between his lips. She wept if he objected. It was moral blackmail. He had essays to write; it wasn't as if they were all sitting under some date palm in the desert, and he wasn't a girl. He wished she would not do it. His father would try and take him to a whorehouse, but he thought that would be unspeakably vulgar. His father had three other wives, apparently, and I asked if this upset his mother but he shook his head firmly, and said no: his father was very respectful of women and
always careful to serve all three equally. We drank our black coffee quickly and left.

Picture the next scene. Young Hasan lies naked on the bed, his cock reaching almost to his navel. It is as big as it is clumsy, awkward as it is hopeful, coltish as his feet and hands. The bodies of adolescent youths are a strange mixture of soft and bony, protuberances and concavities. He has his hands clasped behind his head while he watches me strip, until I walk about the room with only my heels on.

“How your breasts bounce!” he says, amused. “How strange and uncomfortable it must be for women!” The cock twitched and jerked of its own accord. He looked at it as if it was some over-importunate stranger whose language he failed to understand. He tried to hold it down, and asked how a man could tell false boobs from real ones, so I explained it was a mixture of texture, appearance and likelihood. If a woman has a bean-pole body and very round big breasts they're not likely to be her own. Likewise if they are formulaically circular. If a woman wears flat heels her breasts will usually be her own. I had no time to elaborate because he unexpectedly leapt from the bed with the energy of a jack-in-the-box and bore me down beneath him, pushing my thighs apart. He entered me at once, thrust thrice and immediately groaned in orgasm.

“That was too quick,” he said, blushing apologetically. I had to agree. I told him it took practice and in a little while we would try again. He lay on his back on the
bed and I gave him a lesson in theory. I explained that there was a thing called foreplay which made women receptive. I explained a man could ignore it but to do so limited his own long-term pleasure. The woman would put up with him, no doubt, but it was always better to have her full-hearted enjoyment. By and large where the cock went the finger should go before. I explained about the alleged difference between the vaginal and the clitoral orgasm. His hand moved into my cunt, and he found the clitoris and made me squeal involuntarily. Some women's are more hidden than others, I said, but it's always there somewhere. His cock was already swelling again. Another minute and he was in me again, and I was breathless and pounded: he realized he had to support himself on his elbows and took the weight off me.

That lasted a full five minutes. Then it was back to instruction, “I bet your teachers like you at school,” I said. “You listen, and learn.” He said his favorite subject was physics. He would like to be a nuclear scientist, but he needed extra tuition with the math.

If he was looking for holes, I went on, he must go very gently until he got the angle right. Bottoms needed lubricating. Rough sex, domination, was fine by consent but must be worked up to gradually; although sudden changes of mood and attack could be welcome. Breasts must be treated equally: if the left was nibbled then the right should be equally so, otherwise it made women feel oddly uneasy. Condoms? A requirement, especially
in gay circles or the black community. He said in Saudi you didn't run into that too often. I said actually if you stuck to heterosexual, well-heeled partners, as I did, then you could proceed pretty much as women had in the old days, worrying about pregnancy rather than disease: relying on coitus interruptus to get by. I referred to the “please cum all over my face” phenomenum in the porn films, a play-safe device which did instead of condoms.

By now his cock was standing impudently up again, and he turned me over, and entered me from behind as I crouched. I explained that you didn't have to do it in the same position till you'd finished, but could swap and change, so he took the point at once: now I was on my back with my legs over my head, but that excited him so much his timing went haywire again: at six minutes, though, it was still an improvement.

I explained about the necessity of lubrication for anal sex, the idea of which had at first rather appalled him. I had neglected to bring any but he found the free organic hand cream from the hotel bathroom which I didn't reckon would do me much harm. But I said first there really had to be some foreplay: he couldn't think only about himself forever: we had to now go into the whole business of oral sex. He seemed rather surprised to find this so high on the sexual menu but I demonstrated the art of the blow job, which is patient attention to the man's pleasure but not necessarily always your own. He came in my mouth, neck stretched
to heaven in marvel. I swallowed. I said not all women would do that but personally I thought a dose of young male testosterone did me good. He recovered from sudden shyness to lick into my cunt, blowing and fingering. And the next time we went on for twenty minutes; properly, foreplay to oral sex to full sex to anal sex. I tried not to cry out too loud, because 406 was occupied: the walls at the Olivier are not all that thick.

He asked me how he could tell when a woman was faking, and I said if he was wondering she probably was faking, but it was rude to inquire. Some women got very spiteful and bad-tempered if a man had an orgasm while she did not: but this was a very frequent occurrence and most women would fake out of consideration to the man, or if she had other things to do and wanted to get it over with.

One more time, or was it two? We had a little siesta side by side, then some more. He was inexhaustible. The thing rose and collapsed and rose again as if he was making up for years of lost time which I supposed he was.

“Nine times,” he said, happily. “Is that good?”

“That's very good,” I assured him. “And like riding a bicycle; once learned you never lose the knack.”

Concerned that I was tired, and thanking me for my instruction, which he generously said would stand him in good stead for the rest of his life, he told me it was time to bring the session to an end. He was courteous
but firm. He had a flight to catch at eight o'clock; he supposed I couldn't help him with his packing? I said, actually no to that, and had a bath in 511 which was empty, checked in with Max to touch base, then went home to recover. I washed my hair, and put it in curlers.

I felt quite noble and content: my day had been well spent. I had made a worthwhile contribution to the well-being of society. I was like Joan, I thought, “wanting to make a difference.” It is gratifying, anyway, when one is good at something, to pass one's knowledge on.

I put on a CD of Mozart's K421 quartet in D minor and I waited for Loki to arrive. The delicate music sounded like dance and conversation in shifts, sometimes both at once and seemed to grow naturally out of the stillness of the evening.

S
EVEN TWENTY, AND THE
bell went and there was Loki once again. No, there was no cancelation. I said in that case Mr. X. would have to wait for me to change. I was not going to all that trouble again only to be told the date was off. Loki seemed rather nervous and said Mr. Lam, the pale, scary one, had told him I was not to be late. So I admit I hurried and didn't change my mind about anything other than the Jacobs handbag which I decanted into my cheap but cheerful silver Fiorelli—and then had to decant back again when I changed my mind. I asked Loki if he thought it was nice when I finally made it downstairs, and out of the door, and he said, “I expect he will like it, but shall we go now?” and smiled with all his white, perfect teeth: meaning to reassure me, but clearly nervous. We raced through the streets, so far as anyone can race through London at seven in the evening. I tried to find out more about Loki's background with deliberately casual questions, but Loki would not be drawn further; he was of course
having to concentrate on the traffic.

I also brought along the big yellow Selfridges bag into which, yesterday, I'd stuffed all sorts of odds and ends: shoes, furs, velvet skirts, chokers, earrings, a selection of thirties flapper gear: I'd nearly added a white embroidered Victorian nightie, in lawn, but it took up too much room. Everything else squashed down into almost nothing.

Lam let me in.

“You late,” he said.

“Oh, the traffic!” I said. “Where does it all come from?”

There was no sign of Alden. Lam went through my bags, checking each item against the receipt and adding up the total. He was grudging in his satisfaction. He didn't exactly smile but his wide thin mouth turned up slightly at the edges and his eyes looked less alarmingly suspicious than they had yesterday—well, a bit. He was wearing a white polo neck sweater again, which made his head look too big for his body. He was a bit of a cross, I decided, between the
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
aliens and Gollom in
Lord of the Rings
.

I didn't sit down because it's easier to stand in five-inch heels. The leverage on them as you get up from a chair can be extreme, and they seem about to snap if you don't get the angle right. Alden glided in, looking particularly cheerful and positive: almost serene.