The Girl Behind The Curtain (Hidden Women) (10 page)

Matthew was there waiting. He already had his trousers undone and was stroking the soft mouse of a penis I remembered from earlier in the summer.

‘He’ll start to wake up now you’re here,’ Matthew said as he guided my hand to his open flies. His willy jumped straight to attention.

This time he kissed me. It was absolutely swoonsome. I felt my insides turn to jelly as his hands sneaked to my breasts.

‘You’ve got lovely tits, Hazleton,’ he told me.

‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘You’ve got a lovely . . .’

‘Cock,’ he said. ‘Come on. Say it! I’ve been fantasising about you touching it since that night back in the summer. How does that feel? What’s it like to know that you’re helping a poor soldier get through the dull days of his service with the thought of your beautiful body?’

It felt very good indeed. As did Matthew’s fingers inside my bodice as he groped to find a nipple to squeeze.

No one had ever touched my breasts before. The feeling was sensational. My most private parts shivered, just as I’d read in a novel. I felt myself opening up, in a funny sort of way. I was ready to give Matthew everything. He only had to ask.

But then it all went horribly wrong.

Who should come into the shed but Bettina’s mother and Mr Rhys Blanchard, the local member of Parliament! Mrs Spencer was carrying a torch and shone it straight on my bottom, which was all but bare because Matthew had hoiked up my skirt. The horror on Mrs Spencer’s face was absolute. She started shouting right away. She called me all sorts of names and none of them were Christian.

Matthew did little to defend me, though he did ask his mother why she was in the outhouse in any case. Had she been intending to have a tryst of her own? That earned Matthew a horrible slap. How dare he suggest such a thing! Mrs Spencer said that she had asked Mr Rhys Blanchard to accompany her because she thought there might be an intruder. Mr Rhys Blanchard hurriedly agreed that was exactly why he was there. The last thing he wanted was for us to get the wrong idea about that. He was an upstanding member of the Conservative Party, after all.

Then Mrs Spencer grabbed me by the arm – unnecessarily hard – and marched me back into the house. She interrupted my parents in the middle of their once-a-year slow dance and told them what she thought she had seen.

‘Your daughter. Corrupting my son. In the outhouse.’

We didn’t celebrate midnight at all. Everyone was far too busy shouting. We left at three minutes past.

All day today, I could hear Mummy and Papa arguing over what’s to be done with me. The only thing they seemed to agree on is that Matthew and Bettina Spencer have always been a terrible influence and we must be kept apart. In the end, I got fed up listening and buried myself in my new book instead. But when the time came for us all to sit down for supper, it seemed they were ready to present a united front. And they were very much united against me! Papa glared at me across his mutton. He would not say a word. It was Mummy who told me that a decision had been made. They are sending me to finishing school. In Munich!

Munich! At least if it had been Switzerland, I should have known other girls there. But Munich! Nobody worth knowing goes to Germany.

‘That is exactly the point,’ said Papa. ‘It will do you good to spend less time with fast girls like that Bettina Spencer.’

They are going to talk to one Frau Kluge of the Munich School of Womanly Grace and Charm tomorrow. Please, God, I beg you, don’t let her have any places left this year. I can’t stand the thought of going to Germany. They eat nothing but sausages. I shall come home oinking like a pig and no doubt looking like one too from all the horrid potatoes. And I’ll be so far away from Bettina and everyone who makes life worth living. I can’t bear it! If they insist on sending me there, I will run away at the first possible chance I get.

Surrey,

Saturday 2nd January 1932

Dear Diary,

I am doomed. Frau Kluge said she would be delighted to have me. Papa has agreed to wire a year’s fees in the morning. Mummy has been doing much sobbing. It seems she was hoping, just as much as I, that Frau Kluge’s horrible school would be full. All the same, she will not stand up for me against Papa. She says that I have really cooked my goose this time and it is probably for the best that I am far away from Surrey until the gossip has died down.

How long will that take? The people of this village have nothing to do but gossip. They could keep the story of my disgrace in the outhouse going for months! The only possible way I will cease to be of interest any time soon is if Bettina should do something worse.

I have tried everything I can think of to persuade Papa to let me stay home. I even said that I was worried we might go to war against Germany again and I would be stuck on the wrong side of the Channel when the declaration was made. Papa snorted and told me not to be ridiculous. We are never going to have a war in Europe again, he said. Not after last time. We should all have learned a lesson from that. On the contrary, it would be a damn good thing if I learned to speak German properly so that I am prepared for the day when Europe becomes fully integrated and we work together as one big happy economic family.

In that case, I then asked him, how would he feel if I fell in love with a German man and never came home at all? Papa says that is fine with him, so long as the German in question is solvent and I make sure I get an engagement ring before I follow him into any outhouse. The beast!

And now Mummy has just poked her head round the bedroom door and told me to stop writing. Apparently, I have to be up early tomorrow morning to start packing. Papa’s secretary has arranged his diary so that he can take me to Munich himself on Monday.

Munich,

Thursday 7th January 1932

Charm school! What a horrible joke. If Frau Kluge knows the first thing about charm, then I am a monkey’s uncle. Papa has just left. I can’t believe he didn’t take one look at this dump and insist I go back home with him. This place is less a finishing school than a prison. It’s a horrible old building. Full of nasty brown furniture and horrible paintings of women who look like bulldogs. I am sharing an attic room with Miranda, a cross-eyed girl from Hampshire, who is here because she failed her final exams.

The food is too awful. I barely ate a thing at dinner tonight. The bread is almost black and the meat is so overcooked you can’t tell whether it’s pork or beef or the remains of the last girl who tried to escape. The only vegetable is cabbage. Cabbage, cabbage, cabbage. The smell of flatulence permeates every corner of this place.

It’s only going to get worse, I know it. Frau Kluge has given me a timetable that includes swimming every morning. When I asked her where the swimming pool is, she just laughed. We have to swim in the lake! In the lake! When it’s so cold that I am wearing a bobble hat in bed and I swear my bedtime cup of cocoa was iced over before I could drink it!

I cannot possibly stick it out here. I will die if they really make me swim in a pond. I’ll have to pray that when he gets home to Surrey and thinks about it properly, Papa will turn round and come straight back to rescue me. Mummy will not hear of me living in such terrible conditions. She wouldn’t let me go out without crampons in snow like they have here, let alone expect me to jog across the lawn in bare feet. I have already written to tell her just how terrible it is. Please God, let her insist that Papa fetches me home at once.

Munich,

Saturday 16th January 1932

Dear Diary,

Today we put on our snowshoes and trekked into town for an evening of ‘musical entertainment’. All wind instruments, of course. Papa makes more entertaining music after he’s eaten baked beans. But there was some dancing, which is good. All rather exciting. A little bit hectic. More like Scottish reeling than the sort of stuff they’re doing in the dance halls in London these days. But I ended the evening in the arms of a fellow called Cord Von Cord, who is Frau Kluge’s nephew.

He is so handsome! All the girls were swooning with desire for him but he chose to dance with me from the start. He told me as we danced that I was quite the most beautiful English woman he had ever seen and I gave the lie to the perception that English women are all whey-faced with big backsides and ankles like the horses we send down the mines. I know, Diary. He’s not exactly a charmer, but I think it’s just that we’re communicating in different languages. When we are communicating through the language of dance, he has no trouble making himself understood at all.

How could I ever have been interested in Bettina’s oafish brother Matthew? What a lucky break I had when Bettina’s mother found us in the outhouse. Not only did she save me from throwing my virginity away on someone who definitely wouldn’t have deserved it, I wound up in just enough disgrace to be sent here to meet someone truly special.

I have written to Mummy and told her that she is not to worry about me after all. In just three days I have become quite accustomed to the cold and my room-mate Miranda is wonderful company. Her snoring hardly bothers me at all. No, I will be quite happy to spend the rest of the year here. Munich has become almost like home.

Chapter 12

Venice, last September

One more try. Give it one more try.
Marco heard the words as he woke from another deep slumber. He wasn’t sure where they were coming from. Were they inside his head or had Silvio said them? Silvio was in the room, pulling back the curtains. Marco’s early-morning cup of coffee was on the bedside table.

Marco sat up abruptly. He didn’t like to be in bed when Silvio started work in the morning. It was especially embarrassing to be caught asleep when he knew his most loyal employee would have been up for hours already. Having opened the window, Silvio turned towards him and nodded as he always did: a greeting that felt intimate but not intrusive. Marco struggled to sit up against the pure white pillows. He felt so jaded. He wasn’t sure why.

Silvio left the room, leaving Marco to prepare himself for the day ahead. But what was there to get up for? Marco continued to sit in bed, looking at the patterns on the wall made by sunlight streaming in through the windows. The ever-moving light of Venice, bounced in a thousand different directions by the water that weaved its way through the city’s veins.

Marco had dreamed about Sarah again.

She had been in this room with him. In this bed. In his mind’s eye, he could still see her on the pillow beside him. Her long brown hair made a beautiful contrast with the white sheets, which had slipped to her waist, leaving her perfect back exposed. Marco coveted her body. He made an inventory of every corner, every curve. He stared at the pink petals of her lips. He even envied her eyelashes for touching her cheeks as she slept.

He felt unworthy of her and yet he could not keep from touching her with his sinner’s hands. As she dreamed, he ran a finger along her long, lean lines. When she didn’t stir, he dared to kiss her pale shoulder. The scent of her skin was such an aphrodisiac to him. It made him hungry for her. Greedy.

Slowly, she stirred. She opened her grey-blue eyes, blue like a pair of old Levis, and looked at him. A smile spread over her face. She reached up and cupped his cheek and brought his lips down to meet hers.

‘I was having the most wonderful dream,’ she said. ‘I dreamed that you were making love to me.’

‘Would you like me to make it a reality?’ he asked.

She nodded and pulled him down to kiss her again. Slowly and seductively, she wriggled her tongue into his mouth. Her kiss filled his whole body with warmth. When she let him go, Marco planted kisses all over her, from her neck to her nipples. And as he worshipped her fragrant skin with his mouth, he slipped his hand down between her legs and stroked her clitoris. She arched against the mattress, pressing her body into his hand to increase the pressure. And the pleasure. A sigh of delight escaped her lips.

He slipped a finger inside her to find that she was wet already. Slowly he moved his finger in and out of her. Her eyes were closed in ecstasy. Her cheeks grew pinker and her lips more rubious as the blood rushed to show how good he was making her feel.

‘Don’t stop,’ she begged him.

He felt the early ripples of arousal. Her skin grew warm. He kissed her on the mouth again. He couldn’t get enough.

She reached for his penis. She wrapped her hand around him and caressed him into an erection. She continued to press her body against his, signalling her desire for him with every part of her. With her body, with her murmurs, with the fluttering of her lashes upon her cheeks as he set her tingling with his fingers. The very thought that he made her so greedy for him made him hard.

Reverently he entered her. He felt a sense of completion as he pushed all the way in so that he filled her completely. Her body moulded itself to him. The warmth and the wetness of her made him harder still. He moved slowly to begin with, relishing every stroke, driving himself and her crazy until . . .

She wanted to be on top, she told him. He acquiesced.

Using all her strength to tip him over onto the mattress, she took control. She rode him majestically. Her hair streamed around her shoulders. She was like a beautiful warrior princess. He put his hands on her waist to help her move up and down and to attempt to control her speed. She was moving too fast for him and he wanted this moment to last longer. For ever. But she wouldn’t slow down. She moved faster and faster, as eager to reach her own climax as he was to prolong the arrival of his.