Body and Soul (3 page)

Eden rose from her bed and went down to the kitchen to make herself a cup of tea. Winkie and Wonkie leapt from the floor on to her lap as she sat waiting for the kettle to boil. She petted her dogs and thought how right her mother had been. How her first love, or more accurately her first sexual encounter and falling in love, had always remained in her being. She still loved Marshall though she had not seen him for more than forty years and he was a long time dead. Oh, to live again the thrill of sexual madness, lust beyond measure and being totally in love with a man all at the same time. The very thought of it, the memory, brought a smile to Eden’s lips, made her heart skip a beat for the joy of first love and passion. Memory had long ago dulled the pain that went along with her in-love state and an erotic life with Marshall. Now more than ever she had to admit to herself that pain had never been inflicted by Marshall but by herself alone. She had agonised over his phone calls, been a young and greedy ego demanding his total attention and devotion. All she had needed to do was to walk away when he did not give her what she craved. But now in retrospect all the pain she had suffered, no matter how bad it had been or who had inflicted it, had been worthwhile. She would not have missed that first love affair with Marshall Greenspan for anything.

Eden stood up from the kitchen table and Winkie and Wonkie slid off her lap on to the floor. They followed her into the music room. Chekov, asleep in a wing chair, raised his head to greet them and then lazily flopped back into a doze. Eden sat down at the piano and thumbed through several pages she had been working on: a composition commissioned by Princeton University on behalf of an anonymous donor. But she could not stay focused on the music. Her mind wandered back to that first sexual experience.

* * *

Eden was aware of her own sensual good looks and how both men and women appreciated them. Though she never took such attention seriously she did enjoy making heads turn and always rose to the occasion. Both her father and mother were at home when Marshall called for her. They were charming to him about his taking their daughter out and created an easy atmosphere for Eden, realising from the first moment she greeted Marshall that she was passionately in love with him.

He was dazzled by her. She knew it, her parents knew it. Going down in the lift he told her, ‘You look glorious – so sensual. I hate the very idea of sharing you even a little. I want to sweep you away to some secluded place and make love to you. But you know that, don’t you?’

‘Yes,’ she answered because she did know it and that was just what she wanted.

‘Later,’ he whispered in her ear.

They remained silent for the remainder of the ride down to the ground floor. Sexual tension was building between them and the excitement was so powerful they lost themselves in it.

In the waiting taxi were two men friends of Marshall’s. Attractive, dangerously sexy, and quite dazzled by his new young thing, they flirted outrageously with her. Eden was not so much offended by their innuendoes, their occasional kissing of her hand or patting of her knee, the slight graze across her breast, as the fact that the man she was in love with allowed it, even sanctioned it with a smile for his friends and an announcement to her: ‘Pay no attention, Eden. They’re jealous, furious that I should have discovered you before them.’ With that he kissed her on the lips and caressed her face.

For Eden, every hour at that party was a year. As much fun as it was, and studded with celebrities who took her up, men who made passes, women who looked at her with envy, when at last Marshall whispered, ‘I’ve had enough. We’re out of here,’ the party being over was the best thing about it.

They took a romantic walk down the darkened streets from upper Fifth Avenue to his apartment on Sixty-seventh Street
between Madison and Fifth Avenues in a turn-of-the-century brownstone house with a large garden. The interior comprised several large rooms furnished minimally in the modern style. The paintings were Abstract Expressionist. The lighting was impressive and sexy, only the paintings fully lit while a spot recessed in the ceiling poured light on to a drafting table which stood facing the garden.

Marshall switched on music, Sibelius, and removed her coat, dropping it on the floor. He took her by the hand and together they walked up the curved staircase, he leading, Eden following. It all seemed terribly adult and romantic to her. Marshall had such confidence, such self-assurance, she sensed she was in the safest of hands, considering herself lucky that a man such as he was to be her first sexual experience.

‘I share this flat with my associate. We work downstairs, entertain there and sleep up here. Fortunately he’s away for the night and we have the place to ourselves. That’s his room, this is mine.’

With that he opened a door and they stepped into a large room overlooking the garden. There was a massive bed covered with a suede-lined fur blanket. Otherwise the room was bare. Marshall pulled the blanket back to reveal wrinkled white linen sheets. From a cupboard he retrieved pillows and tossed them on to the bed.

Eden was confused. The romance seemed to have vanished though the excitement was still there. She felt awkward, suddenly aware of how inexperienced she was in sexual love. She simply did not know what to do. Marshall undressed hurriedly before her and Eden was astounded by how handsome and virile he was. She was mesmerised by the size and girth of his erect penis, the passion in his eyes for her, desire, lust as she had only imagined it might be. He was rampant and ready for her and she was frozen, not with terror but with anxiety that she might disappoint him, that sex with her might be less than pure bliss. That was what she was ready for, what her heart and body and soul cried out for.

She wore no undergarments and when he raised her dress over her head and dropped it to the floor, he smiled. She had obeyed
him. He kissed her breasts and licked her skin and caressed her cunt with searching fingers. He was delighted with her raunchy look: naked save for the black net stockings and high-heeled shoes. Eden promised much with her seductive looks and what to Marshall was obvious hunger to be riven until she screamed for mercy.

And scream and shout and cry with the pain and the pleasure of his animal lust for her, she did. To feel Marshall deep inside her, to sense the power of the pleasure she was giving him, was overwhelming. He wrung from her orgasm after orgasm in quick succession and she lost herself in their lust for each other. Eden wanted this sexual bliss to go on forever.

Marshall mastered her with sex. It was giving her a new dimension of herself and she liked the passion he inspired in her, even though she hardly knew what to do with it. When he exploded and she felt the rush of his hot come she called out his name and sucked hard to hold every drop of his semen within her. They had been a marvellous experience together. Or so she thought until, holding her in his arms, he told her: ‘You were delicious but a cheat. You should have told me you were a virgin. That I was to be your first.’

‘I didn’t know how,’ she answered him, somewhat fearful of his tone of voice.

‘Not coming on to me as if sex was a second skin you wear might have been a start.’

‘Does it matter?’ she asked, pulling away from him, heart racing with fear and disappointment at his behaviour.

‘Of course it matters. I don’t like breaking in young women. Other men might thrill to that, I don’t. I like my women to be ladies in the street and whores in my bed. Women who are experienced in sex and lust and love sex for the erotic life it affords them. I like them to be able to transport me into a sexual life that sizzles and burns deep. I thrive on exploring the dark, animal lust that an erotic world can afford me. We were a case of mistaken identity, you and I. You were as divine as you could be under the circumstances.’

Marshall pulled her back into his arms and caressed her hair.
She told him, ‘I have fallen in love with you.’

‘Bad idea and you have not. You have fallen in love with sex.’

Chapter 3

Eden slipped into her wax-proofed Barbour and, calling the dogs, set out for a long walk with them in the wood surrounding her house. She kept thinking about the love affair she had pursued with Marshall. He had not wanted it, she had. She had been desperate to find love in the erotic life they shared. He became her mentor in sex but never in love. All these years later she could understand what she had refused to believe when they were together: he simply did not love her in the same way she loved him, and he never had. Yet they remained lovers in an on again, off again fashion for years. They had even very nearly become friends.

She had had youth and beauty and enormous talent on her side, and in time enough admirers to dull the blow of not being loved by Marshall Greenspan. Eden was quite shocked to think that even now, a near life-time ago, having lost him to another woman still left a bruise around her heart. She raised her chin that little bit higher and said aloud, ‘Thank you, God, for Marshall and the erotic passion he had for me. For allowing myself to be moulded sexually by him.’

She began to laugh at herself, one of her many endearing traits, and broke into a run through the wood, the dogs chasing after her. How good it felt still, in these autumn years of her life, to love her lovers. She ran all the way back to the house feeling a new kind of freedom. The joy of admitting to love and passion, of wallowing in it rather than cutting it out of her life as she had done for so many years.

Once more in the house, the dogs dried off and huddling with
her in front of the open fire, she gave in to her desperate need to return to the world where she had been such a sexual success, where she had been so enriched by her lovers, had been so young, vital and happy. Suddenly the very idea of travelling to those places excited her. She sensed that being there would validate what a marvellous erotic life she had lived there, that time had not transformed the actual into a flight of the imagination.

She had not forgotten her troubling state of sexual invisibility and that she was no longer the person she’d thought she was. Walking over to the drinks tray, she opened a chilled split of champagne and filled her glass. Pol Roger White Label had been Churchill’s favourite champagne; it was hers as well. She felt buoyed by the taste, the sense of occasion. She would close the house the very next day and strut back once more into the world she had walked away from.

The housekeeper was called before Eden even finished her glass of champagne. Rachel would move in to take care of things here. Eden’s next call was to Max Kerwood, her agent of more than twenty years. She experienced momentary anxiety before the tone stopped and he was on the line.

‘I’m going away, Max.’

‘For how long, where and why?’ he asked, sensing at once that something important had happened.

‘You should have told me I was turning into one of the millions of invisible women,’ she chided him.

‘Why should I? You only needed to look in the mirror to see what you were doing to yourself. I thought that was what you wanted – to leave the stage, become a recluse, concentrate on composing rather than performing? Have sex with the occasional country gent, the gardener, anything that didn’t interfere with the passion in your soul.’

‘Max, I’ve been having a good hard look at what my erotic life has been and what it is at present. I don’t like what I see. I seem to have neglected that side of my life. Where did it go? And why did I let it? It’s not that I’m going all out to find love or a new erotic life for myself, more that I want to revisit my favourite places and remember what it once was to be an erotic soul there
in search of love, passion of the heart. I have to know if I have really become a poor shadow of the woman I once was. Have I burned myself out as attractive and sensual in the eyes of vital, exciting men? Am I now entering another phase of my life, where I’ll begin a new way of being and loving? Who knows? Certainly not me. Hence I’m taking a sabbatical and going on an adventure. I’m not prepared meekly to accept being one of the invisible women men no longer look at, let alone want. I want more than that.’

‘Do you know where you’re going first?’ a by now fascinated Max asked.

‘To open the house in Hydra. I’ll start from there, my beloved Greece. Could you be a dear and transfer some money into my Athens account?’

‘And I’ll call Maria and tell her to open the house. It must be ages since you’ve been there. And so long since the concert you gave in Syntagma Square, the amphitheatre in Epidaurus. I always thought you were crazy to hang on to your property in Hydra. Now suddenly it makes sense that you insisted on keeping it. When should I tell Maria you will be there?’

‘Two days’ time. Book me for one night at the Grande in Athens. And no PR, Max. This is a very personal odyssey and though I’m taking my cello, I have no intention of performing in public.’

‘I hear you. How long do you expect to be in Greece?’

‘I have no idea. But I’ll keep you in the picture of where I am and what I’m doing.’

‘You sound happier than I’ve heard you in a very long time,’ he told her.

Max was at Heathrow Airport when Eden arrived. She was not surprised. He had a history of taking care of her and they both knew that was the way it would always be. He never failed to be where he had to be in order to make her way easier, dismissing the mundanities of travel and life in general for Eden. He saw that as his privilege.

She saw him immediately she arrived at the terminal. Hardly a woman who passed him did not give him a second glance. Max
was over six foot tall with broad shoulders and film star good looks. He was dressed in a belted crisp-looking Burberry, collar turned up. Dark blond hair prematurely streaked with white and worn on the long side framed his strong perfect features. For the first time in all the years she had known him Eden realised that he resembled Marshall Greenspan in his good looks and self-assurance.

Max was in love with Eden. He knew it and had declared it nearly twenty years before. And Eden loved Max. The tragedy or success of their love affair, depending on how one looked at it, was that they loved each other in different ways. Max had declared once and never again that he would marry no woman except her, and he never had. Instead he had mistresses and three children to whom he was a great father but remained besotted by Eden.

Walking across the crowded terminal towards him now she was reminded of how much discipline it had taken not to have a sexual relationship with Max. The desire had been there for both of them but set aside from year to year, not the thing to indulge themselves in when business was and would always be the lion’s share of their affair.

So many times they had come close to consummating their love-business affair with sex: one moonlit night in Sorrento, after a concert in Paris, on a yacht sailing up the Nile. But always Eden had pulled back. Now decades had passed as had other lovers and they were still together in all but lust. She sensed once more she had been right. Their relationship was the sweeter and the more exciting, always fresh, for the way they had dealt with it.

Max was looking in the opposite direction when she approached him. Eden touched his cheek with the back of her hand, they smiled and kissed, and with Max slipping his arm through hers they walked to the check-in desk followed by a porter with her cello.

‘Everything is arranged,’ Max told her, showing his VIP visitor’s pass as they walked to the first-class lounge where they had a glass of champagne. ‘Don’t do anything foolish.’

‘Have you ever known me to be?’ she asked.

‘Never,’ he told her, admiration in his voice.

‘It’s because I am not a foolish woman that I am making this odyssey. Surely you can understand that?’

He walked her to the departure gate and superintended the transfer of her cello which would travel in the seat next to her. They kissed goodbye and he was gone without another word. Max had been paving an easy way for Eden for so long they both took it for granted. These were the roles they played in each other’s lives and things would never change. What was so incredible was that at no time did either of them ever abuse the situation.

Once he was gone Eden put him thoroughly out of her mind, still preoccupied with her own invisibility. The incident in Frog’s Hollow had badly undermined her confidence and goaded her into action. She felt she had no option but to begin again. Invisibility was too unrewarding.

As the plane circled Athens Eden’s heart skipped a beat: the sprawling white of the houses covered the landscape as far as the blue of the Aegean, the winter sun beating down giving an added sparkle to the sight. No matter how often Eden flew over the city it always remained something marvellous in her heart and mind. A unique place with heart and soul that no matter how it grew remained always charmingly provincial for all its attempted sophistication.

Now, with the descent of the plane, she understood how right she was to have made this trip, to see once again the beauty of the places she had experienced in her youth and remember her lovers there. It was a validation of the thrilling and adventurous life lived. By no means was she in search of another man nor the return of a sexual life to make herself feel complete, desirable. She was looking for something more than that.

As she descended the stairs to walk across the tarmac to the terminal Eden realised that she was about to have a very good time. A fun time. Something she had not been having for many years because she had, for whatever reason, abandoned her will to do so. Almost aloud she muttered, ‘Fuck that woman’s plague of growing invisible with age,’ and wondered how she had ever allowed herself to fall into the middle-age trap.

Halfway between the plane and the terminal, she recognised Andoni Pappas rushing across the tarmac to greet her. She placed her cello on the ground just in time for him to crush her in a huge embrace, tears of pleasure filling his eyes. Max, as usual making life as easy as possible for Eden, had quite obviously called on Andoni to take charge of her arrival.

A former Prime Minister and admirer of her genius as one of the world’s great cellists, his adoration of her as a woman had never flagged in all the many years they had known each other. He had arranged memorable nights for Eden that he and a handful of selected friends as well would never forget: Eden Sidd playing by moonlight on the steps of the Propylia at the Parthenon; a lazy picnic in the sun at the Temple of Sounion with her playing Bach in an after-lunch interlude where the glorious Aegean sparkling blue below a cloudless sky of the same colour and intensity made it difficult to distinguish, save for the movement of water, where earth separated from sky. Memories came rushing back of the many other places she had been privileged to play, not in concert but for herself: a sunset at Knossos, on a remote deserted island near Ikaria, in Delos one dawn morning, in the courtyard of the monastery high up in Hora Patmos.

The two old friends kissed and as their lips met for a fleeting moment she remembered the lovers who had afterwards rounded off such splendid experiences. Garfield Barton, handsome and sexual, filled her thoughts. She pushed him firmly from her mind as she stroked Andoni’s cheek with the back of her hand. He had been one of the many who had tried to make her wrench Garfield from her heart. Even now as Andoni and she looked at each other she could remember the anxiety he’d felt for her in her desperate love then.

Arms wrapped around each other, Andoni and Eden broke away from the queue snaking its way into the terminal and walked to the waiting car where one of his faithful attendants took Eden’s passport and slipped away to process her entry into the country.

The warmth and charm of Greeks was always a pleasant surprise for Eden. She and Andoni had not seen each other for years and yet they spoke as if they had been in touch constantly.
Eden felt suddenly in touch with herself and the world and very much more alive and happy.

The traffic from the terminal into the centre of Athens was more congested and chaotic than ever. A cloud of pollution hung over the city, something she had not seen before. But the vitality and noise and bizarre driving, the blocks of modern concrete apartment buildings with mean little balconies, were in much the same style as she remembered.

‘Progress has a great deal to answer for,’ she said to Andoni.

‘Everywhere, my dear, not only in Greece,’ he replied. ‘Max said I should not impose hospitality on you, or anything else for that matter. A very private, very personal journey was what he called your visit. So I hesitate to ask you to dine with us this evening …’

‘He told it to you the way it is, Andoni. You will forgive me if I decline?’

‘Let me at least offer you my boat to take you to your island.’

Andoni’s schooner was a familiar sight in Hydra. It was probably the most low-key return she could hope for and so without hesitation she accepted his offer.

Andoni was surprised as the car drew up before the Grande B when Eden asked him not even to accompany her into the hotel. Surprised but not offended. He watched as the doorman greeted her and removed the cello from her hands. He knew her, of course, as did most of the hotel’s staff from the years of her love affair with Greece, her fame as a musician and as the lover of the American painter Garfield Barton.

Eden went directly into the streets of Athens after registering in the hotel and instructing the concierge to send up toothbrush and paste. Except for her cello and her handbag she had travelled with no luggage. She was an old hand at travelling, always wearing just the right sort of clothes so that she would be chic and well dressed no matter where she was going or not going as the case might be. Today she had chosen a fine herringbone tweed dress of charcoal grey and over her shoulders a suede jacket lined in silver fox, with large revers of the fur framing her face. Black high-heeled alligator shoes matched her Hermès handbag.

She had forgotten the way the Greeks conduct their lives in the streets and was delighted by the crowds rushing about. She realised after no more than a few minutes how much she had missed the Greek need to play at life, enjoy the leisure of long lunches and siestas, their inability to stay at home and be bored. She laughed aloud as she walked through the familiar streets and memories of the past came flooding in on her.