Surrender to Mr. X (8 page)

How long am I to lie here? Supposing they never come back? Of course they will. My whereabouts are known, I came in a black cab. I can be traced back. Just to loosen the corset would be a comfort. It is crushingly tight. How did the Victorians live with these things? A twenty-one-inch waist was nothing to them. The lady's maid would put her foot in the small of your back and she'd pull the strings tight with all her strength. I have Lam for a lady's maid, unasked. My waist is 24 in normal times and from the feel of it it's squeezed down to 21. Alden has strong arms, understandably. I am sure I am dribbling, though I can't see any sign of it in the mirror above. The pattern of lights re-constellate around me. I am spotlighted. I can't turn my head to shade my eyes. I shut them, but it's so glaringly bright my eyelids can't keep it out, so I open them again and squint. Yes, it's true, I am dribbling. That's horrid,
humiliating. Think of other things. This is own fault, you stupid cow. You should never be sorry for people. While I agitate the background drone rises in pitch. It seems to be picking up my heartbeat now.

I flee again into the world of facts.

The search for the dream-partner? Where had I come across that? More Crowley? Yes. “First raise the sexual energies before sleep by constant sexual stimulation without orgasm, then concentrate onto a talisman bearing a requisite symbol, and in dreams the aroused libido will copulate with the dream-partner. The talisman will thus become magically charged, and would make a particular wish come true.”

My great-grandmother visited Aleister Crowley in his house in Primrose Hill Road, down the hill from Alden's place, up the road from mine. It was 1929: she went along in terrified anticipation, seeking a spell that would release her from love, but found a scene of shockingly inane domestic decorum: the Beast holding a skein for his mother while she rolled wool from it into a ball, the better to knit his winter jumper.

But her friend, Nina Hammet the sculptor, found him otherwise three years later in his apartment at Ninety-Three, Jermyn Street. Tales of Satanic masses, witchcraft, sacrifice of virgins and sexual excess of every kind at his Abbey of Thélème in Cefalu in Sicily had been titivating newspaper readers for years. Nina recorded the overwhelming smell of incense, mysterious fires which would burst into flame around the room,
burn vigorously and then just as suddenly douse themselves, and quite horrid portraits on the walls of the mysterious entities which came to Crowley in visions. She left as soon as politeness permitted. When he subsequently sued her for describing him in print as a “black magician,” he lost. The collapse of an unwise libel case, as so often, rubbished his position in society. He was shunned and excoriated. Nevertheless the cult of Crowley lingers on. Think about it, Joan. Knights of Thelemy resurrected in Southgate. Ray a student. Alden with his atonal symphonics, the thelemic silence of the senses. Higher powers. Control over others. The Will, for good or bad. This is bad. With a shiver of recognition, I fear that on the Day of Reckoning I might be caught on the wrong side.

The music drones on at a pitch which is now like a soft breathing purr, and it's sending vibrations through my body which seem to have anesthetic powers. None of me is hurting. And it's sending me to sleep. I am broadcasting back to myself my own soporific narcosis. A feedback loop of sleep. I have the brainwave that you could market this drone and make piles of money. But no other thoughts succeed. I sleep.

My awakening is shocking. I am almost without restraints, lying on my side, though my right leg is up by my left shoulder, pushed up and held there by one of Alden's strong hands. The lights are dim; the ceiling mirror is blacked out. The gag-ball is still fixed in my mouth; other than the fact that Alden, naked, is driving
his penis into my vagina from behind, I am relatively free. It is a patient rhythm, a regular, mechanical piston. In—thump, out—thump, in—thump, out—thump, goes the pile driver. His resolution and determination, just not his impetuosity, is most impressive. For me, the wished-for consummation has come, and it's pretty good. Remembering it now I think of the William Blake line: “What is it women do in men require? The lineaments of gratified desire!” With every steam-hammer drive of his, my inner answering self responds. I can hear my own cries, and his gasps. I feel ecstasy welling up gradually, to the unbearable and beyond, the culmination, the after shocks, only slowly fading … the best kind. Thank you, Alden.

Perhaps for Alden the dream partner indeed approaches. It isn't me. He grinds and pumps on. He could stop now so far as I am concerned. The evening must surely soon be over. Rationality must return. Now he has both my hands in one of his, together in front of me: the angle has changed, but the beat continues remorseless. The other hand releases the tie round my head so I'm able to force the gag-ball out with my tongue. I cry out, because the ache when my mouth muscles revert to their normal form is extreme, yet exciting: if this goes on will I become a full-blown masochist? Suddenly I want more. My ass arches toward him of its own account.

And then he stops, and withdraws, and says, “I'm sorry, Joan. I still can't.”

Or won't, or won't! How men will punish women by failure to complete sex. It is strange to be called by my name, even though it is not the right one. I have quite forgotten I had an identity. I try to ignore the hollow feeling in my cunt, now there is nothing in it, and become quite maternal, and when I have recovered some self-control I say: “It's all right, there, there,” and so on.

To which he says, “No, actually, Joanie, it is not all right,” and I feel I have let him down, I have failed as a woman. I have failed to neutralize the trauma of the past. The explosion that haunts him still. I see the eager, handsome youth, the chemicals stolen from the school lab, the boy playing with fire: the mistake, the shock of realization, the roar, the pain, the dark, the waking to the reality of the half-life of the future, then the triumph of great difficulties heroically overcome, of fortune achieved—but the trauma remains. He still can't trust the world. Fulfillment can't be reached. The body triumphs but the soul fails. Tears of compassion fill my eyes.

My earlier paranoiac fantasies, that I was part of some musical composition, have vanished, only to be replaced by maudlin sentiment, which I wish to disown even as I feel it. I hope it is something to do with the drugs I have been given. I dash away the tears, glad that my hands are free to do such a thing, before Alden notices.

I have been fucked, and not fucked. I am confused.
I am more Vanessa than Joan again. I want to get home, if only in order to re-establish some kind of sanity. My mouth is recovering, but my arms have been pulled in their sockets and I am beginning to feel it. My knees ache: the spreader-bar kept my legs unnaturally straight and my ankles apart for too long, and my cunt is sticky from sodding chocolate of all things. I need a bath and I want a rest, and I am not sure what I feel about Alden, except now I can see his poor helpless legs, and they are too thin for the rest of him.

“I'll come back tomorrow,” I hear myself saying. “Maybe you'll be used to me by then. I'm sure we'll do better. Only—please—could we somehow do without Lam?”

He thought about it. His prick had subsided, and lay, a great long lobcock thing, red from exercise and abrasion against over-narrow loins. He pulled the pink silk over himself, modestly, as I sat up. He did not like to be looked at. I wondered at my own confidence in expecting he would want to see me so soon, even at all. And I would like three or four days to recover from this.

I was off the bed, piecing together the rags of my dress, abandoning the French knickers, running my fingers through my hair to put some sense back into it, rubbing my neck to help the marks from the collar buckles go away. His eyes follow me.

“I'll send a taxi at 7:30 tomorrow,” he said, eventually.
“We'll try and do without Lam if that's what you want. But I really think I need an assistant.”

I refrained from saying that once he had managed a complete sex act the elaborate foreplay—for so I had decided to think of it—we had gone through that evening would be unnecessary. It might even begin to seem absurd. But I had to let him come to that conclusion in his own good time.

L
AM APPEARED FROM NOWHERE
, as was his talent, perhaps training, certainly his inclination, and said my car home was on its way. He followed me to the peg where Alden had left my Lacroix jacket stretching—cover myself with that and I could be moderately decent, at least to the superficial glance—and counted off a hundred fifty-pound notes, new and stiff, glowing in that relaxingly distinctive and agreeable rusty-orangey color. Five thousand pounds. He took his time. He wanted to show me that I was nothing but a hired hand like him, just less permanent. I sat down while I watched him, the better to relieve the rubbing of my Jimmy Choo straps against a patch of chafed skin left by the the spreader-bar's metal anklets. Anklets should be stainless steel, but lined with at least leather, or better still sheepskin. The ball-gag had been simply plastic: at the very least it should have been silicon or leather. I didn't think Alden would have chosen them. I bet it was Lam.

He waited after he had given me the money. I couldn't believe this—now he wanted me to bloody sign for it.

I protested, just to wrong-foot him, to puncture his unctuous implied contempt, that I couldn't possibly take the money, that I did not want it, did not need it. Maybe I was an idiot. But I also told myself that if putting myself on Alden's staff at this stage of the relationship would collapse it, or if not, at any rate greatly weaken my hand, I might seem replaceable: another nursery teacher Joan would lie on the bachelor bondage bed. The world was no doubt full of them: impressionable and more or less occasionally unsatisfied girls who would put up with anything for a bit of attention. What you pay for up front can always be replaced. I was playing for greater stakes: I wanted him to want to share his life with me. Oh the fantasy! I was a girl from a good family, more than well educated, socially secure, his equal. He would surely recognize the Vanessa beneath my Joan disguise? He needed me. I could make his house into a home. I would cook—we would never have to get take-outs, however high class. I would teach him about wine: what age to drink what. He would teach me about everything else, and how happily I would learn from him. I would encourage him in his music: if he were happy with me it might even get better. With me he would soon be sexually rehabilitated: stem cell research might even lead to re-growth in his spinal cord so that he could walk again.
Christopher Reeve had died too soon but science might yet be in time to mend Alden. We would live happily ever after.

I knew as soon as I had these thoughts that they were absurd. These were the fantasies of the seventeen-year-old who believes that a kiss means love and marriage. Whatever was in the Harrod's chocolates had left me unhinged. The bundle of notes was tempting, even though taking them would tip me over the edge into unqualified, undeniable whoredom.

“You take,” said Lam, annoyed and impatient. He really did not like me. “Taxi get you tomorrow same time. Mr. Alden say: buy clothes, bring receipts. Model shoot here tomorrow. Mr. Alden say your taste better than me: buy top quality; buy color. No cheat Mr. Alden.”

The long speech seemed to have exhausted him. I could hear the taxi outside. I shrugged; I took the money. My jacket had, as I feared, a nasty mark in it where it had been ruthlessly jammed over the designer peg: the beads and sequins made it quite heavy. Before I came back here I'd better sew on a ribbon tag so that at least it could get hung up properly, if I could find a needle and thread.

“Lam,” I said as I went, “if there's to be any repeat of what happened this evening I want good quality gear in properly lined metal, preferably padded with real sheepskin or calf leather, Japanese silk bonds and definitely no plastic. Mr. Alden deserves better.”

He just looked at me blankly. I don't think he knew what I was talking about. Perhaps Alden was just phenomenally mean; or perhaps Lam was deaf. Maybe I still wasn't speaking clearly because of being previously gagged.

It was the same cab, with a discreet, custom-made wheelchair hoist and no public hire license number on the back. The driver was the same sleek, beautiful young African who had delivered me. I asked him what his name was, and he said Loki. My voice really was a little blurry: my lips were swelling. Normally I would have asked how a taxi driver from Somalia happened to have the name of the Norse trickster god, but I was not sure he would make sense of what I was saying, and I didn't have the energy to enter into any protracted conversation with anyone at the moment.

Loki opened the door for me when we got to my house in Warwick Road, where the water of the canal reflected the moon and stars, and helped me out: looking at my sleepy eyes, my swollen lips, my mussed hair and torn dress, the thongs of my Jimmy Choos wrongly laced, he must have seen I was scarcely fit to be out.

He behaved as impeccably, courteously as if I were a lady of the land, which indeed I just about am, though not by bloodline: my mother's sister's husband's eldest brother is a baronet, and of course there is a connection with the dreadful Lord Wallace F.

I
WOKE THE NEXT MORNING
refreshed and none the worse for my experience. A good bath, some essential oils in it—camomile and a touch of angelica root—for aromatherapy; after a sound night's sleep whatever it was that had made me feel poorly was already cleansing out of my metabolism. Also, of course, sex always has a tonic after-effect.

The fact that I had £5,000 in cash and instructions to spend it on clothes made my step all the lighter. I called through to Max and said I had a migraine. I knew he would square it with the management: he owed me for the tennis champion, an incident that now seemed to me half a lifetime ago. His wife would be checking in this morning after an early arrival at Heathrow around nine and I wished them every happiness. Because of my ministrations he would be feeling less tense and have got a better night's sleep than otherwise: it is best to be in mental, physical and emotional nick for any kind of power games. Clinton may have been right when
he maintained that blow jobs didn't count, in spite of the uproar from the feminists. It is a here-and-now kind of thing, and affection does not necessarily flow between sucker and sucked: nor should it, because it won't necessarily give rise to any sense of emotional obligation. “But you and I made love last night, don't you love me?” is at least a reasonable kind of question, as requiring the Latin prefix “nonne”: the “yes” of the yes? neither-or-both? no? trio: nonne? ne? num? “I gave you a blow job last night—don't you love me?” if asked, must surely require the prefix “num” if it's to be a sensible question at all.