The Girl Behind the Mask (20 page)

Ernesta and her monkey
was the title of the portrait. This Ernesta looked to be on the verge of laughter. I wondered how long it had taken to paint the portrait. It could not have been easy to persuade a monkey to stay in place for long enough to get such a good likeness. And how the monkey was decked out! No ordinary collar for this pampered creature. It was wearing a long string of pearls with one huge drop-shaped pearl as a pendant. What was all the more striking was that Ernesta was wearing nothing at all round her creamy neck. I understood at once what sort of statement this was supposed to make. ‘Look at me. I am so beautiful I do not need adornment. I am so wealthy that my pets are dressed in pearls.’ What a woman this Ernesta must have been.

While I was gazing at the painting, I heard the myriad bells of Venice begin to strike the quarter-hour. In fifteen minutes, Silvio would come to the library door and escort me to the exit. Perhaps Silvio had heard the quarter-hour chimes and already started to make his slow way through the house. I was thrilled by my secret moment in the grand salon but knew I should not risk staying there. I crept back to the door and into the corridor. I pulled the door shut behind me, giving the smiling monkey an affectionate rub on the nose as I did so. Then I tiptoed back to the library and by the time Silvio arrived, it was as though I had not strayed from my desk at all.

Silvio was as unfriendly as usual, but that day I bestowed upon the old man my most winning smile. My secret and the motivation behind it was a little bit like being in love.

Luciana was falling in love too. That much was obvious. As she spent more and more time with her teacher, the familiar cursive of her handwriting seemed more exuberant, somehow, as though she was writing more quickly than usual, so keen was she to share all her thoughts and feelings on the page. I recognised that craziness from the days when Jason and I were first exploring sex with each other. Such energy. Hormones raging. As I read on, I hoped Luciana would not be as disappointed by her first love as I had ultimately been by mine.

Perhaps she would be more disappointed, as her first lover was obviously a man of skill and generosity when it came to making love. Sometimes, when I read Luciana’s diary entries, I was uncomfortably reminded of the early days with Steven. How sophisticated he had seemed to me compared to my previous lovers. Sex – lust – can be so blinding. When the blood is rushing from your head to your heart, it’s easy to overlook the harder truths about the object of your desire.

I thought back to the very last time Steven and I touched each other. How in the flash of heat between our bodies, it had seemed possible that we would try once more to stitch the rest of our relationship back together. And then I thought about him wrapped around another girl. The girl behind the mask.

Chapter 28

I had not been entirely honest with Nick, Bea or Marco about the end of my relationship. It had been a great humiliation to me. A humiliation more complicated than the obvious embarrassment one feels on losing out to a younger, more attractive, more malleable model. That happens every day, doesn’t it? The old is replaced by the new. What was humiliating to me was that I could not help but feel I was in some way responsible for the way our relationship ended. You see, I thought introducing other people into our love life might somehow make us stronger.

Ever since that day at the seminar, when I first dared disagree with him, Steven had been drifting away from me. That much was obvious. He was making more excuses to stay late at the office and when he wasn’t, we shared the once happy space of our home like a couple of flatmates rather than the devoted lovers we once were. At night, we slept with a chaste gap between us like two medieval monarchs on a tomb.

Still, I was desperate to save our relationship. I was sure there must be a way to reignite our passion. We – who had been so hot for each other – couldn’t possibly be destined to become one of those couples that doesn’t speak over dinner and eventually drifts apart. There had to be a way to bring the good times back. While I was supposed to be working, I spent way too much time online, looking at the advice on relationship forums, trying to figure out how to talk to Steven about my fears.

I tried all the usual things. I cooked nice meals, I wore nice underwear, and I tried to show more interest in his work. But actually, it wasn’t as though I had slipped with those things in the first place. The growing chill between us was about something other than having let ourselves go. Doing more baking wasn’t going to fix it.

Then I read an article in a magazine about a woman who claimed she had saved her marriage by agreeing to accompany her husband to a sex club. He was delighted at the prospect. She was terrified, imagining she might have to have sex with strange men in front of him or – somehow worse – might have to watch him making love to someone else. In the end, the lucky woman’s husband only wanted to watch. They went to a club but they didn’t join in, and having a naughty little secret to share in the bedroom when they got home strengthened their bond.

Until I read that article, I had always assumed that sex clubs were impossibly seedy: full of desperate women and dirty old men; but the club the writer described was entirely different from the places of my imagination. She said it wasn’t so different from an ordinary nightclub. People wore fewer clothes, that was all.

So, crazy as it sounds, I decided to try the same thing. When Steven and I were together that evening, I told him I wanted to go to a sex club. He blinked at me. Then he laughed. He obviously thought I was joking. He said as much. I insisted. I told him I had always been curious.

‘Really?’ he said.

‘Yes. Really.’

‘I wouldn’t have guessed.’ His expression grew serious for a moment. ‘I didn’t think it was your kind of thing.’

‘Perhaps you don’t know everything about me after all,’ I said. ‘Perhaps I have hidden depths.’

I hoped he would be tantalised by the hint.

‘You really want to go to a sex club?’

I nodded. My heart was beating so hard. My face was burning hot. I longed for him to tell me he found the idea repulsive. But he called my bluff.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘If you want to. If you
really
want to?’

What could I say but that I did?

Steven smiled. His expression was a cross between amused and confused.

‘When?’

We agreed to go the following Friday. Now that I mentioned it, said Steven, he had heard about a good place in King’s Cross. It was called ‘L’Enfer’ – the French word for Hell. Perhaps we could start our adventure there.

I didn’t ask Steven how he knew about this club. I plastered on a grin and told him I couldn’t wait.

Chapter 29

I spent the next week in a state of sick anticipation. I’d made a terrible mistake. I didn’t want to go to a sex club. But I wanted to hold on to Steven so badly, I would have done anything. Anything at all. The way he whistled as he went around the flat in the run-up to our big night out told me he was experiencing none of my anxiety. The weekend held nothing but promise for him. In the meantime, he was kinder to me than he had been in a while. When we woke up in the mornings, he rolled over to kiss me, like he used to. He was tender again. If this was what the promise of a night in a club could do for our relationship, then what would things be like afterwards when we had a new secret to share? I tried to be optimistic.

On Friday evening, Steven came home with a gift for me. I opened the black tissue-wrapped package to find a set of underwear. It was unlike any lingerie I would have chosen for myself. I pulled it out and stared at it. Though the red silk bra was my size, it had no cups to hide my nipples. The panties could be more accurately described as string. Not even a G-string. Just a piece of string, threaded with cold red beads, which were supposed to slide over my clitoris as I walked, as Steven helpfully explained.

‘That’s what the girl in the shop said.’

I hated the girl in the shop.

‘You want me to wear this tonight?’ I asked him.

‘You might feel underdressed if you don’t,’ was Steven’s reply. ‘Just try it. See how you feel.’

I went into the bedroom, stripped and put on the new underwear. It’s possible I felt even more naked once I donned the flimsy scraps. I regarded my reflection in the mirror. The bra lifted my breasts so my nipples, which had hardened in the cold, seemed to point forwards like missiles. The beaded G-string was strange and uncomfortable. I felt as though Steven had chosen the underwear for someone else.

Steven crept into the room behind me. I watched his reflection in the mirror as he in turn regarded me from the door.

‘I like it,’ he said. ‘Perhaps we shouldn’t go out after all.’

I seized upon that throwaway line.

‘We could have a club night all of our own.’ I thrust a hip in his direction, playing along.

Steven crossed the room and slipped his hands around my bare waist. He cupped my cupless bosom and pressed his crotch against my buttocks, grinding so that the beaded string pulled taut against my clit.

‘Much as I am reluctant to share this wonderful sight,’ he murmured, ‘I think it would be a shame to stay home.’

Much as I wanted to, I couldn’t disagree. I had started this adventure, after all.

‘There’s just one finishing touch,’ he said then.

He pulled another small black bag from beneath the bed and proffered it to me.

‘Cupless bra. Crotchless knickers. Footless tights?’ I joked.

It was a mask. A plain white half-mask of the kind the Venetians used to wear every day. I think the style was called a Colombina Punta.

‘Everyone has to wear one. Club rules.’

Steven had a black version. He held it to his face and I shivered to see him made so anonymous. With the mask in place, he pulled me towards him again and crushed my mouth against his own.

‘You’d better put something over that kit before I fuck you here and now.’

So I covered the thong and the cupless bra with a little black dress that was extremely demure by comparison. Before visiting the club that night, Steven and I had to attend a cocktail party thrown by one of his colleagues. I knew most of the people there – I’d known many of them for years – and yet I felt extremely shy and awkward in their presence. Steven assured me no one but him would know what I was wearing beneath the knee-length black dress with its high neckline, but I felt sure they must. Every move I made had the pearls on the G-string rubbing against me obscenely. I could not help glancing down at myself to see whether they were pressing outwards against the fabric of the dress too. It was not warm in that room and my nipples puckered and strained to be seen, without cups to hide behind. I felt sure they were obvious.

Several times, Steven caught my eye across the crowd and smiled. But his smile suddenly seemed wolfish and unkind. Once, having smiled at me, he turned back to the man he was talking to and when they suddenly burst into laughter I had the awful feeling they were laughing at my expense. Had Steven told him where we were going next? Had he told him what I was wearing beneath my plain black frock?

I spent another half-hour talking to Rod, the party host, who was so deaf I practically had to shout in his ear. In my state of paranoia, I began to think that was exactly what he wanted, so he could get a better look at what was going on beneath my dress. I folded my arms tightly over my chest, shielding myself from his eyes. He asked if he should turn the heating on. I blushed so hard I needed air conditioning.

Eventually, Steven came to fetch me. I would have said ‘rescue’ but it didn’t feel like that at the time. He told the old academic, ‘I must take this poor girl home.’

‘But it’s only ten o’clock,’ Rod complained.

Steven batted the protests away.

‘You’re going on somewhere else, I know it,’ Rod pressed. ‘Where are you heading to? Had a better offer?’

‘That would be telling,’ said Steven. And then he winked, making it obvious once and for all that we weren’t heading home to have cocoa.

Outside the party, I told Steven how uncomfortable I’d felt.

‘Everyone was looking at me. Everyone knows I’ve got something weird on under my dress.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ said Steven. ‘They don’t have that much imagination.’

‘The way Rod was looking at me . . .’ I continued.

Steven silenced me with a kiss. He put his hands underneath my coat and squeezed my right breast hard. I winced. He’d never touched me like that before, with the intention of causing me pain, however playfully.

‘I liked the way he was looking at you,’ Steven told me. ‘It made me hard to think he wanted you, knowing I’m going to have you later on.’

I prayed he would tell me then that we should go straight home. I prayed that the idea of me trussed up like a stripper beneath my demure dress while his colleagues ogled me would have been enough of a turn-on for now. In the course of our relationship, I had never before tried to make him jealous. Would the envy of his friends have made a difference? Steven hailed a taxi. Gallantly, he opened the door so I could step inside first, then leaned in through the window to tell the driver we were going to King’s Cross. The opposite direction from home in every sense.