Lysander looked at the drawing. Very detailed and three-dimensional, the charcoal shaded and blurred by the rub of her fingertips. A strong confident hand, a very capable draughtswoman. He felt his throat close and a nerve-tremor run across his shoulder blades.
He cleared his throat. ‘What would you call this? “A study of male genitalia”?’
‘You have a shortish foreskin, I noticed,’ she said, lowering her voice confidentially. ‘For a moment I thought you must be circumcised, like Udo.’ She took a step towards him. ‘But as I looked more closely I saw that you weren’t.’
‘No. I’m not circumcised,’ he managed to say, feeling a warm flush spread across his neck and chest – the gulps of Madeira only now working on him. He felt his penis stir and thicken, as though aware it was being discussed and responding.
Miss Bull allowed her gaze to drop below his waist and with one hand moved the hanging towel aside.
‘Now that’s what I call a study in male genitalia,’ she said. He felt her other hand run softly down his back making him shiver. Her fingertips scraped across his buttocks.
‘Shall we go to bed?’ she asked, leaning into him, looking up, smiling, her big hazel eyes full of laughter.
16. A Devilish Plan
Dr Bensimon looked at Lysander quizzically.
‘Well, that’s somewhat extraordinary. I have to say.’
‘I know,’ Lysander admitted, shaking his head in similar bafflement.
‘Everything functioned?’
‘Absolutely problem-free. As normal. In fact I did it again – just to prove to myself that it wasn’t some kind of fluke.’
‘Twice?’
‘Within the space of forty minutes, say.’
Lysander thought back – two days after the event he still felt bemused and marvelling. They had gone into the small bedroom and then, in a maelstrom of his clothes being flung off the blanket and Miss Bull ridding herself of blouse, skirt, camisole, shift and knickers, they found themselves in the iron bed, her little slim lithe body tense and squirming in his arms, his arousal insistent and demanding. Certain details initially printed themselves on his mind – her dark hair spread wide on the pillow, her surprisingly full breasts with perfectly round small nipples, her fingertips sooty with charcoal – but from then on he seemed to go into a form of sexual trance, everything blurring as he concentrated. And when the release came and his orgasm arrived it took him by complete surprise, so much so that he shouted – ‘MY GOD!’ – in astonishment and pleasure, that made her ask him if he was all right.
They separated, rolled apart and Lysander buried his face in the thin pillow, feeling tears in his eyes as Hettie – Hettie, now, no longer Miss Bull – went to fetch the Madeira bottle and the glasses. They drank, they caressed each other, they talked.
‘This was all a devilish plan, wasn’t it?’ he accused her.
‘Yes. I admit – I confess. Ever since that first day when we met in Dr Bensimon’s rooms. When I was in such a state, remember?’
‘Yes.’
‘But, even so, I found I couldn’t get you out of my mind, for some reason. Maybe because you let me barge in and were so understanding. Not horrible, but kind. And pretty.’
‘And so you plotted and planned and came up with this diabolical scheme.’
‘But I was worried it might not work. You might have stormed off in a fit, outraged. But, I thought, seeing as you’re an actor –’
‘How did you know I was an actor?’
‘I asked Dr Bensimon what you did . . . I thought, seeing as you were an actor, you might rise to the challenge.’
‘No pun intended.’
‘I can call you Lysander, now, can’t I?’ she said, kissing his chin and reaching down for him.
‘I think you’d better.’
And then they made love again and Lysander experienced and enjoyed his second orgasm, somehow even more satisfying than the first because it was prefigured and if his mind was going to interpose itself it had had plenty of warning. Miraculously, he climbed steadily to a second climax of sensation and duly climaxed.
Dr Bensimon was tapping the end of his pen on his desk pad of blotting paper, thinking hard.
‘Who was your partner? A prostitute?’
‘Ah . . . No.’
‘Was she someone who conformed to your sexual preferences, your “type”, I mean.’
‘Actually, no . . . Not really my type at all.’
‘Most intriguing. Can you explain it?’
Lysander thought again. ‘I don’t know. Perhaps you helped in some way – all our conversations. Perhaps it was Parallelism . . .’
17. Autobiographical Investigations
Hettie Bull – who would have thought? . . . But how to explain it? How to describe and understand the effect she has on me? I was attracted to her from the outset, I now see, which defies logic – or my emotional logic, anyway, as I know my eye veers towards those tall rangy girls and women, with long necks and thin wrists – tall rangy women like Blanche. How and where do these sensual tastes generate themselves? Why does one respond to dark hair rather than blonde? To plumpness rather than slimness, say? What is it about the configuration of a face – of eyebrows in relation to a nose, the height of a forehead, the fullness of lips, the changing geometry of a smile – that makes me, in particular, and not someone else, quicken and react? Is it the stirring of some atavistic notion of the ideal mating partner, our primitive sexual nature superseding the rational civilized mind – ‘That’s the one, that’s the one’ – and thereby leading us astray?
So – Hettie Bull. I wonder if it began with the juxtaposition of the staid, solid name – daughter of John Bull, England’s icon – and the olive-skinned, big-eyed, eldritch, psychologically unbalanced gamine that is the physical reality of the young woman you see. Was ever a name less suited to a person? So many questions. But I have to testify here to the potent, unignorable catalyst of her slim naked body – so small and lissom, so enthusiastic . . . perhaps that’s the key? She is so unabashed and brazen. When a man knows he is wanted – when a man knows he is wanted so much that an elaborate trap is laid for him, a trap so devious that he voluntarily sheds his clothes and stands naked before the woman who is hunting him . . . Aching physical presence, plus manifest desire, plus absence of shame, plus perfect opportunity. Impossible to resist.
Have I been cured by Hettie Bull? Can I go back to London now and be with Blanche, full of sexual confidence at last? She will take me to her bed, I know, she’s practically said as much. So why don’t I just go home?
Be honest. Hettie Bull has cast some kind of spell over you. Her sorcery works and you want to see her again, you have to see her again, you can’t wait to see her again . . . But two afterthoughts nag at me: the sense that my involvement with Hettie Bull – wherever it goes from here – will bring me trouble in some form or other; and the fact that the more I become involved with Hettie the more grievous my betrayal of Blanche.
When I came home that afternoon – the little train carrying me back to Vienna through the encroaching dusk – I went to my room and, locking the door, stripped off my clothes. My body was marked with sooty fingerprints, like the lightest clustered bruises, charcoal dust from her fingertips tracing the passage of her rapid hands over my body. I washed them away with a damp flannel and put on fresh clothes, the impress of her fingers easily effaced. But as I sit here writing this I see in my mind’s eye tantalizing glimpses of her body, remembering vividly moments that we shared. The hang of her breasts as she reached over me for her Madeira glass. The way she stayed naked as I dressed, watching me from the tangled sheet and blanket, head propped on a hand. Then as I left how she slipped out of the bed and reached beneath it for the chamber pot. I stood watching her as she squatted over it, then she shooed me from the room, laughing. I think I am in serious trouble. I know I am. But what can I do?
18. Mental Agitations
Lysander began to see a pattern in Dr Bensimon’s
questioning, began to sense the direction in which he was being gently led.
‘What was your mother wearing when you came home that day?’
‘She was wearing a teagown, one of her favourites – satin, a kind of coppery colour with a lot of lace and ribbon at the neck.’
‘Anything else you can remember about it?’
‘There was a sable trim on the sleeve and the hem. A lot of beading on the bodice.’
He looked at his notes again.
‘You ate buttered toast and strawberry jam.’
‘And seed cake.’
‘Were there any other jams or condiments?’
‘There was anchovy paste – and honey. My mother always eats honey at breakfast and teatime.’
‘Describe the room you were in.’
‘We call it the Green Drawing Room, on the first floor at the side off the landing on the west stair. The walls are lacquered an intense emerald green. On one wall are about thirty miniature paintings – landscapes of the estate and the house in its setting – I think done by an aunt of Lord Faulkner. Competent but rather flattered by their framing, if you know what I mean. It’s a small but comfortable room – the main drawing room is vast and looks over the south lawn – you can sit forty people easily.’
‘So you made instinctively for the Green Drawing Room.’
‘We always had tea there.’
‘What’s on the floor?’
‘A rather fine carpet – a Shiraz – and standard parquet.’
Slowly but surely the questions drew out more and more precise details. Lysander saw how this parallel day, during which nothing happened, was slowly acquiring a tactile reality – a texture and richness – that began completely to outstrip the original, disastrous day with its cluster of jangling, indistinct memories. That fatal afternoon began slowly to fade and disappear, buried under the accumulating facts and minutiae of the new parallel world. As the sessions continued, he found that he could summon up this new world far more effectively than the old; his new fictive memories, spurred on by his fonction fabulatrice, became concrete, overthrowing his painful recollections, making them vague and shadowy, to the extent that he began to wonder if they were simply the half-remembered details of a bad dream.
Soon, when tea was over, he had his mother going to the piano – a baby grand – and singing a Schubertlied in her rich mezzo-soprano. Lord Faulkner, lured by the music, joined them and smoked a cigar as he listened, the smoke making Lysander sneeze. Lord Faulkner called for another pot of tea, asking for Assam, his favourite. The fact that all this was an exercise in auto-suggestion didn’t devalue these ‘memories’ at all, Lysander saw. By a sheer act of will, persistence and precision his parallel world came to dominate his memory, exactly as Bensimon had predicted, and the bland domestic emotions of that new fictive day supplanted everything that had caused anguish and provoked insupportable shame.
As he left, retrieving his Panama hat from the hat-stand, Bensimon’s stern, bespectacled secretary appeared, an envelope in her hand. A receipt, he supposed, for last month’s fees.
‘Herr Rief,’ she said, not meeting his eye. ‘This was left for you.’
Lysander took it and read it on the stairs going down to the street. It was from Hettie.
‘Come next Wednesday at six pm. U is going to Zürich. Pack an overnight bag.’
Lysander acknowledged the irrepressible surge of excitement. He felt like a boy legitimately excused school in the middle of term – that sense of unlooked-for freedom, unexpected release. Then more reproachful thoughts intruded as he strolled homeward. It was all very well feeling grateful to Hettie for ‘curing’ him but he had been snared, after all, and had tumbled guilelessly into her trap – everything had been contrived to make what took place inevitable. In his conscience he could just about forgive himself – it had been a momentary fall, his honour tarnished but not irreparably – one moment of uncontrollable passion that could be consigned to history and forgotten. No one knew, no one had been hurt. But if he went back to her and spent a night or two then that was another matter. For the sake of his engagement, his relationship and future with Blanche he should write back and say no – it couldn’t happen again or he’d be lost, he knew.
He crossed the Ring by the Burg Theatre and was instantly reminded of Udo Hoff and his architectural recriminations. And with that trigger came the fizzing surge of elation at the idea of seeing Hettie again. He began to imagine what it would be like to spend a night with her in that narrow bed, to wake in the morning, sleepy and warm, thigh to thigh, to roll over and reach for her . . .
Back at the pension he sat down and wrote immediately to Blanche, breaking off their engagement. It was the only honourable course to take, even if the lies were fluent. He said that various consultations with doctors and psychoanalysts in Vienna had convinced him that any cure, if it were to work, would be lengthy and complicated. Furthermore, he was troubled by the depth and severity of his ‘mental agitations’ and therefore, under these circumstances, he felt it was only fair to you, dearest Blanche, to release you from your promises and vows. He begged her forgiveness and understanding and urged her to do what she wished with the ring he had given her – throw it in the Thames, sell it, bequeath it as an heirloom to a niece or a goddaughter – whatever seemed apt. He would remember her kindness and beauty as long as he lived and he was abjectly sorry that his ‘particular unfortunate circumstances’ forbade him from becoming her devoted husband.
He sealed the envelope with a mixture of emotions – guilt, sadness and exhilaration – also modest self-satisfaction at promptly ending the duplicity combined with a thrilling sense of liberation. He was a free man now – his wretched anorgasmia a horrible memory, a thing of the past. Who could say where this liaison with Miss Hettie Bull would lead? But he made a promise to himself not to look any further into the future than his next encounter with her. There was a real element of danger added to the excitement, of course – a cuckolded lover in the wings – not to mention Hettie’s own deep instabilities (he had witnessed them breaking through – he wasn’t ignoring them) but for the moment next Wednesday at 6.00 p.m. was all he could think about.
At dinner that night, Wolfram said to him, ‘You seem in excellent spirits this evening, Lysander.’
‘I am,’ he confessed. ‘I’ve realized that coming to Vienna was the best thing I’ve ever done in my life.’
‘I’m glad to hear that, Herr Rief,’ Frau K said. ‘I’ve always said that Vienna is the most pleasant city in Europe.’
‘In the world,’ Lysander added. ‘The most pleasant city in the world.’
19. The Arc of a Love Affair
In late September Lysander arranged with Hettie to meet for a long weekend in Linz. They travelled there separately and each, for the sake of appearances, booked a separate room in the Goldener Adler Hotel. Hettie told Hoff that she wanted to look at a seam of marble that had been unearthed in a quarry near Urfahr. He didn’t seem in the least suspicious, she said.
The change in being away from Vienna would be marked, Lysander thought. Their snatched afternoons and rare nights in the barn always suffered from a persistent undercurrent of anxiety – fear of discovery. It wasn’t just the prospect of Hoff finding them together – it could just as easily be a neighbour or a friend dropping by unannounced. To spend two entire nights as normal lovers would surely affect their moods. Everything would be different. Lysander was entranced by the prospect but initially Hettie seemed oddly edgy and nervous. For the first time he saw her inject Bensimon’s medicine. She poured some white powder from a small envelope into a glass of water to make a solution, then filled her syringe with it, injecting it with practised ease into a vein in the crook of her elbow.
‘What’s it called?’
‘Coca.’
‘Does it hurt?’
‘Not in the least. It calms me down,’ she explained. ‘It makes me more confident and sure of myself.’
‘It’s not morphi
ne, is it?’
‘You can buy it at a chemist. But then you have to leave your name and address – but I don’t want to do that so I get it from Dr Bensimon. His is better quality, anyway, so he says.’
It worked fast. Soon she was smiling and kissing him. She said she’d had a ‘blazing row’ with Hoff before she left and that had unsettled her. On the train to Linz she became convinced someone was following her and had taken a very roundabout route from the station to the hotel to throw any such person off the scent.
‘I felt all raggedy and nervy,’ she said. ‘And now I don’t. I’m all calm. See? Do you want to try some?’
Lysander took her in his arms. ‘If I felt any happier, I’d explode.’ He kissed her. ‘You’re my medicine, Hettie. I don’t need a drug.’
‘Dr Freud uses Coca as well,’ she said, a little defensively. ‘That’s how Bensimon knows about it.’
They walked along the promenade by the Danube and ate Linzer Torte in the Volksgarten, where a band was playing military marches. Back in Lysander’s room – the bigger of their two – Hettie undressed him, removing his shirt and tie, unbuckling his belt and unbuttoning his flies. It was something she liked to do, she said, before she removed her own clothes. For Lysander it was an unconscious echo of that first day, the day his anorgasmia left him for ever, so he had no complaints.
On the Sunday he took the opportunity of being in Linz to look up a cousin of his mother – a Frau Hermine Gantz. His mother had given him the address when he said he’d like to meet some of his Austrian family. He was going to call and leave his card but at the house on Burger Strasse they had never heard of a Frau Gantz. Lysander assumed his mother had made a mistake – she hadn’t been in Austria for over twenty years, after all.