Fascinated Read online

  ‘She was young and she was beautiful and God snuffed out her flame in the glorious brightness of youth,’ he says softly. ‘It must have been one of God’s little jokes that passeth all understanding…’ He stops, his voice strangled into silence, and pulls at his nose with his hand. Monkeys gibber and mock him from their perch in the distant canopy.

  ‘What happened?’ says Frank.

  ‘Valentine was six years old,’ says Conrad, rolling his eyes to blink out the tears. ‘We sent her away to school and I was taking Dawn on a second honeymoon. It was something we’d always promised ourselves. Dawn worked hard and she needed the rest. She’d complained that she was feeling tired. Breathless. Pains in the chest. I thought she needed a tonic. We were going to forget everything for a couple of months. We were going to swim and sit in the sun. And she had a heart attack on the flight to Barbados. There were three doctors on board that flight. When the captain asked for help they came forward to the first-class cabin and stretched her out in the aisle. They pulled off her blouse and took it in turns with the kiss of life and the massage of her heart. They were dedicated, Frank. I can’t deny it. She had them sweating on their hands and knees. They even accepted the help of a priest and a semi-retired dermatologist …’

  ‘Horrible!’ says Frank.

  ‘I haven’t finished!’ barks Conrad, aggravated by the interruption.

  ‘What happened?’ says Frank.

  ‘Nothing,’ says Conrad. ‘It was a miracle. The colour came rushing back to her cheeks and she looked as right as ninepence. She wouldn’t go to the hospital in Bridgetown. The next day she went out swimming and a wave caught her up and swept her away. She demised alone in the deep, Frank. Stolen by a jealous God and carried to the bottom of the sea.’

  Frank turns the coffee cup in his hands and gazes stubbornly at his knuckles. He doesn’t know what to say in response to this high-flown tragedy.

  ‘We had a plantation house with a view of Pelican Bay. Do you know it? I never liked it. I could never manage the dago food. But Dawn couldn’t get enough of it. She was a woman of the world. A woman of the world. She was a star. She knew how to handle a knife and fork. We used to have houses everywhere. Spain. Morocco. South of France. When Dawn demised I sold ’em. I don’t go out. Sometimes I sit in the garden. I don’t have the stomach for it.’

  He falls silent and stares around at his tropical acre’s breadth, a capsular kingdom of steam pipes and glass.

  ‘Why did you call me here?’ asks Frank, watching Conrad sink away into melancholy.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Webster told me you wanted to talk.’

  ‘It can wait,’ says Conrad, brushing the question aside with a flick of his hand. He becomes agitated, scowling and sucking his teeth.

  Frank drains the dregs from his coffee cup and sets it down in the damp earth beside the granite block.

  ‘I’ve something I want to show you,’ Conrad says at last. He beckons Frank closer, leans against him. ‘I want you to see something wonderful.’

  ‘What is it?’ whispers Frank.

  ‘I want you to see my wife,’ he confides in a trembling voice and his eyes sparkle again with tears.

  ‘Here?’ whispers Frank, looking around, searching for the site of her grave beneath the dark spread of forest trees.

  ‘Downstairs,’ breathes Conrad, winking and tapping the side of his nose. ‘We can see her downstairs.’

  So they leave the forest and follow a flight of stairs into the basement of the house, where Conrad bullies open a door that leads to a square room with several rows of quilted armchairs. The chairs are turned towards the wall, gawping at an empty cinema screen.

  Frank feels chilled, plunged from the heat of the jungle into this subterranean chamber. The room with its curved ceiling and whitewashed walls has been decorated with a brass pot containing a bunch of wilted flowers. Bronze and gold chrysanthemums. It’s cold and sparse with the lonely smell of a private chapel.

  ‘Sit down,’ snuffles Conrad. He jerks a handkerchief from his pocket and snorts an oyster from his nose.

  ‘Dawn made dozens of pictures, Frank. But Rude & Ripe was one of her first and I think it was her favourite.’

  He settles down beside Frank and gropes for the box of controls beneath his chair.

  The lights dwindle into dead stars.

  The magic window in the chapel wall opens into a sunlit orchard, a garden of crooked apple trees with their branches loaded with fruit. Music wafts from an orchestra hidden somewhere among the trees, flutes like fluttering songbirds trapped in a sticky web of strings.

  A young woman is standing on a ladder, plucking at the apples and filling a basket slung from her arm. She’s a dark-eyed Juno with her hair wrapped in a red silk scarf. She is wearing a simple summer frock printed with bunches of daffodils.

  Frank stares. He recognises that frock! It’s the same design that Conrad wore to greet him on the first morning beside the goldfish pond.

  Conrad groans in the darkness and mauls his handkerchief as his wife seems to lose her balance, clinging anxiously to the ladder, while a breeze balloons her petticoats and reveals the length of her legs gleaming in old-fashioned nylon stockings and a fancy black suspender belt. She leans against the ladder, slapping at her skirt with her hands, and the apples go bouncing from the basket. She twists, cries out and tumbles from the rungs, falling into a tuffet of grass at the base of the tree, rump reared, hair slipping loose from the red silk scarf, the frock hanging loose from her shoulders, exposing her breasts in their flimsy black lace harness.

  At the first joggle of those pendulous titties Conrad is howling and chewing his hankie. Frank reaches out in the dark and squeezes the old man’s hand. It’s terrible. Dawn is heaving, the apples are rolling and Conrad is bawling so hard there’s a danger he’ll swallow his tongue and choke to death on his grief. But there’s no time to attend to him since Dawn’s late fall has brought a stranger into the orchard.

  The scrumper is a thin young man with the face of a hungry pangolin. He stares at the windfall under the tree and, without a word of introduction, pulls his penis from his pants and sinks to his knees before the sight of the whiskery cleft in Dawn’s unbridled buttocks. For a moment he hesitates, staring, grinning, rolling his balls in his fist, then he slips his hand around her waist and pulls her against him, splitting her pouting cunt on his pike.

  Dawn looks more than a little surprised, her eyes wide, her breasts spilled and shivering. She struggles and squirms but there’s no escaping this violation.

  Conrad squelches his nose into the sodden handkerchief as the eager young pomologist reaches out to pull Dawn’s fruit. Her breasts bulge in his hands, her nipples very dark and erect. Frank looks away, dizzy, excited, lights popping in front of his eyes.

  When he turns back to the screen, Dawn has lost her frock and the shreds of her underwear. She is flat on her back with her legs apart and her knees pressed hard against her chest. The man must have dipped his wick in some enchanter’s potion – the thrust of his attack is sending Dawn into raptures. She gurgles and groans and rolls her head in a swoon. The music has slipped to a slobbering of saxophones and the muffled heartbeats of keyboard and drums. And then, at the height of her delight, the devil withdraws his favours, straddles her waist and slowly takes his penis in hand, strokes Dawn’s mouth with its glistening bulb, her throat, her shoulders, the tips of her breasts.

  She wriggles and moans, trying to clasp him again with her thighs, knocking him forward, catching his quivering shaft with her hands and guiding the length of it into her mouth. He shivers, held fast between her teeth and the slithering of her tongue until, at last, with a desperate shout, he jerks himself free from the embrace, his head thrown back, his spine arched, the music in a thumping finale triumphant while his penis fires strings of pearls through her dark and tangled hair.

  As the lights come up again Conrad is wheezing and wiping his face in his dressing-gown sleeves.

  �
�That’s poetry!’ he whispers proudly. And Frank wraps an arm around him, trying to give him comfort.

  Valentine is waiting for them at the top of the stairs. She’s wearing some kind of star-spangled cocktail dress and a pair of red shoes with impossible pencil heels.

  ‘What the hell happened?’ she demands angrily, hands on hips, scowling at the voyeurs as they grope their way to daylight. It looks bad. Conrad is still sobbing and leaning on Frank for support.

  ‘It’s nothing,’ he snotters, avoiding her eyes. ‘Frank was telling me about his marriage. He’s had a very difficult time. We shall have to be kind to him.’

  ‘You’ve been looking at mother again!’ shouts Valentine.

  ‘A glimpse. No more than a glimpse!’ protests Conrad, wagging his head. ‘I wanted to show her to Frank.’

  ‘Why can’t you leave her alone, you stupid man! You know how much she upsets you.’ She takes his arm and leads him back towards the warmth and security of the jungle. He shuffles away like a frail old man, trailing his dressing-gown cord behind him.

  ‘You’re staying here, Frank,’ he shouts, before retreating into the mist. ‘Webster will make you comfortable. Tell Valentine to take you up to his quarters. I want you to relax and make yourself at home. Remember you’re part of the family. When you’re ready we’ll have some lunch and talk about your future.’

  Frank follows Valentine in silence as she takes him through the house towards the servants’ stairs. A gloom of Gothic cupboards. A fat chintz sofa. A handy rococo armchair wreathed in fruit and gilded flowers. A chipped Chinese vase large enough to drown a child.

  ‘I didn’t know she was family,’ he says at last, breaking into the silence.

  ‘So what?’ snaps Valentine, without turning to look at him.

  Frank shrugs. She has reason to hate him. He’s just had a ringside seat at the ceremonial shagging of the woman she is pleased to call mother. He feels ashamed, assaulted by the spectacle, thrilled and horrified at the same time, like a man at a public hanging.

  ‘I couldn’t refuse. I think it would have insulted him.’

  ‘He’s a crazy old man.’

  Frank scowls at her heels clicking on the polished floorboards. Nothing seems real. Nothing makes sense. It’s as if he’s been plucked from the world and is now condemned to watch life continue without him. A flickering film running in an empty cinema where he sits alone, a prisoner in darkness. Jessica and Bassett. Dawn and the Unknown Scrumper. Scratchy hardcore action between the cartoons and newsreels. He wants to explain to Valentine but she isn’t listening to him.

  A maid appears, running along the corridor, her face flushed, her arms filled with laundry. She shrinks at their approach and presses herself against the wall, punching the linen in her fists like some demented pastry cook pounding a lump of tumescent dough.

  ‘I can find my own way from here,’ he says, as they reach the staircase. ‘You don’t have to come with me.’ He reaches out thankfully for the big oak baluster, wrapping his hand around the pineapple crowning the column.

  ‘I wasn’t offering.’

  ‘It wasn’t my idea!’ he says in a final attempt to plead his innocence. ‘I wouldn’t have watched if I’d known what he wanted to show me.’

  ‘Oh, yeah?’ The contempt pinches her face, reducing her eyes to slits, twisting her mouth in a sneer.

  ‘I didn’t know!’ He slaps the pineapple with his hand, making the newel posts rattle.

  Valentine turns on him, whipping the hair from her face with a scornful shake of the head. ‘What’s wrong? Don’t you like to look at women? Didn’t she give you a cheap thrill? Didn’t you enjoy yourself? Didn’t you think she was beautiful?’

  ‘Yes. Beautiful.’

  ‘Hah! What would you know about my mother!’ she shouts triumphantly.

  ‘I think I’d recognise her again,’ he says quietly. He’s been introduced to the woman by having his nose rubbed under her belly. It’s the kind of encounter he isn’t likely to forget.

  ‘You’re so stupid!’ she says impatiently, striding forward, trapping him, glaring into his startled face. ‘Whenever she stepped from her clothes she became invisible. Her body was her disguise. Do you really think you can know a woman by looking between her legs? You didn’t meet my mother. You were shaking hands with your own fantasies.’

  Frank flinches, thinks of Jessica, flagrante delicto, kicking her heels on the kitchen table, under the rule of Bassett’s thumbs. One man’s dream is another man’s sorrow. He feels sick to his stomach, poisoned with drink and jealousy. ‘So why do you let him watch it!’ he barks back at her, humiliated and angry.

  ‘He’s got every film she ever made down there in the basement. Thousands of photographs. Dozens of boxes of old love letters. He kept everything. He saved her clothes, her shoes, her make-up, the hair from her combs and brushes.’

  ‘Why? For God’s sake, why?’

  ‘Fucking is the poor man’s opera,’ she hisses, stabbing her finger into his chest. ‘And my mother was a diva!’

  Frank climbs to the attic where Webster makes him welcome with pastries and strong sweet coffee. He’s cleared a corner of the long room and assembled a hospital bed, set square on a Persian carpet beneath a narrow window.

  ‘There’s a wardrobe for your clothes and somewhere to keep your personal effects,’ he says, nodding at a metal locker wedged in the crock of the iron pipes that snake through the timber beams.

  Frank sits down on the edge of the bed and chews morosely at a pastry.

  ‘I’m sorry about your wife,’ says Webster, turning to the window, hands in his pockets, staring at clouds as dark as bruises in a bright band of yellow sky. ‘Do you want me to fetch her home?’

  ‘That’s not the answer,’ says Frank.

  ‘Did Conrad have any suggestions?’

  ‘No. We went to the movies.’

  ‘He took you down to see Dawn?’

  ‘Yes. Does he always make his guests watch his old home movies?’

  ‘He’s very proud of ’em. They’re not home movies, Frank. Dawn was a big star at the time. Her films sold around the world. Some of them are classics. She had a regular photo-feature in a couple of magazines. A successful mail-order business. The works.’

  ‘But how can he want to watch them – his wife making love to other men?’ demands Frank. It’s enough to drive you crazy and he’s talking from bitter experience.

  ‘That’s acting, Frank!’ chuckles Webster, amused by Frank’s bewilderment. Theatre imitates life. A mockery of love and death. Reality is suspended. The law of gravity denied. ‘She’d been to drama school. She was a proper actress. She could sing and dance. She’d once had a part in a pantomime.’

  ‘How did they meet?’

  ‘Conrad saw her by chance one afternoon in a little theatre in Soho. She was starring in a movie called Hungry Housewives. Did you ever see it? Conrad fell in love the moment she appeared on the screen. He tracked her down to an address in Ladbroke Grove and besieged her with diamonds and flowers.’

  ‘And she fell into his arms,’ suggests Frank. The prince of thieves and the gypsy dancer. A song from the chorus and the curtain falls to a storm of applause.

  ‘No. It took a long time to win her trust. She was deeply suspicious of men bearing gifts. But Conrad was a young man and full of energy and determination. He was already rich and influential. He always took what he wanted and her resistance only served to excite him. He took her out to big society parties and introduced her to film producers, photographers and all the rest of the hoi-polloi. It took time but he had to be patient.’

  ‘Did they have a big wedding?’

  ‘The biggest. As far as he was concerned she was the most desirable woman in the world. A goddess adored by millions of men. The creature that other men saw in their dreams when they turned in the dark and reached out to make love to their small, ugly wives. Think of the sense of power that gave him! He possessed the object of other men’s dreams! It wa
s like owning their souls!’

  Webster turns and walks to a big wooden chest, wrenches at the mouldering leather straps and throws back the lid. The chest has been packed with bundles of letters. The envelopes are tattered and curling, like bundles of faded leaves, neatly tied with yellow silk ribbons. He pulls an envelope from a bundle, plucks out the contents and gives it to Frank.

  ‘The object of other men’s dreams,’ he says gently, as he watches Frank unfolding the letter.

  Dear Dawn

  Whenever I see you’re massive busty endowments in my favourite mag I have an uncontrollable urge to yank forth my capacious carnal column, plunge it into the creamy curvacious cleavage of you’re ponderous protuberances and explode like an atom bomb swamping you’re ample acreage with sweet spurt’s of sticky love lava. Then Id tumble you onto you’re back, pull apart those tremendous temptations thighs and stroke the shaggy abundance of bountiful bush that shelters you’re squelching love tube. Lunging forward, hand’s massaging those mountainous mammaries, I’d launch my throbbing torpedo between those curling petals of pinkness and glide into the sweet squeeze of you’re silky sex shaft – spurting as I enter; gushing as I pump with my love thrusts, drowning you in delicious oblivion as you’re screaming climax shatter’s the mirrors. Please find enclosed snap. I am available most evenings.

  The letter has been composed on an old typewriter with a faded ribbon. The signature is a small squiggle of blue ink. Eric Something. There is a Polaroid with the letter. A smudged portrait of a naked middle-aged man grinning at the camera and sporting an erection, dark as a smoked sausage, beneath a rumpled paunch. His hair has been plastered against his skull and his eyes, scorched by flashlight, are crimson holes in the white of his face. He’s standing randy and ready for action, in some corner of his own parlour. The curved back of an armchair. The pole of a standard lamp. A light switch on the wall behind his left shoulder.

  ‘Everybody loved Dawn,’ says Webster. ‘They were always writing her begging letters, asking for pictures in special poses or items of underwear.’