Дональд Джеймс - The House of Eros

Looking back on the meeting, Cy Stevenson thought of it as the high point of his career.

She awoke at dawn, her mind a blank, the surface of an unruffled pool. Her eyes remained closed. Slowly sensations edged their way into her consciousness. A draught of cool morning air brushed her legs and her face. She breathed to capture its full flavour and heard a gurgle in her nose and throat. Like having a bad head cold. One hand was heavy on the bed she lay on. Some unidentified weight pressed on her stomach. Her skin seemed caked with thin mud, a sensation she identified immediately from the orphanage visits to the river bath. To be among the last into the hole dug into the mud beside the river was to emerge caked with a thin slurry of mud which dried in the sun… to feel like this.

A strange ache pervaded her body. An ache made bearable by the soft filtering of her mind from the orphanage bathing hole to lunch with the American in Paris.

Perhaps it was an hour before she woke again. The thin shaft of sun, falling through the gap in the curtains, was hotter, uncomfortable on her face. This time she was aware of the reek of brandy and another odour, sweeter, somehow sinister. Something warm and liquid slid down her thigh.

She was conscious now. With clarity suddenly. And crazy with fear as she opened her eyes and sat up. In a mirror opposite she saw a face. Screaming with terror she stared at the bloodied shape that faced her. Blood-caked like the mud of the river. Blood in her nose, her hair, blood on the back of her hands and streaked up her arms, blood on her shoulders and rounding her breasts. Blood on her belly and in dried smears across her legs.

She tried to rise from the bloodstained bed but something restrained her wrist. Looking down, she gasped with fear.

Shivering, she remembered.

They had stood in the vast salon. He had poured her more cognac and walked back to lean against his desk, silent, appraising, watching her drink.

‘Why do you think you will be arrested?’ Nan had asked.

After a long pause he had nodded. ‘Let us say simply that I know that I have come to the end of this one particular road.’

‘You seem not too distressed.’

He had smiled. For the first time she noticed the jaggedness of his lower teeth. ‘Not too distressed, you say? Well, perhaps not. I am, you see, inside my white suit, spats and walking cane, truly a Vietnamese. An oriental. Bernadette has often said the same.’

‘A fatalist?’

‘Perhaps. I have been sometimes touched by the beliefs of some of the sects. Belief runs deep.’ She felt a momentary leap of hope. ‘It runs deep,’ he said with his jagged-toothed smile. ‘But the surface waters are turbulent.’

She shivered.

Taking her arm he raised her from her chair. ‘When I first saw you,’ he said, ‘I recognised immediately a quality in you. Something which one day would be worth a sacrifice.’

He gestured to her to walk before him into the adjoining room. No more brightly lit than the salon, it was dominated by a huge bed spread with a red silk cover. The bedhead was of dark teak, intricately carved and set with decorative brasswork, brass lions and elephant heads and pictorial incised panels.

‘Is it not magnificent?’ Quatch said behind her.

He came to stand beside her and together they stared silently at the bed. Her eye was caught by a sequence of line drawings on the brass panels. A young peasant girl holding a bunch of lilies was bending towards the headstone of a grave. Three exquisitely drawn panels described the girl… the shock which made her drop the lilies… and the hand rising to welcome her from the grave.

‘I see you know the story of the hand from the grave,’ Quatch said. ‘It is, of course, our own Vietnamese version of the myth of Greek antiquity, of the beautiful Persephone snatched into the Underworld. But the Vietnamese story is more subtle, more ambiguous. The question it poses is this: is the corpse that pulls her down attempting to defile her beauty? Or somehow trying to capture it for himself for ever?’

‘I don’t understand,’ Nan Luc said cautiously.

‘I’m sure you’ve heard it said that beauty like yours, Nan Luc,’ he said softly, ‘drives men wild. A hackneyed old cliche. But it contains a truth. Such beauty drives men mad because love is an inadequate way of possessing that beauty. Mad with the frustration of beauty such as yours some men see destruction of it as the only satisfying solution.’

She stood beside him in the bedroom every nerve end alive with a sick fear.

‘Undress,’ he commanded.

‘The passport,’ she said. ‘You have a telephone call to make.’

‘Payment first,’ he said bitterly. ‘I see you have the mentality of a whore.’

He motioned her to sit and she sat on the edge of the red silk coverlet. Taking her hand, he lifted it as if to kiss her bent wrist.

‘The passport,’ she said.

‘There is no need for a telephone call,’ he said. ‘It is here. In my desk drawer.’

She took a deep breath. ‘I wish to see it.’

‘Of course.’

He was still holding her wrist with one hand. He seemed to her to be bent awkwardly to the right. For a moment he fumbled. Then his other hand came up and a cold bracelet circled her wrist. As the metal cuff clicked he stood away from her in triumph. She stood bolt upright, her arm pulled rigid by the movement. A thin chain attached her to the bed.

‘Undress,’ he said again.

She shook her head, too shocked to speak.

Quatch roamed in front of her, mewling with delight. He had thrown off his jacket and waistcoat, and now continued in a wide half-circle round her, sometimes moving forward quickly to brush her hair with his palm or squeeze her breast. As she turned away from him he ran his hand from her shoulder down the curve of her back. ‘Perfect,’ he said.

His hand left her. She was half aware of another, different movement. Then the stick fell across her back breathtakingly sharp, sending a shooting pain through her body. As she turned to defend herself he hit her again, blows, she now saw, from a pliant bamboo cane. She was screaming in pain as the first blow struck her across the face and she fell forward on to the bed. Too weak to speak she lay there across the crumpled red silk coverlet as Quatch poured cognac. Breathing heavily he put the bottle down on the floor and straightened up, watching her with his head cocked to one side.

Her mind was still working, however uncertainly. She was chained but she had seen that the blows, the very pain she suffered, was for him an absorbing sexual experience. And a man sexually absorbed was off his guard.

‘I could teach you many things,’ he said. ‘But it would take time I no longer have.’ She watched him while he lifted his glass and drank the cognac. ‘You must beg,’ he said. ‘Plead with me.’ He paused, his lips formed thoughtfully in a round. ‘Perhaps you are more wilful than Bernadette,’ he mused. ‘I would like to think so.’

She moved, taking the weight off her left arm, her free arm.

‘Bernadette,’ he said, like a schoolmaster reviewing a former student, ‘was not naturally submissive. But she grew, before long, to be appreciative of the things I taught her.’

A moment’s inattention on his part would enable her to reach the only weapon available to her, the heavy, almost full bottle of cognac. She moved, her knee protruding through the torn pyjamas. Her free hand stole towards the bottle. He watched, savouring the movement of her legs. She swung the bottle. It bounced off his shoulder and rolled back towards her.

With a grunt of surprise, he had fallen to his knee, his head hanging forward within range of another blow. She swung again, crashing the bottle against the side of his head. He screamed, half rose and fell forward, face down upon the coverlet beside her.