Primula Bond - The Unbreakable Trilogy

It’s only till Christmas.

‘Your work is marvellous, Miss Folkes, and you are going to make millions. I can’t believe how lucky we are to have discovered you!’

As the lift doors start to close him off from my view, I realise that he’s said exactly what I was praying someone would say to me. He truly is the answer to my prayers.

A satisfied smile, shining with possibility, spreads across his face and behind him an aeroplane cuts a swathe through the velvety evening sky as it starts its descent to Heathrow.

It’s the tall dark mansion on the corner of the square, somewhere in Mayfair. The one the witches swerved past on Halloween night because they were too scared to bang on the knocker to trick or treat. The one he started to walk towards that night then changed course to walk me to that cocktail bar. The one that is now being battered by gusts of wind as a storm revs up and tips buckets of rain over me as I struggle up the hill.

I should have known that’s where Gustav Levi lives.

What I didn’t expect when he invited me to his house tonight to celebrate our long and happy association was that no-one would answer the door. I ring the bell and bash at the knocker for a few minutes, getting wetter and wetter, before the door swings open apparently of its own accord. I hesitate. It doesn’t creak on its hinges, but it’s pretty Hammer Horror nonetheless.

I follow a trail of bright lights set into the edges of the floor, the treads of the stairs curving up into the shadows upstairs, enticing me from the darkened, red-lacquer-painted hallway down another flight of stairs into the basement, and the second thing I didn’t expect was that I’d find the man of the house in a vast, quartz kitchen wearing chef’s whites and breaking eggs into a huge glass bowl.

‘Ah, you found us.’ He looks up at me with a boyish grin and starts whisking so energetically that he has to follow the bowl across the counter. ‘And so we come back to the square where it all began.’

‘Us?’

‘My household. My underlings.’ He waves the whisk vaguely. ‘Usually you’ll find all sorts of people coming and going here. But tonight it’s skeleton staff, you might say. I’ve even let Dickson off tonight.’

‘Dickson?’ I look around.

‘My chauffeur and pilot. Doubles up as my chef, too. But a man’s got to find a way of relaxing when he comes home from running his empire and sealing deals with startling new talents he’s picked up in the street. So I’m cooking tonight.’

To cover the sudden chill of awkwardness I walk around the kitchen making a show of examining everything. It really is state of the art, with several ovens of various sizes and at least six gas rings the size of hub caps on the oversized central hob. What did I think Gustav was going to be cooking? Toe of frog and eye of newt?

‘So you didn’t pick me at all. You live right here in the square. You were just taking a constitutional that night and happened to bump into me.’

He shakes his head calmly. I see what’s different about him tonight. He’s had his hair cut. It’s sweaty with his culinary efforts, but it makes him look tidier, more formal, but somehow safer. And it means I can see his eyes clearly, and tonight they are very bright. ‘Believe what you like, Serena. I picked you, as soon as I saw you.’

‘You thought I was a boy.’

‘ Touché .’ He grabs at the escaping bowl and we both start to smile. ‘But very soon you’ll see that we’re a perfect match. In fact, I can’t wait to get started.’

‘On the exhibition? Or on me?’

He allows himself a brief chuckle. ‘Both. Although the exhibition I believe is nearly ready for lift off. It’s the other part of the contract which is beginning to feel a little like the blind leading the blind.’

‘The sex part, do you mean?’

‘I love that you’re so direct, Serena. Was I really that explicit?’

‘You didn’t have to be. You started off by touching me, remember? Very intimately. I took that as, I don’t know, an introduction to what you have in mind?’

He puts down the egg whisk and rubs at his hair. Now that it’s shorter it stands up in black spikes and makes his face look more open. ‘I confess you caught me on the hop. Once I’d met you and seen the work stored on the camera, I wanted to do something to keep you here. Otherwise I feared that you would simply vanish into thin air. Or someone else would snap you up. So I thought of doing it this way. Making it personal as well as professional. Having said all that, I’m not sure I thought it through.’ He neatly rips a huge paper bag and releases a cloud of flour. ‘I think it’s a case of suck it and see.’

I turn my back on him before he sees me blushing, and walk as calmly as I can to the end of the kitchen. The scraping of my feet sounds intrusive on the underheated floor. Through the big doors I can see, in the long thin moonlit paved garden, small trees and rose bushes in pots being bent and buffeted by the rain and rising wind. I lean my forehead on the glass.

I’m well and truly trapped in his web now. Gustav’s designers and printers are working all hours. The pictures have already been selected for enlargement and framing, and the railings leading along the street towards the front door of the Levi Building have been cleared to display the publicity poster we’ve chosen for my exhibition. It will show the crocodile of mini witches caught by my camera on their way to the party, lit by the streetlamps and halted in their tracks by the little one falling over. In the next day or so that image will be developed, enlarged, elongated and fixed to the railings, the witches waiting in their various impatient attitudes under the melancholy statue for the little one to right herself.

‘No going back now, Serena.’ Gustav rubs the foil from a pat of butter round a couple of ramekins. ‘We’re on the slippery slope.’

‘I like you barefoot,’ I remark as he dances from what the chefs would call the mise en scène over to the fridge and back again. ‘And I like those dark jeans. You were wearing ones like those the night we met.’

‘I’m flattered you remember.’ He stops buttering and whisking and looks down at himself. Holds the white apron out comically like Little Bo Peep. ‘You like it rough, Serena?’

I bite my lip. He does too, biting down the shocked smile we share at the naughtiness of his remark. Yes, I like it rough , I think to myself. Or I will when I try it.

‘The suit distances you, that’s all. Makes you unreachable. Maybe first impressions are the ones that stay with us?’

He frowns as he ponders the question. Ponders me. ‘I think I like you every which way, Serena. Though I’m glad the tomboy is beating a retreat.’

‘I can be all things to all men. But yes. It’s kind of fun, and kind of pervy, dressing as my cousin.’

He laughs lightly and turns to a tray on the counter. I nearly tell him I also prefer him with his arms showing, because I love his strong hands and what I know they can do, and his strong forearms with the ropes of muscle. But I say nothing.

‘Have a drink,’ he says. ‘Shaken, or stirred?’

I pick up a glass of vodka martini from a tray on the counter and once again relish the slow burn of it down my throat. I hold the glass up and watch how his movements sparkle and undulate through the clear liquid.

‘Dip these nachos into the tzatziki. I’m willing to bet you haven’t eaten anything today.’

I hitch myself onto a stool and drain the entire glass. Take another one. ‘You’d be right. The cupboard is bare at Polly’s flat. I had a sandwich at the gallery today. So what’s this going to be? Pavlova? Mousse? Meringue?’