Primula Bond - The Unbreakable Trilogy

Our footsteps echo in the silence as we turn left through a set of huge double doors and enter a long ballroom.

‘Christ, this is like the Tardis!’ I exclaim, whirling round in a circle. The silver chain winds itself around me and I have to twirl anti-clockwise to unwind it. ‘It looked like a kind of slum from the outside.’

‘The wonders of Georgian architecture. City architecture in general, actually. Everything built to maximise the use of the space, and yet deceptive. Go up higher, if you’re in the new world. Dig deeper, stretch backwards, if you’re in the old country.’

He unwinds his scarf as he waits in the doorway of the ballroom. His handsome face, settling into calm as he’s revealed to me properly once more. The knot at his throat is a peacock blue with a feathery design fading down the tie.

When I was about nine I came home with some gigantic feathers I’d found arranged in a circle in the middle of a campsite along the cliffs. It was winter, so the campsite was vacant. I thought the feathers were so pretty, the shimmering green and blue with the huge eye in the middle. I stuck them with Sellotape into a fan but when she saw them she screamed that I was a wicked girl who’d brought the evil eye into the house.

I start to walk down the middle of the polished floor. This room is also panelled, but the panels are hung with oversized black and white photographs in very contemporary plain frames. The far end of the room, which should traditionally accommodate a fireplace or an ancestral portrait, is filled entirely by an enormous flat screen.

‘What you’re going to see here should appeal to your voyeuristic tendencies, Serena. And your secret taste for punishment. In fact, I’m banking on these images really liberating your mind.’

I plant my hands on my hips. ‘You really think you know me, don’t you?’

He bats his hand lightly as if I’m a moth. ‘Half the glitterati of London reckon they know you, signorina . That’s why certain erotica collectors have been sniffing round while you’ve been out of town.’

‘Collectors? Cool.’

‘Did you know that Ian Fleming allegedly possessed a collection of flagellation erotica? It was his wife Ann who was into it, apparently. She wrote him letters, begging for it . I long for you to whip me. Imagine the scandal of that. In the fifties and sixties. Whipping each other to a frenzy in their Jamaican paradise.’ He runs his hand along the wall, rubbing dusty plaster between his fingers. ‘So you see, punishment isn’t only the stuff of dungeons and fetish clubs. Even the smarter echelons are into it.’

I pretend to look through a magnifying glass. ‘Imagine. The collected work of Serena Folkes coming to light in centuries to come, unearthed in dusty antique shops and little galleries in the back streets of London or New York.’

‘Or Venice itself. You didn’t hold back, that’s why they’re eager to snap you up. You’re out there now and every bit as daring as I suspected.’ His face is wide with laughter, that pebbly rumble from the base of his throat as he unwinds his scarf. ‘Hey. Don’t look so appalled. Everyone has a dark side.’

‘And you want to explore mine?’

‘I want you to explore yours. It’s time to place yourself inside the action for a change, with the aid of some wizardry. See if you want to participate, as well as watch.’ He still sounds so relaxed, his scarf dangling round his neck, his coat open as he leans in the doorway. ‘You’ll see what I mean.’

The photographs show men and women dressed in marionette costumes dancing, feasting, or sleeping. Arms are raised in Bacchanalian delight, bodies are prostrate on sumptuous beds, or resting in poses too awkward for real sleep.

The composition is more stylised than my photographs. More technically adept, too, using studio lighting and exaggerated colour stains.

As I get to the furthest series I see that some subjects are not resting at all. They are being driven from sleep as an orgy is depicted, step by step. It starts with a couple, just like the figures in the lupanare frescoes, half-clothed. They are laying each other down on a big bed in a room styled like a Titian painting, with draped curtains, bowls of fruit, slave girls whispering in the corner.

Soon it’s the people I’m concentrating on, not the composition. In the next picture the couple are kissing messily, pulling at each other’s remaining garments, and in the next the woman is on her back and the man is pushing himself between her legs while other people gather round to watch, including the slave girls.

A familiar heat starts to trickle through my body. The same sensation assailed me in the convent. My eyes travel over the faces, the mouths, the hands, the naked bodies. I remember the nuns drifting round their cells, the shock of the first slap of knotted leather on their downy skin. But this is different, because the people in these pictures are acting, directed by the quiet eye behind the camera.

‘Those nuns were alive and breathing, right in front of you. That’s why you were turned on watching them.’ His voice is soft, and caressing. I can hear it, but I’m barely listening. ‘Let’s see how these images affect you. They’re more extreme, more adult, an even stronger story. This isn’t a private dance, as you so aptly put it. The action involves more than one person.’

‘No technological tricks here that I can see. Just very effective crowd control,’ I sniff. ‘But what’s troubling you?’

I catch him glancing warily at the photographs.

‘The trick is in the way this exhibition forces a response from the viewer. Just go with it. Take no notice. A goose just walked over my grave, that’s all. This is about you, not me.’ He holds up his finger as I try to protest. ‘We’re taking you way out of your comfort zone.’

He waves me on along the sequence. I decide not to query the peculiar way he slips into ‘we’ instead of ‘I’. The scenes progress into a no-holds-barred orgy, beautifully composed and patently not simulated. This is sex by numbers. The hands, fingers, mouths, are everywhere. The women are open, the men are erect, they’re all gymnastic in their positions, beautiful in their physiques. It’s art, but it’s unadulterated sex, too.

‘It’s artificial,’ I remark dismissively. ‘No comparison with the insouciance of my nuns.’

But the display is starting to work on me just as he said it would. The frisson of menace in the room accentuates the chill running through my own limbs. I come to a halt in front of one woman, her face contorted with abandon as she’s groped and penetrated by two men. Not so artificial now. She could be one of those female saints in the Venetian convent’s cloisters, in the throes of religious fervour. The same excited fervour invading me now.

‘The next room will show you the punishment I was talking about. Flagellation brought graphically to life.’

I realise my hand is up as if to stop traffic. For once I want to shake Gustav off, be totally alone. I stumble to the end and turn right, and here is another, smaller room with another huge television screen dominating the far end. This is switched on and is showing an interior of some kind. Just an empty bed, in an empty room. I suppose anything passes for modern art.

The photographs continue to gallop round the room. Here is the same couple as in the last room, but the woman is on all fours now. She is wearing an ordinary-looking dress, but nothing else in the picture is remotely ordinary. For a start her hands are tied to the bed post. Her flowery dress is flipped up over her backside so that it is bare. The man is standing behind her, fully clothed, resting one hand on her rump. His other hand is holding a long thin switch. I’m willing him to get started.