Richard Mason - History of a Pleasure Seeker

No one was.

The van Prinsterer ladies talked without ceasing and drew breath in relays. The result was that one or other was always speaking, and not even Piet Barol could find a way to insinuate himself into the conversation. He noticed that Constance and Louisa did not attempt to do so and were listening with gleeful attention.

The van Prinsterers had recently returned from Venice. They had found the heat unbearable and the gondoliers conceited and familiar. They swore never again to travel to a city in which Mr. Vermeulen-Sickerts had not yet opened a hotel. They repeated this refrain as they ate highly sugared cakes and complained of what they had endured at the hands of lesser hoteliers. Not once did they seek anything more substantive than a murmur of sympathy from their guests.

The room was very hot and held nothing in it to delight the eye. As one hour became two, Piet began to wish he might leave it. He could think of no way of doing so politely and sat on, astounded at his hostess’ endurance. As they entered the third hour he felt that anything — the humiliation, even, of admitting to his station in life — would be worth the delirium of freedom. He was about to say that he should make sure Egbert had his bath on time when Constance looked at her watch and said “Goodness me! The hours have flown!” and so permitted them all to leave.

Outside, Piet filled his lungs gratefully with the stench of the canals.

“Adorable, aren’t they?” Louisa unraveled her parasol.

The idea that anyone, least of all Louisa Vermeulen-Sickerts, found the van Prinsterer ladies adorable robbed Piet momentarily of the power of speech. At first he did not understand why Constance, observing his hesitation, broke into a fit of giggles so extreme she had to bend over double to contain them. “Go on, Mr. Barol,” she said when they had turned the corner onto the Reguliersgracht. “Tell us what you really thought.”

“I—” But Piet smelled a test, and this startled his higher functions from their stupor. “I thought two things,” he said solemnly, resolving to pass it with panache. “Poor Queen Wilhelmina.… And poor peacock.”

Jacobina Vermeulen-Sickerts was an upstanding woman. Though she increasingly blamed her husband for his amatory neglect, she loved him dearly. She did not at all enjoy encountering him when floating in the aftermath of a tryst with Piet Barol and had looked forward to his absence — which she intended to use wisely.

Her nurse Riejke Vedder had had definite views on the delineation of masculine and feminine responsibilities, and Jacobina had never attempted to assert herself in questions of finance or sex. To taste the elixir of sexual authority in the fifth decade of life was marvelous.

So was Piet Barol.

He never made embarrassing declarations or asked for any reward save the knowledge that he had given good service. She addressed him with the polite formality she used with her household staff and set the time of their appointments as well as the limits of what took place. She did not permit Piet to undress or touch himself, or touch her with anything but his fingers, lips and tongue. This was the price her conscience demanded and it was a high one because she longed to see him naked. But the prohibitions were practical, too. She had dreaded the shame that settled on Maarten after spending and preferred to dismiss Piet fiercely and cheerfully aroused. The idea that he saw to himself later, and thought of her when he did so, pleased her greatly.

They did not speak to one another in her aunt’s ugly bedroom, and as the weeks passed Piet’s fluency in decoding the clenching of Jacobina’s thighs and the meaning of certain half-suppressed sighs improved. But it was inevitably imperfect. The preferences of the mezzo-soprano were not, after all, quite Jacobina’s, and Piet’s unquestioning confidence in them diminished the impact of his labors.

The crucial distinction was that Jacobina Vermeulen-Sickerts was unpredictably ticklish. This meant that the mezzo-soprano’s insistence on Piet’s taking a meandering route upwards from her feet sometimes made Jacobina squirm in a way that was not at all pleasurable. Piet Barol interpreted this wriggling as a sign of the highest approbation and responded to it by going more slowly still, which made Jacobina yearn to tell him to hurry. She never did, because the idea of putting a base physical desire into words was mortifying; but her restraint was sorely tried when they met for the first time after Maarten’s departure.

Piet’s desire to make the encounter memorable inspired an exceptionally reverent start. When his lips brushed lightly against her ankles, Jacobina began to feel violently ticklish. As Piet’s tongue made its too-gradual progress beyond her knees, she found the experience excruciating and started to writhe urgently. This made Piet slow down further and the sensation became so unbearable that from a place deep within her, potent and unstoppable, a loud voice cried, “Faster, Mr. Barol!”

This immediately had the desired effect. Jacobina’s ticklishness subsided and was replaced by a heavenly sensation. Now she saw the advantages in explicit communication, which yielded results of a precision that bucking limbs and fluttering sighs could not deliver. When Piet’s index fingers began to prize her apart and his tongue to trace its way delicately between them, she wished he would push it into her as far as it would go; that he would lap greedily at her like a dog, wallow in her, force her open.

But what could she say? She could not ask him to do these things to a “little kitten.” The word she had heard street boys use now came to her. It seemed much more accurately to convey her meaning, but the ghost of Riejke Vedder intervened and forbade it. Jacobina opened her eyes. Piet was entirely hidden by her bunched skirts. She hesitated, but the certainty that this was not an opportunity to squander rose up in her. She had come this far. Why should her transgression not have its rewards? She banished her nurse — but still she could not speak. The tickles worsened. She was shaking, and Piet’s pace slackened. Oh, the agony of it!

At last, with a courage that made her proud for days, Jacobina Vermeulen-Sickerts spoke — and she did so in a crisp, commanding voice, in which there was not a trace of shame. “My cunt, Mr. Barol,” she said firmly, gripping the arms of the chaise longue. “Be bolder with it!”

It was an indelibly erotic moment. Piet obeyed Jacobina’s instruction with a brutal enthusiasm that kept her in a state of rolling orgasm until — several hours later — the knowledge that they should stop became insistent, and then absolute. It was a wrench. Finally Jacobina gathered all her self-control and closed her legs to Piet Barol. She dispatched him with a curt word of thanks, and once he had left the room it was almost fifteen minutes before she could stand. She made her way to her own house in a daze of euphoric tranquillity.

Piet went to his bedroom, volcanically aroused. There were no locks on the servants’ quarters at Herengracht 605 and in order to secure his privacy he pulled the armchair in front of his door. He was undoing his flies when he heard a sharp knock. The door opened at once, hit against the chair and revealed Mr. Blok’s white face.

Gert Blok knew at once what was up: the young man’s flushed cheeks, the discreetly positioned furniture, the rich, sordid smell in the room told him all he needed to know. His eyes flicked to Piet’s crotch and there — oh rapture! — was the unmistakable outline of an object to which he had devoted many hours of furtive imagining. This was too fine an opportunity to pass up. He insinuated himself into the room and began to talk.

Mr. Blok told Piet about the entertainment their employer arranged every year for his workers and complained of the extra responsibility the festivities placed on his shoulders. He described the ruined, ivy-clad country mansion Maarten Vermeulen-Sickerts had bought the year before, the tragic fire that had gutted the place a decade previously, the number of bathrooms Maarten intended to install once he found time to attend to its refurbishment. As he spoke, Piet Barol’s excitement dwindled rapidly. He knew very well how pleased Blok was to have caught him, and the butler’s persistence annoyed him.