Eighty Days Amber (25 page)

I did, however, warn him to acquire more formal attire for the occasion as he told me he hadn’t travelled to Spain with much in the way of clothing.

The chauffeur collected Dominik and I at 10 p.m. sharp and whisked us away in the spacious comfort of a luxury limousine. We barely spoke as we drove along the winding coastline that led to an opulent yacht at the end of the Sitges marina in Aguadolc. A bright full moon shone across the water to our left and I spent the duration of the journey concentrating on the peaceful shimmer of the still ocean in an effort to calm my nerves.

Dominik sat comfortably in the silence, and I was relieved that he was not the sort of person who felt obliged to release a stream of inane and perpetual chatter to fill a gap in conversation.

The hostess for the evening, a middle-aged Network matriarch clad in a dark-green velvet evening gown with a white lace collar and a pair of heavy gold tear-shaped earrings, spotted me as soon as I arrived and I was ushered away from the guest area and into a makeshift dressing room in the lower level of the yacht, leaving Dominik to his own devices. He had bought an Armani tuxedo at one of the exclusive stores off the Passeig de Gracia, but still looked out of place, apparently unaccustomed to the sheer scale of the unabashed and often tasteless wealth that surrounded us.

‘La Mer’ complemented the setting perfectly and my limbs moved indolently to the rising beat of the music without any accompanying feelings of disgust or shame at the thought of dancing with a total stranger that night in Amsterdam. My bad memories had faded and tonight Debussy was just Debussy.

When Tango stepped into the spotlight, any remaining tension in my posture relaxed and I slid happily into his arms, relieved to see him again and delighted that the pleasure I had first taken in his body and the delicacy and grace of his skilful movements had returned to me.

Tango had always been my favourite dance partner. He was the most handsome and the better dancer of the three of my companions, and he was the one that I felt the most warmth towards. He always greeted me with a smile and a wink before putting on a show of domination that matched the routine I had devised and seemed to fool the audience, but that I knew was as theatrical for him as it was for me. Unlike the man that I had danced with in Amsterdam, Tango seemed genuinely to care for me, as much as it was possible for two people to care for each other in such limited circumstances.

With Dominik in the audience, I was even more eager to put on a good show. As I imagined his eyes on my body and the arousal that he might feel at the spectacle of my nudity and the athletic public coupling that we were about to present, I felt myself tingle with anticipation.

When Tango took my hand and pulled me against him, it felt like the first time that we had danced together, thrilling and dangerously erotic. In response, my nipples hardened like beacons and wetness gathered between my thighs, ready for his penetration.

He inserted himself inside me and I was barely able to control my body enough to continue the routine, so desperately did I want to just pull this tanned and muscular man on top of me and simply fuck him on the hard wooden floor of the yacht, audience be damned. But living with Viggo had taught me that restraint can sometimes be as pleasurable as fulfilment, and besides, I was a professional and here to put on a class act, not an animalistic and pornographic display full of heat and passion, even if that was what I desired at the time.

Tango squeezed my hand gently in farewell as the music came to a finale and I tiptoed backstage, masked by the sudden cut of the stage light. In the dressing room, I took a few deep breaths and resolved to calm myself down and present a professional front to Dominik. I was not inclined to explain to him the history of my dancing or the feelings that appearing on stage aroused in me, and I had by then decided that I did not want to take him to my bed or pursue him any longer.

Dominik was apparently shocked and awed by the performance.

‘That was beautiful,’ he said as the chauffeur returned us to our respective hotels.

‘It was also well paid,’ I replied, even though the money bored me now. I was no longer impressed by the dripping wealth that was always on display at these events and neither did I care if I possessed it or not. I just wanted to dance.

Dominik kept on asking me question after question about Viggo’s art and music collections until I began to wonder if he’d turned into some sort of amateur sleuth. Or perhaps he had got wind of the disappearance of Summer’s prized violin, which had gone missing the night of Viggo’s
charity performance at the Brixton Academy. Did he suspect that Viggo was in some way responsible for it? More likely he was seeking details of real people to hang his latest novel onto. He had told me over dinner that he was writing the story of an instrument and its passage from one owner to the next. A fascinating idea and one that required much ruminating on the subject of collectors. I wondered whether it had occurred to Dominik that he was one of them, a voyeur like any other, wandering the world in search of characters, motives and emotions to snare like butterflies in the net of a lepidopterist and pin down onto a page.

The Belsize Park mansion was empty when I returned. Summer was still touring. A postcard from Berlin was waiting in the mail box addressed to Viggo and I. She would be home soon, following concerts in cities across Scandinavia – Copenhagen, Oslo and Helsinki – with the tour then ending in Sarajevo and Ljubljana. At this rate, Summer would turn into more of an international wanderer than I.

Viggo was on his way to join her and Groucho Nights for a special one-off appearance in Stockholm. I had declined the opportunity to go with him. Somehow, even though Finland was geographically nearer, it was too close to Russia for comfort. I knew the feeling was irrational. When I thought of Russia, I thought of St Petersburg and Donetsk and my friend Zosia from the dormitories in the School of Art and Dance, and her sunken face, the thin features of her child and her garden of skeleton trees. It was not a place that I ever wanted to set foot in again.

Time passed as it always did, but not without the
inevitable waves of loneliness that were part and parcel of having virtually nothing to do. Without my dancing, any other form of employment or my two lovers to keep me company, my life took on a certain aimless quality and it was only by immersing myself in the imaginary worlds contained within the books that I found on Viggo’s endless shelves that I was kept from going stir crazy. On one particularly uneventful day I amused myself by attending a cookery class near Oxford Circus, where I irritated the chef by imperiously suggesting that he was far too heavy handed with his macaroons.

When Summer eventually returned a few weeks later I greeted her with all the enthusiasm of a young lover, but after the initial passion of our reunion she became withdrawn and spent little time at home. She never mentioned Dominik and I did not inform her that we had run into each other in the Catalan capital, seeing little point in causing her pain if thoughts of him touched a nerve.

Viggo and I were still lovers but our feelings for each other had long since lost their fire and I felt little for him besides a playful friendship. Still, we seemed to draw comfort from each other’s bodies as I woke most mornings tangled up in his arms with Summer a short length away from us curled up alone at the edge of the bed.

Since her return from the Groucho Nights tour she lived in a permanent state of distraction and had lost her usual joie de vivre for our group lovemaking sessions. Summer had always been the spark that lit our triad’s fire and, without the vision of her pliant body pressed against Viggo’s and the temptation to pull her into one position or another using her mane of fiery hair as a set of reins, I spent more time pleasuring myself alone in the shower or the
guest room where I had slept when I first moved in. I always thought of Chey when I masturbated, reliving our time together and imagining the athletic and sometimes perverse sex sessions that I wished we could have.

The motivation for Summer’s strange behaviour became clear when I awoke late and bleary-eyed one morning after an evening spent with her and Viggo at a private preview for a photography exhibition on the South Bank close to the hotel where I had bedded my first woman, Florence. Summer and Viggo had gone home early while I stayed for the afterparty, drinking champagne until the wee hours. I’d crawled into the bed we shared blissfully unaware of Summer’s absence and totally ignorant of the events that had unfolded without me.

When I padded down to the steps to the breakfast bar I found Summer radiantly happy and half naked, her slim waist encompassed by one of Dominik’s arms. His hand strayed only occasionally down to the cleft in her arse and the bare flesh of her thighs, every now and again slipping between her legs and caressing her mound, while Viggo looked on, grinning like a child in a candy store, and Summer blushed a dozen different shades of red despite the fact that Viggo had seen her naked a hundred times and more and touched her in those same places. None of them were yet aware that I was watching from the stairway.

Dominik was like a different person when he was with her, I observed. Gone was the melancholy man that I had met in Barcelona and in his place was a confident and powerful man whose self-assurance seemed unquestionable. She nestled her head against his shoulder tenderly, apparently inviting him to exert his playful brand of dominion over her. In his presence she lost that hard edge she so often
assumed, the veneer of coolness that I had only otherwise seen dissolve when she was playing the violin or having particularly vigorous sex. They were made for each other.

And Viggo seemed pleased by the whole affair.

‘Morning,’ I announced, tightening my satin bathrobe and cruising down the last few steps as though I had only just awoken and as if finding the three of them in various states of undress in the kitchen was not unexpected in the slightest.

They looked up in unison, each wearing an expression that drifted halfway between happiness and embarrassment.

‘Morning, Queen of the Night,’ said Viggo. ‘How is our ethereal mermaid today? Did you leave any ladies at the party unsullied?’

‘Only the dull ones.’ I grinned back at him. Actually I had spent the night engaged in only the most mild of flirtations with a pair of girls clad in matching bright satin dresses, but I saw no harm in perpetuating Viggo’s idea that I broke hearts wherever I went. He seemed to take some kind of perverse satisfaction from the thought that every man and woman in the world would happily worship at my feet given half a chance. It was a fantasy that cemented my status as the jewel in his crown of beautiful things.

‘And how were your respective evenings?’ I asked collectively.

There was a long silence while I wondered whether Viggo, Dominik and Summer had spent the night engaged in a new threesome combination that excluded me. Viggo had previously hinted at the occasional past dalliance with a male lover in his never-ending quest to savour every experience under the sun. I was unsure of Dominik’s persuasion but did not doubt for a second that Summer would have
relished an opportunity to be sandwiched between the two men.

But as it transpired, the nocturnal activities of my three companions were of a quite different nature altogether. I listened as Viggo explained that between the three of them they had managed to track down Summer’s lost Bailly violin and Dominik had apparently risked life and limb to retrieve it.

‘So, who was it who had the instrument?’ I asked, perplexed.

‘We won’t bore you with the details,’ Dominik replied smoothly. ‘It’s rather complicated and not nearly as exciting as Viggo makes out.’

‘But it gave you some good material for your next novel, I hope?’

‘In a manner of speaking. I don’t like to stray too close to real life.’

Summer snickered. Dominik smacked her playfully on the backside.

‘Shall we leave these two lovebirds to it?’ Viggo asked, offering to treat me to breakfast at a nearby cafe on Hampstead High Street.

Summer and Dominik were gone by the time we returned, and within two weeks she had collected her few belongings and left the Belsize Park mansion for good in favour of Dominik’s more modest house further up the hill in Hampstead proper. In between shifting boxes and sorting through our joint wardrobe, there were many promises of keeping in touch and seeing each other for dinner and walks on the Heath and so on, but in reality I knew she was happy with Dominik and ready to close the book on this particular chapter of her life.

One day, some weeks after Summer had left our lives – and our bed – I took Viggo up on his invitation to join him in his studio on Goldhawk Road where he was recording some new songs with the Holy Criminals. Summer had inspired him to create an album with a more classical bent, and he had been auditioning young classical musicians from the nearby School of Music to fulfil his penchant for sponsoring the many hopefuls who didn’t have much of a chance at a record contract without a foot in the door.

I was quickly checked off the security list and pointed down the corridor to the recording studio to find that I had picked the one day in weeks that Viggo was not actually present.

‘He’s in a meeting with some record company folk,’ announced a tall blonde girl with a cello leaning between her spread legs when I asked if anyone had seen him.

‘But you’re very welcome to stay and watch us,’ she added with a flirtatious smile and a bold wink.

With that kind of welcome, it seemed rude to decline, so I settled myself into one of the leather beanbags that rested on the studio floor and watched her play.

She didn’t lose herself in the music in quite the way that Summer had, but it was still a delight to observe the sharp angle of her wrist as she coaxed note after note from the strings and the way that she clenched the instrument so firmly between her open thighs.

‘I’m Lauralynn,’ she purred, extending her hand in a gesture of greeting when she had finished her set. For a moment I wasn’t sure whether she intended for me to meet her hand with my own, or to bend down and kiss it. ‘Fancy a drink?’