Katie In Love: full length erotic romance novel (9 page)

'Esto Quod Es,' she said, and kissed my lips.

It was the school motto - Be what you are.

'I am.'

'A little tart?'

'Absolutely.'

'I am so happy, Katie. Was it that, what's his name, Simon?'

'Noo...'

'Was he a poet? A svelte handsome Lord Byron?' she asked and I laughed; we'd studied him in literature.

'No, actually, he was old with a bit of a belly and a gold chain around his neck.'

'How marvellous, my dream,' said Tara, and we all hugged like we were back again in the dorm.

Bella brushed a curl from my eye, an oddly male gesture that came naturally to her. She had been born with feminine charm and masculine determination in equal measure. She had once written an essay on all the things Romeo and Juliet had done wrong and what she would have done to bring the Montagues and Capulets together. I have a photograph of her in costume in the school play and study it when I have to make a difficult decision. I try to work out what she would do, then do the same. She had from the age of fourteen always been conscious of her innumerable talents. She had waltzed into school after living in Italy and proceeded to seduce everyone, each to their needs. She knew what she wanted and exactly how to go about achieving it, the opposite of me, the opposite of Tara, languid, gamine, with big brown eyes and perfect features, identical to Saskia, her twin, two dolls straight from the factory. They were my rivals, my mentors, my oldest friends.

Tara and I watched Bella perform at a gig that night, her career was just starting, and after the show they took me to
Pink
in Wardour Street, where I would come to learn that where sex with a man carried an air of menace, sex with a girl was like slipping into a bath of bubbling water.

I had been cloaked in the shadows of my family, class, education, my own secret ambitions. A little membrane had snapped and my eyes had opened. I understood why Mr Drew was offhand with me, men will either fawn over a young girl or feign disinterest. I knew why Mother was constantly on the verge of a nervous breakdown. She was a beautiful woman who must have missed afternoon sex with strangers and was forced to find her pleasure among the bridge players and golfers of rural Kent knowing, no doubt, that Daddy, an Orientalist, was with a girl half his age practising his language skills. People adore sex but take it far too seriously, an error I had no intention of making.

8

Black Dwarf

My one concern after driving away that day from Black Spires was waiting for the letter I knew was coming to finally slide through the brass flap on the door and fall to the doormat. Like a death row prisoner, it was like waiting for a reprieve or a death sentence, that something not merely personal, but universal, was suspended within the contents of that letter.

When I arrived home each day from Drew Butler, I searched the places where Golo hid the mail and took my disappointment with me out into the garden to catch the last of the sun. The trees on the horizon at this time of day were bronze like statues and a pink and pale blue glow illuminated the sky. It was, we would learn, the hottest summer on record. I was as brown as teak. Old people were dying from dehydration, the environmentalists warned us that global warming was destroying the planet, and there was a ban on garden hoses, which Mother told the gardener to ignore.

Now, ten years later, when everyone talks and texts nonstop on their smart phone, the very notion of waiting for a letter seems like a literary device. I started to imagine the communication was lost in the post, or had never been sent in the first place. In an unkind moment, I did wonder if the missive had come and Mother had hidden it for reasons that would never be fully explained and would be put down to the onset of menopause.

Then it arrived, a pale dun envelope with a smudged stamp, and I had that feeling I imagine parachutists have the second they pull the rip cord, a tug, a lurch, fear and relief. It was Saturday morning, hot already. The French doors were open. Golo had left the letter on the breakfast table and I heard as I reached for it what I'm sure was a nightingale. I rushed back upstairs, the envelope in trembling fingers. I peeled back the gummed flap, a war bride opening a telegram. Destiny doesn't run in straight lines. I had reached a crossroad, and the contents of that letter would send me in one irreconcilable direction or the other.

Mother poked her head around the door. She was in her dressing gown, velvet slippers with embroidered initials, no make-up.

'It's come?' she asked and I nodded.

'And?'

'I haven't looked yet.'

'Best get it over with.'

I pulled out a sheet of paper with a crest on top, glanced at the words in the first paragraph and tears welled into my eyes. I ran into her arms.

'You got what you wanted,' she said.

I sniffed back my tears. 'I worked for it, Mummy.'

'We all know that,' she said, and shook herself free. 'You must call your father, and Matthew.'

'I will.'

She always wore heels. In her slippers, I was taller, I realized.

'Well done,' she said.

'Thank you.'

She left the room, closing the door. She was pleased for me, I knew that, even if she was unable to show it. I glanced back at the letter, the words fizzing like a struck match. The touch-paper had been lit that day. My life was starting; Mother's was in stasis. She had achieved and acquired the things she had wanted and was aware that there were other landscapes she may have crossed. We set out on a certain course. It is hard to change direction, harder still to turn back down a path littered with regrets. We get one life and I wanted to do everything, be everything I could be. Be myself. At school, there had been moments of boredom and melancholy. Now, I was free. I stood at the open window. The sky was a shade of blue that doesn't visit England often and the lawn was as green as an emerald.

It was mid-afternoon for Father. I could hear the pleasure in his voice when I called him. Fresh tears filled my eyes and it occurred to me that I always cried when I was happy and was stoical when sad; the English way.

My brother was more down to earth. He was fifteen, sailing his passion, and was in Cornwall taking part in a regatta.

'That's not going to make life easy,' Matthew said. 'First Father, then you. They're going to expect me to do the same.'

'You'll be starting uni when I'm leaving.'

'Dead men's shoes, that's all I need,' he said, and I laughed.

'Are you winning any races?'

'No, not really. We don't want too many winners in one family, it wouldn't be fair.'

'Nothing's fair.'

'Yes, I know, it's all, what do you call it, random chaos.'

'That's what Mother calls your room, Matt.'

'Anyway, bloody well done.'

I dressed in a white bikini and grabbed a book;
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix,
the latest from JK Rowling. The wet grass was cold underfoot. My mind was empty like a suitcase in a cupboard. I read without hearing the words, closed my eyes and saw myself dancing naked through the dusty light at Black Spires. Now I had been offered a place at the college of my choice, it felt as if these two disparate turning points were connected, that the first had, by some absurd act of wizardry, intervened in the second.

Golo lugged a table into the garden and placed it in the shade of the rose arbour. She spread out a cloth from Provence; it was green with yellow parrots on swings and loaves of country bread. She placed at the centre a vase with lily-of-the-valley, the white blooms mysterious as pearls.

Mother wore a white cotton dress with a lace top and a large straw hat with polka dots in pink on the white hatband. She looked pretty, immobile, a china doll. I could always tell her moods by the faint twitch in her right eye, the vacant look, like she's just missed a train. She had made marriage her career and her husband was on the other side of the world.

'How's your father?'

'He sends his love?'

'Does he now? I'm sure he's pleased.'

'Over the moon, he said.'

'What a peculiar thing to say. You're so alike.'

We sat down with a bottle of sauvignon blanc in a bucket of ice, my glass topped up with fizzy water.

'This weather,' she said, and sipped her wine.

The air was baked. The roses were fully open, the petals heavy with perfume. There was no breeze. I could hear the soft murmur of a bee and remember how the bottle of Perrier gleamed in the sunlight, the beads of condensation like diamonds, a dark circle spreading over the cloth. Golo had made Caesar salad, far too much. She was from Bolivia, Golondrina, 'swallow' in English, the bird, not the action, plump as a peach, her mission to fatten us up utterly hopeless.

We sat quietly. Mother kept refilling her glass. It was too hot to talk, and it was a relief when Golo came waddling out like a conspirator.

'Misses Boiled...'

'Boyd.'

'Misses Boyed, is Simon.'

'Simon?' I gasped.

'Do tell him to come through,' Mother replied.

'Really, I wish you hadn't said that.'

'Why? I thought you were, whatever.'

'Well, we're not.'

He appeared and she smiled. She lifted back the brim of her hat and her eyes lit up.

'Simon, what a pleasure.' She called Golo. 'Bring another glass, will you, dear, and a chair.'

He stood beside the table as if at ship's rail sailing away from port. He was wearing a tee-shirt with the words
Black Eyed Peas
on the front and a stain on the shoulder. He was as white as clay and I had an urge to tell him about Mr Devlin.

'Hi.'

'Hi.'

'The clever girl has made it into Cambridge. Her father's old college,' Mother said, and he looked away from me as if surprised by a distant sound.

The wine bottle was empty. Mother left and he remained standing there at the table in his stained tee-shirt.

'That's great,' he said.

'Thank you.'

'You didn't mean what you said, you know, those emails, like, like just like that.'

'I did.'

'But why? Why, Katie? You promised.'

'I changed my mind.'

He was breathing heavily, panting, clenching his fists, revving himself up.

'Is there someone else?'

I thought for a second. 'Yes,' I replied. 'Me.'

He wasn't sure what I meant. 'What...'

I pointed at myself. 'Me. It was always about you, what you wanted, what you want...'

'You did, too.'

'Not any more.'

'Well, let's see what happens. We can go out tonight. I'm back now, go into town or something?'

I shook my head. He was pleading, throwing out his hands, jaw tight. The urge to mention Mr Devlin had gone. Like enemies, it is best to keep old lovers, even if they were never lovers, as friends.

'No, best not,' I said.

'Moving up, then, are you, Katie?' He shook his head and looked at me properly, really for the first time. 'You look fucking...fucking amazing. Maybe I'll see you on the way down.'

He turned, marched off, paused and glanced back.

'Bitch,' he spat.

He passed Mother without speaking. She had returned with a second bottle of wine and sat with a look of pleasure crossing her features.

'A thwarted lover, dear?' she said.

'No, not really.'

'Always be nice when you give them the sack. It pays.'

'I was just thinking the same.'

'So we do have something in common after all.'

The bee had sunk its head into the nectar on the rose hanging above me. It flew off, buzzing, as we clinked the rims of our glasses.

'Here's to you, Katie,' she said.

'Thanks, Mummy.'

She sat back. 'It never crossed my mind to go to university,' she said. 'I thought it would be a complete waste of time.'

'It's different now.'

Again, she lifted the brim of her hat. She studied me for a long time, my face, my shoulders, my breasts in the white bikini top.

'Not really,' she replied. 'You could just find an older man, there's lots of them about, someone who likes fishing and shooting, and golf. Those things they do. While he's in the country, you could swan around Kensington with different lovers.'

'Like in a Luis Buñuel film?' I said and she shrugged.

'I've never been interested in all that psychological claptrap. I'm not even sure what bourgeoisie means.'

'Middle class,' I said.

'Really? I thought it was an attitude more than a designation.'

'Well, yes....'

Mother had never spoken like this before, of love and lovers. She didn't know about Roger Devlin, I was sure of that, but was aware that something in me had changed and the way Simon Wells had stalked off had revealed what it was. She stared at me through the vase of lily-of-the-valley.

'You have become quite a beauty, but then, you know that, don't you, Kate?'

I shrugged. 'I'm alright,' I said.

'No, dear. You have become...' she paused, 'that obscure object of desire.' She refilled her glass, leaned back in her chair. 'It is a burden as well as a gift.'

Once, in a restaurant, as a man was leaving, he leaned over my table and whispered, 'Don't think you're special, because you're not. You're nothing.'

What had I done to offend him? Was my voice too loud? Too plummy? Was my skirt too short? He had seen something in me he didn't like. Had Tom seen something he did like? Or was I just a stray girl with whom to see in the New Year?

It felt more than just that to me. But did he feel the same?

I grow anxious when happiness comes near. I grill myself with the same dreary questions. Who am I? Where am I going? What makes me me? What do I want? What do I really want?

There is a game we used to play. You ask a friend, if they had to stop being human and become an animal, what would they be? Immediately they answer, you say, there are no vacancies for that particular animal. What is your second choice. The first choice (often a lion, a wolf, a leopard) is what we think we are; the second is what we really are (a poodle, a fox, a snake). I can't remember my first choice, but my second was a giraffe – aloof, an observer, partial to the sweetest leaves.

I look into the mirror and it seems sometimes as if the person in the reflection is wearing a mask, that there is someone quite different looking out through my eyes, the hunched, haunted figure I call Black Dwarf, my avatar, the portrait of Dorian Gray that hides in the cupboard. I have always surrendered to Oscar Wilde's counsel: The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it.

The mirror reveals each day someone different. Time never sleeps. It moves, bends, spirals. Our cells die and new cells come to life. We grow tired repeating ourselves. Something had been shifting inside me, slow and delicate, like a lizard stalking a fly. An ennui had slipped like a sour smell into my daily routines; perhaps that's why I had moved along the river from west to east?

Was Tom another symptom of this feeling, or the catalyst for something new; something definitive? It was as if I had wished him into being and he had appeared in the dying seconds of the old year; the first day of the new.