Lose Yourself (The Desires Unlocked Trilogy Part Two) (11 page)

Maria doesn’t understand Joan and her casual attitude to the sexual act. But she doesn’t judge her, either. She is truly fond of her friend and her open, warm manner – so different from most of the other girls in the dance school, who are stand-offish and competitive. Yet she can’t help wishing that Joan respected herself a little more. She has read it in magazines: if you are too easy, no man will ever want to marry you. And isn’t that what Joan wants, at the end of the day? To be a wife, have babies, settle down? Isn’t that what every single girl wants?

Maria has been raised amongst women. All men, including her father, have been figments of her imagination. Despite her liberal upbringing, the daughter of two women in love, Maria secretly wants to be one man’s princess. She wants a summer wedding; she wants the happy ever after.

It is mid-summer. London is warming up. It is nowhere near as hot as it can get in Venice, but, even so, Maria makes two summer dresses out of fabric her mother has sent over from Italy. Jacqueline and she have pored over pictures of Christian Dior’s ‘New Look’ in
Harper’s Bazaar
. Clothes rationing still restricts them in London, so her mother’s package of materials made both of them cry, as if they had been sent the crown jewels. How on earth had Belle found such beautiful textiles in Italy?

Maria is a talented seamstress, taught by Pina to sew when she was a little girl. She promises Jacqueline that they will both be ‘New Look’ girls before the summer is out. How well Belle knows her colouring! With her dark, curly hair, pale skin and blue eyes, Maria looks best in jewel colours. And so Maria makes two dresses for herself, but, instead of the pastels favoured by other girls, she makes one in ruby red, with the Dior fuller skirt, and one – a little more girly – in sapphire blue with tiny pink buds, a pleat and tuck on the back of the skirt to accentuate her bottom, and a bolero jacket to emphasise her waist.

Wearing her new summer dresses, Maria feels a spring in her step, and knows by the admiring glances of the Londoners that she looks good. Her English has improved immensely and she is really beginning to feel like she fits in here. Now that the Olympics are almost upon them, there is a festive feeling in the city: an excitement and pride.

In dance school they have been rehearsing
Pandora
relentlessly. Today in class, Joan collapsed, sobbing on the floor of the studio after Lempert had made her repeat the same phrase what seemed to be a hundred times. Maria is glad she is only part of the chorus. She wouldn’t be able to cope with such pressure at the moment. Yet, although Lempert is a hard taskmaster, there is something about him that makes you want to do your best for him. You want to work hard. You want to shine and do this provocative ballet justice.

It has now been two months since Felix rescued her and, for Maria, he has become a fictional character. She has lost hope that she will ever see him again.

It is a Friday, and the girls are packing up their dance things after life drawing class. Joan grabs Maria’s sketchbook and flicks through it. ‘Oh, these are great, Maria; you really are good at picking up each pose.’

‘To be honest, Joan, I don’t understand why we have to do life drawing when we are dancers.’

‘It’s about looking at the body, studying another dancer in a pose and seeing the line through them,’ Joan says. ‘Were you not listening to Lempert when he explained?’

‘Yes, of course. I would just rather be dancing . . .’

The changing room has cleared and it is just the two of them left. Maria notices her friend is still in her black leotard and tights. ‘Are you not coming with me?’

Joan sighs. ‘No. I have to rehearse some more, with Louis.’

In these final few weeks before the show, Louis and Joan have been doing even more extra work on their duet in the evenings.

‘OK. Well, don’t overdo it.’ Maria checks her face in her compact. ‘See you on Monday.’

She is several streets away and in a shop buying cigarettes when she realises she has left her purse behind on the bench in the girls’ changing rooms. She supposes that, since Joan and Louis are still at the studio rehearsing, the door will be open. She needs to get her money. She had all of her allowance for this month inside the purse, as well as her ration cards.

Maria walks briskly back up the street. She is in her blue dress with the pink flowers. She feels delicate in it, like an oriental bloom.

Sure enough, the front door of the dance school is still unlocked. She pushes it open and walks as quietly as she can down the corridor. She doesn’t want to bump into Lempert, or disturb Joan and Louis. All the girls adore Louis. He is from the Caribbean, with such beautiful skin that Maria is constantly tempted to reach out and stroke him. He is built like a pure powerhouse. It is hard not to be bewitched by him when he is dancing. His synergy can be blinding. Joan had been nervous about her duet with him. He seems to be one of the few men that she has ever been tongue-tied around. Yet it appears to Maria that their partnership is going well. When they dance together, they look so good.

Maria rushes down the corridor, glancing at her watch. She has promised Jacqueline she will go to the butcher and get into the tripe queue before it is too late. She is hoping that her dress might inspire the butcher to give them something other than tripe – maybe a paltry chop or two. As she approaches the studio, she is surprised not to hear the pianist. Maybe he has gone home already. Passing the door, she hears a strange noise. She is not sure what it is but, without thinking, she pushes open the door. The studio is deserted, yet she can still hear the same sound: a cry, or something more like a mew. It is coming from the gallery above the piano. She slips off her shoes and tiptoes across the wooden floor. She is not really thinking about what she has heard; she is just curious. Maybe a cat is trapped inside the studio and needs to be let out? She climbs up the stairs and peers around the corner. What she sees makes her jaw drop.

Her friend, Joan, is lying on the table that, less than one hour ago, they were all sitting around and drawing at. She is lying on her back, facing Maria, but she cannot see her because tied around Joan’s eyes are a pair of black dance stockings. Her bare legs are up in the air, so that she is an L shape, and, pressing against her, with his back to Maria, is Louis. Both of them are naked. Joan’s skin is cream to Louis’s rich colour. Maria cannot take her eyes off his buttocks. She has seen his body every day in his leotard, and yet, to see those buttocks naked and moving, thrusting forwards . . . Louis has Joan’s little feet balanced on his shoulders and he has pulled her right to the edge of the table. He is pushing in and out of her, and the mewing is Joan herself, as he goes further and further.

Maria brings her hand to her mouth in shock. So this is it: the sexual act. She has seen pictures of it, of course. She has imagined it, but never like this – never as primal, urgent and raw. She looks up at the back of Louis’s head and hears him panting as he bangs his body harder and harder into her friend. What should she do? Should she stop them? Run away? Maria does neither. She crouches down at the top of the stairs and she watches. She cannot help it. She is an eighteen-year-old virgin in love with a fantasy man and she wants to see what this act is that Joan refers to all the time. She wants to see what pleasure is. She feels a mixture of emotions: shock, wonder, disgust and yet stronger than all of these is a throbbing between her legs, the way her limbs feel liquid and the strange palpitations deep within her.

Louis speeds up and their lovemaking becomes more ferocious. It is a dance – the first dance of all, Maria thinks, as she watches him cry out with one final thrust and then collapse on to the bare chest of her friend. Maria quickly ducks and slides down the stairs. Joan must never know she saw this. She slips out of the studio and runs to the changing room, quickly retrieving her purse from where it has fallen beneath the bench. It would be a disaster if she bumped into Joan – especially after she has seen her so exposed.

Back outside, she hurries down Kennington Road. All looks normal. It is just another sunny afternoon in London. The sunlight streaks her face as she rushes away, but she feels damp beneath her clothes and her breath is short. She realises there is a whole world that she is not part of. Do husbands and wives make love like that? she wonders. Or is it just for lovers – illicit love?

Afterwards, Maria always felt that what she witnessed that day cracked the perfect mirage of her princess dream. It changed her fate. She believed it was no coincidence that, when she turned the corner of her street, carrying her parcel of tripe in one hand, the powerful aroma of raw meat filling her nostrils, its bloody smell mixing with the June roses in the gardens she passed by,
he
would be walking towards her in the other direction.

At exactly the same time, they reach the gate to number eighteen. When he turns to look at her, he is just as he is in her dreams: a tall, dark stranger, with brooding eyes and full lips – a man straight out of one of the gothic novels Pina reads; a man you cannot refuse. And so, before Felix even speaks, Maria is his.

As she turns off the Finchley Road, into the leafy
street in Hampstead, the sun comes out, streaking the oily road with rainbows. Yet inside Valentina is feeling blacker and blacker. Her anger is gone. All she feels now is fear. What if he slams the door in her face? Can she really handle the cold reality of her father rejecting her? What with everything else going on in her life right now, why on earth is she putting herself through this?

Yet it is precisely her torment over Theo that has led her to find her father. After another restless night trying to figure out how she could prove her love to Theo, she has come to the conclusion that she still cannot completely trust him. He has asked her to trust him. He told her he loved her. Yet she can’t work out why he is going to continue to see Anita. As the hours ticked by, and she listened to the soft snores of Antonella in the bed beside hers, Valentina realised that another twist of fate could not be ignored: the fact that she went to see Garelli the very day she was leaving for London, only to discover that her long-lost father lived in London. Maybe here is the key to the puzzle of her own heart? If she can face her father, and her fear of him rejecting her, she might begin to trust Theo and ultimately win him back by showing him this. But she is still wavering. She wants Theo back, but she is afraid of exposing herself. She wishes Anita was off the scene and she had no competitor.

As the grey dawn began to seep through the gap in the curtains, Valentina got out of bed listless and on edge. She decided to distract herself by watching the old film footage of Maria Brzezinska dancing in the Ballets Jooss’s
Pandora
. Despite the name of the dancer and fact that she did bear a striking resemblance to herself, Valentina just couldn’t believe that she was her grandmother. This ethereal, creative spirit was at odds with the shy wife and mother she had heard of. In any pictures of her grandmother that she had seen, Valentina remembered a small, plump woman. There was nothing about her that suggested she was once this waiflike creature, flitting about the stage. Moreover, if it really was her grandmother, why did she never tell her daughter that she was a dancer? Why did she keep that part of her past secret? Valentina tried to follow the dance, but the footage was disjointed and then, all of sudden, stopped when the character that looked to be her grandmother was lifted into the air by one of the other dancers.

Valentina turned off the film footage and put aside her laptop. She lay on her back on the couch. She wanted to wake Antonella and confide in her. She wanted to tell her about seeing Theo. Yet she knew that her friend would instruct her to forget about him, especially since he was going out with someone else. She may be promiscuous and adventurous, but Antonella is not into stealing men off other women, just as Valentina had thought she wasn’t, either. And yet she can’t quite believe that Theo is serious about Anita. Something has reached beyond her concern for the other woman’s feelings. She knows it isn’t a nice thing to want to break them up, but she can’t help it.

Valentina’s pace slows to crawl. She pulls the address Garelli wrote down for her out of her coat pocket and reads it again. She is only a few houses away. A man is walking towards her. Her stomach clenches and her palms feel sweaty. He looks to be in his sixties, tall, with thick grey hair and spectacles. It could be him. She is not certain how much he has changed since she was six. She walks towards him mechanically, her throat tight with fear. Just as he approaches her, she looks into his face. He has very dark skin and thick, bushy eyebrows. Close up he looks nothing like the old photographs she has of her father. She quickly glances away, embarrassed, her heart rate slowing with relief.

Now she is outside her father’s house. It is a narrow, terraced house with sash windows and a small front garden. It is a miniature house, but looks well maintained – cared for. This handsome little house doesn’t fit with the new image of her father, the wandering investigative journalist, the man who doesn’t care about his own children . . . So how does he find it in his heart to care about a mere house?

She takes a deep breath and is just about to walk up the steps to the front door when something catches her eye. She sees a figure in the periphery of her vision; someone lurking behind her. She spins around and, to her utter shock, standing on the other side of the road and staring at her quite blatantly is none other than Theo’s art thief rival, Glen. She takes in his height and his blond hair, shining like a gold crown in the sunlight. He looks like some kind of futuristic avenging angel. Despite it being a warm day, he is wearing a heavy long black coat. His hands are shoved in the pockets. He doesn’t move, or walk away. She realises that he is standing there waiting for her. She wonders how long he has been following her. Could he have trailed her all the way here, to a place that is so personal?

Her emotions flip and now her terror at meeting her father turns to rage at this man for intruding in her life yet again. She marches across the road until she is right in front of him, yet he doesn’t move to accommodate her and her heels are tipping off the edge of the kerb. He is so tall that she is forced to look up at him. She is glad she is wearing sunglasses so that the sun doesn’t glare into her eyes, and she can look at him with the loathing she feels without him actually seeing it so blatantly.

‘What are
you
doing here?’

‘Hello, Valentina; how nice to see you again,’ Glen says smoothly, in a crisp English accent. ‘You are most welcome to my home city.’

‘How dare you follow me? You stay away from me.’ She is so angry that she points her finger in his face.

‘My, my! You are in a bit of a temper, my dear,’ he replies. In a flash, his hand springs out and he grabs her pointing finger, squeezing it tight.

Pain shoots down Valentina’s hand and arm. ‘Let go of me,’ she hisses.

His eyes glitter. ‘I must say,’ he says evenly, still gripping her hand tightly so that she feels like her finger might snap off, ‘I am so glad we have run into each other like this. It is so convenient.’

‘What do you want?’ she asks, twisting to get away from him. ‘If you don’t let go, I’m going to scream.’

He smiles and then drops her hand. ‘I do apologise. I didn’t mean to hurt you,’ he says, in a way that makes Valentina feel that his intention was just that.

‘Stay away from me,’ she hisses. ‘Otherwise I’ll report you to the police.’

He crosses his arms. ‘Well, now, we know, Valentina, that you and your boyfriend don’t want to get the police involved in our affairs.’

‘He’s not my boyfriend.’ She laughs, suddenly glad to have the upper hand. ‘Theo and I are over – have been for months.’

Yet Glen shakes his head, looks down at her, all knowing. ‘Oh, no. Anyone can see that you two belong together. You are one of the great love stories, my dear. I have every confidence that one day you will be wearing Theo’s wedding band on that little finger there.’

He prods her sore hand and she thrusts it into her pocket defensively.

‘You’re wrong. He has a new girlfriend. Why don’t you go and harass her?’ She turns on her heel and starts to walk back down the street. She can’t go and visit her father now – not with Glen stalking her. She can hear his footsteps behind her and, no matter how fast she walks, he keeps up. She feels anger coursing through her and she stops, spinning around. ‘What do you want? What?’

He saunters up to her, so that his lips brush the tip of her head. She feels his breath on her forehead and she can smell him: that overwhelming male musky scent that had been so suffocating the first time she met him at Marco’s party in Milan.

‘You can give Theo a message from me,’ he says, smiling at her, sweetly.

‘Why don’t you tell him yourself?’

‘Because he won’t listen to me, Valentina, but I am confident he will listen to you.’

She shrugs, trying to appear as if she doesn’t care. ‘Well, OK; what’s the message?’

‘Tell him he owes me one million dollars.’

She snorts derisively but Glen looks serious.

‘Tell him that’s what Gertrude Kinder had agreed to pay me for retrieving the Metsu painting,’ he says, referring to the Dutch Master Theo had found before Glen could, and had returned to its rightful owner free of charge. ‘That’s my livelihood.’

Valentina crosses her arms. ‘Don’t you think it’s immoral to demand such a huge sum of money from a little old lady for giving her back something she owned in the first place?’

Glen laughs nastily. ‘Don’t get all moral with me. I see the way you live, the things you do, Valentina . . .’ he sneers. ‘You are a very naughty girl.’

She feels disgusted by his innuendo. ‘That’s completely different.’

He cocks his head to one side. ‘Well, we all have our moral codes. And I don’t see what is wrong with being paid for doing a dangerous job. My very liberty is at stake. Besides, do you know how rich Gertrude Kinder is? Why shouldn’t she pay me?’

‘I don’t think there’s much point in me telling Theo that he owes you all this money . . . even if I actually see him while I am here in London,’ she adds.

‘But I have an offer for him,’ he says. ‘I know why he is here. I know what he is after.’

Valentina casts her mind back to the conversation she had with Theo yesterday. He had of course told her that he and Glen were after the same picture.

‘You can tell him that, if he lets me have the Masson . . . well, then I will let bygones be bygones. Otherwise—’

‘Otherwise what?’ she interrupts, hotly.

‘I will have to take you.’

Valentina widens her eyes at the man’s audacity. ‘What makes you think I will let you “take” me? I don’t belong to any man; I never have and I never will.’

‘Believe me, you will have no choice in the matter.’

There is something in the way Glen says this that frightens Valentina, although she is determined not to let him see her unease.

She puts her hands on her hips and gives him her coldest stare. ‘I have a piece of advice for you,’ she says. ‘Stay away from me. If you have messages for my
ex
-lover, deliver them yourself. It’s nothing to do with me.’

Before he has a chance to respond, Valentina jumps on to the back of a double decker bus that has just pulled in at a stop on the Finchley Road. She climbs up the tiny stairwell, her heart pounding, wondering if he has got on behind her. Yet, when she sits down and looks out of the window, she sees Glen still standing on the street looking up at her. His eyes are black with menace. Despite Theo’s assurances that the man is harmless, Valentina’s skin is prickling with apprehension.

She is still spooked later that evening, reluctant to go out with Antonella. However, after a two-day hangover that had her bedbound most of the time, Antonella is determined to make up for lost time.

‘We’re only here another few days, Valentina; we have to go out. Besides, Aunt Isabella has got us tickets for The Crazy Horse’s “Forever Crazy” tonight.’

‘Isn’t that a Parisian burlesque show?’

‘Yes, but it is in London for the first time, on the South Bank. I’ve always wanted to go.’

Valentina remembers now she saw a poster for the show as she was travelling back by Tube this afternoon. It was a close-up of the women’s faces and they all had the same wig on: Louise Brooks-style black bobs, just like her.

‘Isn’t that the sort of thing you go to with your boyfriend? Not two women on their own.’

‘Three,’ says Antonella, kneeling down and unzipping her suitcase.

‘Are you telling me that your aunt is coming with us, as well?’ Valentina asks, astonished that the older woman would be interested in the burlesque show.

‘Of course; she bought us the tickets.’ Antonella starts pulling clothes out of her suitcase. ‘Now, what to wear? We have to look stunning, of course . . .’

‘I don’t think there’s much point trying to compete with those beauties,’ says Valentina, remembering the poster.

Antonella twists around and smirks at her. ‘Quite the contrary; Aunty says that there will probably be groups of young men there, so we should be prepared to do a little flirting during the interval.’

‘Your Aunt Isabella said this?’

‘Yes; she is on the hunt.’ Antonella giggles.

Valentina rolls her eyes. ‘Why doesn’t she do something a little more demure, like internet dating?’

‘She’s tried that – said she only met a load of perverts that way. She says it’s better to actually size someone up in the flesh first, before you send any signals.’

Now Valentina feels even less like going out. The last thing she wants to be part of is a girls’ pick-up night with Antonella and her flamboyant aunt.

She flops down on the bed and considers telling Antonella about Glen . . . Theo . . . her disastrous non-meeting with her father, but she doesn’t quite know where to begin.

‘Where were you all day?’ Antonella suddenly asks her, as if reading her mind. ‘I went over to the gallery in Soho, but you weren’t there.’

Valentina fiddles with the eiderdown. ‘I was just walking around, thinking.’

Antonella stops pulling clothes out of her suitcase, and looks over at Valentina. ‘Have you decided?’