The Girl Behind The Fan (Hidden Women) (10 page)

So I was not surprised when Remi admitted to me that our first time together would not be his first time overall. Or even the tenth, he later added with a boyish little smile. But he hoped I would be glad that he would be able to show me exactly what to do. He promised me also that he had learned much that would make him the ideal husband. He would show me pleasure I had hitherto only dreamed of. Still I hesitated.

I wished I could have spoken to Arlette about it. Elaine, I knew, would only encourage me. She’d already told me that she’d lost her virginity when she was eleven, to the family’s landlord. Her parents had been more than happy for the situation to continue if it meant they didn’t have to pay the rent but Elaine hated the landlord and ran away as soon as she could. The circumstances of her defloration made me feel sad for her indeed. It should be a moment of mutual discovery. Of pure joy.

I wished I might have been Remi’s first, but since that was not going to be possible, it would have to be good enough for me that I would be the last, as he had promised me from the bottom of his heart. In our eyes we were married in the sight of God, since Remi had convinced me that the Almighty is everywhere and not just in church.

‘And if God did not mean for us to love each other, why did he make the act so delicious?’

‘Dear husband,’ I said. ‘I quite agree. You have my consent.’

So, we went to bed. I was dressed in white. It wasn’t deliberate. My white nightgown – a cast-off from Arlette – was the one that was clean and it was the only one that wasn’t patched and darned like a beggar’s coat. It was voluminous and a little unfashionable but Remi told me that it was the perfect attire for our ‘wedding night’.

Of course, he had touched me before and I had touched myself, far more intimately than the nuns at my first school would have recommended. I was not an entirely innocent girl who would be shocked by the sight of a penis. I had felt Remi’s erect member through his trousers. But to be properly naked with each other at last was something different.

Remi undressed me slowly and reverently. He gazed at my body with such awe and desire that I felt I must really be beautiful. When he was undressed too, we stood side by side in front of my small, scratched-up mirror. We matched one another. His lines and my curves.

‘We make a perfect picture,’ he said.

Remi lifted me and placed me gently on the middle of the bed. He lay down beside me and we started to kiss. His hands moved tentatively over my body. I echoed his movements and wrapped my legs round his, as I had seen Arlette doing with Charles.

Gradually, Remi worked his way down to my most secret part. He rubbed at my clitoris and then he tried to push a finger inside.

I was immediately tense. I had never before let anything inside me.

‘You have to trust me, my darling,’ he said. ‘You have to believe that this will be a wonderful sensation for you or you will never let me in.’

Remi moistened a finger in his mouth and tried again to massage me into a state of more openness. It did not seem at first to be working.

‘Perhaps we should wait,’ he said.

‘No, no!’ I begged him. Not when we had already gone so far. I had a notion in my head that once Remi had my virginity, we would be properly married. Our vows would have been consummated. Until then we were not as firmly wedded as I wanted to be.

‘If you’re sure,’ he said. ‘We’ll try just one more time.’

After he got his finger inside me just a little, he moved on top of me and tried to replace finger with penis. He could gain no purchase.

‘Perhaps if I were a little bit harder.’

‘I think I know what to do,’ I told him.

I thought of Arlette with Girodin, the politician with the penis that would never stand to attention. I remembered how she took him into her mouth in order to encourage him into hardness. I told Remi to sit on the edge of the mattress while I got to my knees on the old Persian rug.

‘Gosh,’ said Remi, when I took him between my lips. ‘You’re . . . you’re quite expert at this!’

‘Oh no,’ I broke off to assure him. ‘I’ve never done it before.’

‘Well, you have a natural talent in that case.’

I was glad to hear that. I wanted to give Remi all the pleasure he deserved. I took him between my lips again and sucked for all I was worth.

Remi soon told me that he felt his penis was as hard as the cock on Michelangelo’s
David
. At the same time, a strange thing had happened. While I had been sucking Remi’s cock, I myself had become aroused. When he put his finger into me again, I was more ready to receive him. I was wet.

‘This is perfect,’ he said. ‘I think at last you may be ready for me. Are you?’

I nodded. I lay back down again and let him climb between my legs. He put his hand down between us and gently parted the lips of my vulva to let the tip of his penis between them.

Carefully, he pushed forward. All the while, he looked into my eyes, making it clear to me that we were becoming connected not only in body but in mind and in spirit too. When he pushed a little harder, I screwed my eyes tightly shut. When I opened them, he was regarding me with such concern and such softness.

‘I must stop,’ he said again.

‘No. Go on,’ I told him. ‘Please go on.’

I wanted this moment to happen. I desperately wanted to feel Remi deep inside me.

‘Please,’ I repeated. He pushed a little more. I was still tight but little by little I was becoming more welcoming. Each time Remi withdrew and pushed forward again, he went a little further. Each time it hurt a little less and I felt a little better.

‘Lift yourself up to me,’ Remi instructed.

He slipped his hands beneath my buttocks to tilt my pelvis more.

I rocked against him as I had seen Arlette rocking with Girodin and the general. I wrapped my legs around his back and he was suddenly so deep inside me I cried out.

‘I am hurting you!’

‘No. No.’

I smoothed my hand across his hair, comforting us both at the same time. I started to move again and he picked up the rhythm. Within moments we were in perfect unison. He kissed me passionately. We were so perfectly connected. It was as though the blood from his veins was pumping through my heart.

‘Oh!’ Remi came in as calm and gentlemanly a manner as I would have expected.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘That did not take long. I’m afraid I have been in a state of complete agitation since the moment I first met you, Augustine Levert.’

I assured him that I did not mind.

‘There will be plenty of time for us to practise,’ I said.

‘We will practise every day!’

I could feel Remi softening inside me. Eventually, he had to withdraw. He rolled off me onto the mattress and pulled me close.

‘I love you,’ he told me. ‘You are my darling girl.’

All that night, Remi held me in his arms and rocked me as though I were a precious china doll. He told me that I would always be his and he would always be mine. In giving him my virginity, I had proved the depth of my love.

I could not have loved him more.

Our first time together had been lovely enough but the more we were together, the more delightful our lovemaking became. Thanks to Arlette, I suppose, I was not under the impression, as I might otherwise have been, that there was only one way to make love and so Remi and I soon had a repertoire of different positions. There were some that made me sigh and some that made me laugh. Remi liked to take me from behind. I liked to go on top of him and thus control how fast and deep he went.

When we weren’t making love, Remi continued to use me as a model for his practice sketches. Now that he had seen every part of me, of course I did not mind when he asked if he might draw me nude. Still he promised me that the sketches would never be seen by anyone but we two lovebirds. Likewise, he said that when he got round to making an oil painting of the sketches, it would be for our pleasure only.

‘I will hang it on the back of our bedroom door,’ he joked. ‘To remind me of what you were like when you were young and lovely.’

I threw a small cushion at his head.

‘But you will always be young and lovely to me,’ he assured me, putting down his sketchbook and pencil and pinning me to the bed.

I felt like the luckiest girl in the world.

‘You should paint me,’ Arlette suggested, one Sunday afternoon when Remi and his friends were lounging by the fire with her. ‘You say you want to be a portrait artist but all you have as your calling card is a few charcoal sketches. Paint me and then you will have something to show anyone who expresses an interest. It can hang here in the salon and perhaps one of my lovers will buy it. Perhaps they’ll commission matching portraits of their wives.’

Remi could not refuse Arlette’s offer. She even said that she would pay for the canvas and the paint.

Elaine was amused by the whole idea.

‘She’s making it sound like a favour to him, but you know how much she’s wanted a picture of herself? It drives her mad that none of her lovers has ever suggested it. She’ll hang that picture in the salon and have them all going crazy guessing which of the others stumped up the cash to pay for it. It’s quite a clever ruse.’

I didn’t care why Arlette wanted her painting. I was just glad that Remi would have the chance to exercise his talent properly.

Remi began work right away. Arlette chose a blue dress for the first sitting. It was a dress that we all thought suited her particularly well, but for the second sitting she changed her mind and decided that she would wear a green dress instead, green being suddenly more fashionable. And then she decided that the cut of the green dress was all wrong. It did not show off her shoulders to best effect. She pulled out a red frock, but what was the point of being immortalised in only your third favourite dress? She changed back into the blue. Remi tried to remain patient.

Remi was not in a hurry. He stayed in the house now. When his friends went home, he remained. He came upstairs to my
chambre de bonne
and we lay down together on my narrow little bed. It did not seem to matter that the bed was so small because we fitted together so well. It was as though we had been made from the same piece of clay and thus we moulded ourselves around each other easily.

I lived for the touch of his lips upon me. In the daytime, whenever I passed him in the house, he would reach out to grab my hand or – if no one else was around – grab me by the waist and pull me to him for a kiss so deep it made me swoon. At night-time, we continued our explorations of each other.

Remi assured me that though I thought him a man of the world, he was, in fact, almost as naive as I was when it came to matters carnal. I didn’t tell him about the things I had seen through the hole in the floor. Instead, I feigned the utmost surprise when he brought a book up to my room one evening. He had borrowed it from the poet. It was called
The Lover’s Lessons
and it recalled the experiences of a young girl in Venice, from the night she lost her virginity until such time as she met a courtesan and embarked upon a Sapphic adventure.

‘We could re-enact this book,’ suggested Remi. ‘For your courtesan, you have Arlette.’

‘Oh, I couldn’t,’ I told Remi, though of course I had thought about it. Who could help but think about it when they had been as close to Arlette as I had been? I had touched her soft skin as I dressed her and smelled her scented hair as I brushed it loose at night. I knew what attracted the men who beat a path to her door. I had seen her in the throes of love and I knew they made her even more beautiful. But would she ever have felt the same about me? I doubted it. I let Remi have his fantasy though.

‘I could paint you both,’ he said. ‘Entangled in each other’s arms. What a sensation that would be!’

‘You would be drummed out of Paris for indecency.’

‘People would queue round the block to take a look.’

I laughed along but I wanted Remi to be content with me and only me. I was glad when he put the book away. I didn’t want to follow in the footsteps of some long-dead girl from Venice. I wanted to make my own story.

Remi was gazing at me but had that faraway look in his eyes again, as though he were looking but not seeing. I might have been a vase of flowers.

‘Kiss me,’ I begged him.

His eyes changed. He smiled at me, engaged once more.

I wrapped my arms round his neck and pulled him down towards me so that the tips of our noses touched. I grinned widely. In that little room, in that narrow bed, with Remi in my arms, I was as happy as any princess.

In the room down below, we heard Arlette’s exultant shriek of ecstasy.

‘Must be the general,’ I said.

Chapter 13

I didn’t expect Greg Simon to fall for my line that going to Italy to see a book of sketches would greatly inform my characterisation of Remi Sauvageon – especially since he was already paying me so much and I was living rent-free in Paris – but next thing I knew, Greg had paid for me to make a round trip. Business class. He had also had his assistant make my hotel reservation. I had been prepared to stay with Nick or Bea – a sofa would have been fine – but Greg’s assistant booked me a room at the Hotel Bauer. In fact, it was a suite. I could not have been more thrilled. I was going back to Venice.