The Girl Behind The Fan (Hidden Women) (2 page)

All this time later, I still oscillated between shame and embarrassment – convincing myself that Marco had got what he wanted when I stripped off and played with myself for his distant pleasure – and anger mixed with sadness. You see, I also had reason to think that Marco’s reluctance to meet me face to face was less about his having got everything he wanted without having to meet me than about his being afraid of
my
rejection if he did. There were aspects to the way things ended between us that quite simply didn’t add up.

I didn’t get to the bottom of it while I was in Venice. Perhaps I never would. I had not heard from Marco in all the time I’d been back in London. In any case, I had plenty of other business to grapple with. I had a thesis to edit and I was on my way to Paris to begin a new job. I’d been commissioned to complete some research for the producers of a historical movie. It was an exciting assignment that I hoped might lead to more interesting work in the film industry. That’s why I needed to get my thesis polished and sent off before too long.

While the stags and hens partied on, I turned my attention back to the glowing laptop in front of me. Having read her personal diaries so closely, I had grown to love my subject Luciana, but that evening, with so much change right ahead of me, reading the diary passages I had translated back in Venice couldn’t help but make me melancholy. When Luciana talked about the Venetian courtyard garden of her lesbian lover’s house, for example, I could picture it only too clearly, because that house was the Palazzo Donato, where I had spent so much time. And when I thought of the Palazzo Donato, I couldn’t help but think of Marco. Or at least the image of him that still lived in my heart. An image based on old photographs and encouraging words blinking on a screen.

Closing my laptop again, I gazed out of the window at the vast flat expanse of Northern France, speeding by at 175 mph. But I wasn’t really seeing the farmland and the pretty provincial church spires that punctuated the endless fields of green. My mind’s eye saw only the courtyard garden in Venice. I was remembering plucking a single white rose on my very first trip there and how that petty theft had led Marco to tease me into telling him how I lost my virginity. A rose in exchange for a defloration.

I told Marco Donato more about myself than I had ever told anyone. Over those weeks when we wrote to each other – sometimes dozens of emails a day – we shared our childhood joys and pains. I shared my hopes for the future. My deepest fantasies.

And though we had never met in the flesh, I felt as though Marco knew my body intimately. Long before we had cybersex together, he had infiltrated my dreams. I’d stared at photographs of him for long enough to be able to imagine him well. And in my dreams, Marco was my ideal lover. He was dominant but always careful and tender. Sometimes he asked me to do things I wasn’t sure I wanted to do, but I always found that I enjoyed myself when Marco took control. I liked to imagine the strong grip of his hands round my wrists or my ankles, holding me in place as he forced me to take my pleasure, teasing me with his soft lips and his warm tongue on my nipples or my clitoris until I could take it no longer and begged him to enter me while my entire body vibrated with desire. When I imagined him inside me, it was as though fireworks had been lit in my head. I couldn’t get enough of him. I would grab his buttocks with my hands and try to force the pace. I wanted to feel him flood me with his passion. I wanted to see him be as swept away by the moment as I was. I wanted him to give in to me and buck and thrash with an energy he could not conquer. I wanted him to be mine.

I had never had such strange dreams or such strong orgasms as I did when I thought about Marco. But of course it never came to anything more than that strange moment in the library. And now he was gone. He had retreated back into his private world, leaving me wanting more and without a hope of getting it. You can see why he had perhaps turned me slightly insane.

Soon the train was pulling in to the Gare du Nord. I got up quickly, grabbing my bag and heading for the door before the drunken stags and hens could start blocking the corridor. I was among the first off the train, walking quickly up the long platform and racing for the taxi rank. Compared to the bright new station at St Pancras, the Gare du Nord seemed old-fashioned and even slightly sinister. There was no one there to meet me as there had been in Venice, when Nick Marsden, my university colleague, came to take me to my flat in the city’s Dorsoduro area. This time I had just an address on a scrap of paper and the promise that the concierge would be there to give me a key. Providing I turned up in good time, that is; I’d been warned that the concierge wouldn’t hang around on my account.

Reaching the front of the taxi queue, I showed the driver the street name. He nodded curtly and plugged the details into his satnav before resuming a conversation on his mobile phone. There was none of the friendly banter that was standard with the water-taxi drivers of Venice. Neither was there anything like Venice’s astonishing beauty to look at on the way. We drove through streets that were far from the picture-book fantasy of Paris to a grey-looking square in the second arrondissement. Standing in front of my new building with my luggage, I wondered for a moment whether I should have stayed in London.

What kind of adventure would Paris turn out to be?

Chapter 3

Paris, 1838

No girl had a more wonderful childhood than Augustine Levert. The only child of doting parents, she made it to the age of seven without considering for a moment that the world was run for anyone’s pleasure but her own. The Levert family lived in a small hamlet near the sea in southern Brittany. Augustine’s father Jean was a fisherman. Her mother Marie, a seamstress. Marie and Jean were childhood sweethearts, desperately in love with each other and utterly enthralled by the one small girl who was the result of their passionate attachment.

But good fortune was not to stay long with
la famille Levert
. Two weeks after Augustine’s seventh birthday, her father went to sea and did not come back. An unexpected storm had taken six vessels with almost all hands. One of only two survivors explained that Augustine’s father died trying to rescue his brother, so Augustine lost an uncle as well. Every family in the region was affected. The entire village was in mourning for months. Theirs was a close-knit community and people were always keen to help each other, but, like a sudden war, this storm had taken too many of the men. Poverty came hot on the heels of grief and soon everyone had to look out for him or herself again.

Marie Levert had not really worked since her marriage. In those short years of bliss, the real world had changed greatly. There was no work to be had in the village. Her elderly mother could not feed two more mouths for any length of time. There was nothing to be done: Marie and her daughter would have to go to Paris.

Augustine detested Paris. She had grown up knowing the freedom of village life and the refreshing breath of the sea. In Brittany, the Leverts lived in a cottage. In Paris, they lived in a single room: a stuffy
chambre de bonne
– or maid’s room – on the top floor of a big house. Marie had already lost her sunny smile when she lost her husband, and living in Paris seemed to leach the very colour from her skin. Seeing her mother so sad made Augustine determined that one day they would leave this wretched city and go home. She hated to have to live in a hovel with no view.

Neither did Augustine enjoy her new school. The city children teased her for her country accent and her unsophisticated manners. But it was more than that. The other girls were jealous. Augustine was as beautiful as an angel. Her brown hair was as glossy as the mane of a thoroughbred horse. Her skin was as smooth and even-toned as a porcelain doll’s face. Her eyes were a bright summer sky-blue, intelligent and alert. Even as a child, she aroused the envy of grown women, who spent hours at their toilette to impersonate Augustine’s natural glow.

Five years after leaving Brittany, however, Augustine was beginning to feel like a real Parisienne. She had the accent. She knew the slang. She knew the places to avoid. She didn’t talk much about Brittany any more. The only trace of that life that remained in their new existence was an oil painting of a fishing boat on calm seas. Augustine’s father had painted it as a courting gift for Marie. It hung above the bed mother and daughter now had to share.

‘If he hadn’t been a fisherman, he could have been a great artist,’ Marie often mused. ‘If he hadn’t been a fisherman then perhaps he wouldn’t be dead!’

Marie could have married again. She had her offers and there was no doubt that it would have made her life easier, but one of the things Augustine admired most about her mother was her fidelity to Jean Levert’s memory. Theirs had been a love truly worthy of the word ‘toujours’, which was engraved on the inside of the wedding ring that Marie would never take off.

Marie Levert often talked with pleasure about the day she and Jean would be reunited in a better place, but when she finally made the journey to Heaven, she would find the way there long and arduous. She died of consumption, over a series of many painful months. Her anguished coughing became more familiar to Augustine than her voice. When Marie finally died, Augustine was relieved. At least now she could remember the mother who had laughed and played, not the mother who only coughed and sobbed.

But now Augustine was an orphan. She had no one to turn to in the world and nothing to her name except the little seascape and the sewing skills she had learned from her mother. Well, perhaps that wasn’t the entire sum of her assets; but her most significant blessing, her beauty, was not to be without its downside.

The orphaned Augustine’s plight raised pity in the heart of her landlord, Monsieur Laurent Griff. Though he could not afford to let the young girl pay no rent, he was able to help find her a job with his brother, Claude, who had a garment atelier nearby. Augustine was good at sewing; she could make stitches as small and neat as a spider’s. Moreover, she was diligent. She was neat and polite. She was always on time. She kept her mother’s small-town ways in that respect. It was important, Marie had always told her, to make the very best impression. You never knew who might be watching.

Unfortunately for Augustine, the person watching her most closely at the atelier was Delphine Griff, daughter of the proprietor. Delphine had seemed friendly enough at first, but that soon changed.

Claude Griff was a little too effusive with his praise for Augustine’s sewing. Delphine – who considered herself to be the best seamstress in Paris – found it hard to believe her father had been moved to such loud admiration by Augustine’s embroidery alone. She got it into her head that her father had fallen in love with the teenager from Brittany. She told her mother. An argument ensued and Augustine found herself out of a job.

It got worse. Monsieur Laurent Griff’s wife put pressure on him to ensure that not only did Augustine lose her job, she also lost her lodgings. It would not have been seemly for them to continue to house the girl who had tried to wreck his brother Claude’s marriage. They had to stand by their family. The girl would be fine on her own, said Madame Griff. She clearly had an aptitude for gold-digging.

And so Monsieur Griff informed Augustine, with great regret, that she would have to leave the room she had shared with her dying mother. He was about to offer Augustine a return of her last month’s rent to help her on her way when Madame Griff arrived and insisted on watching Augustine pack her bags.

Not that Augustine had much to take with her. The furniture in the room, like the room itself, was rented. Her mother’s finest clothes – and some of Augustine’s – had already been sold to pay for Marie’s funeral. Augustine had just two dresses, both plain and sober as a nun’s. She had her rosary. She had her hairbrush. She had the small seascape her papa painted all those years ago. She packed these few things into the battered leather bag that had once belonged to her grandfather.

Madame Griff – who was every bit as jealous and fearful of Augustine’s beauty as her sister-in-law had been – put it about that Augustine left the building spewing curses. In fact, Augustine left quickly and quietly, with an undeserved sense of crushing shame. She found it hard to believe that people could be so cruel without provocation and thus assumed that she must be somehow at fault. She thanked Monsieur Griff for all his kindnesses and apologised for causing him trouble. While Madame Griff was busy crowing about the steps she had taken to avenge her sister-in-law, Monsieur Griff found time at last to press a few sous into Augustine’s hand.

News of her eviction had come upon Augustine so unexpectedly that she had not the slightest idea where next to go. She knocked on some doors advertising rooms to rent but was turned away from them all; Madame Griff’s unfair opinion of her had already spread far and wide. After seven or eight knock-backs, Augustine took herself to a café. She counted her money beneath the table and tried to calculate how long she might survive. If she found lodgings, she still had the problem of finding employment. How would she find employment without her last employer’s recommendation? She could hardly go to Claude Griff and ask him for a letter. Not now.

Augustine came to the conclusion that the only possible course of action open to her was to return to the one place she had truly called home. She would go back to Brittany, where people knew her and would think the best. She thought her grandmother was still alive, but if she was not able to take her in, then surely a cousin would. Family was the most important thing in the end. Augustine’s travails were simply God’s way of letting her know that truth. The more she thought about it, the more appealing a return to Brittany seemed.