The Girl Behind The Fan (Hidden Women) (9 page)

Dear Marco,

Thank you for responding so quickly. It will be enormously helpful for my research.

Are you well? Have you been having a good summer? Are you busy? Etc, etc.

I wrote a long email, telling him exactly what I had been doing since we saw each other last and how much I hoped we would be able to see each other if I came to Venice again. But I didn’t send it. Instead, I kept my response to a simple expression of thanks. I’d let him know when I would next be in Italy.

I spent the rest of the day swinging between excitement and discouragement. The coolness of Marco’s email suggested I should stay well away. How much could the book of sketches actually tell me, after all? I didn’t really need to see them. But the speed with which he had responded to me was encouraging, wasn’t it? My heart grasped at the flimsy excuse to try to deepen our correspondence.

When would I next be in Venice? That was the real question now, as far as my heart was concerned. I sent an email to Greg Simon telling him at length about my discovery and how it might help me to learn more about our movie’s love interest. Then I took a walk to the cemetery at Père Lachaise. I bought a small posy of peonies from a flower stall outside the cemetery’s gates. I wanted to say ‘thank you’ to Augustine for giving me this chance to be in touch with Marco again. Perhaps I wanted her to intervene on my behalf to make my wishes come true.

When I got to her grave, I found that someone had beaten me to it. There were already fresh flowers in the little marble vase. I arranged my flowers alongside them and muttered a quick prayer.

‘Please don’t let this be a mistake.’

Getting back to the apartment, I read Marco’s email again, looking for a hidden meaning. A wisp of affection. Some sort of encouragement. But there were so few words that there really was nothing to parse. Instead, I looked back over older correspondence. Despite having felt at times pretty angry with Marco Donato, I had kept everything he ever wrote to me. Our direct-message conversations, I’d also saved. It felt important to have some kind of evidence of what had happened in the Palazzo library. But I had never until now plucked up the courage to read the words we had sent flying across the Internet to one another like a pair of teenagers passing secret notes in class. I hadn’t dared. I thought it would hurt.

Perhaps now was the moment. I should read back through our emails with the benefit of time and distance. There, in black and white, would be the truth of the situation. Either I would find enough there to make it worth booking a trip, or I would see that we had nothing more than the kind of banter that popped up on dating websites every day.

It took me a while to read our correspondence. There was so much in it. That in itself seemed promising. And then I found the transcript of that day in the library when Marco sent Silvio on a spurious errand so we could be ‘alone’ at last.

Chapter 11

Alone, though still not face to face. I could picture quite clearly the library that morning. It was a cold day, but the sky was clear and the library was illuminated with bright sunshine that made it feel warmer than it should.

I could see the desk that I’d made my own and remember the feel of the well-polished wooden handle as I pulled the drawer open. Then, inside the drawer, I saw the vibrator: as black and shiny as a piece of burnished coal. It was so incongruous, that sex toy in the drawer of a beautiful handmade antique desk. The desk had been in the Palazzo for generations. The vibrator was a piece from the future.

Marco began our cybersex session by asking me what I was wearing.

I told him. I was wearing a dress with a long skirt. Beneath it, stockings. They were hold-ups. A suspender belt just seemed like a cliché too far. I was wearing black silk knickers and a matching bra. Marco asked me not to take the knickers off but to push them aside so that I could attend to my clitoris. He instructed me to begin with the very lowest setting on the vibrator, which was barely more than the throb of a resting pulse.

Looking back now, the moment was tinged with all sorts of doubts and insecurities. Whenever I read about a saucy photograph or video that had been meant for just one set of eyes going viral, I remembered that day in the library and tortured myself wondering where the hidden cameras had been. Surely it was only a matter of time before the girl in the video clip was me?

It seems crazy that I trusted Marco enough to make myself so vulnerable, but I did. I think I thought that it was going to be the day we met. I’d persuaded myself that once I had passed this test he would reveal himself to me.

I’m convinced that he was in the house that day. Perhaps even in the next room. Of course he would never admit it.

I had a vibrator with me in Paris. It nestled in the corner of my washbag, which had seemed the best place for it given that I was crossing a border. As I stood in the queue to pass through security at the Eurostar terminal, I had a vision of being taken to one side and asked to unpack. That didn’t happen. The vibrator had not moved from its hiding spot. Now, alone in my apartment, I took it out.

It was very different from the vibrator that Marco had chosen for me. He had picked one so cleverly designed and so subtle you might have mistaken it for a fancy remote control for an iPod dock. It was the size of a chicken’s egg but flattened like a pebble. It was finished in shiny black.

My own vibrator was a more colourful affair. I had bought it at a sex-toy party, if you can believe that. One of my fellow academics back in London had thrown the bash, like a subversive Tupperware party. It was excruciating. A game saleswoman tried to encourage us all to try on French-maid outfits and showed us how to hold the cock-shaped toys to the tips of our noses to feel the strength of the vibration.

I bought the vibrator because I felt sorry for my friend. No one else seemed to be buying. I told her I was going to give it to another friend as a gift on her hen night. In reality, it was always just for me.

I had never owned a sex toy before. I didn’t feel I’d ever needed one. Before I met Steven, my love life had been so pedestrian I hadn’t even considered the possibility I could be orgasmic. With Steven, I had no need for anything but his hands, his mouth and his cock. Or so I thought. While Steven was at the rugby the following Saturday afternoon, I got out my new vibrator and made myself come eight times in a row. I felt daring and naughty and ridiculously alive. When Steven came back from the rugby, I jumped on him the moment he walked through the door.

Now I used my vibrator to relive that moment in the library in Venice. Reading the transcript of Marco’s instructions, I recreated the situation as closely as I could. I took the laptop through to the salon, where I had my desk. With the laptop set up, I started to follow Marco’s commands, not turning the vibrator on full blast from the beginning as I would ordinarily have done, but increasing the power slowly, taking care to properly savour each tiny increase in intensity. As Marco had suggested, I didn’t concentrate all the energy on my clitoris either. I moved the vibrator all over my pussy and with my free hand I pinched my own nipples, until they stood to attention, throbbing and begging for more.

That morning in the library, Marco had led me through several peaks of sensation and I let the same thing happen again now. I pressed the vibrator against my clitoris and fondled my own breasts. Just when I thought I would be able to hold on no longer, I followed Marco’s command to turn the vibrator down a notch again. Then I let him take me through another crescendo and another and another, building in power until I felt like I was plugged into the mains. Eventually, it wouldn’t have mattered if I had turned the vibrator off altogether; I’d reached a point of no return.

Every muscle in my body was tense for just a second. Then that melting feeling overcame me. That rolling sensation as though a speedboat had just ripped across a tranquil pond and I was rocking in its wake.

Staggering to the bedroom, I fell onto the pillows and let the vibrator drop to the floor, where it buzzed like an indignant beetle flipped over onto its back, until I gathered myself enough to retrieve it and turn it back off.

Getting up again, I went and looked at my laptop screen, as though there was a chance that in the brief time I’d had my eyes shut, another message might have come through. There was nothing new apart from the two lines he had sent that day. The last message from Marco before that still bore the same date and time it always had. It was almost five months old.

Chapter 12

Paris, 1839

My musings with regard to what love would look like had been answered in the most wonderful way. Love looked like Remi Sauvageon. It had his height, his bearing, his kind brown eyes and his soft pink lips. It had the shadow on his jawline when it was time for him to shave. It had his voice. It had his way of walking. It had the way he brushed his floppy hair back from his face. It had the way he took my face in both his hands and kissed me as though I were his angel.

I could not imagine that any moment in my life would ever match the moment when he declared his affection to me, but after that declaration, our love grew ever more wondrous. Every chance we could, we snatched the opportunity to be together. Arlette merely smiled when Remi said that he would help me peel potatoes.

‘If your love means that supper is on the table more quickly, then I very much approve,’ she said.

If she had not approved, of course I would have run away to see him in an instant.

How happy I was. It was almost impossible to believe that two years earlier I had been that wretch in the Bois de Boulogne, with no parents, no money and no hope whatsoever of getting out of Paris alive. Now I didn’t want to leave Paris for a second. The dirty old city was transformed when seen through loving eyes. Suddenly the river seemed fragrant. The scrappy flowers in the parks seemed magnificent. Even the filthy pigeons were as beautiful as turtledoves to me now.

But it wasn’t all hearts and flowers. Remi had awakened something else in me. I was sixteen. Almost seventeen. Girls my age were married. Some had babies. Through the hole in the floor of my bedroom, I’d had more of an education in sex than most of them, I was sure, but I was still a virtual innocent. For months Remi and I only kissed. He ran his hands over my body, of course, but always and only over the top of my clothes.

It wasn’t that I didn’t have desire for him – I wanted him very much indeed – it’s just that sex had somehow become linked in my mind to Arlette’s endless visitors. I wanted my first time to be very special indeed. I wanted to make love to just one man in the whole of my life, as my mother had done. I needed to know that I would not be throwing my most precious gift away on a man who did not deserve it.

Remi said he understood but that if I were waiting for a proposal, I would have to wait a good deal longer. He had not a penny to his name. If he could have afforded to take a wife, he would have been on his knees in an instant but for now he could offer me nothing more than his highest esteem. One day, he promised, he would have all the wealth that he needed.

Of course, I insisted to Remi that he would need a great deal less than he imagined to keep me.

‘My love,’ he said. ‘Your insistence moves me, but I will not be persuaded. You have no father to give you away, so the costs of the wedding fall quite squarely on my shoulders and I want you to have a proper wedding. You must have a fine dress and flowers and there will be a feast.’

He said that the waiting was agony for him. It was agony for me also. After we had snatched a moment together, and kissed and cuddled ourselves into a frenzy, it was not in the least bit easy to pull ourselves apart. When Remi left, I would often go back to my bed and lie there, imagining his hands upon me. My fingers would stray between my legs. If Arlette had a visitor, I would roll back the carpet and touch myself, watching her avidly and imagining everything that happened to her was happening to me with Remi. I was insane with longing and so was he.

Then, one day, Remi brought me a ring. He said he had found it in the street. It was not much of a ring – Elaine said it would probably make my finger go green – but it was the first piece of jewellery I’d ever been offered.

‘This is a promise,’ he told me. ‘One day I will replace this with a ring of solid gold.’

He got down on one knee right in the middle of the kitchen and asked if I would be his. When, of course, I told him ‘yes’, he jumped to his feet and we concluded our very own wedding ceremony with Elaine as our only witness.

‘Under the sight of God,’ said Remi, ‘We promise ourselves to one another. For ever and ever, amen.’

‘Amen!’ I shouted.

‘Poor foolish girl,’ said Elaine.

So, there was no legal ceremony, but to my mind, we were very much married. Certainly, I knew that no other man would ever lay claim to my heart.

We went back upstairs and to our kissing, after which Remi asked me tentatively, ‘I know it was not proper and it wouldn’t be recognised in a court, but I have given you my promise. You know that whatever happens, I will look after you. That being the case, I wonder if we . . .

Remi was not a virgin. I suppose I should not have expected it, given the sophisticated crowd he ran with. I knew that Charles the poet, while he nursed an undying passion for my mistress, had availed himself freely of the prostitutes he could actually afford. In fact, those encounters formed the inspiration of his first terrible collection of poems. Another of Remi’s friends had actually published a book like a catalogue, describing the best Parisian whores and where to find them. When he neglected to include Arlette, she said she didn’t know whether to be relieved or offended. I thought I would have been relieved.