The Intimates (7 page)

“‘It's not that,' she said, suddenly becoming articulate for the first time in years. ‘You know I'm fond of you James, but you have always just been a dear friend of mine. I would never have invited Antoine here to embarrass you. I just wasn't aware that you were definitely coming over, that's all.'

“‘Embarrass me?' I answered. I was flinching at this point. ‘Embarrass
me
? It's you who should be embarrassed, playing these sick little games. You've strung me along for years and I've crawled around on the ground after you like some love-sick puppet. Because that is what I have been, love sick.'

“‘Please James,' she said. ‘Please calm down, come in for a drink.'

“‘For a drink? With your disgusting little man toy? You really are a repulsive little creature,' I said, and I leapt back into the car.”

“You had an accident that night, didn't you James,” I say, trying to hurry him before he gets even more emotional.

“That's an understatement, my boy. A real understatement. I was angry, out of my mind. You can imagine. She'd pushed me to my limit, and then nudged me off the edge. ‘Come in for a drink?' Can you imagine the neck of that woman?” I try to remain looking passive.

“Yes, I'd had a drink, but it was the anger that did it. I was a man who'd lost his grip. We all have limits, Vincent. I sped into the night, and three minutes later came off a sharp corner, obscured by poplar trees. Boom, straight off the cliff. Then I got this,” he flips his hands up at his eyes. “And was faced with staring into a grey tunnel for eternity.”

The sound of music from the drawing room reaches my ears and I'm inclined to follow it, but something makes me stay. “I can only see in darker shades of grey now,” he whispers, taking my arm. I can smell the sweat on his shirt, the mustiness of his breath. In one precise movement he places the slim book back into the exact slot he drew it from, without even looking up. Even with twenty-twenty vision it would be an impressive act, but in this half-light it really unsettles me. “At first it was just light and dark grey that I saw in. Now it's just various shades of sludge.”

“It must have been devastating, for a painter… ”

“You have no idea. My world revolved around colour, sensation. It was how I guided myself, how I was inspired. I felt my way through colours every day, and in one blinding second I had that centre point taken away from me. Had to stumble through everything, had to find some new niche. I guess what each colour is now, and have to rely on the clumsy compliments of strangers to determine the success of new paintings. Have you ever tried to eat a dish of something that's completely that colour?” I shake my head, guiltily. “Or tried to make love to a woman whose body looks just like clay?” His voice is rising now, slightly more emotional. “My early work was exhibited in Florence, Prague; there was talk of a New York exhibition. Reviewers said I would ‘finish what Paul Klee started'. A cruel fate, isn't it?”

“I can't imagine – ”

“No, you can't.” The sound of Barbara's laughter reverberates through the aisles. It is hideously inappropriate. “And we know whose fault it is, don't we Vincent? That becomes increasingly clear, with every year that passes.”

“Now come on James, you can't blame Carina for your accident.”

“She wasn't in the car. It's not as if we were on some jolly together and she drove me off the road. But it was her that put me in that state of mind Vincent, it was. To be treated like that by a fellow Intimate? And even if you don't think she was to blame for the state of my vision, she must be accountable for more than that?”

“What do you mean?”

“Oh come on Vincent. I was in love with her. Desperately, hideously in love. And for years she strung me along and then rejected me, in the most humiliating way possible. In front of a man who is everything I am not. How damning a verdict upon me. She stripped me of my confidence, my potency. I haven't been in love since Vincent, and I never will again. She took away my sexuality, Carina did, she stole it from me.”

“Is everything alright in here?”

Francoise suddenly appears at the end of the corridor, against a backdrop of bright gold light. She's holding two glasses of champagne, and she smiles kindly but firmly at us. “Ah, the hostess. Here to toast my ruin,” James mutters. Francoise slides her slender arm through mine, and the room seems instantly warmer.

“You two must join the other guests,” she admonishes, propelling the two of us towards the doorway. “I've decided that we are going to play a little party game.”

Barbara is lingering at the entrance to the drawing room. Francoise pushes James towards her, amused perhaps by the potential contrast. “He's like the ghost of Christmas past, that man,” she whispers, drawing close. “You look pale. He does that.”

After the isolation of the library the drawing room is a blaze of colours. The scent of wine escapes everyone's lips; gold liquids bubble from glasses, foaming over slick fingers before being pressed to open, painted mouths. Smiles are flashed from person to person, erupting into laughter and then snapping away. Polished flesh, once carefully concealed, is now exposed and flushed excitedly with wine. Jazz music emanates from the gramophone, prompting the shoulders and feet of the guests to move in time with that urgent, incessant rhythm.

Carina uncoils her long dark hair, looking over as it bobs around her shoulders. Graham pulls off his bowtie, casting it behind him and moving forward. He draws a cigarette from his breast, lights it, and then places it between his lips, now pursed in expectation. Franz holds a violin bow in the corner of the room, excited and cautious. As Francoise enters the room she waltzes in time to the music, greeted by a rising cheer from her guests.

“You disappeared,” Elise says, as I join her, Carina and Graham in a corner of the room.

“Tonight, we are on the same team,” Graham says, placing his hand on my shoulder. “This is the moment when Francoise gets to feel the spotlight on
her
.”

As Francoise acts out the film written on the card before her, her body moves with forced precision. She taps her arm to denote syllables, she plucks imaginary light bulbs from the ceiling, she pretends to delicately shop at a market stall as Georgina, Barbara and Franz shout film titles at her. “Barbara ought to be good at this – she did it for a living once,” Graham whispers, Carina berating him with a gentle pat.

“How did you not work that out?” Francoise exclaims, as the buzzer snaps her mime to an end.

“How did you not find my spout?” Graham answers, pretending to not understand her accent.

“I'm not talking to you; you are not on my team,” Francoise replies, trying not to smile.

“This is not a cuisine? Francoise, none of us can
understand
you when you've had a drink,” Graham says. “If you're going to be the hostess and instruct us to play party games you must be sober enough to speak English properly.”

“Your English is
parfait
, Francoise, ignore him,” Barbara says.

“He's just trying to cause divisions within us because he knows his own team lacks talent,” Georgina says.

“Excuse me, Elise is a dark horse. She showed me her impression of Francoise before she came in, and proved that she is a naturally gifted mimic,” Graham retorts.

“I did not do an impression of you,” Elise says to Francoise, but I can tell from the blush on her cheeks that she's lying.

James enters the room, clutching a glass of brandy, and Carina's eyes flash cautiously over to him. “Can you work out what Francoise is saying James?” Franz asks, looking up at him. “She is being too Parisian for any of us to understand.”

Graham and I simultaneously guess Carina's film in seconds. Elise reacts as if smarted. Afterwards, Carina slips into her chair, closing her eyes as she draws out a cigarette.

“How did you know what film she was doing?” Elise asks.

“We watched that film together once at university,” he says, looking between the two of us.

“Your go now Elise,” Francoise commands, and as she rises to her feet I sense Elise willing herself to usurp Carina.

Carina reclines, pushing a slim plume of smoke from her lips and looking up as it dissolves around the chandelier above our heads. She barely bothers to watch as Elise frenetically acts, Graham and I firing film names at her until the alarm erupts, to jeers from Franz and Barbara. I feel guilty for being embarrassed by Elise's energy; she looks angry as she draws back towards us.

“I'm sorry,” I say, as she moves to her seat, her cheeks more flushed than before. “It was
Dances With Wolves
,” she snaps. “The first film that we watched together.”

“Terrible of you not to have got that really,” Graham says.

I feel Georgina's eyes trying to find mine as Franz loudly applauds Barbara's acting. Barbara performs a scene from one of her more successful films, bowing elaborately when Franz guesses it in seconds. “You can't just do any film you want!” Georgina exclaims. “You are supposed to pick a film at random from the bowl!”

“Nonsense,” Barbara says, sitting as close to Franz as she reasonably can without straddling him. “That's not how the game works.”

“It is, isn't it Francoise?” Georgina asks.

“Dissension in the ranks… can't you keep your team together?” Graham calls.

“You won't create civil war in us, our loyalties are unbreakable!” Franz jeers.

“Georgina,” Francoise instructs. “It is your turn.”

Franz sits back, conscious that he must not judge Georgina's acting superior to her mother's. The clock starts.

“I knew you couldn't do it,” Barbara says, when the alarm eventually sounds. “She never could act,” she whispers to Franz. Georgina stops and looks over at me, a look of humiliation playing on her face.

“That's hardly fair,” James says, as Georgina passes wordlessly behind him.

“Carina, your turn. Franz, please make the music louder,” Francoise orders, keen to extinguish the sudden and rather painful silence.

“I'm sure you'll manage to get this in seconds,” Elise says, as Carina steps to her feet.

Carina dances drunkenly to the music for a few moments, as if steeling herself, before setting down her glass as the clock starts. For the full minute she holds the same pose, her arms held aloft as she moves her hips, as if slowly wading through treacle. Graham and I flounder for guesses, Elise retaining a determined silence until the alarm sounds. “I was trying to be Anita Ekburg in
La Dolce Vita
,” she says, as she steps back behind Graham.

“Could you have been any less creative?” Graham asks, and Carina lifts two fingers up at him.

“I'm surprised you weren't a better actress,” James whispers. “I'd have thought you'd be good at selling illusions.”

“Graham might have been better suited to that part. It's his favourite film,” I say, as Carina tucks a lock of hair slowly behind her ear.

I look over to the gramophone as the music starts to fade.

A hand reaches out and replaces the record with one that hums and crackles for a moment, before erupting into a galloping rhythm. The guests cheer loudly.

An Egyptian man in a white suit enters the room, acclaiming us with one hand as the lights go up. He is holding a long, elaborately decorated drum under one arm. A second, louder roar greets his accomplice, a belly dancer whose long body shimmers in gold and scarlet sequins as the butlers make space for her. In moments the man is drumming out a pulse-quickening tattoo that drowns out the gramophone. He bites his bottom lip and sweat builds on his forehead as the dancer shimmies to the front of him.

The drum is soon accompanied by enthusiastic clapping from the guests. The man's head is bowed, all of his concentration channelled into the wonderfully earthy sound of this drum, a lone instrument with which he seems to pummel the world into sense. I wonder if he isn't burrowing to find some essence that he himself has lost, some link to his past. Or if he is in fact tunnelling towards a more sensuous future by creating a canvas for this Turkish woman to move her hips over. It startles me that a man can commit such unbending passion to so simple an instrument. But the simplicity of the drum beat makes perfect sense as it inspires the bouquet of sensations the dancer provokes.

“It looks as though the party has taken a sordid turn,” Elise says. “What is this, a Middle Eastern striptease?”

“It's a Raqs Sharqi belly dance, and this woman is one of its most famous exponents,” Carina says, in an awed voice.

“She looks like a lap dancer. Bit fat for it, isn't she?”

Carina looks at Elise as if confused. “She's amazing, watch what she can do.”

The dancer swirls her hips in time to the building drumbeat, which seems keen to accelerate her into a state of abandon. But with a composed, warm smile the dancer resists the temptation, her searching fingers finding new texture in the brutal drumming. This ability to absorb a man's frantic passion and express it sensuously, defines the beauty of femininity, played out in a timeless dynamic before us.

Barbara hoists her glass into the air and mimics the dancer's movements. Fortunately the dancer seems oblivious to this, as if she is somewhere else entirely. Franz copies Barbara for a few moments, before craning a champagne bottle towards her. Liquid spills out of the bottle and into her glass in one long, foamy gesture. Barbara holds the glass above her head, hoisting her dress over her cleavage with the other hand. Francoise dances along with them, allowing James to cup her waist as he reluctantly joins the rest of the writhing bodies.

Carina's face is alight; her attention passing between the aggressive drums and the exotic way the dancer quells his fervour. “Isn't she wonderful? I wish I could dance like that.”

“I heard that you're recovering well,” Graham says, over the riot. “That you feel almost no pain now when you dance.”

Carina's attention remains with the dancer, but a second later she considers Graham's voice. “I'm lucky that it doesn't hurt to walk anymore, and that it doesn't hurt at night. But whenever I dance, a piercing pain comes through me. I won't let it stop me though – dancers like her remind me that I mustn't give up.” With these words I remember Carina's story. That just after she left university she was training as a dancer, on track for fame until a riding accident left her barely able to move.