The Pleasure Quartet (11 page)

Joan, I recalled, had been drawn into the Ball by a red-haired woman with hair down to her ankles like a long flame who had met her by a lamp post outside a music hall in Piccadilly Circus. I
had the sudden sense that though separated by decades, our experiences were converging, as though time were folding in on itself and drawing our worlds closer together.

I coughed, and Clarissa looked up.

‘Well, well,’ she said, examining me up and down, her eyes lingering on the silken sheen of my tuxedo trousers. ‘Don’t you look wonderful.’

‘Thank you. I wasn’t sure if you would like me to wear them, or not.’

‘Dear girl!’ she cried, drawing her body away from the post and standing at full height, ‘of course I want you to. Did you think I bought them for you so they could sit in a
cupboard? All you need now is a good haircut, but we’ll leave that for another day. For now, let’s drink, and talk, and be merry.’

She flicked the long nub of ash that balanced precariously on the edge of her cigarette and I watched it flutter like tiny grey snowflakes onto the footpath.

‘Come on then,’ she said, and proffered her arm to me. I threaded mine through hers and we walked along Shaftesbury Avenue and into Soho, dancing between late-night drunks, couples
walking hand in hand and occasional raucous groups of youngsters in search of the next best thing. I instinctively scanned each face that passed mine, searching for Iris among the crowds. She would
have stood out here, a lone pale star amid the busy glittering throng, her quiet graceful beauty gleaming all the more bright against the gaudiness that surrounded us.

Clarissa pulled me towards the doorway of a basement bar that I would never have even noticed under ordinary circumstances. The steps downward were rickety and poorly lit, and inside it
wasn’t much better. Bare electric bulbs hung from the ceiling and cast a yellowed light not much more powerful than the flame of a candle. The room was oddly absent of any proper tables, but
instead furnished with a mix of small coffee tables, most of them in carved Edwardian style with tall, curved legs and bulbed feet that gave them a Daliesque appearance, like an army of wooden
spiders that might come to life at any moment. A wide, long bench seat ran along three walls, dotted with cushions and throws in shades of pale pink, yellow, and deep red with gold trim on which a
handful of customers lounged. Painted wooden screens set up at irregular intervals interrupted the geometric straight lines of the place and added some booth-like privacy that could easily be
removed when the tables were pushed aside and the bar was turned into a dance floor. Posters affixed to the walls advertised themed discotheques, thankfully occurring on other nights of the week. I
was not in the mood for loud music. Tonight, music was notably absent, and just the low murmurs of whispered conversations filled the air. There was not even a jukebox.

‘Not elegant, I know,’ she told me, ‘but intimate. Just what we need. You settle in, and I’ll fetch drinks.’ She pushed me towards at the back of the long,
low-ceilinged room and I tucked myself onto the bench, rearranging my limbs several times until I found what I hoped was the most attractive position to any onlooker as I watched Clarissa order at
the bar. Her waistcoat highlighted the squareness of her hips and sharp angularity of her broad shoulders, and her cropped hair elongated her neck. She swept her long fringe back behind her ear
with one hand and then took the wine glasses that the bartender presented to her, one in each hand, and turned towards me.

The other patrons didn’t even glance at her. I was astonished by this. To me, Clarissa brought a stage with her everywhere that she went. To see her walk across a room was to see her lit
by an invisible light that cast the world around her into shadow. She was a butterfly in a sea of moths.

‘Thank you,’ I said, relieving her of one of the glasses so that she could sit down without spilling the contents of the other.

‘Now,’ she said, ‘my melancholy Moana. Tell me something I don’t know about you. Tell me a secret.’ She ran the tip of her finger around the length of her glass and
I noticed for the first time that evening that her nails were painted bright red.

I thought of all the secrets I could tell and nearly laughed.

‘What kind of secret?’ I asked her.

‘The kind that you’re too afraid to tell anyone. Tell me and I’ll forget I ever heard it, right away.’

‘You might write it into a play.’

‘Only if it’s a very entertaining secret.’

‘I’m in love with my room mate,’ I blurted out. ‘I watched her make love to a man. And now I can’t think about anything else.’

A wide smile spread across Clarissa’s lips and she leaned back against the sofa cushions.

‘Oh. I confess, that is vastly more entertaining that I was expecting. Perhaps I shall indeed make you into a play. Tell me more. Tell me all about it.’

I told her first about growing up with Iris and how my feelings had been lustful from the outset. Of the nights that we shared huddled together in a single bed (‘How charming,’
Clarissa remarked), and the bedsit that we shared now, in Hammersmith, and Iris’s job with the legal firm and how Thomas had inconveniently appeared in our lives out of the blue.

She just sat and stared straight ahead into the distance, as if my words were playing out in front of her like a film on some invisible screen, and carried on playing the tips of her fingers
against the wine glass. All of a sudden, as if it were nothing, she put the glass down and relocated her hand to my knee.

My voice faltered for a moment. Her touch was so warm, as if she had been standing too near a radiator. It crept right through my clothing and entered my veins, and like a candle flame blown by
a gust of wind I felt my own heat rise up in response.

I told her how I had arrived home, the night after I had first met her and we had visited Patch’s studio, and how Iris had been waiting for me, perched at the end of the bed in her
borrowed outfit with that terrible look on her face and she had asked me to watch her with Thomas. I told her about the squat ottoman stool at the end of his bed that gave me such an obscene view,
focused almost entirely on the lower part of their bodies, and how that particular angle seemed to throw them out of proportion in the low light, like a pair of tall shadows. The way that Iris had
looked nude, like a lily flower with a single blossom. As if I were seeing her truly for the first time. Thomas, standing straight and tall in front of me as she sat, and my first true view of a
man’s cock – so smooth and rigid against the softness of his balls, and the firm pertness of his arse. How her lips had parted as he touched her, and she had turned pale and awkward,
like a schoolgirl with her first crush.

‘And is she very fond of you?’ Clarissa asked me. I recognised the expression on her face as I had seen it on the faces of others many times before. Pity. Mixed with something else
though, recognition and a kind of hunger. It cast her face into a strange masque and made her look older than she was, as though she had experienced too much already for her years.

‘I don’t know . . .’ I faltered. ‘I think so.’ I tried to remember the last time that Iris had told me she loved me and came up short. I could not recall the last
time that I had spoken those words aloud to her either. More often I whispered my feelings to her in the privacy of my own mind, fearful that my tenderness would be unreturned and I would be made a
fool. But I felt like a fool now. Why had I not told her how I felt? We shared a bed and a flat together but no longer the deepest recesses of our hearts.

It wasn’t until Clarissa handed me a tissue that I realised I was crying.

She wound an arm around my shoulders and pulled me close against her and I was further overwhelmed by the heat of her body and richness of her fragrance and began to sob, my face pressed against
the short crop of her hair as the tears fell. Clarissa hugged me tighter until I had cried myself out.

‘More wine?’ she asked. I had barely noticed finishing the last glass.

I shook my head.

‘I suppose I should be going home.’ I glanced around the room looking in vain for a clock, and noticed for the first time that the sketched charcoal drawings that decorated the walls
were pornographic in nature and depicted men and women in various states of undress. I was no wiser about the time.

She squeezed my shoulders. ‘Why don’t you come back to my place?’ she asked. ‘It’s perfectly warm and comfortable on the couch and I can’t send you out into
the night like this. Or indeed home. Iris will think we’re mistreating you at the theatre . . .’ she joked.

For a moment I thought of how Iris might react if she woke up alone and realised that I hadn’t come home, and had not let her know my plans or left a note. I could hardly call the home
phone now – it must be two in the morning, at least. And what would I say – that I was in a Soho bar with Clarissa, with another woman?

‘Come on,’ she said, ‘a few more hours won’t make a difference. I can call a cab for you before the sun rises. And you’re not rostered on tomorrow, are you? You can
sleep in, laze around all day.’

She brushed her fingers under my chin and lifted my face towards hers, and then she kissed me. I kissed her back without even thinking of Iris, such was the heat of Clarissa’s mouth and
the insistency of her touch.

The pads of her fingers arrived lightly on my hips, finding their way beneath my blouse and caressing my waist. Her grip was as gentle as a breath of wind, so gentle that it crept past the
barrier of my guilt. Or perhaps it wasn’t in fact guilt that I felt, but just the knowledge that I was not free. Despite the fact that I had witnessed my lover in bed with a man, the ties of
my relationship with Iris bound me to her. Clarissa had deftly loosened those bonds.

I shifted in my seat and the pressure of her touch grew firmer. Her palms ran all the way up my body to the base of my neck and she pulled me against her.

A light alongside us began to flicker and I was struck by the illogical impression that somehow our rising energies had affected the electrical current. Or was it the spectre of Iris, physically
absent but present in spirit? Clarissa’s lean body cast a long, dark shadow across the pale hardwood floor. My tempter, in both body and spirit.

Clarissa guided me up the stairs ahead of her, with one hand pressed firmly against my tailbone, narrowly avoiding grabbing my arse. She threw her arm into the air the moment that we exited the
bar into the now chill night, and a taxi skidded to a halt in front of us. The driver glanced at us once in the rear view mirror as Clarissa instructed him to take us to Brick Lane, and then he lit
a cigarette and turned his attention back to the road. Clarissa gripped my knee, and I felt a sense of claustrophobia mixed with my rising arousal. I wound down the window an inch, seeking relief
from the lingering scent of late-night takeaway snacks, cigarettes and cheap perfumes battling against upholstery cleaner in the small cab. The streets of the inner city, and then the East End
unravelled before us and for a moment I forgot where I was and watched it all rush by, caught up in the sheer romance of London.

Brick Lane was eerily quiet. It was by now too late for all but the drunkest of partygoers, and too early for the market traders. We had arrived in that strangest of times between the night and
the dawn when time seems to stop for those few who are awake when the rest of the world sleeps. A bird chirped, as if letting us know that we were not the only two out-of-place souls in the
neighbourhood.

Clarissa took my hand, and pulled me along to her front door. She pressed her fingers to my lips.

‘Shh!’ she said, as she turned the key in the door. ‘My partner is upstairs. He won’t mind of course, but we’ll need to be quiet. And keep the lights
low.’

We stepped inside.

‘Your p-partner?’ I remembered at the last moment to keep my voice down and the words came out in a high pitched hiss.

‘Yes,’ she whispered, ‘Edward. He has an early start tomorrow . . .’

‘Oh . . .’

I must have sounded surprised.

‘Just because I fancy women, my dear,’ Clarissa pointed out, ‘doesn’t mean I must deprive myself of male comforts . . . We’re even married, but partner is a much
better word, isn’t it?’

Her voice had a velvet quality to it that made her able to speak perfectly clearly in a low, hushed tone that would more easily lull a man to sleep than wake him up. I tried to do the same, but
my shock made it nearly impossible not to shout.

I heard the flick of her lighter, and then the soft light of a candle appeared on the counter top. She removed my purse and set it down on a shelf alongside her own.

‘I thought . . .’

‘As some would put it, I play on both sides.’ Her grin was gloriously impish. She bent down and removed a liquor bottle from a wine rack that stood near the front door, and poured
two strong measures into shot glasses. ‘Why deny one’s self anything good?’ she continued. ‘Wouldn’t life be absolutely boring, if we just stuck to woman and woman,
man and man. Mix it up, I say. Pleasure can be reached in so many different ways, you see.’

She handed me the drink and raised her own glass into the air.

‘We don’t have long. The sun will be up soon. Here’s to pleasure . . .’

‘To pleasure,’ I replied, and knocked the shot back in one.

There was nothing soft about Clarissa’s lovemaking. She was as different to Iris as night from day. She took my glass away as soon as I had swallowed, set it down on the counter and then
took me into her arms and kissed me forcefully, her tongue edging between my lips and her fingers tangled in my hair as she walked me backwards until my legs knocked against a sofa and she pushed
me onto it. I took in a vague impression of the room as we stumbled across it; the thick rolls of fabrics piled up, prints and pictures covering the walls and hung at haphazard angles, albums and
books stacked in random piles around the room, no apparent order to anything. In the half-dark candlelight with everything blurred in shadow it seemed vaguely unreal, as if the contents of her mind
had tumbled out onto the floor and morphed into her studio.