F
our hours later, having deposited an armful of birthday presents on her desk, Constance let her dress fall to the floor and crept into Louisa’s bed in her shift. Her sister sat at the dressing table, taking the diamond clips from her hair. On the subject of Piet Barol she kept her silence until Agneta Hemels had brought in a tray of hot chocolate, removed Constance’s dress, and congratulated them on a triumphant success. When the servant had gone, following her sister’s train of thought with the precision that so unsettled their friends, she said: “I maintain, Constance, there’s something false about him.”
“You’re so sullen and suspicious.”
“You’ll find I’m right.”
“It’s not because you think I’m in love with him any longer?”
“I never thought you were in love with him, darling. You wanted him to love you, which is something different entirely.”
“Whatever it is, I’m done with it.”
“I know.”
“You’ll agree it was funny.”
“Suggesting that Norbert Breitner is an opium addict?”
“Being sharp enough to catch on and brave enough to play too. Norbert’s such a pompous fool.”
“With that I wholeheartedly agree. And I never suggested that our Mr. Barol was anything less than sharp.”
“There, you said it.
‘Our’
Mr. Barol.”
“
‘Your’
Mr. Barol, then.”
Constance turned on her side. “Wouldn’t it be fun to have a brother? Someone to go about with, and gossip with, and persuade our friends to marry?” She spoke wistfully to the wall. “Egbert’s so hopeless.”
“There’s no use being friends with a person who doesn’t tell the truth.” Louisa climbed into bed next to her sister and yawned. “Piet Barol will always say what he thinks you want to hear.”
“You’re a miserable cynic.”
They fought on as the sky lightened to indigo. Finally Louisa said: “Very well. Let’s ask him to tea with Karina van Prinsterer. You mark my words: he’ll tell us she charms him and the house is beautiful.”
T
he next afternoon, Maarten Vermeulen-Sickerts left for New York to supervise the completion of his most ambitious undertaking yet, a hotel of unrivaled opulence at the corner of Fifth Avenue and the Central Park. The family saw him off at the docks and on their return to Herengracht 605 Constance asked Piet if he’d care to join them at tea with a friend.
“A
dear
friend,” added Louisa. “With one of the loveliest houses in the city. Her mother’s a lady-in-waiting to Queen Wilhelmina.”
With difficulty, Piet disguised his excitement at the prospect of meeting a member of the royal household. He had only twenty minutes to change and chose the most elegant of the Charvet ties Maarten had given him. When he had knotted it five times he was more than satisfied with his reflection.
The van Prinsterers lived on the Keizersgracht. Piet escorted the girls on foot, wishing that a childhood enemy might cross his path and observe him with such a fashionable pair. Their destination proved to be a gloomy mansion, six windows across, with a coat of arms emblazoned in scarlet and gold above its doors. These opened before they could knock, as though someone were permanently on duty at them. In the vestibule were two very tall footmen in mustard-yellow livery. Piet gave his hat to one and looked about, prepared to be impressed.
But he was not impressed.
The hall was a strident blue, fussily embellished in shiny gold leaf. In the ornate wrought-iron balustrade of the staircase, the letters
LVP
(for Leopold van Prinsterer, the current occupants’ grandfather) were pricked out in gilt. It struck Piet as overanxious to advertise oneself in this manner. He found it vulgar. Vulgar too was the cluttered drawing room full of heavily fringed furniture, its tables weighted with framed photographs of notable personages. Most vulgar of all was the presence on the mantelpiece of a large stuffed peacock, fanning its tail over the silver frames like a pagan deity in a graveyard.
He was examining a signed portrait of Crown Princess Marie of Romania when the van Prinsterer ladies appeared. They were absurdly overdressed. Miss van Prinsterer’s skirt was tied tightly below her knees by a tasseled cord that swung wildly with every mincing step. Her lace sleeves hung almost to the floor and became fans whenever she raised her arms—which she often did to flaunt this effect. In her fuss of crinolines and tulles, her mother resembled a cream puff that has aged during its display at the baker’s.
Nor did they compensate in charm for these sartorial deficiencies. Piet had looked forward to performing one of the anecdotes, as polished as the satinwood tea stand between them, with which he had delighted women of the better class before. He intended to make a deftly self-effacing impression and to bow to the demand that he continue his wonderful stories with becoming shyness. But he was first disconcerted and then annoyed to discover that he was not permitted to make any impression at all.
No one was.
The van Prinsterer ladies talked without ceasing and drew breath in relays. The result was that one or other was always speaking, and not even Piet Barol could find a way to insinuate himself into the conversation. He noticed that Constance and Louisa did not attempt to do so and were listening with gleeful attention.
The van Prinsterers had recently returned from Venice. They had found the heat unbearable and the gondoliers conceited and familiar. They swore never again to travel to a city in which Mr. Vermeulen-Sickerts had not yet opened a hotel. They repeated this refrain as they ate highly sugared cakes and complained of what they had endured at the hands of lesser hoteliers. Not once did they seek anything more substantive than a murmur of sympathy from their guests.
The room was very hot and held nothing in it to delight the eye. As one hour became two, Piet began to wish he might leave it. He could think of no way of doing so politely and sat on, astounded at his hostess’ endurance. As they entered the third hour he felt that anything—the humiliation, even, of admitting to his station in life—would be worth the delirium of freedom. He was about to say that he should make sure Egbert had his bath on time when Constance looked at her watch and said “Goodness me! The hours have flown!” and so permitted them all to leave.
Outside, Piet filled his lungs gratefully with the stench of the canals.
“Adorable, aren’t they?” Louisa unraveled her parasol.
The idea that anyone, least of all Louisa Vermeulen-Sickerts, found the van Prinsterer ladies adorable robbed Piet momentarily of the power of speech. At first he did not understand why Constance, observing his hesitation, broke into a fit of giggles so extreme she had to bend over double to contain them. “Go on, Mr. Barol,” she said when they had turned the corner onto the Reguliersgracht. “Tell us what you really thought.”
“I—” But Piet smelled a test, and this startled his higher functions from their stupor. “I thought two things,” he said solemnly, resolving to pass it with panache. “Poor Queen Wilhelmina.… And poor peacock.”
J
acobina Vermeulen-Sickerts was an upstanding woman. Though she increasingly blamed her husband for his amatory neglect, she loved him dearly. She did not at all enjoy encountering him when floating in the aftermath of a tryst with Piet Barol and had looked forward to his absence—which she intended to use wisely.
Her nurse Riejke Vedder had had definite views on the delineation of masculine and feminine responsibilities, and Jacobina had never attempted to assert herself in questions of finance or sex. To taste the elixir of sexual authority in the fifth decade of life was marvelous.
So was Piet Barol.
He never made embarrassing declarations or asked for any reward save the knowledge that he had given good service. She addressed him with the polite formality she used with her household staff and set the time of their appointments as well as the limits of what took place. She did not permit Piet to undress or touch himself, or touch her with anything but his fingers, lips and tongue. This was the price her conscience demanded and it was a high one because she longed to see him naked. But the prohibitions were practical, too. She had dreaded the shame that settled on Maarten after spending and preferred to dismiss Piet fiercely and cheerfully aroused. The idea that he saw to himself later, and thought of her when he did so, pleased her greatly.
They did not speak to one another in her aunt’s ugly bedroom, and as the weeks passed Piet’s fluency in decoding the clenching of Jacobina’s thighs and the meaning of certain half-suppressed sighs improved. But it was inevitably imperfect. The preferences of the mezzo-soprano were not, after all, quite Jacobina’s, and Piet’s unquestioning confidence in them diminished the impact of his labors.
The crucial distinction was that Jacobina Vermeulen-Sickerts was unpredictably ticklish. This meant that the mezzo-soprano’s insistence on Piet’s taking a meandering route upwards from her feet sometimes made Jacobina squirm in a way that was not at all pleasurable. Piet Barol interpreted this wriggling as a sign of the highest approbation and responded to it by going more slowly still, which made Jacobina yearn to tell him to hurry. She never did, because the idea of putting a base physical desire into words was mortifying; but her restraint was sorely tried when they met for the first time after Maarten’s departure.
Piet’s desire to make the encounter memorable inspired an exceptionally reverent start. When his lips brushed lightly against her ankles, Jacobina began to feel violently ticklish. As Piet’s tongue made its too-gradual progress beyond her knees, she found the experience excruciating and started to writhe urgently. This made Piet slow down further and the sensation became so unbearable that from a place deep within her, potent and unstoppable, a loud voice cried, “Faster, Mr. Barol!”
This immediately had the desired effect. Jacobina’s ticklishness subsided and was replaced by a heavenly sensation. Now she saw the advantages in explicit communication, which yielded results of a precision that bucking limbs and fluttering sighs could not deliver. When Piet’s index fingers began to prize her apart and his tongue to trace its way delicately between them, she wished he would push it into her as far as it would go; that he would lap greedily at her like a dog, wallow in her, force her open.
But what could she say? She could not ask him to do these things to a “little kitten.” The word she had heard street boys use now came to her. It seemed much more accurately to convey her meaning, but the ghost of Riejke Vedder intervened and forbade it. Jacobina opened her eyes. Piet was entirely hidden by her bunched skirts. She hesitated, but the certainty that this was not an opportunity to squander rose up in her. She had come this far. Why should her transgression not have its rewards? She banished her nurse—but still she could not speak. The tickles worsened. She was shaking, and Piet’s pace slackened. Oh, the agony of it!
At last, with a courage that made her proud for days, Jacobina Vermeulen-Sickerts spoke—and she did so in a crisp, commanding voice, in which there was not a trace of shame. “My cunt, Mr. Barol,” she said firmly, gripping the arms of the chaise longue. “Be bolder with it!”
I
t was an indelibly erotic moment. Piet obeyed Jacobina’s instruction with a brutal enthusiasm that kept her in a state of rolling orgasm until—several hours later—the knowledge that they should stop became insistent, and then absolute. It was a wrench. Finally Jacobina gathered all her self-control and closed her legs to Piet Barol. She dispatched him with a curt word of thanks, and once he had left the room it was almost fifteen minutes before she could stand. She made her way to her own house in a daze of euphoric tranquillity.
Piet went to his bedroom, volcanically aroused. There were no locks on the servants’ quarters at Herengracht 605 and in order to secure his privacy he pulled the armchair in front of his door. He was undoing his flies when he heard a sharp knock. The door opened at once, hit against the chair and revealed Mr. Blok’s white face.
Gert Blok knew at once what was up: the young man’s flushed cheeks, the discreetly positioned furniture, the rich, sordid smell in the room told him all he needed to know. His eyes flicked to Piet’s crotch and there—oh rapture!—was the unmistakable outline of an object to which he had devoted many hours of furtive imagining. This was too fine an opportunity to pass up. He insinuated himself into the room and began to talk.
Mr. Blok told Piet about the entertainment their employer arranged every year for his workers and complained of the extra responsibility the festivities placed on his shoulders. He described the ruined, ivy-clad country mansion Maarten Vermeulen-Sickerts had bought the year before, the tragic fire that had gutted the place a decade previously, the number of bathrooms Maarten intended to install once he found time to attend to its refurbishment. As he spoke, Piet Barol’s excitement dwindled rapidly. He knew very well how pleased Blok was to have caught him, and the butler’s persistence annoyed him.
Finally the dinner gong sounded. Now Blok had to leave, and when he had gone Piet washed his hands and face and went downstairs, his body painfully alert, his mind half crazed by the intoxications of the afternoon.
There were no guests, and the new friendliness of Constance and Louisa made the gathering intimate, almost cozy. Jacobina had taken a scented bath and was feeling wonderfully composed. She knew at once that Piet was not, and the jolt of power this sent through her banished all inclination to guilt. As Constance recounted the details of Myrthe Janssen’s pursuit of Frederik van Sigelen, Jacobina thought that God would not have created human bodies as He did—in His own image, after all—if He disapproved of sexual pleasure. Consequently, what she had done was not the grievous sin the churchmen described. The minister of the Nieuwe Kerk came to her, a stupid, ugly man who could rail against carnality quite safely since no one was likely to engage in any with him. She knew that she had promised her body to Maarten twenty-eight years before, but surely his long failure to exercise his rights entitled her to reclaim a portion of his entitlements and bestow them on another?