M
onsieur la Chaume had outdone himself. They ate turtle consommé and
corbeilles Polonaises
, followed by larks stuffed with pistachio and foie gras. The Château Neuf du Pape, of which Piet had three glasses, made the pursuit of pleasure seem obligatory. There was a wildness in the way Jacobina laughed at Constance’s jokes that combined with the message of the dress she had chosen to tell him that he need only make a sign. The invitation, delivered so tracelessly, added a helping of flattered vanity to the assortment of delights offered by the elegant room, the fine food and the deference of the servants.
As Didier bowed, looked into his eyes, smiled, refilled his glass, and bowed again, Piet marveled at how far he had come from his father’s dank and gloomy house, cleaned once a week by a woman with dandruff and chilblains. He thought contemptuously of the morning’s sermon and of the poor fools who exchange their worldly ambitions for the vague promises of heaven.
A
gâteau de trois-frères
appeared and an exquisite champagne jelly, in which white elderflowers were magically suspended. Piet had watched the jelly being made, layer on fragile layer, the day before. He plunged his fork into it like a barbarian at the gates of Rome, destroying the labors of others for no better reason than this: he could.
“Some champagne, Monsieur Blok,” said Maarten, who was in excellent spirits. He did no work on Sundays and was looking forward to a pleasantly drunken nap. “My dear, I insist you take some.” He stroked his wife’s hand. “You haven’t been yourself all morning. It’ll settle your digestion.” He waved at the butler, in unconscious imitation of the rich men he had envied in the days before he could afford to be commanding with sommeliers. “Let us have the Moët Brut Impérial, 1900.” He turned to Piet. “A superlative year, in my opinion.”
Thus pressed, Jacobina did take a glass of champagne. When Louisa announced that she and Constance were out to tea with the van der Woudes, and might stay to dinner, she had another. Though her life was enviably luxurious by any objective standard, she nevertheless believed quite sincerely that she rarely did anything to please herself. Because the sight of her husband had the power to weaken her resolve, she rose and went to the window; and thus the party broke up.
Constance and Louisa went upstairs to change. Maarten summoned Egbert to read aloud to him. The servants cleared the table. As the household dispersed, Jacobina announced to no one in particular that she should see to the flowers in the schoolroom and went into the house next door with a thudding heart.
S
he had not been two minutes in the room when Piet knocked at its door. “I wondered if you needed me,
mevrouw
.” He entered without her leave and came halfway across the carpet towards her. “If so, I am entirely at your disposal.”
The similarity between this declaration and statements made by the Piet Barol of Jacobina’s dreams was startling. “There is a very great deal you might do for me,” she said.
“I had hoped there would be.”
They looked at each other in silence. Now it was Jacobina who smiled, and when Piet did not look away, she felt embarrassed. But he was not, and his look conveyed this. She walked past him out of the room and climbed the stairs, wondering if he would follow. When he did, she took a key from a vase on the landing and let them both into her aunt’s bedroom and locked the door behind them. But now the spur of her impulsiveness died, leaving her nonplussed and at a disadvantage. What if this young man has no idea? she thought.
But Piet Barol had every idea.
Two weeks before his seventeenth birthday, a similar exchange of bold glances had earned him his first invitation to the bed of a thirty-four-year-old mezzo-soprano whose husband was a visiting lecturer at Leiden. This lady had asked Madame Barol if she might hire her son to practice with her at home and had practiced with him at will, with no instrument but the human body, for the remaining nine months of the academic year. She had curbed Piet’s uninventive, youthful exuberance and taught him the virtues of rhythm and pace while insisting on chivalric standards of discretion.
Jacobina’s locking of the door was all the license Piet required. The blame would now be hers if pleasure were succeeded by recrimination. He had never before encountered a woman as tinderbox ready as Jacobina Vermeulen-Sickerts and was slightly unnerved by the suddenness of his success. He fell to his knees before her, as the mezzo-soprano had liked him to do, and lifted the hem of her apple-green dress. Jacobina neither objected nor looked at him. He kissed her ankle in its white silk stockings and this touch, too, was permitted. It was highly effective. Abruptly abandoning all consideration of the consequences, Jacobina sat, almost collapsed, on the chaise longue.
“Remove my shoes,” she said. “
Lentement
.”
With extreme delicacy, Piet liberated Jacobina’s feet.
Very
slowly he ran his fingers up her calves, behind her knees, to the lace bands of her suspenders. This made her shake, as it had the mezzo-soprano. He loosed her stockings with studied reverence, but in truth he was uncertain. He had no idea what she would permit, and it seemed to him that she was not very clear on this point either. He hesitated, considering his repertoire. Then, with an animal growl that was indescribably pleasing to Jacobina, he pushed her skirts over her knees and put his head beneath them.
J
acobina’s childhood nurse, Riejke Vedder, who had lived with the Sickertses until her death at the age of seventy-eight, had been far more beloved by the Sickerts children than either of their own parents. Jacobina had been the last of the brood and her favorite. For the first six years of her life, until a drizzly English governess challenged Riejke’s exclusive rights to her attention, Jacobina had not spent a single waking moment beyond the range and sight of her nurse.
Riejke taught Jacobina to focus and crawl and speak and walk; and then to read and wash and count and go to the toilet by herself. She loved her with the unchallengeable enormity of the simpleminded and religious, and the responsibility she assumed over her was total. “Ugly language” was banned and included all but the most discreet euphemisms for any private place below the belly button. Faced with the occasional necessity of referring to these shameful regions, Riejke had devised a language that suited the needs of practical communication while remaining inoffensive. Thus, Jacobina’s young vagina became her “little kitten,” her bottom “the strawberry patch.” Every evening before bed, Riejke told her charge to take her little kitten for a walk and Jacobina rose obediently and squatted over the chamber pot and peed and returned to her bed without fear of wetting it. On family picnics, when privacy was harder to achieve, Riejke would ask Jacobina whether she needed to “visit the strawberry patch” or could simply “walk her little kitten” (which, in extremis, could be done behind a bush).
As a consequence, Jacobina had grown up with a sense that the most intimate and rewarding part of her body was somehow independent of her, a little furry animal to be walked and cleaned and sometimes played with—but cautiously, because it might scratch or bite. She knew this was nonsense, and yet her nurse’s prohibitions remained compelling and in her own mind she still remembered to walk her little kitten before taking a long journey and was revolted by the sight of strawberries on a chocolate cake. Her husband had once made a pet of this kitten, and on one mortifying occasion had put his tongue into it, and then withdrawn it, bright with embarrassment. But for ten years he had not touched her there or anywhere else, and nothing he had ever done compared with the sensations Piet Barol now produced.
Piet’s mentor had taught him well and he was rewarded for finding his rhythm by a clenching of Jacobina’s legs around his neck. This sign of favor removed the last of his doubts and he began to find the encounter as rewarding as she did—because there is nothing more flattering to a young man’s vanity than the knowledge that he is capable of pleasing a woman.
Jacobina had no previous experience to prepare her for the currents of delight that radiated from Piet’s tongue as it traced dwindling circles toward a place she knew existed, but for which she had no name. When she saw he was entirely lost in his devotions, a blissful serenity overpowered her; rose and fell away, to rise again as the light beyond the curtains faded and she forgot the discomfort of the chaise longue and the protestations of her conscience and the mediocrity of her aunt’s pictures and everything else in the world except the smooth scratch of Piet’s chin against her thighs and the warmth of his lips.
When Piet slid a thick finger into her, pressing upward with authority, her horsewoman’s legs clenched around his neck so violently she thought she might choke him. He persisted, as every part of her tightened; and then she was twisting urgently and he knew that the end was near. It was announced by a shrill, high gasp and a gush of hot liquid over his face, which cooled as it ran down his chin. He remained on his knees as her convulsions subsided and when they had he wiped his face with his handkerchief and smiled—a respectful, happy smile that conveyed a becoming gratitude.
Jacobina rose shakily and put her stockings in a pocket and her feet into her shoes. She had almost lost the power of speech. At last she said, in the curt voice she used to mask awkwardness, “My compliments, Mr. Barol.”
“Thank you,
mevrouw
.”
“Je vous en prie.”
She went to the door, but hesitated before unlocking it. “We should wait until you are presentable.”
“Yes,
mevrouw
.”
But erections are harder to suppress the harder one tries, and in the face of Jacobina’s scrutiny Piet’s stubbornly obeyed this law. This fact was tremendously gratifying to her. Eventually, with a laugh she had last given as a girl of twenty-two, she took from a bookcase a large, privately published history of the Amstel Hotel and handed it to Piet Barol. “It would be advisable for you to know something of Mr. Vermeulen-Sickerts’ business interests,” she said briskly. And with that she unlocked the door and stepped onto the landing.
P
iet followed her, the volume carefully positioned to hide his embarrassment. By the time he reached the attic floor of Herengracht 605 he no longer had need of its assistance to preserve a modest silhouette. He closed his door and lay on his bed, observed by the photograph of his mother. He turned away from it. The heady exhilaration of three glasses of wine and two of champagne had lifted and been replaced by a dull, insistent throbbing at his temples. He was not a man much given to bouts of conscience and had he not been fond of Maarten Vermeulen-Sickerts he might have experienced none on this occasion. But as he stared at the ceiling, the last embers of pleasure died and a chill horror crept over him.
It was one thing to have flirted with Jacobina before meeting her husband, quite another to insult him now that he lived in his house and wore his clothes. Piet was accustomed to holding himself in high regard. He did not at all enjoy feeling like a cad and thought—too late!—of Epicurus’ advice to consider the full consequences of a hedonistic act before embarking on it. He could not deny the intensity of the hedonism. Who would have thought that a woman so universally well regarded was capable of sinning with such abandon?
He got up and went to the mirror above the writing desk. His lips were slightly swollen. “You are not to do that again,” he told his reflection. But even as he spoke, he doubted his resolve, because he knew that his conscience was insufficiently exercised to prevail over his pleasure impulse in fullest sail. He repeated himself sternly, felt ridiculous and considered praying for strength. But he did not. It seemed foolish to draw attention to himself at a moment of such disadvantage, if indeed there was a God.
Instead he undressed and had a bath and was glad that Didier was not there to question him from the radiator. In the warm water his cock demanded satisfaction, and when this had been achieved he felt better. He got out and dried himself, rinsed the tub, and dressed. Then he told Mrs. de Leeuw he would not be dining in and spent half a guilder on roast beef and pickles, which he consumed meditatively on the terrace of a café on the Leidsegracht as the shimmering evening stole away and he wondered what on earth he was to do.
T
he decision Piet Barol reached was this: as soon as possible, while still in the grip of somber good intentions, he should perform for Jacobina the speech of the young believer, racked by religious scruple, that he had prepared for Constance but not had occasion to employ.
He went to see her at eleven the next morning, having set Egbert twenty lines from
Paradise Lost
to translate into Dutch. Jacobina was in the private salon, answering letters at a dainty escritoire that had once belonged to Madame de Montespan. She, too, had been wondering how best to behave after the wordless excesses of the previous afternoon, but she had reached a different conclusion from Piet Barol’s.
“I would be grateful,” she said coldly as he entered, “not to be disturbed. If you wish to be of service, you may present yourself at five o’clock in the same place in which you were so useful yesterday.”
She returned to her letter, thrilled by her audacity. Jacobina did not at all wish to take a lover, and her conscience drew the line at verbal intimacies with a man who was not her husband. What she wanted was more, a great deal more, of the physical pleasure to which Piet had introduced her. She did not deem it necessary to dismantle the social barriers between them in order to achieve this end; in fact, their inequality was useful to her.
Piet was rarely rendered speechless, but now his little soliloquy evaporated. “I have lived all my life in the shadow of a church, madam,” he began, reaching after it clumsily. “God has been ever present to me. His will—”
“Your domestic arrangements do not interest me, Mr. Barol.” Jacobina touched an electric bell on the wall and returned to her letter.