The Pleasure Quartet (30 page)

By the time I had filled my suitcase and set aside a bag of things to discard or give to a charity shop – not that I knew where to find one here – it was barely 10 a.m. Packing had not been an arduous task. The bikinis I had worn almost daily for the past months were worn out, and I had little need for flimsy beach dresses in London, even on the hottest summer days in the capital. All of the things that Joao had given me that I had stored here – the handful of pairs of earrings, a silver chain with a single tear-shaped pearl pendant, a pair of strappy gold Manolo Blahnik heeled sandals that I detested – I set aside to have couriered back to him.

My eyes kept straying across to the flowers that Noah had sent to me, and then to my phone. I refreshed the display as I had every few minutes for the last hour, checking the time. Again. The minutes were passing interminably slowly. I had not yet had a bite to eat for breakfast. Wasn’t hungry; my stomach a churning mess of butterflies.

Noah was flying out today, but I wasn’t sure when. The early afternoon, I thought he had mentioned.

Was I hoping that he would ring, or that he wouldn’t?

Somehow I knew that the bouquet had been his last move. The ball was now in my court and he was waiting to see what I would do with it.

I slipped on a pair of sandals and grabbed my purse from where it hung on my bedroom doorknob. Rain was pelting down, thundering against the apartment block and visible in great grey sheets through the kitchen window. There was a brolly hanging in the laundry room that I had never used; I took it. I didn’t own any kind of rain jacket here. Not even a cardigan.

The umbrella sheltered my top half from the rain but could not prevent the horizontal spray from soaking my bare legs, feet and the bottom few inches of the red cotton T-shirt dress that I was wearing.

Cabs circled the streets at all hours in Leblon and they seemed to double in number at the first sight of bad weather, to whisk tourists who weren’t prepared for a tropical storm back to the dry comfort of their hotel lobbies. I flagged one almost immediately and hopped in.

‘The Windsor Atlantica, please. Hurry, if you can.’

The cab driver nodded and spun the vehicle sharply, taking a series of side streets that I hoped constituted a short cut. He kept glancing at me curiously in the rear view mirror. Probably wondering what I was doing heading to a hotel before noon, without any baggage. I knew the average Brazilian woman wouldn’t be seen dead walking into five-star accommodation in what I was wearing, with hair unkempt and only the barest trace of make-up. All the women in Rio looked as though they fell out of bed dressed up to the nines. In fact, nearly all of the men were equally pristine, sometimes more so.

Along the Copacabana boardwalk, water pelted and swirled over the black and white tiles, giving a melancholy cast to the typically sanguine surrounds of the famous beach, today bereft of all but the hardiest locals insistent on taking their daily exercise, jogging along the roadside in soggy shorts with expressions of grim determination spread over their damp faces. The clouds overhead teemed with life and movement, slashes of black and grey battling against stark white streaks in a murky purple sky, a perfect witch’s cauldron of bubbling vapour that made me feel as though the world was closing in, the heavens shutting down over the earth leaving me trapped in the middle and about to be swept away on the storm and wake up in Kansas.

I nearly asked the driver to turn around and take me back to my apartment. But somewhere in among the pounding of my blood in my ears and the pervading fear that raged inside me – fear of what? of moving forward? of turning back? – was an even stronger instinct which led me to Noah like a woman trapped on a sinking ship aims for a lighthouse. Was I running to him, or running from everything else? I didn’t know yet.

We hit every red light and crawled behind every slow-moving vehicle all the way along the Avenida Atlantic. Each time a taxi passed travelling in the opposite direction, my heart fell through the floor, and I tried to catch a glimpse through the back window, convinced it must be Noah on his way to the airport, but none of the passengers were visible. All I saw was the flash of an anonymous shoulder or a profile in shadow.

When we finally pulled to a halt, I handed over a bunch of real and didn’t even query the exaggerated fare or wait for my change.

‘Keep it,’ I yelled, as the driver waved the notes I had overpaid back at me.

The building was monstrous, a giant tinted glass and concrete brick of a thing, a few blocks down from the Belmond Palace, where I had once spent an evening with Joao and his business partners. There were fewer hotels at this end of the beach, and the Windsor towered over all of them.

I stood stock still for a moment, looking up, and swallowed hard. Water still hurtled from the sky and I realised too late that I had left my wet umbrella folded up on the cab’s floor. The driver had already pulled away. I rushed into the lobby, escaping the rain, but couldn’t move fast enough to avoid further dampening my hair and dress. The hem was soaking and glued to my thighs. I pulled at it in a futile attempt to encourage the fabric to hang correctly and succeeded only in producing a loud squelching sound, the suck of sodden-wet material peeling away from skin.

All eyes were on me as I strode to the reception desk, trailing wet footprints across the terracotta-coloured, patterned marble tiles.

I recalled Noah’s room number from the receipt slip for our meal, which the waitress had left unfolded on our table momentarily before Noah had whisked it up, ignored my offer to split the bill and asked her to charge it direct to him. But the door number alone was no good to me. I knew that I needed a security card to swipe through the elevator keypad and give me access to the upper floors.

The desk attendant, a young, handsome Brazilian man with a full head of dark hair, dimpled chin and smart suit jacket slightly too wide for his narrow shoulders, was all politeness despite my bedraggled state. His nametag read ‘Victor’.

‘Hi,’ I said, plastering a broad fake smile across my face and keeping my arms pinned to my sides so he wouldn’t see my hands shaking, ‘I’m in room 2505, and I went out for a walk this morning and forgot my key. And my umbrella. Is there any way you could let me in? I think my partner is out enjoying breakfast, he’s not answering the phone.’

‘Sure,’ Victor replied. ‘What was the surname?’

‘Ahh . . .’ my mind drew a blank. ‘Zahova. Summer Zahova. But the room isn’t booked under my name,’ I stalled.

He smiled at me sympathetically.

‘I’ll need to call through,’ he said. ‘For security. We need to verify all hotel guests and visitors, I’m sure you understand.’

‘Yes, of course,’ I replied. ‘Hopefully he’s back now.’

Damn. I hadn’t wanted to explain my arrival to Noah. Just turn up at his door and think about what the hell I was there for when he opened it, but there was no backing out now, Victor had the telephone in his hand.

‘Yes, Mr Ballard. Your partner is at reception. Yes, Miss Zahova. She’s forgotten her room key. May we issue her another one?’

I breathed a sigh of relief. At least I knew now that he hadn’t left yet.

Victor hung up the phone. Swiped a key card’s magnetic strip through an electronic reader and handed it over to me.

‘Here you go ma’am. I presume you know your way?’

I felt a flush of red sweep up my cheeks. Had he winked at me?

‘Yes, yes,’ I assured him, and then walked swiftly to the elevators, hoping that the same lift that I had taken to the restaurant on the fourth floor where we had met for lunch would carry me all the way to his accommodation on the twenty-fifth floor.

That was providing that I had remembered correctly where Noah was situated. Things could prove awkward if I’d mixed the door number up and walked in on the wrong man.

The journey upward took an age. The doors swooped open at half a dozen floors, collecting and depositing hotel guests.

A middle-aged couple with matching bobbed sandy-blond hair who held hands and might have been mature honeymooners.

A short, elderly Japanese man who wore an elegant silver suit jacket with a thin white tie and a broad smile and was partnered up with a brunette woman who displayed the graceful poise and firm figure of a dancer, balanced on precarious hot-pink heels. She was at least a foot taller than he was and a quarter of his age, and when they departed on the fifteenth floor, he guided her forward with his hand on the small of her back. A freckle the size and colour of a misshapen copper coin marked the skin below his middle knuckle. The soles of her shoes were red.

At the level marked ‘pool and gym’, a woman who was likely in her fifties and carried a thick white towel under her arm stepped in and stood in front of me. She was dressed only in a Baywatch-red swimsuit with a low-cut back. Her broad arse was pale and dimpled, and deep blue veins trailed down the backs of her legs.

I wondered what kind of sex they each enjoyed. Did the Japanese man lie back in the bathtub while his younger lover balanced with her feet on the sides and peed on him? Did the woman in the red swimsuit like to masturbate to violent pornography? Did the bobbed-blond fuck silently, or did he whisper terrible things into her ear as he loomed over her in the missionary position? The secrets people held.

When the lift was finally empty and I only had two more floors to travel, I turned and peered in the mirrored panels and attempted to fix my hair which was still half damp and plastered to my skull, with a layer of frizz sitting like a halo over it. My face was unnaturally pale and my eyes looked bright and dilated, as though I had just woken from an unusually vivid dream. Goose pimples had broken out on my arms and hands from the hotel’s air-conditioning further cooling my already icy skin. Water continued to drip down my legs. The cold had hardened my nipples. I was not wearing a bra. Or underwear, for that matter, since I had left my apartment wearing just the dress I’d thrown on for comfort’s sake while I worked on my packing.

Random thoughts and memories began to crowd into my mind. The feeling of the smooth slate tiles beneath my feet as I woke in the early hours of the morning at Joao’s villa and paced his corridors, bored, lonely and restless. The rush of cool water on my skin on the nights that I dived naked and almost silent into his pool, wondering if any of his servants were awake and observing me. Raoul’s heavy body over mine, pinning me down, and the fight in my mind as my internal sense of right, wrong and self-preservation battled with the desires of my wanton flesh, that part of me that wanted him even though I knew that he would hurt me – wanted him
because
he would hurt me.

Odd sensory recollections came hurtling back to me too. Memories that still lurked in my subconscious and crept out to surprise me at the most unwelcome times.

Like the burst of juices in my mouth as I bit into the apple that I had bought the morning after I had been released from the Kentish Town sauna. The faces of the men who had used me that night remained a blur, but I would never forget the sharp taste of that piece of fruit, or the way my knees had ached as I was bent over on the tiles, or the clouds of steam that had clogged my throat.

Back in time further, to Dominik. The waxy sensation of the lipstick he had painted onto my nipples. His extraordinary tonal range as he moved through a series of moods in the course of our sex games; from good-humoured and seductive to commanding to insistent and severe. A streak of sunlight against silver; the flash of his Tag Heuer catching the glare from the window in his study as he typed, and I interrupted him to offer a coffee refill, or tempt him into taking a break to indulge in a daytime fantasy. The smell of his old books that had lined shelves of the house we shared on the hill in Hampstead.

So many other things about him were fading now. As if the Dominik that I had stored in my mind was becoming more ghost-like as the years passed. I could no longer recall the precise tilt of his features, or the exact shade of his hair, without looking at a photograph. Yet fragments from our time together that I would have preferred to forget still stayed with me. The everlasting silence as the Lana Del Rey record, that had been playing before I found him, ended. The red blinking light from his CD player. The particular shade of green that the uniformed paramedics who had collected his still-warm body wore.

I remembered the smell of the rubbish bags in the alleyway where the two American sailors had dragged me. The sweet scent of decaying fruit skins, the bitterness of rotten meat.

The look on Noah’s face when he had found me there. Surprise and pleasure overwhelming any sense of fear, dread or disgust that another might have felt. And the sound of his voice when he called my name.

The elevator doors opened and I hurried up the hall, checking the digits on each room as I went, my soggy shoes sinking into the thick carpet with each step.

I reached 2505.

Lifted my newly acquired room card to swipe it through the security device by the handle, and then knocked instead.

The door opened. He was waiting for me.

Noah, standing there, in a pair of jeans that were too loose on his waist and a black T-shirt advertising a band I hadn’t heard of.

‘Summer?’ he said.

I burst into tears.

He pulled me into his arms.

‘Shh,’ he said, ‘it’s okay.’

He smelled of hotel shampoo, a fresh scent tinged with pine and cloves. His T-shirt was crisp and clean and freshly pressed as though it had just been returned by the laundry service.

I pulled away from him.

‘I’m making you wet,’ I said.

‘I don’t give a fuck,’ he replied, and embraced me again.

He ran his thumb over my cheek and brushed a tear from my face.

Bent his head down, and kissed me.

His lips pressed against mine. The pressure firm, but gentle.

‘Your flight,’ I whispered, when our mouths broke away from each other.

‘I don’t give a fuck about that either.’

His smile was wide and tinged with warmth and humour. He glanced at the clock alongside the bed.