The Pleasure Quartet (9 page)

She was standing on the roadside, next to the cycle and running lane, beneath a palm tree. A young girl in a sheer floral-patterned sundress over a turquoise blue bikini. She was thirteen or fourteen, I guessed; that perilous age when your body is morphing into that of a woman, but you are still slightly behind. I bought a fresh coconut drink from a nearby stand with a few plastic chairs and tables scattered outside and watched her play. She wasn’t bad. Not bad at all. And she clearly found some joy in her music. She played with her eyes closed. Her lithe body swayed slightly as she moved the bow. I winced when she hit a bum note, and a string screeched. Probably, one of the pegs was loose, or needed lubricating. She didn’t notice me watching her until the song came to an end, and I put the coconut shell down and clapped.

‘Muito bem!’ I called out, then blushed as I realised I had probably used the wrong words, and embarrassed myself. She smiled at me and came over.

‘Are you American?’ she asked, pulling up a chair next to me. She laid the violin and bow down gently on the table. ‘Do you play?’

The owner of the stall called out to her in their native language, and she yelled back, then stood up and bought a can of guarana soda and a packet of crisps, fishing the real coin from the inside of her bikini top.

‘He said I had to buy something if I wanted to sit down,’ she explained when she returned.

Her English was totally fluent, which wasn’t common here, I had found, unless in the more expensive restaurants.

‘I’m from New Zealand,’ I told her, ‘but I lived in London before I moved here. And yes, I do play. At least I used to.’

I was about to ask her where she learned to play, and to speak English so fluently, but she carried on talking before I had a chance. Her face was animated as she spoke. Her dark curls bounced when she moved, and her eyes flashed, an uncanny shade of purple. She was vivacious, like a tropical bird that had alighted alongside me and wouldn’t shut up. I was still uncertain about her age. She had an unusual naivety about her that suggested youth.

‘My father speaks English,’ she said. ‘He has business meetings in the city this week, and we live near here. I came with him so I could go to the beach, but I knew I’d get bored of swimming, so I brought my violin.’

‘Do you take lessons?’

‘I did, at my school, but the violin teacher moved away and so far there’s no replacement. I’ve been learning songs from YouTube, mostly.’

‘You’re doing good. It’s not easy to play well without following music.’

She shrugged.

‘I don’t have much else to do.’

It occurred to me that I didn’t have much else to do either, and no one to do it with.

‘Will you come back here to swim tomorrow?’ I asked her.

I was hungry now, and tired, and wanted to eat in peace and then go back to my apartment and nap.

‘Sure,’ she said.

‘Why don’t you meet me here?’ I told her. ‘Around lunchtime, maybe. I can give you a violin lesson, and you can teach me some Portuguese.’

She laughed.

‘Okay then, violin teacher.’

‘You can call me Summer,’ I told her.

‘I’m Astrid,’ she said.

3

The Devil’s Fiddle

There was a familiarity to London that soothed Noah.

Always one to follow through in full once he made a decision, he had not been back, even for a holiday, since moving to New York. But now as he stared out the back window of the taxi cab that he had flagged down at Heathrow, he had to admit there was something homely about the red-brick terraced houses rushing by outside and the grey blanket of sky overhead that promised to punish him for failing to pack a pocket-sized umbrella into his hand luggage.

Noah tipped the cab driver and wrestled his suitcase out of the vehicle and up to the front door that led to his new apartment, a reasonably priced – by London and Brooklyn standards, at any rate – one-bedroom flat with generous living space and access to a private roof terrace arranged over the ground and first floors of a period conversion near Little Venice, off Maida Vale. Or at least, that was what the estate agent, a smarmy type with a public-schoolboy voice and a glossy-brochure photo that prominently displayed his full head of bottle-blond, gelled-back hair, had assured him.

Light drops of rain began to fall. Noah stood his wheely case up and fumbled for the keys in the battered laptop bag that he wore slung over one shoulder. He cursed when the door refused to budge. Tried turning the bottom lock once more, and then the top, before reversing the two again, but without success. He reached for the tan Moleskine notebook he always carried in his shoulderbag’s side pocket, holding it close to his chest to protect the pages from the elements, and double-checked the address, in case he had got it wrong or the cab driver had mistaken one street for another since all the houses around here were virtually indistinguishable from one another. There was no number on the front door to indicate which house he had arrived at, or whether he was outside flat A or flat B. He turned back and looked around, searching for information from the letterbox or even the digits scrawled on the blue-green recycling bins that decorated the footpath.

His eyes alighted on a woman striding towards him. She wore a large, but evidently not heavy, long black tube-like case balanced on her back, the strap crossing over her body diagonally between her breasts. An instrument, perhaps? She was tall and voluptuous, with wide hips and equally broad shoulders. Her dark green and red plaid skirt was short and pleated like the bottom half of a stereotypical schoolgirl’s uniform that might be found in any chainstore sex shop alongside a rack of pink rabbit-eared dildos or furry handcuffs. Below it, her thick legs were encased in opaque tights, visible from her thighs to her knees, where they slipped into a pair of long boots with a high flat platform heel. Tucked into her skirt she wore a tight black top made from stretch fabric with sleeves that reached to her wrists and a wide boat-cut neckline that exposed her throat and her collar bones but was not low enough to provide any hint of cleavage. A jet-black, dead-straight pony tail hung from the back of her skull and swung when she walked. She carried neither jacket nor umbrella and ignored the rain, apparently daring even the weather to defy her.

‘Excuse me,’ Noah called out, as she turned off the pavement onto the steps that led down to the basement flat below the one he still assumed was his.

‘Yes?’ she said, glancing at him with a scowl spread across her unlined face. The only sign of make-up highlighting her features was a sweep of lipstick in a deep red, femme-fatale shade. Noah couldn’t guess her age. She might have been anywhere from 27 to 45. Not his type, but attractive nonetheless.

‘Is this Tevington Street?’ he asked. ‘Flat 36B? I’m moving in,’ Noah explained, in case she suspected him of breaking and entering. ‘At least that’s if I haven’t arrived at the wrong place. The lock doesn’t seem to work and I’ve just got off a long-haul flight from New York . . .’

‘Hold the top key to the left as you push. Works for me,’ she interrupted, and then immediately turned away and continued down without making any kind of neighbourly introduction. Typical Londoner, Noah thought, as he watched her disappear into her apartment. Not that New Yorkers were known for their friendliness either. Ever attentive, now, to the sight of any potentially classical musical instrument, he tried to make out what it was that she carried on her back. A half-dozen or so long slim implements poking out of an open top cylindrical case. Paint brushes? Arrows? Or canes, or riding whips? His neighbour could be an artist, an archer, or a dominatrix, he thought. He continued to ponder the unknowable and curious private lives of others as he stepped inside, finally out of the rain, and examined his new residence.

He had expected something sleek and inhospitable, the type of acceptable yet anonymous décor that adorned corporate hotels across the world, but it was cosier than that. The place had personality, albeit not his own. An open-plan kitchen with a deep-purple laminate breakfast bar backed onto the living room, with expansive wooden floors and a wide bay window that looked out onto the street. Net curtains had been fixed permanently into place for privacy. A worn cream sofa suggested that a previous tenant had ignored the landlord’s regulations and owned a dog. The walls were painted a dirty-looking variant of cream, probably labelled ‘eggshell’ on some interior design colour chart. A rug might have improved things, but Noah knew that home decorating was something he was unlikely to ever get around to.

For a brief moment, he missed April, who would have had the place looking elegantly lived-in in a jiffy, re-painting the walls in apple or indigo and replacing the tired sofa and generic flat-pack shelving units with something comfortable, leather and chic, recycled vintage bookcases, colourful throws and art that managed to walk the fine line between pretentious and generic.

The estate agent had at least lived up to his word and ensured that all of the rooms were fully furnished. Noah filled and switched on the kettle, then rifled through the kitchen cupboards until he found a mug and a cafetière, pausing when he realised that he was bereft of coffee. In his rush to escape the airport, he hadn’t thought to stop and pick up a loaf of bread, or even a single tea bag.

He checked the time. It was nearly 7 p.m., but he was nowhere close to tired, besides the usual long-flight weariness. An evening of television didn’t appeal, and neither did further reading, since he had already finished one throw-away paperback spy thriller purchased along with a packet of sweets moments before his flight had closed for check-in at JFK. His laptop was sitting on the kitchen counter. He recalled the last time that he had spent an evening alone in front of his computer screen and shivered. Felt he needed to take his mind off things, seek out some kind of distraction and human contact. A shower, some fresh clothes and a trip into the city would do the trick. On his way back, he planned to recce the nearest supermarkets, takeaway joints and Tube stations, to get to know the lay-out of his new environment.

The streets were more homogenous than he remembered. Old-fashioned boozers he had stumbled out of years ago had been replaced by conglomerate bars with glossy, glass exteriors. A clothing store selling cheap leather jackets now stood in place of the second-hand bookshop where he had enjoyed browsing and had picked up occasional bargains from the small vinyl record collection the owner had kept alongside the racks of dusty, battered paperbacks. Later, there was the reassuring presence of the Thames as he walked the long way from Monument station to the foot of London Bridge and then along the Thames Path towards the National Gallery, not as vast as the Metropolitan but confident in its own quiet grandeur. Noah had always found the Trafalgar Square lions somewhat mawkish, although it might have been the presence of flocking tourists clambering up to sit astride their smooth backs and have their pictures taken that reduced the animals’ dignified repose in his mind.

He studiously avoided the coffee shop and health food empires that had popped up a dozen to a block in the streets around Charing Cross, and headed instead for the subterranean comfort of Gordon’s Wine Bar on Villiers Street, which he was glad to see remained open and apparently unchanged. Once he had taken a date here, and abandoning any hope of finding a table amid the queuing Friday-night hordes they had attempted to gain access to the gated gardens next door, and, denied that too, Noah had ended up fingering her behind a bush as cars raced by along the Embankment, aware that the patchy vegetation behind which they sought cover afforded them very little, if any privacy. He had been faintly embarrassed by the whole affair. Later, he had realised that canoodling in full public view was not an inconvenience, but rather the very thing that had encouraged her to bend over in front of him and shamelessly grasp his wrist and manoeuver his hand beneath her short skirt, directing his fingers to her panties. She had been thoroughly lubricated and the ease with which he had slid into her cunt had caused an immediate erection that he had subsequently relieved in private, after she had confessed that she was already married and refused to come home with him. He recalled that she shared her name, Victoria, with the street on which these sordid events had occurred, and the fact had struck him as more funny than serendipitous at the time.

Now, mulling on it, Noah was convinced that Victoria was the kind of woman who would let herself be used like the redhead in the photographs he had viewed that New York night on his laptop screen, even the sort of woman who would ask for it. He wondered how many other women existed like that, who actively enjoyed being defiled by men. His cock twitched in his trousers. He had never previously thought of himself as the kind of man who would enjoy doing the defiling. Thinking of hurting or humiliating someone, a woman, had never even remotely aroused him. Noah had often encountered it in pornography, and always trained his focus away from the would-be abusers and onto the willing models and their evident provocation, the expressions on their faces, feeling vaguely ashamed at times of the sentiments that such clips stirred up in him, but he had never pictured himself in the driving seat. Until now.

A space at the bar opened, finally, and he paid the weary bartender for a mixed plate of cheeses, bread, olives and cold cuts, and ordered a red wine that the menu board described as full-bodied, round, and ample in the mouth with a lingering finish. Coincidentally not unlike the woman next to him, who interrupted him as Noah’s entrenched habit of economy directed that he buy a full bottle although he was unlikely to consume it, since the value was far greater than the same wine sold in smaller measures.

‘If you’re not going to drink all of that,’ she said, when he notified the bartender that he would only need one glass, ‘you might as well share mine instead. I won’t finish it.’

He agreed, and followed her through an archway to an empty table in a room reminiscent of an ancient dungeon, with close stone walls and only thick, melting candles for light. No music played, but conversation was nonetheless difficult over the hubbub of chatter emanating from the other patrons crammed in around them.