Read The Pleasure Quartet Online
Authors: Vina Jackson
The Pleasure Quartet
the
Pleasure
Quartet:
Spring
By the same author:
Eighty Days Yellow
Eighty Days Blue
Eighty Days Red
Eighty Days Amber
Eighty Days White
Mistress of Night and Dawn
THE PLEASURE QUARTET
Autumn
Winter
First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2015
A CBS COMPANY
Copyright © Vina Jackson 2015
This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.
No reproduction without permission.
® and © 1997 Simon & Schuster Inc. All rights reserved.
The right of Vina Jackson to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
Simon & Schuster UK Ltd
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Simon & Schuster Australia, Sydney
Simon & Schuster India, New Delhi
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
PB ISBN: 978-1-47114-155-3
EBOOK ISBN: 978-1-47114-156-0
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to
actual people living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Typeset by Hewer text UK Ltd, Edinburgh
Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY
the
Pleasure
Quartet:
Spring
2. The Watcher and the Watched
The Beauty and the Knife
It begins in darkness.
A darkness deeper than night.
The silence has the quality of dread.
A thin beam of light cuts a steady glow through the gloom, and grows, an expanding cone beneath which a faint play of shapes and shadows soon becomes recognisable.
One arm emerges. Then another. Blurred movement, like a slowly spreading stain.
Sleeved in dark material, the arms are in motion, somehow connected to a body still hovering on the perimeter of vision.
A wall of bricks.
A man standing tall against it, his face unseen, wearing a shapeless coat wrapped around his elongated body, held together by a length of rough straw-coloured string. Motionless.
Time stretches and I feel an itch in my right thigh as I stand there waiting for the inevitable. But I dare not move. The deliberate lack of speed in the way the scene is unfolding has something
of a ceremonial nature that speaks to me deeply. Elongating time.
The peculiar mood transports me back to the sea in New Zealand, just those few months previously when I had attended the Ball together with Iris, and witnessed the beach littered with bodies.
There is no comparison of course: this is a strikingly urban setting, and an altogether different example of human passions at play. The brick wall, a faint wisp of fog rising across its height,
the pattern of the cobblestones, and not a raging wave in sight. A desolate city at night against the vision of nature unleashed. There could be no bigger contrast. But they are unified in feeling.
With me as the onlooker. Voyeur.
A thrill of anticipation runs through me.
A woman appears.
One moment she wasn’t there and now she is.
She is small in stature, or maybe it’s a case of the man being exceptionally tall. The background is blurred and indistinct and I am unable to decide on their respective heights.
She is dressed in an ankle-length brushed velvet skirt in russet shades, her cinched blouse is white. She is small-waisted. Her hair pours over her shoulders in cascades of auburn curls. Her
face is heavily made up, with her lips aggressively rouged. She has green eyes and a calculated appearance of innocence.
She walks across.
Unable to see the man who lurks on her wrong side. He circles her to retain the blind spot, a subtle dance whose movements only observers can discern the pattern of.
The light illuminating the whole scene has imperceptibly grown, chasing the shadows away as the couple continue their progress over the wet cobblestones.
He is following her, his bulk threatening and invisible. His hand moves inside his dark coat. Emerges. Holding a deadly steel blade.
There is a sharp intake of breath.
He holds the blade high.
Like a ritual whose successive steps have long been ordained and are now unavoidable.
He is upon her in a flash.
Her head turns and she catches sight of the knife, her eyes drawn by the way the light flashes on its sharp metal edges. There is no panic, or surprise.
‘It’s you,’ she says calmly.
His face is finally revealed. He is in his mid-forties, is handsome in a rugged sort of way, cheekbones high enough to suggest wildness, the jagged lines of an old scar bisecting his right side
from jaw to the folds of his lip. Beyond the danger in his appearance, there is also a note of grief.
‘Yes.’
‘I knew you would return,’ the woman continues, deliberately not seeking to defend herself from the weapon or evade its coming trajectory. He holds his arm steady as he gazes at
her.
‘I had to find you again . . .’
‘And make me pay?’
‘Yes. What you did was truly unforgivable.’
‘I know.’ She sighs.
Her shoulders slump slightly.
The man with the blade hesitates.
The couple are like statues, immobile, frozen in time. The light surrounding them has not ceased to intensify. They are like figures in the centre of a blaze of white.
‘I am ready,’ the woman says, her body straightening.
‘Lulu . . .’
‘I will not ask for your forgiveness.‘
‘Maybe you should?’ The tone of his voice is regretful.
‘Once, I loved you.’
Hearing her say this, his resolve appears to falter briefly and a shadow races across his eyes, clouding his anger.
She calmly undoes the top button of her white blouse and exposes the pale skin beneath. I immediately wish to see more. The curve of her breasts. Her nipples.
Noting his hesitation, the woman raises her left hand and grips the wrist of the hand holding the knife and lowers it to her throat.
‘Do it,’ she whispers.
He is frozen to the spot.
‘Now,’ she orders. Pulls on his wrist.
The serrated edge of the steel blade faintly cuts into her white skin, drawing a thin line of blood.
She gasps.
He screams out loud.
And pulls his weapon-yielding hand above his head before throwing it back at her with rage and violence. This time, the tip of the blade digs deep and wide and the blood flows freely, splashing
to the ground, soaking her blouse, its deadly pattern spreading like an alien flower across her front before disappearing into the darkness of her velvet skirt where it takes root.
For just a short moment, the young woman stands, unsteady, her eyes clouding, then stumbles and falls to the ground.
I was expecting something more melodramatic – as if what I had just witnessed hadn’t been striking enough – more words, action, but its simplicity hit me in the gut.
Spread across the cobblestones, her body slumped at random angles, a limb quivers in a final involuntary movement. The man, the killer, stands before her, his face a deathly white, tears in his
eyes. The light slowly fades, until the couple are captured in a final cauldron of white and the city scene fades back into the darkness where it had been born.
A hesitant clap, then another. The rustle of movement in the audience. Then the applause began in earnest.
The spell was broken.
I took a couple of steps back and pulled aside the heavy curtain through which the spectators would now begin to stream towards the foyer and the busy Covent Garden streets. On the other side of
the stalls, another usherette, Agnetha, a plump girl who wore a red ribbon in her dark hair, was doing the same. I stepped aside to allow the crowd past me as she did likewise on her side of the
theatre, lines of spectators in a rush to catch a bus or Tube home, filing past in a flurry of hats and coats and gloves and sighs, blank faces pinched in a kind of despair that the magic was over
and real life resumed. I imagined that I caught a glimpse into their lives as they went by, the lovers identifiable by the smiles that clung to their cupid lips, the tired and the lonely carrying
the ghost of solitude with them as they walked, shoulders hunched, gait a little slower than the others.
It wasn’t hard work as it goes, I reasoned, following this initial night in my first London job. But I was unsure how much of the magic of the theatre would sustain itself if I had to
watch the play over and over again during the course of its run.
I knew I had been wrapped up in the events on stage, something about the voyeur in me, managing to believe for a short while the events unfolding on the proscenium, forgetting they were actors
and banishing the artificiality of the circumstances as the drama gripped all along, while hundreds of spectators munched their sweets and sipped their beers or white wine in plastic cups.
I had always been impressionable, even as a kid, drawn to the dark magic of life in the shadows, real or imagined, that surrounded me. Which was, I reckoned, what had brought me to London. I
could lose myself here, in the cobbled streets that wound, labyrinthine, beneath grey skies.
That and Iris, of course. Who would now be waiting for me, in the bedsit we shared by the canal in Hammersmith.
After I had changed back into my jeans and T-shirt, left the now empty theatre, I watched the London night and sights rush by from the top floor of the night bus and thought of Iris – the
sea-salt tang of her that I loved to bury myself in, and of the first night that we had properly come together. That first night at the Ball, by the ocean.
I had always been a child of the sea.
It was the one and only thing that I had inherited from my parents who had emigrated from London to New Zealand in the winter of 1947. Although I hadn’t yet been born at the time, my
mother would later tell me that my love of water came from those six weeks aboard the
Rangitata
, most of it spent on the upper decks navigating the turbulence inside her belly as she endured
most of the long journey vomiting across the rails, overcome by rolling waves and morning sickness. My father had fallen overboard drunk and drowned on the way.
We had docked in Auckland and there we had stayed. Having travelled that far, and now husbandless, my mother refused to go any further, and I had been born six months later and, although I
didn’t have a drop of Maori blood in me, I was named Moana after the ocean and promptly placed into a Catholic boarding school as soon as I was old enough to be enrolled. My mother visited me
once a week, but each time we set eyes on each other I saw only the woman who had abandoned me and all my mother saw were the waves that had swept my father away.
I first learned about love through Iris.
We had met, aged seven, at Holy Communion. After opening my mouth and swallowing the dry husk that had been placed there by the robed priest, who had brushed his thumb against my bottom lip too
slowly and for too long, I had spied Iris through the curtain of her white veil, trailing her fingers through the Holy Water before an attendant had pulled her away. I had broken from the orderly
queue of girls from the boarding school waiting to be escorted back to its cloistered walls and run after the little girl who had dared to touch the untouchable and managed to grab her hand before
I too was whisked off by another adult. As we touched, the water had passed between us. I had carefully held my hand out away from myself so as to keep it damp and not wipe the precious droplets
away but I could not prevent even Holy Water from drying.