The phone rings.
‘There’s something I want to show you, Serena. I think it’s time. Can you shut up shop and meet me?’
‘Where?’
‘Are you alright? You sound breathless.’
I take a deep breath. Open a drawer to shove the diaries away, and something catches my eye. A hasty sketch on a piece of paper torn from Crystal’s clipboard.
A woman’s face. Big eyes. A swan-like neck. Face turned sideways, mouth half smiling, half gasping in secret rapture, an arm outstretched pointing at something. She looks like the pre-Raphaelite Rapunzel in Gustav’s house. She looks like me. I recognise the long drop earrings I was wearing at the private view. Someone sketched me that night when I was leaning against the wall, remembering Venice.
‘Are you there, Serena?’
‘Er, yes.’ The diaries topple on top of the sketch and without thinking I slam the drawer. Wipe the sweat off my hand, off the phone itself. Stare out of the window at the sliding river.
‘I’m OK, Gustav. Just had a trying trip to Devon yesterday.’
‘I missed you when I came to the gallery. Important business, was it?’ He clears his throat. ‘That ex-boyfriend hassling you?’
‘Tying up loose ends, yes.’ I can feel myself calming down as I hear his voice. My heart rate slowing. ‘Ex-boyfriend hassling me? No. I was making sure I never need to go back there.’
‘You still sound stressed, Serena. What’s happened to that feisty mare with the tangled hair?’
Tears are welling up, obscuring my view of the river and the London Eye opposite. Goddammit. How does he do that? Takes what I’m feeling, reads it even through the phone, processes it, susses it, even makes it rhyme?
‘If I start telling you what’s dead and buried, I would never stop.’
‘I’m a good listener.’
‘One day, Gustav.’
‘Fine. So. You’ve looked at the figures? Crystal held the fort while you were out and she’s shifted nearly half the pieces now. Your amazing delivery the other night has tapped into some kind of underground zeitgeist. I thought I had my finger on the pulse when it came to trends, no matter how off the wall, but the response to your masochist voyeur motif has hit the mainstream!’
‘I don’t know how to thank you.’
There’s a silence at the other end of the phone. Rain is starting to hurl itself against the window.
‘You can thank me by meeting me in half an hour,’ Gustav answers at last. ‘Indulge me by letting me show you something that will extricate you from all those memories once and for all.’
‘In that case I’ll bring my bags. They’re right here. I’m coming to you tonight.’
‘Leave everything at the gallery. I’ll send Dickson for them.’ I hear a quiet hiss of satisfaction at the other end of the phone. ‘This will blow your mind. But if I’m wrong, you can walk out of my life with your head held high.’
He’s waiting for me at an anonymous-looking house in Baker Street which has seen better days. Rain stains run green and brown down the facade, over the peeling plaster and cracked woodwork. It’s almost opposite where Sherlock Holmes fictionally lived, in fact, and not far from the weirdness of Madame Tussauds. So much effort put into recreating the make-believe.
He is walking towards me. We are both holding umbrellas. As he sees me he picks up his pace, and I pick up mine. I can practically hear the swelling of violins in the backing track. He’s wearing the red scarf again but the vampire-slayer’s black coat has been replaced by a cool rain jacket. Underneath that he’s wearing another business suit, black, almost funereal.
But despite the formal garb it’s his face that catches me unawares. He looks happy. Slightly unshaven, with that rough, gypsy look that makes me want to touch his face. The cold air and the rain seems to have washed life into him. His eyes under the shade of the umbrella are bright and lively, and when he sees me it’s as if someone has switched on a light behind them. He starts to smile. Really smile. As if he’s about to burst into laughter.
I smile back uncertainly. We’re still separated by a few yards. I look down at myself. Have I spilt something onto my jeans? Is my jacket buttoned unevenly?
‘You look even more beautiful than when I last saw you. That sea air has blown roses into your cheeks.’
‘It’s the only good thing about that place.’
‘You’re where you belong now.’ He lifts my hand and runs his lips slowly and sensuously across the back of it. It’s that mouth I want to conquer. The softness of his mouth in that world-weary face has become my secret challenge. Soon I’m going to make him kiss me properly. French tongues. Everything. But for now he closes his eyes in rapture at the smell of my skin. Then, still slowly as if he’s waking from a sleep, he opens his eyes, produces the silver chain, and locks it onto my bracelet.
Seeing him hook me up like that has become so matter of fact now. But the instant I’m chained to him, I’m anchored. He’s strong, but so am I.
He pushes open the shabby front door and leads me inside. The house is a museum. The musty, waxy smell tells me it’s not lived in. The walls are all panelled in dark wood. The floors are polished dark boards, as are the stairs and even the ceilings. It’s like being boxed up in an antique crate.
Our footsteps echo in the silence as we turn left through a set of huge double doors and enter a long ballroom.
‘Christ, this is like the Tardis!’ I exclaim, whirling round in a circle. The silver chain winds itself around me and I have to twirl anti-clockwise to unwind it. ‘It looked like a kind of slum from the outside.’
‘The wonders of Georgian architecture. City architecture in general, actually. Everything built to maximise the use of the space, and yet deceptive. Go up higher, if you’re in the new world. Dig deeper, stretch backwards, if you’re in the old country.’
He unwinds his scarf as he waits in the doorway of the ballroom. His handsome face, settling into calm as he’s revealed to me properly once more. The knot at his throat is a peacock blue with a feathery design fading down the tie.
When I was about nine I came home with some gigantic feathers I’d found arranged in a circle in the middle of a campsite along the cliffs. It was winter, so the campsite was vacant. I thought the feathers were so pretty, the shimmering green and blue with the huge eye in the middle. I stuck them with Sellotape into a fan but when she saw them she screamed that I was a wicked girl who’d brought the evil eye into the house.
I start to walk down the middle of the polished floor. This room is also panelled, but the panels are hung with oversized black and white photographs in very contemporary plain frames. The far end of the room, which should traditionally accommodate a fireplace or an ancestral portrait, is filled entirely by an enormous flat screen.
‘What you’re going to see here should appeal to your voyeuristic tendencies, Serena. And your secret taste for punishment. In fact, I’m banking on these images really liberating your mind.’
I plant my hands on my hips. ‘You really think you know me, don’t you?’
He bats his hand lightly as if I’m a moth. ‘Half the glitterati of London reckon they know you, signorina. That’s why certain erotica collectors have been sniffing round while you’ve been out of town.’
‘Collectors? Cool.’
‘Did you know that Ian Fleming allegedly possessed a collection of flagellation erotica? It was his wife Ann who was into it, apparently. She wrote him letters, begging for it.