‘My husband is a very private man.’
‘A natural trait in a genius, Mrs Huntington. I believe him to be one of the most original thinkers in the field. Perhaps you could persuade him?’
His candour made it impossible for Lavinia to refuse him. She laughed. ‘I shall try, but I must warn you I have little influence.’
He swung her around for another rotation, his face breaking into a boyish grin that instantly dissolved the studied sophistication he affected.
The Huntingtons collapsed across the bed cover. Lavinia, still in her ball gown, her petticoats flung in all directions, looked like some airborne vessel that had been shot to the ground. Still tipsy with exhilaration and punch, she was beyond sleep. Her feet ached; already she could feel the prickling of blisters. Forcing herself to stand, she freed the fastenings at her waist and stepped out of the crinoline and bloomers, leaving just her corset that flattened her breasts.
The Colonel, speechless with exhaustion, had flung his jacket across the dresser in the corner. His collar and cravat were pulled open, and he lay there with one hand across his burning eyes, pondering whether he should get straight back up again and drive over to the Albemarle Hotel where a breakfast of devilled kidneys, bacon and sweetmeats would provide the perfect cure for a surfeit of wine and brandy.
Lavinia threw herself back down beside him.
‘You should sleep and I should go,’ he murmured, and flung a hand in his wife’s direction to console what he assumed was a mutual malaise born of excess. To his dismay she drew the hand up to her lips and kissed it.
‘Stay,’ she whispered.
The words Caress me, drummed against the inside of Lavinia’s skin, an aberrant continuation of the pulsating waltz rhythm still echoing in her head. She wondered whether she should move towards him. The waiting was more torturous then the fear of rejection. James had not moved a single limb, yet there was hope in his passivity; surely this was acquiescence, Lavinia argued to herself.
Deciding she could no longer bear the suspense, she rolled toward him, pushing him onto his back as she moved.
James turned his face away and looked instead at Lavinia’s silhouette thrown by candlelight against the far wall. With her breasts flattened and her hair up, she looked like a slender youth as she mounted him. With his wife now transformed into a stranger, James found this pinning down of his body, this sudden swing into submission, arousing. He hardened and she felt the thickness of him against her. She stared into his face. It was tilted to one side, his eyes now closed, his cheeks flushed.
‘Open your eyes.’
He obeyed her command, his gaze directed somewhere beyond her searching look. Wrenching his arms over his head, she held him down by his wrists. I am towering over him, I am taking him, she thought as he entered her. Gasping, she stared into his eyes, refusing him this escape, this turning from her. All her sensuality was focused on one point of contact, the apex of their sex, and the friction grew and spread like a burning as both careered toward climax.
Despite their locked gazes, James was not wi
th her. He had transported himself into a scenario that was entirely of his own construction; one in which he was making love to a completely different individual. But one who, disturbingly, was beginning to resemble someone he knew. Closing his eyes, he tried to dismiss the image that he had superimposed upon Lavinia’s body. He hauled himself back into the reality of the moment. Here was his wife, her hair wild, each nipple a hard bud, her lips hovering close to his—nothing touching except his sex inside her and her hands burning circles around each of his wrists. She was taking him, seducing him like a man, and he couldn’t deny that it was pleasuring him a great deal.
The months of frustration swelled up in Lavinia as she rode him, legs spread, her flesh stretching and softening in response to his hard organ. Her body stilled in anticipation before wave after wave of contracting ecstasy gripped her.
James, in the embrace of an incubus of his own making, reached his own orgasm, then buried his burning face against the coverlet.
28
Los Angeles, 2002
JULIA HATED BEING OUT OF control. Hated it. ‘I believe in free will,’ she whispered in a desperate mantra as she picked up the scissors. Mania was a sinister trait; not a dramatic hijacking of the psyche, but an insidious intrusion.
Pieces of photographic paper lay in a large spiral around her, like the gatherings of an exotic bowerbird. Julia sat in its centre, two thick photo albums beside her. She was carefully cutting Klaus’s head out of all the images. The current photograph was of a picnic they’d had while on a holiday in Taos, New Mexico, three years before. Klaus was tanned, grinning as he glanced across at Julia, who sat bare shouldered in a summer frock. It was a disconnected moment of exhilaration—no indication of impermanency, no sign that he did not love her, would leave her.
Julia tried to remember who had taken the photo. She concluded that it must have been an anonymous tourist. The thin blades of the scissors traced Klaus’s neckline, not one millimetre over. She was as careful as a head-hunter.
As she cut, she was reminded of a necklace of dead parrots she’d seen at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford several years before, collected from an Amazonian tribe. This bizarre marriage of death and beauty had mesmerised her. Despite the fact that the parrots were corpses hung on string, heads lolling, their feathers were as bright and shiny as they must have been in life. Oddly macabre it was also a wonderfully decorative piece of jewellery.
There had been a glass case full of shrunken human heads in the museum too. The cephalic trinkets resembled oversized walnuts and Julia was shocked when she realised what she was actually staring at. Each mouth was sewn shut with twine, the tiny eyelids squeezed closed against terrible horror.
She remembered a father and son standing in front of the exhibit transfixed, the eight-year-old English boy describing the process of head-shrinking as patiently and dispassionately as if reciting a recipe for muffins. All the while, the blackened wrinkled heads gazed blindly out with an air of aggrieved perplexity, as if wondering how they had ended up mummified in a Victorian glass museum case.
Julia could hear the boy’s crisp consonants even now. So, Daddy, you pull out the skull so there’s just the skin left with the hair still sticking out. Then you stuff the head with stones so that it keeps its shape, then you boil it and it shrinks right down. It takes hours. They did it for power, you know. They believed that all the power of their enemies was kept in their heads, so if you kept the head you got the power for yourself.
Was that what she was trying to do now? Trying to get back the power Klaus had taken from her? Trying to reclaim their history so she could magically construct her own version of a future? She paused, the blade of the scissors neatly turning around one ear, ignoring the fly that buzzed around her own ear, which had flown in through the open window. She didn’t dare speculate. Whatever her motives, she sensed that they were buried deeper than conscious thought.
She finished cutting, careful to keep the rest of the image intact, then placed the head at the end of the spiral, next to its thirty companions. Thirty incarnations of Klaus—some smiling, some deadpan, some squinting in the light of the flash of the camera, some defiant, some sober, but all neatly severed at the chin.
As Julia slammed her hand against the fly, killing it instantly, she wondered whether Klaus had felt her scissors.