‘So how much did he give you?’ she asked.
I told her, and saw her eyes widen.
‘Some of which I’ve already spent,’ I said, ‘on you.’
When I first arrived, we had kissed and then undressed each other, and the present I had brought had been forgotten. Now, though, I took a wide, flat box out of my bag and handed it to her.
She sat up on the bed and lifted the lid. Inside, under crisp sheets of tissue paper, was a cream silk gown with lilac petticoats. She took a quick breath and fell quite still, her face filled with light reflected from the dress. ‘I’ve never seen anything so beautiful.’ She leaned over and kissed me again. ‘But I’m too hot to try it on just now. Do you mind?’
‘Of course not. In fact, I need you to stay as you are.’ I reached into my bag a second time, producing a pair of scissors. ‘You remember the favour I asked you about?’
Faustina leaned back and looked at me drowsily, one hand cushioning her head so I could see the small round bone on the inside of her elbow. ‘What favour?’
‘I asked if I could have some of your hair.’
‘That’s right. From the private places.’
I nodded. ‘Yes.’
‘I don’t suppose you’re going to tell me what it’s for?’
‘I can’t.’
‘What if I tried to guess?’
‘You couldn’t.’
She rolled on to her side, cheek propped on one hand, and watched as I produced three tiny packets, each of which I had labelled in advance: ARMPIT HAIR (LEFT), ARMPIT HAIR (RIGHT), PUBIC HAIR.
‘You’re very well prepared,’ she said.
‘Where should I begin?’
She touched her left armpit. ‘Start here,’ she said, then she moved her hand down between her legs. ‘And finish here.’
I bent over her and laid the blades of the scissors flush against her skin.
She drew the air in past her teeth. ‘That’s cold.’
‘Do you trust me?’
She nodded.
I began to cut the hair, which was straight and dark, though not as dark as the hair on her head. The smell that rose out of her armpit was delicate and bitter, like chicory.
‘It tickles,’ she murmured.
‘Try not to move,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to hurt you.’
Once I had removed all the hair from her left armpit, I folded the packet shut. Faustina altered her position on the bed. As I started work on her right armpit, I could feel her watching me with a mixture of amusement and curiosity. It was as if I had an obsession, and she had decided to indulge me. Not so far from the truth, perhaps.
The right armpit was soon finished. As I moved down her body and knelt between her legs, Faustina turned her face to one side. I bent over her pubic mound. The blood rushed to my groin. Faustina had closed her eyes, and her breasts rose and fell with every deep, slow breath. From where I crouched, between her knees, she looked foreshortened, reduced to a succession of erotic places. Clitoris, nipples, lips. I wondered if she could sense my erection. Trying to ignore it, I began to snip at the dark inverted triangle.
‘Strange,’ I murmured, ‘how this hair differs from your other hair.’
‘Which do you prefer?’
‘I prefer it all.’
Eyes still closed, she smiled.
‘There’s no part of you,’ I said, ‘that I don’t prefer.’
‘You’re not making any sense.’
The coiled springs proved hard to cut, and all the time I was aware of her cunt below me, and its aroma, which was the aroma of love-making — a new mingling of her juice and mine, a recent, ripe concoction of the two of us. To give myself a better angle, I decided to kneel beside her, next to her right hip. Turning my back on her, I aimed the scissors downward, towards that little knot of tissue that gave her so much pleasure. As before, I tried to cut as close to the root of each hair as I could. Slowly, I filled the last of the three packets.
Though I was facing away from her, I heard her breathing quicken, and when I glanced over my shoulder I saw that her left hand was up against her mouth. I kept snipping at her pubic hair, getting ever closer to the place where the skin parted. Once the packet was full, and I had laid the scissors to one side, I climbed over her right leg and slid my prick into her cunt. Eyes still closed, she sank her teeth into the edge of her hand, just below the little finger.
I closed my eyes as well and moved inside her, imagining the ribbed flesh, the supple rings of muscle. Mauve and yellow flowers filled the blank screen of my eyelids, the petals loosening and drifting downwards on to smooth grey stone. I kissed the soft bristles in the hollow of her armpit, then I kissed the smaller hollow of her clavicle. I moved up to her mouth, which smelled of ripe melon. Not the wound-red Tuscan water-melon, but the pale-green variety I had bought in Naples once, and which had grown, so I was told, on the wild coast of Barbaria. I breathed her breath, I licked her lips. When I reached beneath her and held her buttocks in my hands, she trembled all over, her cunt seeming to flutter, and I thought of a fish in the bottom of a boat, a fish just lifted from the water, then she tightened round me and I came. The force of it threw me sideways, and my head struck the ceiling where it slanted above the bed. I must have cried out because she opened her eyes and asked if I was all right.
‘I think so,’ I said. ‘I hit my head.’
‘The ceiling is rather low.’ She began to laugh, despite herself. ‘Does it hurt?’
I was laughing too. ‘Only a bit.’
She lay back.
‘I came too quickly,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry. I couldn’t help it.’
‘No, no. It was good. I liked it.’
‘I saw flowers. Huge mauve and yellow flowers, all massed together, and falling slowly through the air —’
‘When you hit your head?’
I laughed again. ‘No, before. When I was inside you.’
‘Flowers?’ she said. ‘I never heard of anything like that.’
It was a happy time, the happiest I had ever known. Later, though, when I looked back, I saw that I had been living in a kind of dream state. But perhaps that’s what happiness is: a suspension of disbelief or a willed ignorance, which, like held breath, cannot be sustained beyond a certain point.
By the first week of April, I had put the finishing touches to the commission. In the end, I didn’t use the contents of the three packets. Working with scissors had been a mistake, perhaps, since many of Faustina’s hairs were too short to implant successfully. Instead, I resorted to hair plucked from a corpse provided by Pampolini. I had, in any case, begun to feel uncomfortable about the idea of involving Faustina, not least because she claimed to be the bastard child of the Grand Duke’s wife. When confronted with the adjustments I had made, the Grand Duke declared that I had, once again, more than fulfilled his expectations, and presented me with a dark-brown doe-skin coat which he had bought in London, and whose cuffs, pockets and hem were discreetly embroidered with silver thread. I also began to be invited to the most exclusive gatherings, and met many luminaries of the age, people like Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, who had developed the microscope, Hayyim Pernicca, a Kabbalistic scholar from Livorno, and Govert Bidloo, an anatomist who had written a musical work known as an opera, the first of its kind. What’s more, when I attended court, I was allowed to within a few paces of the Grand Duke, perhaps because we now had a whole new area of common ground; after all, when it came to a certain subject, I was the only person in the world he could talk to. In company, I took care to underplay the change in my fortunes. In private, though, I felt valued as never before.
Then, one sultry morning towards the end of that month, I discovered that my gnawing sense of the unrepeatability of things had been justified, and even, to some extent, prophetic, though not at all in the way I had imagined. I was in my workshop, with the doors open to the stable yard, when Vespasiano Schwarz appeared. Sweat had blackened his armpits, and he was panting. The Grand Duke wanted to see me at once, he said. I asked if something was wrong. He didn’t know.