“Please accept our apologies,” he says. “You must be quite tired?” He ceremoniously takes her hand. He is now wearing a smoky grey lounge suit, the same colour as his eyes. “Come,” he says. “We’ve prepared some food for you.”
She agrees to enter the castle, although she also knows this might be a mistake, that maybe she shouldn’t, now that the falling sun has retreated with all its elementary seduction and the menace of night is ready to take over.
Once inside, she glances back – intuition or ultimate temptation. The moon is full and shines over a freshly mowed lawn at the heart of which stands a white marble statue, maybe of Venus, or even Diana the huntress without her slings and arrows, the languorous shape of the goddess bathing in the moonlight.
The young woman turns back and, with quiet determination, enters the house.
“If you wish to freshen up,” the man says, pointing to a door.
“Yes, I’d like to spray my warpaint on again,” she jokes, repressing the anxiety quickly rising inside her throat.
As she washes her hands, she gazes at the reassuring image in the mirror: she is still pretty, still looks fresh despite all those hours on the train; some would even say the darker shade below her eyes was an added bonus. “What a face,” she says nevertheless, almost out of habit.
A snack? On a small table at the centre of the art deco living room filled with delicate furniture, she can see all the things she likes: patisseries, fruit, finger-sized delicacies, lemonade – she is still at an age where you are allowed to enjoy sugary things. In the meantime, the stranger is busy starting a fire inside the big fireplace, kneeling in front of the first orange flames longer than he normally would, exposing his slim neck to her gaze, no doubt aware she is full of questions and in no hurry to supply answers.
He finally rises from his prone position while she finishes biting into a thin slice of an exquisite tart. “I will take you to your room,” he says. “You’ll find something you can wear for dinner. Take your time. If you want to take a bath, just tell Nora, and she will arrange it.”
With his hand, he points to a corner of the room where a young coloured woman in a domestic’s uniform is standing, straight and silent. She has pale grey eyes, shining in the light of the nearby flames like the eyes of a cat.
She hadn’t even heard her enter the room. “We dine at eleven,” he adds.
They walk up a wide, pink, marbled set of stairs, a bit too ostentatious for her taste. Then, after passing through a red vestibule, down a long corridor punctuated by doors numbered one to nine. At the other end, there is another set of stairs, probably leading up. They stop at number seven. The maid opens the door and stands back to let her go in.
The room is spacious, tastefully furnished. Not one piece of furniture is contemporary; every single piece, from the straight geometry of the dresser to the vanity table with its crystalline mirror to the bed shrouded with delicate linen, appears to be brand new, although they all obviously were made in the twenties.
On the wall, a Millet-style print: three farm laborers resting in a field, enjoying a drink, while a woman awaits them, sitting against a haystack; it’s unclear what she might be waiting for, as, unlike any character in a picture by the Barbizon artist, she is totally naked, and when you take a closer look, her hands, though held against her knees, are tied with a thin piece of string.
This sets her thinking again of the four men playing cards on the train, the same sense of discontinuity between the image you expect and the more disturbing one…
“Do you wish to take a bath?” the maid asks. There is no trace of the Caribbean in her voice.
“Yes, please…”
The bathroom that connects to the room is huge, all green marble, all three walls covered by mirrors, as is, curiously enough, the ceiling. Exotic plants, suspended from shelves and metal stands, spread a delicate perfume of wet earth and heavy flowers throughout the room. The bathtub, carved out of a single piece of dark marble and held up by sphinx-like feet, is positively enormous.
The maid runs the water, pouring in perfumed oil that rises in bubbles, the strong fragrance of which blends easily with that of the green plants in the room. The perfume rising through the steam now obscuring the mirrors transports her back to that sense of dizziness she experienced on the train; it’s like feeling slightly drunk on an empty stomach.
The maid comes towards her, unbuttons her shirt, unhooks her bra and then the skirt. She does not remark on the fact that she is wearing no panties. The young woman allows her to do so, suddenly assaulted by tiredness, or at any rate using the tiredness as an excuse to surrender to whatever is about to happen to her.
In the water, it feels to her as if she is swimming in the immensity of the tub. Above her, she sees the shrouded reflection of a young blonde woman in the misted-up mirror, her skin ever so pale, like a white mummy floating inside a green marble coffin, the blue-grey of her eyes lost in the distance. But the steam rises and finally wipes out this lazy landscape of curves.
The maid allows her to soak for a long time in all the fragrances the heat is now breaking up. Finally, she comes back and hands her a Japanese robe, pale green, embroidered with birds of paradise.
“Do you want me to give you a massage?” she asks. “The bath will wash the journey away, and the massage will wash the bath away. Afterwards, I shall apply your make-up. The commander has given me very precise instructions.”
She lets herself go, agile fingers skimming across her skin with exquisite softness, slowly untwisting her nerves, polishing her muscles, effectively providing her with strength again after her energy has been sapped by the bath. The maid has her lie down on a folding table once she has slipped out of the robe. First, lying on her stomach, she is massaged from her neck down to her heels, unavoidably feeling something stirring inside her when the long, brown fingers knead her ass and thighs. But she’d rather believe it’s just a feeling of comfort. She almost falls asleep anyway, listening to the gurgling sounds of the emptying bath.
She is then turned round. Above her, the mirror is clearing up.
The young Creole woman is working her shoulders, the beginning of her neck, grazing her breasts whose tips are hardening, not that she notices as her hands lower themselves towards her midriff, before moving back to polish her nipples from time to time. Her brown hands make the extreme winter pallor of her pale skin appear almost indecent.
The young woman looks at herself in the ceiling mirror, and from her perspective, the girl massaging her appears closer to her than she in fact is, as if it were her mouth, her lips massaging her, and not her fingers. But very soon, it is actually her darker lips that are now attaching themselves to her taut nipples, licking then sucking on her hard tips, racing across her tremulous skin, her pretty café au lait face soon ensconced between her thighs. All she can see is the back of her head, a mass of short, dense curls when the maid’s mouth alights on her cunt, and the masseuse’s tongue separating the delicate lips of her opening, skimming across her dilated clit. She feels as if she wants to come that very moment, if only to release all the tension building up inside her since she walked into the house. With her hands, she grasps the short dark curls and pulls the girl’s face hard against her stomach – black against white – her lithe tongue butterflying over her clit now feeling more forceful, more incisive.
The young maid pulls her body down towards the edge of the table, both her legs now winging over the sides, the indefatigable tongue squirming around her red-hot button, plunging down into her wet vagina, tiptoeing across her anus and delicately forcing it open – she has never had the courage to tell any of her previous lovers how much she would like to be sodomized by a hard, burning tongue – all this while her long bronzed fingers keep on playing with her breasts. Finally she comes, no longer able to restrain her voice, flooding the girl’s face with her juices. The maid rises, wiping her mouth, her chin, and her nose with a towel and, curiously enough, smiles not at her but towards the mirror on the ceiling. The thought that someone has just witnessed the whole scene through a one-way mirror dawns on her with absolute certainty. What other traps are to follow? She slides off the massage table, pulls the young maid by her hair as she had done earlier, forces her to kneel before her and presses her face against her cunt, the heavy-lipped and violent mouth against her small blonde bush.