Eighty Days Yellow Read online

  ‘So do you have any plans while I’m away? More fetish adventures maybe?’ Dominik asked.

  ‘None right now,’ Summer answered, although she also knew it was unlikely nothing would happen. It was bound to. Every single nerve in her body had now been lit like a torch and she knew her arousal and curiosity were moving down a slippery slope, the momentum increasing with every day.

  Dominik was obviously aware of this.

  His features became more solemn. ‘You do understand you owe me nothing,’ he said. ‘You are free to pursue your life in my absence, although I would ask only one thing of you.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Whatever you do, whatever you get involved in beyond the normal banalities of day-to-day life, working, sleeping, playing with your little band, I want you to let me know. Write to me. In detail. Report to me. By email, or SMS, or even by quaint old-fashioned letter if the time allows. Will you do that for me?’

  Summer agreed.

  ‘Can I offer you a ride back to your flat?’

  She declined. His house was just a few minutes from a station on the Northern line and she needed the space to think, some form of free time Dominik did not own.

  Dominik had declined when the Sapienza University in Rome had offered to arrange for him to stay in a hotel close to the campus. He much preferred his own accommodation and had booked a room in a four-star establishment off Via Manzoni, a ten-minute cab drive from Stazione Termini, where the train from the airport would deposit him.

  He would engage with the conference, give his comparative literature lecture on ‘Aspects of Despair in the Literature of the 1930s to 1950s’, focusing on the Italian writer Cesare Pavese, one of a long tradition of writers who had committed suicide for all the wrong reasons. A subject matter, although somewhat uncheerful, on which he had by default become something of an authority. He would socialise with international colleagues, but he also wanted time alone to reflect on these weeks with Summer. He badly needed to clarify his thoughts, analyse his feelings and decide where he now wanted matters to lead. He had a sense there were a profusion of inner conflicts to resolve. Too many. Things could get messy.

  Following the keynote speech, on the second day of his Roman stay, he had joined a group of other conference speakers and attendees, and dined in a restaurant off the Campo dei Fiori, where the fragole di bosco, the wild strawberries, had just the right touch of pungency and tanginess, and the caster sugar with which they had been sprinkled drew the flavour out to perfection when the fruit touched the tongue.

  ‘Is nice, no?’

  Across the narrow rectangular table, a dark-haired woman he had not been introduced to earlier was smiling at him. Dominik looked up, his eyes stealing away from the succulent concerto of primary colours on his plate.

  ‘Delicious,’ he opined.

  ‘They grow them in the mountains, on the slopes,’ she continued. ‘Not in the forests as it says.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘I enjoy your lecture, very much. Is an interesting subject.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘I also like the book you write three years ago on Scott Fitzgerald. Is very romantic subject, no?’

  ‘Thank you again. It’s always a pleasant surprise to come across an actual reader.’

  ‘You know Roma well, Professore Dominik?’ the woman asked as the waiter navigated the table juggling a tray of piping-hot espresso cups.

  ‘Not particularly,’ he said. ‘I’ve visited a couple of times previously, but I’m afraid I don’t make a great tourist. Not a huge fan of churches and old stones, you see. I love the atmosphere, though, the people. One can sense the history without going on a proper cultural safari.’

  ‘That’s even better,’ she remarked. ‘Is good to be one’s own man, not to follow common path. By the way, I am Alessandra,’ she said. ‘I live in Pescara, but work at Firenze University. I teach ancient literature.’

  ‘How interesting.’

  ‘How long are you in Rome for, Professore Dominik?’ Alessandra asked.

  ‘I have another five days.’ The conference proper ended the following evening, and he had no plans beyond. He had thought of just relaxing, enjoying the food, the weather, grabbing some time for reflection.

  ‘If you want, I can show you around. Reveal to you the real Roma, not the tourist tracks. No churches, I promise. What do you say?’

  Why not? Dominik thought. Her tousled black hair was a jumble of untamed curls, and her deep tan held a promise of warmth. Had he not made it clear with Summer, back in London, that what was developing between them was not exclusive by nature? Or had he? He knew he had not asked her for any promises, and neither had she made any demands on him. Call it an adventure, not a relationship, at this stage.

  ‘I say yes,’ he said to Alessandra. ‘It’s a wonderful idea.’

  ‘Do you know the Trastevere well?’ she asked.

  ‘I expect I will soon,’ Dominik smiled.

  Seduction is mostly a game played between grown-up men and women, when neither party is aware who is the seducer and who the seduced. That was how it turned out with Alessandra from Pescara. The fact they ended up in her hotel room was just a matter of geographical convenience, as the late-night bar they had their final drinks in (sweet Martini for her and Dominik’s usual glass of cola without ice – he was teetotal by taste and not on a matter of principle, never having enjoyed the taste of alcohol when he had been younger and a normal consumer of the stuff) was closer to her homely boutique pensione than his spare, impersonal, expensive chain-hotel room.

  His phone vibrated just as he entered her suite, holding Alessandra’s hand in his and having kissed her in the elevator and been allowed to negligently fondle her arse through the thin cotton skirt that she was wearing.

  He begged Alessandra’s indulgence, pretexting outstanding business matters of a non-academic nature and consulted the text message that had just arrived. It was from Summer.

  ‘I feel empty,’ it said. ‘I think of your twisted desires over and over. Confused, horny, sort of lost.’ It was just signed ‘S.’

  As Alessandra excused herself and moved to the suite’s bathroom to freshen up, Dominik walked over to the balcony where the hills of Rome curtained the surrounding landscape in the hot evening air and texted her back.

  ‘Do what you must, but tell me all when I return. Assume your nature. Consider that a piece of advice rather than an order. D.’

  He swept past the floating curtains shielding the balcony as he returned to the room. Alessandra was waiting for him and had poured two glasses. Hers appeared to contain white wine, his mineral water.

  She had loosened the top two buttons of her white blouse, revealing the plump hillocks of her substantial cleavage, and was sat on a narrow chair. The bedroom door to her immediate right was half open, its darkness a beckoning cavern. Dominik moved over to her level, stood behind the chair and took her hair in his hands, gripping the jungle of unkempt curls. As he tightened his hold on her and the hair began to pull at her scalp, Alessandra groaned quietly in response. Dominik let go, bent over and kissed the back of her neck while his hands circled her neck.

  ‘Sì,’ Alessandra said, with a distinct breathlessness.

  Still standing behind her, he could feel the heat rising from her body.

  ‘Sì? Meaning?’ he asked.

  ‘Is meaning we fuck, no?’

  ‘Indeed,’ Dominik confirmed, and his hands moved further down and slipped under the fabric of her blouse and seized her breasts. Her heart was pumping away, its rhythm a drum tattoo across the surface of her skin.

  His thumb rubbed against the volcanic texture of her nipples. He guessed they would be dark-brown, from her colouring, and remembered the delicate symphony of beige and pink that had delineated the contour of Kathryn’s nipples and the fact they seldom got hard, and then the light-brown, coarser nature of Summer’s tips, and then the breasts of yet another and another of the women who populated his past, those who
had come, those who had gone, those he had loved, lusted after, abandoned, betrayed, hurt even.

  He tore Alessandra’s blouse off rather violently, as if now consumed by anger that she was the one now in this room with him, and not another. That her skin was the wrong shade and not consumed by pallor. That her voice expressed itself with a quaint, foreign accent that only served to remind him of Summer’s Antipodean lilt. He knew he should not reproach Alessandra because her body was voluptuous and didn’t have a tiny waist juxtaposing her wide hips. She was just the wrong body at the right time, he felt, but this didn’t make her the enemy. She held out a hand to reach his trousers and extract his semi-hard cock from his underwear, then took it into her warm, humid mouth. Damn, he realised, Summer had still not sucked his cock. Did this mean anything, or was it just that he’d never invited her to do so? Alessandra’s tongue began to play with his glans, slipping and sliding in a clever dance of arousal round it, teasing, deliberately grazing his most delicate skin with her sharp teeth. With one swift movement he pushed hard into her mouth, forcing himself as deep as she could manage to host him, lodging within her. For a brief moment, Dominik felt he was going to make her choke, and the look of fear and disapproval in Alessandra’s eyes as she looked up to him from her submissive vantage point froze him, but he did not stop. He knew it was merely anger speaking, dictating the roughness of his gestures. Profound irritation at the fact she was not the woman he wanted to be with right now: Summer.

  Dominik relaxed, undressed, as Alessandra silently did likewise and, divorcing her mouth from his cock, lay back on the bed to await their coming together. From the look in her eyes, they both knew this was going to be a rough fuck, a hard one, a mechanical coming together with no elements of romanticism or gentility. This was fine with both of them. It would be their only fuck. A mistake maybe. Strangers holding on to some buoy in the night. Maybe she also yearned for the arms and the cock of another, Dominik speculated, which was why their coming together tonight meant nothing.

  They would part in the morning with few words or endearments, going their own way again. Dominik had no plans to return to Rome in the near future. Once they were both fully naked, he threw himself against her, skin against skin, sweat against sheen of sweat, pulled her legs apart and entered her. Without a word.

  In the background, Dominik’s mobile phone buzzed again, but he would not read the message from Summer until the following morning.

  ‘So be it. S.’

  Summer was worried about her finances. Now that she had stopped playing in the tube, the meagre wages and tips from the part-time gig at the restaurant were stretched thin. The band were on a hiatus, with Chris improvising some new material in a cheap home studio outside of London at a friend’s country cottage, and she’d recorded her brief violin parts some weeks ago and wouldn’t be paid for that work anyway until the recordings actually made any money. She was having to dip into her minimal savings. Too many cabs to distant locations: Hampstead, fetish clubs and so on. Assignations and destinations that she just couldn’t travel to by public transport without feeling much too self-conscious. And no way was she about to ask Dominik to help her out. Or anyone else for that matter.

  She’d heard that there was a board advertising jobs or one-off studio session work or teaching possibilities at the College of Music in Kensington. When she arrived, the main entrance hall was almost deserted and she realised it was half-term. Damn. Whatever was likely to be posted on the board would be old and out-of-date prospects!

  She made her way to the far wall to peruse the pinned-up notes and rectangular cards scattered across the surface of the noticeboard, took out a small notebook from her handbag and scribbled down a few numbers, checking on the dates they had been initially posted to avoid wasting time on anything too ancient and out of date.

  Between the requests for violin lessons for suburban kids and a dearth of well-remunerated calls for string ensembles (bring your own black dress and make-up) to fiddle along in the background for TV recordings with rock groups in search of classical credibility, she caught sight of a card with a familiar ring and realised how Dominik had found the three musicians who had accompanied her in the crypt. She smiled. All roads certainly led to Rome . . . Then she experienced a moment of doubt when she noticed that the phone number listed was not in fact Dominik’s. Maybe he used another number depending on the occasion or need. She filed the information away.

  ‘Looking for a gig?’ a girl’s mellifluous voice said in her ear. Summer turned round to face her interlocutor.

  ‘Yes, but there’s not much to choose from, is there?’

  The young woman was uncommonly tall, almost Amazonian, bottle blonde and rather spectacular in a dark leather bomber jacket and black skinny jeans ending in shiny boots with perilous heels. There was something familiar about her. It was the wry smile at the corner of her lips, the way she contemplated Summer with detached amusement and an assumed sense of superiority.

  ‘That one is interesting, isn’t it?’ the newcomer said, pointing to the card that had already caught Summer’s attention.

  ‘It is. All a bit mysterious and hush-hush,’ Summer remarked.

  ‘I think it might be out of date by now,’ the other said, ‘but someone’s forgotten to unpin it from the board.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Summer said.

  ‘You don’t recognise me, do you?’ the blonde said.

  Then it all came rushing back and Summer felt herself blushing. It was the cello player from the first session in the crypt.

  ‘Oh, Laura, is it?’

  ‘Lauralynn, actually. I’m sorry I made so little impression on you, but then I suppose your mind was on other things. The music, no doubt?’

  The mischief in her voice was evident and Summer remembered the day and how she had briefly thought that Lauralynn had been witness to her nudity beneath her blindfold somehow.

  ‘We played well together, I thought. Even though we couldn’t see you,’ Lauralynn emphasised provocatively.

  ‘That’s true,’ Summer confirmed. They had quickly established a solid musical rapport despite the quirky nature of the performance required.

  ‘So what are you in search of?’ Lauralynn asked.

  ‘A job. Jobs. Anything really. In music preferably. Funds right now happen to be in short supply,’ Summer admitted.

  ‘I see. Well, some of the better ones are not advertised here. You don’t study here, do you? The better gigs are usually word-of-mouth stuff.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Shall we have a coffee maybe?’ Lauralynn proposed. ‘There’s a nice cafeteria on the first floor, and as it’s half-term, it won’t be crowded. We can talk in private.’

  Summer agreed and followed her up the circular staircase Lauralynn made a beeline for. The contours of her arse were wedded to the fabric of her jeans like a second skin. Summer had never been attracted to women per se, but there was an undeniable aura about this blonde woman, an air of authority and self-confidence that she had seldom come across even in men.

  They quickly bonded, discovering they had spent a few years in Australia at the same time, albeit in different cities, and knew a lot of places, musical haunts in common. Summer felt herself relaxing and warming to Lauralynn, despite the ambiguous overtones of manipulation she could instinctively sense in her. They’d agreed after two rounds of coffee to tone down the caffeine rush and had moved on to Prosecco. Lauralynn had insisted on paying for the bottle of sparkling wine.

  ‘How flexible are you?’ Lauralynn asked her, all of a sudden, following on from an idle conversation about the acoustics of Sydney venues.

  ‘Flexible how?’ Summer queried, not quite sure what Lauralynn was referring to, if any double meaning should be ascribed to her question.

  ‘In terms of where you live.’

  ‘Reasonably flexible, I suppose,’ Summer replied. ‘Why?’

  ‘I know there is a position going in a second-division classical ensemble. I think you’re good
enough. You’d pass the audition for it with flying colours, I have no doubt. Even blindfolded,’ she laughed.

  ‘Sounds great.’

  ‘It’s in New York, though. And they want someone who can agree to a minimum one-year contract.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘I’m in touch with the headhunter in Bishopsgate who’s handling this. She’s also from New Zealand, so you’d have something in common. I would have loved to spend time in New York myself, but there’s no demand right now for a cello.’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Is it because of him that you’re hesitant?’

  ‘Him?’

  ‘Your guy, your benefactor, shall we put it? Or is he your master?’

  ‘No way,’ Summer protested. ‘It’s doesn’t work that way at all.’

  ‘You don’t have to pretend, you know. I guessed what was happening, what the two of you were up to, in the crypt. He wanted you starkers, didn’t he? Gave him a thrill to see you performing like that while we were all still clothed, no?’

  Summer swallowed hard.

  ‘Gave you a thrill too, eh?’ Lauralynn continued.

  Summer found refuge in silence. She took a further sip of the sparkling wine, which was going flat by now.

  ‘How did you know?’ she asked.

  ‘I didn’t,’ Lauralynn replied. ‘I guessed. But a friend of mine with a good background in kink posted the ad on behalf of your man – they’re friends – so I had a reasonable idea the whole episode was on the left wing of kosher. Mind you, no way do I disapprove. I’m into the scene myself.’ She smiled conspiratorially.

  ‘Tell me more,’ Summer asked.

  9

  A Girl and Her New Friend

  ‘I can do better than that,’ said Lauralynn. ‘I’ll show you.’

  We were still in the university cafeteria, discussing Lauralynn’s involvement with the kink scene.

  She reached over the table with one of her long, thin arms and took my hand, running her nails softly up the back of my wrist.