‘Les Liaisons Dangereuses.’ The sexy French voice caresses my ear. ‘What an incredible theme for your next commission, Serena. A contemporary take on that classic tale of sexual shenanigans, all being filmed in a glorious château.’
‘Don’t stop with the gorgeous accent. I love it when you go all continental!’
He laughs softly and licks and nibbles the back of my neck, making me shiver even though we’ve just shared a very hot shower.
‘Zeez are my roots. I don’t know why I haven’t brought you here before.’
‘To the penthouse at the Georges V, do you mean?’ I press my forehead against the cool glass and stare across at the Eiffel Tower shrouded in early-morning May mist. ‘If we had your telescope I might just be able to spot the pension I stayed in last time I was here.’
‘You’re the budding star who scored an all-expenses-paid trip. What I meant was, I should have brought you to Paris sooner. It’s where I grew up, after all.’ Gustav combs his fingers through my hair and lets it drop, tickling my spine. ‘And this commission will be a piece of cake. After all, you’ve done a similar day-in-the-life before, for Pierre.’
I open the door to our balcony. There’s a faint chill as the spring rain paints the slate rooftops and wide streets a silky grey.
‘Do we have to talk about your brother?’
Gustav lifts my wet hair off my damp skin and twists it into a plait.
‘Yes, we do. You’re going to be related to him just as soon as I can get a gold ring on your finger. Also, this gig is down to the enthusiastic response of his Hollywood bosses when they were shown your pictorial record of his burlesque show.’
I put my hand outside. The rain is so gentle I can barely feel it. ‘I can’t shake off the suspicion that he’s been pulling strings. To make up for all the trouble he’s caused.’
Gustav steps on to the balcony, out into the rain, so that he can face me. His hair is slicked back from the shower and he’s naked but for a huge white towel draped dangerously loosely around his hips. He hasn’t shaved yet and the morning’s shadow sculpts his gorgeous features. He’s shivering, but he takes my shoulders and shakes me.
‘If he could twist people’s arms on your behalf, he would. He won’t rest until you are a hundred per cent convinced he’s not a two-faced schemer. But it doesn’t work like that in the tough world of film. So knock this chip off your shoulder, Serena. When are you going to realise your own worth? It’s your professional talent that has brought us over here. Not Pierre. Not me. This French film company booked you after they saw the pilot of Pierre’s show. It gave them the idea to run a similar storyboard for their own production. The Theatre B was a stepping stone, yes. But so is every job, surely? One body of work leads to the next.’
I open my mouth to respond, but Gustav puts his hand over my mouth to silence me and pushes me back into the room.
The breakfast tray is resting on our vast bed and I start picking apart a croissant. ‘Well, if that’s true, I’ll thank him when I next see him. If I’m honest, these nerves are about Margot. She’s like a bad smell, G.’
Gustav picks up another towel and starts rubbing his hair with it.
‘Why are we even talking about her? You’re her nemesis, Serena. Snow White to her Wicked Queen. The more beautiful you grow, the more her mirror has to give her the cold hard truth. That she was never the fairest.’
I shake my head, smearing butter on to my pastry. ‘Honey, this is real life. Not a fairy tale.’
‘Come on, cynic. Every day with you is magic,’ Gustav says with a twinkle in his eye as he throws the towel into a damp heap on the floor. ‘We’ve shown her we’re unbreakable. No one in New York will give her the time of day. With any luck she’ll have flapped away on her broomstick by now to pick on someone her own size.’
He drains his coffee cup then carries the tray over to place it outside the door.
‘Look. Pierre may have been the catalyst for this job, but, as he said in his emails before we flew out here, your work sells itself. It’s visual; a portrait, an impression, a story. So when it’s on display, in a gallery, or in a boardroom, whether it’s personal or public, by its nature it has an audience. The audience sees it, and likes it, and wants a piece of it. Just as I saw you, and liked you.’ He wanders back to where I’m sitting, folds me into a tight bear hug and nips my neck. ‘And wanted you.’
I pull my shoulders up and giggle as the sharp pain rouses me.
‘Where would I be without you?’
‘Not in Paris, that’s for sure!’
I tip my head sideways to expose my neck a little more. ‘I meant, without you putting things into perspective for me, G.’
‘Did you know you’re using that nickname more and more? I love it.’
I lean against him, watching a finger of sun running down the side of the Eiffel Tower before being snatched back into the clouds. If I continue looking straight ahead I can pretend we’re on holiday. But in an hour, the film company’s car will arrive and whisk me away from this dreamy room.
‘I noticed the first time Pierre called you “G”, during that awful row before Christmas. You’d not seen each other for five years. There was so much hurt, Margot had done so much harm, all of it was pouring out of both of you, but when there seemed nothing else to say Pierre reached out to you. He called you “G”. One tiny letter, but it shows how close you were. Are. It seems to calm him every time the temperature between you starts to rise.’
‘And it’s yours to use, too, whenever you feel anxious.’ Gustav starts to touch each bump of my vertebrae with the tip of his tongue. ‘So let’s focus on today, and why we’re here. Thanks to that call from Château Cine, Serena Folkes is back in her voyeur’s saddle.’
I let his words soothe me. ‘Tell me more about these sexual shenanigans, then. These dangerous liaisons.’
‘The clue is in the title, and as a cadeau for my clever fiancée I have acquired an original edition of the book the film is based on.’ Still kissing me, he produces from behind his back an ancient book with a yellowing jacket. ‘I sneaked off to a sale at the antiquarian bookshop yesterday. Only a handful of copies were available and they went like hot cakes. Philandering Frenchmen buying them for their petites amies, no doubt. But I’ve also bought a convenient translation so you can research the story in the car going to the location.’
‘I’m not your mistress, buster! I’m your fiancée!’ I slap at him. ‘But thank you.’
He holds the book away from me playfully. ‘It’s a naughty, twisted, sexy tale full of scheming and intrigue between older characters, who set out to corrupt their innocent young counterparts. But it’s a complicated ensemble. Before the studio limousine whisks you out of town to the château where they are filming, you’ll need to read the cast list to work out who’s who, and who is going to do what to whom.’
‘Hmm. Maybe I’d better do some homework now. They’ve commissioned me to do what I do best, which is turning stalking into an art form. I’ll just be lurking in the shadows as the film takes shape. The filmers filmed. This shoot shouldn’t be too difficult if all they do is stand around plotting and then have sex!’
‘And you know what will happen if you don’t blend into the background?’ Gustav hands me the little book. ‘They’ll want you to join in!’
‘Honey, I’m trying to be serious! Today it’ll just be me and my camera.’
I open the book and look at the list of dramatis personae. Gustav has drawn a tiny sketch of my face alongside the date and the words Serena. Ma chérie. Ma femme.
I smile up at him, speechless for a moment. He kisses me again and pads away across the thick, luxurious carpet.
He reaches for his clothes, which in last night’s haste were left crumpled over a chair. ‘I still feel a little regretful that instead of being your rich lover bringing you on a dirty weekend, I’m just here as your hanger-on.’
‘So allow me to enjoy pulling rank over you, Monsieur!’ I put the book down. There’s a sudden flurry of rain ricocheting off the overhanging roof. The tulips out on the balcony boxes, apparently driven fresh from Amsterdam every day, bend their heads under the shower. ‘Although I may not be able to concentrate on my work if you’re lounging beside me in that biker jacket and scruffy jeans.’
‘These jeans, do you mean?’ I turn to see what he’s talking about, and see him bending to pull one black trouser leg up over his tight boxers. My stomach lurches as the part of him that delights me, night after night, is packed away.
‘Why are you putting those smart ones on? They turn you into Gustav the entrepreneur, not Gino the bag carrier. I liked it at that hilarious Robinson family shoot when you pretended to be my sexy Latino assistant, doing all the heavy lifting, and ended up watching me being fingered by the daughter of the house! Aren’t you coming to hump my equipment?’
‘Not today, chérie. I have to go out of town for a meeting with some Italian associates.’
‘Another meeting? You never said. When will you be back?’
He pauses as he’s about to do up the trousers. ‘Late, signorina. They want me to take the high-speed train down to Florence to view the site. We’ve been discussing this project for weeks now. But don’t look so despondent! Tomorrow I have a much more exciting appointment with a certain jeweller in the Quartier Latin. He has some very special measurements to take.’
I run across the room, jump into his arms and he staggers with me back to the enormous queen-size bed. ‘Our wedding rings! Oh, my God, Gustav! It’s really going to happen! When can we do it? When are we going to get married?’
He rolls on top of me and starts peeling the fluffy towel away from my flushed, damp skin. As my breasts are revealed and the nipples sharpen into tight points, I grab at his waistband and start undoing the button of his jeans.
‘I don’t want to rush anything, but hey, why not sooner rather than later? Can you think of any significant dates? How about Halloween?’
‘The anniversary of our meeting! That would be amazing! But five months isn’t much time to get things organised!’
‘We could just elope.’
I smile as I grow heavy with desire. ‘Our life is one long elopement!’
He kicks the trousers away and lets me pull off the clean boxers. Oh, God, there’s nothing like a super-luxurious hotel room with a panoramic view over the rooftops of Paris, a historic wine cellar far below, and a sparkling blue bathtub big enough to practise your lengths, to turn you on.
And talking of lengths. My lover’s hardness springs free, jabbing into my stomach as I wrap my thighs around his hips and pull myself up against him, feel the tip of him nudging at me.
‘Gustav Levi, even if we elope I can’t get married without a dress, can I? Polly would kill me if I did it in jeans or a bikini. She has her heart set on making the wedding gown, and I don’t feel happy about planning anything until we’ve mapped out her part as seamstress, but how can she if I’m in Paris and she’s in Marrakesh?’
Gustav fans his hands out over my bottom and pushes me hard against him. We pause for a moment, breathing softly into each other’s faces, taunting each other to see who will move first, who will crack and give in.
‘A minuscule complication, Serena. One I’m sure you’ll fix somehow. But for now? Let’s shut that beautiful sexy mouth of yours.’
His black stare rakes over me as he pulls his haunches back. I wait, luxuriating in the way he devours me with his eyes. He pauses. He’s not going to be gentle. He’s still loving, but he’s rarely gentle these days. He rocks his hips against me and slides straight in, straight up. The rain patters more insistently against the window. The poor tulips dip their heads in the spring storm as my fiancé and I arch and move in delicious slow rhythm.
I ease myself across his thighs, press closer to him so he goes in deeper. My muscles tighten around him. His hands loosen slightly on my hips as his face softens. We are totally enclosed in this circle of love and luxury. So gentle, so familiar. So real.
His black eyes glitter with fresh fire and he moves faster, banging me against him in a spiral of excitement until his eyes half close with the effort of holding back. The release comes quickly and we fall together into the snowy sheets.
The studio limousine takes me away from Gustav and away from the magic of the hotel, out on to the bustle of the Champs-Élysées. We drive along the north side of the Seine for a while, past the spot near Notre Dame where I took the photographs for my Parisian series of young lovers that the Weinmeyers now have in their house. Or did have, before they installed the ruined Baker Street footage.
But instead of crossing over the famous river, we plunge underneath it, and when we re-emerge from the tunnel we have left all those landmarks behind us. We are in another land, the land of grey, flat banlieues, where even the telephone lines seem to sag with boredom.
I get out the summary of Les Liaisons Dangereuses and stick my iPod in my ears.
I wanna kiss you in Paris.
I read a little about the story then close my eyes and think of the big, rumpled bed Gustav and I have just climbed out of. How many hours will it be until we can be back there again? When I look up again about forty minutes later, the car is driving slowly along a nondescript village street. There’s no apparent life except a couple of teenagers trying and failing to kick-start their mopeds. The rain has stopped, but the clouds hang heavily over the landscape as if waiting for an excuse to puke up a fresh load.
‘On arrive!’ declares the driver as two enormous black gates set in a long grey wall at the far end of the village street open electronically. We cruise up a long, straight gravel drive policed on either side by dark green topiary clipped into the shapes of cockerels and spaniels and flying fish.
The château is a mini version of Versailles. The large grey bricks are seamed with watermarks, but the pointed turrets give the building an impressive, majestic air. I tuck the book into the pocket of my faded denim jacket and get out of the car. I stare up at the long, blank windows, and the château stares back at me. The driver waves me up a set of stone steps extending along most of the façade and leading to the main double doors, which are standing open. I walk through a cold stone porch and straight through an internal courtyard. On the far side is another door, this time modern, double height and glass.
I’ve arrived in an echoing stone hallway complete with sweeping double staircase, a number of ominously closed doors and a glassed-in corridor leading away into the distance, offering more glimpses of garden. It’s all very cool and grand, but still no one appears to greet me. If it wasn’t for the coils of black cable snaking between arc lights, several unmanned film cameras balanced on enormous gantries, and the rows of overloaded electrical sockets, I would think I’d come to the wrong place.
‘Excusez-moi? Are you lost?’
A door on the left of me opens just as I’m lifting my hand to knock, and a slim girl appears beside me with huge brown eyes and crimson-dyed hair cut in the kind of gamine crop only French girls like her can carry off.
‘Bonjour. Je m’appelle Serena Folkes,’ I say, holding up my camera case. ‘Je suis ici pour photographier Les Liaisons Dangereuses?’
‘Ah yes. They are filming now. Well, they are always filming.’ She waves a clipboard over the cold deserted hall and beckons me to follow her. Today I’m wearing a leather miniskirt and cowboy boots, and a striped Breton sweater which keeps falling off one shoulder. She runs her hand down my arm. ‘T’es très française!’
As she opens the doors, a wall of breathy, sexy music hits us. It’s the lowdown, gravelly, slightly jungle beat of Madonna’s Erotica complete with moaning, persuasive voice and orgasmic sighing. I’ve just been listening to it on my iPod. It winds into your ears, right down into you, makes you want to sway, until you remember that you’re not dancing in an underground nightclub in the early hours, but toiling in a château in broad daylight. More studio lights are set up in here, filling the room with an artificially bright glare so that, although it’s raining outside, it looks like a hot summer’s day in here.
The girl leads me across the back of a rectangular, parquet-floored salon with pale gold and gilt walls whose cornices and coving are alive with vines and cherubs clambering all over the walls and ceilings. The room shares the proportions and period detail of the ballroom at the Palazzo Weinmeyer in Venice. The bright gold of the figures picks up the artificial sunlight being beamed around the room. When this is screened, the scene will be bathed in a warm, golden glow, like an advertisement for Hovis or Bisto.
The girl, who I realise is holding my hand now, puts a finger to her dark-painted mouth. I can’t see past the next semicircle of cameras grouped halfway down the room. Various cameramen in nondescript dark clothing are training their lenses or moving their wheeled apparatus towards the far end while a couple of spindly lads lay a train track down the centre of the floor.
The runner and I walk down the garden side of the room where ceiling-height glass doors lead on to an ornate patio and a lawn sweeps down to a lake.
Everyone is staring at a vast stone fireplace with flames the size of a bonfire flickering in the grate. It’s all very baronial, except that there is no wooden furniture, tapestries or aloof aristocrats. Instead, there is a huge TV screen above the mantelpiece, as wide as the chimney breast itself, showing what looks like a window spattered with raindrops, and grouped around the fireplace is a set of very modern, low-slung white leather sofas.
Instead of the aloof aristocrats you’d expect to see striking poses in tailcoats and powdered wigs, I can now see two men, one on either side of the fireplace, leaning pugnaciously out of their leather chairs and having a blazing row. One is handsome and silver haired, and wearing faded jeans and a washed-out cotton shirt. The other is in a kind of sharply tailored tawny mod suit with a tie-less white shirt buttoned up to the neck.
The silver-haired man picks up a bottle of red wine from a big glass table stacked with other bottles, cakes and candles, and starts waving it around as he snaps and snarls at the younger man. Everyone else in the room stands very still, arms crossed. Just watching. I make a face at the girl.
‘Maybe this wasn’t a good day to come!’
‘Not rehearsal. This is real. Real shoot I mean.’ She smiles, waving her clipboard at the actors. ‘The cameras roll twenty-four seven. Like documentary. But also like reality.’
I glance back at the set. Cool idea.
The runner girl nudges me. ‘That’s the Vicomte de Valmont, the old guy, the one who makes all the trouble in the story, and he’s fighting with Comte de Gercourt.’
I glance at her. She’s clutching the top of her clipboard and staring at the grey-haired man. He has filled his glass so full that red wine spills on to the wooden floor.
I lean closer and whisper. ‘You’re going to have to explain the plot to me again.’
‘All you need to know is that they all want to have sex with each other. At least, that’s the simple version of the story.’ She blushes, then pulls me behind one of the cameras and points at a third person I hadn’t even noticed. ‘And there’s Cécile, the innocent character. That’s the one they all want. Even the women want her.’
The male characters may be after Cécile, but at the moment the character is being ignored. She is young, around the same age as me and my new friend the runner, and she’s perched at the end of a third long sofa which faces the fireplace and the blank TV screen with the raindrops. She is dressed in a long grey overcoat and thick black tights, and the knees in those tights are pressed tightly together. Her white fingers are hooked round her knees and drawing them towards her so that her feet in their polished black loafers are lifted off the ground. She has an angular, pale face with not a scrap of make-up, and pale hair the colour of sand pulled behind a drab grey Alice band.
She reminds me of Sister Perdita, the little nun whom I stalked and watched in her secluded convent in Venice last year, flagellating herself in her cell to atone for her sins.
‘She doesn’t look as if she should be in a film about sex. She looks like a nun!’
‘C’est ça! Très bien!’ The runner girl starts to smile but tips her clipboard over her mouth to hide it. ‘She has come out of the convent to be married, but the old guy, Valmont, has a bet with his ex-mistress that he can take the little nun’s flower.’
Now it’s my turn to snuffle with laughter. The runner girl is about to pull me away when the screen above the fireplace, unnoticed by the arguing men, suddenly illuminates, sending a dazzling white glow over the room, and there is Madonna, enacting the sunlit sexual fantasies she recorded in her infamous book of twenty years ago. She and her acolytes are writhing and dancing and moaning as she sings the lyrics to Erotica. The screen is alive now with a stream of artistic, erotic footage, part blurred, part paused, part sharply in focus. Mostly in monochrome. Girls pressing together on a windy beach, mouths on each other’s necks and faces, but eyes on the camera. Two naked men bending over a stripped girl in a school gym.
Do as I say.
Below the TV screen, the two men are standing. They have their backs to the fireplace, so they are not seeing the bodies arching on the screen above them. They pay no attention to the thrusting breasts, the bondage straps wrapped around pert buttocks, the opening mouths and those greedy tongues poking and licking as the music suggests all kinds of naughtiness.
I begin to see how reality and fantasy can merge within a film set, especially with the surreal touch of highly sexual music distracting them even when they are not speaking. I want to capture this concept. A film within a film. I notice that a cameraman is placed on a slightly raised platform at the side of the room, filming the filmers.
The watchers watched.
I bend to open my camera case, and as I do so a crumpled photograph flutters out of an inner side pocket. It’s the picture of me and my cousin Polly taken at the top of the Rockefeller Center last January. It shows us supposedly balanced precariously on a construction girder swinging out over the rooftops of New York City. Polly must have tucked it in there when she came to the Serenissima gallery’s opening night to say goodbye.
I smooth out the creases. They run symbolically between the two of us, the white paper showing through the cracked image, like the graphics of a zigzag dividing a once happily married couple. The worst weeks of my life were when Polly and I fell out over that misunderstanding about Pierre. Now, looking at her white, pinched face pictured on that day up the Rock, I experience an overwhelming urge to be with her.
I grab my phone and send her a text. She rarely gets a signal from her Moroccan retreat, but I desperately want to communicate with her anyway.
Am somewhere near Paris, standing in a château full of mad people pretending to act out an old epistolary French novel, who wouldn’t know real life if it bit them on the bum. Still. Am being paid. Wish you were here, Pol. U OK?
I press ‘send’ and glance around me. Everyone, except the dancers gyrating in the video above our heads, is standing completely still. The crew are fiddling with knobs and switches on their equipment, murmuring to themselves. The runner girl is staring at me. The two men by the fire are watching the young nun girl, and the young nun is watching the screen.
Let my mouth go where it wants to.
I used to sit in my old boyfriend’s caravan in a muddy field near the cliffs in Devon, watching this film on YouTube. I also watched the video accompanying the track Justify My Love, over and over again. The singer’s lust oozed out of her as she beckoned her wide-eyed companions to lick and pleasure her and each other. Like the singer, I couldn’t get enough of it.
I’ll hit you like a truck.
I place the photograph back in the case. I’ll follow up the text and try to call Polly as soon as this shoot is done.
I’ll teach you how to—
Suddenly the clapper-board is operated and someone yells ‘And action!’ So they still use the technicalities to compartmentalise the scenes that will eventually be screened. I guess the undercurrent, the flowing of fiction into fact and back again, will be incorporated later. As the slate clacks, the music on the video screen changes to the opening of Justify My Love. Someone can read my mind.
The young nun girl, Cécile, sits up on the sofa. She’s lit by the fake sunlight, but she could be me in that draughty, cold caravan on the cliffs, waiting for her bulky boyfriend to come back from the pub. She’s staring at the horny pop star up on the screen, all milky skin, mussed-up bleached hair and black eye make-up as she squats in a hotel corridor and touches herself.
No, not like that.
Cécile’s hand is running down the side of her face. A silky strand of hair escapes the stern hairband and falls over one eye. Her finger hooks into her open mouth and she bites down on it.
The silver-haired man, Valmont, suddenly notices me and the runner girl gawping in the background. He slams the bottle of wine down on the table and calls ‘Cut!’ The crew appears to pay no attention. They continue filming, and holding up sound booms, and checking monitors.
All part of the illusion, then. Saying ‘cut’ in real life doesn’t work, either.
Cécile’s hand has run down over her breast. Her feet drop to the floor and she parts her knees. On the screen above the fireplace, the superstar lies back on a hotel bed and opens her stockinged legs for a wide-eyed, beautiful, androgynous young man.
I don’t wanna be your sister.
Valmont extricates himself from the scene and comes towards me. He shakes my hand. His eyes are a bright Paul Newman blue, the same colour as his faded shirt, but he’s several years older than Gustav.
‘Bonjour. Serena Folkes? I am Alain, the director. You will see that name on your invoice when I pay you. But while you are on set I am the Comte de Valmont.’
‘Valmont is the villain of the piece, right? So you’re one of the protagonists as well as directing this film?’ I ask, flipping off my lens cap.
‘Yes, and no. It’s not so simple.’ Alain waggles his hand to show comme ci, comme ça. ‘I don’t think the word “villain” is correct. The way Malkovich played Valmont he had a streak of evil, but in real life the man is charming.’
‘You mean the actor is charming, or the character?’ I frown as I get out the larger Canon.
‘Both, actually.’ The director lifts his hands. ‘He is one of my idols. He directed a stage play of Les Liaisons which deliberately blurred the edges. It was designed like a rehearsal studio. The actors all watched each other, even if they were not in a scene, which gave it the claustrophobia and awkwardness of a masterclass. And the letters were transmitted by text and iPad. I wanted to go further with that idea. Not the iPads, but the illusion. Install the cast in a comfortable château then ask them to almost entirely improvise. They know the outline of each scenario. But since everyone in the story is tricking someone else, or two-timing, or spoiling things, why not have the cast doing that, too, even when they’re off set learning their lines or resting?’
The young girl beside me starts to cough. ‘Which means they will be having much sex, mademoiselle.’
I glance at her. Her angular face has gone bright pink, as if the words came out by accident.
The director’s piercing blue eyes laser through her.
‘C’est ça! So because they have total freedom I have one rule to keep them focused. All actors are addressed as their character for the length of the shoot.’
‘I guess that’s what they call the method?’ I remark, and Valmont nods approvingly. I touch the runner’s arm. ‘Can you show me where to go next? Can you come with me, er—’
‘Je m’appelle Cécile,’ she replies quickly, flipping at the paper on her clipboard.
‘Another Cécile?’
She tries to navigate towards the window, glancing again at the director. Alain, Valmont, whatever his name is. ‘They call me Cici.’
‘Our pretty assistant has the same name as the virginal heroine. Sometimes I use her, to make them interchangeable. I forgot to mention that the crew are subject to the same rule. They are here to organise filming and lighting and sound, and record our work, but they can also take part if they like, or be dragged into a scene if someone demands it. I’ll decide in the final edit if it fits.’
I glance down at my Canon and select a medium range lens. ‘This has to be the most interesting brief ever. So, monsieur. Just so I’m clear before I set up. No real names. Everyone in character, all the time?’
‘Don’t question it. Don’t fight it. You are the voyeur photographer. The bee on the ceiling.’
‘Fly on the wall?’
Valmont smiles. ‘You can eavesdrop, spy through curtains or half-open doors, listen to conversations and seductions. There are cameras in every room, some with operators, some not. We are living the story. Everyone sleeps and eats under the same roof. We are locked in this château until we start scratching at the cage to get out.’
‘Something will blow soon,’ Cici murmurs. ‘Some of us already are half-mad.’
I screw my lens on. ‘You live here too?’
The director whispers something into the girl’s hair and she blushes.
‘Of course she lives here,’ he says, ruffling her hair into little spikes so she looks like a new-hatched chick. ‘Nobody leaves until it’s in the can.’
He takes a pen off Cici’s clipboard and writes something on the paper. She peers at it, and her elfin face goes bright red again. Then he waves his hand to dismiss us. The nun Cécile and Gercourt remain exactly where they were, one standing by the fire, one sitting on the sofa with her hand now thrust between her legs. Not moving, and not speaking to each other.
My runner girl leads me towards a door beside the fireplace, and as I pass this part of the main salon I take a few more shots. Gercourt and Cécile keep perfectly still while Alain/Valmont peers for a moment into the monitor of one of the big cameras. Then the two of them turn stiffly towards the maestro as he re-enters the scene with an assertive click-tap of his Church’s brogues on the parquet.
The clapperboard goes again and everyone jumps to attention. Valmont takes up exactly where he left off, roaring at Gercourt.
I can already feel a little of Château Claustrophobia’s insanity infecting me, and I’m going to reflect this in my approach. I intend to entrap the viewer. Then trip them. Let them think they are in a domestic scenario, witnessing a real argument, then pan down to a trail of wires and cables snaking over the floor. A pair of head mikes hanging off a trolley handle.
As Cici and I retreat, I exaggerate the exposure to show how the natural sunshine is bleached by the glare of electricity.
Cici shuts the door behind us. ‘I tell you the story as we go. The original Liaisons was written in the form of letters.’
We are in another dusty hallway. Delicious cooking smells waft towards us from the end of a long stone passage, but Cici leads me away, up a flight of stairs winding up to a wide landing dominated by a beautiful arched window. From here you can see over the formal gardens and the lake, the high grey wall bordering the property, and the haze of Paris just beyond.
‘So, the histoire. Valmont and Marquise de Merteuil hatch the plot. They were lovers once. Maybe sometimes they still are. But La Marquise wants to make trouble for Cécile, la petite religieuse, because her mother has brought her out of the couvent to marry Comte de Gercourt, and he, Gercourt, was once the lover of La Marquise but he is now bored with her. So she is angry.’
‘So the Marquise is the scheming older woman.’
My God. The Margot character. Which makes her ex-lover Valmont who? Gustav? Or Pierre?
‘C’est ça. She wants Valmont to take the flower of Cécile so that she will be too dirty for Gercourt. But Valmont is not interested. He desires another woman, Madame de Tourvel. In fact, he sleeps with her and falls in love with her. She is his weakness.’
‘So Valmont is not such a villain. He knows how to love.’
‘Well, it’s strange love, because he still takes Cécile also.’
‘But a love story nevertheless. Do you think they’d have the energy for all that playing around and infidelity in real life?’
‘The energy, yes. The endless time, no. There is much ennui in this story. They don’t have enough to do.’ Cici rips at the corner of her call sheet. ‘Moi, I believe they would all end up killing each other!’
I laugh and go to sit on the broad window seat for a moment and stare at the distant pencil prick of the Eiffel Tower. My Gustav was a baby, a child and a teenager in that city. What did he look like growing up? All the family photographs from that time were destroyed by the fire that killed his parents.
His silky black hair was probably too long, probably the bane of his mother’s life. He was not yet shaving properly, but already kissing girls and smoking Gauloises and gabbling in French to his friends, swinging his long leg over a bike or a mobylette to scamper off over the cobbles to school or college. He must have been cute, fresh and naughty.
I get out my phone. There’s still no answer from Polly, so I text Gustav.
These people could be you. Us. They are living and breathing this film. It’s giving me the creeps!
Cici touches the diamond ring that sparkles as I hold my phone up to the light. ‘Beautiful.’
My body tugs with longing for Gustav. He’s too far away today. If he’s going to be late back tonight I’ll keep busy for as long as possible.
Cici taps my arm and beckons me to follow her. She leads me up to the next floor, which consists of smaller, cosier servants’ quarters, and the next hour is spent taking photographs of secondary cast and crew up here, mostly sleeping, eating, gossiping, playing card games or, oddly, knitting.
The final door on this floor gives way to an enormous bathroom under the eaves, and in the rolltop tub by the window a big man with a bushy beard is lying back in the greenish water. Above him the spindly white body of the nun Cécile, wrenched from the drawing room to the attic, is partly obscured by clouds of hot steam as he holds her above the water long enough for me to get several fantastic silhouette shots, before he lowers her on to his huge, erect penis.
‘That’s the dirty gardener, Artolan! The actor has done Shakespeare in Stratford, would you believe?’ Cici whispers. ‘But here, finally, with the help of Cécile, he is getting clean.’
The craziness of this scenario starts me giggling helplessly. I snatch up my unopened camera bags, and Cici collapses into laughter too as we run down another set of stairs and into another wide corridor which passes over the main salon.
One side of this corridor is bordered by glass walls overlooking the garden. The other is flanked by closed double doors.
‘So who lives along here, Cici?’ I ask, catching my breath. ‘Are these VIP quarters?’
‘This is the wing of Valmont and the Marquise de Merteuil.’ She stops laughing. ‘But sometimes we sleep along here, too.’
We pace slowly past a set of closed double doors and approach a second. The old floorboards creak beneath our feet.
‘So tell me more about those two. What schemes do they cook up that are so awful?’
‘Madame La Marquise is mad on sex. All the men on set she likes. How do you call it, she’s un couguar?’ Cici tries to close the second door, which is slightly ajar. ‘Don’t go in there, mademoiselle. La Marquise is a diva. My boyfriend says she’s fierce if she’s disturbed. She might be sleeping or – otherwise occupied.’
The rain has stopped and the real sun is shining through the huge windows behind me, trying to push its light into the dark room. The pervasive music from hidden speakers all over the château is now a kind of funky salsa overlaid with a remix of Nina Simone’s My Baby Just Cares for Me.
My phone vibrates. Gustav has replied. Je suis Valmont, qui trouve son amour véritable.
Valmont finds his true love. I text Gustav back. Et alors? Qui est ton amour véritable?
He answers immediately. Toi, bien sur! Tu es la Madame de Tourvel.’
‘Serena, come away, s’il te plaît.’ Cici starts pulling at me. ‘You must be hungry. Chef is making coq au vin. Good for photographs.’
‘In a moment, sure. But I’m intrigued by what happens in these rooms. Can’t we just explore a little more? Tell me what happens in the end of the book?’
The girl shakes her head, ripping at the corner of the sheets on her clipboard.
‘Please, mademoiselle. Let me show you the catering! Fantastic catering we have.’
‘I’m a professional voyeur, Cici. I seek out the naughtiest, most private activities which should be hidden. I explore everywhere. The darkest corners.’ I push open the door with my foot. ‘And I suspect the bedrooms will be more interesting than the kitchen.’
At first, like the salon downstairs, this big room looks empty. Bare floorboards, shutters half closed at the windows, a lit bateau with a white muslin canopy hanging like a waterfall from the ceiling.
The music is piped into here, too, and changes to a slow, sensuous Argentine tango. Now I can see that it’s not entirely empty. There is someone dancing near the window. From here all I can see is a sinewy woman’s back and tendrils of wild black hair falling down as she winds her arms above her head and shimmies on long bare legs across the dusty floorboards.
She’s wearing a short baby-doll negligee in black or dark navy, I can’t see in this light. She moves beautifully to the Latin arrangement of the music. If you were walking down a backstreet one steamy night in downtown Buenos Aires you might spy a woman like her, through a chipped blue door, being undressed, then laid across a bar and ravaged.
I lift my camera and take a couple of shots of the way the light slants across her body from the wooden shutters. As I pan round the room, I spot a film camera and a couple of folded up studio lights parked in the corner. No obvious cameraman, but the dancing woman is not alone. A surfer dude is sitting astride a bentwood chair, leaning his chin on his arms. From here he looks stark naked. He has long blonde hair which would be girlish if he didn’t have beautiful swimmer’s shoulders. When he stands at a silent gesture from her, all vestiges of femininity vanish, because there’s a huge bulge visible in his tight tartan boxers.
Cici grabs at my arm. ‘You have to stop them! That’s La Marquise. And the boy – he’s my – he’s Danceny!’
I step further into the room and the boy sees me. The dancing woman must have noticed him glancing across her shoulder, but she doesn’t turn. In fact, she steps closer to him and starts running her hands up his body.
Cici gasps. I can hear tears catching in her throat.
‘Remind me. Who is Danceny in the story?’ I whisper. ‘Why are you so upset?’
‘Danceny is the young man who the little nun Cécile falls for. But La Marquise, this cougar, she sleeps with him, too.’ Cici keeps tugging me like a child. ‘But that actor is my boyfriend.’
I hesitate. Cici is waggling her hand frantically from behind me, trying to catch the boy’s attention. He looks directly at both of us, his face expressionless.
As the dark-haired temptress runs her hands over him, caressing the bulge in his shorts, Danceny keeps his eyes on poor little Cici. It must be agony for her to see this, but I suspect this goes on all the time. I also suspect that Valmont has rammed home that if she doesn’t like it, she knows where the door is.
There’s no one directing this scene, and no one filming, at least as far as I can see.
‘But you’re disobeying Valmont’s rule, Cici! You must leave your life behind while you’re in here, n’est-ce pas?’ I press my mouth against her hot cheek. ‘So what do we think? Are these two rehearsing, shooting a scene, or are they just having a quick screw while they wait to be called on?’
She leans her forehead against mine for a moment. ‘All what you say. But also none of it. Valmont says we can do whatever we like while we’re here, but ça ne marche pas, because we must stop or start the moment he tells us.’
I watch the woman’s hand diving into the boy’s boxers now. ‘What you’re saying is, you have to go with the flow?’
She shrugs sadly. ‘Qu’est-ce que ça va dire?’
‘Er. In French you’d say, suivez le mouvement? That’s what is happening in this château. Reality and illusion, flowing seamlessly.’ I pinch her cheek to try and get her to smile back. ‘Either you enter into the spirit of it, or you walk out.’
I train my camera on the couple again. The woman has a sensational body, and now I’m seeing more clearly through my viewfinder I’m certain I recognise her. The tumbling black hair, the flex of muscle in her spine, the tempting rise of her big breasts in the flimsy little nightie. I’ve seen this body before.
I step closer to the bed. The floorboards creak loudly again. I’m not sure if the couple has heard my footfall through the music, but even if they have, surely Valmont has warned them I’ll be filming today. The boy knows I’m here, and the woman isn’t bothered. The little satin garment rises up over her naked buttocks as she hooks her leg round the boy’s thigh. His eyes shift away from Cici and fix on the woman who is charming the pants off him. Cici gives a kind of strangled sob. The woman turns, her hands gripping the boy’s shoulders, and her black eyes flash over her shoulder. First annoyance, then a questioning raise of her eyebrows, then a big, pleased grin spreads across her face. I can almost feel her warm, wet lips fastening on to mine.
With a jolt, I realise it’s the same girl I espied through my long lens when I was walking along the High Line in Manhattan a few weeks ago, the night Gustav presented me with the Serenissima gallery. She was being filmed having sex with an anonymous guy in a rumpled bed. Her CV must be well thumbed by casting directors looking for uninhibited actresses, and boy, she’s perfect for this scenario. Ripe, exotic, and naughty.
She winks at me. She’s a woman, not a girl. Her eyelashes are long and thick like spiders. Her mouth is a juicy honeytrap of thick red lips and I want those lips. I want her. Shockingly. Desire plunges inside me. And she knows it. Sliding her hands down to the boy’s hips, she turns to face me fully, rubbing her bottom against his body like a pole dancer, opening and closing her knees for my benefit.
I return her look, aware that my mouth has dropped open. I lift the camera. That’s my message to her. I can’t have her. Not now, anyway. I’m working.
The boy’s eyes are half closed as she rubs against him. She bends forward, her big breasts dangling like tempting fruit. Showing herself to me. I remember the erotic pop video on its endless loop downstairs. Those hungry open mouths, those girls and boys greedy for each other. My hands are sweaty as I adjust the apertures for more light.
Danceny can’t hold on any longer. As La Marquise fondles her own breasts, pushing them together, running the flats of her palms over the nipples so that they poke through the silky nightie, the boy spins her around, hoists her up off the floor so that her legs wrap around his hips.
‘Cici,’ I whisper, trying to distract her. ‘Could you unzip my tripod bag for me, please?’
The girl bends to do so, still sniffling. She’s been involved with this production for long enough. Surely she knows the score? I can see why she’s possessive over her tasty boyfriend, though. He may be young, but he sure works out. He bears the voluptuous weight of La Marquise as easily as if she’s a fresh baguette and throws her on to the bed. They sink into the whiteness, the pillows bouncing round them as if eager to join in, and I switch to film because the slow motion stills will look fantastic.
When they stop bouncing, La Marquise manoeuvres herself on top of her prey. Her strong thighs grip him. Her hair flies back as she tosses her head triumphantly. She’s in the same controlling position as when she rode on top of her lover in that loft in New York.
‘Ça suffit, mademoiselle. Viens.’ Cici hisses. She’s beginning to annoy me now. ‘We can find other people in the château to film.’
I shake my head. She can talk the talk, but when it comes to her own feelings the poor girl can’t face walking the walk. If Cici has a problem, she has to button it. I’m just here to do a job, and her feelings have to go on the back burner for now. But I can’t tear myself away.
La Marquise is pulling the boy’s boxers down now, kissing her way down his hairless torso and flat stomach. Her face is buried against him, but he can’t help glancing over at us. At me, actually. Is he a brilliant actor or is he genuinely struggling with a mixture of remorse for his jealous young girlfriend and exhilaration at being fondled by the sexiest woman in the film business?
His erection thumps out of the boxers and La Marquise cradles it in her fingers for a moment, twisting her long black hair back behind her shoulder with the other hand. The two of them are perfectly positioned in profile against the slatted window. The light is more diffuse here, perfect for the atmosphere. I’m guessing there’s a courtyard or a more shaded area of the premises beyond. On my side of the room the light through the still-open door is coming through stronger now that the rain has eased.
And so in perfect profile Danceny’s erection thrusts upright, manifesting its impressive proportions. No wonder little Cici wants that treasure to herself. The woman is massaging it, hard, as if she’s throwing pottery.
A long-ago conversation with Polly comes back to me. Actually referring to Pierre, when he was this age. When he was lusting after Margot, his out of bounds sister-in-law.
You know what they’re like at that age. Always hard, and always grateful.
And thinking of Pierre, he fits the Gercourt profile. La Marquise’s secondary lover, employed to create mayhem. But as I watch the couple, I realise that Pierre’s name no longer makes me panicky or anxious. He’s forgiven. Better still, he’s far away.
I’m working. I must push those Levi brothers out of my mind. I peer through the camera again. Danceny is hard enough now. La Marquise is going down on him. She pulls him into those red, shiny lips of hers, her teeth nipping. She’s sucking and he’s responding, thrusting into her face.
My fingers start trembling. Time to screw my camera on to the tripod. Cici is silent, not offering to help. I turn round and realise that whatever nonsense she spouts about the liberating ethos of this shoot, it’s proving too hard for her to swallow. Poor Cici has left the room.
Once the camera’s fixed on I can take the pictures without spoiling the shots with too much shake. I check the apparatus is secure and I’m lifting my meter to test the dimness in here when the light alters, because a door has opened on the far wall.
Danceny notices, and moans with frustration. But he can’t move. For the benefit of the intruder who has just come in, La Marquise tightens her grip on the young man’s hips and sucks harder, then works her way back up to the tip, sucking and licking his sweet length until he jerks and cries out loud.
A dart of desire shoots through me again, stronger this time. I watch the woman’s mouth, working on the boy, and I imagine those lips working on me, kissing my mouth, working down my throat to my breasts, her female mouth on my female breasts, on those other parts of me other women have only really skimmed over in my little experiments.
I could practise on her what I learned with Mrs Weinmeyer.
Look at her! As she leans over the boy, sucking him, her fingers wandering beneath him and jabbing into other parts of him, she works her heavy breasts and nipples against his body, rubs herself against his legs. The moist sound effects carry over the music. It’s changed yet again to an almost monastic humming, accompanied by a drumbeat. The woman’s wide, brown bottom flexes eagerly against her toy boy, showing him how a real woman feels.
Another man has come through the far door and simply merged with the shadows, because he is wearing a beige suit. It’s the character called Gercourt. I look at my watch. I’ve been up here for ages.
The newcomer walks straight over to the bed and stands above the lovers, watching them. He’s close enough to touch them. But he folds his arms, and his face is expressionless.
I take a shot of the curves and shapes of the two lovers on the bed contrasting with the ramrod-rigid watching man. La Marquise gives the boy one last, long suck, letting the length of him, still stiff, slide out past her teeth, along her tongue and into her waiting hand. Without turning her head, she murmurs something to the newcomer Gercourt.
I remember how astonished I was when I saw her in that New York loft, mounting her invisible lover in the bed, all the time offering a running commentary to the crew hanging around her. This woman has to be the coolest thing since red-hot chilli.
As if reading my mind, she glances at me. All three of them glance at me. The boy in fresh embarrassment, rising up on his elbows to push her off. Gercourt coldly. La Marquise with another languorous wink. Then she clambers back on top of her boy, pressing him gently down on his back, tilting herself over him.
‘C’est magnifique,’ she croons at him, showing him the length of his shaft encircled by her fingers.
She grins, not at the boy, but at me, as she rises on her knees and aims him inside her, pausing, letting me focus and shoot, the stiffness about to enter the softness. She lowers herself inch by inch, sighing loudly now, and a muscle twitches in Gercourt’s cheek.
I watch the woman teasing herself, teasing her lover. I know how that feels. That agonising slowness, forcing yourself to put off the delicious moment for as long as you can bear, knowing that you will want to screech with delight when it’s inside you. And that’s what she does, flinging her arms in the air like a flamenco dancer, sweeping her hair up. Her spine undulates as she alternates between rising up on her knees and falling forwards on to her hands. When her nipples swing over his mouth, her curtains of dark hair conceal them both.
Gercourt can’t hold back. That gorgeous female bottom must be a red rag to a bull. I don’t care if this is rehearsed, or being secretly choreographed by Alain, or being filmed by invisible cameras. Lust runs riot in this château, with no boundaries. The naughtier the better. The more combinations, the better.
It’s perfect material, and it’s perfect for the narrative.
Gercourt unzips his narrow trousers. The boy Danceny’s eyes widen in alarm. Maybe he thinks Gercourt wants him. But La Marquise simply tosses her head and rides the boy more furiously.
Gercourt steps round the bucking bodies and kneels on the bed behind La Marquise, pulling her butt cheeks open, running his hand over her rump. Then he settles himself, angles himself like a weapon, and with no niceties he thrusts up that other part offered to him, forcing a long, low, juddering groan from her as he enters.
She’s not so in control now. She falls forward, and Danceny takes advantage of her distraction by pulling at her breasts, taking one nut-brown nipple into his mouth and biting it, hard, just as Gercourt at the rear rams himself in.
So this is the question answered. The composition of two men and a woman, framed by my viewfinder, showing me what goes where, and into whom.
Somehow I can’t see Gustav agreeing to me trying it.
Should this be happening, or is this going too far even by Valmont’s standards? Is La Marquise being overpowered, or do they all know full well she can take whatever’s coming to her, whoever, whenever? However?
La Marquise starts to mutter to herself as the pace increases, a kind of crooning, puffing stream of consciousness in a language I don’t recognise, but the two men are silent, intent upon filling her.
I take a couple more splendid shots of the intricate threesome, zooming in on a sequence of intimate close-ups.
Now it’s time to retreat. I pick up my equipment as best I can, my legs trembling as I drag it noisily from the room. For all I know, they’ll stop as soon as I’m gone. Someone else I haven’t seen will call ‘Cut’, and either they’ll stop or they’ll finish in their own good time. But so what? I’m not here to shatter the illusion. I’m here to encapsulate it.
Even the music seems to have stopped now. I wander down the wide corridor, back the way we came. Cici’s clipboard has been left on the window seat on the landing. I pick it up and carry it down the stairs and down the corridor she told me led to the kitchen. That’s where she must be.
I can smell garlic and onions and wine as I approach. Maybe the casserole is ready. Something metallic crashes to the floor behind the kitchen door, accompanied by whispered curses.
I push open the door.
Cici is in here all right. She’s half sitting, half lying on a big scrubbed pine table, and it looks as if she’s just knocked an entire plate of steaming vegetables to the floor. Behind her, through a rubber curtain, I can see other white shapes blurred by steam, arms waving, knives flashing, utensils gleaming. I hear the slamming of oven doors.
In this section, the dining area I presume, Valmont is standing between Cici’s long white legs, peeling her dark woollen stockings and tiny white knickers down to her ankles while she unbuttons his faded jeans.
I lift my smaller camera, still slung round my neck, and take a few more shots. I’m well into my stride now. Cici and Alain are kissing. Her young face is so fresh and clear against his greying, grizzled bristles.
The rubber curtain clatters aside, making me jump. The large man from the bathtub, dressed now in a lumberjack shirt and mud-spattered gardening trousers, pushes through. He mutters something at Alain, who nods and then lifts his hand to dismiss us both before pushing Cici on to her back amongst the bread and the fruit and the bottles of beer. She’s ready to be properly skewered.
I grin at Artolan, the dirty gardener, and he scowls back as if he’s never seen me before. Despite the filthy clothes and still-wet, matted hair, he has perfect white teeth and clear grey eyes. I’ll mark him down as the Dickson/Crystal character from my own life. He points towards the door to indicate that I’m to leave the way I’ve just come in. No food for me, then.
I pack up my camera, remember to place Cici’s clipboard down beside her. As I grab an apple from the fruit bowl beside her head, I can see the billet-doux that Alain/Valmont scribbled on there earlier.
In five minutes I’m coming to fuck you.