She smiled back at him. “I suppose it’s like riding a bike—once you’ve learned you never forget. . . .” She could still feel his hard erection against her. “But you haven’t come yet?”
“That’s because . . .” And here he slowly entered her, the size of him making her groan involuntarily. He grinned again. “. . . I haven’t finished yet.” He filled her completely; lifting her legs over his shoulders, he pulled back until the tip of him was nestled between her swollen lips and entered her all over again, this time as slowly as his excitement would allow. Over and over until he abandoned himself and they both galloped to a shuddering climax—his first, her second—while two flights below, Rosa, the housekeeper, returning from church and hearing the cries, crossed herself at the homemade shrine she kept in her bedroom.
Afterward they both lay entwined on the floor, watching the setting sun leave the grand old bedroom like the closing of life itself. And when the evening chill began to creep across the floor Sara took him to her bed, where they lay like two slightly bewildered children, cradled against each other in faint amazement.
“Sara . . .” Stephen murmured against her neck. She turned but he left the sentence hanging like the question that had already fallen across them.
“You know . . .” he finally continued, catching the silence before it snapped in two, “. . . we can’t have a relationship.”
Deciding to rescue him, she replied, “But we can have some fun occasionally?” She tried to sound casual and succeeded.
“I can’t see why not.” Stephen laughed, his deep voice resonant. “But there’s one thing I want you to really understand. . . .”
Sara found herself tensing in anticipation of rejection. Dreading the worst, she interrupted: “But you don’t have to say it.”
“But I do, I really do. . . . You’re beautiful, no matter what you think. Don’t change a thing, promise?”
She lay back and thought before answering. She couldn’t remember the last time she felt so flushed with contentment, so elated to be in her own skin. At last she felt completely and utterly powerful.
“Promise.” She stared over at the shower of freckles that peppered his shoulders. She hadn’t noticed them before. There was something else that had finally fallen into place, something that had been forming like a jigsaw at the back of her brain.
“You know this collection I want to put together? Well I want you to be the curator. And I think I’ve finally decided on the charity.”
There was silence from Stephen. Sara glanced across to find he’d fallen asleep.
• • •
The auction was in one of Christie’s smaller, more exclusive rooms. It was already in mid-swing and the last two items had gone for three times their estimated price. Sara scanned the room. She and Stephen as well as a fantastic publicist had made sure that the rows of bidders read like a who’s who of the wealthy, famous, and infamous of London. The slow burn of satisfaction had already started spreading through her. This time Sara didn’t mind being visible; in fact she rather liked the huge banner that hung on the auctioneer’s stand reading “The Sara Le Carin Collection.” She’d even enjoyed the radio and press interviews engendered by her unusual choice of charity and the unusually large amount of money the collection was expected to bring in, all of which was to be donated. For the first time in her life she found herself relishing who she was and what she was doing. She smiled up at Stephen, who was standing beside the auctioneer as the official curator of the collection. Stephen smiled briefly back down at her, then helped one of the assistants bring out the next artwork to be auctioned. They carried the huge photograph of her mother onto the stage.
“Lot six—a photograph of fashion model Daphne Le Carin, in spotted bikini, nineteen sixty-two. Originally taken for French Vogue, this is believed to be the only surviving print. Do we start at a thousand . . . ? We have a thousand from the gentleman in blue. . . .”
Sara swung around. She recognized the man, who was in his midseventies, as someone who was rumored to have been a lover of her mother’s. So he must have been, she concluded. As if in agreement there was a faint ripple among the older bidders, all as curious as Sara was to know the truth of the matter. Another bidder put up his hand; it was another old friend, this time of her father’s, and a bidding war began. Delighted, Sara leaned back in her chair. She was finally going to be rid of the photograph, and the idea of that particular sale going to her assigned charity—No Cut, a charity dedicated to the fight against female genital mutilation—thrilled her even more. And then there was Stephen.
She glanced back up at him. Here he was entirely in his element, and she’d never seen him more beautiful. An old familiar emotion swept through her, catching at her throat. As impossible as it seemed, she knew it was pointless fighting it.
THE ALCHEMY OF COINCIDENCE
Jennifer sat staring out the window. The studio at the back of their large garden was a wooden bungalow with a tin roof, and the heavy Australian rain beat across the metal as if triumphantly announcing the breaking of the drought. It was ironic, Jennifer thought, because it felt like the beginning of her own. Drought, dry, I am parched. She scrawled the sentence in the margin of her sketch pad with her thick 2B pencil; the rest of the crisp, creamy page was blank. She liked the writing—it was defiant, a declaration.
Somewhere in the corner of the large studio rain had started to drip through the ceiling. A singular soft persistent plop she decided to ignore. She placed the drawing pad on the wooden foldout chair she’d been sitting on and walked over to her modeling table.
A couple of old sculptures from her last show sat on the simple worktable, two porcelain vaginas—one young, the other older—as delicate as orchids, the fragile lips as thin as petals. The one-woman show had been hugely successful and had landed her a London gallery as well as several wealthy English collectors. But that was last year, and her next one-woman show was only a month away and she hadn’t even begun. Oh, she knew the theme. It was to be based around a theory she’d started to develop over the past few years, a theory based both on experience and whimsy. But that didn’t worry Jennifer, who had learned to regard inspiration as something as elusive as threads of gossamer that one had to gather in and then make tangible. The artist had become an expert in such matters—she was good at making emotions and ideas manifest.
The theme of the show was to be the concept that an artist could induce coincidence through image making. It wasn’t a theory that her husband, Toby Gladwell, shared, but then Toby, although he too was an image maker (a film director), was not a romantic. No, indeed, she smiled, bringing to mind his oft-repeated philosophy: Toby believed in concrete realism, the concrete being a reference to concrete playgrounds of the housing commission flats he often set his documentary-style movies in. Despite this championing of realism the film director was most renowned for launching the career of Australian film star Jerome Thomas, an actor most famous for his romantic leads.
As a practitioner of cinema verité, Toby regarded whimsy as the terrain of the middle classes—in other words, it was utter escapism and a complete waste of time. In this the couple differed greatly from each other—her art was all about whimsy; his art was about realism. And yet, despite this, the five-year marriage was passionate, a meeting of both the sexual and intellectual.
At least that was how Jennifer, the romantic, had viewed it. But lately Toby’s long absences while shooting had begun to alienate them from each other. It felt to Jennifer that while Toby’s life was filling up with actors, crew, media, as well as characters from his scripts and general entourage, her own life was emptying out. It was the culmination of all her long, isolated hours in the studio, and the way all her girlfriends seemed to be getting either married or pregnant, or leaving Australia to pursue their careers overseas. And finally there was the loss of her mother, who had been one of her best friends, which had suddenly pushed Jennifer over the edge. She felt as though her life and Toby’s were like scales with a dish at either end—Toby’s dish was weighed down while her own floated up empty. It wasn’t how Jennifer had imagined her day-to-day existence would be.
Restless, the artist got up again and counted out the space between the stool and the empty easel in long strides like a child. Outside the rain had intensified and she had to fight off the urge to rush back inside the large terrace house and cocoon herself in the quilt to spend the rest of the day listening to the rattle of the wind against the windows and the roof. She arrived at the empty easel, lifted up a whiteboard, and clamped it between the wooden bars, then picked up a whiteboard marker, her hand poised over the board. What she required was an example, a working example of her theory that would be the subject of her one-woman show—half installation, half sculpture. But to begin she needed something or someone to be an inspiration, a muse. She wrote the word Coincidence, then listed as many coincidences in her life as she could remember:
1. My first boyfriend had the same first name as my husband.
2. My mother was born in the same English town as Toby’s grandfather.
3. My birthday is on the same day as the painter Van Gogh’s.
4. We live on Verona Street, Hawthorn, and I first met Toby in Verona, Italy.