Objects of Desire Read online

  Anoushka would listen but never really hear what he was saying. She always heard what she wanted to hear. It made life so much easier.

  She entered Robert’s office. Mrs Winkler nearly jumped out of her chair. ‘Mrs Rivers. I didn’t expect to see you.’

  ‘That’s because I’m a surprise. Hello, Mary.’

  ‘It’s always nice to see you, but you should have called.’

  ‘What? For an appointment to see my husband?’ And she smiled at Mary Winkler, meaning it as a joke.

  It was not, however, taken as such. Mary Winkler was embarrassed and felt she had to defend herself. ‘Oh, no, I didn’t mean it that way. I said that because the doctor isn’t here. You’ve just missed him. Shall I try to find him?’

  ‘No. I just came on the off chance that he might be able to come home early for a change. I seem to see even less of him now than when the boys were at home.’

  Mrs Winkler, normally extremely discreet about Robert’s movements, felt strangely sorry for Anoushka. It prompted her to say, ‘He did say, if need be, I could reach him at home. He’s probably on the way there now. You’ve only missed him by a few minutes.’

  Anoushka felt a surge of delight which showed on her face. She smiled and thanked Mrs Winkler. The two women spoke for several minutes and Anoushka left for home.

  The Rivers house was large and very beautiful. Nineteen rooms of crisp, white, New England, turn-of-the-century architecture, many chimneys and grey shutters, on a rise of green lawn carved out of a white birch wood only yards from the edge of the lake. Chimneys was one of those New England, picture postcard sort of houses. Anoushka never took it for granted, but always felt a surge of happiness when she drove down Longmeadow Road past her neighbours’ houses. Those too were impressive, set back on large plots of land or down winding drives through the birch trees.

  She drove up the drive and round to the back of the house, directly into the garage where she parked her Mercedes Estate next to Robert’s Jag. She gathered up her shopping and walked across the lawn, now a white blanket of frost, and through the back door. The warmth felt good. It made her realise how raw and cold a day it was. She shivered and shrugged deeper into her coat. I could do with less grey and more sunshine, she thought, as she continued on through the house to the library where she knew Robert would be.

  ‘Robert, I’m home,’ she called out as she dropped her shopping on a chair in the hall.

  ‘In the library,’ he called back.

  ‘I know,’ she said, entering the room. ‘I saw the lights from the road. How really nice that you’re home early.’

  Anoushka sat on the arm of Robert’s chair, placed an arm over the back of it and, leaning towards him, gave him a kiss on the cheek. She briefly caressed the back of his neck and then looked away from him to the flames leaping in the fireplace. She removed her hat and shook out her shoulder-length hair. To be in the warmth and comfort of her own home was a great feeling.

  ‘Oh, that looks just what I need! I’ve had a hard day shopping for clothes for this evening,’ she told him as she caressed his hand and took from it the Lalique tumbler containing a vodka martini with a twist of lemon. She placed it to her lips and drank, at the same time placing his now empty hand on the top button of her coat.

  Silently he undid the button and then the next and took notice of the one that was still missing, the threads that once held it in place. He nearly said something about it but didn’t. He had, several times, and still it was missing. There seemed no point. Especially not now.

  ‘You don’t mind my pinching your drink?’ she asked.

  ‘Of course not, I’ll make another,’ he told her and rose from the chair to go to the drinks tray set on a Queen Anne table in front of the library window. Still with his back to her, he asked, ‘Did you buy something really lovely, something special?’

  Robert did so like beautiful things. She smiled because she knew how pleased he would be when he saw her shopping. ‘Very. I was extravagant,’ she told him as she balanced the glass on the back of the chair and finished unbuttoning her coat, slipping out of it, and removing her gloves.

  ‘Good,’ he told her. Still with his back to her he said, ‘I knew you wouldn’t mind. I’ve cancelled the country club this evening.’

  ‘But my shopping! My new clothes!’

  He was surprised to hear the disappointment in her voice but it had no bearing on his resolve. ‘We can still get dressed up in our finery and have an evening together. Here, preferably. Dinner, a nice bottle of wine, some time just to talk.’

  ‘Robert, what a charming idea. Much better, very much better than the club.’ He felt a surge of relief to hear delight replacing disappointment in her voice. ‘There isn’t much in the refrigerator, I don’t go to the supermarket until tomorrow. I know, there’s some lobster bisque. We can have that to begin, and there’s endive. I can make us a salad, and a cheese soufflé.’

  ‘No!’ It came as a shout. Robert hadn’t meant it to, but the thought of Anoushka fussing in the kitchen: the whirr of the electric mixer’s stainless steel whisks, the egg shells lying on the marble counter top, the flour leaving a light film over everything, the mess, all the same as usual, as if nothing had changed. Anoushka always made a horrendous mess when she cooked without the help of their cleaner-cum-cook-cum-housekeeper. Somehow tonight he could no longer turn a blind eye to it, something he was usually good at. He turned to face his wife. The look of surprise on her face prompted him to disguise his anger.

  ‘No,’ he repeated more calmly. ‘That’s too much work and mess. Something easy, or we’ll go out for dinner somewhere nice. I don’t want you distracted in the kitchen and me getting into a good book. An evening together is what I had in mind.’

  Anoushka chose to ignore the sharpness in his voice though it had felt like a sharp slap. ‘Then it’s one of Mrs Cooper’s casseroles from the freezer right into the oven, or we go out. Whichever you choose.’

  ‘You put the casserole in the oven and I’ll fetch us a good bottle of wine.’ He took a sip of his drink. The chill and bite of the vodka in his mouth felt good. It was what he needed.

  ‘The kitchen, the dining room, our upstairs sitting room? Where would you like to dine?’ she asked.

  ‘The dining room. We’ll bathe and dress for dinner in the dining room, you in your new outfit.’

  Robert walked back to the chair where he had been sitting and picked up the arts magazine he had been reading. Anoushka was still sitting on the arm. He sat down. They gazed at one another. He very nearly began to speak to her right then and there, but lost his moment when she deliberately slid from the arm of his chair on to his lap and in the process yanked her cashmere jumper up and over her head to drop it on the floor in front of the fire. She removed his glass from his hand and put that on the floor too, and then, taking his hand in hers, placed them on her naked breasts.

  ‘This is not what I had in mind,’ he told her, not unkindly, while cupping one of her breasts in the palm of his hand and caressing it gently with the other. The large and voluptuous weight overflowed his palm. He liked to feel the heft of her breasts in his hands. Robert had always liked her breasts, the dark and sultry-looking nimbus that circled the fat erect nipples. He had always found something powerfully decadent about Anoushka’s breasts. He liked her much better naked than clothed. Her body suited his sexual fantasies, desires, his strong and restless libido.

  Though he never yearned for her sexually, all she had to do was present herself in that light and he found her irresistible. She had always been like that for him right from the first time she had seduced him. The feel of her skin, her natural scent, made even more voluptuous by the perfume she used: Paloma Picasso. He enjoyed her cunt, so soft and moist, and the deep coral colour of its fleshy and succulent outer and inner lips; the way it gripped him tight and teased him into powerful fucking. How clever and imaginative she was in her lust, the outright depravity she practised with her husband. In the dark, in the pri
vacy of their sexual world, she was lewd, base even, and knew how to excite him. She fed his own sexual raunchiness with hers and he was always surprised how far they would go to experience sexual oblivion.

  In their erotic life together, they gave in to the darker side of sex, wallowed in it. He never tired of her. Robert enjoyed satisfying their sexual hunger for each other. She had always had sexual power over him, and he had loved her for that. How well she hid her erotic soul from everyone but him. There was of course more to Anoushka than that, enough for him to have built a life with her. They had created two wonderful boys, been a family. Theirs had been a good life, but now he could see clearly as he fondled Anoushka’s breasts, saw the lust come into her eyes and feel her squirm with pleasure as he lowered his mouth to bite into her nipples and suck deeply on them, that love, if it had ever really been there for him, was gone and had been for a long time. Lust had been carrying them for as long as he could remember. It came as a tremendous relief to him to see that so clearly and be able not only to admit it to himself but to act upon it.

  He sat back in the chair, sighed and repeated himself. ‘As I said, this is not what I had in mind.’ He stroked her hair and caressed her cheek.

  ‘Well, this is exactly what I have had in mind for the last few hours. So much so I even went to the Clinic to find you, meaning to induce you to come home and make love to me.’

  ‘You were at the hospital?’

  ‘I just missed you.’

  Anoushka unzipped Robert’s trousers. He tried to stop her but she laughed at him. It was a sensuous, wicked laugh. One that insinuated he was behaving foolishly. A knowing laugh that said, ‘Don’t be ridiculous, you’ll not resist me.’ She cupped one of her breasts in her hands and fed it into his mouth by first grazing his lips with her erect nipple until they parted and he hungrily licked and sucked with a wild abandon.

  He was erect and in her hands, pulsating. It brought him to his senses. He eased her from him and gazed at her, touched the dot-sized beauty mark just above the right corner of her lips. ‘You’re not listening to me, Anoushka.’

  ‘No,’ she admitted happily and rose from the chair to stand facing him. She took her drink, drained her glass and handed Robert his. He too finished his drink. ‘I’ll be right back,’ she told him.

  Anoushka hurried from the library and Robert tried to compose himself. Not easy. He was still erect and full of lust which had no place in his resolve to implement the drastic change necessary to his life. In only a matter of minutes Anoushka was back. Seeing her enter the room, he yet again marvelled at how sensual a body his wife had. Still, after two children, she possessed the narrowest of waists. It was as if she were reading his mind. She went directly to him, delighted that his condition had remained the same as when she had left him. She bent over him, moved her breasts seductively, caressingly, back and forth, across his face. This woman, so sedate, cautious, somewhat remote in her public persona – who when clothed was a tinge slovenly and not very stylish unless prompted by her husband or an insistent saleslady – how whorish and exciting she could be in her sexual persona.

  She was taunting him, denigrating his sexual prowess, and he didn’t like it. He grabbed her by the wrist and she fell against him, whispering something obscene in his ear. When she stood up, he rose from the chair with her.

  Anoushka began kissing him all over his face, and between kisses told him, ‘I want to come in your mouth, feel you deep inside me, taste your come.’ Pink with embarrassment now, she whispered again in his ear, ‘Oral, anal, cuntal sex. Now wouldn’t that be a lovely way to begin our evening?’ He took her in his arms and kissed her deeply, and it was a kiss not devoid of genuine passion.

  He saw happiness shining in her eyes, and felt a twinge of sadness for her when she told him, ‘How can you have any idea what a joy it is for a woman to be filled by the cock of a man she loves? To grip it inside her, vice-like … that for me is being alive and one with you.’ This was the kind of talk she knew seduced him, set him free to explore the depths of his sexuality. He still liked her for that, but as one would like their favoured hooker, the mistress one kept but never married. Once more Robert felt relieved that he was already finished with her as wife or mother of his children.

  ‘I adore you, Robert, and our life together. This is the best of us, right here and now, when we are in lust, and the world falls away. Every time we make love, I always feel you are fucking me for the last time. That’s why I can never go too far, never want to stop, why I savour every drop of your come. Now take me to bed.’ And she kissed him once more as passionately as he had kissed her.

  ‘What if it is for the last time?’ he boldly asked. Hoping it might stop her, make her think, listen.

  No such thing. All he received was that wickedly sensual smile. ‘You’ve said that before.’

  ‘Have I?’

  ‘Yes.’ And she laughed and pulled him along through the library, the hall, and up the stairs. Once she turned round, looked at him and said, ‘The sex is too good, and in that you are a very greedy man, Robert. I tie you to me with it, and since we love each other and are bound together there is no last time for us.’

  ‘What about dinner?’

  ‘It’s in the oven. What about me?’ They were just outside their bedroom door. She flung her arms around his neck and kissed him. Before they entered the room, she began to undress him.

  ‘Once again, Anoushka, I’m telling you that I hadn’t planned this. Sex is not what this evening is about.’

  ‘It is now,’ was her retort.

  He had seen her like this before. Anoushka at her most seductive. The usually introspective, somewhat remote woman exposing her most intimate self to him in lewd and base expressions of her sexual hunger. Honest in her sexuality to the very core of her being, in that she was the rarest of women. Anoushka pushing all the sexual buttons that she knew he would not resist because of his own sexual lust. He went down on her, a taste of Anoushka to begin the last ride they would ever take together into the land of sexual oblivion. This was the first time Robert could admit to himself that lust, not love, had been the foundation of his happiness with Anoushka, and it was no longer enough. They were finished, dead, over. But that didn’t stop him. This, their last sexual encounter as husband and wife, was fierce and thrilling; the little death of many orgasms for her, his parting gift.

  Chapter 2

  Anoushka could hear the sound of a cello; the music of Villa Lobos drifting up from the drawing room. She cut the sales tag hanging from the cuff of her new satin blouse, straightened the skirt over her hips and adjusted the belt of black jet beads. It suddenly seemed very important that Robert thought she looked perfect – beautiful and perfect. He was angry with her. Though he had not said so, she sensed his anger, had experienced it in the sex they had just experienced together. There was always a little anger in Robert when he was out of control sexually. At those times he turned his anger to passion and uninhibited sex, sex with no boundaries. Base and lewd and so exciting. That was why she drove him to it, used her sexuality to seduce him into streams of orgasm they both enjoyed. There was nothing else like sexual bliss with Robert, that and to hear him tell her how much he loved her.

  How she revelled in his protestations of love during their orgasms together. But not this time, not once had Robert used his sexual rage to call out his love and passion, and tell her, ‘I love you, my wife,’ or ‘I love you, Anoushka.’ Once spent, it was always the controlled, kind, generous Robert asking, ‘Happy, babe?’ or telling her, ‘Something special. You deserve something special in your life. Go and treat yourself to something you want.’

  Some little thing he was too much of a gentleman to make an issue of, that was it. The button missing on her coat? She had seen him take notice of that. Something she should have done and had let slide? She was more curious than concerned. She knew her Robert. Something must have happened at the hospital. But he never brought the hospital home and into their personal lives
. Anoushka shrugged her shoulders and tried to put Robert’s anger out of her mind.

  She took a long steady look at herself in the mirror, and what she saw gave her confidence that Robert would be much pleased with her. Just out of a dress box elegance, everything in place and shining. He liked his women to look as if they had stepped directly from between sheets of crisp white tissue paper or walked off a fashion runway. Once again she vowed to herself to keep up her standards for the man she loved.

  She could smell the casserole, lamb and lemon, rosemary and thyme, wafting through the house from the kitchen. She turned from the mirror, and as she passed their four-poster bed Anoushka found Robert’s absence from it disturbing in the same way she had done when she had awakened and he had not been there. She left the room immediately and blocked all worries from her mind.

  Anoushka was aware that her marriage was the sum of many little rituals. Dressing for dinner was one of them. It kept an edge on their togetherness, their making an effort for one another and leaving the day and the outside world behind them, to be viewed with a degree of emotional detachment as a voyeur might. It was one of the rituals they both enjoyed whether dining at home or out in some smart restaurant before going to a concert, the theatre or cinema. Had they not planned to go to the country club for dinner this evening, Mrs Cooper would, as she did most of the evenings they were at home, have been serving them a splendid meal. It was neither laziness nor not wanting to be home alone with her husband that prompted Anoushka, on entering the kitchen and seeing Robert dressed in his dinner jacket and black tie, to suggest, ‘It’s not too late for us to change our mind, Robert. I think I would like to go to dinner at the country club.’

  He ignored her words. He was standing at an angle to the cooker, tending a saucepan. ‘Your timing is perfect. The rice is done. I used the Basmati, butter and black pepper. Another fifteen minutes and the casserole might have dried out.’