The Diamond Ring

CHAPTER TWO

The diagonal journey across Manhattan is like a parody of a car chase. We are in a rush to find Pierre, yet the evening traffic is against us and we are crawling rather than careering. The set of Dickson’s broad shoulders as he steers skilfully through the one-way grid system would normally make me feel safe and secure. But the atmosphere in the car is too tense.

Gustav keeps trying his brother’s number. I pray with all my might that Pierre is nowhere to be found, because he’s the one Gustav will listen to next. I’ve told him we sneaked off together, and then I realised my mistake and ran away, but how can I tell my fiancé how perilously close Pierre and I were to shattering everything?

Pierre won’t hold back. Oh no. He’ll rehearse every gory detail. The ripped muslin drawers, the velvet buttons flipping open his velvet breeches, my legs pulling him towards me as I urged him to hurry, the rope he tied round my wrist to keep me there. He won’t tell Gustav how I stopped him. He’ll put his own spin on it and say we went the whole way. He’ll convince Gustav that we’ve committed the worst possible deception.

We pass Katz’s Deli where Sally faked her orgasm in front of Harry – God, if only life was so simple – and cross over Rivington Street.

I can’t work out where we are. According to Polly, when she did some digging to find out more about him, Pierre lives in an apartment still owned by Gustav’s ex-wife Margot. But Polly said it was in Soho, not the Lower East Side, which is where we are now. It’s an area I’ve never been into, and after the almost eerie quiet of the Meatpacking District late at night, this place is still humming with neon-lit stores and cafés. Dickson drives behind the main drag and pulls round into a narrower street. The engine of the car sounds intrusive and loud bouncing off the tall, looming tenement buildings, where iron fire-escapes zig-zag across the red brick walls above the back entrances of bars and restaurants.

Polly was wrong. After all, she has never been here. Pierre never invited her to stay, even when, for those intense few months over the winter, they were lovers. Dickson, however, knows exactly where he’s heading. This might be Pierre’s apartment now, but Dickson must have driven here plenty of times in the past when someone else was in residence. When he had that other passenger in his car.

‘I hoped I’d never come to this godforsaken place again. Despite what Polly thinks she deduced, Margot has no hold over Pierre any more. She walked out of that apartment and out of his life six years ago, so the fact that he’s been living there all this time means he’s even more boneheaded than I thought,’ mutters Gustav half to himself as the car stops. He steps out into the cold night air and shudders as if someone has just thrown a bucket of iced water over him. ‘I guess staying there rent-free swung it for him. But I should have sold it when I had the chance rather than let Margot keep it.’

There’s the clatter of cutlery and barked orders from the surrounding restaurant kitchens. The primaeval heartbeat of club music thumps up from somewhere underground. But this street has a dark silence all of its own. It reminds me of the ghetto area of Venice where I wandered with my camera last month, thinking of Gustav. Thinking of Manhattan. Thinking it was all over between us.

The city noises clang and echo in my ears. The tall buildings in this narrow dark street are bending over, intent on crushing us. My fiancé turns his back on me, still clutching his mobile phone, and glares up at the mostly unlit windows in the building above.

I can no longer escape the series of disasters that has brought us to this narrow dark street. Maybe to the metaphorical end of the road.

The reason Polly had the incriminating photographs of me and Pierre which so infuriated Gustav was that she had been stalking us. The reunion of her boyfriend with his brother Gustav meant that when Pierre dumped her for no apparent reason after the New Year, Polly thought I could help her. So when Pierre commissioned me to shoot a storyboard at the theatre where he was working, that seemed like the perfect opportunity. Polly asked me to find out what was going on in Pierre’s head and ask him if he would take her back.

But instead of trusting me to carry out my mission, she decided to spy on Pierre and me in the Gramercy Hotel bar. And if she’d heard how graphic the conversation became she would have pounced on us sooner.

When I interrogated him about my poor cousin, Pierre decided not only to share but to shock. He laid out his entire sexual history in intimate detail. I was given chapter and verse about the volcanic sex he and Gustav’s ex-wife Margot indulged in after they had run away together, and how ultimately it destroyed him, because when she chewed him up and spat him out six months later, he realised no other woman would ever match up.

He had spent five years searching for the perfect specimen. Polly looked promising when they met at a magazine shoot. She was sexier than most, prettier, funnier, and English like him. They even shared a flair for fashion and style. But in the end, despite her connection with me and Gustav, she was the latest in a long line of casualties. Women who would never satisfy him.

Except that then, fired up by my slightly drunken attention, Pierre hinted that someone new might have come close. Me. He helped me into my coat as I prepared to leave, and knowing I was flummoxed by his insinuations he ran his lips across my mouth, and that’s what my cousin saw.

So Polly took this as hard evidence that I was the reason Pierre had dumped her. His own damaged psyche was too complex to grasp. And when she stormed into our apartment, Gustav chose to believe a couple of grainy photographs over my emphatic professions of innocence.

That was the night my world caved in. Polly thought I’d gone behind her back with the boyfriend she still wanted. Gustav thought I’d been unfaithful with his own newly returned brother. I was incandescent that the pair of them could have so little faith.

So I went alone to Venice. Vulnerable. Broken-hearted. The perfect target for Pierre Levi. He came after me, impersonated his brother and got within an inch of penetrating me.

But I need to focus on what’s happening now.

I follow Gustav towards the apartment block, but before I reach him I see that parked outside the entrance is a sleek grey Porsche.

‘Let’s go home, Gustav. Better still, let’s get that table you booked at La Lanterna before it goes to someone else. We’ve got plans to make! We can just walk away, and you and Pierre can carry on as you were. He got it wrong, that’s all. He’ll be like a cornered animal if we go storming in there. He’ll lash out.’ I tug on Gustav’s sleeve, aware that I’m mewling like a kicked kitten. ‘You won, and he lost! Think how embarrassed he’ll be!’

Gustav stares at the apartment building, his arm hanging by his side. ‘Embarrassment won’t cut it! He could try shame. Remorse, if it’s true that he tried to take advantage of you. Sorrow, for upsetting and confusing you like this. And as for winning and losing? Serena, this isn’t a competition!’

‘It is to him, Gustav! That’s just it! He’s desperate to be your little brother again, but he also wants whatever you’ve got! That’s how it’s always been. He wanted, and took, Margot—’

‘She stole him, you mean. She knew exactly how to hurt me the most. He may have been a willing participant, but he was still a kid.’ Gustav’s face is set in a series of hard lines as he takes another step across the pavement. ‘Going after my girlfriend six years later is totally different.’

Yet again I regret saying anything. I slide my hand up to his face, lay it on his cheek. I can feel the muscles flickering with tension around his clenched jaw.

‘We can drop this now. What’s important is that you and he have made up. You’re brothers. So he’s jealous. He looks up to you. He wants what you have. Gustav, you’ve both worked so hard to get back to where you were. Don’t spoil it.’

‘He’s the one who’s spoiling it. Just when my life was settled again. Just when I wanted to sit down and start thinking of where and when we might get married. Why does he never learn? Why did he have to mess with you, of all people? Why does he have to trample all over other people’s happiness like that? He had his own chance of romantic bliss with your poor cousin, and he blew it. He can’t have you. No one else will ever have you!’

We stare at each other out there in the street. The possessive words thrill me, but the new rage in his voice terrifies me, too.

‘I thought you were angry with me, Gustav. But if you’re not, let’s just – let’s just get away from here.’

‘I’m angry with everyone and everything at the moment. You think your life is finally on track – lovely girl, successful businesses, brotherly love restored, rosy future – and then a feather, of all things, wafts in out of nowhere and turns it all upside down. What you’ve said, or tried to say, has really shaken me up.’ He takes my hand and pulls me after him. ‘But it’s Pierre who has crossed a line.’

As we pass the Porsche, I touch the bonnet. The metal is still hot.

Gustav pushes open the big glass-panelled front door of the apartment building. We step out of the dark street into an even darker hallway. But there’s a certain faded grandeur to it, with high ceilings and period cornices. The wall-mounted lights flicker and crackle, making it even gloomier.

I try once more to stop this.

‘Pierre can’t help himself. Margot fatally corrupted him. I was a juicy challenge, just because I’m female. He was arrogant, and I was stupid. Darling, I’m so sorry. Your relationship with Pierre will survive this. No harm’s done. He’ll be hunting some other woman by now.’

Pierre’s boast comes back to me. Anything with a pulse and a pussy will do.

‘You’re not “some other woman”. You’re my woman.’ Gustav pulls me roughly towards him and kisses me. ‘Thank God he didn’t get what he wanted. But if I let it go, all that communication closes off again. Don’t you see? He needs to know he can’t shit on me.’

Our footsteps ring on the hard floor as we walk to the bottom of the stairs. I peer down. I can just make out the Victorian-style geometric pattern of terracotta blue and white mosaic tiles. Gustav takes the first stair then changes his mind, doubles back and calls the lift instead.

Panic rises like boiling milk inside me. ‘That feather, Gustav. Maybe it’s not a taunt, or a threat. Maybe it’s an admission of defeat.’ I hop from foot to foot as he punches the buttons on the old-fashioned lift. We hear the thick metallic clunk far above our heads. ‘His way of apologising?’

‘You’re not going to deflect me from this conversation, Serena. Pierre and I spent five years not speaking to each other, letting the misunderstandings fester. If we get this out in the open, especially with you here as well, we can clear the air. It’s the only way.’

Gustav puts his arm round me to usher me into the lift and closes the squeaking scissor gates. The lift creaks upwards, passing landing after deserted landing until we reach the top.

‘At least ring the doorbell to warn him,’ I whisper, though the building is silent as the grave. ‘We can’t just turn up unannounced!’

‘Watch me.’ Gustav shakes out a key and shoves it into the door with a decisive rasp. ‘You know perfectly well that I deal best in situations where I have the advantage.’

‘We know you’re here, Pierre!’ I call out as the door swings stickily open. I’m still clinging on to the last vestiges of hope that a couple of seconds’ warning will keep him on my side.

There is no answer. Gustav pushes away from me into the warm, musky darkness.

So this is the love nest.

I hover by the door, waiting for Pierre to show himself. I fear that instead of admitting to Gustav that he tried to seduce me, and that in any case I rebuffed him, he’ll stand there, gloating over the feather and all the havoc it’s caused. How he danced with me in Venice. How eager I was. How far he got. How far he wanted to go.

I feel the sour draught from the stairwell licking across my face as I wait in the dark entrance of the flat. I’m a trespasser. If I go inside, the rip tide will suck me back to that night. How can I ever explain my dirty excitement, how I relished the roughness of this strange, silent faux Gustav, how I lifted my skirts for him, opened my legs, his breeches open to display the extent of his excitement, that peacock feather dancing above my head, how I was begging for it, oh, how close we came to destroying everything?

Gustav is crashing about somewhere in the flat. I venture inside and feel my way down a hallway. An internal door gives as I fall against it, and a light switches on.

I’m standing in a black-painted bedroom strewn with clothes and shoes and belts, as if someone has just upended a suitcase. There are no pictures on the walls. Only a series of red-lacquer-framed mirrors. The ceiling is also totally mirrored. A black-painted carved bed dominates the space. It’s unmade, with scarlet pillows dented and punched and scarlet satin covers slipping off the mattress as if someone has just woken up and thrown them back. Hanging off the posts are handcuffs, whips, long chiffon scarves, executioner-style leather masks and muzzles as well as bejewelled and feathered Venetian masks.

There’s a scent in the air, but it’s not Pierre’s heavy, headachy scent, which I would know anywhere. It’s floral, with an exotic eastern tang of lemongrass and something else. The nostril-pricking aroma of female excitement. Gustav will be able to smell it, too. Maybe even recognise it.

I stare at the bed and remember what Pierre told me about this very room. As we sipped those strong fig cocktails in the Gramercy Hotel, he described the scene nearly six years ago when Gustav found his wife sitting on his brother’s face – just as she had threatened to do if Gustav ever crossed her – and threw them both out. After a few days in a London hotel, Pierre and Margot had come to New York and lived in this flat. She had kept him here for six months, tied most of the time to this very bed.

A draught of cold air rushes over my face. The thick curtains billow and I cross the carpet strewn with discarded underwear and stockings. But as I lean out to shut the window, the night air clutches at me. The hot, cluttered room behind me is shoving at my back, urging me to plunge into the dirty alleyway below.

Don’t be ridiculous. Polly’s in my head again. It’s not haunted. It’s just a bachelor bedroom done out with a tasteless penchant for Chinese brothel motifs. Which is odd, given Pierre’s a designer—

Well, it feels haunted to me. I close the window and lean my forehead on the glass. I miss Polly. I wish she was right here, like when we were kids, telling me what to do next.

There’s a tiny creaking sound. The door to the double wardrobe, painted in shiny red lacquer, is half open. I go to push it shut, but an internal light flicks on.

I expect to see a jumble of Pierre’s trademark leather jackets and jeans hanging there, but instead there’s a rail of immaculate men’s shirts, arranged through the colour spectrum from jaunty pink through deep blue to snowy white. Each sleeve has a sharply ironed crease and is buttoned to the neck.

The clean laundry smell of starch contrasts with the sluttish mess and manky scent of the rest of the room. The shirts sway under my fingers on their smooth wooden hangers. The last one is a white dress shirt, such as you would wear for a wedding, and as I separate it from the others I see that a silver grey cravat is tied round the wing collar, fastened with a simple silver pin.

It glistens in the light dancing from the tasselled lampshade above my head. I can’t resist pulling the shirt closer to look at the tiepin.

This doesn’t belong to Pierre. Because engraved on it are the entwined initials GL.

‘My brother has obviously moved some of his dancers in here. Two or three, judging by all this paraphernalia. So it’s group sex he’s into now!’ Gustav calls from up the hall. ‘None of his stuff is in evidence, but there’s knickers, make-up, theatrical costumes everywhere. The place is a tip.’

Where have I seen those initials before? I know they stand for Gustav Levi, but where have I seen that style of engraving? I turn the pin over, and a cold hand claws at my heart.

Across the back is the tiny inscription M and G. Forever.

Gustav is in the corridor, muttering something about a wasted journey, but I can’t move. This is the loving inscription from a bride to a groom, promising permanence. Encapsulated in those curly silver words is their relationship, their marriage, their life. When he was her groom. Not mine.

Everything Gustav has told me about her, the things Pierre told me about Margot and what she did to him with her whips and handcuffs; it all comes back to me. Those deep voices merging with story after story, trapping me in this overheated, over-furnished, stinking reminder of Margot Levi and the sexual power she had over both the Levi brothers.

When she had reduced Gustav to a debauched, diminished figure after five abusive years of marriage, Margot took Pierre. Her willing, besotted prisoner. She was the cougar. He was nineteen, easy meat. He’d lusted after her all the time she was married to his brother, fantasised about her when he heard them moaning in the night, and when at last he had her to himself, he probably thought it was for ever too.

PL and GL.

I let the shirt nestle back softly against its fellows and close the cupboard. I step backwards and fall back on to the bed. Margot was insatiable, Pierre told me. She couldn’t get enough of him. She would straddle him, or get him to take her from behind, several times a day, tying him, whipping him, drugging him either with dope to make him hornier or Viagra to make him harder, teaching him everything she knew about her world of punishment and pain, the world she once shared with Gustav.

GL.

Pierre couldn’t resist tormenting me with the notion that Margot’s particular brand of poison still flowed in Gustav’s veins, too. That after living with, and being married to, a mesmerising, demanding dominatrix like her, no woman would ever be enough for him.

The woman they both loved once writhed on this bed. I can see her black hair twisting like wire, the nodules of her spine flexing as she knelt up, impaling herself on the hard length of her sex slave. GL, or PL.

It’s the same image that tortured me in the chalet in Lugano where Gustav took me last winter. I blundered into Margot’s boudoir, thinking it had been cleared, but her stuff was everywhere. Her leather basque and boots invited me to try them on. Her collection of whips hung on their hooks, ready to deliver punishment. In my confusion that day I thought I might become stronger by dressing myself up in Margot’s clothes and in a way I did because, although Gustav went mad with anger when he found me, the anger turned, very quickly, into lust, and that’s the night when he first fucked me.

I know where I’ve seen those initials before. I yank open the wardrobe again. The same style of engraving was on the silver cufflink I found in the master bathroom in Lugano. Gustav declared that a cufflink without its pair was worse than useless. He told me that he had disposed of it, along with every other gift from Margot.

I snatch at the sleeve of the white dress shirt. One cuff is unfolded and bare. Fastened in the other is the missing link.

This place feels like a shrine to the unholy trinity of GL, PL and M. And I don’t belong.

I used to feel excluded like this as a child. Every day I came home from school to be ignored by unloving parents, knowing that in other families my friends were being welcomed into warm homes full of light and food. All I could do was stand in the darkness outside.

But I’m an adult now. I’m going to marry Gustav. I’m supposed to be in control.

‘Why is Pierre storing your shirts here?’ I slam the cupboard shut. ‘Your wedding shirt, for God’s sake?’

There’s no sound. Not even from the street outside. Nothing, then the creak of floorboards. I peer down the dark red painted corridor.

‘Pierre’s not at home, Gustav. This feels all wrong. Let’s just get out of here.’

Still he doesn’t answer. But the peacock feather that was in his pocket floats through the air from the room opposite the front door and drops to the floor.

‘I’ve been counting the days till you were in my boudoir again instead of that freeloading brother of yours. Or should I say our boudoir? Cat got your tongue, Gusty? I always did have that effect on you!’

A woman’s throaty voice, perforating the silence. The accent has a Germanic rasp and she pronounces his name ‘Goostie’.

A pair of spike-heeled red sandals steps through the open front door. The brief hope that they are attached to a harmless young dancer flickers and dies. A dancer wouldn’t be able to afford Jimmy Choo.