Belle - Lesley Pearse [159]
In the room adjoining the dining room a band was playing, and hearing a waltz, Belle jumped to her feet and caught hold of Clovis’s hands, urging him to come and dance. She thought she heard some of the others at the table say they would join them, but she didn’t notice whether or not they came on to the dance floor later.
What she did remember was feeling very sleepy and clinging to Clovis. She heard him say something about taking her up to his room, and the next thing she knew, he had his arm around her and was helping her up a huge staircase with a thick, patterned red carpet.
‘You have a room here?’ she asked, trying very hard not to slur her words.
‘Yes, this is where I always stay when I am in Marseille.’
‘But what will they think of me going to your room?’ she asked.
‘Hotels as good as this one don’t have an opinion about their guests’ behaviour,’ he said.
Belle remembered going up the stairs, but it seemed to take for ever to get to the room. Then, contrarywise, it seemed only a second or two before she was entirely naked. She had a vague memory of Clovis standing her before a huge mirror and touching her intimately in a way which was pleasurable but didn’t seem quite right, not for a man who was just supposed to be taking her out to dinner.
Then she remembered him suddenly being naked too, and it was something of a shock to see that his chest and back were covered in thick black hair. At that point she tried to say that this was a mistake and she should go home, but he didn’t listen, just swept her on to the big bed.
Everything was hazy after that. She heard him saying things in French which she suspected were rude, she knew too that he was penetrating her, and even in her drunkenness she felt a sense of shame that she’d let herself down by drinking so much and allowing Clovis to believe this was what she wanted.
She woke later with a raging thirst, and didn’t know where she was at first for the room was so dark. But as she groped out to her side and her hand came into contact with a hairy back, it all came back to her.
She felt sick at letting herself down by getting drunk. What was Madame Albertine going to think of her now? Her head was pounding, she could smell herself, and she needed a drink of water badly. She vaguely remembered that she’d used an adjoining bathroom to this room, so she slid out of the bed and groped her way along the wall. She came to a door, but as she opened it, light flooded in from the corridor. Before she closed it, though, she was able to see there was a second door in the room.
Of all the things Belle valued most in life, a bathroom with a tub with hot and cold water, and a flushing lavatory, was top of her list. Even though there had been one at Martha’s, with so many girls wanting to get in there, and the boiler to heat the water only lit at certain times, her turn for a bath didn’t come as often as she’d like. Madame Albertine’s was nice, she’d even had a thing she called a bidet for washing her bottom. But this hotel bathroom was the best Belle had ever seen, with a washbasin set in a marble stand, a huge bath, and a lavatory and a bidet too, with a black and white tiled floor that shone as though it was wet.
But although Belle took in this luxury, she had barely shut the door behind her before the contents of her stomach rose up, and she only just reached the lavatory in time.
It seemed as though she was retching for hours. One minute she was so cold she had to wrap herself in a bath towel, then she became hot and felt she might pass out from the heat. Finally, when there was nothing left in her stomach to bring up, she dragged herself off the floor and looked at herself in the big mirror behind the bath.
Her hair, which she’d spent an hour arranging the night before, securing curls with combs and pins up on the top of her head, was now like tangled brambles, her face was chalk-white and her lips looked swollen and bruised. She was sore below too, and she knew Clovis must have treated her roughly.
When Madame Albertine had first explained