Chapter Sixty-Four
As they entered their room—Enid had moved the last of her things into Genevra and Rosella’s suite, and her old room in the hotel, just like her life before this holiday, ceased to exist for her—Genevra made some art-historical small talk, but Enid, all of whose scruples had dropped away like the last leaves of autumn in a sudden gust, covered her mouth with her own. Rosella, an upending yin-yang of jealousy and titillation, watched Enid remove her own clothes using Genevra’s hands, as one might grab a pastry from a grocer’s using a small sheet of waxed paper offered for that purpose. Once denuded, Enid continued to manipulate the artist’s hands over her own body for her own pleasure, as if collaborating on the sculpting of herself out of clay. Rosella witnessed the love of her life allow herself to caress and penetrate this middle-aged interloper, and could stand it no longer, but leapt onto Enid herself, and, this time of her own volition, attack her from the other side.
Enid was carried to bed, and, without any of them conscious as to how, all three were soon divested of their clothes, Enid throbbing slippery-fish-like between their bodies. Her feet were wrinkled and hooked, against Genevra’s big blocks and Rosella’s creamy, dainty ones; her thighs bony and saggy, against Genevra’s muscled and Rosella’s firm, smooth ones; her stomach plump and flaccid against Genevra’s tough, wide one; her buttocks flabby and pimply against Rosella’s young, hard pelvis; her back crumpled against Rosella’s tiny, pointy breasts; her own breasts dilapidated and inflamed against Genevra’s mammoth, heaving ones; the back of her neck hyper-sensitive against Rosella’s lips, and her own lips sphinctered around Genevra’s tongue.
The pleasure they inflicted on her was a martial thing, to which she left herself open to attack, surrendered, and awaited the impending obliteration. But then the tangle of their limbs shifted and recombined, alignments were renegotiated, and Enid and Rosella had joined forces to charge on Genevra, who basked in the assault from her two acolytes. With matronly benevolence, she cradled both their heads to her, as her ancestor the she-wolf had those of Remus and Romulus millennia before. After the three had shifted yet again, Enid’s mouth was thrust so deeply into her that she felt the call of the vortex—far from recoiling, resisting, retreating, she plunged deeper, she gave her body to be swallowed up whole within her. Behind her, now, she was distantly aware of Rosella violating her, but as the actions she felt mirrored the actions she performed, she might have been doing them to herself, curled around the entire world and back onto her own tail. Genevra, she sensed, was in some manner violating Rosella, and a sense of a completed circle overtook her, in which all their flesh was one, all their moans originated in the same throat, all their thoughts were shared—she was pressed in on all sides by feminine sensations, haptic and olfactory and gustatory. Squishing, and moistness, and primeval smell, and the catch of hair between teeth: they no longer knew whose body was whose, whose mouth was where, whose mouth was whose; the fleshy soup into which their constituent parts had all decomposed vibrated with the dinosaur’s stomp in a rainforest puddle, a beetle’s wing aflap in the air, the delicate branch of a sapling in the breeze, the first inhalation of the first creature to crawl out of the sea—and all three saw Genevra’s vision when it came:
As a girl, she’d been close to her mum, especially after her dad started taking up with other women. He finally left them, to seek a new life with his current mistress somewhere in the Far East. Genevra did not mourn him; rather, the period of just her and her mother, against the world, was the happiest for her—until her mother began to miss the basest attributes that could be recommended of her father, so started taking in a succession of lovers. Little Genevra, during these sordid goings-on, took refuge in their attic, under its skylight, where, cotton wool jabbed in her ears, she could paint and draw loftier worlds, worlds devoid of males, where generations of gleeful women spring into life, seemingly, purely by dint of their own will. Her mother had always encouraged her artistic tendencies, paid for drawing tutors and bought her plenty of supplies from the funds her male acquaintances gave her, and even dreamt that Genevra might, when she grew up, avoid her mother’s mistakes and pursue the independent life of an artist, with her own purse filled through her own efforts, and her hungers quenched by artistic, rather than masculine, gratification. When her mum grew pregnant from a lover, Genevra, enraged, painted a picture of the child dead at birth. To her horror, both the child and her mother died on the birth-bed. Alone in the world, and stunned by this manifestation of her own power, she vowed never to draw or paint again, and, now thirteen, joined a nunnery, as atonement, and as a conscious act of rebellion against the discredited idea of being an artist. Once enshrouded within those Gothic walls, it didn’t take her long to grow bored out of her mind, and resentful of authority, and unable to keep her thoughts on God instead of on the girls around her, so she scaled the stone wall, found her way to Paris and became a starving artist after all. All the clichés of unwashed limbs cramming filthy garrets, hours caricaturing tourists in shady squares, drunken debates in sleazy cafes, and lifestyles free from the strictures prescribed for non-artists were hers for the taking. Her bold subjects arranged in novel compositions, unflinchingly refusing prettification to cater to American tourists’ sensibilities, apathetically marketed by this unfeminine, flinty-eyed Italian, began, against all odds, to sell, and she gradually, almost despite her best attempts to forestall it, built up a reputation as a genius, or at least as someone talented enough to convincingly counterfeit genius, to the point where she was now quite well known, in discerning modern circles, and able to pick and choose from a fathomless pool of young female acolytes for seduction.
Now, however, she was feeling the one sensation which had been hitherto bricked off to her: romantic love. And it was a feeling voluminous enough to encompass both the ladies who at this moment lay beside her, stroking her hair.