Chapter Sixty-Nine
Genevra, head atilt, lips tucked in, was painting the naked forms of her lovers, who lay in each other’s arms in the bed before her. The piece was almost abstract, with palpably fleshy connotations. While the gender of the sitters was unpindownable, it was somehow unswervingly feminine, and teeth-gnashingly erotic.
Enid, whilst she felt her flesh, as it existed on this single afternoon, be chiselled into something closer to perpetuity, a profound love for both these women, and an urge to give not just her body, but her soul, and her future, to them, melted over her. Although all three were content to stretch this minute into eternity, and prayed the hotel be never unshackled from its snow-bounds, they also dreamt up giddy plans for cohabitation and artistic collaboration in the future: Enid would write the text on a feminist theme for prints of Genevra’s erotic sketches of Rosella; Rosella would insert a bundle of paintbrushes up Enid’s rectum so that Genevra could paint her unconstrained facial expression, the resulting picture to be titled Shame of a Bourgeois Spinster Alchemised into Art (all three laughed at this) and exhibited in Enid’s old village, where her friends, colleagues and kin could not fail to view it; they would adopt a waif child from the streets of some African colony and rear her in an atmosphere of deep maternal love; they would grow old under the caressing sun by Mediterranean waters.
For the moment, Rosella’s finger traced along Enid’s skin in tandem, in inexplicable sympathy, with Genevra’s brush across the canvas, and she desired nothing.