Chapter One Hundred and Seven
Not having anything better to do at eleven o’clock that night, Voot returned to the duchess’s room, with a bottle of champagne he’d stashed away for such an occasion, and submitted to her seduction. She insisted her footman be present throughout the act of intercourse, in case they should need anything; when Voot queried what they might need, she grew impatient with his questioning. In the event, the footman remained, stood at attention, off to the side, sneaking a little champagne when the actors’ backs were to him.
Voot clenched the duchess’s upper arms and groaned existentially as his penis, as if with a mind of its own, sought to fertilise this noble womb with a speck of new, guiltless life; all the heavens shook within Voot, as they would for the nurtured birth of a star in space, celebratory bells rang between his ears, and in so doing, he felt himself reach out to the past, link with the history of his species, and gain both youth and incalculable age; during which, the footman, had one’s ears been so sensitively attuned, might have been heard to chuckle.
Voot had come from a rich bourgeois family, grown up with every gratuitous privilege, until they fell on hard times. He’d had to pull out of university—as one might pull out from a woman for whose body one had the greatest respect, but whose potential as a wife and mother left something to be desired—and get a position managing this hotel, a job for which he was innately unqualified, and only secured through strings his father pulled. He’d been here ever since, his capacity for boredom increasing in proportion with the inflation of his managerial competence and the shrivelling of his soul. He’d achieved a morsel of respect, at least from his staff—at least when they weren’t staging a coup—which vanished as soon as the next guest treated him with patronising contempt. As for love, he had a lady friend, a widow, plain and unsmiling, who visited the hotel each summer, when they would fornicate in her room. She was relatively well-to-do, but reliably rejected his repeated offers of marriage. Though she was coy on the subject, he suspected she had a series of such lovers managing various hotels around Europe, and intended to continue on her circuit until she should finally die, an outcome she in no manner dreaded, finding the whole thing pointless in the extreme.
He meditated on this, then slumped alongside the duchess on the bed and covered his eyes. The duchess, alas, could not reach sexual apex that evening, but secured from Voot a promise to return. She stroked his buttocks, until, disgusted at himself, he pushed her hand away. Remembering the presence of the footman, he hastily drew the bedcovers over his (Voot’s) dwindling masculinity. Before he left, she gifted him some little bauble, made of glass and precious stone, which he guessed he was supposed to wear somewhere on his person. After protesting that it was too generous of her, he accepted, out of politeness, made his way to his own room, fell immediately asleep, and dreamt of mounted knights chopping off peasants’ heads for sport.