The motor stalled in the middle of a snowy landscape, lodged in a rut, wouldnt budge an inch. How I swore! Id plao be snug in front of a r fire, by now, a single malt on the mahogany wiable (a oisseurs piece) beside me, the five courses of Melissas dinner savourously aromatising the kit; to plete the decor, a labrador retrievers head laid on my knee as trustingly as if I were indeed a try gentleman and lolled by rights among the tz. After dinner, before I read our ary pre-coital poetry aloud to her, my elegant and aplished mistress, also a oisseurs piece, might play the piano for her part-time pasha while I sipped black, acrid coffee from her precious little cups.
Melissa was rich, beautiful and rather older than I. The servants slipped me looks of sly plicity; no matter how carefully I rumpled my sheets, they knew when a bed hadnt bee in. The master of the house had a pied-a-terre in Londohe House was sitting and the House was sitting tight. Id met him only o the same dinner party where Id met her -- hed been off-hand with me, gruff. I was young and handsome and full of promise; my relations with husbands rarely prospered. Wives were quite amother matter. Women, as Mayakovosky justly opined, are very partial to poets.
And now her glamorous motor car had broken down in the snow. Id borrowed it for a trip to Oxford, ostensibly to buy books, utilising, with my instinctual ing, the weather as an excuse. Last night, the old woman had been shaking her mattress with a vengeance -- suow! When I woke up the bedroom was full of luminous snow light, catg in the coils of Melissas honey-coloured hair, and Id experienced, once again, but, this time, almost untrollably, the sense of claustrophobia that sometimes afflicted me when I was with her.
Id said, lets read some snowy poetry together, after dionight, Melissa, a tribute of white verses to the iography of the weather. Any excuse, no matter how far fetched, to get her out of the house -- too much luxury on ay stomach, that was the trouble. Always the same eyes too big for his belly, as grandma used to say; grandma spotted the trait when this little fellow lisped and toddled and pissed the bed before he knew what luxury was, even. Cultural iion, I tell you, the gripe in the bowels of your spirit. How I get out of here, away from her subtly flawed antique mirrors, her French perfume deted ieenth-tury crystal bottles, her inscrutably smirking aresses in their gilt, oval frames? And her dolls, worst of all, her blasted dolls.
Those dolls that had never have been played with, her fine colle of antique women, part of the apparatus of Melissas charm, her piquant inality that lay well on the safe side of quaint. A dozen or so of the fi lived in her bedroom in a glass-fronted, satinwood et lavishly equipped with such toyland artefacts and miniature sofas and teeny-tiny grand pianos. They had heads made of moulded porcelain, each dimple aung underlip sculpted with loving care. Their wigs and over-lifelike eyelashes were made of real hair. She told me their eyes had been manufactured by the same craftsman in glass who made those terribly precious paperweights filled with magiowstorms. Whenever I woke up in Melissas bed, the first thing I saw were a dozen pairs of shining eyes that seemed to gleam wetly, as if in lacrimonious accusation of my presehere, for the dolls, like Melissa, were perfect ladies and I, in my upwardly social mobile nakedness -- a nakedhat was, ihe essential