Free History of a Pleasure Seeker by Richard Mason Page A

larks stuffed with pistachio and foie gras. The Château Neuf du Pape, of which Piet had three glasses, made the pursuit of pleasure seem obligatory. There was a wildness in the way Jacobina laughed at Constance’s jokes that combined with the message of the dress she had chosen to tell him that he need only make a sign. The invitation, delivered so tracelessly, added a helping of flattered vanity to the assortment of delights offered by the elegant room, the fine food and the deference of the servants.
    As Didier bowed, looked into his eyes, smiled, refilled his glass, and bowed again, Piet marveled at how far he had come from his father’s dank and gloomy house, cleaned once a week by a woman with dandruff and chilblains. He thought contemptuously of the morning’s sermon and of the poor fools who exchange their worldly ambitions for the vague promises of heaven.
    A
gâteau de trois-frères
appeared and an exquisite champagne jelly, in which white elderflowers were magically suspended. Piet had watched the jelly being made, layer on fragile layer, the day before. He plunged his fork into it like a barbarian at the gates of Rome, destroying the labors of others for no better reason than this: he could.
    “Some champagne, Monsieur Blok,” said Maarten, who was in excellent spirits. He did no work on Sundays and was looking forward to a pleasantly drunken nap. “My dear, I insist you take some.” He stroked his wife’s hand. “You haven’t been yourself all morning. It’ll settle your digestion.” He waved at the butler, in unconscious imitation of the rich men he had envied in the days before he could afford to be commanding with sommeliers. “Let us have the Moët Brut Impérial, 1900.” He turned to Piet. “A superlative year, in my opinion.”
    Thus pressed, Jacobina did take a glass of champagne. When Louisa announced that she and Constance were out to tea with the van der Woudes, and might stay to dinner, she had another. Though her life was enviably luxurious by any objective standard, she nevertheless believed quite sincerely that she rarely did anything to please herself. Because the sight of her husband had the power to weaken her resolve, she rose and went to the window; and thus the party broke up.
    Constance and Louisa went upstairs to change. Maarten summoned Egbert to read aloud to him. The servants cleared the table. As the household dispersed, Jacobina announced to no one in particular that she should see to the flowers in the schoolroom and went into the house next door with a thudding heart.
    S he had not been two minutes in the room when Piet knocked at its door. “I wondered if you needed me,
mevrouw
.” He entered without her leave and came halfway across the carpet towards her. “If so, I am entirely at your disposal.”
    The similarity between this declaration and statements made by the Piet Barol of Jacobina’s dreams was startling. “There is a very great deal you might do for me,” she said.
    “I had hoped there would be.”
    They looked at each other in silence. Now it was Jacobina who smiled, and when Piet did not look away, she felt embarrassed. But he was not, and his look conveyed this. She walked past him out of the room and climbed the stairs, wondering if he would follow. When he did, she took a key from a vase on the landing and let them both into her aunt’s bedroom and locked the door behind them. But now the spur of her impulsiveness died, leaving her nonplussed and at a disadvantage. What if this young man has no idea? she thought.
    But Piet Barol had every idea.
    Two weeks before his seventeenth birthday, a similar exchange of bold glances had earned him his first invitation to the bed of a thirty-four-year-old mezzo-soprano whose husband was a visiting lecturer at Leiden. This lady had asked Madame Barol if she might hire her son to practice with her at home and had practiced with him at will, with no instrument but the human body, for the remaining nine months of