Free History of a Pleasure Seeker by Richard Mason Page B

the academic year. She had curbed Piet’s uninventive, youthful exuberance and taught him the virtues of rhythm and pace while insisting on chivalric standards of discretion.
    Jacobina’s locking of the door was all the license Piet required. The blame would now be hers if pleasure were succeeded by recrimination. He had never before encountered a woman as tinderbox ready as Jacobina Vermeulen-Sickerts and was slightly unnerved by the suddenness of his success. He fell to his knees before her, as the mezzo-soprano had liked him to do, and lifted the hem of her apple-green dress. Jacobina neither objected nor looked at him. He kissed her ankle in its white silk stockings and this touch, too, was permitted. It was highly effective. Abruptly abandoning all consideration of the consequences, Jacobina sat, almost collapsed, on the chaise longue.
    “Remove my shoes,” she said. “
Lentement
.”
    With extreme delicacy, Piet liberated Jacobina’s feet.
Very
slowly he ran his fingers up her calves, behind her knees, to the lace bands of her suspenders. This made her shake, as it had the mezzo-soprano. He loosed her stockings with studied reverence, but in truth he was uncertain. He had no idea what she would permit, and it seemed to him that she was not very clear on this point either. He hesitated, considering his repertoire. Then, with an animal growl that was indescribably pleasing to Jacobina, he pushed her skirts over her knees and put his head beneath them.
    J acobina’s childhood nurse, Riejke Vedder, who had lived with the Sickertses until her death at the age of seventy-eight, had been far more beloved by the Sickerts children than either of their own parents. Jacobina had been the last of the brood and her favorite. For the first six years of her life, until a drizzly English governess challenged Riejke’s exclusive rights to her attention, Jacobina had not spent a single waking moment beyond the range and sight of her nurse.
    Riejke taught Jacobina to focus and crawl and speak and walk; and then to read and wash and count and go to the toilet by herself. She loved her with the unchallengeable enormity of the simpleminded and religious, and the responsibility she assumed over her was total. “Ugly language” was banned and included all but the most discreet euphemisms for any private place below the belly button. Faced with the occasional necessity of referring to these shameful regions, Riejke had devised a language that suited the needs of practical communication while remaining inoffensive. Thus, Jacobina’s young vagina became her “little kitten,” her bottom “the strawberry patch.” Every evening before bed, Riejke told her charge to take her little kitten for a walk and Jacobina rose obediently and squatted over the chamber pot and peed and returned to her bed without fear of wetting it. On family picnics, when privacy was harder to achieve, Riejke would ask Jacobina whether she needed to “visit the strawberry patch” or could simply “walk her little kitten” (which, in extremis, could be done behind a bush).
    As a consequence, Jacobina had grown up with a sense that the most intimate and rewarding part of her body was somehow independent of her, a little furry animal to be walked and cleaned and sometimes played with—but cautiously, because it might scratch or bite. She knew this was nonsense, and yet her nurse’s prohibitions remained compelling and in her own mind she still remembered to walk her little kitten before taking a long journey and was revolted by the sight of strawberries on a chocolate cake. Her husband had once made a pet of this kitten, and on one mortifying occasion had put his tongue into it, and then withdrawn it, bright with embarrassment. But for ten years he had not touched her there or anywhere else, and nothing he had ever done compared with the sensations Piet Barol now produced.
    Piet’s mentor had taught him well and he was rewarded for finding his rhythm by a