Donna and Paris

‘I won’t be about next week,’ Donna had said over supper one evening. I suppressed an urge to question her. Part of our deal was that I didn’t cramp her style or ask her what she was doing – if she wanted me to know she’d tell me but I was a mort irritated. Supposing I had booked a theatre trip or planned a surprise party for her. But I hadn’t.

‘I’m going to France. The Gallery Director has asked me to take some paintings by one her current protégés to a gallery near Notre Dame where they are to be displayed.’ I asked if she was good. ‘You know Munch’s ‘The Scream?’ I nodded. ‘Of course you do, College. Well even though it is not something you’d probably want hanging on your kitchen wall here, it being less than restful on the eye there is no doubting its artistic merit, agreed?' I agreed. 'Miss Crimson Tatley-Bhint’s work has some of those qualities. To wit, you wouldn’t hang it on your toilet wall. She is gratuitously pornographic and her work graphically depicts women suffering, usually at the hands of other women. My Director has offered six of her pieces to be shown, presumably in the hope that the Parisian Perverts club is having a convention.’ Donna, having been recruited to clean the gallery and make sandwiches etc had been promoted to a more senior position and assisted at exhibitions and even wrote blurb for the gallery’s PR material. At last someone was recognising her qualities aside from me.

On the evening she was due to return I had laid the table as if for a dinner party. Candles, cut glass, flowers, an ice bucket with a bottle of bubbles in it and I had prepared her favourite meal of Coq au Vin to be followed by chocolate ice cream. I put a note saying ‘Welcome Home’ at her place and then showered and dressed in readiness for her return. I wore the blue dress she had chosen for me and hid in the kitchen when she came home. She strolled into the kitchen where she stopped and stared open-mouthed at the table and the room. I was pleased with her reaction until suddenly two large tears appeared and ran, like glass marbles, down her lovely cheeks. I came out of hiding and held her, worried to death that something was wrong. She shook herself and looked deep into my eyes with her own, mismatched eyes.

‘Don’t mind me, College, but this is simply the nicest thing anyone has ever done for me.’ I held her then and felt the wet of her tears on my neck. She stepped back and let her hands slide to my hips. ‘Oh, but look at you,’ she said, then kissed me firmly.

Over dinner and champagne she told me she had been fortunate that the Parisian Perverts had indeed been out in abundance (and a Citroen she had remarked impishly) and she had sold all six pictures. She had, purely for the sake of art and commerce, had to sleep with twenty-two Parisian women but, not to worry, they all smelled of garlic and Camel cigarettes. I smiled.

As I removed the final dish from in front of her, her hand wandered up under my frock. ‘Oh, College, you’re wearing them for me aren’t you?’ Since the first time she had seen me in stockings and a suspender belt it had been a mode of dress that always inflamed her, hence my decision this evening. She drew me to her and I sat astride her, the dress rucked up to my waist and we kissed. After that we were all hands and mouths and tongues. Later in bed, still wearing the stockings, I lay with her head on my breast and stroked her hair.

‘Only twenty-two Parisian women?’

‘Well, it might have been twenty-three but who is counting?’