You will want to have read the first episode of Natalie’s Tale before reading this.

The night is not done with her yet; she’s agreed to let him look at her paintings, and he still has her keys, so she cannot do what she would dearly love to do, and curl up in her emptiness, hoping to sleep.

The chauffeur opens her door for her, very formally and properly, deferential, but there is also something in his manner, something she can’t pinpoint, which makes it impossible not to recall that he is a person, a stranger, a man who has seen her slutty behaviour, heard her slutty words, and she feels suddenly very small and tawdry and worthless, her hollowness expanding to eat her self-respect, as it does all too often these days.

He’s a big man, broad rather than tall, with a bleak and battered face, and, without understanding how she senses that he is seeking to impress his strength upon her, as a threat, so that she must know that he wants her, that he is a man she should be frightened of, frightened of being raped by. His threat, the rawness of it is very clear to her and she feels it so strongly that she staggers, is going to fall until he reaches out to catch her upper arm in a huge, meaty hand, and simply lifts her, stands her up again, effortlessly as if she had been made of paper;

“Take care, Ma’m’selle.”

It is all perfectly unexceptional, nothing which she can put a finger on, but his hand holds her just a fraction too long, too hard, just a little, a deliberate but also momentary demonstration to her of his immense strength, her relative weakness, that he wants her to know it, and she feels her stomach clench in fear.

And then, having saved her, he lets her go, just as a gentleman would, and Signoret-Gregoire is at her side, calm and suave and serious, and— apart from her abiding (and before too long fully justified) terror of the man it is as if the moment had never been, the chauffeur deferential and attentive as Signoret-Gregoire tells him he will be half an hour or so, no more, apologising to him for the lateness, the man demurring, his voice grating but carefully quiet;

“Always happy to be of service M’sieu, thank you M’sieu. I’ll be here, never fear; take your time.”

“And now, Natalie, since it is late, let us proceed— lead on, do!”

She has, many times, deliberately chosen to walk ahead of a man on a steep stair in a short skirt, savouring the imposition onto him of a choice— to knowingly look up a girl’s skirt, risking her turning, catching him at it, or to self-consciously look away, feeling less of a natural man. Always, it has been fun, empowering, made her feel raunchy.

This time, she is overcome by shyness, self-consciousness— shame, even; wondering if Signoret-Gregoire is looking, not daring to turn and catch him, acutely aware of the nakedness between her legs, feeling her sex move as she climbs the stair, uneasy at the evidence of her earlier sexual arousal— she can feel herself slick down there; fizzing inside with the vulnerability like an electrical field in her, and she is suddenly aroused again, soft, needy, warm, and she slows; even though the shyness makes her want to hurry, her need for his attention is more; I’m not teasing him, I’m offering myself, without any hope, just because I need him to want me. It is novel, and strange, and hypnotic, and she is notably sad when they finally reach the attic level that was hers.

He does not give her her keys, but leans around her to the door, the corridor so narrow that he is pressed against her— he apparently oblivious, pragmatic, she trembling, wanting him to take her in his arms, incapable of action herself; this is crazy!

And then he precedes her into her chaos, and she is mortified; again, she normally uses the astonishment of men at the disorder of her place as a way of unsettling them, laughing at their shock, teasing them for their bourgeois conventionality, but is now experiencing the opposite; shame at her filth, her mess, the smell of old food, the loud scuttle of the rat which lives under the floor.

But he does not react; indeed, once the lamp is turned on (a dim orange bulb, almost imposing gloom rather than bringing light to the room with its dark blue walls), he looks around with actual interest, without apparent judgement, eyes travelling slowly, and she is flooded with gratitude.

Why am I so vulnerable to him? How does he have me so completely off guard? It’s not as if he’s doing anything much.

He looks at her, then;

“Very well. Here we are. The work?”

The other room is different. Small, empty, painted white every few months, paint slapped everywhere, drips and all, the easel on one wall, canvases stacked in a corner, a small plastic topped table her palette, daubs of paint constituting its entire surface, the ashtray overflowing, an old one-piece record player against another wall, player arm hovering over the vinyl, the light very bright indeed.

He looks at her again and she knows she is afraid. He is going to see her work. He won’t like it. Why should he? She doesn’t. It’s nothing to do with him being a dealer, important, not at that moment; this is her exposing herself to someone who will judge her, someone whose opinion seems to have become important to her very quickly, a man who has shown again and again that he is indifferent to her persona, to her manipulations, that he will be looking at the work in its own terms, as she worked hard to make sure no-one else did (though she would never acknowledge it to herself unless forced).

He is impassive as she gets the canvases out, one by one, puts them on the easel. He looks at each for a short time only, sometimes a little longer, never very long, before saying;

“Au suivant,” and she gets the next.

When he has seen the last, he walks over to the window, picks up the thing on the cill, and brings it to her; layers and layers of blackness— ripped plastic bags, paper, cardboard, fabric, rubber, leather— all black, flappy, loosely stacked, pinned together roughly; no apparent order, except that each layer has a hole in the middle, a tiny shard of mirror at the bottom of the hole, glued to the lace which is the foundational layer.

He looks up at her; “What is this?”

She is twisting inside; “Nothing, really. Just … just something …”

He says nothing, simply looks at her. His amused face is gone, he’s almost blank, except that his eyes are focused; receptive, interested.

“Hmm.”

He replaces the black thing, walks to the door;

“Those—… " he indicates the pile of canvases, “will sell. There are people who love such stuff.”

“They are not bad. But they are not real. There is nothing there. Why is there not more of that?” He points at the black thing; “There, at least, you are trying. Trying to be honest about something. Failing, embarrassing, as your reaction shows; it is trite, what you made. But honest. If you tried more of that, you might even achieve something.”

She’s undone; all her inner fears crystallised, laid out in a few devastating sentences, her hollowness.

And the words come from her without being planned;

“I can’t. I can’t do it. Every time I try, I fail. If … if you think that thing is embarrassing, I’m glad I burned the rest.”

He just looks at her, for what feels like a long time; she cannot meet his eyes, feels utterly weak, valueless.

At least the chauffeur wants to rape me. This one calls my paintings ‘stuff’, calls the thing I thought had something, once, ’trite’, and he doesn’t want to fuck me.

But then;

“I will sell those other things; there will be a show. Money is something, after all. Most art is bad, yours is a little better than that. You are not alone.”

He hands her a thick, stiff business card, with a rich texture, very simple block text J-M S-G and a ‘phone number.

“Call to arrange an appointment, if you wish. The paintwork repair will be deducted, as well as my large fee. You will be seen with me, a little. I will fuck you sometimes; when I like, perhaps. Voyons voir.”

He waited until, with an empty feeling that was different from, and better than the hollow feeling, but still deeply unsettling, she said, “OK,” not knowing what else to say.

He left then; not in a rush, but decisively, left her alone.

And still the night had not done with her, for she could not sleep, even though she was desperate to be unconscious. She could not think, though, either; not about anything of the night:— the terrible, miserable, dangerous, wonderful night. It was too much. Everything was too much.

She simply lay down, where she was, in the studio, on the floor, and felt empty and frightened (she did not know what of, save that the chauffeur was going to rape her, she knew it, but also knowing that that wasn’t really what she was frightened of; that somehow, that would just have to be lived with), was empty and wakeful for the longest time, until, sometime after the sun had risen, she was not awake.

And when she was again awake, the world was different.

Everything went as he had said. After a few days of numbness, she had, finally, called the number on the card, and been taken up in the firm management of a middle-aged woman who simply assumed everything, andas never before— Natalie had allowed herself to be carried along, to be managed, to be kept busy (M’sieu wants six more like the ones you showed him— more women than men, and one big one, much bigger. Can you do one? You have two months).

And busy-ness had been good; the hollowness had ebbed away, and the emptiness was at bay while she worked, and she suppressed everything she could about that night, even the business with the chauffeur— save for the one insistent thought, that Signoret-Gregoire had said he would fuck her, when he chose. She could not allow that to go unchallenged, she knew. It was an affront; unacceptable.

And yet she knew she was going to say nothing to him. That, when— if — he chose to fuck her, she would go to him, meek, like a lamb, and let him do her; that he was not unacceptable to her, whatever she ‘ought’ to think. That the way he had said it was not unacceptable to her, not at all, never mind that it should be. She hugged it to herself. He will fuck me sometimes. When he chooses. Perhaps..

That perhaps burned her.

She should be working to encourage him to choose, she felt. She must; because if he did not so choose, she must die, it felt. Only … only she did not know how to encourage him; everything she knew, she had already tried, to no effect.

But she found a way to have the need, the urge, the fear be part of her returning desire and need for wildness, for time with her clique, to fill up the time she wasn’t working, and, within a few weeks, she seemed— outwardly at least, to all but a few, to be the Natalie she had been, again. It went that way with the paintings, too; they were easier now— now that, buried inside her, she knew that they were just ‘stuff’, that they would sell. They were easier, and they came out better, too; freer, less obviously wild, but with more violence in them. He came to see them, one day— the first time she had really seen him since that night, and he looked at them a little and said “Yes.” His voice was normal, he was serious, but not really interested, and the emptiness rose in her and she was enormously relieved when he asked her to take him to a club;

“I want to watch you dance for the young men, before I take you and fuck you.”

It worked; she was wild, he watched her, and she was cooler in her wildness than she had been, more measured, more effective with her teasing, with her calmness, less desperate, knowing that he was watching her, savouring the knowledge that he wanted her, and she was smiling, hard, grinning with it; the hollowness always present, but at bay, the emptiness entirely filled by him, and she gave herself to him very meekly in the plush hotel he took her to, oppressive in its old-fashioned luxury, the smooth tolerance of her ripped punk clothes so perfect it made her ashamed.

He took her very firmly in hand, but with generosity, too; the firmness was needed, because she found it very hard to let him do what he insisted on doing— stripping her naked himself, slowly, with careful, cool, almost meditative kisses on her flesh as he exposed it, forcing her to pay attention to her own sensation, permitted to give him nothing— the opposite of her own approach; him in charge, gently and casually certain, complete in his control of her.

Stripped, he told her he would make her orgasm for him, and she curled away from him, giggling, weak, wanting to say no but not daring to, but unable to resist him, In the end, his fingers large but very knowledgeable and direct at her sex, on her nipples, on her flanks, doing things no one had done to her body, brought her to something she had not experienced before, and she heard herself moan from deep, deep in her chest, low in her throat, urgent, needy— a sound, an experience new to her, and she tried again to resist him, and was captured, held down; gently, but powerfully, his hand back at her sex, his mouth at her breasts— not gentle, but hot, biting, hurting, somehow all part of the sensation, and now the sighing and moaning was continuous and urgent, needy, even as she struggled against him, the struggling fiercer as he brought her closer— she was becoming desperate, urgently convinced that he must not get her to come for him like this, doing everything she could to resist him, but finding it was not enough; her strength— neither of body, nor will nor conviction a sufficient match for his, until at last she was defeated, calling and cooing out her orgasm, her voice high and soft and frightened, almost, of what she was experiencing, at the undoing of herself, quivering and shivering with it, crying hot tears at the realisation that she had never really had an orgasm before that moment, he still fully dressed, she splayed naked on the chaise-longue, feeling terribly young, and naive, desperately vulnerable, then— paradoxically— safe and soft and deeply, deeply grateful.

He had fucked her fully dressed, too, and she had been permitted to show him her own skills, her own techniques, as her gratitude and arousal drove her usual commitment to a lover’s pleasure past all boundaries, giving herself completely, almost in a trance of obsession with what he might want from her, what he had responded to, what she could do for him, with her mouth, her pussy, her hands, her whole body at his service, thinking she had him— that he was over the precipice, that she would see his face go tight, then slacken as he orgasmed, his cock deep in her sex, wanting so much to see it, to know she had given him pleasure, when he had reared up, pulled out of her and roughly, powerfully flipped her over onto her face, hoiked her buttocks up and driven into her from behind, holding her arms up and out so that her shoulders hurt and she found herself grinding her ass into his groin to relieve the pain as he fucked her hard; rapid but steady, driving deep into her, pile-driving her so that she grunted with each impact of his cock, betraying the intensity of her feeling, her openness to him, her need, and then his hand was at her pussy, hurting her clitoris, but it didn’t matter, it was she who was over the edge, jerking and crying out abjectly as he thrust himself yet deeper into her, a deep animal grunt and a long spasm the only outward sign of his own climax.

She was putty in his hands from that moment on. Not that he took her often, but when he called, she ran to him, and when he did not, she hurt, and her hurt fed her wildness and everything became more highly charged.

Her show sold out, and the energy grew again, and she was photographed dancing wildly in stilettos for him (he had told her he would not have her in boots), one breast escaped from her ripped t-shirt, the word ‘SLUT’ in diamante on her dog collar. Used on the cover of an edgy fashion/art/culture magazine, published simultaneously in French, Japanese, and English, the picture became something of a sensation as Paris wondered if it might at last have some new artistic energy building.