Chapter 8: On My Knees in the Wine Cellar

Twelve days. Edmund had taken the early train to London for a board meeting and wouldn’t be back before eleven, and the house was full of other people.

I dressed as the hostess. A silk blouse the colour of cream, a charcoal pencil skirt that made me walk with small precise steps, pearl studs, low heels that clicked on the stone, a rose lipstick I hadn’t worn since the spring. Under the skirt, nude satin knickers, smooth and invisible, the most respectable underwear I owned. It seemed only fair to give them a chance.

The lever hadn’t come out of the cello case in weeks. It didn’t need to. Edmund had booked the extra session himself.

“Action regulation,” he’d told me at breakfast on Friday, reading from an email with enormous satisfaction. “Young Brennan says the hammers want adjusting before the recital. Wants to come Monday as well. Extra. I call that diligence, Margot. That’s the kind of chap you want.”

“Absolutely,” I’d said.

Dominic Achebe arrived at eleven with a clipboard and a tape measure. He was thirty-eight, broad and brisk and friendly, the owner of the catering firm we used every year, and he treated the house like a stage he was about to dress. Ilse walked him round. They measured the music room for chairs. They counted the Riedel glasses in the pantry. They argued pleasantly in the kitchen passage about where the bar should go.

Ansel was at the Steinway with the action half pulled out, a long row of hammers laid bare like piano teeth, and a look of absolute concentration.

At twenty past twelve I said, “I’ll fetch the champagne list from the cellar,” to nobody in particular, and went down the stone steps beside the pantry.

Two minutes later I heard his tread on the stairs.

The cellar is cold and smells of stone and cork and old dust. There are racks floor to ceiling on three walls, a small oak tasting table, one bulb in a cage. In the ceiling over the far end there’s an iron grate, a square of black lattice, which opens into the floor of the kitchen passage above. Light comes down through it in bars.

He came round the end of the rack and stopped. I was standing by the tasting table.

“You said Monday,” he said softly.

“I did.”

He’d taken his jacket off upstairs and had it over his arm. I took it from him, folded it lengthwise, laid it on the flagstones at his feet, and knelt on it. I didn’t say a word while I did it.

He forgot to breathe.

I looked up at him. I wanted him to see my face. For weeks he’d been the one taking me apart, patiently, precisely, the way he took apart a piano. I wanted him to know I could do it too. I’d done this before in my life, of course. I’d never once done it as a statement.

I opened his belt, and took my time over it, and watched him realise that for once he was the one being made to wait. The button. The zip, tooth by tooth. I drew his cock out and held it at the root, already hard, heavy in my hand, the skin hot in the cold of the cellar. For a moment I just looked at it in the striped light from the grate. My other hand slid inside his open jeans and cupped his balls, warm and drawn up tight.