very obviously is not of the flesh. But don’t fret about Midge—English women are naturally bitchy toward ‘foreign’ women. They’re oh-so-proper and fashionable, but they never shave their legs. That’s why I love mah fellow Americans.”
Danielle kissed her chastely on top of her head, powdering Lisette’s hair with biscuit crumbs. “And I’m cold and wet and dying for a shower. How about you?”
“A masquerade?” Lisette wondered. “What sort of costume? Not something that we’ll have to trot off to one of those rental places for, surely?”
“From what Midge suggests, anything goes so long as it’s wild. Just create something divinely decadent, and we’re sure to knock them dead.” Danielle had seen Cabaret half a dozen times. “It’s to be in some back alley stately old home in Maida Vale, so there’s no danger that the tenants downstairs will call the cops.”
When Lisette remained silent, Danielle gave her a playful nudge. “Darling, it’s a party we’re invited to, not a funeral. What is it—didn’t your session with Dr Magnus go well?”
“I suppose it did.” Lisette smiled without conviction. “I really can’t say; all I did was doze off. Dr Magnus seemed quite excited about it, though. I found it all... well, just a little bit scary.”
“I thought you said you just dropped off. What was scary?”
“It’s hard to put into words. It’s like when you’re starting to have a bad trip on acid: there’s nothing wrong that you can explain, but somehow your mind is telling you to be afraid.”
Danielle sat down beside her and squeezed her arm about her shoulders. “That sounds to me like Dr Magnus is getting somewhere. I felt just the same sort of free anxiety the first time I underwent analysis. It’s a good sign, darling. It means you’re beginning to understand all those troubled secrets the ego keeps locked away.”
“Perhaps the ego keeps them locked away for some perfectly good reason.”
“Meaning hidden sexual conflicts, I suppose.” Danielle’s fingers gently massaged Lisette’s shoulders and neck. “Oh, Lisette. You mustn’t be shy about getting to know yourself. I think it’s exciting.” Lisette curled up against her, resting her cheek against Danielle’s breast while the other girl’s fingers soothed the tension from her muscles. She supposed she was overreacting. After all, the nightmares were what distressed her so; Dr Magnus seemed completely confident that he could free her from them.
“Which of your drawings did our prospective hostess buy?” Lisette asked, changing the subject.
“Oh, didn’t I tell you?” Danielle lifted up her chin. “It was that charcoal study I did of you.”
Lisette closed the shower curtains as she stepped into the tub. It was one of those long, narrow, deep tubs beloved of English bathrooms that always made her think of a coffin for two. A Rube Goldberg plumbing arrangement connected the hot and cold faucets, and from the common spout was affixed a rubber hose with a shower head which one might either hang from a hook on the wall or hold in hand. Danielle had replaced the ordinary shower head with a shower massage when she moved in, but she left the previous tenant’s shaving mirror—a bevelled glass oval in a heavily enameled antique frame—hanging on the wall above the hook.
Lisette glanced at her face in the steamed-over mirror. “I shouldn’t have let you display that at the gallery.”
“But why not?” Danielle was shampooing, and lather blinded her as she turned about. “Maitland thinks it’s one of my best.”
Lisette reached around her for the shower attachment. “It seems a bit personal somehow. All those people looking at me. It’s an invasion of privacy.”
“But it’s thoroughly modest, darling. Not like some topless billboard in Soho.”
The drawing was a charcoal and pencil study of Lisette, done in what Danielle described as her David Hamilton phase. In sitting for it, Lisette had piled her hair in a high chignon and dressed in an antique cotton camisole and drawers with lace insertions that she’d found at a shop in Westbourne Grove. Danielle called it Dark Rose. Lisette had thought it made her look fat.
Danielle grasped blindly for the shower massage, and Lisette placed it in her hand. “It just seems a bit too personal to have some total stranger owning my picture.” Shampoo coursed like seafoam over Danielle’s breasts. Lisette kissed the foam.
“All, but soon she won’t be a total stranger,” Danielle reminded her, her voice muffled by the pulsing shower spray.
Lisette felt Danielle’s nipples harden beneath her lips. The brunette still pressed her eyes tightly shut against the force of