by Robin Harrington
I just happened to catch a glimpse of the spine of an unusual looking volume behind piles of other books still waiting to be catalogued. I turned away not wanting to be sidetracked. The job, which I had started in November, was turning out to be of enormous proportions but I was determined to get it finished by mid July. It was now February, and though I had made a considerable dent on the jumble of books, folders and prints crammed into every possible space, the more I did the more I realised how much there was still to do. I had not touched that gloomy far end, so whatever that book was, it would have to wait.
The basement was under a shop in a street linking Charing Cross Road and St Martin's Lane. Bledington and Courtomer specialised in art books, many of which were out of print and rare. They also dealt in good quality artist's prints and a few specialist maps. There was no longer a Mr Courtomer, leaving Charles Bledington as the sole proprietor. He was a fussy man in his mid fifties, whose abiding passion was eighteenth and early nineteenth century English landscapes. I had been told Courtomer's father had taken over the shop some time in the seventies, though the business went back to the nineteenth century. Once I started working there, I realised it must have been years since anyone had done a proper inventory of all the random bits and pieces that had found their way down there.
I walked back to the pile of books I was working on, but I couldn't shake off the image of the spine of that odd volume in the far dark end of the space. "Oh Hell!" I said out loud and went back to disentangle the volume from the jumble of books and folders in front of it.
The first thing I noticed was the unusual format. I carried what I realised was a folio, into the light and found my tape-measure: 750 by 450 mm. I turned it over. The front was so dusty I could barely read the title which seemed to be in German. I cautiously wiped away some of the accumulated dirt.
"Oh my God!" I said.
Though I still couldn't make out the title of the book I recognised the name of the artist: Xavier Kempster. It gave me a jolt. There were not many people who knew about Kempster, but I happened to be one of them.
With a sense of growing excitement I took the book across to the trestle table I used as a makeshift desk. The volume was so big I had to clear a space before I began carefully to clean the rest of the dust from the front. That done, I ran my fingers over the letters of the title and found they were deeply embossed. I paused before lifting the heavy cover. The flysheets were beautifully marbled in pale blues and greys, with 2/10 written in pencil at the top corner of the right-hand page. It was from a very limited edition. I turned to the frontispiece. Gothic script: Unterirdisch Bilder, von Xavier Kempster, towards the bottom of the page there was the publisher's name, Wenden Verleger, Berlin MCMLXXVII. I might not know German but I had taken A-level Latin so I knew the book had been published in 1977. I opened a page at random.
I blinked, almost unable to believe what I was seeing. After a moment I refocused my eyes on the picture. It showed a young woman kneeling on a dark red cushion, her head resting on the knees of a man. The upper body of the man was out of the frame, but his erect penis was just by the woman's face. What made the image so startling was that the foreground was dominated by the woman's buttocks, thrust out towards the viewer, and carrying the marks of a very recent beating. Behind the figures was a terrace with a balustrade and beyond a curious green and yellow landscape with a patterned sky in pinks, blues and gold. Here and there in the landscape, were female figures in floaty white dresses, some dancing in a circle, others perhaps flying. There were also horses and in the sky, what I took to be lizards. The draughtsmanship was in exquisitely intimate detail, which emphasised the vulnerability of the woman, so frankly exposed.
I swallowed hard. I knew quite a bit about Kempster's work, and in many ways this picture was typical of him; a hyper-realist central image set against a dream-like background. However, nothing I had seen before came close to the shameless sexual nature of the print. There was something else which took me a moment to understand. He had played with the perspective so that the foreground figures were seen from a lower view-point, tilting them back. On the other hand, the distant background was seen from a higher point. The effect was to add a further element of disquiet to the overall unsettling impact.
I looked up at the basement ceiling while my mind adjusted to the shock of what I was seeing before I allowed my gaze to be drawn back to the picture. First I focused on the woman's face, trying to read her expression. Despite how near it was to the shamelessly erect prick, the girl was ignoring it, her eyes staring straight out of the picture, staring at me. What was there in those eyes? Fear? No, not fear, I thought, more a dreamy ecstasy, but mixed with a certain penetrating knowledge which made me oddly uncomfortable.
I began to scrutinise the unflinching depiction of the woman's anus and vulva, so available, so entirely undefended. As I looked, I felt my own knees press together in a protective reflex. But what held my attention for the longest time was the state of the woman's bottom. I let my eyes roam over the cluster of welts slashed across her flesh, their well defined puckered edges showing reds and purples with a paler central line. I counted twelve lines. The woman had taken a dozen strokes. My belly was suddenly awash, and I was conscious of my breasts stiffening, my breathing becoming faster and more shallow. In spite of part of me being repelled by what I was looking at, I could not deny it excited me.
I turned to another plate at random. Here, the design was flatter, the colours rather more muted, the forms filling the frame with little sense of a world beyond. The central figure, drawn on a right to left diagonal, was a naked woman being prepared for punishment. On the far side, with an arm wrapped across her back, was a young male figure. The woman's head was turned away from the viewer because the couple were locked in a powerful kiss, even as she was being bent forward towards a wooden frame. In the left foreground was the upper part of another female figure, one bare breast visible. She was holding a cane which cut the image on the opposite diagonal to the central figure. The way the bodies wound round and overlapped one another created a single abstract shape. Yet there was a tension between the unity of those interlocked bodies and the detailed way the figures had been drawn, rendering each entirely individual.
I closed the book and sat for a moment, my heart pounding. I shook my head thinking how close I had come to ignoring the volume. The question now was, what was I going to do with it? I had only looked at two images, but I was determined to study them all, though not there in the basement. I needed to press on with the job, and from what I had already seen, it would be too distracting to have this book down here with me. As it was Friday, the obvious thing was to smuggle it out of the shop and take it home for the weekend. I fished around under the trestle moving boxes until I found what I was looking for. It was a large canvas bag actually belonging to my friend Alison, which I had borrowed some weeks ago and never got round to giving back. The book fitted snugly and was completely hidden once I had flipped the large flap into place.
That done I got back to work. A little after half-past five I went up the stairs to the shop, the big bag, on its strap over my shoulder, banging against my thigh. I felt a surge of exhilaration at the idea I was doing something not quite proper.
On Saturday mornings I minded the shop for Mr Bledington until lunchtime, because he always seemed to have things to do on a Saturday morning. Whatever these things were, they seemed to involve his having a drink or two, as he always smelt of booze when he came back round one o'clock.
"See you in the morning Mr Bledington," I called, as I opened the door to the street.
"See you in the morning Jessica. Don't be late," he said without looking up from what he was reading. I smiled to myself and set off towards Leicester Square to catch the tube.
The idea I would take the book back after the weekend did not go to plan. Though I did my stint in the shop Saturday morning and saw friends both Friday and Saturday evenings, most of my weekend was devoted to it.
There were thirty-six prints, some highly coloured, decorative images, others using a more limited colour range and eight monochrome, four black on white, four terracotta red on pale grey. In all of them a young woman was either being prepared for a beating, was being beaten, or bore the marks of a very recent punishment. Besides punishment, many of the prints showed explicit sexual activity, or implied it was about to start or had just finished.
For instance, one of the terracotta prints depicted a young woman sitting, her body slightly turned to the viewer, and her arms over the back of the chair. Between her thighs a man's mouth was pressed against her sex, while her breasts were being whipped by a naked woman standing to the girl's left. A subtle distortion of the perspective made her breasts, already criss-crossed with a network of dark lines, the dominant feature of the print.
I went to the mirror on my wardrobe door and lifted my tee-shirt and bra and gazed at the reflection of my tits. I tried to imagine how they would look marked like the ones in the picture. I tried to imagine what I would have to endure for such marks to be put there. I was surprised by just how overwhelmed I was by the erotic power of the picture. And it was not just that one. All of them, in their different ways aroused me hugely, to the point that on the Saturday afternoon I took the book into the bedroom, propped it open, then lay in bed drinking in the image and masturbating. After I had come, I fell asleep, though when I woke almost the first thing I saw was the picture, and my hand was immediately feeling for my clitoris: I finished myself off in the shower.
I spent Saturday evening at my friend Kirsty's flat where her rather soppy boyfriend, Andrew, kept up a stream of meaningless conversation. I found I could not stop my mind slipping back to one or other of the pictures. Once home, I took the book straight to the bedroom and brought myself off again.
On Sunday I didn't get dressed, just put on a thick dressing gown over my nightie. I tried to put off looking at the book, because I knew what effect it would have on me.
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