Vincennes

Vincennes

By

Kurt Steiner

PART ONE

On the fringes of the Calcutta Racecourse, in an expensive and extensive top-floor apartment with views across to the beauty that was the Hoogly Bridge, Vincent Vincennes was surrounded by affluence and lived the life of a canine.

The root of his discontent?

His Indian girlfriend.

Samira.

Where he was Anglo/French and Paris/Londres, Samira was all India and Kolkata. Where he was, had been, proud European , she was unrepentant sub-continent. Where he was…

As usual at this point, Vincennes deliberations on their differences came to a halt; the others too numerous to list; sufferance of them leading him to wonder just who the hell he was these days – if, indeed, he was anything.

Sure, he had his passport – or rather she did; stashed away with the other evidence of his existence such as a driving licence and the credit cards she refused to let him use. But these unavailable verifications of his presence on the planet were all that was left to him. In his mid-forties; Vincent Vincennes had managed to die while somehow contriving to live on.

And for what?

He had been devoured and then regurgitated in a design of a young girl’s own choosing.

But how?

Positioned on the terrace as he was now; Vincennes could spend hour after hour, immobile on a recliner, staring into the distance. Gazing down and across at the famous bridge and its structure, blind to the Hoogly flowing beneath, he would see only the events that had led him to his current pass as, for the umpteenth time, they played themselves out before eyes oblivious to the reality in front of them. Fate, he would tell himself, with much bitterness for that fickle arbiter of human fortune; had decreed his life up to that first encounter -so good, so full, so vibrant- should come to an end; the full-stop it delivered consigning him to a country he had little time for many thousands of miles from his own.

The providence he’d had so much to be thankful to until then had decided to rein in its largesse and draw an iron curtain across his former existence before reopening it in a desired area of what was, in reality, a shithole of a city two oceans and a continent away from his home, his family and his business.

That “Shithole of a city” one he knew well from former visits of a business nature and one in which he hadn’t intended to remain for a single moment longer than the business demanding his presence required.

Vincennes ruminations on his predicament, he recognised and resented, had taken on an inevitable familiarity now. Every twenty-four hours seemed no more than a repetition of the last as his thoughts took on the same numbing consistency of the day before. Except as insights into parts of his psyche he’d been oblivious to before her appearance in his life; nothing resembling either the stimulating or the plain interesting distinguished the events preceding one Vincennes bedtime from another and begged the oft asked questions:

Where had it begun?

How had it begun?

Why had he allowed it to escalate to a stage where it was impossible for him to locate an escape route?

Constantly he sought to reach the heart of his captivity and found only one possible explanation:

He was obsessed.

He was also demoralised, docile and malleable, and a servile thing at her feet.

Where once she had professed to revere his potency and masculinity she now despised him for his weakness – though looking back even he could see her mockery as she fed the Vincennes ego on the myth of its own self-professed superiority.

Where he went she had followed: relatively respectfully to begin with – in public, at least; the object of his strange infatuation –when she wasn’t belittling him- flattering his sense of self-worth and doing so in order to lower his guard and make his coming humiliation at her hands and feet all the more potent. Going about the massaging of his ego; even as she chipped away at it; in the same insidious way most women of the East had learned to flatter the self-regard of the countryman to whom they were about to entrust their futures while having no intention of being ruled by them.

Except Vincennes was not her countryman.

He was from a different land. And in that land women were also different; born as they were into a culture of relative equality a peasant girl of Samira’s stature could only envy. An equality ensuring they did not have to bridge the same kind of gap between the sexes - even if it did have the less desirable effect of dulling their female wiles when it came to the management of their male counterparts.

That “Equality”, as it turned out, had proved an unhappy development for the businessman from the West.

This “Dulling” of age-old female cunning and manipulation in the face of greater male strength and privilege on the part of the women from his own culture, had made him vulnerable. The men of the patriarchal society from whence she sprang were far less indulgent to those of her sex. In the culture she had been born to flattery of the beast was learned at the breast and seen as imperative if a female of lower social standing wished to climb even a few rungs on the ladder.

Of any standing, actually.

Such a girl had been Samira when she had served drinks to the “Big important man” from London. Yet here he was -both metaphorically and in real terms- prone before those pretty little feet with their long painted toes and arched insteps. The lower extremities, with all their symbolic inferences, that occupied so much of his thinking lately.

Now, in the heavily accented but surprisingly fluent English taught her by a former employer with the British Consulate for whom she had skivvied; it was the low-caste girl who commanded and he, Vincent Vincennes, superior to her in all ways, who stood to attention.

How the fuck had he allowed it to happen?

Still in his dressing gown and Calvin Klein bottoms, despite the late hour; he continued to look without seeing towards the bridge and the cars crossing the river. Resentment, as was usual, becoming anger as it took on more heat. The Vincennes “Rage” legendary in the business circles he had once moved and something other men –and women- of substance had quailed before.

But not her.

He recalled an ancient Chinese maxim he had picked up in his previous life:

“The happiest of men are those who choose to cut the claws of the she-demon rather than sharpen them.”

Wise advice he wished he’d recalled earlier - though he suspected he would have found himself wanting the necessary wherewithal to implement it. For even at the beginning, when he still considered himself the big man and imagined she saw him in the same light –despite her sexual aloofness- she had been supremely unfazed by his displeasure and indifferent to his displays of temper. Now, so cowed did she have him, he was afraid to show even the slightest sign of reproach for her behaviour.

Let alone voice it.

How had she reduced him to this?

Each day saw him in a state of rut; following her about the apartment as she supervised Tapani - the rather plain little girl she had hired as a live-in servant.

This habit of dogging her footsteps had swiftly ingrained itself as a compulsion and he found himself unable to prevent himself doing so even when the plain little servant girl herself became more contemptuous of her master and the way he allowed her new mistress to treat him. Vincennes overriding desire in her presence was to throw himself at the feet he found so unaccountably tantalising while professing his love to the Indian girl above for whom he had given up everything.

The problem, however -amongst a whole host of other problems- being it wasn’t love.

That was something he could be sure of.

Nobody could say Vincent Vincennes wasn’t familiar with love.

It was, assuredly, an emotion he not only recognised but one capable of fetching him much pain whenever he was forced to acknowledge its loss.

Every time, in fact, his thoughts drifted back to the wife and family he had left behind in…

As was now usual with him; the images forming to portray the victims of his desertion created such pain in his breast he was compelled to cut them off.

A feat he accomplished on this day by biting into his own hand with such savagery he broke the skin; a trickle of blood running down towards his wrist and forcing him to dab at it with a napkin from the terrace table yet to be cleared of the debris from the morning. For though it had been hours since breakfast and Samira’s departure for town; the glasses with dregs of fruit juice and the muesli bowls containing the remains of his petit-dejeuner with Tapani’s mistress –the only time recently he seemed to be alone with her- were still to be cleared.

Another source of irritation to him.

The plain little servant girl’s increasing slackness and inattention to her duties, he told himself, needed to be addressed; even as he dabbed at the still weeping wound he had just inflicted.

Allowing himself a purposeful nod; he made a mental note to have a word with Samira on the subject – though he did notice Tapani contrived to be super efficient whenever her mistress was in attendance.

Still nodding, the ironic smile crossing his face proving as fleeting as it was rare; he told himself it was just what he needed in his life.

Another manipulative teenager.

Brief thoughts of a girl not Samira over, he acknowledged painful reactions to images from his former life were by no means uncommon events.

Anguish, he knew, would always follow hot on the heels of any trip down memory lane. Any revisiting -no matter of how short a duration- was guaranteed to provoke a similar reaction whenever he considered the lust he had remained in the “Shithole” to experience when compared to the purer emotions he had turned his back upon at home in England.

These days; far from the sanctuary of what had been his Surrey home after having spent a day at the helm of his company, and when he wasn’t following the swish of her sari or the peck of her high-heels against the apartment’s terracotta floor-tiles in the hope of gaining her attention; he could be found in a state of bemusement and reproach for the sorry condition his life had become.

He, a man of taste, culture and refinement?

Dogging the footsteps of a young Indian girl?

A girl, moreover, in possession of none of the attributes he had in abundance?

“How??”

The man formerly known as Vincent Vincennes had been reduced to a mere cipher of the force of nature he used to be - and by someone, a girl nobody found in the least remarkable whether in terms of looks, intelligence or good-heartedness.

Quite the opposite, in fact.

Such had been the fate he was given to rubbishing so much lately; that indifferent wheel of fortune having perpetual fun at the expense of expendable and ever replaceable mortals.

And why wouldn’t he rubbish it?

It had, after all, been his partner in the water sanitation business who was meant to travel out to tie up the remaining ends of a lucrative cross-region contract; not him.

The same partner who had been laid low with some mysterious virus not hours before he was meant to fly from Heathrow to clinch the deal. Ensuring it was Vincent Vincennes who would be required to step in and spend two weeks in India to cement deals, visit the proposed sites for his company’s sanitation plants and the inevitable bribing of officials – not to mention the round of hospitality responsible for him meeting the girl who would alter everything. Two weeks away from the sanctuary of his beloved family home not two miles from that of Churchill’s former bolt-hole at Chartwell the ownership of the National Trust and the footfall of paying tourists made sure was preserved for both the nation and posterity.

His associate’s malady, Vincennes had come to believe, had been a fortunate misfortune, if such a thing existed.

Blood disorders, after all, were temporary and responsive to treatment.

The contamination waiting to greet the friend and CEO standing in for that associate, with a tray and a drink on his first night in Kolkata, was of a power beyond the ken of medicine to heal.

And how much good had it led Vincent Vincennes to toss away?

His wife, Marianne:

Beautiful. Loyal and well-bred from a good family in the shires and acutely protective when it came to her loving husband. Beauty, loyalty and protectiveness he had thanked by jettisoning her as if she were so much flotsam.

Their children, Perry and little Elise:

Apples of the paternal eye, cuteness personified, and gone! Nothing in his new life indicating they had ever existed apart from the photographs in his wallet the new lady in his life insisted on holding and seldom allowed him to either use or see.

In the early days of his infatuation, before Samira had sucked both him and his independence in further, Vincennes had composed a long and suitably apologetic missive to explain what a brief forerunner -informing Marianne he had decided to stay in India and would not be returning- had not.

Now, under the current regime, it was not a letter he would even be allowed to compose; let alone send.

As he’d expected, aware of the strength of will and unforgiving nature when wronged residing beneath her reserved exterior; Marianne hadn’t replied - even if the lawyer acting for her interests did.

The process that followed one he was happy to leave to his own representative and one that left him a sight less wealthy when it was over. A process, being the man of honour he was, he considered only just and reached through a mix of reason and guilt his new idée fixe did not share. The unlikely young girl supplanting his beautiful former wife was unhappy to see his/her wealth diminished in such a fashion and was not shy about letting him know.

The more he seemed to love her, in fact, the more displeasure did she feel free to show him - recognising his need for her was based on pure lust and wishing to punish him for not finding her worthy of the purer sentiment she knew he still extended to the wife and family back in the country he continued to regard as home.

Before long, his life as it had been –a good life, a dignified life- was gone. No more than a memory only self-mutilation; albeit of a minor kind; could keep at bay and prevent the almost physical pain he felt in his breast whenever the Vincennes thoughts wandered to the past and the divorce and settlement had taken him from his children’s lives forever.

That removal by far the worst of the many sacrifices he had made for his unlikely Venus.

It had been something Marianne had insisted upon, not him. Her insistence –as presented by her legal team- forwarded with all the unbending resolution of a woman betrayed in the worst of ways. Her need to strike back in a form guaranteed to inflict durable and long-term damage on the man by whom she’d been betrayed a familiar one. That “Need” being of a kind her former husband –no stranger to retribution of a corporate nature- understood completely.

But for what had he betrayed her?

As was usual at this point in his ruminations –and unwilling to break the skin of his flesh again- Vincennes tears began to flow, streaming silently down cheeks unusually unlined for a man of his years

“Marianne,” he sobbed out loud with guilt, need and futility: guilt for his desertion; need for the support she had always supplied; and futility for knowing the chances of her reappearing in his life stood at precisely zero.

Inconsolable in his anguish, he was about to repeat the refrain again, when a familiar rebuke came from behind him…

The rest of this story can be found on www.femdomcave.com

Authors wishing to write for us read our “Author Guidelines” at the site

Royalties are paid and there are NO fees