Sophie’s Secret: Forbidden Fruit in the Garden of Pleasure by Thurlow, Chloe

. I man with sallow skin like a creature the lives under sea was sitting behind a glass counter reading a newspaper and smoking a rollup. He looked up with dead fish eyes. ' Scarlet ?' I said. He pointed behind him with his th umb, relit his rollup and returned to his newspaper. I made my way down a narrow flight of wooden stairs to a basement room without windows, the air cooled by a fan that swiveled back and forth like a watching face. A woman sat in front of a giant mirror in a gilt chair with red velvet cushions and arms. She was wearing a red girdle that shrank her waist and pushed out her bare breasts in two domes mounted in teats decorated with golden rings. A mask of red feathers covered the top half of her face, making you concentrate on her scarlet lips that were shaped in a bow of the sort hunters carry in fairy tales. She stood. She was tall in red heels, her legs sheathed in red stockings held by garters. H er stomach below the girdle was ornamented with a ring that matched th e piercing s in her breasts. Everything about her exuded the same tone of decadence and indifference I had witnessed in the photographs by Helmut Newton in the saffron - room at Pink . Her red lips opened. 'What do you want?' 'Lacy sent me.' 'Ah.' She spread her arm about the room, indicating the walls crammed with whips, canes, straps, spanking paddles and implements I vaguely recalled from a school trip visiting the dungeons at the Tower of London. Inside glass cases like you would see i