‘It’s time, my love, to play.’ The pen whispering Connie awake, signalling a falling, a submitting, a surrendering to the trance that will lead to goodness knows what.
‘Yes.’
‘Tomorrow?’
‘Yes. Quick. Please.’
Cliff senses a new restlessness in his wife. A jittery, unvoiced agitation. It needs addressing. He has been neglectful in that department, is brought up sharp. Of course it’s time. It’s been too long. As for Connie, she needs to be needed again, needs purpose. Fast.
That afternoon, after the car has seen her father off to Paddington Station, she is prepared. The sleepers are gently worked through their tiny holes. The padlock is threaded through. Clicked shut by Cliff. She moans. Toys with the object’s weight, its resistance. The thought of it. Closes her legs on it. Expectation blazing under skin.
‘The release …’ he murmurs, smiling secrets into her eyes. ‘For me, for you, for us.’
Thrumming, all evening; exquisitely tuned.
21
To let oneself be carried on passively is unthinkable
The red skirt with the fringe, the six-inch Louboutins, no knickers. All according to plan.
The stranger has arrived. The intercom rings.
Papers are needed; Connie takes the bundle in her arms. Deep breath. Rolling her muscles upon her secret. Ready. She opens the office door, softly. Cliff, expectant, sitting at his desk that was Napolean Bonaparte’s once and is methodically neat. A man, his back to her, a stiff white collar of a very expensive shirt, a nape. In the past she has fallen in love with a mere nape of a neck, the bend of a wrist, the kink of a hip, it is all it has taken and she is gone. Once.
Connie walks straight up to her husband’s desk, leans over – and hands the papers across.
Cliff’s astonished face.
‘Can’t,’ she mouths, wincing, retreating.
The nape is wrong, the moment, the intimacy that should be a husband’s and no one else’s, the whole confused lot of it. The spell of enchantment is snapped.
Connie leaves without looking at the stranger’s face. Churning. Cliff cannot control such a privacy, he can’t choose it, can’t. Her mind has taken over, it has triumphed; her body is in retreat. In fraught air she backs back. Lost.
Cliff too, bewildered, but in a meeting stuck. ‘I – where was I?’ He smiles benignly to his guest.
22
When people are happy they have a reserve upon which to draw, whereas she was like a wheel without a tyre
Connie walks up the grand staircase, slowly, carefully. She feels like a pane of glass with a thousand hairline cracks: one push will shatter her. She will not be broken, she will not. Her tread is so careful, contained, her back stiff. Onward she walks, onward.
To her room, its windows slammed shut by cleaners barked at by Cliff to keep in the house’s heat. Connie flings the panes wide and the cold rushes in and she collapses, belly down, on her bed. She remains there for the rest of the day and deep into the night. Her vocation of serving – submission – is not enough. No. Is meant to be enough. That is her role, as wife.
Everyone has a universal desire to be needed. How does Cliff need her? As his perversion, plaything, pet. That’s it. How much pleasure will she give the others of his choosing? How far will she go? For in the upended way of their world that is the proof of her love for him now: how voluminously she will submit. How removed she is from that girl he first knew. The easy blusher, in the Peter Pan collars and knee-length skirts. She stares at her Louboutins kicked off by her bed, their ridiculously high heels that bind her to her servitude. What woman would ever design a constraint, a buckling, an absurdity, as cruel as those?
And how often has she readily stepped into them.
A visible symbol of her servitude, compliance, decadence. The girl from Cornwall with the beautiful face, bound by all this. Her walk-in wardrobes, summer and winter, her jewellery boxes, her private safe. How she has always loved her shoes and her clothes; the quickening at a singular vintage dress that fits, the Edwardian necklace, the deco cuff, the Stephen Jones hat – grabbed! – and so often now. The thrill of which has never passed. Complicit, in all of it.
Rain comes. The windows stay wide. Usually Connie feels cocooned within that sound but tonight she feels pummelled by it. The wind is high, haranguing her as if pushing her away, far away, to somewhere else. Gradually it all clears, the sky is orange as it always is, the light pollution scattering a proper, rich, weighty dark; the dark of the land, the untrammelled earth. Water drips from the eaves, endlessly drips, deep into the early hours; it feels like her life leaking away, in wakefulness and worry. The whole house of cards has come tumbling down, just like that; she has lost the sexual urge, just like that, with Cliff, with any man.
He does not come, of course, he would not. She has humiliated him, stepped out of order, done what he did not want. And meanwhile she has surfaced into something else.
A new land, a strange new life, not sure what. No ballast to it, that’s all she knows.
23
He thought her beautiful, believed her impeccably wise; dreamed of her, wrote poems to her, which, ignoring the subject, she corrected in red ink …
‘Would it perhaps be a good thing if you had a child by another man? Con? What do you think?’
Dinner, the next night. Cliff thinking aloud through thick silence, trying to ensnare his wife with talk, to work out this new person; and there is Connie, all changed, flinched, hearing him as if from afar, as though through an old diving helmet, a weight stifling, airless, wrong.
‘You’d think we’d be able to arrange this sex thing as we arrange going to the hairdresser, wouldn’t you? In this day and age …’ Cliff is now snapping out his thoughts. ‘Since some fucking trees on a ski slope – that shouldn’t have been there in the first place – have given us a checkmate, physically, in that department.’
He is talking at Connie, not with her, as he does, he always does. ‘I don’t know,’ she is saying, ‘I don’t know,’ unable to articulate anything of her new, strange roar to him, her silent roar. A weary yearning, a dissatisfaction has started in her but he cannot see it and she does not expect him to. It’s all talk, all nothing, a wonderful display of nothingness, Connie thinks as she looks around her at all their careful objects that were procured by the interior designer, so tastefully placed, so exquisitely photographed, so sucked of life. There is no love behind any of it, no passion, no shared stories, no mess or mistakes, not even the shard of a fight. Because they don’t care enough, she thinks. Neither of them. Not a single thing here has been picked out by either of them, not even the family portraits in silver frames crowding a sideboard from Churchill’s family home. A child? Into this?
Cliff does not want one, never has, a new creature who would interfere so meddlingly with everything he’s got. He would lose control, what he fears more than anything; he’s always conveyed that; it’s too seismic a shift, too slippery and uncontainable for such an ordered life. Or perhaps he has a child somewhere else, has always had one. He works long hours, is a fair bit older, could cram a lot into all his time spent apart from her.
Connie doesn’t care enough.
She does not respect this world. He has no idea of this. She would not want her own child to follow in Cliff’s footsteps. A banker? Whose sole purpose is to be fêted in Forbes, to work his way up the rich list? Please. It’s all about vanquishing everyone else; if colleague X acquires 200 acres in Oxfordshire, they must have 300. If colleague Y has four cars they must have five and a multi-car, underground basement garage to house them. It is all display, ridiculous plumage. The most robust bonus, the most exquisite house, the cinema room and the servants’ quarters, the predictably lavish milestone birthdays in exotic places, the paintings, the cutlery, the crockery, glassware, wife. It is all so predictable, and utterly of a type; like homosexual men they must follow each other meticulously in the way they dress, what they acquire, how they display
their wealth, act. And Connie is chafing, chafing at the bit.
All around her are bankers’ wives having a fourth child, for even that is competitive, the bigger family for the artfully smug Christmas card photo, the new mode of accessorizing; four because they have the funds and the help and the ease to do it, four because look at us, we fuck a lot. Clifford wants other men to envy him, as simple as that; but not in terms of the child-gaggle, he’s often conveyed that. He doesn’t like anyone’s child – despite having four godchildren – they’re all too rude, loud, obnoxious, spoilt. It’s all a great and ugly nothingness and for Connie, in this moment, to accept the great nothingness of life seems to be the end of living.
‘Con, Con, what is it you want? Speak to me.’
But she can’t. Because she does not know herself. Uncertainty, doubt, something like hate has cut through her world like a shark; scattering the enchantment of the secret nights.
24
I am rooted, but I flow
Mid March. Connie on the garden bench next to Cliff. Their faces full to the first proper sun of the season, pinnacles of light pricking them into a waking. It is like being soothed inside a rarefied enclosure here, behind its tall black bars, removed from the mess and the muck of the world. Cliff especially loves it, away from dispiriting Notting Hill Gate with its steely pollution you can taste in your mouth, its riff-raff of people, churning crowds, grimly unbeautiful buildings. All grey! Grey! Tired! Washed out! And the little people, the great seething mass of them, can’t even discern it. Then this, so magically, secretly close. Nothing lets in the world here and he is extremely grateful for it.
A man walks past on the gravel, pushing a wheelbarrow. He doffs his flat cap at Cliff in a quick, deferential nod, flicks eyes at Connie, nothing more. Cliff barely notices.
‘Who is that?’ she asks, watching as the new man rakes a damp slush of leaves; his hands curiously elegant as they grasp the rake.
Cliff shrugs. ‘The new gardener? He was here before, apparently, for years, then had a bit of trouble with some shrew of a wife. Moved away. Is now back. Johnnie told me. He’s good, apparently. Mel or something. God knows.’ Johnnie being a neighbour a few doors down, a fellow banker, a rare Brit in these parts.
Connie gazes after this new man, suddenly alert. He’s in a T-shirt, unusual for this time of year, winter’s chill not yet past. He’s in a T-shirt as if he doesn’t care for the cold, doesn’t feel it, or wants the brace of it shivering him up. An animal energy, a difference. A shock of black hair. Pale skin. A face that would shadow by early evening and she’s always loved the virility of that. A body gracefully lean, taut; not from the gym but from constant hard work. Grubby hands from whatever he’s been doing with the earth. Dirt under the nails. A swipe of mud across his face. From the land, with the land, quick and at ease with it, in the way no one else around here is. So alone, but so sure of himself, apart; contained, uninterested in them, in any of the odd creatures who inhabit this place. Connie has a calibrated awareness, behind her Times, for he is like a sudden rush of a threat out of nowhere.
And he does not notice her one bit.
But there is a shine in him. It is called self-sufficiency. A pure lack of need. Of envy. Of this strange, jittery, out-of-kilter world around him, these people, their money, their ways, any of it. Connie stares after him.
Cliff does not notice.
25
What is the meaning of life? That was all – a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years, the great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one
Later. A strange growly mongrel of a day, short flurries of snow then pregnant grey then brief rain then snow once again. Now it is clearing and Connie is out, again, in the deserted wild place, the garden’s most secluded part. Walking stills her, brings her down into quiet; it has always been like this. Here, where nature has stolen back and the obedience of the show garden is utterly wiped, here, where all is immoral, rampant, untamed. She’s not sure why, she’s just needing to be alone and is holding her palm flat to the looming trunks, here, and here, breathing deep their stillness and wisdom and stoicism and quiet, the great moving strength of them.
A sound, below her, one small chirp. A tiny bird, at her feet, quite crushed. Grasping onto life. Dropped from up high, or attacked perhaps. Connie lifts the small beating heart of it in her palm, blood from the beak and down a wing. She doesn’t know what to do. It’s getting dark. Cliff will hate it at home. Blood, noise, mess, imminent death. Everything he can’t stand. Barely knowing what she is doing, she makes her way to the gardener’s grace-and-favour cottage, a sturdy work pony of a dwelling, in the north-east corner of the garden, cradling the fading life.
It’s a tiny scrap of a place, meanly proportioned, ripe for damp. In fact she can smell the walls holding in the rain, can smell it clamouring to get out. Ivy snuffs the light from most windows; he would have to stoop to get inside. It always strikes her that Victorian dwellings like this were constructed coldly and deliberately to keep the inhabitants in their narrow places, to stop them from aspiring in any way to the heights. Nothing is small-scaled in her life, nothing; it is all high ceilings and vast ballrooms and pendulous lights, excessive cinema rooms, bold diamonds, towering heels, wide cars.
She knocks. No answer. The door is slightly ajar. She swings it wide and calls out. ‘Hello?’ Steps inside. Indifferent furniture. Cobbled together from unloved places, no cherishing in any of it. Faded floral print on the walls, smoke-licked. Nowhere the sprightliness of a woman’s touch. Then she sees him, through the kitchen, bent over the old stone tub of a sink. Shirt gone, splashing water over his chest, face; freshening up.
He turns. With a calm, searching gaze he turns. Stands there, waiting. He makes her feel shy. She blushes, sweat scuttling across her skin like too much chocolate too quickly gulped. Gazing at him – his nakedness – has hit her in the middle of the body.
But she cannot show any of it of course.
‘I …’ She holds out the bird, at a loss. In the bowl of her hands, a mess of blood and feathers and a racing heart.
‘What have you got there then?’ his accent, the strange sing of it. The practised boom to cut across the weather, speaking of another place, world, ancestry, life.
‘I found this … by the trees.’
‘And what am I meant to do with it?’ His tone detached, cool, as he towels himself dry.
‘I don’t know.’
He comes close, inspects. ‘The sky’s all over the place, it’s throwing a party at the moment. Your little friend won’t last the night outside.’
He’s laughing at her. Is he laughing at her? Connie will not be deflected. ‘Could you keep it, maybe, perhaps?’
‘It won’t last much longer inside. But if I must …’ And in one swift, gentle movement he extracts the dying bird from the cup of her hands and Connie knows in that brush of a touch that there is tenderness in him, and the sky, and the earth, he is touched by it all still; he would move like an animal in her, she just knows, it would be peaceful and different and repairing and right. It strikes her in that moment, like the flare of a match, that here is a soul strong with a simpler, grounded, utterly removed way of life to all this, around them both; it is strong in him, a mode of survival, a necessary distancing. It is utterly compelling.
And he does not notice her. She is one of a type.
But, but. Delight licks Connie behind the ear. A shiver of a touch. Her insides pull, contract. Still he discerns nothing of her churn; he turns, with the bird, and she knows it is her cue, she is dismissed. ‘I’ll see what I can do, ma’am.’ She is done, it is time to go.
‘Thank you. Mel?’
‘Yes, Mel.’ Not looking up.
Connie stares back at him; for a moment, she lingers and he doesn’t even realize, so busy is he placing the bird in a cereal bowl with a scrap
of tissue around it. A man so content, self-sufficient, alone. Not playing the game, any game. But they all play the game. All want the money, the connection, the acknowledgement. Except him. Her husband wouldn’t see him, note him, in any way; Mel is part of the great seething mass of people who are there for his benefit and utterly unnoticed. He has no curiosity and Connie always thought that people without that are like houses without books – unsettling. To have bound her life to a man so narrow! So oblivious of the wonders of life! Cliff would be the type who would tear the wings off a fly, and she feels instinctively that Mel would not, it is as simple as that. It’s odd how you can sense these things from a first conversation, the knowing as sharp as a flick knife. Yet she married him. So desperate for the settling, the security, so afraid. Of what?
Connie takes her leave, her heart singing from a strange haunting, brightness bleeding from a swiftly shutting sky as she brusques her way home.
Home. Such a generous word for such a shell of a place.
26
The older one grows, the more one likes indecency
Cliff could never choose this moment, never dare to presume. No man ever could. The mysterious alchemy of attraction, that moment of combustion when all else is forgotten, rubbed out. The animal desire to fuck one person, just one, with driven intent; and utterly, completely, with every bone in your body, not another. The men over the years never got that. Thought they could bend her, change her, break her down, but it is there from the first moment or it is not. Just as they never got that Connie wanted absolutely no talk over the lovemaking, ever; for she needed to imprint her particular narrative upon the process, be alone with her own, quite separate scenario in her head.
I Take You Page 5
