Postscript
And there the manuscript ends. To this date my daughter’s whereabouts are unknown. My grandson’s pushchair was also found by the cliff, but no bodies were ever recovered.
Author’s Note,
You may be wondering why I originally chose to write this book anonymously. It’s the only way I could write it: as a mother, a daughter, and most of all, a wife.
I loved the idea of diving under the surface and exploring a woman’s secret life. All the better if she was a seemingly good, contented wife. I had fully intended to put my name to the book when I began it, but soon found I was censoring myself. Afraid of the reactions of people close to me, afraid of hurting them, and not quite having the courage to expose myself.
It’s hard, in a relationship, to be completely honest: to show your partner your secret self. Vita Sackville-West described herself as an iceberg, and said her husband could only see what was above the water’s surface. She speculated it was the reason their marriage worked. What relationship can survive the harshness of absolute candour?
That doesn’t mean this book is a memoir; it’s many things to me, fiction and non-fiction, fantasy and fact, a quilt that is pieced together not only from my own stories but those of my friends.
And then there was the book that inspired my own: the mysterious seventeenth-century text called Woemans Worth. Its author chose anonymity and, in responding, I wanted to also. I was writing some four hundred years after its author, basking in the freedoms of so many feminist advances, and yet, bizarrely, I felt something of the same constraints as I’m sure she did when it came to writing truthfully about what women want. That fascinated me.
So once I accepted the idea of keeping my identity to myself, everything clicked. I was suddenly like a woman on a foreign beach who’s confident she doesn’t know a soul and parades her body joyously, without worrying what anyone thinks of her. I had opened a door to a reckless, exhilarating new world and could say whatever I wanted. All those secret things a woman may think but never talk about, and no one would ever know it was me.
Dear reader, I would like you to understand something of the spirit of secrecy in which this book had to be written. – ‘I would like you to understand why I might feel uncomfortable putting my name to this work, even though I felt compelled to write it and I’m so glad I did. One reader wrote, ‘I would never have had the courage to have said what you did – it’s so raw, so open. You’re very brave.’ I laughed when I received this for, of course, I would never have had the courage to say what I did either if I’d thought my name would be attached to it.
The Bride Stripped Bare is about a woman finding her voice. I’m glad it is now out in the world, on its own, and perhaps – who knows – encouraging other women to find that voice within themselves.
Finally, I would like to acknowledge some books I used as I was working on The Bride Stripped Bare. There are two Victorian texts I found in the London Library, which provided my lesson headings: the Rev. J.P. Faunthorpe’s Household Science: Readings in Necessary Knowledge for Women, and Mary Scharlieb’s A Woman’s Words to Women on the Care of their Health in England and India, and of course, the intriguing, cheeky, anonymous text which inspired my book, Woemans Worth, otherwise known as A Treatise proveinge by sundrie reasons that Woemen doe excell men, a manuscript of which is in the Bodleian Library, Oxford.
N.J. Gemmell
With My Body
With My Body
Nikki Gemmell
Contents
Title Page
Prologue
I
Lesson 1
Lesson 2
Lesson 3
Lesson 4
Lesson 5
Lesson 6
Lesson 7
Lesson 8
Lesson 9
Lesson 10
Lesson 11
Lesson 12
Lesson 13
Lesson 14
Lesson 15
Lesson 16
Lesson 17
Lesson 18
II
Lesson 19
Lesson 20
Lesson 21
Lesson 22
Lesson 23
Lesson 24
Lesson 25
Lesson 26
Lesson 27
Lesson 28
Lesson 29
Lesson 30
Lesson 31
Lesson 32
Lesson 33
Lesson 34
III
Lesson 35
Lesson 36
Lesson 37
Lesson 38
Lesson 39
Lesson 40
Lesson 41
Lesson 42
Lesson 43
Lesson 44
Lesson 45
IV
Lesson 46
Lesson 47
Lesson 48
Lesson 49
Lesson 50
Lesson 51
Lesson 52
Lesson 53
Lesson 54
Lesson 55
Lesson 56
Lesson 57
Lesson 58
Lesson 59
Lesson 60
Lesson 61
Lesson 62
Lesson 63
Lesson 64
Lesson 65
Lesson 66
Lesson 67
Lesson 68
Lesson 69
V
Lesson 70
Lesson 71
Lesson 72
Lesson 73
Lesson 74
Lesson 75
Lesson 76
Lesson 77
Lesson 78
Lesson 79
Lesson 80
Lesson 81
Lesson 82
Lesson 83
Lesson 84
Lesson 85
Lesson 86
Lesson 87
Lesson 88
Lesson 89
Lesson 90
Lesson 91
VI
Lesson 92
Lesson 93
Lesson 94
Lesson 95
Lesson 96
Lesson 97
Lesson 98
Lesson 99
Lesson 100
Lesson 101
Lesson 102
Lesson 103
Lesson 104
Lesson 105
Lesson 106
Lesson 107
Lesson 108
Lesson 109
Lesson 110
Lesson 111
Lesson 112
Lesson 113
Lesson 114
Lesson 115
Lesson 116
Lesson 117
Lesson 118
Lesson 119
VII
Lesson 120
Lesson 121
Lesson 122
Lesson 123
Lesson 124
Lesson 125
Lesson 126
Lesson 127
Lesson 128
Lesson 129
Lesson 130
Lesson 131
Lesson 132
Lesson 133
Lesson 134
Lesson 135
Lesson 136
Lesson 137
Lesson 138
Lesson 139
Lesson 140
Lesson 141
Lesson 142
Lesson 143
Lesson 144
Lesson 145
Lesson 146
Lesson 147
Lesson 148
Lesson 149
Lesson 150
Lesson 151
VIII
Lesson 152
Lesson 153
Lesson 154
Lesson 155
Lesson 156
Lesson 157
Lesson 158
Lesson 159
Lesson 160
Lesson 161
Lesson 162
Lesson 163
Lesson 1
64
Lesson 165
Lesson 166
Lesson 167
Lesson 168
IX
Lesson 169
Lesson 170
Lesson 171
Lesson 172
Lesson 173
Lesson 174
Lesson 175
Lesson 176
Lesson 177
Lesson 178
Lesson 179
Lesson 180
Lesson 181
Lesson 182
Lesson 183
Lesson 184
Lesson 185
Lesson 186
Lesson 187
Lesson 188
Lesson 189
Lesson 190
Lesson 191
Lesson 192
Lesson 193
Lesson 194
Lesson 195
Lesson 196
Lesson 197
Lesson 198
Lesson 199
Lesson 200
Lesson 201
X
Lesson 202
Lesson 203
Lesson 204
Lesson 205
Lesson 206
Lesson 207
Lesson 208
Lesson 209
Lesson 210
Lesson 211
Lesson 212
Lesson 213
Lesson 214
Lesson 215
Lesson 216
Lesson 217
Lesson 218
Lesson 219
Lesson 220
Lesson 221
Lesson 222
Lesson 223
Lesson 224
Lesson 225 – The Last
PROLOGUE
You begin.
It feels right. At his desk. On his chair. His typewriter is the only thing left of him in the room. The ink ribbon is fresh – the metal letters cut firm and deep – as if he has placed it for this moment, just for you. You start slow, clunking, getting used to the heft of the old way. Working laboriously on the beautiful, antique machine for if you make a mistake you can’t go back and you need these pages methodical, neat. You type with his old Victorian volume by your side, that he gave you once – A Woman’s Thoughts About Women – that logged within its folds all that happened in this place, that breathed life, once. You relive the dialogue of his handwriting and yours jotted in the margins and the back, don’t quite know what you’re going to do with all the work; at this stage you’re just collating, filching everything that’s needed from this notebook whose pages are bruised with age and grubbiness and life, luminous life: sweat and ink and rain spots; sap and dirt and ash; the grease from a bicycle and a silvery snail’s trail and a cicada wing, its fragile, leadlit tracery. You reap his words and yours and then the Victorian housewife’s, her lessons about life, her guiding voice. She will lead you through this. Tell the truth and don’t be afraid of it, she soothes. Yes.
Writing to understand.
And as you work you feel a presence, a hand in the small of your back, willing you on. Every person who’s ever loved and lost, every person who’s ever entered that exclusive club – heartbreak. Your little volume always beside you, the book you came here to bury, to have the earth of this valley receive as one day it will receive your own flesh, you are sure – lovingly, gratefully, because it is so, right, you are part of it.
But first this book must serve another purpose.
You feel strong, lit.
Whole.
Writing to work it all out.
You have never told anyone this. No one knows what you really think. It has always been extremely important to never let them know; to never show them the ugliness, brutality, magnificence, selfishness, glory; never give them a way in. It has always been important to maintain your equilibrium, your smile, your carapace at all times. You could not bear for anyone to see who you really are.
But now, finally, it is time. With knowing has come release. It has taken years to get to this point.
I
‘Even in sleep I know no respite’
Heloise d’Argenteuil
Lesson 1
Let everything be plain, open and above-board.
Tell the truth and don’t be afraid of it.
You think about sleeping with every man you meet. You do not want to sleep with any of them. Couldn’t be bothered anymore. You are too tired, too cold. The cold has curled up in your bones like mould and you feel, in deepest winter, in this place that has cemented around you, that it will never be gouged out. You live in Gloucestershire. In a converted farmhouse with a ceiling made of coffin lids resting on thatchers’ ladders. It is never quite warm enough. There are snowdrops in February and bluebells in May and the wet black leaves of autumn then the naked branches of winter clawing at the sky, all around you, months and months of them with their wheeling birds lifting in alarm when you walk through the fields not paddocks; in this land of heaths and commons and moors, all the language that is not your language for you were not born in this place.
Your memories scream of the sun, of bush taut with sound and bleached earth. Of the woman you once were. She is barely recognisable now.
You do not know how to climb out, to gain traction with some kind of visibility, as a woman. To find a way to live audaciously. Again.
Lesson 2
The house-mother! Where could you find a nobler title, a more sacred charge?
Your husband, Hugh, will be home late. Ten or so. This is not unusual. He works hard, as a GP, and you cherish that, the work ethic firm in him; he will not let his family down. There’s always something he has to do at the end of the day, paperwork, whatever.
It is good Hugh is home late, what you want. You seize those precious few hours between putting the children to bed and his homecoming for yourself. The soldering time. When you uncurl, recalibrate. Draw a bath and dream of being unclenched, of standing with your face to the sky in the hurting light, opening out your chest and filling up your bones with warmth. Becoming tall again, vivid-hearted, the woman you once were.
You have a good girl’s face. Young, still. But Hugh detected something underneath, early on he sniffed it out like a bloodhound. Something … unhinged … under the smile. Something coiled, waiting for release.
He’ll never find it. You have been locked away for so long and your husband does not have the combination and never will, now, has no idea what kind of combination is needed; he thinks all is basically fine with his marriage. You’ve both reached a point of stopping in the relationship. Too busy, too swamped by everything else.
Nikki Gemmell’s Threesome: The Bride Stripped Bare, With the Body, I Take You Page 21
