Nikki Gemmell’s Threesome: The Bride Stripped Bare, With the Body, I Take You

by Gemmell, Nikki

  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.