All day, hope.
Lesson 223
We are able to take interest in the marvellous government of the universe
You’re admitted into a ward of gyni-complicated women. Are handed a grey cardboard bowl to catch whatever will come out. The coldness of the gesture cuts through you. You bite your lip, staring at it. Right. They want the foetus, their prize; want to examine it.
By nightfall the nurse confirms you are miscarrying. There is, of course, nothing that can be done. Nature must take its course. It’s for the best. And now it is as if your body just wants to flush the alien object out, you bleed and bleed in great clumps.
A scan confirms everything.
Nothing left.
‘Cry, and cry again, love,’ the radiographer soothes, her gentle hand on your belly and then around your heaving, shuddering back. ‘It’s a bereavement. Nothing less.’
Oh yes.
The hospital wants you staying but no, you must get out, there’s a family and a house that awaits. It is where you need to be. You just want to hold your boys at this moment, your beautiful bright boysies, bury your nose into their softness and cuddle them tight, so tight.
As you walk from the fluorescence of the hospital’s bright electric doors: an enormous white balloon of sadness inside you, filling you up.
Lesson 224
Marriage ought not always to be a question of necessity, but of choice
Through it all, Hugh.
Your weeping, as you were wheeled into the ward and were told that your husband was over there, waiting; see, look.
And there he was, yes. Standing, glittery-eyed, holding your overnight bag. The leather bag he bought for a surprise birthday trip to Rome, where he played you a clip from Roman Holiday on the DVD player in the cab on the way to the airport and teased guess where we’re off to, guess? He has packed completely the wrong clothes but never mind, there is so much love in it that you have to laugh. And there is also a cosmetic bag he’s scrambled together with absolutely everything you need; it’s spot on. Fifty pounds for the TV and the phone rental, your favourite magazines. A Colette book about her childhood of rural happiness that you’ve never read. So much thought, all of it.
‘Thank you,’ you say, choked up.
Because you never say it enough.
His disappointment, too. His deflated, telling ‘oh’ when you say to him that you are miscarrying.
‘Bye bye, Bean number four. Hello Bean number five,’ he says into the shardy bright.
You laugh and then keen, barely knowing why. Holding him, feeling his weeping through your hands and wanting to swallow his own shudders, swallow his grief, clamping him down with your body.
You’re in this together, oh yes.
Lesson 225 – the Last
When the day’s work is done
The hour grows calm and quiet like the candle you have lit. You are pulling away from your former life like a ship leaving a wharf, you are sailing far from it. Ahead, the cleanness of a new adventure. You have the shape of your family now, the shape of your life. Hugh and you are not gazing blindly into each other’s eyes – you are both gazing out, keenly, at something else. Your three children. Side by side, focused on something else, and that feels strong and calming and right. This is your reality. This is your life. You have chosen it. You are trusting ahead, for what seems like the first time in your life; trusting the void.
You shut your little Victorian volume. It is no longer needed. Your work, for now, is done.
This is the end where now begins.
And how you love writing that.
I Take You
I TAKE YOU
Nikki Gemmell
FOURTH ESTATE • London
Contents
Title Page
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Note
1
Each has her past shut in her like the leaves of a book known to her by heart, and her friends can only read the title
Four a.m. The prowling hour. The wakefulness comes into Connie like a blade flicked open, for ours is essentially a fearful age and she is a child of it. All her choices in adult life have been dictated by fear and now, in the early hours, it curdles.
Fear of entrapment. Of being found out. Of turning into one of those women for whom indecision has become a vocation, of a silent slipping into that. Of emotional sledging, that she is becoming less resilient, not more, as she sails beyond youth. Of softening into fat, of men who take note as if she’s ripe for a mugging, of life settling like concrete around her and judgement; of what people think of her, yes, that most of all. Women! How awful they can be.
When does the unliving start? For a particular female of this particular age, it is incremental. For Connie – ensconced in her five-storey villa in London’s Notting Hill that was once splashed creamily across the pages of Architectural Digest – it has begun.
2
The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages
But there is one small pocket of Connie’s life where there is no fear.
Quite the opposite, in fact.
None of the people in her regular world of kick-boxing with her private trainer in Kensington Gardens, of ladies lunching around the communal table at Ottolenghi and of shop scouring, endlessly, on Westbourne Grove, knows of this place. In this one tiny corner of her existence all the blushing is left behind; she is unbound. Connie blooms in this world, into someone else entirely. It is a place that is open with possibility, with the potency of power, and she has so little of that in her regular life. It bequeaths her little moments of vividness that have become like scooping a hand into cool, clear creek water in summer’s heat.
3
Blame it or praise it, there is no denying the wild horse in us
Cliff has called. He has asked Connie to be ready in two hours. He is taking this late afternoon off – rare in the silky world of a Mayfair hedge fund manager – and a car will pick her up. Her stomach rolls in anticipation, as he speaks, it rolls as if a steamroller is gently travelling over it. The tugging, deep in her belly, the wet; at the whispered command, it has been a long time, too long, since this.
‘Prepare yourself.’
Connie waits for the car on the Lockheed chaise longue – made entirely of riveted aluminium �
� by its tall window in a mewly winter light. She loves how the metal of her coveted design piece looks like a giant goblet of mercury, like something else entirely; thrills at the sternness of it against her flesh. Its arresting cold. She is shaved, perfumed; this is all necessary now. To her, and to Cliff, dear Cliff, to whom she has been married for four years and with him for five before it.
Connie is dressed well. Always, she is dressed well. A woman who has the instinctive touch of looking impeccably ‘right’, on every occasion; conservative, with a flick of cool. Today, it is the shortened Chanel skirt of grey bouclé with veins of red through it. The iron-grey, silk Chloé blouse that slips like water from Connie’s hands and hangs below the jacket cuffs with something of the loucheness of the seventies to it; a touch of Bianca Jagger in her prime. The black lace Rigby and Peller bra, fitted by the Queen’s fitters. Wolford stockings. No knickers. Shoes, vintage McQueen’s, that look like the snout of a bull terrier. Fearsome, hobbling, but Connie has mastered them; everything in her rarefied life appears gilded, effortless.
She must be entirely shaved, of course. ‘I need you bare,’ Cliff has whispered, his voice dropping an octave as Connie squeezes her thighs together, tight, so tight, upon the thought. Bare for whom? What?
The car, sleek and panther black, purrs to a stop outside their villa which backs onto one of Notting Hill’s finest communal gardens, an expanse of several hidden acres now silent with snow on this January afternoon. A pristine, waiting brittleness. It has been a particularly long winter. One pair of footprints, heavy workman’s boots, smear the glary expanse of the great lawn like the restless prowl of a lone wolf; but no child plays, no adult wanders. The sky is pale, almost white. Everything waits. But for what …?
The lady of the house picks her way carefully down the icy marble steps. She smiles her too wide, too unEnglish smile at Lara Deniston-Dickson, her neighbour, who is nudging recalcitrant window boxes into spring preparation after winter’s clench; checking on the wilted cyclamens that withstand so much. Lara is one of the few Brits left on this square. Her dilapidated house is crammed with fabulous but shabby heirlooms, oak dressers and chairs, a dining table piled with books, washstands, a zebra rug, ancestral portraits, a Modigliani from Granny, several pianos and a lot of dust – the servants have long gone, as has the heat. It is one of the few houses left like this on the square as the bankers have sharked in, mainly from foreign countries, everyone, it seems, but the Russians because this is still not Belgravia, still a bit too ragged, edgy, loose for that lot. Lara has a grand disdain for this new world that has gone into lockdown, barricading the riff-raff out. Even her husband, dear Rupert, a man of some standing, thank you very much, yet treated like a tramp, asked by the new committee if he ‘owned’ – if he deserved a key to this very garden – merely because he was old and a touch scruffy with it. Oh yes, Lara has a disdain for these shiny, refulgent newcomers with their babies in cashmere and men in their too-new Barbour coats, all of them; except for the poor, lost girl next door with her dazzle of a smile that illuminates her face as if she is lit from within, but she doesn’t see it enough.
She does now. ‘Going out?’ The older woman smiles in approval, for she likes to see her sweet slip of a neighbour getting some fresh air, cheeks flushed; bound as she is to her workaholic husband and his precise demands. Connie knows little of his previous life, she has told Lara that.
‘I have no idea where,’ Connie laughs. ‘Do you? No, I didn’t think so. It’s a complete surprise. He adores them. To a quite ridiculous extent.’ She is talking of her husband as if he is a little boy.
‘He’s a keeper, that one.’ Lara nods, smiling, a woman who has lived through three marriages and four children. ‘A good marriage is fed with kindness, of course, but surprise, the gift of it – now that is the hidden ingredient. To sparkle things up now and then. Absolutely necessary in my book.’
‘Oh yes.’ Connie waves a pale hand nonchalantly, a hand manicured three times a week, upon which sits a single ruby within a protective ring of diamonds that once encircled the finger of Wallis Simpson. ‘Oh yes,’ she repeats, stepping into the warmth of the idling car and staring into her husband’s eyes as he waits in the back seat, spinning in the deft fingers of his left hand his Mont Blanc Bohème Noir pen. The pen that has been everywhere, that has begun all this; with the words it wrote, with the secret world it sprang into life.
4
She had the perpetual sense, as she watched the taxicabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day
The car pulls seamlessly away from the kerb. The windows are smoked to blankness. No one can see inside. Connie sits upright, legs delicately crossed at ankles, the worn crocodile of her vintage Mulberry handbag demure on her lap. She does not look at Cliff, she never looks at him, at the start, she can’t, she will stumble if she does. The spell cannot be broken; she must not let her head intrude, her rational thoughts; it is the only way these tumblings into something else can work. These episodes when she lets her body’s anima, the dark recesses of her mind, take over; when she trusts, completely trusts, because he has unlocked her into this.
The car is driven through the jangly upper reaches of Ladbroke Grove – as opposed to the White Heights, what Cliff and Connie call their rarefied end of Notting Hill in a private joke – and takes a left at the end of it. Their cars never take a left. Connie still does not look at Cliff, she neither asks nor questions. She gazes out the window as she is transported further and further from the graciousness of her home, her tree-lined street. A new London entirely unpeels before her.
A very different London – the real London, possibly – skinned before her eyes. A world of unremitting ugliness, scruffiness; not a blade of green in sight. The great press of its people, from all walks of life; everywhere but Britain, Connie thinks. It feels like these poor, watchful people are the stranded backwash, left high and dry upon a cowed, groaning, exhausted plot of earth. Connie’s from Cornwall, where the earth still sings, the great, beautiful bones of an ancient land and when she catches scenes like this it feels like the joyless future of this island, of the world; the crowded, jostling, built-over and unhappy future of the world as they know it. Feels like her tiny, lovely little Kensington and Chelsea is ring-fenced by the crushing, resentful, triumphant press of … this. The utter lack of any attempt at graciousness and wit and reach in this new England is startling, jarring, wrong; yet Connie feels like the only person in the world so thoroughly disturbed by it. These people need beauty too! Nowhere, here, is the London of her imagination that she moved into to gulp aged twenty-two.
Fingers suddenly spider across Connie’s soft inner thigh. It is the whisper of an enquiry, tracing a finery, her names perhaps; to submit, to begin. It is the signal. She turns from the window. Obediently, beyond will, beyond thought, Connie unhooks her legs and parts them, just a touch. Sits upright, very still. Waits. The fingers gently, gently nudge up her skirt until it is bunched in a thick band around her waist. She is ready, as directed, with just a plain black suspender belt. No ribbon, no lace, the thrilling cold of the limousine’s leather seat pressing up onto her, into her. The driver’s eyes flick at hers. She catches them. It is a new driver. She holds his gaze, her face gives nothing away; he is trying not to look, he looks down, at her bareness splayed on the leather, he cannot help himself. Cliff’s fingers softly, gently, part her lips, as if for the driver’s benefit then circle, exploratory, her back passage then suddenly plunge in – she gasps, lurches forward – then his fingers find her other hole until she is hooked and now poised, exposed, on the crook of his hand as her own reaches down, unstoppably, as she spreads herself, unstoppably and exposes her clit wide and presses her forefinger down on it and moans. She shuts her eyes on the driver’s glance, on the greyness of the world outside, on the weighed-down people at their drab little bus stop and the Halal chicken shop and another right beside it as she grinds down
unstoppably on the cool leather of the seat.
‘I want to inspect you,’ her husband whispers. ‘You have to be fully prepared. Nothing must be left to chance. Remove your skirt.’
Connie obediently slides down the zipper and wriggles out of it. Loops the shirt ends up into the top of her bra, for maximum visibility, holds her hands obediently, waiting, across her breasts.
Nikki Gemmell’s Threesome: The Bride Stripped Bare, With the Body, I Take You Page 47
