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.
That, of course, was one thing that Cliff did come to understand – that he had become a facilitator, nothing else. In their grand and complicit experiment.
But now this.
27
The world wavered and quivered and threatened to burst into flames
The moon is the colour of old bone that night as Connie stands bold, bared, in front of her full-length mirror. The Anglepoise lamp is glaring fully at her nakedness. She looks at herself, in coldness, in dismay. How odd the human body is in hard light. Frail, ugly, vulnerable, breakable, freckled and crumpled and dimpled; pulsingly primed for its biological purpose, as if it exists for that and that alone and she shivers at the thought.
She cups falling breasts. Something is slackening yet she is still young. It is the thinness, she is too thin, wilfully; the beautiful bounce and ripeness of her youth has fallen away. Now, skin and bone. Not sexy, no, absolutely not. Primed by Pilates and yoga in the edgy part of W10, which she cycles to almost daily on her black Cambridge bicycle with its wicker basket. The diligence has sculpted that sinewy, well-bred look that clothes compliment so well.
Connie thinks of all the wasted beauty of a mere ten years ago, when she had no idea of it. No idea that she was perfect, glowing, bounteous then, for all she saw endlessly, despairingly, were dimpled thighs and a pot of a belly, breasts too big and spots and endlessly obsessed over the lot of it. Tweaked, burst, dyed, shaved, starved and plucked, relentlessly trying for something better, something else. She always dreamed of an A-cup, for her little Jane Birkin Ts, the boyish, insouciant line of it. Instead, she is full-breasted with wide, wing-like, childbearing hips she is constantly trying to flatten down. Make disappear. Never understanding why men would go for all that when women like her wanted something else entirely; constantly fighting cruel nature to attain it.
‘So long as you can forget your body, Connie, you’re happy,’ laughed Lara once, catching her checking her reflection in the car window, and sucking in her belly, before she entered the house. But Connie can’t, not yet, she’s imprisoned by it. She eats little and her chest is becoming scrawny, the bones showing too much, her cheeks hollow. The wrinkles will come faster this stringent way, she knows; sees it on friends slightly older and just as scrawny and then the Botox begins, of course, that uniform, terrified face. Blaring the hatred of self.
Lara abandoned her body years ago, at forty, ‘when I stopped trying to change who I was and just settled back and floated in my life. I’ve never looked back. Had the best sex I’d ever had, all fat and veiny and wrinkled, with a good old laugh along with it. We’d never been more adventurous, and free – because we were relaxed, we couldn’t care less, and I’d found my voice.’ Then the change again, within the textured journey of a woman’s sexuality, the waxing and the waning throughout life. Her third marriage entirely celibate, except for the first night. ‘I was glad in the end to be rid of it. I’ve been so productive, and content, ever since.’
Connie slips on an old nightdress from a Friday rummage in Portobello, the cream linen stiff and enveloping. She always feels safer in it, cocooned for sleep, like a child in a boarding school. She’s deeply tired but knows the haranguing will come, as it always comes; the shardy wakefulness of 4 a.m. She feels now that she’s in a perpetual holding pattern, wondering when and where to land or how to soar, take flight, and can’t. Anything but this. Cliff, of course, is not to blame, it’s just the way he is and he will never change, has never changed his entire life. She sees the little boy in him, still, too much, demanding his own way, experimenting with his flies, endlessly bending things to his will, endlessly triumphing. ‘You will look after him, won’t you?’ ‘But what about me?’ she had wanted to scream to his mother but never did, never will, endlessly the good wife.
A sense of injustice has slid into Connie, like an invisible splinter under a fingernail. It’s an addling tinderbox of unfairness and duty and compassion and disquiet and it must be seen to or it will eat away at her until she implodes. She cannot see the end of it.
28
Every face, every shop, bedroom window, public-house, and dark square is a picture feverishly turned – in search of what?
Connie’s father rings often, and her frail mother and her bossy sister, all telling her in their different way to get out, get some fresh air, fatten up; to
come and see them in Cornwall, get away for a while, fill up her lungs, let the wind whip all the cobwebs out. Her old childhood room is waiting, always waiting, untouched, the high corner room facing water on two sides and no one’s been in it since. Sea-licked. It was like living within the curve of a shell, for there was the constant swish of water below her, the faint hollow moan of it. Connie shuts her eyes on the endless battery of admonishment, harangued by a girl striding the great stumpy toes of high cliffs and blinking tears in the wind’s snap, by her footfall sponging on a different soil and always close, the sea, the sea, the beautiful, restless width of it. She can’t go back now – she dare not, for fear it will turn into a catastrophic escape – and her father knows this. He pleads for her to put on her coat and just get out of her house, at least, see the daffs in that garden square, for God’s sake. ‘Plant some yourself if you have to, get your hands mucky, Neesie, do something with your life.’
Connie hangs up the phone.
But they’re right. A rare shaft of light beams through the window, calling her out and she must, must, for it feels like the damp and the cold have curled up permanently in her bones, nestled in their very marrow, cultivating airlessness, quietness, mould. She knows it will all be too brief, this symphony of the coming spring; one cluster of flowers bursting forth then another, and another, and she knows exactly where to find them.
She rushes out.
29
Let us not take it for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small
The wind today is roguish, playful, flurrying Connie into a smile, whooshing up her legs in a merry hello and whipping up her skirt. It’s the first time in so long she’s been out without a coat; the sun spines her up. The earth is opening out, she can feel it, smell its release; opening wide to the sky, to life. As always she gravitates to the wild places, the formal parts of the garden too predictable, neat, as they obediently wait for their adornment of colour.
A knocking sound.
He is there, in the thick of it, of course. Deeper Connie walks into it, deeper, until she comes across a small shack, one she knew was here, of course, but has barely registered in the past; a place for storing lawnmowers, axes, wheelbarrows, rakes.
He is chopping wood, getting rid of several large, fallen branches. Startled to see her, as if no one ever intrudes upon this, his secret place. Not happy. Wanting his solitude, the sweetness of it; needing the place where the world cannot find him and instinctively she knows this is it, she has stumbled upon it.
The churn in her belly, at the sight of him, Connie cannot help it. She sits on a rough bench by the shack, in a pool of replenishing light, watches, catches her breath. She will not be gone just yet; she wants to ask about the bird, wants to ask about so much. Mel keeps on chopping, anger tingeing it. At the intrusion, the discovery, the watching. Abruptly stops. Looks down at her, stares at her, into her. Axe loose in his hand.
‘The bir—’ she goes to ask but, ‘You’re cold,’ he says over the top of it.
‘Am I?’ She nervously laughs.
‘Your hands.’
Oh. She looks down. Orange and purple, the deep mottling on her skin, she hadn’t noticed, he had. ‘You need to get warm.’ Something so sure, calm, authoritative; not a question but a statement and instantly acted upon. Mel disappears into the shed and emerges with a hessian sack. Rough, a bit grubby, sprouting its fibres.
The challenge.
Which she can accept, or not. Connie’s cheeks patched with sudden heat. ‘Thank you,’ she smiles, and places the sack over her lap.
Then in that roguish whip of a day she leans back, and watches. Just that. She will not be going anywhere for some time, in the vast peace of this space, she will not give him any talk because he does not want it, his whole body is telling her that. He is so self-sufficient, comfortable, at ease with all this. Dirt on his hands, under his nails, across his cheek where he’s wiped his sweat. She wants to lick it off. Smell him, snuffle into his secret furrows; it would be a healthy smell, there, under his arms, she just knows it. A working, moving, dynamic scent, close to the sky, the earth. Unlike Cliff, who likes to be shaved, clipped and trimmed, at all times, perpetually neat, devoid of smell, devoid of anything close to the animal in life. Unlike Cliff, who when walking used to appear somewhat ungainly, with his great height, this man has a natural grace. Seems almost too fine for this work. There’s a beauty to him. It’s held back, contained. Quiet, listening, watching, observing; not eager for the world and its traps.
Mel looks at the banker’s wife watching, waiting, so open, sitting there, it is all on her face. A quizzical smile, a little flick in his loins. Dreads another woman, any one of them, with their wily, depleting, emotional ways, oh no, not now, no more messy entanglements. He needs to heal, in this garden, in this secret place. He feels that if he cannot be alone with his flintiness now, right now, in this new job, he will die; he must be left in peace. By everyone, by the world, by life. This position was meant to do it. It pays nothing but it’s the peace he wants.
The sky is softening into a rare spill of gold. Connie needs to be going. She does not. She is now sitting on the bench with one leg up, crossed upon the other, like a child. The ease of it. His body is taking over; inwardly, silently, he groans. He has not been in the company of a woman for four long years, has not so much as touched one and here he is now, is in this woman’s employ, technically; he knows what she wants though she will not declare it, cannot, every pore of her is singing it, he can almost smell her, it.
‘It’s so restful here’ – she leans back – ‘I’d love to come whenever I want.’
‘Yes.’
Angry with her. This is his space yet as an owner she has more right to it.
‘Is this private, this bit?’
‘No, but I’m here a lot. Working. It would be hard to find your peace and quiet.’
She sees then how angry he is with her, how contemptuous; of her sitting here, watching, of her finding his secret place, his ring-fenced, precious inner life. A jagged silence. He does not want her, does not want a bar of her. The crippled banker’s wife in her inappropriate Charlotte Olympia shoes and her Gucci shirt, one button too many undone and she only just notices it; her hand trembles over it, in embarrassment; yes, she has made a spectacle of herself.
Abruptly Connie stands. A tight smile holding the slide of her face, the fury, the hurt. She censors it with a crisp ‘Goodbye’. Departs.
30
It is a thousand pities never to say what one feels
Connie does not actively hate Cliff. It’s just that for a long time, regrettably, there has been a physical aversion. This has never changed and never will. An aversion towards his prissy cleanliness, his obsessive shaving of not just his chin but his chest and genitals; his fear of anything too close to the earth. He has always had a physical dislike of anything too messy and mucky, long before the accident. For Connie, her antipathy towards all this was masked at the start by the sheer bullish power of Cliff, the thrill of heads turned at the collective energy of them both, the buzz in their wake. The catapulting into such a heady new life! The best booth at Locanda Locatelli, Nobu takeaway, private jets, the smorgasbord of Bond Street and champagne weekends at Claridge’s; of never again having the fret of an overdrawn credit card, a straining overdraft, a crammed, stuffy Tube in her life. The exhilarating relief of all that. Oh yes, she could be bought.
She was. Deliriously. And then it was too late.
There is an extraordinary dependence now. Relentlessly. Not just sexually but with work dinners, cocktail parties, charity auctions, with constant demands to be by his side in his public life. As if Connie’s youth, her vitality, her health and subservience make Cliff whole, cementing the pretence that all is normal, proceeding as planned, quiet. A life becalmed, that’s how he wants it, has always wanted it. He said to her once, early on, that if one must have a relationship it should be conducted in a
shade of the coolest, palest cream and no, she’d admonished, raising her bellini high, not on your life, it should be a vivid, roaring blood red! ‘That settles it then, we’re hopelessly unsuited,’ and they’d both laughed.
The dependence has bled into all corners of Connie’s life. She can’t even fill a car with petrol any more, has forgotten how; hasn’t stacked a dishwasher for years, paid a bill, applied her own nail polish. The colour of her life now? A brittle white.
As her husband’s strange ballast. He lets her shave him or sponge him as if he were a child. Connie asked at the start of their tremulous new life, he acquiesced. It has become a habit between them. He likes her to do it naked, straddling him, his hands at her hips, in wonder, as if he can’t quite believe he still has this.
She doesn’t want to. She cannot stop. She must. She can’t. The good wife.
31
Well, we must wait for the future to show
Early April and Connie is back, drawn inexorably back; daily the green expanse saturates her gaze from her high window, daily it calls her out. The sky hangs, its colour a battleship’s waiting grey. The world is poised as if holding its breath. A storm’s coming, there’s electricity in the air, she can taste the thundery day sparking her alive and the rain comes suddenly, needle sharp. Connie, in the thick of it, needs to find shelter, won’t make it out, runs to the wooden rotunda – too cold, exposed – dashes to the shed, hurrying along narrow paths bowered over by the garden’s press. Sits on a dusty chair just inside the door and watches the world being drenched around her.
Nikki Gemmell’s Threesome: The Bride Stripped Bare, With the Body, I Take You Page 52
