Could she? Could she possibly? For surely Mel would have to leave his job; Cliff and his garden cronies wouldn’t countenance his staying, they’d drum him out. Out of the garden, out of the area, out of their sight. So. They’d be forced to live somewhere far more affordable, like here, perhaps. Right. And their child, if they had one, would go to its local primary then its local comp, a grammar if they’re good enough but are there any in these parts? No, they’re all beyond London’s inner reach, she’s heard that; so, impossible, unless they move out and could they afford all the tutoring on top of everything else? Connie looks around her, trying to imagine the brave new options right at the start of their child’s school life: perhaps one of those failing primaries with a plethora of free school meals and English as a second language for most. She experiences a flash of it: the narrowing of choice, the despair of it. The corrosiveness of envy suddenly seeps into her soul; she gets it.
The sleek panther of a car stops at traffic lights. A posse of black kids in hoodies slap its windows as they cycle past. Connie yelps, Cliff tells the driver to run the red. ‘Fast,’ he snaps. ‘Cunts.’ So much anger, unspoken, struggling for articulation in this place; so much anger from the lot of them; everyone elbowing each other, jostling and lashing out, all the sharpness and unease and fret. Oh no, she couldn’t live here, in a place like this, the future of England, surely not. But perhaps she must. Connie suddenly feels like a mouse in God’s almighty paws – free me or eat me – she doesn’t know what.
She just wants to be back in her dear Notting Hill, now, her lovely dipping place with its bespoke little gems of shops, her gym tucked into its darling cobbled street, her flower supplier in the cannily transformed toilet block, everything she could ever want. Lidgate’s with the best meat in the land, Clarke’s deli, the Electric, the glorious Gate cinema, the raffish delights of her Friday rummages on the ’Bello, pedis at the Cowshed, hefty gift books from Daunt’s, even her chai lattes from Starbucks and you’d never get a chain like that in these parts. A life without her chai lattes, how would she cope! The vast seductive thrill of her neighbourhood … the expansive sense of chuff she has dwelling in it. Connie looks out at the sullen, suspicious faces clocking their car now, its muggable occupants, wondering where it’s going, if it will stop, if they’d get a chance.
No, no, she couldn’t. But Mel, a new life …
England my England! she thinks. But which is my England? Which do I want? Suddenly overloaded with uncertainty, and Connie knows that a not-knowing is the most debilitating of states. She flops back in her seat and shuts her eyes, feeling like her life all of a sudden is a leaky wooden ship finally giving way to the water … all her dreams rushing out.
50
Alone, I often fall down into nothingness. I must push my foot stealthily lest I should fall off the edge of the world into nothingness
Home, to a crisp e-mail from her sister, Emma, who is a good bit older than herself. She is to be whisked away to her family’s cottage in Scotland, for two weeks, her father will not take no for an answer and frankly, little sis, neither will the rest of us. Connie feels as she always does around this time of the year, constantly shuffled on the chessboard, a pawn to everyone else. She has to choose … has to face Cliff … cannot. It’s like none of them quite trusts her by herself: where she would go, what she would do, in what way she’d uncurl, be lost to the lot of them.
She forwards Cliff her sister’s e-mail, cc’ing Emma and all her family on it. It’s for all of them to decide but she knows what will come to pass. Cliff is trapped. He cannot go against her family. He has always been slightly intimidated by them, their fluidity in the upper echelons of the English world. Their ease with wellies and smelly dogs and pheasant shoots, wretched yomping in forests after Sunday roasts; all that jolly grubbiness in country houses, dog hair on couches, ponies and hunting, collected Shakespeares in kitchens, too much drink. The English do wealth differently and he will never be a part of it. He’s always sensed they tolerate him but don’t particularly like him; he could never go down to the pub with his father-in-law and have a rousing chat over a pint. Connie’s father is a fulsome man of great and spilling appetites, Cliff is not. All Protestant discipline and control to the father’s blowsy Catholicism and sentiment.
‘Whatever. You will fly out to meet with my own family, as soon as Scotland is done.’ Cliff’s brisk reply to the lot of them.
He is staying later and later at work, burying himself in it. The money is rolling in like never before, audaciously, in this financial climate. The PR consultant has been called in again to expand the charitable portfolio; to shore up the image, get him in the FT mag’s ‘Diary of a Somebody’ and be smart about it. Cliff has said to Connie in the past that the best of his breed succeed with utter madness, and a touch of coldness, and a singular disdain for their clients – all of which must be masked, superbly. He does, he is supremely good at it, and as he feels his wife slipping from him he is even more ruthless with it all and ever more successful. For he has to succeed in at least one aspect of his life.
At night he plays poker with Marichka until 1 a.m. with a strange camaraderie between them both, long after Connie has retired. She can picture them like this in thirty years’ time, still playing their cards, up all night. They’re like an old married couple who’ve not had sex for decades and rarely talk about much, but vibrate so intimately upon one another that it’s moving, settled, right; they know by instinct each other’s thoughts, wants. Cliff raised Marichka’s salary so she can gamble on it – she was losing so much to him, every night, and he was demanding she pay up. Connie was furious. Her husband was getting deader, colder, more competitive, with everything; removing himself completely from anything to do with a warm heart. Connie could no longer bear it. When she is back from her holiday she will leave him. She must, yes, she tells herself. His family will be around him. That will be a buttress to his anger. Yes, it will work.
Perhaps.
She glances at her latest black box from Net-A-Porter, still unopened on her bed. She slips off its satiny ribbon.
51
Outside the trees dragged their leaves like nets through the depths of the air; the sound of water was in the room and through the waves came the voices of birds singing
A soft pitter-pat of rain like a blanket over them both. Mel is asleep in his bed, in Connie’s arms, the cup of her foot on his calf. It is that sleep of a man found. Her arms wing him tight and she breathes in his dreaming, of what? He wakes with a start.
‘What if I had a child?’ she asks.
He sighs. ‘It seems a wrong and bitter thing to bring a child into this crazy world right now. Would you really want to? Can’t you feel it? All the agitation, unhappiness, fret.’
‘Oh, don’t say that, don’t!’ A glittery quiet. ‘I might be going to have one.’ No one talks, as if the very air is digesting the news. Connie looks Mel deep in the eyes, all her dreams poised on the wings of those words.
‘No.’
‘Maybe, I don’t know. It’s too early. But I might.’ Connie places his hand on her belly, smooths his fingers out. ‘Are you pleased?’
‘I’m pleased that you’re pleased.’
‘Then you don’t really want me! You don’t really want this.’
‘No, no, Connie, I didn’t say that,’ Mel protests. ‘I’m just not sure I want it growing up among … this. This world. Envious and raging. Feeling like life is constantly unfair, through no fault of its own. Never able to compete because its prospects haven’t been decided at three, four – at that blinking nursery down the road, because we could never afford it. Everything is still so weighted by class, still, oh yes. All this, all around us! Look at our government, look where they all came from. It’s so difficult to reinvent yourself in England, even now. More so, perhaps. Yes, Connie, I really do believe that. I could never crack the code – and I wouldn’t want to. But our child might. It’s bloody hard. And then who’d want to be these people, reall
y? Who? Are they happy? I don’t think so. I’ve seen too much. Heard it, as I’m wheeling my barrow past.’
‘We don’t have to stay here!’ Connie grabs Mel’s shoulders. ‘We could go to South Africa. Australia. Somewhere fresh. Younger. Wilder. Closer to the sky and the earth. Where no one knows us. We could become something else!’
‘We could,’ Mel says slowly.
‘I was born in Australia, you know. When Dad was a diplomat. I’ve never really thought about it because we moved on when I was two. I haven’t a single memory of it, have never been back. But I’m sure I could get a visa. Perhaps.’
‘I don’t care what I do. I just know I can’t stay here, after everyone knows. If everyone knows. All the men. And they will, eventually. I’m just waiting for it all to explode.’
‘Tell me you want a child, Mel, tell me you have optimism, and hope. Still. Please.’
Connie is begging him, Mel is shaking his head, trying to get his head around it, the whole lot of it. ‘If we could not live for money,’ he says, quiet. ‘If we could just live for something else … anything but that. Is it possible, Con? I don’t know, in this world. All these people around us, so depleted in their souls, so greedy and grasping and unsettled by it. Too busy ever to live for anyone else. Even to notice. What do they live for, what? Really? Besides a vast accumulation of personal wealth?’
Thunder rolls across the sky like a series of bombs being dropped. Flint is in the air. Connie sits up like a dog, alert. They both listen to the rain getting heavier, dispersing the scent of the earth, pummelling the slate of Mel’s roof.
Connie flings back her head and breathes it in deep.
‘You really are a child of the earth, aren’t you?’ Mel chuckles, pulling her back. ‘I bet Cliff never, ever noticed that. How much you need it.’
52
I am in the mood to dissolve in the sky
The rain is heavy now, the sky dark; Connie can smell it all, flinting her alive. She has a sudden desire to rush out into it. She looks at Mel and tilts her head enquiringly, giddy with the prospect of it, the challenge. Mel holds his breath, laughs in disbelief. His girl has slipped outside with a wild heavy laugh, utterly naked, out onto the central lawn of the garden in the pummelling wet, holding up her breasts to the drenching sky and spreading her arms and twirling about. ‘Come on! No one’s about. It’s ours, ours, we own it for tonight!’
Mel laughs, what the heck, and dashes out, naked and white. He grabs Connie’s slithery hands, runs her to a tree, rams her up against it in the gushing wet then tips her into wet leaves, wet earth, and takes her like an animal, quick, short, sharp, her slippery legs locked tight around his back.
Later, after a bath, Mel holds a towel over the springy hair of Connie’s cunt and just keeps it there, still, in gratitude. She farts. Whoops with embarrassment.
‘Hey, don’t be silly. You shit and you piss, here, and here, just like an animal. Just like me, just like all of us. That’s life. But what I can’t abide – what I absolutely cannot abide – is what that bastard did to you once.’ His fingers curl over Connie healing scars. ‘How dare he violate you like that,’ he says, turning her over and stroking the flesh of her rounded cheeks, the languid dip into her thighs. ‘You’ve got the most beautiful arse that ever existed. Ever. Full stop. He had no right. It’s criminal. Abuse.’ Connie laughs, Mel is deadly serious. ‘You should have flowers down here, daisies and snowdrops, not padlocks.’
Connie pushes him away, laughing, it’s all gone, all in the past, she is entirely someone else; she looks at her watch, she will have to get back. Has to pack for Scotland. They’re both suddenly quiet, as if each of them can feel the weight of separation; and both can sense it will be a reckoning of some sort.
‘Do you mind me going away?’
‘You have to do what you have to do,’ Mel says, calm, quiet. ‘It will make us or break us, I know that.’
‘I thought it might be a good way to begin a severing … with Cliff. I do want a child. It might be a canny way of …’
‘… letting everyone slip into believing a few lies, perhaps?’
‘Yes.’
‘And could you raise a child under his roof?’
‘If you didn’t take me away, then yes. I’d have to. He’d raise it as his, I guess. I don’t think he’d be averse to it, actually, as long as he didn’t know whose it was. There’s a lot to think about.’
‘And where would I take you? If I did take you …’
‘Anywhere! Just away from here.’ Connie’s heart is fluttering in panic. What is she doing, what train is she setting in motion, what does she actually want here and she doesn’t completely know; the panic of indecision, the vocation of procrastination, uncertainty, that has plagued her whole life. Goodness, obedience, weighing on her like a vice.
‘I’m not making things difficult for you, Con, I just want to find out what you’re after – but I don’t think you really know yourself.’
No, no, she doesn’t! Her eyes at him now tell Mel that.
‘I’m not keen on being a kept man, either. By you, by anyone. My pride wouldn’t allow it.’
‘I know that!’
‘I’d have to work. But it wouldn’t be the life you’re used to.’
‘I love you for that. That you’d want to work … for us.’ So much in her head, so much to work out, all, all when she’s back. ‘I just want to sleep with you, Mel, for one full night. Can I? Before I go. Just … sleep and then wake up with you next to me. I need it.’
‘But how?’
‘I’ll work it out.’
And with that Connie is gone, swallowed by the scrubbed air, the wet black, her pale skin swiftly vanished in the dark.
53
And it was awfully strange, he thought, how she still had the power, as she came tinkling, rustling, still had the power as she came across the room
Connie bursts through the back door in a flurry, hair still wet, clothes crumpled, cheeks flushed. Cliff is reading a new history of Lincoln, champagne glass in hand. He’s appalled, horrified at the vast unhinged sight of his new wife.
‘Look at your hair – your clothes! Where have you been?’
‘In the garden. It was so wild and wonderful with all the thunder and the lightning. The sky came roaring down. Did you hear it, Cliffy, did you? I was stuck and then just thought sod it! I ran out into the rain with no clothes on! Can you believe it? Couldn’t resist.’
Cliff cannot comprehend. Any of it. His wife of the past few weeks, her new body, tallness, wildness, laugh, this crazed reckless confidence. ‘You are mad. You must be. You are going mad. Suppose anyone saw. The gardener!’
‘Well, he would have got the absolute fright of his life and run off as fast as he could. Quite completely spooked and utterly not able to cope. No one is as mad as me,’ she declares, laughing and taking the champagne glass from Cliff’s hand and tipping it up in an extravagant sip.
Cliff stares at the long, exposed throat of his wife, transfixed. Appalled. Admiring. She looks so glowing and healthy, so brimming with life. Unbound. After the stasis of this house, their new life. Perhaps this is what works, perhaps there will be a lot more of this. Perhaps he can use it.
‘Do you like your body?’ he asks, quite dispassionately.
‘I love it,’ she proclaims joyously, thinking of Mel’s declaration that she has the best arse that ever existed. Cliff remembers back to a very different body, a very different wife.
‘What’s caused this sudden change in you? Running out into the rain, putting on weight, laughing like a mad woman or a naughty child. Is it the summer’s heat? Anticipation of a holiday, desire for sensation, change, boredom, what?’
‘All of it! The whole damned lot! Should I change for you, my darling, become very quiet, and meek, is that what you want? How you’d like it. The little kitten in her pretty collar, all obedient.’
‘Oh, don’t bother. You almost communicate a thrill to me.’
Connie
is thrilled, yes, thrilled – to feel the bonds snap. She couldn’t deny it. She refills Cliff’s glass, hands it across, and gets one for herself.
‘I want to get my video camera out. Like old times. Come on, Con, come on. Just this once. The Emin neon … panning across to you …’ – he mimes a camera close on her cunt – ‘you’re on my bed … waiting, wide, knowing not what … yes … your new magnificence.’
Cliff clutches his wife’s thigh, her waist, and inhales deep. As if he is breathing in life itself.
54
Now begins to rise in me the familiar rhythm
Emma is driving across to London to pick up Connie. She loves a long drive. They will stay the night, leave at the crack of dawn, meander up the motorway, stop at friends near York. Excellent, all of it. For Connie has a plan.
‘I’ll put you up in a hotel, Emma, the Dorchester, Claridge’s, whatever you want. You just have to give me one night to myself. Pick me up from home say, 3.30, drop me around the corner, have a quick cuppa and then head off to wherever, to wallow in your lovely luxury. Then come back for me the next morning. Nine a.m., on the dot.’
Nikki Gemmell’s Threesome: The Bride Stripped Bare, With the Body, I Take You Page 57
