I Take You (10 page)

‘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.

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.

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.

Mel comes into view, she laughs, despite herself. ‘I got soaked!’ she girlishly exclaims, then shuts down. At his expression. Of course, she shouldn’t be in this place. ‘There was nowhere else,’ she adds, wiping her face.

‘No matter.’

He stands beside her chair, in the doorway, in silence, watching the wet, drenched himself. She rises beside him.

‘I’ve been to ask you … wondering … what happened to my bird?’

‘Dead within the hour.’

Connie gasps.

‘It put up a mighty struggle, trying to flap its way out of its mess. I held it. It was all I could do.’

‘Oh.’

A tear is slipping down her face, she can’t stop it, can’t speak; just feels brimmed, with so much. Mel glances at her, notes. There’s something so mute and hopeful and good in her, despite everything; she’s better than she realizes, nicer, more than she knows. There’s something spiritual, wild, of the earth to her, despite all the polish. He leans across without thinking and wipes the tear from her cheek. She smiles, lips rolled in, laughs at her silliness, ‘Just a bird!’ in wonder and ridiculousness. Amid the thumping rain, the canopy of slick green, his hand lingers a touch. A trickle of a caress. Blind, instinctive, whisper-soft. It drops to the dip in her neck. Lingers at the vulnerability; the soft, wild beat of it.

‘You should come into the hut.’ His voice neutral.

‘Yes,’ Connie murmurs, as if in a trance, ‘yes.’ There are hessian sacks, ready, waiting. On the floor. Has he laid them, for this, for what? No, surely not. There’s a fluttery newness in her, a tug, a wet. Her belly, her very depths feel liquid, ready for anything or nothing, she knows now what. Connie’s hand slips into her pocket; quietly, secretly, she brushes her mouth, slips something under her tongue.

‘Lie here,’ he says and with a quaint obedience she does. Absolutely straight, on her back, arms crossed demurely upon her chest as if she has never before done this, as if she doesn’t know what to expect. Waiting, breathing snagged. He lies the supine length of her, nudging close, she can feel his strong, slow, unhurried weight, he is up on one hip and caressing her inner thighs, with such infinite tenderness, and cherishing; closer, he nudges, closer, swirls, opening her gently, so gently out, closer and closer to her core and she lies back and closes her eyes and cries out softly, just that. With gratitude, with relief. A tear slips down her temple.

‘What’s wrong?’ he asks, concerned.

‘Nothing.’ She shakes her head, murmurs, ‘Go on, please, don’t stop.’

Reverently Mel lifts up Connie’s dress, reverently he brushes her navel with a kiss. Draws down her panties, and stops, gasps. With shock, with pity, sorrow – at what he sees before him; at this poor, caged creature who’s fluttered into his life – and Connie reaches up and draws him strong into a wallop of a kiss and as she does so she passes something metallic and hard from her tongue into his mouth, the tears streaming down her cheeks.

Mel stops in surprise, draws back. Retrieves a small key. Stares at it in bewilderment.

‘Help me,’ Connie whispers. ‘I want to be alive again. Please, get rid of this padlock, get rid of all of it.’

And so he does. First the lock, then the two tiny sleepers, with sure steady hands and an infinite gentleness, the gentleness of hands used to unhooking animals from a trap. All the while shaking his head in wonder and horror that the world has come to this.

Connie is finally unlocked. She pushes herself wide, wider with release. The moment Mel enters her body is a moment of pure peace. With a sudden thrusting back he withdraws and comes quick; seed is spilled upon her stomach with a quiet, guttural groan and then a stillness plumes through him, through them both, like sleep.

They lie there listening to the rain, its slowing, the soft drip, drip, of its aftermath. They lie there with the smell of saturated, sated earth, utterly quiet with no talk. His wet, sticky body touching hers, completely unknown, and right. It is like an abandonment for them both. Of everything else in their lives, here, in this secret place.

‘I thought I’d done with it for now,’ Mel laughs ruefully, as if he can scarcely believe it.

‘What?’

‘Fucking. Women. Life.’

‘Life,’ Connie says wondrously, soft. ‘Life,’ she repeats.

His smile, arrowed into her, his smile at all of it.

One must love everything

Striding home across a darkened park, the gravel path an entrail of paleness to her married existence but no fear now, no dread, a tall walk. Like she’s just had exhilarating sex, the power of it inhabiting her whole body. Alive again, alive, and supremely flushed with it. Life, Connie smiles,
life
, each has brought the other back into it. Mel’s touch and his smell are threaded into her fingers and giggly, tremulous, she holds them to her nose, her mouth, and breathes deep.

All smiles, filled up like a glass. Feeling unshadowed at last.

And so it begins.

She had known happiness, exquisite happiness, intense happiness, and it silvered the rough waves a little more brightly, as daylight faded, and the blue went out of the sea and it rolled in waves of pure lemon which curved and swelled and broke upon the beach and the ecstasy burst in her eyes and waves of pure delight raced over the floor of her mind and she felt, ‘It is enough! It is enough!’

Through April, through May, Connie’s days are newly oiled, she is sprung into wakefulness. Mel’s smile is rangy in her, loosening her gut. But she must wait, all the time wait, for the day’s softening, for the residents to depart the park, for Cliff to be late home from work.

He’s entertaining a client tonight, it’ll be a lap dancing club of course, he revels in it, none of them knows how much, all that look but no touch. So, today, a possibility! An afternoon of sprightly sun, warm and replenishing, uncurling the world from its long winter sleep as if it is life itself.

Swiftly Connie looks around and enters her bower of wild branches overhanging a fragment of path, almost swallowing it complete; swiftly she is enveloped by a distant wind roar and birds somewhere close and the scurries of low animals; swiftly she flits by the peak of an old greenhouse, askew, its beautifully carved wooden apex straining from nature’s clutching like a man reaching from quicksand or an earthquake-sunk church. Every gardener has left it untouched, Mel has told her, it’s like a secret code between us, not to disturb it, to let the earth take over and every one of us has respected that. Cliff wouldn’t, Connie had remarked in reply, if he knew he’d have it cleared, bulldozed without a thought, he’s so disconnected from nature, from the earth. Can’t bear it.