I Take You (12 page)

Marichka watches over her. Brings her glasses of milk and chai tea lattes just when she needs them, tells her to go to bed, get some sleep. Entwining herself into both their lives.

But then anyone who’s worth anything reads just what he likes, as the mood takes him, and with extravagant enthusiasm

‘I want a relationship that’s belly to belly not back to back. Isn’t that a lovely expression? My Irish cleaner told it to me. It summed up her marriage, she said. Belly to belly.’

Mel does not answer. Does he want to get married again? No, not if it means the vast entanglement of a woman who turns into something else. His wife, still his wife, was so grandly neurotic, Machiavellian, complex, and she’d been none of that at the start. As punishment withheld sex. Her weapon. Mel is separated not divorced and has left all the connecting with people behind him for a good while, or thought he had; he is still shell-shocked. Belly to belly, what, he can’t even think of how to answer that.

He looks at Connie, sitting exotically in the corner of his room, her silk-clad legs crossed and so utterly wrong in all this – like an orchid in a butcher’s shop. No, not an orchid, she has the vulnerability of jasmine, yes that, so briefly blazing, heralding a softer, lovelier time before curling up. But would she wither like the rest of them? Trap him, then change? Where is the shrew in her, the nag? They all have that. Mel doesn’t want to be broken again. Financially drained and harangued along with it. He’s been like a dog licking its wounds for so long, called in now to the warmth. Yet he doesn’t quite trust it. Look at Connie now, idly flitting her beautifully manicured nails along his books as if she can’t quite believe his type would read, let alone all this; surely it’s wall-to-wall football, the
Sun
and endless
Corrie
with his lot.

So many books on bowed bookshelves, hardbacks stripped of their jackets, paperbacks almost oily with the reading and rereading. Connie thinks of the grand rise of bookshelves at home. They hired a professional book buyer to stock the shelves, to convey the image of exquisite taste. Her side of the fireplace: Booker winners, literary fiction, a lot from India; his: histories, biography, the odd frivolity about carp or the genesis of fat. Handsome hardbacks, first editions, often signed, some rarities but Connie can’t remember what. She wasn’t allowed to slip in her own scuffed paperbacks, all her dog-eared women, her passions from youth, her secret pillow books. Here, in this humbly neat little room Camus and Hardy jostle with Kafka and James; other worlds, other lives. Amis senior, Joyce, McEwan, Le Carré, Rushdie, McCarthy, Doyle and a shock of women. Mansfield. Austen. Byatt. O’Brien. Woolf, goodness, so much of that. Connie slips out
To the Lighthouse
and opens it.
NEVER READ THIS AGAIN
, shouts stern ink in horror, right across the frontispiece, from some unknown reader. She whoops a laugh. Holds up the page.

‘I found it at an Oxfam in Bath. Couldn’t resist it with a message like that. Just had to read it. It’s the naughty little boy in me. Always doing what I’m told not to.’

‘But why Woolf? And there’s so much of her.’

Mel shrugs. ‘I read anything. She tells me what women think. She tells me the truth. It’s so hard to get it out of you lot. Have
you
read her?’

‘No.’

‘You should. All women should.’

Lara has said that to her too. Connie makes a mental note. ‘Belly to belly, don’t you love that?’ she tries again, nudging the book back then changing her mind and slipping it into her jacket pocket.

Mel looks at her. The way she just filched his book, without asking, that princessy sense of entitlement. Connie looks down on him, of course; he’s her amusement, diversion, a bit of rough. An uneducated, working-class white boy: the most maligned and disadvantaged of the lot. From Stoke, a northern city that the steelworks and coalmines clothed triumphantly in a sooty black; the grime throughout his childhood settled on everything: windows, washing, his mother’s face, his father’s lungs. He went to a bog-standard comprehensive and didn’t even finish it; Connie went independent, a West Country boarding school, it’s in her voice and her grace. She followed it with a respectable second in English Lit and he’s not even sure what that means, has never got his head around the way unis work along with those secret codes of pronunciation – Cholmondeley, Cadogan, Magdalen, Fettes – that all of them seem to know about, shutting out the rest and he always has to ask, embarrassing himself. It infuriates him that in this country, still, your prospects in life are determined by birth; such a vicious, Third World form of inequality. It festers, just to think about it. What would Connie Carven know about the mystery of powerlessness? If you’ve not been raised in disadvantage how could you possibly understand?

‘Did you know that richer, thicker kids will always end up getting further ahead in these parts than brighter, poorer kids?’

‘Sorry?’

Connie shakes her head, scrabbling with where Mel’s coming from. Is it a slight … an insult … on her … Cliff? Surely not. She feels like a swimmer suddenly caught in a soft, insistent rip.

‘What are you saying?’

Mel sighs, says nothing more, it’s no use trying to explain to the likes of her what enrages him about this garden and its shareholders and their gilded offspring in their grey and red coats. He sees it, hears it all the time from those not a part of this oblivious set. What would she know of the poison of envy? He has a young stepdaughter and how it used to rile his wife – that her child was destined for the local primary, her life marked out from that point and it would take an extraordinary spirit in someone so young to haul themselves above it. Nowhere in Notting Hill can Mel see the bracing rigour of a meritocracy. The hugely expensive nursery nearby – where Connie’s son would surely be sent – is a feeder for Prince William’s old pre-prep which is a conveyor belt into feeders for Eton and Westminster which are well-worn paths to Oxbridge and the upper echelons of British politics. So. The shaping of the nation’s elite begins at three. Of course.

Does Connie get that? Could she possibly? That glittery prospects are bought? Does she notice it, care? He thinks not. UK politicians are being drawn from an increasingly narrow pool, of course, yet what would she care; right now the Prime Minister, his deputy and Chancellor all went to schools with fees substantially higher than Mel’s wage. The bruise of inequality enrages Mel, the stain on this world no matter how bright you are. Connie, poor lost soul that she is, would have no idea of the depth of the rage around her, the infuriating sense of impotence, and there’s no use trying to explain it.

She looks at Mel now, sitting in his armchair, so knotted all of a sudden, so sullen and uncommunicative. Her eyes narrow like a cat’s. She feels so very apart from him tonight, vexingly, like they’re standing on opposite river banks with a rush of water roaring between them and can’t hear each other, will never be able to hear each other. How can this possibly work? She stands, chest tight. This is ridiculous. The gulf too great. Leaves with scarcely a goodbye, the book still in her pocket.

Which Mel notes.

We do not know our own souls, let alone the souls of others. Human beings do not go hand in hand the whole stretch of the way. There is a virgin forest in each; a snowfield where even the print of birds’ feet is unknown. Here we go alone, and like it better so. Always to have sympathy, always to be accompanied, always to be understood would be intolerable

Shopping is Connie’s drug. She has to control its dosage and then the urge overtakes her and if she sees something she must have, but it is not in her size, she will rise magnificent and track it down with the thoroughness of a detective on the scent. The sweetness of a purchase, the vast sweetness; within the tumult of loveliness that is Notting Hill, Marylebone, Bond Street, Westfield Shepherd’s Bush. She’ll do High Street as much as high end, she’ll do anything. Her walk-in wardrobe brims, she forgets what she has and often ends up wearing the same favoured thing, day after day. No matter. Her appetite has her wolfishly prowling not just shops for fresh stock but websites. Interrupted by Cliff e-mailing obscene photos of women being penetrated by men with enormous cocks, often black, begging her teasingly for ‘play’, informing her it’s ‘what she really wants’, reeling her in. She looks, still looks, shuts her eyes on it.

Shopping, for Connie, is a deeply alone pursuit. She could not bear for anyone else to witness her greed, her thrill, her sharkish intent. Spying something she likes, she’ll often linger slow by something else, as if to gather herself, calm her heartbeat, for the thrill of the kill. Alone she will secrete the bags home, alone tumble the purchases upon her bed, alone dress up for another viewing then disperse into the cupboards and drawers, forget …

She always looks effortless. It takes hours to perfect.

Mel would be revolted, by all of it.

To love makes one solitary

Connie has not been into the garden for days and days and then with a rush she is there, in an afternoon of roaring light and air that is thinning with a coming summer; she can no longer hold herself back. She hears the catch of his pale breath as she comes upon him. Under her thin coat of red dots she is naked but for silken black panties, a wisp of them.

‘It’s too early …’ – he backs back – ‘people are about.’

‘I don’t care.’ She is flinging aside his shovel and hauling him into the shed, the neck of his T-shirt in her hungry fist. ‘I do. not. care. All right?’

‘All right.’ Laughing, giving in.

He is pleased to see her, so pleased, it is a deepening; this lively little sprig of jasmine is vining his life; taking over his calm, his thoughts, his retreat into solitude, his flinty remoteness. Quick, his hands break the band of her thong and push it aside, quick, his fingers slip into both holes, bringing Connie to pleasure with a sure touch, oiling her up until she collapses in on herself, again, and again, and again, and then he encircles her trembling and just holds, and holds, his hand protective over her secret places. A still quiet. No talk, of course, never that straight afterwards, he knows she does not want the crash of that, is learning her fast.

Her flinching quietens. ‘Thank you for coming back,’ he whispers finally, hoarse.

Connie just lies there, encircled by him, and the tears slowly run from her eyes. Crying, snotting, all phlegm and fluid; for she is loosened, completely, released. Mel does nothing, just wraps her in the encompassing peace of his body. All is still, humble, quiet. It is the stillness of a man found, as he holds her, he knows it. No matter how much he tries to resist.

The passion for him moves in Connie’s belly once again, she resists it as far as she can, must get back, Cliff is at home this evening, she can’t. But quick. She stirs him and he responds, his touch so much more competitive and creative than Cliff’s has ever been. There is no complacency, no taking for granted, he wants his stroking, licking, caressing, cherishing to be remembered. It’s as if he wants to wipe all her husband’s ways like a whiteboard freshened; to stamp her skin with the permanence of his own stroke. He flips her, wants something else. Her buttocks spread wide, a cool breath, a nudging, a trembling, a reticence, into her arse, gently, probing, so careful not to hurt.