I Take You (7 page)

Connie looks back at her man, his face full to the feeble sunlight heralding spring, his useless ankles vulnerably thin as they poke from his Ralph Lauren corduroy. She knows the Brits always looked at her American as someone to be laughed at and admired and feared in equal measure. His energy was the future. His grasp, boldness, affront. The way he showed off his excessive wealth, revelled in it, laughing at the Brits with their scruffy, faux modesty, their battered old cars and couches covered in dog hairs and sense of detached quiet and bewilderment (which was anything but, he saw right through it). Cliff would drop fifty thousand on alcohol at a restaurant without thinking anything of it; would fly out planeloads of partygoers to the south of France and hire an entire village for it. Connie, ever faithfully beside him, grew quickly addicted to this way of living – loved the sparkly, unthinking splash of it.

Cliff would never be one of them, all the Brits around them knew it; it was amusing and threatening at once. He never bothered to weave himself into the rhythms of their world, his allegiance had always been to his kind. Connie was so attracted to his otherness at the start, the difference of his energy, power, his booming voice and confidence; the animal dynamism so naked and thrilling and blunt.

He’s someone else, now, with his dead ankles. She cannot abandon it.

Arrange whatever pieces come your way

Connie’s father gets the train up from Cornwall, where he lives with her mother in genteel retirement in a manor house on a cliff by the sea. Over brunch in the Electric Club he strokes his youngest daughter behind the earlobe, just as he always has. She’s getting thin, too thin. He’s a former diplomat, a great walrus of a man of huge appetites and a roaring laugh, endlessly astounded that he sired such a graceful slip of a thing so late in life. Yet he’s worried now that his princess, his Neesie, is becoming a demi-vierge, a half-virgin, and tells her so.

‘Oh, Daddy!’ Connie scoffs. ‘I’m fine. Honestly.’

‘The world is supposed to be crowded with possibilities, but they narrow down to pretty few in most people’s experience. I worry for you, I really do.’

Connie looks out through the curtain of chains to scruffy Portobello Road below them, bustling with its vegetable carts and impatient cars, its idling tourists, pushchairs, bicycles. Possibilities in life? Hers. Now. None.

‘My life is very full, Daddy. Cliff needs a lot of help.’

‘Do you ever think about children, Neesie?’

‘What do you mean?’ she snaps.

‘Having them. You’re so young, you’ve got your whole life ahead of you. It’s a …’

‘What, Dad?’

‘Waste. Your slick Yank has no use for you at all now, as far as I can see. He’s entirely wrapped up in himself. Always has been. Now more than ever. You’re wasting away, child. So pale, thin, and you were such a bonny thing once. What has he done to you?’

Connie’s nostrils flare in annoyance, as they always have, since she was a child, when her father presumes too much.

‘We’re happy, Dad. As we are. I’m his wife and I have a job to do. A very important one. Now more than ever. Only I can help him, only me. I’ve become crucial to him in a way that’s impossible to explain.’ End of conversation.

‘Oh, love,’ says her father, and calls for the bill, which she snatches up, and he lets her, as they always do. They walk out arm in arm, laughing despite themselves, too fond of each other for anything else.

They went in and out of each other’s minds without any effort

‘It’s time, my love, to play.’ The pen whispering Connie awake, signalling a falling, a submitting, a surrendering to the trance that will lead to goodness knows what.

‘Yes.’

‘Tomorrow?’

‘Yes. Quick. Please.’

Cliff senses a new restlessness in his wife. A jittery, unvoiced agitation. It needs addressing. He has been neglectful in that department, is brought up sharp. Of course it’s time. It’s been too long. As for Connie, she needs to be needed again, needs purpose. Fast.

That afternoon, after the car has seen her father off to Paddington Station, she is prepared. The sleepers are gently worked through their tiny holes. The padlock is threaded through. Clicked shut by Cliff. She moans. Toys with the object’s weight, its resistance. The thought of it. Closes her legs on it. Expectation blazing under skin.

‘The release …’ he murmurs, smiling secrets into her eyes. ‘For me, for you, for us.’

Thrumming, all evening; exquisitely tuned.

To let oneself be carried on passively is unthinkable

The red skirt with the fringe, the six-inch Louboutins, no knickers. All according to plan.

The stranger has arrived. The intercom rings.

Papers are needed; Connie takes the bundle in her arms. Deep breath. Rolling her muscles upon her secret. Ready. She opens the office door, softly. Cliff, expectant, sitting at his desk that was Napolean Bonaparte’s once and is methodically neat. A man, his back to her, a stiff white collar of a very expensive shirt, a nape. In the past she has fallen in love with a mere nape of a neck, the bend of a wrist, the kink of a hip, it is all it has taken and she is gone. Once.

Connie walks straight up to her husband’s desk, leans over – and hands the papers across.

Cliff’s astonished face.

‘Can’t,’ she mouths, wincing, retreating.

The nape is wrong, the moment, the intimacy that should be a husband’s and no one else’s, the whole confused lot of it. The spell of enchantment is snapped.

Connie leaves without looking at the stranger’s face. Churning. Cliff cannot control such a privacy, he can’t choose it, can’t. Her mind has taken over, it has triumphed; her body is in retreat. In fraught air she backs back. Lost.

Cliff too, bewildered, but in a meeting stuck. ‘I – where was I?’ He smiles benignly to his guest.

When people are happy they have a reserve upon which to draw, whereas she was like a wheel without a tyre

Connie walks up the grand staircase, slowly, carefully. She feels like a pane of glass with a thousand hairline cracks: one push will shatter her. She will not be broken, she will not. Her tread is so careful, contained, her back stiff. Onward she walks, onward.

To her room, its windows slammed shut by cleaners barked at by Cliff to keep in the house’s heat. Connie flings the panes wide and the cold rushes in and she collapses, belly down, on her bed. She remains there for the rest of the day and deep into the night. Her vocation of serving – submission – is not enough. No. Is meant to be enough. That is her role, as wife.

Everyone has a universal desire to be needed. How does Cliff need her? As his perversion, plaything, pet. That’s it. How much pleasure will she give the others of his choosing? How far will she go? For in the upended way of their world that is the proof of her love for him now: how voluminously she will submit. How removed she is from that girl he first knew. The easy blusher, in the Peter Pan collars and knee-length skirts. She stares at her Louboutins kicked off by her bed, their ridiculously high heels that bind her to her servitude. What woman would ever design a constraint, a buckling, an absurdity, as cruel as those?

And how often has she readily stepped into them.

A visible symbol of her servitude, compliance, decadence. The girl from Cornwall with the beautiful face, bound by all this. Her walk-in wardrobes, summer and winter, her jewellery boxes, her private safe. How she has always loved her shoes and her clothes; the quickening at a singular vintage dress that fits, the Edwardian necklace, the deco cuff, the Stephen Jones hat – grabbed! – and so often now. The thrill of which has never passed. Complicit, in all of it.

Rain comes. The windows stay wide. Usually Connie feels cocooned within that sound but tonight she feels pummelled by it. The wind is high, haranguing her as if pushing her away, far away, to somewhere else. Gradually it all clears, the sky is orange as it always is, the light pollution scattering a proper, rich, weighty dark; the dark of the land, the untrammelled earth. Water drips from the eaves, endlessly drips, deep into the early hours; it feels like her life leaking away, in wakefulness and worry. The whole house of cards has come tumbling down, just like that; she has lost the sexual urge, just like that, with Cliff, with any man.

He does not come, of course, he would not. She has humiliated him, stepped out of order, done what he did not want. And meanwhile she has surfaced into something else.

A new land, a strange new life, not sure what. No ballast to it, that’s all she knows.

He thought her beautiful, believed her impeccably wise; dreamed of her, wrote poems to her, which, ignoring the subject, she corrected in red ink …

‘Would it perhaps be a good thing if you had a child by another man? Con? What do you think?’

Dinner, the next night. Cliff thinking aloud through thick silence, trying to ensnare his wife with talk, to work out this new person; and there is Connie, all changed, flinched, hearing him as if from afar, as though through an old diving helmet, a weight stifling, airless, wrong.