I Take You

  Nikki Gemmell

  I TAKE YOU

  FOURTH ESTATE • London

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Note

  Anonymity: An Essay

  About the Author

  By the Same Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1

  Each has her past shut in her like the leaves of a book known to her by heart, and her friends can only read the title

  Four a.m. The prowling hour. The wakefulness comes into Connie like a blade flicked open, for ours is essentially a fearful age and she is a child of it. All her choices in adult life have been dictated by fear and now, in the early hours, it curdles.

  Fear of entrapment. Of being found out. Of turning into one of those women for whom indecision has become a vocation, of a silent slipping into that. Of emotional sledging, that she is becoming less resilient, not more, as she sails beyond youth. Of softening into fat, of men who take note as if she’s ripe for a mugging, of life settling like concrete around her and judgement; of what people think of her, yes, that most of all. Women! How awful they can be.

  When does the unliving start? For a particular female of this particular age, it is incremental. For Connie – ensconced in her five-storey villa in London’s Notting Hill that was once splashed creamily across the pages of Architectural Digest – it has begun.

  2

  The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages

  But there is one small pocket of Connie’s life where there is no fear.

  Quite the opposite, in fact.

  None of the people in her regular world of kick-boxing with her private trainer in Kensington Gardens, of ladies lunching around the communal table at Ottolenghi and of shop scouring, endlessly, on Westbourne Grove, knows of this place. In this one tiny corner of her existence all the blushing is left behind; she is unbound. Connie blooms in this world, into someone else entirely. It is a place that is open with possibility, with the potency of power, and she has so little of that in her regular life. It bequeaths her little moments of vividness that have become like scooping a hand into cool, clear creek water in summer’s heat.

  3

  Blame it or praise it, there is no denying the wild horse in us

  Cliff has called. He has asked Connie to be ready in two hours. He is taking this late afternoon off – rare in the silky world of a Mayfair hedge fund manager – and a car will pick her up. Her stomach rolls in anticipation, as he speaks, it rolls as if a steamroller is gently travelling over it. The tugging, deep in her belly, the wet; at the whispered command, it has been a long time, too long, since this.

  ‘Prepare yourself.’

  Connie waits for the car on the Lockheed chaise longue – made entirely of riveted aluminium – by its tall window in a mewly winter light. She loves how the metal of her coveted design piece looks like a giant goblet of mercury, like something else entirely; thrills at the sternness of it against her flesh. Its arresting cold. She is shaved, perfumed; this is all necessary now. To her, and to Cliff, dear Cliff, to whom she has been married for four years and with him for five before it.

  Connie is dressed well. Always, she is dressed well. A woman who has the instinctive touch of looking impeccably ‘right’, on every occasion; conservative, with a flick of cool. Today, it is the shortened Chanel skirt of grey bouclé with veins of red through it. The iron-grey, silk Chloé blouse that slips like water from Connie’s hands and hangs below the jacket cuffs with something of the loucheness of the seventies to it; a touch of Bianca Jagger in her prime. The black lace Rigby and Peller bra, fitted by the Queen’s fitters. Wolford stockings. No knickers. Shoes, vintage McQueen’s, that look like the snout of a bull terrier. Fearsome, hobbling, but Connie has mastered them; everything in her rarefied life appears gilded, effortless.

  She must be entirely shaved, of course. ‘I need you bare,’ Cliff has whispered, his voice dropping an octave as Connie squeezes her thighs together, tight, so tight, upon the thought. Bare for whom? What?

  The car, sleek and panther black, purrs to a stop outside their villa which backs onto one of Notting Hill’s finest communal gardens, an expanse of several hidden acres now silent with snow on this January afternoon. A pristine, waiting brittleness. It has been a particularly long winter. One pair of footprints, heavy workman’s boots, smear the glary expanse of the great lawn like the restless prowl of a lone wolf; but no child plays, no adult wanders. The sky is pale, almost white. Everything waits. But for what …?

  The lady of the house picks her way carefully down the icy marble steps. She smiles her too wide, too unEnglish smile at Lara Deniston-Dickson, her neighbour, who is nudging recalcitrant window boxes into spring preparation after winter’s clench; checking on the wilted cyclamens that withstand so much. Lara is one of the few Brits left on this square. Her dilapidated house is crammed with fabulous but shabby heirlooms, oak dressers and chairs, a dining table piled with books, washstands, a zebra rug, ancestral portraits, a Modigliani from Granny, several pianos and a lot of dust – the servants have long gone, as has the heat. It is one of the few houses left like this on the square as the bankers have sharked in, mainly from foreign countries, everyone, it seems, but the Russians because this is still not Belgravia, still a bit too ragged, edgy, loose for that lot. Lara has a grand disdain for this new world that has gone into lockdown, barricading the riff-raff out. Even her husband, dear Rupert, a man of some standing, thank you very much, yet treated like a tramp, asked by the new committee if he ‘owned’ – if he deserved a key to this very garden – merely because he was old and a touch scruffy with it. Oh yes, Lara has a disdain for these shiny, refulgent newcomers with their babies in cashmere and men in their too-new Barbour coats, all of them; except for the poor, lost girl next door with her dazzle of a smile that illuminates her face as if she is lit from within, but she doesn’t see it enough.

  She does now. ‘Going out?’ The older woman smiles in approval, for she likes to see her sweet slip of a neighbour
getting some fresh air, cheeks flushed; bound as she is to her workaholic husband and his precise demands. Connie knows little of his previous life, she has told Lara that.

  ‘I have no idea where,’ Connie laughs. ‘Do you? No, I didn’t think so. It’s a complete surprise. He adores them. To a quite ridiculous extent.’ She is talking of her husband as if he is a little boy.

  ‘He’s a keeper, that one.’ Lara nods, smiling, a woman who has lived through three marriages and four children. ‘A good marriage is fed with kindness, of course, but surprise, the gift of it – now that is the hidden ingredient. To sparkle things up now and then. Absolutely necessary in my book.’

  ‘Oh yes.’ Connie waves a pale hand nonchalantly, a hand manicured three times a week, upon which sits a single ruby within a protective ring of diamonds that once encircled the finger of Wallis Simpson. ‘Oh yes,’ she repeats, stepping into the warmth of the idling car and staring into her husband’s eyes as he waits in the back seat, spinning in the deft fingers of his left hand his Mont Blanc Bohème Noir pen. The pen that has been everywhere, that has begun all this; with the words it wrote, with the secret world it sprang into life.

  4

  She had the perpetual sense, as she watched the taxicabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day

  The car pulls seamlessly away from the kerb. The windows are smoked to blankness. No one can see inside. Connie sits upright, legs delicately crossed at ankles, the worn crocodile of her vintage Mulberry handbag demure on her lap. She does not look at Cliff, she never looks at him, at the start, she can’t, she will stumble if she does. The spell cannot be broken; she must not let her head intrude, her rational thoughts; it is the only way these tumblings into something else can work. These episodes when she lets her body’s anima, the dark recesses of her mind, take over; when she trusts, completely trusts, because he has unlocked her into this.

  The car is driven through the jangly upper reaches of Ladbroke Grove – as opposed to the White Heights, what Cliff and Connie call their rarefied end of Notting Hill in a private joke – and takes a left at the end of it. Their cars never take a left. Connie still does not look at Cliff, she neither asks nor questions. She gazes out the window as she is transported further and further from the graciousness of her home, her tree-lined street. A new London entirely unpeels before her.

  A very different London – the real London, possibly – skinned before her eyes. A world of unremitting ugliness, scruffiness; not a blade of green in sight. The great press of its people, from all walks of life; everywhere but Britain, Connie thinks. It feels like these poor, watchful people are the stranded backwash, left high and dry upon a cowed, groaning, exhausted plot of earth. Connie’s from Cornwall, where the earth still sings, the great, beautiful bones of an ancient land and when she catches scenes like this it feels like the joyless future of this island, of the world; the crowded, jostling, built-over and unhappy future of the world as they know it. Feels like her tiny, lovely little Kensington and Chelsea is ring-fenced by the crushing, resentful, triumphant press of … this. The utter lack of any attempt at graciousness and wit and reach in this new England is startling, jarring, wrong; yet Connie feels like the only person in the world so thoroughly disturbed by it. These people need beauty too! Nowhere, here, is the London of her imagination that she moved into to gulp aged twenty-two.

  Fingers suddenly spider across Connie’s soft inner thigh. It is the whisper of an enquiry, tracing a finery, her names perhaps; to submit, to begin. It is the signal. She turns from the window. Obediently, beyond will, beyond thought, Connie unhooks her legs and parts them, just a touch. Sits upright, very still. Waits. The fingers gently, gently nudge up her skirt until it is bunched in a thick band around her waist. She is ready, as directed, with just a plain black suspender belt. No ribbon, no lace, the thrilling cold of the limousine’s leather seat pressing up onto her, into her. The driver’s eyes flick at hers. She catches them. It is a new driver. She holds his gaze, her face gives nothing away; he is trying not to look, he looks down, at her bareness splayed on the leather, he cannot help himself. Cliff’s fingers softly, gently, part her lips, as if for the driver’s benefit then circle, exploratory, her back passage then suddenly plunge in – she gasps, lurches forward – then his fingers find her other hole until she is hooked and now poised, exposed, on the crook of his hand as her own reaches down, unstoppably, as she spreads herself, unstoppably and exposes her clit wide and presses her forefinger down on it and moans. She shuts her eyes on the driver’s glance, on the greyness of the world outside, on the weighed-down people at their drab little bus stop and the Halal chicken shop and another right beside it as she grinds down unstoppably on the cool leather of the seat.

  ‘I want to inspect you,’ her husband whispers. ‘You have to be fully prepared. Nothing must be left to chance. Remove your skirt.’

  Connie obediently slides down the zipper and wriggles out of it. Loops the shirt ends up into the top of her bra, for maximum visibility, holds her hands obediently, waiting, across her breasts.

  The driver’s eyes. Cliff and her need others, now, need to elaborate; need to shift away relentlessly from sameness.

  ‘Come,’ her husband commands.

  Connie climbs across the wide interior to her husband’s seat.

  ‘Sit.’

  She straddles her husband, her back to the driver; she goes to kiss Cliff but veers to the left of his cheek at the last moment and hooks her chin on his shoulder. He lifts her body high. ‘Yes,’ he whispers, examining her cunt with his fat pen, parting her lips then running his fingers in luxurious strokes along the wetness then lifting up her hips so that her behind is fully exposed, high, so high, to the driver, and Cliff is parting her cheeks wide, wider now and she is like a baboon there, poised, with her ready arse. ‘Display yourself,’ Cliff whispers and she parts her cheeks with her own hands, flattening her belly and moaning and pushing out her cunt, as wide as she can for the driver, for her husband, for any camera that may be filming for she is now, entirely, someone else. Poised. For the next step, whatever it may be.

  ‘Your Maglite,’ her husband says to the driver in another voice entirely.

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Please.’

  The driver fumbles in the glove compartment to his left and hands a tiny, slim torch across. Cliff switches it on and runs the beam across Connie’s wideness then he turns the torch around, switches it off, and toys the blunt end at her anal opening. The shock of the cold, the thrill of it. She groans, starts to move under its questioning, the chill pushing soft against her resisting bud. Cliff works it and works it until Connie is tightening her muscles and coming in a spasm of wet and collapsing against his strong shoulder that’s like a sudden scaffold to her limpness.

  ‘Yes. She’s ready,’ Cliff smiles. ‘Proceed.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  The car revs yet does not lurch, never lurches, all is smooth and seamless and utterly correct.

  5

  The world wavered and quivered and threatened to burst into flames

  How far will you go? When do you stop? Have you stopped, have you shut down, did you ever start? Bow out, now, if you must. When is the spell broken so that the inhibition, the flinching, the admonition and retort come rushing back? Have you put this down yet? Once, Connie would have thought a woman could have died of shame but instead of which, the shame died. Just like that, so D. H. Lawrence wrote. Shame, which is fear. And judgement. And with the death of shame she was released. A regular, everyday woman, any woman, of demure and considered tastes; raised by an empowered mother to be an empowered woman and yet deep down she was plumed into transcendent life by this. How? Why? It doesn’t make sense, yet it seems like something deeply animal, biological, these moments of vividness when she surrenders to something quite disconnected from everything else in her life; baubles of otherness, oh yes. Surrenders her body, by relinquishing
her mind, such a delicate balancing act. And so Connie is released, for nights like this, to become someone else. Entranced. On the cusp of an unimaginable fate …

  The city peels away, the car drives on, out into open country and through villages bunkered down against the cold and they’re gone in a flash and then they’re bulleting along runnels of narrow, high-hedged green and then thick woods, on, on, through the waiting quiet. The snow-scrubbed day has absorbed all sound.

  The car suddenly, smoothly, pulls over into a small clearing. Without a word from either man. As if this has been done before. As if all is proceeding to plan. As if they are in some kind of strange, unspoken collusion. Connie jerks up her head, like a dog suddenly alert; lights are in front of them, but at a distance, high, wide; something momentous is close. She has no idea what. She trusts.