I Take You Read online

  ‘Fucking vermin,’ Cliff snaps. ‘They should all be trapped and burnt. I’d get the gardener to do it – and watch.’

  ‘Oh.’ The charming side of her husband that no one but Connie ever sees.

  They push on, the chair climbing slowly in its unwilling way. The earth is yielding to it too much, clogging up its wheels. The chair suddenly stops.

  ‘Blast this wretched thing.’

  ‘Let me push.’

  ‘No,’ Cliff says coldly. ‘I didn’t buy it for that.’

  Connie tries, can’t help it.

  ‘Get the fuck off it.’

  All the anger in him, from the other day, in his office, all the anger from the past twelve months. Without a word Connie tries to shove the contraption clear, to get him started again. It’s surprisingly hard. Cliff hits back at her with all his might, hits her away from his chair, away from his life. ‘You are pathetic, useless. You can’t even listen, can you, you fucking cunt?’

  Connie is very, very calm. ‘I saw the gardener over there.’ Her voice is neutral, her face tight. ‘In the trees. The wild bit. Perhaps he can help.’

  ‘Well, go and fucking well get him.’

  Cliff hits the wheels in frustration. At himself, his wife, his spectacle of a life. ‘If only I could get out and have a look at this fucking cunt of a thing myself.’

  Connie strides off and shouts into the trees, ‘Hello? Mel? Can you come and help us, please?’ Not a trace of anything in her voice.

  Obediently he comes, shovel loose in hand. Face blank, she business-like. ‘Do you know anything about wheelchairs?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Could you just see if anything’s stuck in the wheels, or broken perhaps?’

  Mel drops the shovel. Leans down on the ground. Connie catches a glimpse of his back where his T-shirt rides up, the stretch of golden skin. Her thighs clench.

  ‘Get your hands in there, come on, man, is there anything underneath, anything caught?’ Cliff’s voice utterly superior, admonishing, cold. ‘You’re not afraid of a bit of muck, are you?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  Mel lies flat on his stomach, trying to work out the mechanism underneath, tinkering, poking, prodding. His hands, shorts, are soon streaked with grass stains and black. But he’s done something right. The motor coughs, splutters into life.

  ‘I’ll need some help.’

  Mel looks directly at her, into her, grins a secret grin. Cliff doesn’t catch it. And before he can protest Connie is behind the chair, firm against Mel, they are pushing in tandem, muscle against muscle, sinew against sinew, locked together and complicit and triumphant. It’s hard work. The slope is punishing, the machine coughing and protesting.

  ‘Leave me alone!’ Cliff snaps. ‘I can do it now.’

  Immediately they fall back and watch, shoulder to shoulder. Immediately the chair looks vulnerable, it veers off, starts to tip and Mel rushes up and catches it just in time. No thanks from Cliff, just an exasperated sigh as once again he struggles with the buttons and knobs; the alpha man from the alpha world, humiliated. Turning it on and off, trying to churn it forward with a sheer raging will that is impotent. ‘You’ll rip her insides out if you keep doing that,’ Mel remarks softly.

  ‘Oh, fuck off.’

  The chair firms again and lurches off the grass, rumbles across the gravel.

  ‘You see, she’s doing it!’

  Then he catches Mel’s face behind him. ‘Are you helping it? Are you?’

  ‘It won’t do it by itself, sir. It’s shot.’

  ‘Fuck off. I’ve just paid a hell of a lot of money for this.’

  Without another word the gardener picks up his shovel and strides off. The chair stops immediately, there’s a sickening grate of knobs, nothing works.

  ‘Mel? Mel!’ Cliff barks.

  The gardener strides to him. Without a word drops to the ground. Is on his back now, tinkering with something else. ‘Start it up,’ he commands finally, in an utterly dead voice Connie has never heard before. It works, half-hearted, with Mel and Connie’s help pushing. A whirring, across the gravel at last, both machine and man tackling the job and punishingly hard work for the lot of them. Then the chair stops as if that’s it, for good.

  ‘Well, it’s obvious I’m at everyone’s fucking mercy.’

  Jagged silence.

  ‘You’ll have to get back into the house, Clifford,’ Connie says.

  ‘Well?’ He looks at Mel. ‘Can you bear it?’

  His superior tone. His coldness. A question and a command. Mel is expressionless. Without another word he hauls up the huge bulk of Clifford in a fireman’s lift and carries him into the house in utter silence. Connie looks at the strange intimacy of it; her husband silent, humiliated, her lover’s face white with effort for Cliff is a big man, six foot four. Mel’s hands are trembling towards the end with the vast strain of it. Connie can’t bear it. ‘Over there, quick, that armchair by the door,’ and Cliff is dumped into it as if Mel can’t do this a step longer. He is paler than Connie has ever seen him, and remote, absent. He stands back, quiet, waiting for whatever is next.

  His frailness, against the big bulk of her husband. His grace, his litheness, his vulnerability. Connie stares at him as if she has never seen it before. The straining muscles, every one of them put to work; the beauty of him within the thick of hard labour. The civil stoicism amid such astonishing incivility. The determination not to give up. It makes Connie want to rush up to Mel, hold him; she cannot. All her soul goes out to him and he is so silent, removed, out of reach in her house, in front of her husband, in this vast shell of a place. So utterly lost to her in this moment as he waits for something, anything, an apology, a thank you.

  Nothing comes.

  Of course. ‘Thank you, thank you so much,’ Connie gushes to him while Clifford is scrabbling to arrange himself, scrabbling out his mobile phone, stabbing the number of the wheelchair company to roar his complaint and focused entirely on that, on himself.

  ‘I’ll see you out,’ Connie says quietly and by the door lifts Mel’s trembling hand, once, in a courtly gesture of a kiss. Drops it swift. ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispers and he smiles his thanks, deep into her, smiles his understanding at last as Cliff shouts oblivious down his phone. They feel so together, in that moment, more than they ever have before, united against this man and this world and then Mel is gone back, back, to his work.

  Connie had once dreamed of a friendship between these two men, a child raised together, an odd threesome full of secrets but something that worked. She knows now it could never be; neither man would countenance it. Oil and water, their hostility instinctive and immense. Neither respects the other.

  Connie hates Cliff. Yes, hates him, from this afternoon, she has suddenly realized it. The depth of her feeling has not taken shape until this incident and what a freeing thing it is, exhilarating, enervating, to finally admit it to herself. There is no guilt. Now I hate him I shall never be able to go on living with him, she thinks. He’s a dead fish of a man, dead inside, and suddenly she knows she wants nothing to do with it: it’s no use trying to hold onto her life in this place.

  48

  To upset everything every three or four years is my notion of a happy life

  It is dark, Connie has to get out, has to flee the claustrophobic house. She enters the garden, its wild scary depths in the black, her long hair blowing about. The wind roars in the trees like the heft of a great soul passing; all is hostile, telling those caught within it to get away, get out. The glow of Mel’s cottage is like a beacon in the black. Connie bangs loud on his door, calls his name. Pulls him from it, licks the tip of her tongue down his forearm.

  ‘Out here?’

  ‘Yes. Now.’

  Why is it with Connie that only when she’s doing something bad or irregular or wrong does that feeling of absolute power, and control, come shooting out with a whoop?

  ‘You wild sweet thing, you!’

  Out, out, running across
open land, hand in hand, houses saucering the wide space. Giggly, making it to the sandpit. Needing risk, needing ridiculousness, Connie cannot explain it, she just needs to crack open her life, upset the apple-cart – she’s never upset anything in her life! In the roguish wind she’s pulling Mel towards the earth, scattering her Roger Viviers, her Marni cardigan, peeling everything off.

  It doesn’t work. Mel grates, he cannot come, it’s all wrong; Connie’s thinking of Cliff, her future with him, her new hate; Mel is withdrawing, his spirit leaving her, he can feel the vast sigh of it.

  ‘Well, that was no good,’ he says. ‘No good at all. You weren’t there and neither was I.’ He falls back. ‘At least, I suppose, you aren’t like my good lady wife. Dead inside. And if you forced her into it she’d just grind her teeth and send out waves of revulsion, hate.’

  ‘How vile. You poor thing.’

  ‘I need a woman who wants me, wants it.’

  Connie giggles a kiss, draws Mel to her, slings her legs about him trapping him tight. ‘There are lots of women like her. But not me, mister, not me!’ She thinks of her friends, more than a few, who’ve never been warmed through by a man; would prefer not to do it at all but must, of course must; she thinks of all the vast dishonesty and pretence. And for years that was her.

  ‘Thank God you’re not like that shrew of a thing, thank God. I thought they all were. I need you, Connie.’

  ‘Oh, you poor, scarred thing, you.’ She kisses him between the eyes in a vast soothing. Pulls back. ‘But do you honestly think a man and a woman should be together? Really? Truly?’

  ‘For me, it feels like it’s the core to my life.’ Very quiet, very serious. ‘You reminded me of that. You woke me up.’

  Connie props up on her elbow and sighs. ‘Oh, we’re just a couple of battered old warriors, aren’t we? You with your teeth-grinding wife, me with Cliff.’

  Mel puts his arms behind his head. ‘He’s got no balls, that one.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, when a man’s got none of the earth in him, the wild streak, you say he’s got no balls. When he’s sort of tamed, removed, civilized beyond belief. And nasty with it. It’s not a pleasant combination, and a lot of men have it.’

  ‘And you’re not tamed, mister?’

  ‘No. Not quite! He’s cold-hearted, Con.’ Mel shivers. ‘As for me, I’m all for a warm heart, for being warm-hearted in love, living with a warm heart, fucking with it. Loving your cunt, cunt, lovely cunt with it! Cherishing the whole damned lot of it.’ He holds her close, places his hand between her legs in a kind of benediction, strokes, enters with a soft finger, her stomach dips. ‘Can you feel it? Can you? The warmth?’

  ‘Yes, yes, and I love you for that! Every single bit of you,’ and Connie nestles up to him, feeling small and enfolded as they lie there under a vast bedspread of rare London stars. Mel kisses her. He’s never been completely keen on mouth kisses, it’s a peculiarity of his past, but not Connie’s, oh no. She’s taught him that the kiss can be the most intimate, transgressive act of the lot, if done right; that you can brush each other’s souls in the touch.

  ‘Let’s be together.’ He pulls away suddenly, speaking with the solemnity of ceremony. ‘What do you say? You and me. Let’s try it. Are we mad? We’re mad.’

  ‘Really?’ Connie’s eyes prick with tears. ‘You can’t mean it?’

  ‘I’ll get a divorce. Get clear. I hate all these things, courts, judges … but I’ll do it. For you. To lure you out.’

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘All this.’ He looks about him, shakes his head.

  Connie’s eyes fill, giddy with release and relief; with a firm footing from this point. She starts babbling, scarcely believing, she will have no money, Cliff won’t give her any and, besides, she wouldn’t take it, she’s not that type, she has a little in the bank, yes, a year’s worth perhaps, and some jewellery, she could sell it, she’ll do that, doesn’t know how much she’ll get but she’ll make it work, all of it, yes yes! Then she stops abrupt: ‘You’re laughing at me.’

  Mel looks at her, straight into her. ‘I don’t laugh at you. Ever. It’s the one thing I do not do.’

  ‘I often think you laugh at me, like you can’t quite believe it. Believe me.’

  ‘Oh, I used to think you were just a bit of old wonderclout, before I knew you. I used to see you in the garden. You were noted, believe me, madam, from the moment I began this job. The crippled banker’s wife, too young for all this. With the sad eyes that wanted something else but the husband never noticed, of course.’

  ‘Uh-uh. Spool back. A bit of wonder-what?’

  ‘Wonderclout. It means something showy but worthless. But no, oh no, you are quite something else. I know that now.’ He holds his hand in reverence over Connie’s heart. ‘You have courage, and wildness, and goodness, and I never would have guessed. But I can see it now, all of it. I honestly didn’t think anyone like you was left. I was so … flinched.’

  Connie’s heart is flung wide, wide open into the restless dark.

  49

  Arrange whatever pieces come your way

  The clarion call of summer, Connie can feel it in the lovely lightness of the air. Cliff has decided upon their annual holiday. The Ionika, his newly finished beast of a super-yacht, for six weeks. They will sail the Caribbean. His family will join them from Connecticut. Connie feels the familiar choke of entrapment as he talks; always one’s life arranged for one, always the wheels set in motion by someone else and it feels like it was ever thus.

  But last night …

  In the cold light of day she can scarcely believe what transpired. Did Mel really mean it? Can it actually work? Is she fooling herself? She’ll sell some jewellery and that will make it fine, all fine, of course. Hello? What planet is she on?

  Cliff is talking about how many cooks they’ll need to hire for the yacht. Two? Three? They’re driving through the suburbs to get to the outer reaches of London, a client’s lunch. They are driving through a place she’s never been before. What is next in her life? Connie so often feels there is no next, it’s been such a familiar subtext to her adulthood. She stares out the window in the stalling traffic. It is as if dismalness, greyness, scruffiness, defeat have soaked through everything. The shops, the pavements, the pebbledash houses, net curtains, the clusters of satellite dishes: not a scrap of beauty in sight. A life with utterly no beauty in it … she couldn’t imagine it. Living among it. How pressed down they must all feel, here, in a place like this. What on earth do they think of something like Kensington Palace Gardens, Cheyne Walk, the grand sweep of Lansdowne Crescent? The cherry blossoms in spring, shedding their petals like paper snow and how she loves to twirl in it; the twinkly Christmas trees lining the lampposts of Portobello on crisp December nights. Would they ever venture into her world? From that, to this.

  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, s
truggling 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.