I Take You Read online

  ‘I said Don’t Practise ON ME.’

  ‘I KNOW I KNOW I KNOW.’

  ‘MY CUNT IS WET WITH FEAR.’

  The latter in the shared bathroom off the main bedroom that Connie hasn’t used since Cliff’s accident.

  On the stairs leading to her eyrie is the wiry delicacy of legs splayed, a plunged hand, a labia scurried. Reddened, raw. The titles: Self Growth, Thinking About It, and Those Who Suffer Love, a series of heels and ankles wide, as wide as they can be, in homage to Courbet’s L’Origine du Monde.

  Connie is drawn to Emin as she is drawn to Dickinson, Réage, Duras, Plath, for their vulnerability, authenticity, anarchy, courage, truth. Cliff just thinks she needs a fuck, quick smart. ‘That’ll fix her up.’

  15

  It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes makes its way to the surface

  Connie wakes late into a hard light. Pain, down below. Itch. Practically, how can this work? What is happening to us all? she wonders. All this brazen new openness and honesty, all this craven, spectator want? Public figures, A-list celebs, young royals: they’re all ending up at the Box at some point. Where does it go from here? The experimentation increasingly permeating the public sphere, the new nakedness, raw talk. The Brazilianed and Botoxed ladies of her book club have all read Fifty Shades and now discuss bondage and belts when once it was Proust and now this, her fresh little branding, yet it doesn’t feel so odd. The voracious devouring of these illicit texts feels revolutionary in terms of women’s reading; the dawn of a new age of … what? This new decadence, effulgence, feels like the tipping point of some sort, an inexorable slide into a waning like the Roman Empire’s demise and Connie wonders what on earth could follow it. A flinch into extreme conservatism, perhaps, a vast reining back?

  All she knows is that there is a body, a being, a confidence that dies as soon as light hits her high room and the real world intrudes. But those secret nights … oh, those nights.

  16

  I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in

  Eleven a.m. Saturday. Breakfast together, the yellow and black room at the back of the house. Cliff chewing loudly as he reads the FT, masticating his egg and toast, slurping down his coffee in a loud gulp. Connie cannot bear the sounds, he is oblivious. No one has ever pointed them out to him, she is sure. It is one of those moments of utter stasis between them when her future life comes hurtling towards her suddenly, a wall of acquiescence, stillness, rot.

  Cliff looks up as if he’s only just realized she’s there. Inclines his head. Engages. Reverses his wheelchair, a touch. Asks her to throw her silken kimono from Myla off one shoulder and come closer, right by him, to sit in the chair next to him, upright, one leg cocked: ‘Let’s see what that small fortune spent on yoga poses actually does for you, hmm?’

  Connie complies, winces, it hurts.

  He inspects, smiles a murmur, ‘Good good,’ snaps his paper for better viewing and returns to his reading. Connie relaxes her leg. ‘Play.’ Brusque, from behind the newsprint. ‘Cherish the family crest. Show me. I want to see. Hear.’

  Connie feels too stiff, raw. It hurts. She stops.

  Silence. Stillness. Her cage and she has constructed it, of course. With her obedience, her compliance, her truth. Cliff continues reading the paper, lost in his mergers. Connie now gazing out the window, thinking of Picasso, how he said that all women were goddesses or doormats and if they weren’t doormats at the start of the relationship then he’d do his level best to crack them into it. Herself? She’s never been any threat. It’s why his tight, moneyed family likes her, she knows that. One of those sweet ones who will not rock the boat; a pleaser, primed for a rubbing out; instinctively his family of strong women recognized it despite the slight niggle of a gold-digger, she can sense it; but she’s sure they’re like that with anyone who comes into their fold.

  ‘You will look after him, won’t you?’ enquired his mother, upfront, at the start. ‘Yes,’ Connie answered simply, ‘yes of course,’ even then. And she has ever since. No one’s ever been afraid of her cowardice, her compliance; they all take her to be the good wife. Look after him, of course, but what about herself? Who’ll look after her? She’s a girl, she’ll be fine, she can look after herself.

  ‘Where do we go from here?’ Connie suddenly asks into the morning quiet.

  Cliff puts down the paper. Wheels his chair close. Props her leg back sternly, then the other one, and brushes a touch, admiring his handiwork; his wife’s knuckles are white on the chair’s rim. He does not know this. He tells her he has a new client. His voice, signalling the start of the process. A young South American, from Argentina; not a talker, a possibility, there’s something cheeky and ready in him, her ‘type’. A pause. There’s a scenario … he’d like to try out. He toys with his new bauble buried between his wife’s legs. Her eyes are closed, giving nothing away. Cliff talks on. A business meeting here, at home. Not now, but when she’s healed, readied. He will ring for papers. His wife will volunteer to help, she is close, she knows where they are. She will enter his office, bundle in hand, wearing the shortest of her Chanel skirts, that red one, with the fringe, and her six-inch Louboutins. Then just as she hands them across the desk the papers will be dropped, the whole lot. She will bend, on all fours, and pick them up. Slowly. Searching. Her rump high and square to this stranger.

  His test.

  Which Cliff will watch.

  ‘No knickers.’ Connie nods, feeling the wave of complicity, the stirring, washing through her despite herself.

  ‘Of course. And most importantly – my lovely, lovely new trinket.’ He strokes it with his thumb.

  ‘Arse high, skirt riding up.’

  ‘Yes. I want to watch his face. See what happens next. Give you a room of your own, together. Watch what he does, what he attempts.’ He tugs slightly on the padlock, she gasps. ‘You’ll have the key. You’ll have had it all along. Under your tongue, yes. Pass it to him, please, lips to lips. I want to watch his astonishment. Him opening you. That moment of release. The trembling intimacy, the thrill, the freedom, all of it, I need to see it. What happens next … every orifice … you begging for it.’

  Connie’s suddenly shutting her legs down in one enormous ‘but’ and she’s not even sure why, she’s just stopped like a match suddenly snuffed. The moment’s gone. Just like that. They were in tandem and now they are not. As simple as that.

  Cliff doesn’t realize. All is stillness, suddenly, in the careful, ticking room which has the tall clock of his great-grandfather who went down on the Titanic, a hero of the first class. Connie looks out the window to the tall trees of the communal garden moving in the breeze, their black tracery scratching at a pale, white sky as if trying to tear it aside. Everything feels so different in the wan light of eleven o’clock. Damaged. Wrong. All that’s left for her now are bruised thighs and a dull ache. She feels suddenly skinned by her husband. Unshielded, cold, raw. Where does this all end up? Like sad little O – enslaved? Such a depleting journey for that poor, trammelled girl.

  And yet … and yet … the deliciousness.

  No.

  17

  You cannot find peace by avoiding life

  ‘Am I meant to wear this all the time?’

  The enchantment is gone, the spell broken. Connie wants it off.

  ‘Of course not.’ From behind the newspaper. ‘The sleepers have to be in for a month, six weeks, and then you can put in whatever you want. Studs if you like, I don’t know. Mmm, imagine that, Con? And the little padlock, well, that’s just for playtime. For when I say. When I want.’

  ‘Why do you want me to sleep with other men?’ The question she has asked again, and again, and again.

  The sigh. ‘It gives me pleasure. But more importantly, gives you pleasure.’ How dare he presume to know what I think, Connie muses. ‘You need it now. I’m very aware of that.’ He smiles, cold. ‘I’m the good husband,
no?’

  Cliff’s answer – whatever it is, on whatever day – is not enough, is never enough. He’s not interested in so much, has no passion for anything around him except accumulating vast and competitive wealth – so why this? He devours his Porsche magazines, is just finishing modifying a super-yacht, collects vintage champagne, accrues spectacular bonuses and spends almost every penny of them but rarely thinks of anyone else. He unlives, with so much. Even the charity commitments are selected with careful PR advice. He has little idea of where the money’s spent, ‘Just none of those fucking animal liberationists, OK, can’t abide their thick, braying stink.’

  Cliff wants to participate with an observer’s coolness, wants others to admire, covet. Draws power from envy and adulation; is smooth with it, silvery with his thatch of greying hair, buoyant. Has always seen his hedge fund clients as objects rather than people – fools, sops, muppets – and Connie wonders how far this extends into other areas of his life.

  To her it means almost nothing except that she gives herself to him, as the good wife. It is a kind of love, what he allows her to do now; no, it is love, she tells herself. Generosity of spirit, finally, yes; to be fulfilled by other men. The small price to pay: that he be allowed to watch. Control, yes, always that, for he is a controlling man. Pure head, no belly, no heart. And she is his adornment, his most beautiful trinket, her pliancy and servitude his triumph.

  Yet now this, the next step.

  ‘That moment of release, the trembling intimacy’ – what was it that Cliff had said? – ‘the sudden freedom as you’re unlocked, I want to watch it …’

  For Connie, a violent disconnect. Because all this should be with a husband, no one else. She stands, wraps the kimono around her, and without another word walks out.

  18

  To me you’re everything that exists; the reality of everything

  Late February. The two of them in the communal garden. Out, out, into the flush of fresh air; the weather finally breaking, a wan light on their faces. Connie can never quite get over the rarefied world of the locked garden gate in these parts, those beautiful expanses of public space behind their iron railings that firmly keep out the public. It feels so ragingly undemocratic; every day she spies bewildered tourists rattling the lock, failing to understand, and then the dawning as someone slips past them with their electronic key and shuts the gate apologetically in their faces.

  ‘This is private, you know, if I let you in you won’t be able to get out.’

  They, the keyholders, another species altogether. Co-owners of one of the most ravishingly beautiful private gardens in London, more exquisite than any public park, three acres shared among a select coterie of homeowners whose villas smugly necklace the expanse. Guy Fawkes effigies are dressed in discarded Burberry at the annual bonfire, there are nannies with Stella McCartney baby bags, the blazers and straw hats of some of the best pre-preps in London, the gracious elderly with easels and the rubbish bins brimming with empty Moët bottles. The French and the Italians, the Aussies and the Yanks are slowly pushing the old Brit money out. Through a rusting art nouveau gate Connie and Cliff’s manicured private garden of white pebbles, box hedges and bamboo opens out to beauty, all beauty, of a fundamentally British kind. A secret land. Rolling lawns and languid willows, roses and bluebells and oaks as well as gravel walks and tennis courts, a playground and sandpit for children, an outdoor gym for adults. But alongside all this, the secret parts: the scruffy, reclusive pockets of wildness with obscure Victorian urns and rotunda follies, little moments rarely stumbled upon that are deliberately, audaciously overgrown, pure nature unleashed. A blanket of removal seems to fall over gardens like this when you enter them. A feeling of peace and space and serenity and expansiveness that no one else in this city has; a great, privileged exhalation amid the cram of life.

  Cliff has been carried out to his spot under the great northern oak, Connie beside him on the bench with her Saturday Times and Telegraph, the juicy bits, and her guilty read, the Mail, because she must. She can sense the pent-up rain contained in the very walls of the houses and the fences, the bark of the trees, the soil. Smell the soaking, months and months of it, pluming the ground. Notting Hill, indeed the entire country, has been engorged with rain and it is as if the very earth is now spewing forth its dampness.

  Connie looks up from her papers: a rogue person has got in, she doesn’t know how; he is wearing a hoodie which she instinctively shrinks from and he has that unhealthy pallor so many of them have, as if they’ve never eaten a vegetable in their lives. He is walking around, rapt, gazing at this other world just as Connie gazed at it, incredulous, once. She draws a touch closer to Cliff. Doesn’t like the rogue world intruding on her life, has grown unused to it; the world of the garden represents a vast bunkering down. Yet this is an area that was heavily targeted during the war and alongside some of the most expensive real estate in the world are council estates on old bomb sites; it all rubs up too close for Connie’s liking, far too close. She can read the stares as she slides into her darkened cars … envy, sneer, menace, hate.

  Clifford catches her gaze, winks; ‘You’ll be all right.’ Exiles both, anonymous here, as two people neither born nor raised in London and with no family close. She is sure both couldn’t do what they’re now doing, in their secret life, in their own places of birth. Here they can revel in the anonymity of the exile, far, far away from the anaesthesia of the known. Here, she is someone else.

  The interloper is gone. Connie rises from her bench, needs a walk. She ends up in a wild pocket, in a circle of black urns, an odd, funereal remnant from the Victorian imagination. Here the gardener has somehow managed to coax shy snowdrops to grow and she smiles at that; a touch of home. She feels far, far away from the rhythms of the earth here in London. Nothing feels natural, everything is intervention. She longs to get back to the wild land, to air laden with sea. Longs to roll herself in sand again like she used to as a child, to cleanse, to restore herself. Needs a basting in roaring sunlight.

  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.

  19

  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.’

  ‘Th
e 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.

  20

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