I Take You Read online

  They lie there listening to the rain, its slowing, the soft drip, drip, of its aftermath. They lie there with the smell of saturated, sated earth, utterly quiet with no talk. His wet, sticky body touching hers, completely unknown, and right. It is like an abandonment for them both. Of everything else in their lives, here, in this secret place.

  ‘I thought I’d done with it for now,’ Mel laughs ruefully, as if he can scarcely believe it.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Fucking. Women. Life.’

  ‘Life,’ Connie says wondrously, soft. ‘Life,’ she repeats.

  His smile, arrowed into her, his smile at all of it.

  32

  One must love everything

  Striding home across a darkened park, the gravel path an entrail of paleness to her married existence but no fear now, no dread, a tall walk. Like she’s just had exhilarating sex, the power of it inhabiting her whole body. Alive again, alive, and supremely flushed with it. Life, Connie smiles, life, each has brought the other back into it. Mel’s touch and his smell are threaded into her fingers and giggly, tremulous, she holds them to her nose, her mouth, and breathes deep.

  All smiles, filled up like a glass. Feeling unshadowed at last.

  And so it begins.

  33

  She had known happiness, exquisite happiness, intense happiness, and it silvered the rough waves a little more brightly, as daylight faded, and the blue went out of the sea and it rolled in waves of pure lemon which curved and swelled and broke upon the beach and the ecstasy burst in her eyes and waves of pure delight raced over the floor of her mind and she felt, ‘It is enough! It is enough!’

  Through April, through May, Connie’s days are newly oiled, she is sprung into wakefulness. Mel’s smile is rangy in her, loosening her gut. But she must wait, all the time wait, for the day’s softening, for the residents to depart the park, for Cliff to be late home from work.

  He’s entertaining a client tonight, it’ll be a lap dancing club of course, he revels in it, none of them knows how much, all that look but no touch. So, today, a possibility! An afternoon of sprightly sun, warm and replenishing, uncurling the world from its long winter sleep as if it is life itself.

  Swiftly Connie looks around and enters her bower of wild branches overhanging a fragment of path, almost swallowing it complete; swiftly she is enveloped by a distant wind roar and birds somewhere close and the scurries of low animals; swiftly she flits by the peak of an old greenhouse, askew, its beautifully carved wooden apex straining from nature’s clutching like a man reaching from quicksand or an earthquake-sunk church. Every gardener has left it untouched, Mel has told her, it’s like a secret code between us, not to disturb it, to let the earth take over and every one of us has respected that. Cliff wouldn’t, Connie had remarked in reply, if he knew he’d have it cleared, bulldozed without a thought, he’s so disconnected from nature, from the earth. Can’t bear it.

  Flitting to the clearing, to the shed. He is there. Waiting. She pauses, cusped. A slow smile. Skittery breath.

  ‘No one would ever catch us, would they?’

  ‘No one ever bothers with these parts. Except wild women far too greedy for their own good,’ he chuckles, gathering her up, her want. ‘But no, you can relax. You just have to be careful.’

  ‘We both do, mate.’ She waggles a finger at him.

  Mel giggles her to a tree, giggles her to the ground. ‘Not here,’ Connie laughs him away. ‘Yes,’ he says urgently, ‘oh, yes.’ His hands. A knowing, practised gentleness. As he unpeels her clothes, lifts her whole and slips off her panties, unhooks her bra at the front and exposes her breasts, softly trickles his fingers across them as if he can’t quite believe it, any of it, and she surrenders to the ritual baring in silence, the lovely ritual, with all the familiar tugging and the wet. Then his hands scoop up rich, moist dirt and he rubs it over her, laughing and stroking it vast across her belly, down her arms, along her cheeks and her cunt, blooding her, cleansing her, wiping her clear of her sullied other life and then he buries his head in the very depths of her and breathes deep, deep, as if he needs her returned to this sky, this earth. Trembling, he positions himself over her. Smiles deep into her, drops; nudges, expectantly, trembles her wider and wider as she clutches him tight and as he comes, and comes, a vast peace blooms through them both. All is quiet, in the softening hour of the fading day, all still, all spent.

  But no. Not yet. Who knows when next. So now Connie’s hands, fresh, fevering him. Floating her lips over his body, gathering him in the wet cave of her mouth. Nudging her tongue into his ear, finding the pale clearing behind his ears, breathing a moth of a kiss, can’t get enough. His smell, his breathing, the heavy heat of him her blanket, his arm flung, the pale vulnerability of his inside skin, the curve of his upper arm as bare and beautiful as a Sahara dune, the marbling of blue, the river-map of veins traced by a fingertip. The brazen roar of his sex, the thickly shouting hair of it. It’s been so long since she’s seen that, too used to all the shaving and clipping, all the careful, astringent, sexless men of this new world.

  Mel fingers her punched holes, wondrously. So strange, cruel, barbaric. Those smooth, snaky creatures, those masters of the universe controlling the world’s fate, crowing their prowess and winning, always winning and always slipping back into their ways despite the chidings, the rebukes, awarding themselves ridiculous bonuses and never pulling themselves up – yet how selfish and singular and pathetic, how oddly, vulnerably, human they all are.

  ‘Never do this again, will you?’ Mel whispers, cupping Connie protectively, can’t bear the sight of it. ‘You’re like a halfling,’ he murmurs in wonder. ‘Half in this world, half in the shadows. I need to get you fully out, my wild, broken thing. Get you fixed. Promise me this will never happen again.’

  ‘God, no.’ Connie pushes his hand away, shamed, shamed at all of it, her entire, calcified, beholden adult life. ‘Where’s the padlock?’

  ‘In some corner of the shed. It hasn’t been touched since it was flung away.’

  ‘I need it.’

  Without a word Mel finds it, retrieves it. Connie turns it in her fingers. ‘This must have cost a fortune,’ she whispers, then flings it away, as far as she can, in a ritual of release to be claimed by the undergrowth and lost for ever like that steeple of the greenhouse; a relic from another age, another life. Laughter bubbles up: ‘Gone, gone, all of it!’ She languishes her arms behind her head, the joy geyser-high. The padlock will never be found, she will never have to set eyes on it again, she is freed.

  Now they are back, curled under that tree, their bodies a jigsaw fit. A sanctity of silence, a sealing kiss. Connie is tired, swiftly, so very tired. A great calm washes through her as the day softens into dark on what feels like a momentous occasion; a shifting into something else entirely; her first utterly unfettered, utterly trusting night with a man who is on her side, at last. She nestles down into Mel and his arm wings her sudden sleeping, she is cradled in it.

  34

  Never are voices so beautiful as on a winter’s evening, when dusk almost hides the body, and they seem to issue from nothingness with a note of intimacy seldom heard by day

  Mel has gone to his cottage, Connie has followed, carefully, in her own time, in the thick dark of no one about.

  ‘I’ve run you a bath,’ he says, quiet, as she enters, lighting a candle in a tin holder.

  ‘Where is it?’

  ‘Above you.’

  Connie pokes her head up a dangerously narrow wind of wooden stairs. A tiny first floor, eave-tucked. Delicious. Perfect. She climbs to it. The wooden floor creaks and bows like a saddle beneath her weight and she symphonies the wide boards with her feet and claps her hands, giggling in pure delight.

  ‘They’re old coffin lids. Surplus from Kensal Rise, I guess. Held in place by thatcher’s ladders. It was a way of building a house back then. Come on, your bath’s waiting. We haven’t got all night.’

  Just water and a block of plain s
oap. No bubbles or bath salts, no perfume; nothing cloying, artificial. The low flicker of the candle. The quiet. Mel slips in behind her. A trickle of water down the curve of her back. Again, again, again. A chipped white enamel jug is constantly tipped, drowning out the cold. Afterwards she is towelled down. Patted between her legs, gentle, so gentle; encompassing. ‘You need to heal,’ he says, like a vet with a broken animal, ‘grow everything back.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘And fatten up, lass!’ Feeling the wide wings of her too-defined hips. ‘Give me some softness, some curves. Something to grip on to, girl.’

  Connie laughs, remembering something Lara had said, how the best sex of her life had been when she’d put on weight, surrendered to her body and what it really wanted: ‘A bit of chocolate, ice cream, enjoyment – a bit of flesh, my Connie girl! And lo and behold, he noticed me all over again. It sparked everything into life.’

  Connie’s hands range Mel’s room in the golden light, wanting to seize it, every single bit of it, learn him, gouge him out. She takes up an ivory comb on its tray on the dressing table, a relic from another life, his mother’s perhaps, and flicks Mel playfully around. ‘Ssssh, your turn now, on the bed, quick.’ She pushes him down and straddles him and ploughs his back with ivory that’s the colour of shiny old bone, then his long arms, his thighs, the skittish soles of his feet. Reaping goosebumps. Swiftly he’s enslaved.

  ‘You now, madam,’ Mel commands in response and Connie plunges her face into his pillow of simple stripes that’s lumpy with age and uncaring; she collects his smell and breathes deep. Wanting all of it for ever, just this now, just this, for the world not to intrude on any of it.

  ‘Your face is all light,’ he says afterwards, running his finger down a cheek. ‘Most people have shadows but with you, no, there’s just this wonderful, clear light.’

  ‘Now.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Thanks to you.’

  ‘Was it really so bad in the past?’

  ‘It must have been. Yes, yes.’

  35

  Exposed on a high ledge in full light

  A day of bellowing light. Giddied with it. Standing there, utterly naked in the yellow room ringing with its morning sun, utterly naked before Cliff’s breakfast table. Tall with her newness, strong with it; vivid with life, exuberance, light. Pushing her locked hands above her head as if she is pushing the entire sky up, up.

  ‘Have you gone quite mad?’ Cliff enquires.

  ‘Yes! Yes!’

  ‘You seem very alive, all of a sudden. Perhaps we should take advantage of this.’

  ‘No, no.’ She flinches down.

  ‘Where’s your pretty little trinket?’ He squints.

  She’s silent.

  ‘Con? I need to see it.’

  ‘Not now.’

  ‘Play?’

  ‘No.’ She steps back.

  A clotted silence.

  ‘Is there anything you want?’ Cliff asks carefully.

  ‘I – I don’t want to sponge or shave you any more.’

  There, she’s said it. A shardy quiet. Connie is emboldened.

  ‘I think we should hire someone to do it. A woman. Someone. From the Philippines, Eastern Europe perhaps. Like a nurse. I don’t mind.’

  Cliff is quiet, taking it all in, everything that it means, this newness. A vein flinches in his temple. ‘Right,’ he says, slow.

  ‘I’ll hire her. I’ll do it.’

  ‘You have gone mad, haven’t you?’

  ‘Yes, yes!’

  Connie stands before her husband, emblazoned, utterly bared, knowing that her path will now unfold like a flare shot from a gun, powering through the dark, and she just has to trust the brightness and its landfall wherever that will be. She is crashing catastrophe into her life, it has all begun. Her love for him has been snuffed, like a match extinguished, just like that it is gone and she knows it and she suspects he does too.

  His knuckles tighten around his chair.

  ‘Only you can do what you do. For me. For us.’ The voice menacing, utterly careful, quiet. The bankers always win, always, Connie thinks in that moment, feeling like a great fist has squeezed her heart tight.

  36

  It rasped her, though, to have stirring about in her this brutal monster! to hear twigs cracking and feel hooves planted down in the depths of that leaf-encumbered forest, the soul

  Discreet enquiries are made of the ladies who lunch.

  Marichka comes into their world, she has to, Connie will not countenance the alternative now. A sturdy Ukrainian with a gold cross around her neck, shutting her off, and a fulsome, freckled face.

  ‘I need a looker, I must have that. Couldn’t bear to have to stare at something ugly all the time.’

  Oh yes, Connie knows. She always serves Cliff well. Marichka has a boyfriend. He returned to Ukraine for the funeral of his grandmother and now can’t get a working visa to return. He will, one day, but no one knows when. Perfect.

  Cliff is resisting at first. Utterly stiff, dismissive, not seeing Marichka, really, who she actually is; he’s like this with all the help. But gradually her brisk practicality softens him. She wins him with glasses of whisky whenever he seems to desire them, a sure, professional touch and endless games of poker she will play deep into the night and contentedly never win. Cliff gives up, surrenders his body to her and gradually lets her do what she wants. Lets her do everything for him, like a child, submits to her complete and calm benevolence.

  Suddenly, just like that, he seems to be noticing his wife less and less. Not taking her hand now and holding it kindly, and he used at least to do that. Not noticing what she wears – the new skirt from Joseph, the maxi from Rellik – when he used to clock all of it and appreciate it. Not asking her to sit next to him at the breakfast table, none of it. She wonders what he has planned for her, what is next; wasn’t expecting a silent withholding, doesn’t trust it.

  People create crises to speed up their evolution, Connie tells herself. Rupture is good for us, she tells herself. Even when you don’t know what’s next. She’s sick of having her living deferred: you can’t have a life of endlessly that. The hours ahead of all, all the hours in this house, closing over her like a steel trap.

  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.

  37

  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 w
ith 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.’