Nikki Gemmell’s Threesome: The Bride Stripped Bare, With the Body, I Take You (69 page)
Read Nikki Gemmell’s Threesome: The Bride Stripped Bare, With the Body, I Take You Online
Authors: Nikki Gemmell
Tags: #Fiction, #General, #Erotica
Through it all, Hugh.
Your weeping, as you were wheeled into the ward and were told that your husband was over there, waiting; see, look.
And there he was, yes. Standing, glittery-eyed, holding your overnight bag. The leather bag he bought for a surprise birthday trip to Rome, where he played you a clip from
Roman Holiday
on the DVD player in the cab on the way to the airport and teased
guess where we’re off to, guess
? He has packed completely the wrong clothes but never mind, there is so much love in it that you have to laugh. And there is also a cosmetic bag he’s scrambled together with absolutely everything you need; it’s spot on. Fifty pounds for the TV and the phone rental, your favourite magazines. A Colette book about her childhood of rural happiness that you’ve never read. So much thought, all of it.
‘Thank you,’ you say, choked up.
Because you never say it enough.
His disappointment, too. His deflated, telling ‘oh’ when you say to him that you are miscarrying.
‘Bye bye, Bean number four. Hello Bean number five,’ he says into the shardy bright.
You laugh and then keen, barely knowing why. Holding him, feeling his weeping through your hands and wanting to swallow his own shudders, swallow his grief, clamping him down with your body.
You’re in this together, oh yes.
The hour grows calm and quiet like the candle you have lit. You are pulling away from your former life like a ship leaving a wharf, you are sailing far from it. Ahead, the cleanness of a new adventure. You have the shape of your family now, the shape of your life. Hugh and you are not gazing blindly into each other’s eyes – you are both gazing out, keenly, at something else. Your three children. Side by side, focused on something else, and that feels strong and calming and right. This is your reality. This is your life. You have chosen it. You are trusting ahead, for what seems like the first time in your life; trusting the void.
You shut your little Victorian volume. It is no longer needed. Your work, for now, is done.
This is the end where now begins.
And how you love writing that.
I TAKE YOU
Nikki Gemmell
FOURTH ESTATE •
London
Contents
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.
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.
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 …?