I Take You (11 page)

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.

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 soap. 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.’

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.

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.