I Take You (13 page)

‘Ow,’ she gasps, and he withdraws: ‘Another time.’

‘No, no, now.’

He is on her, moving – surely the thrusting of pale buttocks is a little ridiculous, Connie is thinking, how silly they must look, to anyone who came upon them – then a finger is in her vagina, the skin between the two passages is so thin, paper thin and so sensitively he works until her body takes over, surrenders to the exquisiteness and she comes; they both do, together. And fall back and laugh.

‘I’ve never done that before. Come, at the same time with someone. Ever.’

‘Most people haven’t.’

‘You know, more than a few women I know have never come.’

‘Really? Even now … in this day and age.’ Mel shakes his head.

‘Oh yes. Or they haven’t come until their late thirties or forties at least. Not that you men ever know these things.’

‘You came. I can tell. I always can.’

‘Yes.’ And for a while there she thought she’d never be able to again, in the thick of Cliff, without all the help. She smiles. There is only one word for how Connie feels now, in the sanctity of this quiet.

Anchored.

I want someone to sit beside after the day’s pursuit and all its anguish, after its listening, its waitings, and its suspicions. After quarrelling and reconciliation I need privacy – to be alone with you, to set this hubbub in order. For I am as neat as a cat in my habits

It is late, they cannot part; Cliff will be home now, they must. Connie feels the terrible weight of Mel and tries to extract herself, can’t; he is stroking her, cupping her between her legs, playful; the hair has almost grown back. ‘Ah my lovely, lovely – healthy – cunt of a thing.’

‘What!’ She bats him away, laughing. ‘That
word.
Excuse me. It’s appalling. I can’t believe you just said it. The only men who ever say it are men who don’t like women very much.’

‘Cunt cunt cunt,’ he is teasing, relishing it on the tongue. ‘I love saying it. All of it.’

‘Excuse me,’ Connie admonishes. ‘A woman is trained to distrust the man – and the circumstance – whenever we hear it. To castigate and protest.’

‘Cunt cunt, lovely cunt.’ Mel buries his head into her. ‘For me it’s entirely something else. It’s you, it’s this, it’s sex, it’s inside you, outside you, it’s the whole damned loveliness, the whole blinking lot. Let me … change … the word for you.’ He stops, thinks. ‘It’s a precious thing. Something to revel in, cherish. It’s not just fucking. Argh, I can do that with anyone and bollocks to it. But this,
this
, wakes me up. Hauls me into …’ He struggles for the word.

‘What?’

‘The world again. And I’d given up on it, until a little bird came into my life.’ Mel looks at Connie – ‘Yes’ – with his warm, kind, speaking eyes. She kisses him softly, rightly between them, in chuff. ‘It really has,’ he adds.

‘I know,’ she whispers, kissing his thick black lashes that still have something of the little boy in them, first one side, now the other, in rhythmic gentleness. ‘Do you care for me? Do you? Really?’

‘What do you think? I try my hardest to resist you – everything you represent – but can’t. Just … can’t.’

Mel’s hands curve firm over Connie’s body not with desire now but a cherishing, an ownership. A pleasure that all is well, and all is his,
his
, as if he can scarcely believe it. He kisses her with the lifetime’s tenderness in it and Connie marvels at that – when Cliff had not a scrap.

‘Thank you,’ Connie whispers, ‘thank you.’

The day is winding down and she runs home through air that is vibrant with stillness. What has happened, what has transpired on this day feels like an anointing, a hauling into womanhood, finally, a strong, rooted maturing into something else – or at least a journey’s departing. Connie runs home to the hull of her marriage, high and dry on its sand. The kiss with all the world’s tenderness singing through her still, giddying her up. The touch of his lips, like voice, something she will never forget. She just knows it.

With her foot on the threshold she waited a moment longer in a scene which was vanishing even as she looked, and then, as she moved … and left the room, it changed, it shaped itself differently; it had become, she knew, giving one last look at it over her shoulder, already the past

Connie’s heart like an oven, a furnace, just opened. The heat of it, the roar. She cannot slam it shut. Who can tell? Everyone? The blare of it.

She rushes in to the kitchen. Marichka is spoon-feeding Cliff ice cream, the last of it and Connie has no idea why but he is lapping it up. Some game they are playing. She comes upon them like an intrusion. It is a scene of collusion, tinged in early evening light, a sixteenth-century Dutch painting of domesticity, caring, quiet. Marichka looks up at her like, so, whatever works. Connie nods, yes, whatever works, keep on going, girl, keep at it. But there is something new in her stance, a freshness, a wildness, Marishka can sense it in the other woman. She slips away. Connie turns and watches her depart, wondering for a moment if she is listening by the door.

Steps forward. Takes a deep breath.

‘Clifford’ – she only calls her husband this when something serious is to be said – ‘would you like me to have a baby one day?’

From her husband: furtive apprehension. Trying to second-guess what comes next. To control, to win, command, as he always wins.

‘I wouldn’t mind,’ he says carefully. A pause. ‘As long as it made no difference between us.’

Connie cocks her head.

‘Yes. I could be quite willing, I suppose, as long as it doesn’t affect our marriage.’ He’s like a cornered dog, thinking aloud, trying to see ahead, work it through. ‘Affect what we have. Con.’ The voice lowering, warning. ‘Nothing must come between us. Why are you saying this? What’s going on?’ He is suddenly cold, brittle, as still as a hoary January frost. Connie recognizes it. It is a threat. Cliff crushes people, of course; that’s how he’s always succeeded, in his business and his life. Rivals, colleagues, friends, clients.

Leaving him – magnificent rupture – would humiliate him, of course, the anger would be encompassing and immense. Connie is inside the black oil of his mind now, inside his desire to infiltrate, dominate, swamp. She is all Cliff has. All he wants is for her to stay with him, in this, the husk of his life; be with him for ever, propping him up, his sexual regenerator and adornment. He needs the public show of that, the public theatre of his power over this aspect of his life. This man before her is almost an emotional cripple – and she does not know how she can extricate herself.

‘A child would seem just like my own, I guess. If it’s done right. Legally. Emotionally. People will ask. We’d keep things to ourselves, of course. I’d get everything watertight. Contracts and so forth.’ He’s talking it through, trying to make it work. Connie is listening, her heart breaking. He is willing to do this – something he categorically does not want – for their marriage. To keep up the pretence, to have her by his side, to preserve the past in aspic. He is taking over this too as he takes over everything and he doesn’t even realize it; his unbending way with control. No, it could never work. For her or a child, and Cliff doesn’t understand and most likely never would. Connie has wondered if he’d ever fall in love with Marichka – if the hired help could be her distraction, her saviour – but she’s a diversion, nothing more than that. She sees it now. He would never publicly be with her, he wouldn’t stoop. There’s no cachet in the hired help. As for Connie …

‘Come here,’ he commands. ‘Kiss me.’

As if he senses something new in his wife, something quite incomprehensible and he needs to sniff it out. Some straightness of the spine, a looseness, a stepping back.

‘Kiss me!’ he demands.

Connie hackles at the thought: the stumpy, joyless, wooden blocks of his mouth. He revolts her, with every hair of her body, she can’t do it, can’t explain it.

‘No, Cliff, not tonight.’

‘Why?’ Wounded.

‘I just don’t want to. I’m tired.’

Connie turns, murmurs goodbye, cannot meet her husband’s eyes. Cannot tell him she is not coming near him because another man’s smell and his sperm is strong upon her, smeared lavishly and triumphantly across her stomach, breasts, thighs; and she is rank, filthy with it and cannot hurt him so much.

‘Con? Con!’ The voice bewildered suddenly, on the cusp of an understanding, as if Cliff has suddenly caught a glimpse of a future he has never contemplated.

She does not turn back. Mustn’t.

My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery – always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What’s this passion for?

A restless mongrel of a night, spatterings of rain like hard rice against the high windows. The wind wheening outside Connie’s room is as mournful as a distant aria and the trees from the garden below shake their leaves like the manes of recalcitrant ponies and wet leaves slick the glass. Connie will not bath, wants to keep the animal smell on her, of earth, of sex, of spit and air and grubbiness. She will not wash herself all night, for the sense of Mel’s flesh touching her, his very stickiness, is dear, replenishing, holy. She no longer wants padlocks and blindfolds, sophistication, theatre, clandestine texts, she just wants simplicity. The wonder of that. One man, who listens. Stillness. Spirituality. Quiet. Her cunt reeks, she wants wildness, wants to roll herself in it, wants a different soil, sky, land to this. Wordsworth journeyed back to Wales to listen to the language of his former heart; should she return to Cornwall? With Mel? Go somewhere else? Would he come? What to do, how to begin … what?

Connie’s mind is jumpy tonight with dreams and plans and connivances and plots as she contemplates a vast spring cleaning of her future, her entire life. Her gods now – the gods of change and rupture and the astonishing earth.

Connie looks across at her bookshelf, an old shoe rack from the Golborne Road, and skims all the strong female voices that have spined her own life. Any clues? Help? Are all female narratives of empowerment narratives of escape? It’s why
Portrait of a Lady
is so devastating, of course, why she could only ever bear to read it once. She picks up Mel’s battered old Virginia Woolf.
NEVER READ THIS AGAIN
– but of course, no, she must. ‘I’m always doing what I’m told not to,’ that’s what he said to her that odd, jangly night. Connie thinks of his separateness, his self-containment, the potency of a man strong with his choices and not wavering from them. She flips open
To the Lighthouse
and starts to read. The thud of recognition, the heart-stopping thud of it, and she scrabbles for a journal and scribbles in it. Again and again. A roar of pages filled up.

A sort of transaction went on between them, in which she was on one side, and life was on another, and she was always trying to get the better of it, as it was of her.

Yes, yes. Woolf will be her guide, her beacon. All her novels, her essays, her certainties and admonishments and eviscerating truths. Tomorrow she will go to Daunt’s, buy the extent of her.