I Take You by Nikki Gemmell Page A

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.

42

    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