Читать книгу I Take You: Part 2 of 3 - Nikki Gemmell - Страница 7

I am rooted, but I flow

Mid March. Connie on the garden bench next to Cliff. Their faces full to the first proper sun of the season, pinnacles of light pricking them into a waking. It is like being soothed inside a rarefied enclosure here, behind its tall black bars, removed from the mess and the muck of the world. Cliff especially loves it, away from dispiriting Notting Hill Gate with its steely pollution you can taste in your mouth, its riff-raff of people, churning crowds, grimly unbeautiful buildings. All grey! Grey! Tired! Washed out! And the little people, the great seething mass of them, can’t even discern it. Then this, so magically, secretly close. Nothing lets in the world here and he is extremely grateful for it.

A man walks past on the gravel, pushing a wheelbarrow. He doffs his flat cap at Cliff in a quick, deferential nod, flicks eyes at Connie, nothing more. Cliff barely notices.

‘Who is that?’ she asks, watching as the new man rakes a damp slush of leaves; his hands curiously elegant as they grasp the rake.

Cliff shrugs. ‘The new gardener? He was here before, apparently, for years, then had a bit of trouble with some shrew of a wife. Moved away. Is now back. Johnnie told me. He’s good, apparently. Mel or something. God knows.’ Johnnie being a neighbour a few doors down, a fellow banker, a rare Brit in these parts.

Connie gazes after this new man, suddenly alert. He’s in a T-shirt, unusual for this time of year, winter’s chill not yet past. He’s in a T-shirt as if he doesn’t care for the cold, doesn’t feel it, or wants the brace of it shivering him up. An animal energy, a difference. A shock of black hair. Pale skin. A face that would shadow by early evening and she’s always loved the virility of that. A body gracefully lean, taut; not from the gym but from constant hard work. Grubby hands from whatever he’s been doing with the earth. Dirt under the nails. A swipe of mud across his face. From the land, with the land, quick and at ease with it, in the way no one else around here is. So alone, but so sure of himself, apart; contained, uninterested in them, in any of the odd creatures who inhabit this place. Connie has a calibrated awareness, behind her Times, for he is like a sudden rush of a threat out of nowhere.

And he does not notice her one bit.

But there is a shine in him. It is called self-sufficiency. A pure lack of need. Of envy. Of this strange, jittery, out-of-kilter world around him, these people, their money, their ways, any of it. Connie stares after him.

Cliff does not notice.