Читать книгу With My Body - Nikki Gemmell - Страница 11

Married women have cast their lot for good or ill, having realised in greater or lesser degree the natural destiny of our sex

Hugh and you are bound by an unspoken acknowledgement that you’ll never split – you’re in this together, for life. When you married him you were aching for love, something transporting; he was a friend who had you laughing deep into the night and so it would work, yes. You’ve always cherished his evenness. Were never uncomfortable with him, even in silence – the test of a true connection. You are so fortunate to have him, you know this, you must never forget it.

You do not like the way he kisses. Do not know how to tell him this, could never hurt him. It will not change. It’s gone on too long. It cannot be taught. How can you say to someone you love that they lack tenderness? It’s impossible to learn, to acquire. You could endure it pre-children, he offered so much else – filling up the glittery loneliness of yet another Saturday night by yourself, another New Year’s Eve; his sturdy, charming presence quelling all those awkward questions on Christmas Days and all the weddings and baby showers you were suddenly going to. Your saviour, you know it.

Yet it feels like the only thing that unites you now is the children. You dream of another, a girl – the bliss of her – but just couldn’t be bothered; with Hugh, you’re both beyond all that. You never talk about it. About anything.

He is an Englishman who boarded from the age of seven and from then onward was taught not to trust his feelings; to shut down. He craved his mother, was overwhelmed by grief and loneliness yet all the time was told that his family wanted this, it was for the best. So he learnt from very young not to trust his deepest instincts, to bury far inside what he really thought. He has carried these lessons through life; expects it of others. He never changes towards you – is warm, playful – but doesn’t want all the emotion, the mess of it.

He calls you Vesuvius to his Pompeii. When all your raging, swamping frustrations blurt out. When a voice in you snaps in the thick of the exhaustion, a voice you’ve never heard before, a woman you don’t recognise, at your husband and your children; a voice of anger and ugliness. You fear your beloved boys will hold its tone somewhere in their memories for the rest of their lives and you’re ashamed of that but still, occasionally, it roars out. Yet you love them to distraction, it’s a swamping that’s greedy, wild, voluptuous; every night in prayer you thank God for the gift of them.

Motherhood, the complexity of it. The richness, the depletion, the incandescence. The despair, the loneliness.