Читать книгу Nikki Gemmell’s Threesome: The Bride Stripped Bare, With the Body, I Take You - Nikki Gemmell - Страница 54

if you have a dog and never let him out the poor fellow will bark and howl miserably

Cole has a gift. He hasn’t given you one for so long, since Marrakech, when you received chocolates and magazines and jewellery from the souks. You protest but you’re smiling, you can’t help it, for it signals a thaw, a softening back into an easier way. You can both feel it, time is smoothing things out. You both want this.

It’s an envelope. You slide your fingers beneath the heavy, cream flap.

Private membership to the London Library. The writers’ library. It’s too ironic, heartbreaking, apt and your heart swells with light and guilt. Your husband’s blackmailing you with generosity and you know exactly what you’ll do, for a writers’ library might, just might, have an actor in it, who’s researching a screenplay, perhaps.

I thought it might give you a kick start, Cole says. For the book.

Ah, the book.

For you’d told him once that one day you’d like to take your cheeky seventeenth-century text and do something with it. It was one reason why he was so insistent you give up the drudgery of teaching, to try something you’d always wanted to do – although sometimes you suspected it was just to keep you all to himself. You’d showed him the section where the author stated that women married not for pleasure but for the propagation of children; and her conclusion that the wives of barren men should be allowed to sleep with other men fit and lusty. Isn’t that gorgeous, you remember teasing him, when can I start? And Cole had grabbed you firmly by the arm and had smacked you, stingingly, on the bum.

The cupboard. Quick.

And you’d laughed and laughed.

You’d told Cole that there was a novel in the text, or a history perhaps, the intimate kind that cracks open private lives. It felt good to tell him, as if it would give some weight to your own life. You’re not sure, now, though, you ever really meant it.

But he didn’t forget.

No one except your husband knows of the cautiousness at the heart of your life. Your adulthood has been a progressive retreat from curiosity and wonder, an endless series of delays and procrastinations. You wanted to be so much, once, but life kept on getting in the way. You shone during your journalism degree but were never quite hungry enough for a newsroom. You dreaded the cold calling, of intruding so much on people’s lives. You did an MA and drifted into teaching and were always doubting your abilities: said shouldn’t it be someone else when your colleagues urged you to apply for a higher post, asked me? Really? when offered a promotion, never pushed for a pay rise. You settled. Shunned creativity, flight, risk, never had the courage to give a dream, any dream, a go.

And now you hold the envelope to your lips and smile and kiss your husband on the forehead. You’ll go to the Library tomorrow, you say it’s the perfect gift. You don’t tell him you’ll be looking for a man in a very neat suit, with a beautiful nape. For Cole is seducing you with thoughtfulness and you want him to know how grateful you are.

But something is all skittery within you and there’s the light and the guilt of that.

You know what Theo would do in this situation. You wonder about your Elizabethan wife. If she ever acted on her words, if she was that courageous, or stupid. Indulgent. Selfish. Bold.