Читать книгу Nikki Gemmell’s Threesome: The Bride Stripped Bare, With the Body, I Take You - Nikki Gemmell - Страница 55

God helps those who help themselves

The London Library arrests time, it drags you into its rich dark depths and holds you there, captive and absorbed and lost. You find a space to write in the old encyclopaedia room; it has discreet plugs for laptops embedded in the floor. Your little volume sits demurely on your desk, with its shiny coffee-coloured leather cover and broken clasps. And its shocking declarations in their firm, neat hand.

Eve be more excellent than Adam. Eve be less sinful than Adam.

A husband they desired to have, not so much to be accounted wives, as to be made mothers. For they know that woemen should be saved by childbearing.

Where, know yee, shall we finde a man be he ever so old, barren, weak and feeble that hathe been so kind and curteouse to his wife that was willing to substitute another more able man in his place, that his wife might have issue.

Woemen bare rule over men.

Why was the author compelled to write such things? What is the remoteness, the chafing within you? Why do you always do things you don’t want to, now that you’re embedded in this relationship? You tolerated so much before, within the glow of new love, now you don’t. Why do you feel stronger and more serene when you’re by yourself, that you don’t want your husband around too much? Everyone’s always considered you an excellent candidate for the role of wife; you’re compliant and companionable, you endure, with feigned enthusiasm, in-law dinners, action films, client drinks. If only they knew of the restlessness within you, the tapping at your elbow, the tugging at your skirt.

You’re not sure what to do with the book, it’s like walking under water when you try to find a way in. But it will come. And there are many distractions – magazines and newspapers and the Internet and the looking for Gabriel, always that.

Especially in the Reading Room, at lunch hour, just in case.

The space is joyous with light from tall windows and hushed with cerebration, thick with an atmosphere of scholarship and sleep. Several old leather armchairs are in a line, in stately repose, their bellies now grazing the floor. You get to know the regular visitors. The beautifully dressed elderly man who places a white linen handkerchief on a seat before taking a very long time to lower himself into it. The large man always asleep, head thrown back, mouth agape, hands crossed protectively over a book on his chest like a dead man’s Bible placed by a widow. The mousy woman who arrives promptly at noon every day and kneels on the floor by a reading man and rests her head on his knees. His fingers sift, absently, through her hair and they don’t speak for half an hour and then they leave and your heart fills with tenderness for what they have together as a couple – for you had it once – and then tightens for what, perhaps, they’ll become.

The Library gives you a feeling of industriousness, props your life. You dress as if going to work; you’re not the only one doing this. A middle-aged man in a pinstriped suit does nothing but read The Times every day from cover to cover and you guess an unsuspecting wife is behind the creamy stiffness of his collars and cuffs, and wonder how long he can sustain it.

Soon you’re frequenting the Library ravenously, you want it every day, just as you needed your cafe, once. In the cram of London, amid its grubby, muscular energy, the narrow building is a refuge and a tonic. And always, you’re searching. For you’re infected by the idea of Gabriel and you feel, with an odd certainty, that he will come.