Читать книгу Nikki Gemmell’s Threesome: The Bride Stripped Bare, With the Body, I Take You - Nikki Gemmell - Страница 65

at the end of the year you must see that your window box is tidy and in good order

Darkness is greedy now, it crowds into the afternoons. The year is galloping towards Christmas. Cole’s away a lot, networking at festive functions: drinks parties in creamy Belgravia drawing rooms and St James studios and private Soho clubs. For the first time since you’ve known him he hasn’t asked you to accompany him. He recognises, now, that he can’t get you to do things quite so easily any more.

Gabriel’s in Spain, with his extended family, he’s not sure when he’ll be back. He might do Prague afterwards, and then Greece again, to visit a friend. You don’t feel abandoned for you’re secure in the knowledge that he’ll return; the situation will resume exactly as it left off. There’s a glamour to Gabriel’s existence because he doesn’t do the everyday. His contentment with few possessions is glamorous, and his lack of striving with his job, and his winging off constantly to some other place; it’s all so brazen, flippant, audacious, light.

You tell yourself there’s no crime in a cup of tea or a gallery visit or a skipping heart. You tell yourself your husband deserves your unfaithfulness because it keeps you with him, it keeps your marriage together, which is what you both want.

It will go no further. You don’t want guilt like a sickness.

But during those long December nights you wonder why some people have a compulsion to allow chaos into their lives. To get attention? Sympathy? Love, to have it affirmed? Are you doing all this for Cole, perhaps; for him to notice you again, to be attentive, your best mate, like he was once?

Christmas is endured. Swiftly packed away.

I hate this between us, Cole says suddenly, on a very quiet New Year’s night.

So do I.

Nothing else is said, it does not need to be said, there’s just an unspoken acknowledgement that both of you want to slip back into an old way. The night is curiously healing even though nothing, still, has been sorted out. You’re both in bed by ten. Cole wraps his warmth around you and you do not shrug him off. You cannot explain why your marriage works, now, but it does, enough. Enough not to have to set up your life somewhere else, to go back to the grind of City University, to rethink the baby plan. You’ve stopped asking Cole at every opportunity about Theo, the truth of what went on, for you’ve learnt that invading the mystery of each other’s psyche will be more destructive to your marriage than a simple letting go ever is. So, you’ve let go. To reclaim your life. To navigate a way back into calm, if you can.

January. Cole has a job in Athens. It’s for an old acquaintance who’s in shipping, a billionaire who collects pre-Raphaelite nudes. But he’s got something different this time, a portrait from the waist up of an exquisite medieval Venus and he doesn’t want her out of his sight. Cole’s shown you the photographs, he did the condition report, the paint is blistering and flaking off. There are several losses, patches of canvas totally bereft of paint, and Cole will have to take his palette and brushes and create a seamless match. He can’t wait to get his hands on her. Her skin is pale and cold, as if it’s been carved in marble. She has tiny buttons for nipples, like flesh-coloured smarties, with no aureole, of course. There’s a snake winding round her elongated neck with scales as soft and luxurious as black velvet.

Cole’s gone for three weeks and your true self uncurls in this time. It makes you wish that throughout the years of knowing your husband you’d let him see more of who, exactly, you are. You can only bring her out when he isn’t at home.

This.

The music up loud, your music, all the secret pop songs from your youth, Wuthering Heights and Blondie and the soundtrack from Grease and Nina Simone at her gravelly best, the type of music he hates, it’s all crammed on compilation cassettes stored under the bed like a dietitian’s secret chocolate box. You’re dancing and singing off-key, too loud, drunk with the alone. You’re rearranging furniture, dragging it in great grating shudders, how perfect you could make this space if it were just your own – out with that overlarge TV, off with the Scotch bottles and cheap detective novels! You’re eating nothing but chocolate biscuits for dinner, a whole packet, or just a slice of toast and a glass of red wine and the dishes languish and the candles burn to their quick and at the end of each night you stretch on the couch and feel young and alive and sated and content. For alone you’re refinding a glittering, a clarity, you’re finding your distilled self.

You feel an intoxicating freedom when Cole is not with you, and yet you don’t want him to be gone. You think of the two types of aloneness you’ve known recently: this wonderful, sparkly, soul-refreshing type, and the despairing loneliness that sucks the breath from your life.