Читать книгу I Take You - Nikki Gemmell - Страница 14

Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size

Cliff knew little of Connie until the accident. Their sex life had been uninspired. Connie loathed kissing her husband but had never told him this. It was like he was trying to eat her lips; she hated his breath, how he ate, the clicking of his jaw as he masticated, how he brushed his teeth. He made love with an utter absence of tenderness, as if it had never been shown, taught, as if he had no idea what this was. He took a long time to come, too long, and the whole process veered, often, into tedium and hurt. Connie sometimes thought she could die in that time, as he was grinding away, unproductively, gratingly; she could not bear it, with every pore of her body she could not. She never told him this. He pawed her breasts with an absence of finesse, her nipples remained stubbornly soft. Nothing worked.

Nothing had ever, really, worked. But Clifford Carven the Third was a man set, there was no point in trying to veer him into something else. An American of supreme self-confidence and little self-doubt; a golden boy, an only child from east coast wealth who’d spent a silkily entitled lifetime getting his way and thinking little of anyone else, because he didn’t have to. Handsome, in that robust, blue-blooded American way, of rude, patrician health, as if his entire upbringing consisted of daily vegetables, energy-boosting drinks and the cleansing salt from wooden-decked Cape Cod yachts. Handsome, yes, but cold with it; his face as it aged falling away into hard angles and planes, the leanness and ruthlessness of a competitive cyclist now in him. But for Connie, at the start, he was a promise of something else. For her, for her children. A higher dynamism, perhaps. They were a golden couple and they knew it.

Connie had never come with him. She never told him that. In fact, she had never had an orgasm in her life. Her husband wouldn’t know because he never asked. He made love selfishly, with little thought for the recipient. Always had, because he had the air of a man who had never had a woman say what she really, actually, might want. It was too late, Connie didn’t try, didn’t care enough. And she knew that satisfying sex in terms of a woman was only one small aspect of the fullness of married life, and fleeting or absent for most, so she contented herself with gleaning satisfaction from the other parts. A gaggle of bankers’ wives and girlfriends around her for shopping weekends to Paris, pedicures in a gossipy line at the Cowshed, movie nights at the Electric. A show house of careful beauty, the former residence of the Portuguese ambassador. A manicured garden of clenched formality. Sushi parties for the girls, book club hostings, charity lunches, church fundraisers. Glittering dinner parties for fifty, Christmas drinks, Guy Fawkes barbecues, work dos, anything and everything to mask the terrible silence of the two of them, alone, like a shroud upon them both.

And then the accident, and the marriage was shifted onto another path. Cliff’s pumped charisma gone, to be replaced by something else: a simmering snippiness and cruelty brought about by a sheer sense of raging misfortune, Connie suspects; it’s something that, pre-accident, never seemed to surface. Her duty: to soften all that, to set things right, however she can. She has a purpose now.

Yet, yet. There is a woman she once knew and she gazes at her occasionally as though through thick, opaque glass; can’t touch her, grasp her, be her. That woman is free, fearless, blazing, bold. She is young, her younger self. The lust for losing her virginity surprises her even now, how badly she’d wanted to be rid of it. Yet ever since she has felt disconnected from the sex act, as if she was looking at it, every time, from the ceiling; observing it, wondering, flinching. This is what it’s all about? Surely not. The horror of sex not her way – not the emboldened way it always was in her head – was the first great shock of her adult life.

The men, again and again, who seemed so indifferent to who she really was; who just didn’t want to know, ask. It’s me, she was raging inside, this is who I am. She grazed upon sex through boyfriend after boyfriend; never gulped it complete, never swallowed it whole. Watched, intrigued, always watched; no one could penetrate her careful, observing, inscrutable shell. Then she married Clifford in the Seychelles in front of one hundred guests they’d flown in specially for the occasion and she stepped into, seemingly effortlessly, a world of ridiculous wealth: of subterranean screening rooms and swimming pools, of separate his and her massage rooms, summer as well as winter walk-in wardrobes, four cars (one just for the motorway alongside three vintage Porsches), of FedExed luggage, multiple help, ordering off the menu, daily blow-dries, museum-quality art. Like many rich wives, she rarely looked happy; no, that wasn’t the word for it: she looked collected, smooth, in a uniformly thin, carefully blow-dried, thoroughbred kind of way.

And it was only when Connie was needed that something like love – as far as she knows what love is – uncurled. The accident tipped their sex life into something else. Because Cliff gouged out – patiently, gently, beseechingly – the very marrow of his impenetrable wife. It had become the trigger that now tipped him into someone else. To see her so wanton, transformed, bared, cracked, made him focus on another, made him forget.

Her girlfriends have no idea of any of this. A listener rather than a talker, a receptacle for everyone else’s angst, Connie is extremely good at maintaining a secret life.