Читать книгу I Take You - Nikki Gemmell - Страница 15

Often on a wet day I begin counting up; what I’ve read and haven’t read

‘I want you to read. I want you to tell me what works.’

So. The good wife, eager to facilitate, is flushed by a new sense of purpose. Reading above and beyond her creamy bankers’ wives book club with their Booker winners and Harvill challenges and occasional star guest who lives close. Reading at home, flushed, in the middle of the day, straddled firm on cool steel. A strumming hand. Drinking from an untapped well of words that tingle her up; that initiate, transform, exhilarate, unlock. It is writing that elicits a visceral response like no other words ever have; speaking directly to her in a secret language, woman to woman. To have such potency, as an artist, to elicit such a belly-churning jolt. Only connect, of course. It is said Renoir painted his pictures with his penis and Connie now seeks the words women write with their vaginas. Needs their vulnerability and their truth: as ugly and thrilling and complex and excruciating and scarred as her own. She finds it. Cliff, too. In a world she would never dare talk about with her friends, for she knows too much of it now; mustn’t give herself away, mustn’t break the spell of it.

And so the two of them began, alone. Tentatively. With blushing honesty. An exploratory spirit. Shared books, the enchantment of them, for it is an enchantment. Connie reads fast, her breath shallow, her belly dipping; breathing in deep the liberation of these new texts like a corset unloosed. The journeying progresses into the reality of words suddenly slammed down – a husband summoned, a wheelchair straddled, a Mont Blanc pen whispered into an anus that has never been penetrated; by night the Box visited and by day Coco de Mer; Brazilians are performed at home by a black man of satiny physique; there are collars and handcuffs, blindfolds and belts. The shame dies fast because the new world unlocked is so spectacularly different, transporting, vivifying; yet Connie had been stolidly sexually active for at least a decade before all this.

It’s as if Cliff senses that this is now the one way to entrap his beautiful, slippery, inscrutable wife, to bind her tight to his new life; it’s as if he isn’t quite confident of anything else. And so Connie is reeled in, resisting, but caught nonetheless. Complicit at every step.

All the stops on her life at such a young age, except this, vividly this. Cliff’s goal: to gouge out the – astonishingly different – woman underneath. I take you to be … but what he discovers over these days following the accident is that she is actually, exhilaratingly, quite someone else. And gradually, over time, dear, sweet Connie Carven of the carefully blow-dried hair and Vivier shoes – faithfully handing out her Bibles at the door of St Peter’s every second Sunday of the month – has slipped beyond her calcified adult life into a glittery, secret new existence that steals, spectacularly, her nights. Her husband found the key, at the height of cruel misfortune; his singular triumph in a time that seemed utterly absent of it.

Connie felt needed with all this. Thrillingly. Gratefully. Don’t we all have a universal desire to be needed in our lives? That basic human want. Cliff had a plethora of helpers – drivers, housekeepers, cleaners, personal valets, cooks – to smooth his way in every other respect. Except this one; the one that plumed him into feeling like a man once again.

But now he wants something else. The logical next step. An overwhelming desire to share his triumph with a select few, to trumpet it. He’s that secure with the velvety ropes now binding this relationship tight.