Читать книгу I Take You - Nikki Gemmell - Страница 4

Each has her past shut in her like the leaves of a book known to her by heart, and her friends can only read the title

Four a.m. The prowling hour. The wakefulness comes into Connie like a blade flicked open, for ours is essentially a fearful age and she is a child of it. All her choices in adult life have been dictated by fear and now, in the early hours, it curdles.

Fear of entrapment. Of being found out. Of turning into one of those women for whom indecision has become a vocation, of a silent slipping into that. Of emotional sledging, that she is becoming less resilient, not more, as she sails beyond youth. Of softening into fat, of men who take note as if she’s ripe for a mugging, of life settling like concrete around her and judgement; of what people think of her, yes, that most of all. Women! How awful they can be.

When does the unliving start? For a particular female of this particular age, it is incremental. For Connie – ensconced in her five-storey villa in London’s Notting Hill that was once splashed creamily across the pages of Architectural Digest – it has begun.