Nikki Gemmell’s Threesome: The Bride Stripped Bare, With the Body, I Take You (11 page)

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.

nothing impure should be left in a bedroom one minute longer than is necessary

A letter, heavy on the doormat. Thick, creamy paper, watermarked, Italian, its edges feather-soft. A sensuality to it you want to kiss. The words typed, the thud of them as careful as braille.

I want to remove your clothes in the darkness, I want to unpeel you. I want to feel you, inch by inch.

Your fingertips run over the words, deft as a lizard. You’re trembling, you cover the letter with your hand, you have to sit with the strangeness of it.

I feel like you’re helping me to live.

No name, no return address. Your dipping heart, seduced by text. You stand by the lounge room window with one hand holding the letter to your chest and the other spidered wide on the cold pane and your breath frosting the glass and your cheeks are hot. It’s as if you’re entering, tentatively, a strange new path and swiftly the trees are closing over you and the sky is gone and the light, you’re lost, and in the thick of it, in a clearing, you’ll be tugged down, drowned, in a bed of silk.

Come away. Start afresh.

The phone. Cole. All fired up. You know what’s coming next: he’ll be a couple of days late, he’s still bent over that painting, can’t drag himself away. He’s always loved telling you the minutiae of his work, you’re a good listener.

You’re looking at your watch and the letter as he speaks, wanting him off the phone. He’s worried about his Venus’s lips, some idiot somewhere along the line has had a go, clumsily, at touching them up and it’s tricky to get them right.

Don’t change them too much. No botox, mate.

Yeah, yeah, and he chuckles.

The point of his job is to work to a minimum, to do the least amount possible of fixing up because he’s tampering with an original artwork. But sometimes, Cole’s told you, he just wants to be let loose.

I want to cover her nipples, he says, she looks so cold. She needs some clothes, poor love.

Maybe she’s blissfully happy, darling. Maybe there’s a man under her skirt.

Oy, Cole laughs. Steady down. What’s got into you?

Nothing, nothing, and you hang up the phone, grinning at the irony of a husband so absorbed in his job he hasn’t seemed to have noticed the changes in his own wife’s face over the past few months.

do good and lend

How they’ve seduced:

Slow, enquiring fingers on your skin in an Edinburgh flat and you took off your pyjamas as something flooded through you and you could not dam it.

Marijuana, once, but you fell asleep.

Alcohol. Champagne always worked best.

Porn. A video to soften you up and you were intrigued at first but the monotony quickly repelled and it was the coldest, most unimaginative fuck you’d ever had.

The urgency in a kiss.

An expensive hotel room that made you feel guilty.

A song that turns you on every time you hear it, a line in it:
she only comes when she’s on top: crazeeeee.

Compilation cassettes; and how many men have given
you those? Why do they always think they know best? You’d never impose your own taste on them.

Letters. Letters have always worked.

But how would
you
seduce? How would you guard against scaring a man off?

They seem, often, so flighty, difficult, contrary, easily spooked. And you’re not convinced that it’s the men always chasing for in most of your experiences and your girlfriends’ it’s always the woman biting the bullet and doing the asking out, the hunting down. The looking, the not finding.

you ought never to keep anything whatever under a bed

Only Martha and you are left at the bar, for the Library men have all gone home to their families, and after an awkward pause Martha asks if you’ve had a shag lately and you laugh and say no, not for ages, you’ve forgotten how to do it, it’s been so long. Martha tells you she’s slept on the couch for the last six years while her husband’s in the bedroom, it’s all very English, she tells you. We’re high Catholic, we won’t split. You laugh from deep in your belly, suddenly liking this woman very much. How seductive is honesty. You ask her, casually, about Gabriel, what she knows about him, you can’t work him out. She looks at you sharply. Ah, Gabriel, she says, Gabriel, and she tells you she has a theory and leans close.

I don’t think he’s had much practice with women. He’s
probably only had one or two girlfriends in his life. I think he needs a bit of help.

What?

It’s kind of exciting, don’t you think?

God, I don’t know, and you’re knuckling your hands into your temples, you’re thinking of the letter and the suits and the kind of man who wouldn’t let a woman drive a car if he’s in it, perhaps.

He’s so…odd, Martha says. I mean, gorgeously so, but you know. There’s something of the hermit about him, don’t you reckon, the way he disappears for months on end and then suddenly turns up. God knows what he really does, or how he ever makes a buck. He doesn’t open up to any of us. It’s all just a bit strange.

You rub the line between your brow, trying to knead it out, and Martha laughs that everything’s speculation, of course, and there’s even vague talk of a girlfriend, once, who broke his heart but there’s been no sighting of anyone since.

You know nothing of him. You’ve never even been to his flat. There’s so much you’ve never asked. Deliberately, because you don’t want to hear about a girlfriend in the wings, or a wife. It’s better if you don’t know, so that the spell is never broken; you’re not ready for that.

But you feel a fatigue, now, at living within the web of your own tightly woven imaginings. Since a real man stumbled into it and began plucking at the silk.

some use pillows stuffed with hops, but the best preparation for sleep is honest hard work and a good conscience

Cole’s bags and coat crowd the hallway on your return from a late morning trip to Tesco. He’s home from Athens a day early, without warning. Another letter’s arrived but he hasn’t had a chance to sort through the mail and you push the envelope deep into a pocket, listening but not listening to his travel chat.

The bathroom, as soon as you can. You sit on the toilet seat, tear at the flap.

Some days apart from you I’m in pain, my yearning is so strong. At times you settle over me like a great warmth. I catch myself smiling into space. I dream of us running away, getting out.

The fierce pull as you read, like a hand inside your stomach. The words so close you feel you could almost put out a hand. You touch the letter against your belly, feeling the smooth, cold paper against your skin. You get up, you’ve been too long, you kiss Cole absently on the crown of his head as he unpacks his bag and it plunges you back to a time when the love glowed, for a moment, and then it’s gone. You sit at the kitchen table with the day’s paper unread before you, your hands cradling your forehead.

Perhaps Gabriel is like Ruskin who, it’s rumoured, idolised women so much he was incapable of consummating his marriage when he discovered to his horror that his wife had pubic hair. Perhaps he’s happily married in Spain, has seven kids; perhaps Martha’s made it all up to throw you off the scent. Perhaps he’s having an affair, is gay, caught by fear, can’t bear to let anyone see who he really is. Perhaps he’s one of those men who fell through the cracks – you know several, brothers and uncles of friends, lost men who’ve never found a sure footing with life, who are crushed by the challenge of living in this world and opt out and become loners or drunks. And put their parents, and lovers, through hell.

And then it hits.

What if he’s never been with a woman.

What if he doesn’t know how. A virgin, perhaps, and it all makes sense. The shyness. The pulling back at your touch. The ear tips blushing at a farewell kiss. Is it so implausible? You have an ex-colleague who’s a virgin at
thirty-two and you’ve never been sure about Rupert, your cousin. And he, like Gabriel, is a tall, virile, masculine-looking man, and he, like Gabriel, never seems to be attached.

Would Gabriel be diminished in your eyes, if that were it?

No. It’s oddly endearing. And exciting.

An idea, beautiful in its simplicity. To initiate Gabriel, to teach him exactly what you want. To create a pleasure man, purely that, the lover every woman dreams of. You’ll be in control, for the very first time, you’ll be able to dictate exactly what you want. And there’ll be no expectation of how you should act.

That night Cole slips into your bed and curves his body in a question mark around your back.

An idea beautiful in its simplicity. And impossible.

For you don’t do that type of thing. It’s in the quietness of your clothes, your wholesome face, your ready blush. It’s in your horror at hearing of affairs, your stock response: but I could never do that to another woman.

Or Cole. You don’t think.

some people are terribly afraid of draughts and would rather be poisoned slowly than feel the breath of fresh air. this is grossly unwise and leads to many diseases

A gift box is delivered. It’s beautifully wrapped.

A vibrator.

You gasp. There’s no note. It’s obscene, fascinating, ridiculous, you’ve never seen one up close. You don’t touch it for a long time and then you turn it round, sink back on the bed, turn it on. You can make it go exactly where you want, for as long as you want, or as short.
control
it,

It’s small enough to keep in your handbag and your fingers brush it often, imagining exotic trips and Customs officers searching your luggage, having to explain it, stammering. You’ve never been searched, you’ve always been too innocent-looking and respectable for that.

There’s no note with the package but the address label is
typed. Your fingertips run over the letters, the heavy imprint of them.

Anonymous, of course. How long has he been back? Did he ever go? Is this another game? You ring, leave messages on his machine, he will not return your calls.

Another letter.

I want to be the hand in the small of your back pushing you forward.

Trembling, wet, slumping back against the wall.

Snared.