Nikki Gemmell’s Threesome: The Bride Stripped Bare, With the Body, I Take You (75 page)

To me you’re everything that exists; the reality of everything

Late February. The two of them in the communal garden. Out, out, into the flush of fresh air; the weather finally breaking, a wan light on their faces. Connie can never quite get over the rarefied world of the locked garden gate in these parts, those beautiful expanses of public space behind their iron railings that firmly keep out the public. It feels so ragingly undemocratic; every day she spies bewildered tourists rattling the lock, failing to understand, and then the dawning as someone slips past them with their electronic key and shuts the gate apologetically in their faces.

‘This is private, you know, if I let you in you won’t be able to get out.’

They, the keyholders, another species altogether. Co-owners of one of the most ravishingly beautiful private gardens in London, more exquisite than any public park, three acres shared among a select coterie of homeowners whose villas smugly necklace the expanse. Guy Fawkes effigies are dressed in discarded Burberry at the annual bonfire, there are nannies with Stella McCartney baby bags, the blazers and straw hats of some of the best pre-preps in London, the gracious elderly with easels and the rubbish bins brimming with empty Moët bottles. The French and the Italians, the Aussies and the Yanks are slowly pushing the old Brit money out. Through a rusting art nouveau gate Connie and Cliff’s manicured private garden of white pebbles, box hedges and bamboo opens out to beauty, all beauty, of a fundamentally British kind. A secret land. Rolling lawns and languid willows, roses and bluebells and oaks as well as gravel walks and tennis courts, a playground and sandpit for children, an outdoor gym for adults. But alongside all this, the secret parts: the scruffy, reclusive pockets of wildness with obscure Victorian urns and rotunda follies, little moments rarely stumbled upon that are deliberately, audaciously overgrown, pure nature unleashed. A blanket of removal seems to fall over gardens like this when you enter them. A feeling of peace and space and serenity and expansiveness that no one else in this city has; a great, privileged exhalation amid the cram of life.

Cliff has been carried out to his spot under the great northern oak, Connie beside him on the bench with her Saturday
Times
and
Telegraph
,
the juicy bits, and her guilty read, the
Mail
, because she must
.
She can sense the pent-up rain contained in the very walls of the houses and the fences, the bark of the trees, the soil. Smell the soaking, months and months of it, pluming the ground. Notting Hill, indeed the entire country, has been engorged with rain and it is as if the very earth is now spewing forth its dampness.

Connie looks up from her papers: a rogue person has got in, she doesn’t know how; he is wearing a hoodie which she instinctively shrinks from and he has that unhealthy pallor so many of them have, as if they’ve never eaten a vegetable in their lives. He is walking around, rapt, gazing at this other world just as Connie gazed at it, incredulous, once. She draws a touch closer to Cliff. Doesn’t like the rogue world intruding on her life, has grown unused to it; the world of the garden represents a vast bunkering down. Yet this is an area that was heavily targeted during the war and alongside some of the most expensive real estate in the world are council estates on old bomb sites; it all rubs up too close for Connie’s liking, far too close. She can read the stares as she slides into her darkened cars … envy, sneer, menace, hate.

Clifford catches her gaze, winks; ‘You’ll be all right.’ Exiles both, anonymous here, as two people neither born nor raised in London and with no family close. She is sure both couldn’t do what they’re now doing, in their secret life, in their own places of birth. Here they can revel in the anonymity of the exile, far, far away from the anaesthesia of the known. Here, she is someone else.

The interloper is gone. Connie rises from her bench, needs a walk. She ends up in a wild pocket, in a circle of black urns, an odd, funereal remnant from the Victorian imagination. Here the gardener has somehow managed to coax shy snowdrops to grow and she smiles at that; a touch of home. She feels far, far away from the rhythms of the earth here in London. Nothing feels natural, everything is intervention. She longs to get back to the wild land, to air laden with sea. Longs to roll herself in sand again like she used to as a child, to cleanse, to restore herself. Needs a basting in roaring sunlight.

Connie looks back at her man, his face full to the feeble sunlight heralding spring, his useless ankles vulnerably thin as they poke from his Ralph Lauren corduroy. She knows the Brits always looked at her American as someone to be laughed at and admired and feared in equal measure. His energy was the future. His grasp, boldness, affront. The way he showed off his excessive wealth, revelled in it, laughing at the Brits with their scruffy, faux modesty, their battered old cars and couches covered in dog hairs and sense of detached quiet and bewilderment (which was anything but, he saw right through it). Cliff would drop fifty thousand on alcohol at a restaurant without thinking anything of it; would fly out planeloads of partygoers to the south of France and hire an entire village for it. Connie, ever faithfully beside him, grew quickly addicted to this way of living – loved the sparkly, unthinking splash of it.

Cliff would never be one of them, all the Brits around them knew it; it was amusing and threatening at once. He never bothered to weave himself into the rhythms of their world, his allegiance had always been to his kind. Connie was so attracted to his otherness at the start, the difference of his energy, power, his booming voice and confidence; the animal dynamism so naked and thrilling and blunt.

He’s someone else, now, with his dead ankles. She cannot abandon it.

Arrange whatever pieces come your way

Connie’s father gets the train up from Cornwall, where he lives with her mother in genteel retirement in a manor house on a cliff by the sea. Over brunch in the Electric Club he strokes his youngest daughter behind the earlobe, just as he always has. She’s getting thin, too thin. He’s a former diplomat, a great walrus of a man of huge appetites and a roaring laugh, endlessly astounded that he sired such a graceful slip of a thing so late in life. Yet he’s worried now that his princess, his Neesie, is becoming a demi-vierge, a half-virgin, and tells her so.

‘Oh, Daddy!’ Connie scoffs. ‘I’m fine. Honestly.’

‘The world is supposed to be crowded with possibilities, but they narrow down to pretty few in most people’s experience. I worry for you, I really do.’

Connie looks out through the curtain of chains to scruffy Portobello Road below them, bustling with its vegetable carts and impatient cars, its idling tourists, pushchairs, bicycles. Possibilities in life? Hers. Now. None.

‘My life is very full, Daddy. Cliff needs a lot of help.’

‘Do you ever think about children, Neesie?’

‘What do you mean?’ she snaps.

‘Having them. You’re so young, you’ve got your whole life ahead of you. It’s a …’

‘What, Dad?’

‘Waste. Your slick Yank has no use for you at all now, as far as I can see. He’s entirely wrapped up in himself. Always has been. Now more than ever. You’re wasting away, child. So pale, thin, and you were such a bonny thing once. What has he done to you?’

Connie’s nostrils flare in annoyance, as they always have, since she was a child, when her father presumes too much.

‘We’re happy, Dad. As we are. I’m his wife and I have a job to do. A very important one. Now more than ever. Only I can help him, only me. I’ve become crucial to him in a way that’s impossible to explain.’ End of conversation.

‘Oh, love,’ says her father, and calls for the bill, which she snatches up, and he lets her, as they always do. They walk out arm in arm, laughing despite themselves, too fond of each other for anything else.

They went in and out of each other’s minds without any effort

‘It’s time, my love, to play.’ The pen whispering Connie awake, signalling a falling, a submitting, a surrendering to the trance that will lead to goodness knows what.

‘Yes.’

‘Tomorrow?’

‘Yes. Quick. Please.’

Cliff senses a new restlessness in his wife. A jittery, unvoiced agitation. It needs addressing. He has been neglectful in that department, is brought up sharp. Of course it’s time. It’s been too long. As for Connie, she needs to be needed again, needs purpose. Fast.

That afternoon, after the car has seen her father off to Paddington Station, she is prepared. The sleepers are gently worked through their tiny holes. The padlock is threaded through. Clicked shut by Cliff. She moans. Toys with the object’s weight, its resistance. The thought of it. Closes her legs on it. Expectation blazing under skin.

‘The release …’ he murmurs, smiling secrets into her eyes. ‘For me, for you, for us.’

Thrumming, all evening; exquisitely tuned.

To let oneself be carried on passively is unthinkable

The red skirt with the fringe, the six-inch Louboutins, no knickers. All according to plan.

The stranger has arrived. The intercom rings.

Papers are needed; Connie takes the bundle in her arms. Deep breath. Rolling her muscles upon her secret. Ready. She opens the office door, softly. Cliff, expectant, sitting at his desk that was Napolean Bonaparte’s once and is methodically neat. A man, his back to her, a stiff white collar of a very expensive shirt, a nape. In the past she has fallen in love with a mere nape of a neck, the bend of a wrist, the kink of a hip, it is all it has taken and she is gone. Once.

Connie walks straight up to her husband’s desk, leans over – and hands the papers across.

Cliff’s astonished face.

‘Can’t,’ she mouths, wincing, retreating.

The nape is wrong, the moment, the intimacy that should be a husband’s and no one else’s, the whole confused lot of it. The spell of enchantment is snapped.

Connie leaves without looking at the stranger’s face. Churning. Cliff cannot control such a privacy, he can’t choose it, can’t. Her mind has taken over, it has triumphed; her body is in retreat. In fraught air she backs back. Lost.

Cliff too, bewildered, but in a meeting stuck. ‘I – where was I?’ He smiles benignly to his guest.