I Take You

‘Welcome, welcome, my friend. Ahmed is waiting. And this – this – must be the beautiful Constance.’ The man unhooks her coat and throws it back from her shoulders. ‘Can I watch?’ he asks Cliff, never taking his eyes from Connie, the length of her waiting, ready, primed body, utterly exposed to the three of them. ‘It would please me immensely. It’s been a long time since we had one of these.’

‘Be my guest.’ Cliff nods in the smoothly charming way he has with his clients as he extracts their money from them.

‘And everyone else?’

‘But of course.’

‘Excellent. The theatre, the good doctor, the instruments. All are ready and waiting, my friend.’

A suddenly violent flinch, flaring through Connie, like a horse’s shudder. Cliff takes her hand – ‘I love you so much’ – he is whispering his approval, his gratitude, steadying her. ‘The next step. For both of us. Your gift to me. To us.’

Connie is righted, almost buckles, with anticipation, readiness, want. Nothing must break the spell, nothing, she must not rationalize too much. She must not let fear clench her want, dissolve it.

‘Surrender – completely – or it will not work. For me … for you … for any of us.’

7

For most of history, anonymous was a woman

A young woman is summoned, her hair in a plain bun. She is bearing a silver tray. The receptionist picks up a length of silk cloth and wraps it several times, with practised expertise, around Connie’s eyes and cheeks, her belly firm into her back. ‘My name is Nika,’ she whispers. ‘And I’m going to look after you tonight.’

The master of the house observes, takes over. ‘The cloth is so no one knows who you are in the real world,’ he explains, ‘so no one will ever know. Tonight, our little club is packed. They are being thrown morsels as we speak but you … you … are what they want. They have been told something of what to expect. And none of them will ever know who you are. Or who you belong to.’ Cliff squeezes her hand as the master reties Nika’s knot tighter and whispers in her ear. ‘Anonymity is your refuge. Your liberation. Into another world, another life. You are one of us now. You will be ours from this night. You will want to be.’

He steps in front of Connie and parts the silk, just a sliver, so she can see out, for now, a touch. His fingertip brushes down her lips, he smiles, their secret.

‘Nika, please escort my old friend into the red room. He needs some pre-show entertainment. And perhaps a stiff drink. I need to prepare this dear girl.’

At that, Connie starts trembling; trembling as she realizes this is all entirely new, and Cliff will not be with her, not leading her, telling her what to do, not whispering a kiss on the cheek and assuring her everything will be all right; she is trembling as the maid takes her husband by the hand and leads him out, away, from her, from whatever is next; trembling as she realizes she is now alone with this man with his sudden greed of a touch. For what, she does not know. Have they gone too far, Cliff and her, in spilling their secret wants? She never expected that world to leach into real life.

It is too late, Cliff is gone.

The stranger throws her fur coat briskly on the counter. ‘We’ll be needing none of this now.’ Summons another girl from the shadow of a doorway, also bearing a silver tray. Upon it is a thick red collar. ‘Such a pretty little thing, for a pretty little girl,’ he murmurs, buckling it around Connie’s neck then suddenly tugging it roughly, pulling it a notch too tight as if he is free, now, to be vicious, since his friends have left the room, like a man in a secret moment with a dog. The collar is too thick, the leathery smell pungent. Connie gasps but does not cry out. ‘Oh, you sweet, sweet thing, you are ready, so ready for this, aren’t you?’ A chain is attached and she is jerked towards a wooden door, low, with brass studs. Roughly pushed through it. She stumbles. A foot in the small of her back forces her up, into looking.

A room like Connie has never seen before. Like some anatomical theatre of old. Small and windowless and steeped with hard wooden benches on three sides, on several levels. In the centre of the floor: a narrow, unforgiving doctor’s table. Instinctively Connie knows it will be hard and cold upon her flesh, for it is for her, instinctively she knows that. It has steel railings at its head, like a bedhead, for securing things she presumes, and stirrups hanging down from the ceiling above. Next to it is a narrow steel table with various implements; she can hardly bear to look, she is breathing fast now, shallow; there are irons and manacles, collars, whips of different sizes and some strange instrument that looks like a medieval hole-puncher. How has her world come to this? Where is Cliff? No, no, she must veer back into willingness.

‘Yes, my dear, oh yes,’ the master murmurs, propelling her towards the table, grasping her chin and forcing her into looking. She pulls back, resists, the man immediately calls out ‘Hans’ and through the door steps a man in tight jeans and singlet, no neck, just a fall of skin into shoulders and with two panting dogs on leashes; all three of them look like they’ve been plucked from the London just driven through. He has her fur coat over his arm. One dog barks. Connie is very, very still, scarcely breathing now, trembling.

‘Just remember, my love, this is what Cliff wants,’ the master says, mock-soothing, holding her leash tight so they are now cheek to cheek. ‘He has asked for this. For everything. He will be in the audience. He needs to know how much you love him. How obedient you will be. For him. For others. It’s what he wants.’ Connie whimpers. ‘You know that.’

She does. Everything she has done beforehand has led to this point. She shuts her eyes, wilts. Her tongue is nailed to the floor of her mouth. The master takes her mink from his servant and spreads it upon the doctor’s table, fur side up. Connie knows, now, what she must do, what is expected of her. She does not resist, it is what Cliff wants, it is what she wants, what she has led him to think she wants. She steps obediently up onto the small platform by the table. Slips off her shoes and places them carefully, side by side, on the floor. Lies down gingerly, for she knows this is what Cliff has prescribed; in his precise way, he has thought this through carefully. She says nothing as the bouncer secures her wrists with iron manacles and ties them to the iron bars at her head. Surrenders, gasps. Says nothing as he trusses her up, knees bent, violently exposed, for the entire theatre to see; says nothing as the bouncer runs a finger across her, slips a digit in, grunts his approval. A dog barks, comes forward, Connie moans. The servant withdraws, too quick. Is gone.

And now. Just the master and her. He walks around the theatrical space in a circle, assessing. ‘We certainly don’t need these,’ he says suddenly, crisply, taking out a small ivory penknife and running it down the Wolford silk on each leg, snapping off the garters. Expertly, no skin is broken. Connie cannot see, can barely move, she is so bound. A tongue laps her up, once, quick. Her arse is rimmed, entered. A groan.

So ready, so ready.

‘I’ll leave you for now,’ the master says, looping the dogs’ leashes over a post by the lowest seats. Then he kisses Connie gently on the forehead, caresses her like a child being put to bed. Adjusts a surgical light so it is glaring onto her and steps away. ‘Enjoy. You are extremely lucky to have someone who allows you to be so utterly, magnificently … free.’

He is gone.

Connie hears the door shut, the panting of the dogs, the faint hum of the light. So. Utterly alone. Anonymous. Another person entirely. And waiting, wet. Within the valley of her mind; her roaring raging glittering mind. All the shaded creek pockets like crypts; the beauty and ugliness, the rawness and the want. The night feels open with possibility. How ironic this is, Connie thinks; how ironic that like so many suicides these actions can stem from nothing more than a simple desire to be good. It is the obedient, the pliant, who succumb, who always succumb. The selfish, the craven, the canny – those with the chip of ice – would never get to this point.

Yet the enthralling power of it, too. The thrilling sense of command, of being watched.

Wet, so wet, as she waits, like a spring-loaded trap ready to lock its jaws upon life. Anonymously. Entirely someone else.

8

Lock up your libraries if you like, but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt you can set upon the freedom of my mind

Connie can barely see through her sliver of silk. The banked seats are full. The animal anticipation. Cliff there somewhere, anonymous, hidden, but she can’t make him out. She is exposed, in the glary light, yet no one can discern who she is. She waits. A gong, a frisson of silence. Backs straightened, straining. A ringmaster strides in. He cracks his long whip either side of her and she gasps and flinches at the shock but is untouched. The audience cheer. Then the stirrups begin to move, mechanically, straightening her legs, forcing them apart in a violent V. The audience, primed, thunder their approval.

‘This act, my friends, this last act of the evening, is called … The Banker’s Wife.’ A roar of approval. ‘And to assist, we welcome to the floor a physician who deals with the most unusual, most delicious, most singular of situations – the esteemed Dr Ahmed. Normally, these requests are carried out in utmost privacy. But tonight you are extremely fortunate, for what you are about to witness is to be shared, by consent, with all of you.’ Roaring, stamping. ‘Now, is she good and ready, I wonder? Is she the banker’s wife – or the banker’s whore?’ He is working the crowd, revving them up. ‘Does she want this, I wonder? Let’s see, shall we?’ Clapping, cheering, whistling, jeering. ‘I can’t hear you. Shall we see, or shall we not?’ Roaring, and at that moment Connie realizes that they perceive it all as artifice, pretence, she is part of a theatrical show, one of many put on here, it is all an act, she can play a part. She surrenders; her body a receptacle for whatever Cliff has decided upon next.

The ringmaster holds out his whip, suddenly smiles, thinks twice, turns it around, and with great show of a drum roll nudges the handle inside Connie’s vagina. She’ll show him, draws it in, knows Cliff is watching somewhere close, aroused, his face unmoved yet profoundly moved and she writhes on that handle, grasping it in her muscles and working it, rhythmically working it, for she knows he wants her with others, always asks; other men, women, in a place like this; more than anything he wants this, he has told her often and she comes in a flood, the good wife, too quick, in her own private moment amid the spectacle of the crowd, his gift to her and hers to him.

As she collapses inward, with the sheer exquisiteness, a small man of great containment, neatness, steps from the shadows. The crowd hushes, expectant.

The next step.

‘Good evening. What you are about to witness tonight is a most unusual – but not uncommon – request.’ A naked woman steps forward, wearing nothing but a red collar with a chain looped from it, firm under her cunt, from front to back. She is holding a red velvet cushion upon which sit three small devices. The man picks up a tiny object, displays it high. ‘What you see before you is a padlock. Not quite the usual one. It has a nicely rounded shape. It is has been made by artisans, to the husband’s exact specifications.’ A glittery quiet. ‘Quite a beautiful little treasure, oh yes. A ruby surrounded by diamonds is embedded on one side’ – the audience gasp – ‘and a swirl that echoes an esteemed family crest is engraved upon the other.’ He snatches it away. ‘Ah! No peeking!’ The audience laugh in excitement. ‘It is a most singular and exhilarating form of marital binding.’ He strokes the underside of Connie’s thighs, she shivers.

‘The subject is ready and willing. For her husband. Tonight. We will be inserting two sleepers in a most intimate place; these will be the rings that will hold our pretty padlock in place. From this moment this sweet, willing, and very good wife will feel its presence at all times, reminding her constantly of her most rarefied role. Thrilling her, stimulating her, disciplining her. Whenever she sees another man she wants, she will bear down on this secret bauble, knowing it is her husband and her husband only who has the key. And yes, he will allow others, at times, at his choosing; perhaps, even, if we are so lucky, within the hallowed walls of this club. Others will be allowed to touch this … open it … bestow the thrilling gift of release. Have your way. You see, this is a man of decidedly singular and specific wants. And his wife is extremely beautiful – and wanton – and greedy.’ His finger circles Connie’s anus. Cacophonous laughter. ‘Now, where exactly is this charming little object to be placed? I wonder …’

His fingers brush across Connie’s bared and readied labia, she gasps, writhes, glancing at the menacing hole-puncher on the steel table. Of course. Dr Ahmed picks it up. The stirrups move again, forcing her into the first position that she was left in for seeming hours, forcing her still, utterly bared. Her eyes search the audience for Cliff … he must be in the shadows … somewhere near a door … discreet as always … knows it is what he wants … has requested … the logical step …

‘You will not wear underpants after tonight,’ he had whispered in the car, ‘for me, for my associates, for all of us.’ Now she knows why. ‘Do you love me, do you?’

‘Yes,’ she is murmuring now, ‘yes, yes.’

Because everything has been building to this moment, of course, this moment of the attaching of a coldly explosive little object that is to become part of her from now on, her flesh, her very existence, as much as a scar is, a pacemaker, a metal pin. Every time Connie thinks of it, its weight, its grate, its drag and its coolness, she will be reminded, thrilled, addled, snared; she will shut her eyes upon it and squeeze tight. His, his alone. Totally submissive to him. Unlocked only by him, for others of his choosing, whenever he deems it is time.

How has it come to this?

9

There was a star riding through clouds one night, and I said to the star, ‘Consume me’

Dr Ahmed smiles, doctor-kind and knowing, straight at Connie. Holds up a syringe. ‘To ease the pain,’ he soothes. Someone in the audience gasps. Is that her Cliff? She does not know; still she tries to find him, cannot. He cannot have abandoned her, at this crucial moment, he cannot be leaving her here. This is terrifying, she wasn’t expecting anything like it, she feels so cruelly exposed, wronged, humiliated; the spell is snapped. ‘Show us all how brave you are,’ the doctor whispers close, just to her, holding high the instrument for all to see. ‘It’s just like getting your ears pierced. Show us how much you want this.’

And at that moment Connie catches sight of Cliff, by the door the servant entered, smiling, willing her on and needing this and she succumbs once again, latches onto the surrendering, grabs at it; pushing her cunt out, out, as far as it can go, ready to receive, for him, yes, the magnificent depths of her love … for this has brought them both alive … she will be consumed by it, transformed, someone else entirely … for him … his creation, toy, fascination, his means of being flooded with life; she shuts her eyes, wills it, the slipping into something else. For after all, she is the good wife, everyone knows this.

A local anaesthetic first but still the pain is searing as the first hole in Connie’s flesh is punched through but she does not cry out, she does not, knowing Cliff doesn’t want that … but at the second piercing, oh God – it cannot be helped: a piercing scream tears the night.

This is not an act.

Blackness … she slumps onto the soft mink … the relief of the oblivion. All soothing, velvety dark, all quiet.

10

Why are women … so much more interesting to men than men are to women?

He has asked her to write it down, all of it, the raw, unvarnished depths; the great and astonishing cistern of her lusts. Cliff needs to know, urgently now, and in a supreme act of love Connie has done so. She has stripped herself bare, violently, with moving vulnerability, just for him; she has unleashed her deepest, innermost thoughts. And to a man. A trusted confidant, when women rarely reveal the rawness of this vivid underbelly. To anyone. This, their secret life. Which is rarely given life.

‘He is a man of decidedly singular and specific wants.’

Clifford is confined to a wheelchair. A skiing accident at Klosters, two years into their marriage. And in the gilded unliving of this feted Notting Hill couple – the ex-Goldman banker and his fragrant, former model wife – this, now, is what keeps them tremulous. Connected. There is no physical sex between them. There cannot be because of Cliff’s condition. It is all, now, in the mind. It is all deeply secret display and withholding and commanding and surprise and play – and truth, audacious truth. And it is better now than it ever was, when their marriage was conventional, when Cliff was whole; it is as if a grainy black and white movie has burst into Technicolor life. Because one night – upon hearing his grief-stricken frustration as he tried stirring his deadened penis into stiffness and could not – Connie took up her husband’s Mont Blanc pen and spilled, courageously, her innermost thoughts.

What she really wanted. What she did not. Because Cliff had asked. Had begged for anything that could help them both.

How to love a new husband whose very manhood has been suddenly snatched? She would not leave him although many in their honeyed west London circle expected it. She’d get a grand payout, she was still young and attractive and could move on to someone else, set herself up in a Portobello mews and open a bespoke chocolate shop – but they all underestimated the Cornwall girl. For Connie has a lapdog sense of good in her. Of decorum, of duty, of Christian respect. There was pity there too, and a desire for sudden usefulness after years of being the trophy ornament to various men, the girlfriend everyone wanted to fuck. She would not leave her crippled husband, she could not. She would become a different type of wife now, devote herself entirely to Cliff, do whatever it took to have him lead as normal a life as possible, with normal wants.

Or abnormal. As she soon found out. Because it worked. Like a match struck into darkness it sprang Clifford back into life. He became a man again, with a man’s vociferous lust. And she was pleased, so pleased, at that.

11

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.