I Take You

And it was only when Connie was needed that something like love – as far as she knows what love is – uncurled. The accident tipped their sex life into something else. Because Cliff gouged out – patiently, gently, beseechingly – the very marrow of his impenetrable wife. It had become the trigger that now tipped him into someone else. To see her so wanton, transformed, bared, cracked, made him focus on another, made him forget.

Her girlfriends have no idea of any of this. A listener rather than a talker, a receptacle for everyone else’s angst, Connie is extremely good at maintaining a secret life.

12

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.

13

Why, if one wants to compare life to anything, one must liken it to being blown through the Tube at fifty miles an hour – landing at the other end without a single hairpin in one’s hair!

He puts her to bed like a child. They do not sleep together. They never sleep together. Connie is up high, in the vast attic room, her choice. Her wonder room. Full of twigs and shells and sticks and cones, fossils, bones, sketches, books. Hand-stitched quilts from Victorian Ireland, battered fishing tins of wondrously mottled green, Edwardian rods from the Cornish coast. The windows are never shut so every night Connie can drink the night, the moon, the sky; and by day the melancholy cries of gulls that speak of London’s great maritime past and sing her home. The room has a lift, at Cliff’s insistence, but he never lingers, for this space represents a wild side of his wife he never quite trusts. Because it can’t be bought. She is a woman raw in this eyrie and he doesn’t want this aspect of her anywhere else. No leakage of any of this world – raw, battered, found grubbily off the street – is allowed into the rest of the house.

The rest: a bone house, no warmth. Interior-designed within an inch of its life. Audacious chairs, thick art books (never opened), oatmeal throws and broad, boastful art. This, of course, is what’s photographed.

Cliff kisses Connie on the cheek, kisses his thanks for the magnificence of the night. She turns from him, sleepily; feels the virgin weight raw between her legs. Does not know how many hands inspected as she lay there unconscious, in that theatre; she can feel an ache, a fulsome sullying. Was Clifford watching from the wings? Who, eventually, inserted the padlock? Who snapped it shut? With what sense of ceremony? She does not know. Any of it.

But it is there now, securely locked and suddenly, in the quiet, Connie is unstoppably up on all fours, a pillow under her, grinding the fresh, cold heaviness into her. The drug of it, the drug; never mind the bleeding, the six weeks of getting used to fresh piercings, the endless twisting of the hoops, the careful tending of it. She is back. It is worth it. Further and further along the path. She will do it all, all, for moments of exquisiteness like this when her body succumbs so beautifully and magnificently and powerfully and she is in awe of it, all of it; how she becomes, so completely, someone else entirely; forgetting the pain and the terror and the discomfort in the blind, addictive want. Thinking now of a myriad of hands, and cocks and cunts; cool Nika, the coy driver; it is not connected with Clifford in any way; never is, never was. She comes swiftly and collapses on the bed.

Has never felt more primed in her life.

14

For beyond the difficulty of communicating oneself, there is the supreme difficulty of being oneself

Connie collects Tracey Emin, the brazen knot of her. Cliff lets her because she’s ‘kinky’.

‘She’s not kinky, she’s honest,’ is the retort.

The soft glare of the neon in startling corners of the house.

‘I said Don’t Practise ON ME.’

‘I KNOW I KNOW I KNOW.’

‘MY CUNT IS WET WITH FEAR.’

The latter in the shared bathroom off the main bedroom that Connie hasn’t used since Cliff’s accident.

On the stairs leading to her eyrie is the wiry delicacy of legs splayed, a plunged hand, a labia scurried. Reddened, raw. The titles: Self Growth, Thinking About It, and Those Who Suffer Love, a series of heels and ankles wide, as wide as they can be, in homage to Courbet’s L’Origine du Monde.

Connie is drawn to Emin as she is drawn to Dickinson, Réage, Duras, Plath, for their vulnerability, authenticity, anarchy, courage, truth. Cliff just thinks she needs a fuck, quick smart. ‘That’ll fix her up.’

15

It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes makes its way to the surface

Connie wakes late into a hard light. Pain, down below. Itch. Practically, how can this work? What is happening to us all? she wonders. All this brazen new openness and honesty, all this craven, spectator want? Public figures, A-list celebs, young royals: they’re all ending up at the Box at some point. Where does it go from here? The experimentation increasingly permeating the public sphere, the new nakedness, raw talk. The Brazilianed and Botoxed ladies of her book club have all read Fifty Shades and now discuss bondage and belts when once it was Proust and now this, her fresh little branding, yet it doesn’t feel so odd. The voracious devouring of these illicit texts feels revolutionary in terms of women’s reading; the dawn of a new age of … what? This new decadence, effulgence, feels like the tipping point of some sort, an inexorable slide into a waning like the Roman Empire’s demise and Connie wonders what on earth could follow it. A flinch into extreme conservatism, perhaps, a vast reining back?

All she knows is that there is a body, a being, a confidence that dies as soon as light hits her high room and the real world intrudes. But those secret nights … oh, those nights.

16

I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in

Eleven a.m. Saturday. Breakfast together, the yellow and black room at the back of the house. Cliff chewing loudly as he reads the FT, masticating his egg and toast, slurping down his coffee in a loud gulp. Connie cannot bear the sounds, he is oblivious. No one has ever pointed them out to him, she is sure. It is one of those moments of utter stasis between them when her future life comes hurtling towards her suddenly, a wall of acquiescence, stillness, rot.

Cliff looks up as if he’s only just realized she’s there. Inclines his head. Engages. Reverses his wheelchair, a touch. Asks her to throw her silken kimono from Myla off one shoulder and come closer, right by him, to sit in the chair next to him, upright, one leg cocked: ‘Let’s see what that small fortune spent on yoga poses actually does for you, hmm?’

Connie complies, winces, it hurts.

He inspects, smiles a murmur, ‘Good good,’ snaps his paper for better viewing and returns to his reading. Connie relaxes her leg. ‘Play.’ Brusque, from behind the newsprint. ‘Cherish the family crest. Show me. I want to see. Hear.’

Connie feels too stiff, raw. It hurts. She stops.

Silence. Stillness. Her cage and she has constructed it, of course. With her obedience, her compliance, her truth. Cliff continues reading the paper, lost in his mergers. Connie now gazing out the window, thinking of Picasso, how he said that all women were goddesses or doormats and if they weren’t doormats at the start of the relationship then he’d do his level best to crack them into it. Herself? She’s never been any threat. It’s why his tight, moneyed family likes her, she knows that. One of those sweet ones who will not rock the boat; a pleaser, primed for a rubbing out; instinctively his family of strong women recognized it despite the slight niggle of a gold-digger, she can sense it; but she’s sure they’re like that with anyone who comes into their fold.

‘You will look after him, won’t you?’ enquired his mother, upfront, at the start. ‘Yes,’ Connie answered simply, ‘yes of course,’ even then. And she has ever since. No one’s ever been afraid of her cowardice, her compliance; they all take her to be the good wife. Look after him, of course, but what about herself? Who’ll look after her? She’s a girl, she’ll be fine, she can look after herself.

‘Where do we go from here?’ Connie suddenly asks into the morning quiet.

Cliff puts down the paper. Wheels his chair close. Props her leg back sternly, then the other one, and brushes a touch, admiring his handiwork; his wife’s knuckles are white on the chair’s rim. He does not know this. He tells her he has a new client. His voice, signalling the start of the process. A young South American, from Argentina; not a talker, a possibility, there’s something cheeky and ready in him, her ‘type’. A pause. There’s a scenario … he’d like to try out. He toys with his new bauble buried between his wife’s legs. Her eyes are closed, giving nothing away. Cliff talks on. A business meeting here, at home. Not now, but when she’s healed, readied. He will ring for papers. His wife will volunteer to help, she is close, she knows where they are. She will enter his office, bundle in hand, wearing the shortest of her Chanel skirts, that red one, with the fringe, and her six-inch Louboutins. Then just as she hands them across the desk the papers will be dropped, the whole lot. She will bend, on all fours, and pick them up. Slowly. Searching. Her rump high and square to this stranger.

His test.

Which Cliff will watch.

‘No knickers.’ Connie nods, feeling the wave of complicity, the stirring, washing through her despite herself.

‘Of course. And most importantly – my lovely, lovely new trinket.’ He strokes it with his thumb.

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