Читать книгу: «I Take You: Part 2 of 3»

23

He thought her beautiful, believed her impeccably wise; dreamed of her, wrote poems to her, which, ignoring the subject, she corrected in red ink …

‘Would it perhaps be a good thing if you had a child by another man? Con? What do you think?’

Dinner, the next night. Cliff thinking aloud through thick silence, trying to ensnare his wife with talk, to work out this new person; and there is Connie, all changed, flinched, hearing him as if from afar, as though through an old diving helmet, a weight stifling, airless, wrong.

‘You’d think we’d be able to arrange this sex thing as we arrange going to the hairdresser, wouldn’t you? In this day and age …’ Cliff is now snapping out his thoughts. ‘Since some fucking trees on a ski slope – that shouldn’t have been there in the first place – have given us a checkmate, physically, in that department.’

He is talking at Connie, not with her, as he does, he always does. ‘I don’t know,’ she is saying, ‘I don’t know,’ unable to articulate anything of her new, strange roar to him, her silent roar. A weary yearning, a dissatisfaction has started in her but he cannot see it and she does not expect him to. It’s all talk, all nothing, a wonderful display of nothingness, Connie thinks as she looks around her at all their careful objects that were procured by the interior designer, so tastefully placed, so exquisitely photographed, so sucked of life. There is no love behind any of it, no passion, no shared stories, no mess or mistakes, not even the shard of a fight. Because they don’t care enough, she thinks. Neither of them. Not a single thing here has been picked out by either of them, not even the family portraits in silver frames crowding a sideboard from Churchill’s family home. A child? Into this?

Cliff does not want one, never has, a new creature who would interfere so meddlingly with everything he’s got. He would lose control, what he fears more than anything; he’s always conveyed that; it’s too seismic a shift, too slippery and uncontainable for such an ordered life. Or perhaps he has a child somewhere else, has always had one. He works long hours, is a fair bit older, could cram a lot into all his time spent apart from her.

Connie doesn’t care enough.

She does not respect this world. He has no idea of this. She would not want her own child to follow in Cliff’s footsteps. A banker? Whose sole purpose is to be fêted in Forbes, to work his way up the rich list? Please. It’s all about vanquishing everyone else; if colleague X acquires 200 acres in Oxfordshire, they must have 300. If colleague Y has four cars they must have five and a multi-car, underground basement garage to house them. It is all display, ridiculous plumage. The most robust bonus, the most exquisite house, the cinema room and the servants’ quarters, the predictably lavish milestone birthdays in exotic places, the paintings, the cutlery, the crockery, glassware, wife. It is all so predictable, and utterly of a type; like homosexual men they must follow each other meticulously in the way they dress, what they acquire, how they display their wealth, act. And Connie is chafing, chafing at the bit.

All around her are bankers’ wives having a fourth child, for even that is competitive, the bigger family for the artfully smug Christmas card photo, the new mode of accessorizing; four because they have the funds and the help and the ease to do it, four because look at us, we fuck a lot. Clifford wants other men to envy him, as simple as that; but not in terms of the child-gaggle, he’s often conveyed that. He doesn’t like anyone’s child – despite having four godchildren – they’re all too rude, loud, obnoxious, spoilt. It’s all a great and ugly nothingness and for Connie, in this moment, to accept the great nothingness of life seems to be the end of living.

‘Con, Con, what is it you want? Speak to me.’

But she can’t. Because she does not know herself. Uncertainty, doubt, something like hate has cut through her world like a shark; scattering the enchantment of the secret nights.

24

I am rooted, but I flow

Mid March. Connie on the garden bench next to Cliff. Their faces full to the first proper sun of the season, pinnacles of light pricking them into a waking. It is like being soothed inside a rarefied enclosure here, behind its tall black bars, removed from the mess and the muck of the world. Cliff especially loves it, away from dispiriting Notting Hill Gate with its steely pollution you can taste in your mouth, its riff-raff of people, churning crowds, grimly unbeautiful buildings. All grey! Grey! Tired! Washed out! And the little people, the great seething mass of them, can’t even discern it. Then this, so magically, secretly close. Nothing lets in the world here and he is extremely grateful for it.

A man walks past on the gravel, pushing a wheelbarrow. He doffs his flat cap at Cliff in a quick, deferential nod, flicks eyes at Connie, nothing more. Cliff barely notices.

‘Who is that?’ she asks, watching as the new man rakes a damp slush of leaves; his hands curiously elegant as they grasp the rake.

Cliff shrugs. ‘The new gardener? He was here before, apparently, for years, then had a bit of trouble with some shrew of a wife. Moved away. Is now back. Johnnie told me. He’s good, apparently. Mel or something. God knows.’ Johnnie being a neighbour a few doors down, a fellow banker, a rare Brit in these parts.

Connie gazes after this new man, suddenly alert. He’s in a T-shirt, unusual for this time of year, winter’s chill not yet past. He’s in a T-shirt as if he doesn’t care for the cold, doesn’t feel it, or wants the brace of it shivering him up. An animal energy, a difference. A shock of black hair. Pale skin. A face that would shadow by early evening and she’s always loved the virility of that. A body gracefully lean, taut; not from the gym but from constant hard work. Grubby hands from whatever he’s been doing with the earth. Dirt under the nails. A swipe of mud across his face. From the land, with the land, quick and at ease with it, in the way no one else around here is. So alone, but so sure of himself, apart; contained, uninterested in them, in any of the odd creatures who inhabit this place. Connie has a calibrated awareness, behind her Times, for he is like a sudden rush of a threat out of nowhere.

And he does not notice her one bit.

But there is a shine in him. It is called self-sufficiency. A pure lack of need. Of envy. Of this strange, jittery, out-of-kilter world around him, these people, their money, their ways, any of it. Connie stares after him.

Cliff does not notice.