In the chaos of afterwards you tell all your boys how wonderful they are, how loved, how they flood your life with happiness.
Parenting the opposite to your father. Not turning into your parent as you became one yourself; rebelling against him. You say to Jack how enormously thrilled you are by him, how amazing he was. Rexi does too. He’s much calmer now, the storm within has passed and you wonder at the great dips and troughs of all their childhoods—how they change so much. What they were at four they are resolutely not at eight; you think you have them down pat and then they slip off, into something else. Just like marriage. It’s constantly changing, fluid, dynamic. First one partner in the ascendant, then the other, learning from each other, it’s never still. The four of you walk away laughing from the school hall. Everything has firmed, everything.
Susan rings late that night to lock you into the face-painting stall at the school fair.
‘Wasn’t Emma amaaaaazing?’ she says, referring to a girl in Jack’s class who sang a solo; she’d never give a compliment to your own child, it’s a trick she’s pulled often before. ‘I cried, she was that good.’
You’re calm. ‘Actually, I cried at my own son.’ You smile strong. ‘He was amazing. I was so proud of him.’
‘Yes,’ she says, ‘he was.’ Taken aback; she has suddenly realised something.
Lesson 218
A solid, useful, available happiness
Your little nugget of a secret at your writing desk in the attic.
Steadying your life like a keeled yacht.
Your manifesto, your instruction manual. It will be written with unflinching honesty; you’ve opened a door to a reckless, exhilarating new world and you work in a trance of liberation and defiance. You are stepping out of your normal self, becoming someone more brazen and confident, high on hormones and released. Rubbing your belly in glee. This will be anonymous, it is the only way to do it, with your little family so tight and so cherished around you. And when it is done you will walk away from it like a mother who’s adopted out a child, you will leave it to make its own way in the world and you will get on with your life.
And one day—you dream—Hugh will find it on his pillowslip.
No idea who it’s from. Any woman, and every woman.
But he will learn from it.
Oh yes.
Lesson 219
Deafened with ever-sounding trills of delicious laughter all day, and lying down at night with a soft sleepy thing breathing at his side, or wakened of a morning with two little arms tight around his neck, smotheringly expressing a wealth of love that kingdoms could not buy
What is healed: the great open wound you have carried all through your life. For a while there in adulthood you thought the searing hurt of your father’s withdrawal was getting worse, you had no defences for the pain of his sloppiness; it was increasing, in fact, as you reached middle age. But finally, after so long, it is cauterised. And you know now what the greatest chasm is between two people, out of all the chasms that can widen and swallow and swamp.
Love withheld, by a parent.
If you want to hurt the most, do the most damage—try that. If you want to see a miraculous healing, try the opposite. Love withheld can lock up a life. Lock up confidence, esteem, strength.
Your father will never say he loves you anymore, never say how proud he is of you, will never ring you on your birthday or send a present for Christmas despite you ringing him every one of his own birthdays and each December 25th. He will never do any of these things, but he did something for you once.
And it is enough.
Lesson 220
We have lived just long enough to trace the apparent plot and purpose of our own life and that of others sufficiently to make us content to sit still and see the play played out
Six p.m. Hugh has commanded you disappear. Have a bath, read a magazine, rub lavender oil into your tummy, do all that women stuff.
‘Leave the boys to their men’s business, pizza boxes and beer cans,’ he announces with a cheeky grin, rubbing his hands in glee and flurrying the boys right up. You retreat upstairs, smiling as you hear the squeals and thumps and roars rising below you. A footy’s being kicked, you don’t mind; all you want, all you ever want, is their happiness.
You slip out your little manual with its depth charges threaded through it. Settle your bare feet on the creaky coffin-lid floor.
It feels like you are painstakingly sewing a quilt up here, in your little hidden space, a blanket of warmth and comfort, beauty and secrets—for all women, any women—pouring into it all the wisdom and the heartbreak, all the ridiculousness and the ugliness, all the vulnerability and want and exhilaration and truth.
It’s all you’ve got.
A voice.
And as it’s firmed, the world around you is beauty-ing up. The snow outside your window is ragged, undisciplined, dancing in the air in big, blowsy drops and the restless river churns below you in a beautiful ceaseless rush, somersaulting its foam over the rocks. The wind tugs at the tiny attic window that holds firm but protesting on its latch and the roar in the trees sounds like distant surf but the cosiness of your teapot of a house enfolds you strong in its embrace. It is all ravishing, deeply comforting; and right now, enough.
You are finally stepping into the happiness you’ve spent years backing away from. You didn’t deserve it, that is how you always felt; you couldn’t possibly just lie back in it and bask. But now.
All surrender.
The laughter tripping through you. As you do exactly what you want.
Lesson 221
Real marriage, with all its sanctity, beauty and glory
That night you feign sleep, face to face with Pip, to try and drop him into slumber. He puts his face so close to yours that you can feel his warm breath and then he touches, wondrously, learning. He touches your eyelids and tries to make them open, your lips, nose, cheeks, then he plants a huge, slightly askew smack of a kiss on your lips.
You want this to go on forever.
Later it is the man who curls around you. Hugh’s arm locks in yours, seat belt, he calls it, cupping his child in your belly. Firm in his grip you fall into sleep, nourished. Because what you have with Hugh is evenness, you always know his love, do not doubt it as he does not yours; it is a great constant.
What you have, now, is the seductiveness of shared sleep.
Perhaps it is happiness, perhaps removal, but you rarely think of Tol anymore. Is it a travesty, what you have become, from that girl you once were?
No. Biology took over. Your body insisted you go on this path.
Your breasts ache. Filling, once again, with milk. And this one feels different within you—you are spilling out, widening in a way you never did in the past, a regular Venus of Willendorf, good grief.
Lesson 222
Look up to that region of blue calm which is never long invisible to the pure of heart—this is the blessedest possession that any woman can have
You begin to bleed.
It begins on a Thursday afternoon. During a huge day of ferrying kids to swimming and piano and play dates, one of those running days where you’re constantly trying to catch up. But you carry on. Need to have the kids sorted before you can get to this.
‘It might just be one of those pregnancy bleeds,’ Hugh says on the phone. ‘Rest. Alright?’
By Friday afternoon you are driving yourself to A and E. Are told to go home, put your feet up. The blood is spilling over the soaked pad between your legs, streaking down your legs; the volume is frightening. You wake up on the Saturday after a despairing, hoping, praying night with a sinking heart. So much blood. You wanted this child—this daughter, you just know it—so vastly. Don’t fall out!
Back to A and E. The doctor tells you your blood/hormone reading is 13,000—which means it’s still there. Beautiful, radiant, soaring hope. The baby has somehow, miraculously, gripped on while everything around it is falling away. Inside, still, is a ferociously beating he
art. Despite despairing clumps of tissue and blood coming out and at one point, on the toilet, a soft rolling ‘pop’ of a something but the water in the bowl is too murky to get a proper look, and you can’t, quite.
All day, hope.
Lesson 223
We are able to take interest in the marvellous government of the universe
You’re admitted into a ward of gyni-complicated women. Are handed a grey cardboard bowl to catch whatever will come out. The coldness of the gesture cuts through you. You bite your lip, staring at it. Right. They want the foetus, their prize; want to examine it.
By nightfall the nurse confirms you are miscarrying. There is, of course, nothing that can be done. Nature must take its course. It’s for the best. And now it is as if your body just wants to flush the alien object out, you bleed and bleed in great clumps.
A scan confirms everything.
Nothing left.
‘Cry, and cry again, love,’ the radiographer soothes, her gentle hand on your belly and then around your heaving, shuddering back. ‘It’s a bereavement. Nothing less.’
Oh yes.
The hospital wants you staying but no, you must get out, there’s a family and a house that awaits. It is where you need to be. You just want to hold your boys at this moment, your beautiful bright boysies, bury your nose into their softness and cuddle them tight, so tight.
As you walk from the fluorescence of the hospital’s bright electric doors: an enormous white balloon of sadness inside you, filling you up.
Lesson 224
Marriage ought not always to be a question of necessity, but of choice
Through it all, Hugh.
Your weeping, as you were wheeled into the ward and were told that your husband was over there, waiting; see, look.
And there he was, yes. Standing, glittery-eyed, holding your overnight bag. The leather bag he bought for a surprise birthday trip to Rome, where he played you a clip from Roman Holiday on the DVD player in the cab on the way to the airport and teased guess where we’re off to, guess? He has packed completely the wrong clothes but never mind, there is so much love in it that you have to laugh. And there is also a cosmetic bag he’s scrambled together with absolutely everything you need; it’s spot on. Fifty pounds for the TV and the phone rental, your favourite magazines. A Colette book about her childhood of rural happiness that you’ve never read. So much thought, all of it.
‘Thank you,’ you say, choked up.
Because you never say it enough.
His disappointment, too. His deflated, telling ‘oh’ when you say to him that you are miscarrying.
‘Bye bye, Bean number four. Hello Bean number five,’ he says into the shardy bright.
You laugh and then keen, barely knowing why. Holding him, feeling his weeping through your hands and wanting to swallow his own shudders, swallow his grief, clamping him down with your body.
You’re in this together, oh yes.
Lesson 225—the Last
When the day’s work is done
The hour grows calm and quiet like the candle you have lit. You are pulling away from your former life like a ship leaving a wharf, you are sailing far from it. Ahead, the cleanness of a new adventure. You have the shape of your family now, the shape of your life. Hugh and you are not gazing blindly into each other’s eyes—you are both gazing out, keenly, at something else. Your three children. Side by side, focused on something else, and that feels strong and calming and right. This is your reality. This is your life. You have chosen it. You are trusting ahead, for what seems like the first time in your life; trusting the void.
You shut your little Victorian volume. It is no longer needed. Your work, for now, is done.
This is the end where now begins.
And how you love writing that.
P.S. Insights, Interviews & More …
About the author
Meet Nikki Gemmell
About the book
“A Book Soaked in Love”: An Interview with Nikki Gemmell
Read on
Have You Read?
More by Nikki Gemmell
About the author
Meet Nikki Gemmell
Francesco Guidicini
NIKKI GEMMELL is the author of several novels, including Shiver, Cleave, The Book of Rapture, and the international bestseller The Bride Stripped Bare. She lives in Sydney, Australia, with her family.
The author of the daringly revealing novel With My Body reveals her own loves and fears.
What is your idea of perfect happiness?
Being immersed within my family, somewhere wild by the sea, having just completed a novel I’m satisfied with.
What is your greatest fear?
That my children will be hurt.
Which living person do you most admire?
My husband, for putting up with me.
What objects do you always carry with you?
A notebook, an old Waterman pen, and a lipstick.
What single thing would improve the quality of your life?
More sleep.
What is the most important lesson life has taught you?
Don’t let people fool you into giving up; have the courage to follow your heart and do what you really want to do.
Which writer has had the greatest influence on your work?
Michael Ondaatje.
Do you have a favorite children’s book?
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee.
Where is your favorite café/restaurant?
Anywhere that lets me write. At the moment it’s Starbucks, because I can work for several hours on just a Chai tea and a muffin. I’m sure they loathe customers like me.
Where do you go for inspiration?
Anywhere that’s quiet, where I can be alone.
Do you have any pet peeves?
People who are heart sinkers (as opposed to heart lifters): small, ugly-spirited people who want to drag others down.
Which book do you wish you had written?
Jane Eyre.
About the book
“A Book Soaked in Love”
An Interview with Nikki Gemmell
The age gap between the main character as a young girl and her lover, Tol, is fairly large, although unspecified. How do you think people will react to this age difference, and how do you think they will view Tol’s intentions?
The main character is about seventeen at this point in the narrative and her lover, Tol, is substantially older, although his age is unspecified. I wanted to explore the carnality of teenage sexuality and an older man’s wonder at that. He is in thrall to it. I love dangerous writing, risking, confronting. But most of all connecting—through honesty. I was interested in a man who wanted to dive deep into a woman’s psyche, as an act of generosity, yes—but also to learn, and then to unlock. There’s a dubious quality to Tol’s actions even though in one respect there’s a selflessness to it, too, a teaching element. He wants to impart knowledge—but with his steely writer’s eye he wants to gather it, too. The protagonist, unwittingly at first, is teaching him also. It’s an extremely complex relationship, a consumingly passionate whirlwind of a love affair that haunts three people profoundly, and the scars are carried deep into later life.
The book looks at the discovery of sexuality as a teenager and also sexuality as a mother and wife at forty. How do you think women’s sexuality changes over the decades, and are you looking forward to what’s to come, or do you think you’ve hit the apex already?
With My Body explores the constant fluidity of a woman’s sexuality. I find it fascinating that the female libido can constantly evolve through middle age and beyond into old age; and what may be given up as a lost cause can be sprung into vivid life once again. How extraordinary that a woman who could quite contentedly slip into celibacy at one point find her sexual life suddenly revived, in the most glorious way. The book is about a woman finding her voice, finally, in middle age—and imparting that knowledge. It’s about a woman who decides
that if she’s not having great sex she doesn’t want it at all. She teaches a man to give it to her, after years of surrendering to a man’s wants at the expense of her own.
People tend to go directly to the juicy bits when talking about your book, but it’s about a lot more than just sex. The book talks about different kinds of love, not just that between lovers. Can you talk a little about the different kinds of love that are explored in the book?
I wanted With My Body to be a book soaked in love, driven by it. Love in many forms. The intoxicating intensity of first love, of course, but also the complex, flawed, movingly quiet love of an enduring relationship. There’s the love of country, of land, the great circularity of life that often brings us back to our earliest landscapes. Then there’s competitive love that can stain a friendship, plus the fraught and demanding love that can exist between parents and children. In a way With My Body is about a father/daughter relationship as much as anything. There’s a line in the book, something along the lines of “if you want to inflict the most pain—do the most damage—then try withholding love, as a parent.” I wanted to explore the seismic rifts that can result from that cruelty. But I wanted the novel to be redemptive, too, an uplifting read. The swift and sweet grace that can be found in forgiveness and letting go.
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