I Take You

by Gemmell, Nikki

  ‘So. My daughter.’ The elder man is suddenly cutting to the chase over his boudin of teal and grey partridge.

  ‘Your daughter. Yes, sir. A fine lass.’

  ‘And she’s pregnant with your child.’

  ‘Indeed. I have that honour, I do, yes.’

  Connie can sense it: her father softening, despite himself, to the natural grace of this man, so smart in his suit, and decent, unshowy, with it; his simple goodness leaking from him and her father’s radar, honed over a lifetime of diplomacy, picking it up.

  ‘Honour!’ Her father looks at Mel, considering where to take this. Another sip. He’s drinking a lot. Breaths held. Finally, a chuckle. ‘So, how was it? She’s a fine lass. Good, my boy? Eh?’

  ‘Oh, yes. The best.’

  ‘And with a woman who loves it, too – what a joy, what a treat. I can see it in Connie’s flush, she’s all shined up, isn’t she, with happiness. The sheer joy of it.’ He caresses her cheek. ‘The happiest I’ve seen her in … what?’ He’s stuck, the drink’s got to him at last and it takes a lot to get him to this point. ‘Well done, lad, well done,’ clapping Mel on the back. ‘It’s all a parent ever wants for their child … happiness. Now. To … to business.’ Another sip. ‘How old are you?’

  ‘Thirty-six.’

  ‘Well, you’ve got a good twenty, thirty years left in you then. Excellent, good, excellent. You’ve got skills, young man. You’ll be fine, won’t you, you’ll get a job anywhere.’

  ‘That I will. I’ve got the hard work in me if nothing else.’

  ‘Good, good. And where will you two lovebirds be nesting?’

  They look at each other, don’t know.

  Banging, suddenly, outside, then banging at the windows. The waiters yelling at the diners to get away from the glass, what, what’s going on? Screams and shouts, they have to move to the restaurant’s inner wall but it’s too late – men and women in white are suddenly trying to barricade the front door with chairs. Mel stands, goes to help, what’s going on? Connie’s beating heart as she cups her belly, twisting tight.

  Suddenly a loud smash, a tsunami of glass as the door is broken through and in scatter, what, fifteen, twenty men in hoodies and stockings, mostly black, wielding baseball bats, wine bottles, machetes, knives. ‘Get down, get down!’ they yell, throwing things about: plates, glasses, tables, trolleys, wanting to destroy the lot. Instinctively all the diners huddle to the floor. Mel rushes back to them both, the clientele now all under tables, racing hearts, scrambling to hide wallets, passports, watches and the rioters methodically working the room as if they’ve done this many times before, demanding jewellery, mobile phones, cash.

  A young kid comes up to the three of them, about fourteen at the most, a smattering of down on his upper lip and he jerks up Connie’s hand and rips off her vintage Rolex, grabs at her Wallis Simpson ring. ‘Off, off!’ he yells and Connie tries, can’t. Mel attempts to intervene, a machete menaces, he flinches back. The rioter grabs Connie’s hand and wrenches it, she screams with the vast pain, other kids behind him hold her men back with machetes, knives, and then the kitchen staff are flooding up with brooms, rolling pins, frying baskets but it’s too late, there are not enough of them, they’re overwhelmed. ‘Where are the police?’ ‘Police!’ People yell but they are gone, gone, to everywhere else where London’s burning, but here? What? Who would have thought? In this beautiful, gracious room of two-hundred-a-head meals, the real world intruding, no, surely not. Impossible. But yes.

  And then they’ve fled, just like that, the whole streamlined gaggle of them; off to Westbourne Grove, Portobello, who knows. Everyone emerges, shaking, taking out mobile phones and ringing loved ones and checking news and texting, trying to get cabs to get far far away from this place but no cabs will come. Their waiter with the lovely, wide Antipodean smile offers the three of them champagne and whisky to calm nerves, despite being robbed himself. ‘I’ll take the lot thanks,’ says Connie’s dad, grabbing two glasses and downing both.

  ‘Onya, mate. You deserve it.’

  Then the rumours circulate, the rioters are returning and all the diners are ushered downstairs now, to the toilets, quick. ‘Lock yourselves in,’ flurry the staff and obediently everyone splits along gender lines so Connie is separated. ‘My father, my boyfriend,’ she gasps. ‘You’ll be right, mate,’ says the waiter with the wide smile as he ushers her further in.

  Then a few minutes later the staff are back, ushering everyone out, to the wine cellar, a safer bet. Connie finds her men, presses close; ‘She’ll be right,’ says a kitchen hand in his slow, calm, Australian drawl, ‘I’m a boxing kangaroo, I’ll look after you.’

  And then they are safe, the police arrive, finally, and the good people of Notting Hill spill out, trembling, texting and calling afresh, crying, shaking their heads in disbelief, laughing with relief. Here? In dear old Ledbury Road, with Anya Hindmarch, Emma Hope and Brora within spitting distance? No, too close for comfort, far too close; the protective wall of affluence that has always protected them has been most savagely, impertinently breached. I say, the shock of it! Connie can’t stop shaking, clutching her belly and rubbing it, begging her tiny, precious hoverer to be still, quiet, safe. Oh, what a traumatic jolt for such a little one, her blood is still racing, she wants out.

  Mel puts his arm around her, sensing it. ‘You OK?’

  She nods, biting her lip. Mel puts his arm around her father, too. ‘Now where were we before we were most rudely interrupted …’ He shakes his head, looking around at all the milling people, the sirens, the police kitted out in their riot gear. ‘Something about nesting, wasn’t it?’

  ‘As far away as possible, please.’ Connie’s voice wavers as she looks across at her kitchen hand, his easy smile, his sunny difference. He catches her eye and raises a hand in relief.

  ‘Australia, perhaps. Yes.’

  61

  It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple: one must be a woman manly, or a man womanly

  Clifford finally knows. Connie doesn’t want to go near him, wants to stay exiled in Scotland, in Cornwall, but she must, he demands it; she is his wife. They are in the morning parlour with its emerald silk Earlham wallpaper by de Gournay which Connie swooned over when it was presented to her and now it leaves her dead, cold, as does this entire house. Her husband is like a hysterical child in it now, in this moment of realization, a mummy wrapped up in its bandages, come to life and flailing with it.

  ‘I would have let you fuck a black man, a prostitute, a woman, anything, anyone; something that I could watch – or not’ – he spits – ‘if you’d just asked. Wasn’t that enough? I was so good to you. Gave you everything. But … the gardener? Him. Out there. Under the nose of all my friends. All our world. Out there. Knowing. Laughing at me. Us.’

  ‘No one knew.’

  ‘They do now. Your little bit of fluff is walking around out there like a dog with a tin can attached to his tail. Hasn’t anyone told you that?’

  Connie shuts her eyes, no, no, Mel has not told her this. And he dreaded the eyes so much, that they would make it grubby, reduce it to its tawdry basics without knowing any of it.

  Cliff bangs his fist on the wheelchair. Enraged he has not controlled this, enraged that his wife has so triumphantly slipped from his grasp. Enraged that it’s that cunt of a gardener who took her from him, in his T-shirts and baggy shorts. Enraged that she took him. Wanted him. When he’s got nothing in the world. Doesn’t even own a car let alone a house. When she has all this.

  ‘You’ll get no money from me.’

  Connie has gone over and over this moment in her head. She could get a lot, with a no-fault divorce, millions. Could get an exhilarating amount and be tied to Cliff, his vitriol and his hate, for the rest of her life. Her future bound to his for evermore. Everyone would know, and judge, and she would have to live with it. He would do his best to crush her – and Mel. To break her spirit utterly and spend whatever money it took to do it. She has seen
it in other friends who dare to divorce their alpha male bankers; men determined to win no matter what. Her friend Perdita resorted to calling the police after domestic violence became commonplace; the female officer told her these high-end marital breakdowns in Kensington and Chelsea are the most brutal and savage of the lot – because the man is so supremely competitive and determined to destroy at any cost.

  So. Connie could now fight for a huge payout from her crippled husband – or she could set herself free. To start afresh. Both of them. All of them.

  She lifts her head high. ‘Actually, Clifford, I don’t want a penny from you. I’ve thought about this. It stains me. Your entire world does.’

  He laughs in disbelief. ‘You’ll have to work. You have no skills. What on earth could someone like you possibly do?’

  Everything, of course, is disdain, belittling; everything she has ever tried in her life. It is time to leave, she has had enough. Connie raises an eyebrow, smiles, turns without a word.

  Arrested by his snarl.

  ‘I will humiliate you. I will tell the world what you have done, sexually. I will release the tapes on the Internet. Oh yes, I’ve got a lot. Even, you cunt, that night of the padlock. I’m not on it but you, oh you, most certainly are. Just watch me.’

  Connie walks out, her hands clamped over her ears. Her racing heart, pounding, roaring in her chest.

  62

  To tell the truth about oneself, to discover oneself near at hand, is not easy

  How to cauterize him.

  How to triumph magnificently from this bleakness. Is there any way? How to vanquish and rise up because she must. Or Connie will go mad, utterly mad from it. No money, no, not a cent, she will never ask; couldn’t bear the court case and his brutal lawyers, the best of course, primed to crush her and nothing else; couldn’t bear the years of emotional turmoil in his grip. You hate what you cannot be, and how Clifford hates Mel, with every fibre of his being, and her husband will drag his rival into this all too, consumingly, and their child in her belly. Connie couldn’t bear the vast, extensive stain of it through her life. She’s seen it in all those other banker divorces around her, so many now as the years roll on, the desire to eviscerate at any cost, to utterly destroy and humiliate.

  Connie can’t go down that path, can’t.

  So. She will leave with nothing. Free, at least. To work out how to triumph in all this, to wriggle her way free of Cliff’s vast and swamping threat. To find a way to reclaim her narrative – hers, not his. Her equilibrium, her life.

  63

  Odd affinities she had with people she had never spoken to, some women in the street …

  Heathrow airport. Flight delayed, mechanical problems with Qantas. The plane is called ‘Longreach’. Connie likes that, it’s appropriate, they can do this. It’s en route to Sydney; mechanics are on the tarmac, scurrying about.

  In the departure lounge, weary resignation from the collected travellers chafing for a going home, a holiday, a new world or life. Mel is off wandering. Connie is sitting with a woman who has a boy, about twelve, who’s buried in some game on his iPhone, and another woman with three boys scamping about and a baby. She hopes she’s not sitting next to her on the flight. The baby, a girl, starts grizzling, the eldest son lifts the child from her pushchair and jiggles her in his arms, effortlessly, with much chuff; a little man of the new world, Connie thinks, and how blooming to see it. She smiles at him.

  ‘You’re doing a good job there.’

  The three women smile tentatively and flirt with small talk, filling up the waiting hours. The mother with the lone son lives in Paris – oh! – and is taking him to see the Barrier Reef; it’s just the two of them in their life, they travel a lot; have just been to visit the boy’s father, in London, have been to Uluru before this, years ago, and the Sydney Opera House. The woman with the cacophony of kids is heading out to visit her father for Christmas, she’s Aussie but lives in Gloucestershire and her husband’s following later, when his holidays begin. ‘He’s a GP, he never takes a break.’ A grimace, but a smile with it.

  ‘I’m going to live in Australia,’ Connie announces quietly, rubbing her belly. ‘We’re starting afresh. A whole new adventure. Goodness knows if we’ll like it.’

  Exclamations, delight, from both the women.

  ‘Oh, you’ll love it! Especially the light,’ says the one with the four kids.

  ‘I think so, yes. I can’t wait.’

  The other woman pipes up. ‘The thing about Australia is, and I’ve noticed this. No one can box you into a corner over there. Unless you want to be boxed in. And I just can’t say the same about England, I honestly can’t. It’s why I don’t live here any more.’

  Connie looks at these two women, both older than her. They look so utterly normal, regular; thickening with age but comfortable with it, a bit scuffed of course but beautiful, strong, with their certainty and their strength. She wonders what their sexual lives have been, what regrets, bleaknesses, unlockings they have experienced; what humiliations and exhilaration and what vividness. Surely not, like her. Who knows? Who knows with anyone?

  The secrets we all keep …

  64

  I will not be ‘famous’, ‘great’. I will go on adventuring, changing, opening my mind and my eyes, refusing to be stamped and stereotyped. The thing is to free one’s self: to let it find its dimensions, not be impeded

  ‘I will humiliate you. I will release the tapes on the Internet …’

  Hence this book. A woman bared. A normal, everyday woman who looks no different to any other, any woman, every woman, perhaps; she could be the woman in front of you in the supermarket line, at the bus stop, she could be any of us. So. All her darkness and light, all her deep raging secrets and ugliness and beauty and rawness and wants, glittery wants. That no one, perhaps, would ever know about.

  Because Connie will no longer let a man dictate her story, nor quash it, nor control it nor represent it. This is who she is and she has found the courage, finally, to speak out. This is a woman’s vulnerability. Her complexity. Her hiddenness and contradictions, her defiance and her daring. She knows there will be hatred and belittling and derision and scorn but still she writes on, and on. Because she is no longer afraid. Because she will not be objectified. Because she has to own her story, her truth – no one else.

  65

  The world is crammed with delightful things. I think young people make such a mistake about that – not letting themselves be happy. I sometimes think that happiness is the only thing that counts

  A little fishing village on the cusp of the Pacific. Roaring light. All wondrous, strange, fresh. The trees shed their bark here but not their leaves; ‘the ripping trees’, Connie calls them, to Mel, in delight. So much delight! He has told her that at times he is afraid of all this, starting flush, the huge differences; but he believes in her being with him, in the peace of them being together and in the peace of their fucking and so they are here in this place. Where people smile when they talk. Where you cannot be boxed in. Where the top schools in this country, in terms of academic results, are all free, state. The optimism of a meritocracy! Where there’s not the bitterness of envy like in England because anyone can be anything here, if you work hard enough; they both hear it all the time but, most importantly, they see it.

  Connie rubs her growing belly, often. Looks across to the venerable mulberry tree in the unfenced park next door that’s like a benevolent god with its long arms dipping down, dispersing its joy to all in the know. She watches the tree shivering, the local children high in its limbs, arms and legs and blue-swabbed faces briefly bursting out only to be drawn back inside the green depths to more juicy baubles of sweetness, and yet more, higher and higher as the lower branches are denuded and she smiles vast, listening to shrills and shrieks of triumph and it’s pure exhilaration, to bottle, to pass on to the next generation, and the next. Her little one will be a part of all this. This freedom, this hurting light. And she is glad, so immensely g
lad of that.

  For Connie, this is a place where the eye rests. Yes, the talking dark of night is crammed with feral screams and rustlings and hoots and squawks, possums and foxes and cockatoos, kookaburras and lorikeets, but by day she sits on her balcony, writing out her truth. Virginia, dear, wise Virginia, her guide and barometer of honesty in all this. The words prowl until they are written, for Connie will no longer let a man dictate the parameters of her life and with that resolve comes a vast relief. She is swept clear of Cliff. Of all that he threatens. She has found a voice. And so the happiness plumes through her in this tiny old teapot of a weatherboard house that rings with its foreign air and light and squawks.

  How strange and terrifying it must have been for those first British settlers, Connie thinks, as if an alien god had created this world to astound, to terrify: it sounds like it hurts to be in this place. She comes from a country of soft days, soft rain, soft light, where the morning quietly clears its throat. Australia’s not like that – it’s a full roar into the day and how she loves the exuberance of that. Through wide windows the garden greenery tosses in the sea breeze like the heads of wild ponies and nature presses close, she can feel the great thumb of it. She is as calm as an eiderdown, here, within it, an eiderdown lying snugly, quietly, in readiness for its bed. Connie sleeps deeply here, her nights unbroken, for her man strong beside her is like a cool trickle of water upon her soul and it is all bringing her into stillness, to rest, for the first time in her life; she is content, she is content. As she steps into a new life unbound, optimistic, freed, by the truth; as if a great corset has been unloosed.