Nikki Gemmell - I Take You - Part 2 of 3

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.

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.

What is the meaning of life? That was all – a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years, the great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one

Later. A strange growly mongrel of a day, short flurries of snow then pregnant grey then brief rain then snow once again. Now it is clearing and Connie is out, again, in the deserted wild place, the garden’s most secluded part. Walking stills her, brings her down into quiet; it has always been like this. Here, where nature has stolen back and the obedience of the show garden is utterly wiped, here, where all is immoral, rampant, untamed. She’s not sure why, she’s just needing to be alone and is holding her palm flat to the looming trunks, here, and here, breathing deep their stillness and wisdom and stoicism and quiet, the great moving strength of them.

A sound, below her, one small chirp. A tiny bird, at her feet, quite crushed. Grasping onto life. Dropped from up high, or attacked perhaps. Connie lifts the small beating heart of it in her palm, blood from the beak and down a wing. She doesn’t know what to do. It’s getting dark. Cliff will hate it at home. Blood, noise, mess, imminent death. Everything he can’t stand. Barely knowing what she is doing, she makes her way to the gardener’s grace-and-favour cottage, a sturdy work pony of a dwelling, in the north-east corner of the garden, cradling the fading life.

It’s a tiny scrap of a place, meanly proportioned, ripe for damp. In fact she can smell the walls holding in the rain, can smell it clamouring to get out. Ivy snuffs the light from most windows; he would have to stoop to get inside. It always strikes her that Victorian dwellings like this were constructed coldly and deliberately to keep the inhabitants in their narrow places, to stop them from aspiring in any way to the heights. Nothing is small-scaled in her life, nothing; it is all high ceilings and vast ballrooms and pendulous lights, excessive cinema rooms, bold diamonds, towering heels, wide cars.

She knocks. No answer. The door is slightly ajar. She swings it wide and calls out. ‘Hello?’ Steps inside. Indifferent furniture. Cobbled together from unloved places, no cherishing in any of it. Faded floral print on the walls, smoke-licked. Nowhere the sprightliness of a woman’s touch. Then she sees him, through the kitchen, bent over the old stone tub of a sink. Shirt gone, splashing water over his chest, face; freshening up.

He turns. With a calm, searching gaze he turns. Stands there, waiting. He makes her feel shy. She blushes, sweat scuttling across her skin like too much chocolate too quickly gulped. Gazing at him – his nakedness – has hit her in the middle of the body.

But she cannot show any of it of course.

‘I …’ She holds out the bird, at a loss. In the bowl of her hands, a mess of blood and feathers and a racing heart.

‘What have you got there then?’ his accent, the strange sing of it. The practised boom to cut across the weather, speaking of another place, world, ancestry, life.

‘I found this … by the trees.’

‘And what am I meant to do with it?’ His tone detached, cool, as he towels himself dry.

‘I don’t know.’

He comes close, inspects. ‘The sky’s all over the place, it’s throwing a party at the moment. Your little friend won’t last the night outside.’

He’s laughing at her. Is he laughing at her? Connie will not be deflected. ‘Could you keep it, maybe, perhaps?’

‘It won’t last much longer inside. But if I must …’ And in one swift, gentle movement he extracts the dying bird from the cup of her hands and Connie knows in that brush of a touch that there is tenderness in him, and the sky, and the earth, he is touched by it all still; he would move like an animal in her, she just knows, it would be peaceful and different and repairing and right. It strikes her in that moment, like the flare of a match, that here is a soul strong with a simpler, grounded, utterly removed way of life to all this, around them both; it is strong in him, a mode of survival, a necessary distancing. It is utterly compelling.

And he does not notice her. She is one of a type.

But, but. Delight licks Connie behind the ear. A shiver of a touch. Her insides pull, contract. Still he discerns nothing of her churn; he turns, with the bird, and she knows it is her cue, she is dismissed. ‘I’ll see what I can do, ma’am.’ She is done, it is time to go.

‘Thank you. Mel?’

‘Yes, Mel.’ Not looking up.

Connie stares back at him; for a moment, she lingers and he doesn’t even realize, so busy is he placing the bird in a cereal bowl with a scrap of tissue around it. A man so content, self-sufficient, alone. Not playing the game, any game. But they all play the game. All want the money, the connection, the acknowledgement. Except him. Her husband wouldn’t see him, note him, in any way; Mel is part of the great seething mass of people who are there for his benefit and utterly unnoticed. He has no curiosity and Connie always thought that people without that are like houses without books – unsettling. To have bound her life to a man so narrow! So oblivious of the wonders of life! Cliff would be the type who would tear the wings off a fly, and she feels instinctively that Mel would not, it is as simple as that. It’s odd how you can sense these things from a first conversation, the knowing as sharp as a flick knife. Yet she married him. So desperate for the settling, the security, so afraid. Of what?