Nikki Gemmell - I Take You

The lady of the house picks her way carefully down the icy marble steps. She smiles her too wide, too unEnglish smile at Lara Deniston-Dickson, her neighbour, who is nudging recalcitrant window boxes into spring preparation after winter’s clench; checking on the wilted cyclamens that withstand so much. Lara is one of the few Brits left on this square. Her dilapidated house is crammed with fabulous but shabby heirlooms, oak dressers and chairs, a dining table piled with books, washstands, a zebra rug, ancestral portraits, a Modigliani from Granny, several pianos and a lot of dust – the servants have long gone, as has the heat. It is one of the few houses left like this on the square as the bankers have sharked in, mainly from foreign countries, everyone, it seems, but the Russians because this is still not Belgravia, still a bit too ragged, edgy, loose for that lot. Lara has a grand disdain for this new world that has gone into lockdown, barricading the riff-raff out. Even her husband, dear Rupert, a man of some standing, thank you very much, yet treated like a tramp, asked by the new committee if he ‘owned’ – if he deserved a key to this very garden – merely because he was old and a touch scruffy with it. Oh yes, Lara has a disdain for these shiny, refulgent newcomers with their babies in cashmere and men in their too-new Barbour coats, all of them; except for the poor, lost girl next door with her dazzle of a smile that illuminates her face as if she is lit from within, but she doesn’t see it enough.

She does now. ‘Going out?’ The older woman smiles in approval, for she likes to see her sweet slip of a neighbour getting some fresh air, cheeks flushed; bound as she is to her workaholic husband and his precise demands. Connie knows little of his previous life, she has told Lara that.

‘I have no idea where,’ Connie laughs. ‘Do you? No, I didn’t think so. It’s a complete surprise. He adores them. To a quite ridiculous extent.’ She is talking of her husband as if he is a little boy.

‘He’s a keeper, that one.’ Lara nods, smiling, a woman who has lived through three marriages and four children. ‘A good marriage is fed with kindness, of course, but surprise, the gift of it – now that is the hidden ingredient. To sparkle things up now and then. Absolutely necessary in my book.’

‘Oh yes.’ Connie waves a pale hand nonchalantly, a hand manicured three times a week, upon which sits a single ruby within a protective ring of diamonds that once encircled the finger of Wallis Simpson. ‘Oh yes,’ she repeats, stepping into the warmth of the idling car and staring into her husband’s eyes as he waits in the back seat, spinning in the deft fingers of his left hand his Mont Blanc Bohème Noir pen. The pen that has been everywhere, that has begun all this; with the words it wrote, with the secret world it sprang into life.

She had the perpetual sense, as she watched the taxicabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day

The car pulls seamlessly away from the kerb. The windows are smoked to blankness. No one can see inside. Connie sits upright, legs delicately crossed at ankles, the worn crocodile of her vintage Mulberry handbag demure on her lap. She does not look at Cliff, she never looks at him, at the start, she can’t, she will stumble if she does. The spell cannot be broken; she must not let her head intrude, her rational thoughts; it is the only way these tumblings into something else can work. These episodes when she lets her body’s anima, the dark recesses of her mind, take over; when she trusts, completely trusts, because he has unlocked her into this.

The car is driven through the jangly upper reaches of Ladbroke Grove – as opposed to the White Heights, what Cliff and Connie call their rarefied end of Notting Hill in a private joke – and takes a left at the end of it. Their cars never take a left. Connie still does not look at Cliff, she neither asks nor questions. She gazes out the window as she is transported further and further from the graciousness of her home, her tree-lined street. A new London entirely unpeels before her.

A very different London – the real London, possibly – skinned before her eyes. A world of unremitting ugliness, scruffiness; not a blade of green in sight. The great press of its people, from all walks of life; everywhere but Britain, Connie thinks. It feels like these poor, watchful people are the stranded backwash, left high and dry upon a cowed, groaning, exhausted plot of earth. Connie’s from Cornwall, where the earth still sings, the great, beautiful bones of an ancient land and when she catches scenes like this it feels like the joyless future of this island, of the world; the crowded, jostling, built-over and unhappy future of the world as they know it. Feels like her tiny, lovely little Kensington and Chelsea is ring-fenced by the crushing, resentful, triumphant press of … this. The utter lack of any attempt at graciousness and wit and reach in this new England is startling, jarring, wrong; yet Connie feels like the only person in the world so thoroughly disturbed by it. These people need beauty too! Nowhere, here, is the London of her imagination that she moved into to gulp aged twenty-two.

Fingers suddenly spider across Connie’s soft inner thigh. It is the whisper of an enquiry, tracing a finery, her names perhaps; to submit, to begin. It is the signal. She turns from the window. Obediently, beyond will, beyond thought, Connie unhooks her legs and parts them, just a touch. Sits upright, very still. Waits. The fingers gently, gently nudge up her skirt until it is bunched in a thick band around her waist. She is ready, as directed, with just a plain black suspender belt. No ribbon, no lace, the thrilling cold of the limousine’s leather seat pressing up onto her, into her. The driver’s eyes flick at hers. She catches them. It is a new driver. She holds his gaze, her face gives nothing away; he is trying not to look, he looks down, at her bareness splayed on the leather, he cannot help himself. Cliff’s fingers softly, gently, part her lips, as if for the driver’s benefit then circle, exploratory, her back passage then suddenly plunge in – she gasps, lurches forward – then his fingers find her other hole until she is hooked and now poised, exposed, on the crook of his hand as her own reaches down, unstoppably, as she spreads herself, unstoppably and exposes her clit wide and presses her forefinger down on it and moans. She shuts her eyes on the driver’s glance, on the greyness of the world outside, on the weighed-down people at their drab little bus stop and the Halal chicken shop and another right beside it as she grinds down unstoppably on the cool leather of the seat.

‘I want to inspect you,’ her husband whispers. ‘You have to be fully prepared. Nothing must be left to chance. Remove your skirt.’

Connie obediently slides down the zipper and wriggles out of it. Loops the shirt ends up into the top of her bra, for maximum visibility, holds her hands obediently, waiting, across her breasts.

The driver’s eyes. Cliff and her need others, now, need to elaborate; need to shift away relentlessly from sameness.

‘Come,’ her husband commands.

Connie climbs across the wide interior to her husband’s seat.

‘Sit.’

She straddles her husband, her back to the driver; she goes to kiss Cliff but veers to the left of his cheek at the last moment and hooks her chin on his shoulder. He lifts her body high. ‘Yes,’ he whispers, examining her cunt with his fat pen, parting her lips then running his fingers in luxurious strokes along the wetness then lifting up her hips so that her behind is fully exposed, high, so high, to the driver, and Cliff is parting her cheeks wide, wider now and she is like a baboon there, poised, with her ready arse. ‘Display yourself,’ Cliff whispers and she parts her cheeks with her own hands, flattening her belly and moaning and pushing out her cunt, as wide as she can for the driver, for her husband, for any camera that may be filming for she is now, entirely, someone else. Poised. For the next step, whatever it may be.