I Take You (15 page)

Connie wonders, though, at yet another brasserie of blonde wood and ringing talk, if the social world is becoming a little more shouty now, raucous, in your face? Everyone’s so eager to talk at you, over the top of you, cram in their two bobs’ worth – but actually, quietly, to enquire? To listen deeply? No, she doesn’t see much of that. Only with Mel, who asks so many questions of her and it’s so odd in a man; he seems at times as if he wanted to drink her up. Needing to understand.

She longs often for Mel’s quiet. The comfort of their silence, in sync. With Cliff the silence was oppressive, accusatory, as it shouted their differences, that they had so little in common and how did they get to this and they must spend the rest of their lives amid it.

Connie’s book club is fracturing as hospital appointments, pregnancy yoga classes, exhaustion, end-of-year concerts and summer parties disrupt life. Again and again it feels like Connie’s friends are succumbing and falling pregnant but they’re always careful with this news around her, Cliff being Cliff of course, and the accident … and she’s always so reticent about that side of her life now, poor lamb … there’s been a vast reassessing, a reining back … it must be very painful, not too much is asked.

‘Tragic, all of it. Such a supreme alpha male. He probably couldn’t bear the thought of anyone else’s child so that’s that, I guess. She’s the good wife, Con. Bless.’

No, Connie would not be drawn. On any of it. Such a rare orchid in her exquisitely tasteful, lonely married life; pitied, talked about, endlessly called on to be godmother as if that would be enough. But her thinking veers so fundamentally, often now; she’s reluctant to bring a child into this jangly, jittery world of keeping up, couldn’t say any of this to any of them. Sees it again and again, all around her: how children seem to send the women around her slightly mad. Piteously obsessed. Is it exhaustion? Empowerment now they’re no longer at work? Competitive banker husbands demanding too much of everyone? Too much time on their hands?

The friends who turn into harridans, bullies, where their child’s school is involved, haranguing the teachers and the principals over their precious, infinitely talented darlings; demanding better results, more readings in church, a bigger role in the school play, more tuition, attention, certificates. Imogen has a poo phobia so can never change her baby’s nappies, has to have round-the-clock help and Connie wonders if it’s a secret canniness. Charlotte, Honor and Floss have weekend nannies alongside nannies for each child during the week; when, Connie wonders, are those children actually noticed, let alone surrounded by their parents, basted in love like butter and cherished? India endlessly rails over the mobile phones given out as party gifts at a girl’s twelfth birthday, yet gives out goldfish to every child at her son’s sixth. Then the flurry of end-of-year teacher presents: the voluptuous bouquets from Wild at Heart as big as a television, bottles of Moët, exquisite gift boxes from Space NK. Then there’s the horror of the entrance exams, when her friends disappear into an insanity of pushing and tutoring and hating and shouting and deep, wrenching torment over who got into what. For Connie, sitting back among it all and quietly listening, endlessly listening, this world feels mad, unhinged, overripe.

Could she ever raise a child amid all this?

With no money, at that?

Could she ever compete on the back foot – or would she go mad with it?

I have been stained by you and corrupted … What dissolution of the soul you demanded in order to get through one day, what lies, bowings, scrapings, fluency and servility! How you chained me to one spot, one hour, one chair, and sat yourself down opposite! How you snatched from me the white spaces that lie between hour and hour and rolled them into dirty pellets and tossed them into the wastepaper basket with your greasy paws. Yet those were my life.

Summer is unfurling like a carpet Connie steps upon. Out, out, she must be out in it, often, away from the prison of her house. Its thickness of atmosphere. Cliff is biding his time, she can tell; the punishment is brewing and it will be magnificent. She does not know what correcting will befall her since that day when she boldly bared her new self to him, when she finally said no, enough. Cliff has been icily civil ever since but she knows it’s not the end of it; there are little pinpricks of putdowns, often now, leaking through his veneer of control. Once they would have eaten away at Connie but no, not now, because she has something else: an anchor in another life.

‘You could never get a job, Con, you’ve been out of the workforce too long. No one would have you. And you’d do … what?’ ‘
Another
bag from Rellik? Do you need help? Shoppers Anonymous perhaps?’ ‘Are you getting fat?’ ‘Is that a tummy I can spy coming along?’ Yet still Cliff does not know of Mel, Connie is sure of it, it is just a sense of … difference … a chasm opening up that he can almost sniff out. And so the attempts at shattering her confidence, reining her back, before it is too late.

Even when they are together, even when there is the pretence of that, Connie is not with him now. On this, a trilling day of sprightly light, she cannot resist. Cliff is in his chair by the bench on the lawn and she is expected in her place, her papers on her lap, their public ritual of solidity and togetherness that is noted by everyone who strolls the park. But Connie can’t help it. As Cliff is buried in the
How to Spend It
magazine she slips into the lip of her wild place. Knows she should not. The risk, the risk.

Mel comes up the path from the shed, is able to cup her breast quick and lift it in enquiry and smile secrets then, ‘Con, Con!’ comes Cliff’s voice from the lawn. Mel grimaces, she departs.

Cliff has a new wheelchair. It’s just been shipped across from the States. Custom-built, state-of-the-art, designed by Philippe Starck, a slip of a thing of enormous strength. He is testing it out, wants Connie to see it. He has moved across to grass that needs a cutting, is trying to get up the soft slope and determined to do it as if attempting to haul himself into independence, movement, action and this new contraption will be the grand symbol of it. The chair struggles with its grip, with the weight. ‘Come on, you little beauty!’ he admonishes. ‘You can do it.’ It goes slowly. Connie is now beside him, encouraging him, softly.

They stop for a breather by a large oak. A squirrel races up the trunk and looks at them quizzically from a high branch. ‘Look!’ Connie cries out. ‘It approves, Cliff, it’s laughing at us.’

‘Fucking vermin,’ Cliff snaps. ‘They should all be trapped and burnt. I’d get the gardener to do it – and watch.’

‘Oh.’ The charming side of her husband that no one but Connie ever sees.

They push on, the chair climbing slowly in its unwilling way. The earth is yielding to it too much, clogging up its wheels. The chair suddenly stops.

‘Blast this wretched thing.’

‘Let me push.’

‘No,’ Cliff says coldly. ‘I didn’t buy it for that.’

Connie tries, can’t help it.

‘Get the fuck
off
it.’

All the anger in him, from the other day, in his office, all the anger from the past twelve months. Without a word Connie tries to shove the contraption clear, to get him started again. It’s surprisingly hard. Cliff hits back at her with all his might, hits her away from his chair, away from his life. ‘You are pathetic, useless. You can’t even listen, can you, you fucking cunt?’

Connie is very, very calm. ‘I saw the gardener over there.’ Her voice is neutral, her face tight. ‘In the trees. The wild bit. Perhaps he can help.’

‘Well, go and fucking well get him.’

Cliff hits the wheels in frustration. At himself, his wife, his spectacle of a life. ‘If only I could get out and have a look at this fucking cunt of a thing myself.’

Connie strides off and shouts into the trees, ‘Hello? Mel? Can you come and help us, please?’ Not a trace of anything in her voice.

Obediently he comes, shovel loose in hand. Face blank, she business-like. ‘Do you know anything about wheelchairs?’

‘No.’

‘Could you just see if anything’s stuck in the wheels, or broken perhaps?’

Mel drops the shovel. Leans down on the ground. Connie catches a glimpse of his back where his T-shirt rides up, the stretch of golden skin. Her thighs clench.

‘Get your hands in there, come on, man, is there anything underneath, anything caught?’ Cliff’s voice utterly superior, admonishing, cold. ‘You’re not afraid of a bit of muck, are you?’

‘No, sir.’

Mel lies flat on his stomach, trying to work out the mechanism underneath, tinkering, poking, prodding. His hands, shorts, are soon streaked with grass stains and black. But he’s done something right. The motor coughs, splutters into life.

‘I’ll need some help.’

Mel looks directly at her, into her, grins a secret grin. Cliff doesn’t catch it. And before he can protest Connie is behind the chair, firm against Mel, they are pushing in tandem, muscle against muscle, sinew against sinew, locked together and complicit and triumphant. It’s hard work. The slope is punishing, the machine coughing and protesting.

‘Leave me alone!’ Cliff snaps. ‘I can do it now.’

Immediately they fall back and watch, shoulder to shoulder. Immediately the chair looks vulnerable, it veers off, starts to tip and Mel rushes up and catches it just in time. No thanks from Cliff, just an exasperated sigh as once again he struggles with the buttons and knobs; the alpha man from the alpha world, humiliated. Turning it on and off, trying to churn it forward with a sheer raging will that is impotent. ‘You’ll rip her insides out if you keep doing that,’ Mel remarks softly.

‘Oh, fuck off.’

The chair firms again and lurches off the grass, rumbles across the gravel.

‘You see, she’s doing it!’

Then he catches Mel’s face behind him. ‘Are you helping it? Are you?’

‘It won’t do it by itself, sir. It’s shot.’

‘Fuck
off.
I’ve just paid a hell of a lot of money for this.’

Without another word the gardener picks up his shovel and strides off. The chair stops immediately, there’s a sickening grate of knobs, nothing works.

‘Mel? Mel!’ Cliff barks.

The gardener strides to him. Without a word drops to the ground. Is on his back now, tinkering with something else. ‘Start it up,’ he commands finally, in an utterly dead voice Connie has never heard before. It works, half-hearted, with Mel and Connie’s help pushing. A whirring, across the gravel at last, both machine and man tackling the job and punishingly hard work for the lot of them. Then the chair stops as if that’s it, for good.

‘Well, it’s obvious I’m at everyone’s fucking mercy.’

Jagged silence.

‘You’ll have to get back into the house, Clifford,’ Connie says.

‘Well?’ He looks at Mel. ‘Can you bear it?’

His superior tone. His coldness. A question and a command. Mel is expressionless. Without another word he hauls up the huge bulk of Clifford in a fireman’s lift and carries him into the house in utter silence. Connie looks at the strange intimacy of it; her husband silent, humiliated, her lover’s face white with effort for Cliff is a big man, six foot four. Mel’s hands are trembling towards the end with the vast strain of it. Connie can’t bear it. ‘Over there, quick, that armchair by the door,’ and Cliff is dumped into it as if Mel can’t do this a step longer. He is paler than Connie has ever seen him, and remote, absent. He stands back, quiet, waiting for whatever is next.

His frailness, against the big bulk of her husband. His grace, his litheness, his vulnerability. Connie stares at him as if she has never seen it before. The straining muscles, every one of them put to work; the beauty of him within the thick of hard labour. The civil stoicism amid such astonishing incivility. The determination not to give up. It makes Connie want to rush up to Mel, hold him; she cannot. All her soul goes out to him and he is so silent, removed, out of reach in her house, in front of her husband, in this vast shell of a place. So utterly lost to her in this moment as he waits for something, anything, an apology, a thank you.

Nothing comes.

Of course. ‘Thank you, thank you so much,’ Connie gushes to him while Clifford is scrabbling to arrange himself, scrabbling out his mobile phone, stabbing the number of the wheelchair company to roar his complaint and focused entirely on that, on himself.

‘I’ll see you out,’ Connie says quietly and by the door lifts Mel’s trembling hand, once, in a courtly gesture of a kiss. Drops it swift. ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispers and he smiles his thanks, deep into her, smiles his understanding at last as Cliff shouts oblivious down his phone. They feel so together, in that moment, more than they ever have before, united against this man and this world and then Mel is gone back, back, to his work.

Connie had once dreamed of a friendship between these two men, a child raised together, an odd threesome full of secrets but something that worked. She knows now it could never be; neither man would countenance it. Oil and water, their hostility instinctive and immense. Neither respects the other.