Free Nikki Gemmell’s Threesome: The Bride Stripped Bare, With the Body, I Take You by Nikki Gemmell Page B

pleasure but for the propagation of children; and her conclusion that the wives of barren men should be allowed to sleep with other men fit and lusty. Isn’t that gorgeous, you remember teasing him, when can I start? And Cole had grabbed you firmly by the arm and had smacked you, stingingly, on the bum.
    The cupboard. Quick.
    And you’d laughed and laughed.
    You’d told Cole that there was a novel in the text, or a history perhaps, the intimate kind that cracks open private lives. It felt good to tell him, as if it would give some weight to your own life. You’re not sure, now, though, you ever really meant it.
    But he didn’t forget.
    No one except your husband knows of the cautiousness at the heart of your life. Your adulthood has been a progressive retreat from curiosity and wonder, an endless series of delays and procrastinations. You wanted to beso much, once, but life kept on getting in the way. You shone during your journalism degree but were never quite hungry enough for a newsroom. You dreaded the cold calling, of intruding so much on people’s lives. You did an MA and drifted into teaching and were always doubting your abilities: said shouldn’t it be someone else when your colleagues urged you to apply for a higher post, asked me? Really? when offered a promotion, never pushed for a pay rise. You settled. Shunned creativity, flight, risk, never had the courage to give a dream, any dream, a go.
    And now you hold the envelope to your lips and smile and kiss your husband on the forehead. You’ll go to the Library tomorrow, you say it’s the perfect gift. You don’t tell him you’ll be looking for a man in a very neat suit, with a beautiful nape. For Cole is seducing you with thoughtfulness and you want him to know how grateful you are.
    But something is all skittery within you and there’s the light and the guilt of that.
    You know what Theo would do in this situation. You wonder about your Elizabethan wife. If she ever acted on her words, if she was that courageous, or stupid. Indulgent. Selfish. Bold.

Lesson 45
    God helps those who help themselves
    The London Library arrests time, it drags you into its rich dark depths and holds you there, captive and absorbed and lost. You find a space to write in the old encyclopaedia room; it has discreet plugs for laptops embedded in the floor. Your little volume sits demurely on your desk, with its shiny coffee-coloured leather cover and broken clasps. And its shocking declarations in their firm, neat hand.
Eve be more excellent than Adam. Eve be less sinful than Adam.
    A husband they desired to have, not so much to be accounted wives, as to be made mothers. For they know that woemen should be saved by childbearing.
    Where, know yee, shall we finde a man be he ever so old, barren, weak and feeble that hathe been so kind and curteouse to his wife that was willing to substitute another more able man in his place, that his wife might have issue.
    Woemen bare rule over men.
    Why was the author compelled to write such things? What is the remoteness, the chafing within you? Why do you always do things you don’t want to, now that you’re embedded in this relationship? You tolerated so much before, within the glow of new love, now you don’t. Why do you feel stronger and more serene when you’re by yourself, that you don’t want your husband around too much? Everyone’s always considered you an excellent candidate for the role of wife; you’re compliant and companionable, you endure, with feigned enthusiasm, in-law dinners, action films, client drinks. If only they knew of the restlessness within you, the tapping at your elbow, the tugging at your skirt.
    You’re not sure what to do with the book, it’s like walking under water when you try to find a way in. But it will come. And there are many distractions – magazines and newspapers and the Internet and the looking for Gabriel, always that.
    Especially in the Reading Room, at lunch hour, just in case.
    The