Free I Take You by Nikki Gemmell

actively hate Cliff. It’s just that for a long time, regrettably, there has been a physical aversion. This has never changed and never will. An aversion towards his prissy cleanliness, his obsessive shaving of not just his chin but his chest and genitals; his fear of anything too close to the earth. He has always had a physical dislike of anything too messy and mucky, long before the accident. For Connie, her antipathy towards all this was masked at the start by the sheer bullish power of Cliff, the thrill of heads turned at the collective energy of them both, the buzz in their wake. The catapulting into such a heady new life! The best booth at Locanda Locatelli, Nobu takeaway, private jets, the smorgasbord of Bond Street and champagne weekends at Claridge’s; of never again having the fret of an overdrawn credit card, a straining overdraft, a crammed, stuffy Tube in her life. The exhilarating relief of all that. Oh yes, she could be bought.
    She was. Deliriously. And then it was too late.
    There is an extraordinary dependence now. Relentlessly. Not just sexually but with work dinners, cocktail parties, charity auctions, with constant demands to be by his side in his public life. As if Connie’s youth, her vitality, her health and subservience make Cliff whole, cementing the pretence that all is normal, proceeding as planned, quiet. A life becalmed, that’s how he wants it, has always wanted it. He said to her once, early on, that if one must have a relationship it should be conducted in a shade of the coolest, palest cream and no, she’d admonished, raising her bellini high, not on your life, it should be a vivid, roaring blood red! ‘That settles it then, we’re hopelessly unsuited,’ and they’d both laughed.
    The dependence has bled into all corners of Connie’s life. She can’t even fill a car with petrol any more, has forgotten how; hasn’t stacked a dishwasher for years, paid a bill, applied her own nail polish. The colour of her life now? A brittle white.
    As her husband’s strange ballast. He lets her shave him or sponge him as if he were a child. Connie asked at the start of their tremulous new life, he acquiesced. It has become a habit between them. He likes her to do it naked, straddling him, his hands at her hips, in wonder, as if he can’t quite believe he still has this.
    She doesn’t want to. She cannot stop. She must. She can’t. The good wife.

31

    Well, we must wait for the future to show

 
     
    Early April and Connie is back, drawn inexorably back; daily the green expanse saturates her gaze from her high window, daily it calls her out. The sky hangs, its colour a battleship’s waiting grey. The world is poised as if holding its breath. A storm’s coming, there’s electricity in the air, she can taste the thundery day sparking her alive and the rain comes suddenly, needle sharp. Connie, in the thick of it, needs to find shelter, won’t make it out, runs to the wooden rotunda – too cold, exposed – dashes to the shed, hurrying along narrow paths bowered over by the garden’s press. Sits on a dusty chair just inside the door and watches the world being drenched around her.
    Mel comes into view, she laughs, despite herself. ‘I got soaked!’ she girlishly exclaims, then shuts down. At his expression. Of course, she shouldn’t be in this place. ‘There was nowhere else,’ she adds, wiping her face.
    ‘No matter.’
    He stands beside her chair, in the doorway, in silence, watching the wet, drenched himself. She rises beside him.
    ‘I’ve been to ask you … wondering … what happened to my bird?’
    ‘Dead within the hour.’
    Connie gasps.
    ‘It put up a mighty struggle, trying to flap its way out of its mess. I held it. It was all I could do.’
    ‘Oh.’
    A tear is slipping down her face, she can’t stop it, can’t speak; just feels brimmed, with so much. Mel glances at her, notes. There’s something so mute and hopeful and good in her, despite everything; she’s