I Take You (21 page)

To tell the truth about oneself, to discover oneself near at hand, is not easy

How to cauterize him.

How to triumph magnificently from this bleakness. Is there any way? How to vanquish and rise up because she must. Or Connie will go mad, utterly mad from it. No money, no, not a cent, she will never ask; couldn’t bear the court case and his brutal lawyers, the best of course, primed to crush her and nothing else; couldn’t bear the years of emotional turmoil in his grip. You hate what you cannot be, and how Clifford hates Mel, with every fibre of his being, and her husband will drag his rival into this all too, consumingly, and their child in her belly. Connie couldn’t bear the vast, extensive stain of it through her life. She’s seen it in all those other banker divorces around her, so many now as the years roll on, the desire to eviscerate at any cost, to utterly destroy and humiliate.

Connie can’t go down that path, can’t.

So. She will leave with nothing. Free, at least. To work out how to triumph in all this, to wriggle her way free of Cliff’s vast and swamping threat. To find a way to reclaim her narrative –
hers,
not his. Her equilibrium, her life.

Odd affinities she had with people she had never spoken to, some women in the street …

Heathrow airport. Flight delayed, mechanical problems with Qantas. The plane is called ‘Longreach’. Connie likes that, it’s appropriate, they can do this. It’s en route to Sydney; mechanics are on the tarmac, scurrying about.

In the departure lounge, weary resignation from the collected travellers chafing for a going home, a holiday, a new world or life. Mel is off wandering. Connie is sitting with a woman who has a boy, about twelve, who’s buried in some game on his iPhone, and another woman with three boys scamping about and a baby. She hopes she’s not sitting next to her on the flight. The baby, a girl, starts grizzling, the eldest son lifts the child from her pushchair and jiggles her in his arms, effortlessly, with much chuff; a little man of the new world, Connie thinks, and how blooming to see it. She smiles at him.

‘You’re doing a good job there.’

The three women smile tentatively and flirt with small talk, filling up the waiting hours. The mother with the lone son lives in Paris – oh! – and is taking him to see the Barrier Reef; it’s just the two of them in their life, they travel a lot; have just been to visit the boy’s father, in London, have been to Uluru before this, years ago, and the Sydney Opera House. The woman with the cacophony of kids is heading out to visit her father for Christmas, she’s Aussie but lives in Gloucestershire and her husband’s following later, when his holidays begin. ‘He’s a GP, he never takes a break.’ A grimace, but a smile with it.

‘I’m going to live in Australia,’ Connie announces quietly, rubbing her belly. ‘We’re starting afresh. A whole new adventure. Goodness knows if we’ll like it.’

Exclamations, delight, from both the women.

‘Oh, you’ll love it! Especially the light,’ says the one with the four kids.

‘I think so, yes. I can’t wait.’

The other woman pipes up. ‘The thing about Australia is, and I’ve noticed this. No one can box you into a corner over there. Unless you want to be boxed in. And I just can’t say the same about England, I honestly can’t. It’s why I don’t live here any more.’

Connie looks at these two women, both older than her. They look so utterly normal, regular; thickening with age but comfortable with it, a bit scuffed of course but beautiful, strong, with their certainty and their strength. She wonders what their sexual lives have been, what regrets, bleaknesses, unlockings they have experienced; what humiliations and exhilaration and what vividness. Surely not, like her. Who knows? Who knows with anyone?

The secrets we all keep …

I will not be ‘famous’, ‘great’. I will go on adventuring, changing, opening my mind and my eyes, refusing to be stamped and stereotyped. The thing is to free one’s self: to let it find its dimensions, not be impeded

‘I will humiliate you. I will release the tapes on the Internet …’

Hence this book. A woman bared. A normal, everyday woman who looks no different to any other, any woman, every woman, perhaps; she could be the woman in front of you in the supermarket line, at the bus stop, she could be any of us. So. All her darkness and light, all her deep raging secrets and ugliness and beauty and rawness and wants, glittery wants. That no one, perhaps, would ever know about.

Because Connie will no longer let a man dictate her story, nor quash it, nor control it nor represent it. This is who she is and she has found the courage, finally, to speak out.
This
is a woman’s vulnerability. Her complexity. Her hiddenness and contradictions, her defiance and her daring. She knows there will be hatred and belittling and derision and scorn but still she writes on, and on. Because she is no longer afraid. Because she will not be objectified. Because she has to own her story, her truth – no one else.

The world is crammed with delightful things. I think young people make such a mistake about that – not letting themselves be happy. I sometimes think that happiness is the only thing that counts

A little fishing village on the cusp of the Pacific. Roaring light. All wondrous, strange, fresh. The trees shed their bark here but not their leaves; ‘the ripping trees’, Connie calls them, to Mel, in delight. So much delight! He has told her that at times he is afraid of all this, starting flush, the huge differences; but he believes in her being with him, in the peace of them being together and in the peace of their fucking and so they are here in this place. Where people smile when they talk. Where you cannot be boxed in. Where the top schools in this country, in terms of academic results, are all free, state. The optimism of a meritocracy! Where there’s not the bitterness of envy like in England because anyone can be anything here, if you work hard enough; they both hear it all the time but, most importantly, they see it.

Connie rubs her growing belly, often. Looks across to the venerable mulberry tree in the unfenced park next door that’s like a benevolent god with its long arms dipping down, dispersing its joy to all in the know. She watches the tree shivering, the local children high in its limbs, arms and legs and blue-swabbed faces briefly bursting out only to be drawn back inside the green depths to more juicy baubles of sweetness, and yet more, higher and higher as the lower branches are denuded and she smiles vast, listening to shrills and shrieks of triumph and it’s pure exhilaration, to bottle, to pass on to the next generation, and the next. Her little one will be a part of all this. This freedom, this hurting light. And she is glad, so immensely glad of that.

For Connie, this is a place where the eye rests. Yes, the talking dark of night is crammed with feral screams and rustlings and hoots and squawks, possums and foxes and cockatoos, kookaburras and lorikeets, but by day she sits on her balcony, writing out her truth. Virginia, dear, wise Virginia, her guide and barometer of honesty in all this. The words prowl until they are written, for Connie will no longer let a man dictate the parameters of her life and with that resolve comes a vast relief. She is swept clear of Cliff. Of all that he threatens. She has found a voice. And so the happiness plumes through her in this tiny old teapot of a weatherboard house that rings with its foreign air and light and squawks.

How strange and terrifying it must have been for those first British settlers, Connie thinks, as if an alien god had created this world to astound, to terrify: it sounds like it hurts to be in this place. She comes from a country of soft days, soft rain, soft light, where the morning quietly clears its throat. Australia’s not like that – it’s a full roar into the day and how she loves the exuberance of that. Through wide windows the garden greenery tosses in the sea breeze like the heads of wild ponies and nature presses close, she can feel the great thumb of it. She is as calm as an eiderdown, here, within it, an eiderdown lying snugly, quietly, in readiness for its bed. Connie sleeps deeply here, her nights unbroken, for her man strong beside her is like a cool trickle of water upon her soul and it is all bringing her into stillness, to rest, for the first time in her life; she is content, she is content. As she steps into a new life unbound, optimistic, freed, by the truth; as if a great corset has been unloosed.

The author acknowledges with gratitude the words of Virginia Woolf, which provide each chapter with its opening quotation.

Why did I do it?

Behold a cautionary tale of writing, refuges, and worlds to be free in.

Once upon a time I had a brilliant idea. Well, it seemed like it at the time. The plan was simple: to write a novel that was an examination of marriage with a forensic, unsparing eye. But book writing has always been a process of gradual disappointment for me; the grand ambition of each project contracting over time as I realise that what is emerging on the page wasn’t, quite, what had been envisaged at the outset. To be blunt: my novels slip away in the process of creation, become something else. And so I’d just try again, and again, to get it right; that was the rhythm of my novel-writing and each subsequent book. Early on, this tetchy new book – my fourth – about sex and marriage was not going to plan. I had a title,
The Bride Stripped Bare
, and not much else. The disappointment was gathering force heart-sinkingly soon into the process. Six months in, in fact. The story just wouldn’t lift off. The prose was resistant, leaden. Trying to write it was like wading thigh high through a river rushing towards me. Definitely not a good situation to be in with a newborn baby by my side, my first, and another little one on the way (the lesson here: do not believe those who tell you it is impossible to conceive while breastfeeding).

Then one day, in the thick of new motherhood, I chanced upon Virginia Woolf’s
A Room of One’s Own
. It was the type of book I hadn’t read for a while, drowning as I was under my sea of baby-manuals, and I seized that clear, sharply intelligent prose; remembering a woman I was who devoured books like this once. Woolf described anonymity as a ‘refuge’ for women writers. ‘For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.’ And with that simple sentence, my recalcitrant novel was unlocked.

It was as if a lightbulb was suddenly switched on in a room of sickly light. My name would be removed from the project. Simple. I’d write with brutal candour about a women’s secret life – and brilliantly, no one would be hurt in the process. Myself, of course, but also those closest to me in that precious little coracle of early parenthood we were floating in then, that tiny boat of nappies and naptimes and leaky breasts and wonder, endless wonder, that contained just my husband and our child and our new one soon to join us. Because I knew that if was going to write something with eviscerating honesty there would be reverberations years down the track, for all of us. People have always confused my fiction with autobiography; I’ve always had readers assume it was people close to me who were in my books, and judging them as well as myself. I was seized up by a fear of that; that they would mistake fiction for fact. And as I’d struggled to make that sodden first draft work I’d felt clogged up with caution – afraid of too much honesty, of showing too much vulnerability, and afraid of hurting people close to me.