Nikki Gemmell’s Threesome: The Bride Stripped Bare, With the Body, I Take You (10 page)

putting damp sheets on a bed is little short of murder

A light under the front door. You’re usually home first – you sober your face down. Cole asks where you’ve been and you say the Library, it opens late on Wednesdays, remember? Good, he says, I’m glad you’re getting something out of it. He looks up from his
Evening Standard:
he loves the urban, gossipy side of it just as much as yourself. Hey, you’ve got two red patches on your cheeks, he says, like a clown.

It’s the cold, it’s getting colder, can’t you feel it?

How easily the lie slips out, it’s stunning, so smooth, so quick. It’s because your husband’s trust in you is tethered like a buoy to a concrete block; you’re the good wife, everyone knows that. Your palms fly to your cheeks to hide the heat and you look at Cole and think in that moment how
easy it’d be to do anything you want, and, suddenly, how heartbreaking is his generosity and trust. You think, in that moment, that perhaps he never had an affair with Theo. It’s so hard to imagine, as he sits in his shirtsleeves with his paper and olives and beer. You toy with the thought, for the very first time, that perhaps all along he was telling the truth. He never adequately defended himself from suspicion but maybe he couldn’t: your mind was made up. Time is fading everything and you’re beginning, suddenly, to doubt yourself: what you heard, what you decided upon so quickly. Perhaps, perhaps you were wrong.

That night you place your palm on Cole’s chest as he sleeps beside you and you cup his heartbeat in your hand like a glass over a leech. You can’t sleep, can’t sleep. If you commit adultery in your head, are you beginning the rejection of your husband and your marriage and your life up to that point? Or welding yourself to them? And if that’s the case, how does the marriage become, again, warm and rich?

Do you need an excuse?

You don’t ever lie. Except to tell lovers that you’ve just had an orgasm or your friends that you love their new haircut and all of that doesn’t count, it’s done to soothe and protect. You don’t steal. You don’t sleep around. But you think about it. It’s always been enough, just thinking about it, imagining sleeping with almost every man you meet.

What furious need is within you, you wonder.

Why must we crave the things we’re not meant to, you wonder.

an Inspector of Nuisances may always be found in a letter

Another Theo column. You’re intrigued and repelled. You shouldn’t read them, you know they’ll just hurt; you can’t stop.

As expected, there’s something else about adultery. It’s tucked into a query about a boyfriend who’s unfaithful but gives great oral sex, and the reader wants him monogamous and every night, because it’s all too delicious to pass up. And how can she have him all to herself?

Dear Drowning in Deliciousness, the good news is that any man can be taught how to give great oral sex. Just curl his hand in yours and tell him to imagine the ridges are the folds of your flesh, and then demonstrate with your tongue and breath and fingers exactly what you want. I guarantee
it will work. But, dear Drowning, I‘m afraid it’s just not worth sticking with your boyfriend. How could you expect a committed relationship from someone who’s been unfaithful in the past?

A committed relationship. Uh huh. What would she know about a committed relationship?

You crumple the magazine. Dare to tell Cole that Theo’s column is rubbish, as is the whole paper that she writes for: perhaps this sentiment will be passed on. You wouldn’t mind one bit if she knew she wasn’t being read by you, that her wily messages weren’t getting across.

Darling, I know the paper’s rubbish, Cole says. I was only ever buying it for you.

Well, don’t, you snap, I don’t like it any more.

OK. Whatever, Cole responds lightly and walks over, and opens his dressing gown and invites you in. It’s an old gesture you’ve always loved. All your tension is released by it, your whole body relaxes into him.

cheerfulness is a great charm in a nurse

November flinches into winter and two red patches stain your cheeks, often now. Your heart catches in your throat every time Gabriel’s voice is on the phone, your stomach churns and after the phone clicks in its cradle you run around the room and leap to the ceiling and bat the hand-made paper globes covering your lights and squeal to the sky. It’s delicious and mortifying to be living like this again; so young, so gone. You never thought this belly-fluttering would ever come back into your life, that it would lie waiting for a waking no matter how old you got.

You have coffee with him. You go to the cinema at two p.m., theatre matinees, National Theatre talks. He’s gleeful that you have a car, wants to do London like a tourist; let’s play in history, he says. You go to Kew Gardens and
Alexandra Palace, Chiswick House and Hampton Court. He wants to drive; you let him. He’s like a child with a toy, he’s never owned a car. He takes you to his favourite space, the Rothko room in the Tate Modern, and after it you drag him to the Body section – come on, just a look! – and there’s a Duchamp painting on glass and he watches your intrigue as you stand in front of the work: it’s so odd, you can’t make it out.

What, you ask, to his stare, go away, stop it, you laugh. Well, do
you
know what it’s about?

Nope. And he walks away, laughing, his hands raised in abandon.

He’s always leaping up for elderly men on the tube and engaging in chat with cafe staff and helping mothers with pushchairs down the steps. All the things you should do, but don’t; all the things Cole would never contemplate. He’s so compassionate, unhurried, relaxed. People aren’t like that. It seems, almost, a naivety. How can he survive in the world? He’s a man without scorn, and Cole, of course, is anything but. It’s as if all the hardness that comes with living in London hasn’t claimed him yet.

Sometimes, guiltily, you have afternoon tea in your flat and Gabriel takes out the rubbish at the end of it, without being asked, a small courtesy and yet enormous, for Cole always has to be nudged to do that. It felt so strange to have him in your space for the first time, you just watched: his lean, exotic darkness, his suit with his shirtsleeves poking
out, his scuffed shoes with a piece of cardboard over a hole in the sole because, he said, Charlie Chaplin used to do it and it worked. He roamed the living room with his hands contentedly behind his back, peering at framed wedding photos and CDs and books; gathering evidence of how you lived your life. And how Cole did. He asked questions about him, as if he was endlessly curious about this marriage business.

Do you cook dinner for him?

Not much.

Do you ever wear an apron?

No.

He’s enjoying this, he’s smiling, his eyes are disappearing into slits: you love it when he smiles as completely as that.

Do you iron his shirts?

No.

Do you send him off in the morning with a peck on his cheek?

No. No. No, you shake your head, you laugh.

He opens doors for you, buys your tube ticket, pays the cafe bills, wouldn’t think of anything else. It’s days and days of small kindnesses, each with a tiny erotic charge, and they’re returned all the time now – holding his hand, tugging him along, hugging him with delight – for the young child in you is skipping back. And sometimes there are no underpants under your knee-length skirt and this
gives you a charge. It’s just a small thing, for you, but enormous; unimaginable, a year ago. A private trespass, but no less arousing because of that.

You don’t have a hunger for the book project now. You have no desire to ring your old girlfriends from work, despite your promise when you left. Nothing sings but this time with Gabriel. You’re loving the silkiness of distraction, of flirting with possibility and relaxing into play. When you do make it to the Library there are diversions and rambles that stretch into chapters plucked off bowed shelves and sometimes, in one golden afternoon, an entire book of fairy tales or a novella you’ve always meant to read. You’re drawn to the Library’s shadowy recesses, to old cookery manuals and strange, instructional texts for Victorian housewives accompanying their husbands to the colonies. You’re drawn to Gabriel, at his desk, distracting him from his own languorous work.

You don’t have a world you share, apart from the time together. There are huge gaps in his life you know nothing of, he always turns away from your questions and shines the light back upon yourself. He uses your own tricks, you recognise them too well. He’s endlessly curious but will not satisfy your own curiosity.

What is it about bullfighting, you ask after an Almodóvar film, and you take both his palms and search them again for the secrets of his life.

Come to Spain with me, come and watch a corrida.

I’d love to, but how?

A helpless shrug. Both never daring to speak of what binds you, the insistent tug like the pull of a stream, determined, unstoppable, fast. When he leans to you there’s a shivery sense of the nearness of your skins, of his energy, his difference. The different foods he eats, the different sun he was brought up in, the different sky, it’s all stamped into his skin. It’s like the exhilaration you get when you arrive in a country for the very first time and step from the airport and the strangeness of it all assaults your senses, for Gabriel seems so fresh and fascinating and unique, a new territory to be explored; if you dare to slip your fingers on his hips when he stands before you, if you dare begin.

every womanly woman, who truly realises her mission, desires to be a pleasant object of vision for her fellow creatures

Cole knows of him.

He’d insisted upon meeting the new Library friends at one of the drinking sessions after work, he wanted to tag along. As if he just wanted to keep tabs on your new life; the price of the gift, perhaps. You had to say yes.

The actor one is creepy, he said, as you sat side by side on the tube on the way home.

Why?

He’s in love with you, he said.

What makes you say that? Sweat shimmering across your brow like it does after too much chocolate.

I don’t know, just a look, perhaps.

And Cole had returned to his
Standard.
Secure in his fiefdom, knowing implicitly the type of man you like and
do not. He’s always assuming he knows you so well: orders your drink without consultation, insists you try a particular dish he’s sure you’ll like, tapes you television shows he feels you should watch. And he always considers these gestures a kindness.

Gabriel never assumes, he wants to learn.

Two red patches on your cheeks, often now.

Your nails are painted for the first time in years and you keep on forgetting and catch in the corner of your eye the octopus fingers, it’s as if they’re weighed down with a life of their own. You write neater with them and eat neater and less. You’re losing weight, there’s a reason to now, and you’ve cut your hair short for you want people to see the new lightness in your face. You get contact lenses. You feel taller with them, bolder. You’d become lazy in so many ways, you’d stopped trying. You feel sleeker all over, walk with a subtle shine.

Your Elizabethan book takes on a new urgency as you dip into its pages:

She decked her selfe bravely to allure the yes of all men that should see her. And who knows not how this deceipt of hers prospered and how much she is magnified and commended for the same.

You shut the volume, tremulously, you smooth your palm over its surface. You tuck the tiny book away in your drawer, suddenly not wanting Cole to see it lying around, to flip through the cocoa-coloured subversion of its beautiful handwriting.

You’re readying your life, but for what? You don’t know where all the flirting and phone calls will end up. Does Gabriel feel the same as you? You don’t dare to think ahead too much, for you don’t want this melted under the heat of your attention, don’t want it gone from your life.

in some cases it is necessary to change stockings and flannels every day

Hey, you whisper, poking your head over the wooden desk divider during a long Library afternoon. I’m starving.

Go away, I have to work.

Come on.

He throws his pen at you, several heads look up, someone tuts. The cafe, you say, holding his arm with both hands and pulling tight.

Where are you up to?

The big scene. The bullfight. I have to get back.

Does the matador die?

Hardly ever now.

But I thought –

No, no, the sport’s changed, there’s not the tension that
there used to be. The bull’s no longer brave, the matador even less so. All the beaut}’ in it is being lost.

The beauty in it, an erotic charge from that.

So, how
should
the bull die, you ask.

Like this, and Gabriel leans across the cafe table and caresses the back of your neck, he finds the vulnerable spot and whispers to you that that is where the dagger slides in, feel it, just there, it has to be clean, severing the spinal cord, he tells you there’s a magnificence to the perfect thrust and as he speaks goose bumps sprint across your skin. You sit back. Rub your neck. You’re shuddering for him, pressing your knees tight. There’s an innocence to your face still, at thirty-six you could pass as twenty-six, as still needing to be taught, in your cropped cardigan and ballet slippers and knee-length skirt. The ribbons of muscle in your upper legs tighten, often now, at Sunday brunches with Cole’s clients and dinner parties and in-law drinks; you’re distracted by a want, achingly, for Gabriel to touch your cunt.
Cunt.
You’ve always hated that word and yet suddenly it arouses you; you smile, secretly, dirtily, when you say it in your head.

And yet you cannot imagine it ever coming to that for the one time you kissed – a cheek peck that strayed, a goodbye that went too far after a soaring afternoon – he jerked like a mustang being broken in. And whenever your skin brushes a touch he will retract, you can sense it, the pulling back.