I Take You
From the author of the bestsellers The Bride Stripped Bare and With My Body, a new twist on a classic tale of passion.Set in Notting Hill, this modern-day version of ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ sees a banker’s wife awaken to the erotic possibilities of her life.Connie Carven is devoted to her husband, who is left paralysed from the waist down following an accident. But this is no less than he demands – in fact, he insists on Connie’s utter subservience to his every desire. But unable to physically satisfy his wife, Clifford is eager to explore new, strange and troubling avenues of passion. Connie, ever the dutiful wife, follows wherever he leads.And yet Connie is bursting with unfulfilled desire. Unfulfilled, that is, until the communal gardener enters, and their affair accelerates to its tense, shuddering conclusion.
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Nikki Gemmell
I TAKE YOU
FOURTH ESTATE • London
Table of Contents
1
Each has her past shut in her like the leaves of a book known to her by heart, and her friends can only read the title
Four a.m. The prowling hour. The wakefulness comes into Connie like a blade flicked open, for ours is essentially a fearful age and she is a child of it. All her choices in adult life have been dictated by fear and now, in the early hours, it curdles.
Fear of entrapment. Of being found out. Of turning into one of those women for whom indecision has become a vocation, of a silent slipping into that. Of emotional sledging, that she is becoming less resilient, not more, as she sails beyond youth. Of softening into fat, of men who take note as if she’s ripe for a mugging, of life settling like concrete around her and judgement; of what people think of her, yes, that most of all. Women! How awful they can be.
When does the unliving start? For a particular female of this particular age, it is incremental. For Connie – ensconced in her five-storey villa in London’s Notting Hill that was once splashed creamily across the pages of Architectural Digest – it has begun.
2
The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages
But there is one small pocket of Connie’s life where there is no fear.
Quite the opposite, in fact.
None of the people in her regular world of kick-boxing with her private trainer in Kensington Gardens, of ladies lunching around the communal table at Ottolenghi and of shop scouring, endlessly, on Westbourne Grove, knows of this place. In this one tiny corner of her existence all the blushing is left behind; she is unbound. Connie blooms in this world, into someone else entirely. It is a place that is open with possibility, with the potency of power, and she has so little of that in her regular life. It bequeaths her little moments of vividness that have become like scooping a hand into cool, clear creek water in summer’s heat.
3
Blame it or praise it, there is no denying the wild horse in us
Cliff has called. He has asked Connie to be ready in two hours. He is taking this late afternoon off – rare in the silky world of a Mayfair hedge fund manager – and a car will pick her up. Her stomach rolls in anticipation, as he speaks, it rolls as if a steamroller is gently travelling over it. The tugging, deep in her belly, the wet; at the whispered command, it has been a long time, too long, since this.
‘Prepare yourself.’
Connie waits for the car on the Lockheed chaise longue – made entirely of riveted aluminium – by its tall window in a mewly winter light. She loves how the metal of her coveted design piece looks like a giant goblet of mercury, like something else entirely; thrills at the sternness of it against her flesh. Its arresting cold. She is shaved, perfumed; this is all necessary now. To her, and to Cliff, dear Cliff, to whom she has been married for four years and with him for five before it.
Connie is dressed well. Always, she is dressed well. A woman who has the instinctive touch of looking impeccably ‘right’, on every occasion; conservative, with a flick of cool. Today, it is the shortened Chanel skirt of grey bouclé with veins of red through it. The iron-grey, silk Chloé blouse that slips like water from Connie’s hands and hangs below the jacket cuffs with something of the loucheness of the seventies to it; a touch of Bianca Jagger in her prime. The black lace Rigby and Peller bra, fitted by the Queen’s fitters. Wolford stockings. No knickers. Shoes, vintage McQueen’s, that look like the snout of a bull terrier. Fearsome, hobbling, but Connie has mastered them; everything in her rarefied life appears gilded, effortless.
She must be entirely shaved, of course. ‘I need you bare,’ Cliff has whispered, his voice dropping an octave as Connie squeezes her thighs together, tight, so tight, upon the thought. Bare for whom? What?
The car, sleek and panther black, purrs to a stop outside their villa which backs onto one of Notting Hill’s finest communal gardens, an expanse of several hidden acres now silent with snow on this January afternoon. A pristine, waiting brittleness. It has been a particularly long winter. One pair of footprints, heavy workman’s boots, smear the glary expanse of the great lawn like the restless prowl of a lone wolf; but no child plays, no adult wanders. The sky is pale, almost white. Everything waits. But for what …?
