I Take You. Nikki Gemmell

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       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 …?

      The lady of the house picks her way carefully down the icy marble steps. She smiles her too wide, too unEnglish smile at Lara Deniston-Dickson, her neighbour, who is nudging recalcitrant window boxes into spring preparation after winter’s clench; checking on the wilted cyclamens that withstand so much. Lara is one of the few Brits left on this square. Her dilapidated house is crammed with fabulous but shabby heirlooms, oak dressers and chairs, a dining table piled with books, washstands, a zebra rug, ancestral portraits, a Modigliani from Granny, several pianos and a lot of dust – the servants have long gone, as has the heat. It is one of the few houses left like this on the square as the bankers have sharked in, mainly from foreign countries, everyone, it seems, but the Russians because this is still not Belgravia, still a bit too ragged, edgy, loose for that lot. Lara has a grand disdain for this new world that has gone into lockdown, barricading the riff-raff out. Even her husband, dear Rupert, a man of some standing, thank you very much, yet treated like a tramp, asked by the new committee if he ‘owned’ – if he deserved СКАЧАТЬ