‘What?’ The word is spat, as if Cliff can hardly bear to ask.
Connie shrugs, helpless. ‘Life.’
Cliff’s face. Pale with fury and devastation and loss.
44
To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself
Sunday morning. Needing a quietening. A necessary removal from all of them, to recalibrate. What is happening to Connie as uncertainty and indecision stain her life? A drawing to … what? Mystery. A veering towards it like an ocean liner subtly altering course for a new destination in the great ocean of life. Yet the destination’s unknown.
Before Cliff’s accident Connie had attended church. He certainly didn’t, ever, still doesn’t; one of those pitbull atheists, a sneerer à la Dawkins. Yet increasingly she’s finding there’s something … all-calming … about her Sunday morning experiences at the family-crammed church of St Peter’s in its high, shouting ochre on Notting’s hill. It’s an astonishing leak through a veneer of aspirant coolness and moneyed cynicism; a gentle drip, drip, through her restless, caged, unsettled life. Connie feels righted by these assignations, balmed, lit.
‘I like that you go to church,’ Mel said to her once, even though he doesn’t go himself. As if it softens her. As if it separates her from those who are the jeering, the sneering, the unsettled – and the ones with a chip of ice.
So. Sunday mornings, quite bravely alone. Connie’s brief coracle of solace. Brought down into stillness by a spiritual enveloping from a service mostly sung. The hour or so freshening, shining, rejuvenating. At times she says no, it’s ridiculous, she’s with that gentle atheist, Alain de Botton on this one; tipping her hat to the graces within organized religion but not sucked in by them. Yet Connie knows that she’ll never be aligned with the Cliffs and the Dawkins of the world, thumping that believers are deluded, stupid; she has too much respect for the mysterious in life. Which includes Mel. Can’t turn her back on wonder, craves it, in a sense. Found it, long ago, in the wild places of her travelling youth, the places where the silence hums – Greenland’s ice deserts, Cornwall’s high moors, under a full butter moon – yes, yes. She wants those places again. Somewhere in her life. Her rescue is tied up in them, she just knows it.
Connie feels silted up, often now, with the great weight of acquiring and cramming and rushing and worrying and just getting by; grubbied. Needs the simplicity of a spiritual way, its light touch, a tuning fork back into calm. The ocean liner on its unknown path is veering her towards those most shining qualities of religious practice: pilgrimage, contemplation, quiet. With Mel, she hopes. Somehow.
What she does know: that religion’s a miracle of survival. That places of potent spirituality do not belong entirely to earth. The tugging, the faint whisper of a tugging … and Connie has to find her way back to them. Urgently, it feels now.
Alone, or with someone else.
45
I want to think quietly, calmly, spaciously, never to be interrupted, never to have to rise from my chair, to slip easily from one thing to another, without any sense of hostility, or obstacle. I want to sink deeper and deeper, away from the surface, with its hard separate facts
Everywhere the lovely tight buds of the roses, waiting for a springing into bloom, everywhere the vast loosening as light floods weary, winter-bowed bones, everywhere an uncurling, an unfolding. People, their faces open to the sky, flowers, the happy philadelphus and yellow-wort and the springing grass before the dryness of summer and it all turns to leaching heat and spareness and dust; it’s a tingling day of high giddiness and Connie wants to grab all of it, all, this teeming exuberance, wander through it with eyes wide and fingers trailing and be replenished, by all of it, smell it and giggle and delight. In the garden, of course.
‘I want to touch you like you touch me,’ she tells Mel. ‘I’ve never really touched your body, properly, like you have mine.’
‘How do I touch you?’
‘With reverence. I’ll never forget it. Because no man’s ever touched me like that before. If I never saw you again, after this day, I’d remember your touch for the rest of my life. It’s … stamped. Yes, that’s the word. Stamped. By tenderness. I’ll never forget it.’
Connie straddles Mel’s supine body and shuts her eyes and places her two palms flat on his chest.
‘You feel me as if you’re blind. As if it’s the last time you’ll ever touch me, every time you do that. It’s like you’re committing everything to memory, wondering and delighting and … sanctifying … yes, that. So I’ll never forget you. It’s a gift, you know.’
Mel’s penis stirs under her hand, Connie slips it into her, moves on him, soft. Brings him into a coming with her sensitivity learned and her quietness and as he peaks she bears down on him, voluptuous and feels him spasming in her like a dying animal and embraces as if it’s the last time, the last time ever, and she will never forget.
‘Do you know what you’re doing?’ he pants. ‘You’re trapping me.’
‘Yes, ssssh, it’s all right, no talk.’ A fingertip brushes down Mel’s lips, a vast smile fills her up.
46
They came to her, naturally, since she was a woman, all day long with this and that; one wanting this, another that; the children were growing up; she often felt she was nothing but a sponge sopped full of human emotions
On a glary morning of high heat Connie feels a quickening in her womb, as if the sunshine has touched it and bloomed it into happiness. All about her, nannies and babies in the garden and chitter-chat, all about her, friends falling pregnant, baby showers, girlfriends needing coffees and catch-ups and movie nights. Connie’s always a good sounding board, someone peaceful and repairing to have about. They call her a lot, checking up. She’s a listener, a deep pool of stillness and quiet just waiting to receive, one of those rare ones who never wants to talk about herself. She doesn’t butt in over sentences, trying to dazzle with her own thoughts, doesn’t crash into conversations with ever bigger and better and more hilarious anecdotes.
Connie wonders, though, at yet another brasserie of blonde wood and ringing talk, if the social world is becoming a little more shouty now, raucous, in your face? Everyone’s so eager to talk at you, over the top of you, cram in their two bobs’ worth – but actually, quietly, to enquire? To listen deeply? No, she doesn’t see much of that. Only with Mel, who asks so many questions of her and it’s so odd in a man; he seems at times as if he wanted to drink her up. Needing to understand.
She longs often for Mel’s quiet. The comfort of their silence, in sync. With Cliff the silence was oppressive, accusatory, as it shouted their differences, that they had so little in common and how did they get to this and they must spend the rest of their lives amid it.
Connie’s book club is fracturing as hospital appointments, pregnancy yoga classes, exhaustion, end-of-year concerts and summer parties disrupt life. Again and again it feels like Connie’s friends are succumbing and falling pregnant but they’re always careful with this news around her, Cliff being Cliff of course, and the accident … and she’s always so reticent about that side of her life now, poor lamb … there’s been a vast reassessing, a reining back …