The car pulls seamlessly away from the kerb. The windows are smoked to blankness. No one can see inside. Connie sits upright, legs delicately crossed at ankles, the worn crocodile of her vintage Mulberry handbag demure on her lap. She does not look at Cliff, she never looks at him, at the start, she can’t, she will stumble if she does. The spell cannot be broken; she must not let her head intrude, her rational thoughts; it is the only way these tumblings into something else can work. These episodes when she lets her body’s anima, the dark recesses of her mind, take over; when she trusts, completely trusts, because he has unlocked her into this.
The car is driven through the jangly upper reaches of Ladbroke Grove – as opposed to the White Heights, what Cliff and Connie call their rarefied end of Notting Hill in a private joke – and takes a left at the end of it. Their cars never take a left. Connie still does not look at Cliff, she neither asks nor questions. She gazes out the window as she is transported further and further from the graciousness of her home, her tree-lined street. A new London entirely unpeels before her.
A very different London – the real London, possibly – skinned before her eyes. A world of unremitting ugliness, scruffiness; not a blade of green in sight. The great press of its people, from all walks of life; everywhere but Britain, Connie thinks. It feels like these poor, watchful people are the stranded backwash, left high and dry upon a cowed, groaning, exhausted plot of earth. Connie’s from Cornwall, where the earth still sings, the great, beautiful bones of an ancient land and when she catches scenes like this it feels like the joyless future of this island, of the world; the crowded, jostling, built-over and unhappy future of the world as they know it. Feels like her tiny, lovely little Kensington and Chelsea is ring-fenced by the crushing, resentful, triumphant press of … this. The utter lack of any attempt at graciousness and wit and reach in this new England is startling, jarring, wrong; yet Connie feels like the only person in the world so thoroughly disturbed by it. These people need beauty too! Nowhere, here, is the London of her imagination that she moved into to gulp aged twenty-two.
Fingers suddenly spider across Connie’s soft inner thigh. It is the whisper of an enquiry, tracing a finery, her names perhaps; to submit, to begin. It is the signal. She turns from the window. Obediently, beyond will, beyond thought, Connie unhooks her legs and parts them, just a touch. Sits upright, very still. Waits. The fingers gently, gently nudge up her skirt until it is bunched in a thick band around her waist. She is ready, as directed, with just a plain black suspender belt. No ribbon, no lace, the thrilling cold of the limousine’s leather seat pressing up onto her, into her. The driver’s eyes flick at hers. She catches them. It is a new driver. She holds his gaze, her face gives nothing away; he is trying not to look, he looks down, at her bareness splayed on the leather, he cannot help himself. Cliff’s fingers softly, gently, part her lips, as if for the driver’s benefit then circle, exploratory, her back passage then suddenly plunge in – she gasps, lurches forward – then his fingers find her other hole until she is hooked and now poised, exposed, on the crook of his hand as her own reaches down, unstoppably, as she spreads herself, unstoppably and exposes her clit wide and presses her forefinger down on it and moans. She shuts her eyes on the driver’s glance, on the greyness of the world outside, on the weighed-down people at their drab little bus stop and the Halal chicken shop and another right beside it as she grinds down unstoppably on the cool leather of the seat.
‘I want to inspect you,’ her husband whispers. ‘You have to be fully prepared. Nothing must be left to chance. Remove your skirt.’
Connie obediently slides down the zipper and wriggles out of it. Loops the shirt ends up into the top of her bra, for maximum visibility, holds her hands obediently, waiting, across her breasts.
The driver’s eyes. Cliff and her need others, now, need to elaborate; need to shift away relentlessly from sameness.
‘Come,’ her husband commands.
Connie climbs across the wide interior to her husband’s seat.
‘Sit.’
She straddles her husband, her back to the driver; she goes to kiss Cliff but veers to the left of his cheek at the last moment and hooks her chin on his shoulder. He lifts her body high. ‘Yes,’ he whispers, examining her cunt with his fat pen, parting her lips then running his fingers in luxurious strokes along the wetness then lifting up her hips so that her behind is fully exposed, high, so high, to the driver, and Cliff is parting her cheeks wide, wider now and she is like a baboon there, poised, with her ready arse. ‘Display yourself,’ Cliff whispers and she parts her cheeks with her own hands, flattening her belly and moaning and pushing out her cunt, as wide as she can for the driver, for her husband, for any camera that may be filming for she is now, entirely, someone else. Poised. For the next step, whatever it may be.
‘Your Maglite,’ her husband says to the driver in another voice entirely.
‘Sir?’
‘Please.’
The driver fumbles in the glove compartment to his left and hands a tiny, slim torch across. Cliff switches it on and runs the beam across Connie’s wideness then he turns the torch around, switches it off, and toys the blunt end at her anal opening. The shock of the cold, the thrill of it. She groans, starts to move under its questioning, the chill pushing soft against her resisting bud. Cliff works it and works it until Connie is tightening her muscles and coming in a spasm of wet and collapsing against his strong shoulder that’s like a sudden scaffold to her limpness.
‘Yes. She’s ready,’ Cliff smiles. ‘Proceed.’
‘Yes, sir.’
The car revs yet does not lurch, never lurches, all is smooth and seamless and utterly correct.
5
The world wavered and quivered and threatened to burst into flames
How far will you go? When do you stop? Have you stopped, have you shut down, did you ever start? Bow out, now, if you must. When is the spell broken so that the inhibition, the flinching, the admonition and retort come rushing back? Have you put this down yet? Once, Connie would have thought a woman could have died of shame but instead of which, the shame died. Just like that, so D. H. Lawrence wrote. Shame, which is fear. And judgement. And with the death of shame she was released. A regular, everyday woman, any woman, of demure and considered tastes; raised by an empowered mother to be an empowered woman and yet deep down she was plumed into transcendent life by this. How? Why? It doesn’t make sense, yet it seems like something deeply animal, biological, these moments of vividness when she surrenders to something quite disconnected from everything else in her life; baubles of otherness, oh yes. Surrenders her body, by relinquishing her mind, such a delicate balancing act. And so Connie is released, for nights like this, to become someone else. Entranced. On the cusp of an unimaginable fate …
The city peels away, the car drives on, out into open country and through villages bunkered down against the cold and they’re gone in a flash and then they’re bulleting along runnels of narrow, high-hedged green and then thick woods, on, on, through the waiting quiet. The snow-scrubbed day has absorbed all sound.
The car suddenly, smoothly, pulls over into a small clearing. Without a word from either man. As if this has been done before. As if all is proceeding to plan. As if they are in some kind of strange, unspoken collusion. Connie jerks up her head, like a dog suddenly alert; lights are in front of them, but at a distance, high, wide; something momentous is close. She has no idea what. She trusts.
‘For his little task I need you to lie across my lap, my lovely, but up, up, on all fours,’ Cliff requests politely.
When Connie is done, arranged, as to specification, he whispers to her, ‘Do you love me?’ a moth’s breath to her ear, the pen in his hand stroking her labia, the familiar pen.
‘Yes, yes.’
Something