NIKKI GEMMELL
The Bride Stripped Bare Set

The Bride Stripped Bare

With My Body

Contents

The Bride Stripped Bare

With My Body

About the Author

Also by Nikki Gemmell

Copyright

About the Publisher

The Bride Stripped Bare

Nikki Gemmell

Dedication

For my husband. For every husband.

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Dear sir

I

Lesson 1

Lesson 2

Lesson 3

Lesson 4

Lesson 5

Lesson 6

Lesson 7

Lesson 8

Lesson 9

Lesson 10

Lesson 11

Lesson 12

Lesson 13

Lesson 14

Lesson 15

Lesson 16

Lesson 17

Lesson 18

Lesson 19

Lesson 20

Lesson 21

Lesson 22

Lesson 23

Lesson 24

Lesson 25

Lesson 26

II

Lesson 27

Lesson 28

Lesson 29

Lesson 30

Lesson 31

Lesson 32

Lesson 33

Lesson 34

Lesson 35

Lesson 36

Lesson 37

Lesson 38

Lesson 39

Lesson 40

Lesson 41

Lesson 42

Lesson 43

Lesson 44

Lesson 45

Lesson 46

Lesson 47

Lesson 48

Lesson 49

Lesson 50

Lesson 51

Lesson 52

Lesson 53

Lesson 54

Lesson 55

Lesson 56

Lesson 57

Lesson 58

Lesson 59

Lesson 60

Lesson 61

Lesson 62

Lesson 63

Lesson 64

Lesson 65

Lesson 66

Lesson 67

Lesson 68

Lesson 69

Lesson 70

Lesson 71

Lesson 72

Lesson 73

Lesson 74

Lesson 75

Lesson 76

Lesson 77

III

Lesson 78

Lesson 79

Lesson 80

Lesson 81

Lesson 82

Lesson 83

Lesson 84

Lesson 85

Lesson 86

Lesson 87

Lesson 88

Lesson 89

Lesson 90

Lesson 91

Lesson 92

Lesson 93

Lesson 94

Lesson 95

Lesson 96

Lesson 97

Lesson 98

Lesson 99

Lesson 100

Lesson 101

Lesson 102

Lesson 103

Lesson 104

Lesson 105

Lesson 106

Lesson 107

Lesson 108

Lesson 109

Lesson 110

Lesson 111

Lesson 112

Lesson 113

Lesson 114

Lesson 115

Lesson 116

Lesson 117

Lesson 118

Lesson 119

Lesson 120

Lesson 121

Lesson 122

Lesson 123

Lesson 124

Lesson 125

Lesson 126

Lesson 127

Lesson 128

Lesson 129

Lesson 130

Lesson 131

Lesson 132

Lesson 133

Lesson 134

Lesson 135

Lesson 136

Lesson 137

Lesson 138, the last

Postscript

Dear Reader

Dear sir,

I am taking the liberty of sending you this manuscript, which I am hoping may interest you.

It was written by my daughter. Twelve months ago she vanished. Her car was found at the top of a cliff in the south of England, yet her body was never recovered. Despite extensive questioning of several people close to her the police concluded it was a case of suicide and closed their file. Others speculate that she may have staged her disappearance. I’m not sure about either scenario and the uncertainty of it all, I must admit, has consumed my life.

She was completing a book at the time of her disappearance. It was in her laptop which the police returned to me. I’m the only person, as far as I know, whom she told about what she’d been working on. It’s about a married woman’s secret life, and my daughter wished to remain anonymous because she wanted to write with complete candour; she feared she’d only end up censoring herself if her name was attached. She also wanted to protect the people around her, and herself.

I read through her manuscript in the hope of finding a reason for her vanishing, and I felt her life open up before me like a flower. How much I didn’t know. How much I didn’t want to know. She was a stranger to me in many ways and yet the person closest to me.

My first instinct, I must admit, was to just delete her book and forget about it, but it’s been a long time since her going, and even though I’ve never stopped hoping it will be her on the end of the line when the phone rings, I feel, now, that I owe it to her to help if I can and find a publisher for her work. I believe it’s what she wanted, very much. Her happiness is, ultimately, all I ever wanted for her.

So, here is The Bride Stripped Bare. Thank you for your time.

I

I have a feeling that inside you somewhere, there’s somebody nobody knows about.

Alfred Hitchcock and Thornton Wilder,

Shadow of a Doubt

Lesson 1

honesty is of the utmost importance

Your husband doesn’t know you’re writing this. It’s quite easy to write it under his nose. Just as easy, perhaps, as sleeping with other people. But no one will ever know who you are, or what you’ve done, for you’ve always been seen as the good wife.

Lesson 2

cold water stimulates, strengthens and braces the nerves

A honeymoon. A foreign land.

There you are, succumbing to the sexual ritual and remembering the day as a seven-year-old when you discovered water. You’d never been in a swimming pool before; there were none where you were growing up. You’re remembering a summer holiday and a swimming pool with the water inching up your belly as you stepped forward gingerly and the slow creep of the cold and the breath collected in the knot of your stomach and your mother always there ahead of you, smiling and coaxing and holding out her hands and stepping back and back. Then suddenly, pop, you’re floating and the water’s holding your belly and legs like sinews of rope, it’s muscular and balming and silky and the memory’s as potent as a first kiss.

As for the first time you fucked, well, you remember the sound, as his fingers readied you between your legs, not much else. Not even a name now.

Lesson 3

making a comfortable bed is a very important part of household work

In the night air of Marrakech, on your belated honeymoon, the first scrum of morning birds sounds like fat spitting and crackling in a kitchen. It’s still dark but the birds have taken over from the frogs as crisply as if a conductor’s lowered his baton. The call to prayers has pulled you awake and you can’t fall back into sleep, you want to fling the french doors wide, as wide as they’ll go, and inhale the strange desert dawn. But your husband, Cole, will wake and complain if you do.

So. You lay your hand on the jut of his hip and breathe in his sleeping, the sour, sweet smell of it, and smile softly in the dark. The tip of your nose nuzzles his scent on the back of his neck.

You’ve never loved anyone more in your life.

You slip on to the balcony. It’s hot, twenty-eight degrees at least. A wondrous child-smile greets a great spill of stars, for the vast orange glow from London’s lights means you never see stars at home, scarcely know when there’s a full moon. The night flowers exhale their bloom, bougainvillaea and hibiscus and magnolia are still and shadowy in the night. You feel fat with content. Cole calls out, plaintive, and you slip back inside and his arm wings your body and clamps you tight.

Your feet manoeuvre free of the sheet’s smother and dangle off the edge of the bed, as they always do, finding the coolness and the air.

Lesson 4

very few people have many friends; as the word is generally used, it has no meaning at all

On the day before you leave for Marrakech Mrs Theodora White tells you she has no passion in her life, for anything. It’s such a shock to hear, but she dismisses your concern with a smile and a flick of her hand. She picks a sliver of tobacco off her tongue and throws back her head to gulp the last of her flat white. She was born thirty-five whereas you haven’t gained definition yet, haven’t hardened into adulthood. You’re also in your thirties but still stamp through puddles and sing off-key too much, as if tucked inside you is a little girl who refuses to die.

The only thing I’ve ever had a passion for was Jesus, Theo tells you. When I was eleven. It was something to do with the hips.

She was expelled from your convent school because the Mother Superior decided she had more influence over the students than the nuns did. She has many stories like this. You do not. She’s called Diz by the people closest to her. She’s always rolling her cigarettes from a battered silver case and this only adds to her charm, as does her air of being constantly in heat. Your friend is lush, ripe, her body a peachy size fourteen. She’s one of those women who look like they enjoy an abundance of everything, food, fresh air, sex, laughter, love. When alongside Theo you feel pale, like a leaf left too long in the water, bleached of colour and life.

But you don’t envy her for you know too much about her. She’s your oldest friend in the world, you’ve loved her since you were thirteen. You’re not sure why it’s so disturbing to hear she has no passion in her; perhaps it’s because your life, in contrast, on the cusp of your honeymoon, seems bathed in love. As you walk home from the cafe you smile out loud at that thought, you can’t help it, you smile widely as you walk down the street.

Lesson 5

it is absolutely necessary to wash the armpits and hips every day

You’ve laughed with Theo that your husband always sleeps with his T-shirt and boxer shorts on, even when it’s hot. That he doesn’t appreciate the sweetness of skin to skin, the softness of it and the smell, the warmth. Just the sight of a man’s chest can make you wet. You’d never say an expression like that to him, makes me wet. You would to Theo. Cole would be horrified at how much she knows.

You love placing your palm on Cole’s chest when you’re lying in bed, curving your torso around the crescent of his back, the jigsaw fit of it. You love the smell of him when he hasn’t washed, especially the softness under his arms. If he knew, he’d describe it as unseemly. Sometimes in bed Cole doesn’t allow your hand to stay on his chest, he brusques it away. Sometimes he lets your hand rest there. Sometimes he clamps your hand like it’s caught in a trap and when you drag it away he clutches it tight and it becomes a game to disentangle yourself.

But only you’re giggling, in the close dark.

Lesson 6

girls can never be too thoughtful

Why are you putting on your socks, you ask.

Because I’m going back to the room, Lovely.

But we’ve just got here, Donkey. Your swimmers are still wet.

I know, but there’s a very important meeting in front of the telly. Are you coming?

No, I’ll stay a bit longer.

You feel guilty saying no for Cole needs you a lot and he’s loud with his want, it’s almost a petulance, like a boy’s. But you can feel your skin absorbing this hard Moroccan light like the desert does rain, can feel it uncurling something within you. Here the light bashes you; in England, it licks you. Cole’s skin and eyes recoil from it; his skin is very pale, almost translucent; he’s away, inside, a lot. Not only on holidays but in London too. He sequesters himself by habit. At work, until late, or in front of the television, or in the bathroom. He can stay on the toilet for three-quarters of an hour or more, if you sit next to him on the couch he’ll make his way to the armchair without even realising what he’s doing, if you put your hand on his groin in bed he’ll shrug it away. He sleeps with the curve of his back to you more often than not.

Yet even when he’s away he needs you nearby: he’s told you that you’re his life. You love the ferocity in his need, to be wanted so much. Cole is the only man you’re attracted to whom you can talk to without a fear of silence, like an empty highway, right through the middle of the conversation. Or of saying something ridiculous and telling, or of your lip trembling, or of blushing. Your body stays obedient around Cole, you’re in control, you can relax. It’s one of the reasons why you married him. That you’re comfortable with him, that you don’t have to act too much, you can be, almost, yourself. No one else is allowed so close.

Lesson 7

dance away with all your might

Your big toe’s kissed, indulgently, when you throw back your arms like a diva on the sunlounger and declare you’ll be staying by the pool a little longer. Neither Cole nor yourself has seen anything, yet, of the new city you’re in, even though you’ve been here for four days. Theo would berate you for this but marriage has made you soft, dulled your curiosity. The crush of robed and veiled people at the airport, the mountains of luggage and squealing children and machine-guns on guards were all a little overwhelming, so both Cole and yourself are content to stay wrapped within the hotel for a while. It’s like the one in the movie The Shining, with wide, deco corridors and a surreally spare lobby and the regret of some long-ago lost decadence. A bastion of French colonialism that’s now frequented by wealthy Europeans, but there are not enough of them to plump out its space. There are no Muslims. Perhaps they find it too ridiculous, or unwelcoming, or odd, but there’s no one to ask.

You would’ve sought the answers once, you shone with curiosity once. Now you’re almost too languid to care, for you’re distracted, deliciously so. You sit on the edge of the pool and dawdle your fingertips in its coolness and remember something from the day-old Times, that the urge to think rarely strikes the contented. You smile—so what?—and wave over a pool waiter for another Bellini. How you love them. You’ve never allowed yourself the luxury of laziness, or four Bellinis in a row before.

A donkey pulls a cart of clippings up a rose-bowered path of the hotel’s gardens. A man flicks a whip lazily over the animal’s back. It’s something of this land at least. You must photograph it.

Lesson 8

it is a wife’s duty to make her husband’s home happy

Midnight is thick with heat and humming with stillness before the assault of the frogs and the birds and your eyes are shut but you can sense Cole’s gaze, can feel his greed and there’s a tightness in your throat. Your relationship works delightfully, easily, in so many ways, except for the sex.

But that is not what you married Cole for.

A tongue hits your eye, slug-wet and heavy. Your husband strips away the recalcitrant sheet wound about your legs and nudges, insistently, his knee between your thighs. He must make love on his terms, which isn’t often. You usually make love in the mornings to take advantage of his hardness upon waking. Cole’s penis often doesn’t feel hard enough, as if it’s thinking of something else. He doesn’t come very often. Both of you usually give up before he has and it’s always with relief on your part. You wonder if Cole has a condition that causes him to take so long to come, or if he’s undersexed, or just tired. Like you have been, a lot.

As Cole is on top of you on this wide hotel bed you’re looking at the numbers of the clock radio by the bed flicking over their minutes and you’re thinking of Marilyn Monroe who said I don’t think I do it properly – you read it in a newspaper once with astonishment and relief: so, someone else, and what a someone else. You’re not sure if Cole does it properly, you don’t know what properly is. Theo would, for she is a sex therapist with a discreet Knightsbridge office and a Sunday magazine column. You suspect she finds you both innocent and ridiculous and sweet. Cole and you have never done any of that making love twice in a row or knocking over lamps or pulling each other’s hair. When you do make love you could describe each other as tidy.

The numbers on the clock radio are taking too long to flip over as you lie on the bed, with Cole on top of you. Something has slid away, deep in you. You don’t make love often; you’ve read articles in women’s magazines about how frequently most couples do and it always seems such a lot. But no one’s completely honest about sex.

Thirteen minutes past midnight. Cole has come. This is rare. He wipes the cum across your breasts and your cheeks and dabs it on your forehead, as if he’s blooding you. He’s pleased. You’re pleased. Perhaps it worked this time. Cole turns on the bedside lamp to assess the soakage on the sheets and any items of clothing; he always does this, he wants it cleaned up as quickly as possible, he hates mess.

You push his face towards you. He’s surprised at the boldness, he wants his face back but you hold him firm for you’re remembering walking down the aisle and looking ahead to him and your heart swelling with love like an old dried sponge that’s been dropped into a bath. When your husband enfolds you in his arms it’s a haven, a harbour, to rest from all the toss of the world. It’s what you’ve always wanted, you have to admit, the place of refuge, the cliché.

Lesson 9

the prevention of waste a duty

Before you found Cole you hadn’t slept with a man for four years. It’s hard, you’d say to Theo, it’s really hard. There were the endless birthday nights and New Year’s Eves of just you in your bed and no one else. There was the welling up at weddings, the glittery eye-prick, when all the couples would get up to dance. Sometimes it felt like your heart was crazed with cracks like your grandmother’s old saucers. Sometimes the sight of a Saturday afternoon couple laughing in a park would splinter it completely. Young couples who’d been together for many years were intriguing, hateful, remote. What was their secret? You’d reached the stage where you couldn’t imagine ever being in a loving partnership.

Theo had warned you that any person who lives by themselves for more than three years becomes strange and selfish and has to be hauled back into the world. She said she had to intervene. You told her no, you were beyond help, you’d convinced yourself of this. All your life people had been leaving: you were a child of divorced parents and you never grew up with the expectation that someone would look after you, and stay.

But then Cole McCain.

An old acquaintance from university, a friend, just that. One summer you were house-sitting in Edinburgh during the festival and he asked if he could come to stay; there were some shows he wanted to catch. You remember marching him to his room, a little girl’s, with its narrow bed and pink patchwork quilt. You remember his dubious look.

I think you better sleep in the big bed with me, you said.

It was meant to be two friends bunking down for the sake of convenience. You both had your pyjamas on, you made sure of that. But then his sudden fingers on your skin were like a trickle of water on a sweltering summer’s day. A strangeness shot through you, you turned to him, kissed. Cole stripped off his pyjamas, quick, and then yours were off too and something took over you, you were gone. Within a week you were both rolling up in the sheets and falling off the bed in a giggly cocoon. Within two years you were married.

I’ve known for years, you wally, said Theo in gleeful hindsight, it was always so obvious.

I never saw it.

It had taken you a long time to wake up to some sense. You used to sleep with men you were uncomfortable with in an attempt to make yourself comfortable with them; you married the one you forget yourself with.

But there was a moment of invisibility when you tried on the wedding dress, as if you were disappearing into that swathe of ivory and tulle, being wiped away. It was only fleeting and it was worth it, of course, not to have the prickle behind the eyes of those laughing Saturday afternoon couples again, the heart-crack.

Lesson 10

garments worn next to the skin are those which require frequent washing

Men you have slept with. What you remember the most:

The one who loved women.

The one who never took off his socks.

The one whose hands were so big they seemed to be in three places at once.

The one whose touch hummed, who seemed to know exactly what he was doing and stood out because of that. He seemed only to derive pleasure from the experience if you were, whereas none of the others seemed too fussed. He asked what your fantasies were but you didn’t have the courage to speak out. Back then, you’d never have the courage for that.

The one who sent you a polaroid of his very big cock.* But size means little to you, you don’t know why they go on about it. You much prefer a comfortable fit than a penis that’s too big; you don’t want to feel you’re being split apart.

The one who’d say take me as he came and groaned like he was doing a big shit.

The one who tickled you behind your knees and licked you on the face, who forced you to swallow his cum and rubbed it through your hair; who was aroused by all the things you didn’t like.

The one who said yes, when you asked him to marry you, half joking, half not, on a February the twenty-ninth. You’re embarrassed you had to ask Cole McCain. You wish he’d never mention it, but he does, in a teasing way, a lot.

*You’re more than happy to write the word cock; saying it aloud, however, is another matter. It even feels a little odd to say vagina but you’re not sure what else to use. You hate pussy, you don’t know any woman who says it, and as for cunt, you always think it’s used by men who don’t like women very much. You want some words that women have colonised for themselves; maybe they exist but you haven’t heard them yet. You can’t say down there for the rest of your life.

Lesson 11

a sacred and delicate reticence should always enwrap the pure and modest woman

Early morning.

A bird flaps into the room and you wake, panicked at the flittering above your head and run to the bathroom and slam the door, begging Cole to do something, quick. The bird’s swiftly gone. It hasn’t crashed wildly into mirrors or windows. You couldn’t bear that—you witnessed it once as a child, the droppings out of fright, the too-bright blood, the crazed thump, the shrill eye.

But now there’s just quiet hovering in the room. You step into it from the bathroom and kiss Cole on the tip of his nose. He envelopes you in his arms with a great calm of ownership and laughs: he likes you vulnerable. And to teach you, to introduce you to new things. You didn’t look closely at a penis until you were married, didn’t know what a circumcised one looked like. You wonder, now, how you could’ve had the partners you’ve had and never really looked. You always wanted the lights off quick because you never liked your body enough, and dived under the sheets, and felt it was rude to study a man’s anatomy too intently: you favoured eye contact and touch. Cole forced you to look, right at the start, he taught you to get close. He likes to direct your life, to guide it.

You let him think he is.

Lesson 12

it is our greatest happiness to be unselfish

Cole fell asleep inside you once. He laughs at the memory, finds it erotic and silly and comforting. The morning after, to soothe your indignation, he’d said that falling asleep inside a woman was a sign of true love.

What? Shaking your head as if rattling out a fly.

It means that the man’s truly comfortable with the woman, so comfortable that he can fall asleep in the process of making love to her. I could never do that to anyone else. Think yourself honoured, Lovely.

Hmm, you’d replied.

You love Cole in a way you haven’t loved before. Calmly. It glows like a candle rather than glitters. You love him even when he falls asleep in the process of making love to you. You’d never loved calmly before, in your twenties. That was the time of greedy love, full of exhilaration and terror, and when you said I love you you always felt stripped; there was no sense, ever, of love as a rescue. Sometimes, now, you wonder what happened to the intensity of your youth, when everything seemed so vivid and desperate and bright. Sometimes you imagine a varnisher’s hand whipping over the quietness of your life now and flooding it with brightness, combusting it, in a way, with light.

But Cole. When he enfolds you in his arm you feel his love running as quiet and strong and deep as an underground river right through you. He stills your agitation in the way a visit to Choral Evensong does, or a long swim after work. The bond between you seems so clear-headed: the marriage is not perfect, by any means, but you’re old enough now to know you cannot demand perfection from the gift of love. It’s a lot more than most people have. Like Theo.

Your dear, restless, vivid-hearted friend. Sometimes you feel a sharp envy at the sensuality of her home, all candles and wood and stone, her fluid working hours, weekly massages, Kelly bags. But you remind yourself that she isn’t happy and probably never will be and it’s a comfort, that. For no matter how much Theo achieves and acquires and out-dazzles everyone else, she never seems content. She’s taught you that people who shine more lavishly than everyone else seem to be penalised by discontent, as if they’re being punished for craving a brighter life. I’ve been knocked down so many times I can’t remember the number plates, she said once.

Many people are afraid of Theo but you’ve never been, perhaps that’s why you’re so close. All the noise of her personality is a mask and when it slips off, on the rare occasion, the vulnerability riddled through her is always a shock.

Lesson 13

it cannot be rational enjoyment to go where you would not like to have your truest and best friend go with you

Hold my hand, Cole says as he steers you through the twilight crush of Marrakech. Neither of you knows the pedestrian etiquette of this city; the cars are coming in all directions, the dusky streets teem like rush hour in New York but everything’s faster, cheekier, more reckless; exhilarating, you think. Mopeds and tourist coaches and donkeys and carts stop and start and weave and cut each other off without, it seems, any rules and the scrum of people funnels you into the great sprawling square at the city’s heart, Djemma El Fna, and you lift your head to the low ochre-coloured buildings around you and break from Cole’s grasp and swirl, gulping the sights, for you feel as if all of life’s in this place. There are snake-charmers with arms draped by writhing snake necklaces, wizened storytellers ringed by attentive men, water sellers with belts of brass cups like ropes of ammunition, veiled women offering fortunes, jewellery, hennaed hands. It’s a movie set of the glorious, the bizarre, the deeply kitsch.

Diz would love all this, you laugh.

Thank God you didn’t bring her.

You’d almost invited her on the spot when she said she was so low. You wanted her to join you just for a couple of days, as a treat: it’s her birthday in three days, June the first. But you knew you’d have to check with Cole first and he wouldn’t stand for it, of course.

She’s weird, he says of her.

You say that about all my friends.

She’s weirder than the rest.

You can’t argue with that. Theo takes the train to Paris just for a haircut. Has a tattoo of a gardenia below her pubic line. Can’t poach an egg. Never watches television. Gets her favourite flowers delivered to herself every Monday and Friday: iceberg roses, November lilies, exquisite gardenia knots. Is married to a man called Tomas, twenty-four years her senior, whom she’s rarely made love to. She has a condition.

What, you’d asked, when she first told you.

Vaginismus. It sounds vile, doesn’t it? Like something you’d pick up in Amsterdam. It means that when anyone tries to fuck me the muscles around my vagina go into spasms. It’s excruciatingly painful.

Theo, darling Theo, of all people. You wrapped her in a hug, your face crumpled, you began to cry.

Hey, it’s OK, she laughed, it’s OK. It’s actually been rather fun.

And she leant back and smiled her trademark grin, one side up, one side down. Took out her little silver case. Lit a cigarette. Said that she’d decided to investigate the whole situation, a woman’s pleasure, and it was so deliriously consuming that it eventually slipped into being a job. Said that most women never climaxed from vaginal penetration: all the fun was in the clit. You’d blushed back then, at hearing the bluntness of that word, there were some things you couldn’t help.

I can’t tell you how many clients get absolutely no pleasure whatsoever out of bog-standard penetration, she said, punctuating her words with savage little taps that made the cutlery jump. We just don’t know how to please ourselves enough. We’ll never learn. We’re still too intent on the man’s pleasure at the expense of our own.

You weren’t entirely comfortable with this talk, it was a little close to the bone. You wanted to know more of her condition, for it was a strange relief to hear that your arrestingly sensual friend also had stumbling blocks over sex: so, Theo was human, too.

Did you get some help, for the vagi, vagis—

Mm, I did. It involved a horrible thing called a dilator.

Did it work?

Well, yes, but when I finally had the sex I’d been waiting for it was such a let-down. It’s so dull compared with everything else. Why didn’t anyone tell me this?

Theo’s wonderful laugh curdled from deep in her belly but there was no joy in her eyes. Her marriage to Tomas was so odd, you couldn’t figure it out. He had other relationships with men as well as women and she had relationships with women as well as men, that was their life. And yet they stayed together. I don’t have any passion in my life, for anything. Not for her husband, whom she says she’s too clever to love. Nor for London, the city of fractious energy you both fled to as teenagers from the same boarding school, almost twenty years ago. Nor for her job, for she says she’s been doing it so long that the stories are now all the same, there aren’t many new plots in people’s lives and she’s found, lately, she’s switching off.

You suspect you attract extreme people like her because you’re so stable, as is Cole. She described the two of you once as eerily content and for some this means unforgivably beige but for others you’re an anchor, always there if needed, even on Sunday evenings, and birthdays, and Christmas Day.

Theo and you have shared your lives since the age of thirteen; swapping Arabian stud magazines for the pictures of the horses, camping overnight for tickets to Duran Duran, devouring books in tandem, from Little House on the Prairie to The Thorn Birds and Story of 0. Having your first cigarette together and the last shower you’ve ever shared with a girl. Standing to the left of each other at wedding altars, knowing you’ll be godmothers to each other’s children.

You met in the same class at a minor boarding school in Hampshire, a place where mediocrity was encouraged. You were not meant to be clever, since being clever did not make you a good wife. If you excelled at anything it was seen as a mild perversion but Theo was stunningly oblivious to that. Not many people liked her at first. She came to the class in the middle of term. She’d developed earlier than the other girls and had foreign parents, New Zealanders, who’d made their money only recently, and not nearly enough. But through force of personality she turned her fortune round and was made a prefect, as were you.

Don’t get too excited, she told you, practically everyone’s been made one. They’ve only done it because they forgot to educate us—it’s something to put on our CVs.

She was expelled for writing to the Pope, explaining to him why the rhythm method of contraception, for a lot of girls, just didn’t work. (She’d learnt this lesson from her older sister, who’d had an abortion in secret.) Her mistake was to sign the letter with the name of a blond classmate who was going to be a model when she grew up and was promised a car, by her father, if she stopped biting her nails. And was extremely accomplished at looking down on you both. The scandal made Theo a heroine-in-exile but she always remained supremely faithful to you, the lady-in-waiting who’d fallen in love with her first.

Here, in Marrakech, you just wish your friend were as happy as you for you want others to be joyous, to bring them joy, you get such a deep satisfaction from that. You’d love to have Theo here, to cheer her up; it’d be someone to see the sights with while Cole was off by himself. You’re always doing small kindnesses; your grandmother told you never to suppress a kind thought and you always try not to. You snap a shot of a snake man in the square and he rushes towards you, hustling for coins and waving his snakes and you squeal away from him, pulling Cole with you. You must tell her.

Lesson 14

be respectable girls, all of you

Dinner’s dared in the square on rough wooden benches at a smoky stall. Cole and you pick at the couscous but ignore the gnarled-looking meat on kebabs and gritty salad, and have your photo taken as proof of your courage. Cole’s tetchy and irritable and wants to get back to the too-quiet hotel but you feel like you’re at the centre of a vast meeting place of African tribes from the south and Arabs from the north and Berber villagers from the mountains and you hold your head high and drink in the smells and heat and smoke. All these wondrous people! You look across at your husband and stroke his arm, his thin, sensual wrist, and there’s a stirring of desire: you want him, really want him, in that way, in this crowded place. You do nothing but hold your lips to his skin in the clearing behind his ear and breathe in. It’s usually enough, some small gesture like this, just to touch him, to inhale him, to remind you of what you’ve got.

But here, now, something dormant within you is stretching awake, is arching its back. You think of the hotel room and the expanse of the bed. For just a fleeting moment you imagine yourself naked with your legs wide and several anonymous, assessing men and their hands running over you. You imagine being filmed, being bought.

You smile at Cole.

What are you thinking, he asks.

Nothing, you murmur.

Lesson 15

there are few wives who do not heartily desire a child

As you laze on your deckchairs a heavily pregnant woman strides to the swimming pool like a galleon in full sail, robust and proud and complete. You’ll be trying for a baby soon, once the first year of marriage is done.

Let’s just enjoy ourselves for a while, Cole has said.

But thank goodness a pregnancy is secure in the plans. Man, house, child: such happiness is obscene in one person, isn’t it? There’s such an audacity in the joy you now feel. How could anyone bear you? You glance across at Cole: he looked too young for so long, not fully formed, but now, in his late thirties, when a lot of his peers are losing hair and gaining weight, it’s all starting to work. He’d been in a state of arrested adolescence but now he’s filled out and he’s handsome, at last. He has the potential to age into magnificence and you’re only just seeing it.

Shouldn’t it be wearing off, this fullness in your heart fit to burst? When’s it meant to wilt? You throw down your Vogue and place your body on Cole’s, belly to belly, and breathe in his skin like a mother does with a child. Will that scent ever sour for you? You can’t imagine how. He pushes you off, mock grumpy, and slaps you on the bum. You shriek and settle again on your lounger. A young waiter walks by. You narrow your eyes like a cat and laze your arms over your head and tell Cole that if you’re not treated properly it’s the waiter you’ll be marrying next.

Yeah, and all he’ll have to do to get rid of you is say I divorce thee three times. I wish it were that easy for me.

You laugh; you’re filled up with joy, it’s all bubbling out. The pregnant woman steps out of the pool. People have begun asking when Cole and you are going to start a family and your husband always replies that he’ll have a child when he considers himself grown-up, and God knows when that will be. You tell them soon.

All women must want children eventually, you’re sure, that furious need is deep in their bones, you don’t quite believe any woman who says she doesn’t. The urge has begun to harangue you as your thirties march on, it’s an animal instinct grown bold. Your heart will now tighten whenever you see the imprint of a friend in her child’s face. It’s something that’s in danger of overtaking your life, the want.

Lesson 16

all nature is lovely and worthy of our reverent study

On a day trip to the Atlas Mountains you hold your head out the car window, to the sky, the scent of eucalyptus on the baked breeze. Cole reads the Herald Tribune and dozes and snaps awake.

He works extremely hard as a picture restorer, specialising in paintings from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries. He now travels the globe, preparing condition reports for paintings to be sold and working on site, for since September eleventh the insurance premiums have skyrocketed and it’s often cheaper to fly the restorer to the job. Cole’s days are long but the rewards are great—you no longer have to work. Indolence is something you’ve always wanted to try and this is your second month of doing nothing. Cole encouraged you to quit your job as a lecturer in journalism at City University; he’d bulldozed your trepidation with his enthusiasm. Redundancies were on offer and the sum cleared the mortgage for you both. None of your colleagues wanted you to go; you were a stabilising presence in a temperamental faculty, you kept your head down, worked hard. But you’d been worn thin by years of teaching, the relentless routine of work eat sleep and little else, it had become like a net dragging you down. Theo said you’d been so noble, so selfless as a teacher that it was bound to take its toll. You didn’t tell her it felt cowardly that you’d never actually left university and entered the real world; you just teased that she was a teacher also and every bit as noble as yourself.

God no, I do my job purely for me and no one else. It’s utterly selfish what I get from it.

And what, my dear, is that?

This secret thrill, she grinned, as my clients tell me all their deepest, darkest thoughts.

Your job had stopped being gratifying in any way and you delight in the strange feeling of satisfaction from doing this new wifely life well. You weren’t expecting your days to be swallowed by so many mundanities but you’re oddly enjoying, for the moment, cooking fiddly Sunday meals on week nights and painting the kitchen and sorting through clothes. The days gallop by even though you know that boredom and a loss of esteem could one day yap at your heels. But not now, not yet.

You have little left in the way of savings but Cole pays you an allowance of eight hundred pounds a month. It’s meant a subtle change: he now has a licence to expect darned socks and home-made puddings, to comment a touch too often on your rounded stomach or occasional spots. But his small cruelties are a small price to pay for the luxury of resting. He’s giving you something you’ve never had before: a chance to recuperate and to work out what you want to do with the rest of your life. You’ve been so tight and controlled for so long, always on time and everything just so. During the first month of unemployment you gulped sleep and suspect it’s years of exhaustion catching up on you, all the trying to please, the never being able to say no. Anyway, Cole’s teasing is done in a silly, childlike way and you never mind very much.

On this day trip to the Atlas Mountains he’s here under protest, he wants to go back. He hates activity and the outdoors of any sort, he pretends to be so fusty and curmudgeonly, at such a young age, but you find it adorable, he makes you laugh so much. And there’s an intriguing flip side to his crustiness, the little boy who watches Star Trek and buys Coco Pops. You love the kid in the T-shirt under the Italian suits; you’re the only one, you suspect, who knows anything of it.

On the narrow dirt road the car winds and slows and you want to jump out and whip off your shoes and feel the ochre as soft as talcum powder claiming your feet. You know deep in your bones this type of land, for you visited places not dissimilar, with your mother, when you were young. The Sahara is just over the mountains, the desert of smoking sand and tall skies.

It’s a desert the colour of wheat, says Muli, the driver and guide.

How lovely, and you clap your heavily hennaed hands. The sight of them entrances you. You must take us, Muli, you say.

Cole glances across.

Next time.

You smile and lick your husband under the ear, like a puppy, he’s so funny, it’s all a game, and you’re filled like a glass with love for him, to the brim.

Lesson 17

the duty of girls is to be neat and tidy

Cole more often than not dislikes fingers touching his bare skin, he’ll flinch at contact without warning. Your fingertips are always cold: in winter when you want to touch him you’ll warm your fingers beforehand on the hot-water bottle, he insists.

Cole’s life is very neat. He re-irons his shirts after the cleaning lady has, shines his shoes every Sunday night, leaves for work promptly at eight fifteen, jumps to the bathroom soon after sex to mop up the spillage.

There are some things you suspect Cole prefers to making love. Like his head being scratched so hard that flakes of skin gather under your nails, which you detest. And having the skin of his back stroked with a comb like a soft rake through soil, reaping goose bumps. And resting his head on the saddle of your back as you lie on your stomach in a summer park.

And going down on him. This, only this, is guaranteed to make him come. Sometimes you go down on him just to get it all over with quickly. Cole pushes your head on to him as far as he can and then a little further, and when you bob up for air he measures with his thumb and finger how far you’ve gone and duly you marvel, the good wife, and bob down again. You often gag, or have to break the rhythm to come up for air, your jaw always aches, it goes on too long. You hate the taste of sperm, you recoil from it, like a tongue on cold metal in winter.

Go home and give him one, Theo said once, after a cinema night. The poor thing, it’s been so long.

God no, please, not that.

If you give them blow jobs they love you for life.

But it’s such a chore.

I see it as a challenge.

You took Theo’s advice: Cole told you, when it was done, that he couldn’t wait for the next movie night with your mate.

Calm down, you laughed, and rolled over and went to sleep.

It wasn’t always like this. In the early days you’d make love almost every single night. Cole would sing and dance around in his underwear and be completely stupid before he dived into bed. Have you laughing so much that it hurt. You’d always be completely naked down to the removal of watches, there was a gentle courtesy to that. You’d have sex, daringly for you both, in sleeper carriages from London to Cornwall, as giggly as teenagers as you tried to be quiet for the children next door. Or in your teenage bed that your mother has kept, with Cole’s hand clamped on your mouth to keep you quiet. You cried tears of happiness and he kissed them up, his palms muffing your cheeks and you still have, pocketed in your memory, the tenderness in his touch.

But those moments, now, seem like scenes from a movie; not quite real. The woman in them is removed, someone else. This is real, now: you’ve shut down, there are other things you’d rather do. It’s such a bother removing all your clothes and finding time to do it and making sure you smell sweet and clean. It never seems to be the best time, for both of you at once, there’s always something that’s not quite right. Either you’re not in the mood or Cole isn’t and it’s become easy to make an excuse. You both, it seems, would prefer to be reading newspapers, or watching TV, or sleeping. Most of all that.

Cole doesn’t protest too much. The marriage is about something else. He’s kind, is always doing astonishingly kind things, it’s as if he’s binding you to him with kindness. There are subscriptions to favourite, frivolous magazines, unexpected cups of tea, frog-marching you to bed when you’re overtired, the gift of a new book that he’s wedged somewhere in the bookshelf and says you must find. All these little gestures force you into kindness too, kindness begets kindness, the marriage is almost a competition of kindness. So there’s scratching his head so hard that flakes of skin gather under your nails, and acquiescence in bed, and blow jobs. These small kindnesses buy Cole time alone, away from you, away from the world, within his halo of light in front of the television or in the bathroom or studio until late. You don’t mind the alone either, you need it too, to breathe again, to uncurl.

It’s a strange beast, your marriage, it’s irrational, but it works. It’s traditional, and how judgemental your mother is of that. She was divorced young and raised you by herself until you were sent to boarding school. She instilled in you that you should never rely on a man; you had to be financially independent, you mustn’t succumb. But it’s a relief, to be honest, this surrendering of the feminist wariness. It feels naughty and delicious and indulgent, like wearing a bit of fur.

Lesson 18

sound sleep is a condition essential to good health

One a.m. You’re reading the first Harry Potter. It’s Cole’s, you found it among the rest of his holiday books, weighty tomes on history and art. You’re in the armchair by the french doors to the balcony, a leg dangling over the arm.

A spider of sweat slips down your torso. You’d love to feel a storm breaking the back of the heat, to hear it rumbling in the floorboards and smell it in the lightning. You look across at Cole, sleeping on the sheet with his shoes still on. You slip them off like a mother with a toddler and roll him over to remove his shirt; he’s stirring, reaching for you, scrabbling at your skirt. Sssh, you tell him, and you hold your lips to the dip in the back of his neck. You don’t want him properly waking, don’t want anything to start. For you’ve begun menstruating and the blood’s leaking out of you, hot, and you know he’d be appalled by this. He doesn’t like blood.

Cole usually sleeps soundly, the sleep of a man content. He’s not a snorer, you could never marry him if he were. How could you secure a decent night’s sleep with a man who snores? Cole laughed when you told him this on your wedding night; it’s the only reason why I married you, you said. Cole responded that if he did snore he’d borrow one of your bras and put tennis balls in it and wear it back to front, to stop him from sleeping on his back, that’s how much he loved you.

One thing you could never tell your husband is that his coming takes too long. And that his penis seems bent, and often goes soft in you, as if it’s thinking of something else. And that the reason he got blow jobs all the time, when the relationship was young, was to butter him up. And to make him think you were someone else.

Lesson 19

good habits are best learnt in youth

You sit by the concierge desk in the vast almost empty lobby while Cole changes some cash. A man passes, he wears the sun in his face, he’s a boy really, a decade or so younger than you and he smiles right into your eyes and you feel something you haven’t for years: it’s to do with university parties with bathtubs of alcohol and the smell of hamburgers on fingers and beer in a kiss. You should have been disgusted by all that but you weren’t. You’d be wet so quick; to get their clothes off, to have their weight upon you, to be rammed against a wall with your leg curled up.

You’re singing inside as you saunter back with Cole to your room of fresh roses. Every second day new roses await you, they’re never allowed to wilt in the heat. Inside, you kiss your husband fully on the mouth, surprising yourself as much as him with the ferocity of it. You taste him, drink him, and you so rarely do that. He kisses you back in his way, as if inside your mouth is the most exquisite, expensive morsel imaginable. You don’t like him kissing you on the lips very much; often you secretly wipe away the track that’s left by his mouth.

The last time Cole and you had made love, before this holiday, was your wedding night. The vintage Bugatti you’d borrowed wouldn’t start and all Cole’s distant relatives had to be met and Theo got too drunk. Cole and you had ended up giddy and sweaty back at your hotel room, ravenous, with just a Mars Bar from the mini bar to share between you. Still, there was a new sweetness to making love, even though it was soaked in a sudden tiredness and a little clumsy, and you didn’t get far: almost an afterthought to the end of a long day. It didn’t matter that the sex on that night wasn’t the best you’d ever had, for you’d been together for so long before that.

The honeymoon had been delayed because Cole was always accepting another commission and getting tied up. He finally found a window of escape four months after you’d tied the knot. You didn’t complain, you appreciate his attachment to his job, it’s so solid, so dependable: he’ll never let you down.

He’s never given you an orgasm. He assumes he has. You’re a good actress—a lot of women are, you suspect. You know what you’re supposed to do, the sounds you make and the arching of the back and the clenched face: it’s in a thousand movies to mimic, it’s everywhere but your own life. You’ve never had an orgasm by yourself or with any man that you’ve slept with. You’ve lied to every one of them that you have, that it’s worked. You’re curious about them but not curious enough. It’s like a language you don’t speak; you know you should make an attempt at it but you can get by perfectly happily without it, it’s not going to impede your life. You’re in your mid-thirties and have never even looked down there, at yourself. Cole could tell you about it if you were curious enough, but the intimacies of your own body are for someone else, you feel, not yourself.

Lesson 20

to be delicate is considered by some ignorant people as an enviable distinction

Gin and tonics by the pool.

Cole reads aloud an extract from the historical section of the Herald Tribune. A woman in New Jersey in 1925, a mother of eight, was inspired by Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves to heat a cauldron of olive oil and pour it over her sleeping husband.

Oil, Lovely, can you believe it, oil.

But you’re hardly listening for you’re thinking of the man in the lobby and your very first fuck, with the TV show The Young Ones flicking mute in the background and how tight and dry and uncomfortable it had been. You’re thinking of the boy’s distasteful triumph afterwards, with his mates, and the TV turned up too loud. You’re thinking of Theo—but it all sounds so…squalid – as she dragged on her cigarette with uncommon ferocity. How strange you can’t recall her own account of her loss of virginity. It’s something you can’t remember talking about, in fact, with any of your girlfriends. Were a lot of the experiences as disappointing as yours, is that why they’re never discussed; do you all want to move on? You’re remembering that Theo had put copper lipstick in her hair back then to highlight the colour because she’d read it in a magazine but you’re not remembering, for the life of you, the boy’s name.

You’re thinking of Sean, the student Theo and you shared a flat with. He was still hopelessly, consumingly in love with an older woman who’d broken his heart and he never made an effort to become a part of the household; his days were spent moping, alone. One day he disappeared. The police came to your front door a week later and told you that he’d taken a train to Scotland and hitched to a remote beach where his lover had her holiday cottage and he’d swum out to sea and had never swum back. You were haunted by that for years afterwards, the wild, jagged love that Sean had, and of the outside leaking into him, the water swelling his flesh and lapping at his bones. He was brave in a way, to do that, you’d thought that for so long. Now, you just wish he’d grown up and known other women, that he’d journeyed to a point in his life where he could look back and laugh.

Lesson 21

exercise is quite as requisite for girls as it is for lions and tigers

Muli takes you to Yves St Laurent’s public garden, sheltered and cool within high walls. The noise of Marrakech falls away as you enter. This would be Theo’s kind of place. It’s spiky and seductive with cacti and palms and splashes of blue paint and bougainvillaea-pink cascading over walls. You take a photo for her. You’ll tuck it in an envelope, with some rose petals from the room.

You escape the press of the heat in the winding coolness of the market alleyways. You love the souks, the instrument shop that could have existed several hundred years ago next to a shop selling live iguanas next to one crammed with Sylvester Stallone T-shirts. Love the donkeys in the alleys and skinny cats and red Coca-Cola signs in Arabic, the attacking light, the dust heavy on your skin and clotting your hair, the mountains rimming the city, the talking dark, the crickets and dogs and frogs. There’s the call to prayers and Muli excuses himself for ten minutes. You love the pervasiveness of religion in this place, how the chant wakes you in darkness and plots your day. Cole admires the colours of the city, the vaulting blue of the sky and rich ochres and pinks but he can’t bear the dust and the cram and the heat, he’s very loud about all that, he’s not enjoying being dragged around.

Your confidence is softly leaking as a wife. You’d never tell him. That you sometimes feel as if all the men through your life, the lovers, colleagues, bosses, with their clamour and demand, have been rubbing you out.

Cole’s in another meeting. He’s resorted to watching Pokemon cartoons in French, a language he doesn’t understand, for the English stations carry just rolling news and the stories aren’t changing enough. There are also local news broadcasts with items that run for twenty minutes and seem to be made up entirely of long shots of the King on parade or men in suits on low chairs. The news anchor’s young, with the most beautiful eyes, it’s as if they have kohl round them. You wonder what he’d be like as a lover, if he’d be different. You’ve heard that Muslim women are shaved and all at once you feel a soft tugging between your legs, thinking of that; and of being robed, for your husband’s eyes only. Muli told you both that no one’s ever laid eyes on the Queen, she’s not seen in public, is hidden.

I like that, Cole had laughed.

And was playfully hit.

Later, over gin and tonics in the piano bar Cole holds his cheek to yours and whispers that he wants to lock you up and never allow you out and he wants another wife as well as you, whom you’ll have to sleep with, while he’s watching, and your hands cup his face: You are so predictable, McCain, you chuckle and kiss him gently on each cheek and it stirs something in you, memories of Edinburgh and rolling off a bed and making love with a hand clamped across your mouth.

Lesson 22

making a noise is of itself healthy, when no one is inconvenienced or annoyed by it

Sometimes you wonder if your husband really likes women. He speaks dismissively of your girlfriends and female colleagues, doesn’t want a wife who’s pushy or loud, gets annoyed if you talk to your girlfriends too boomingly on the phone and winces if you shriek. He doesn’t like excesses in women of any kind. He niggles when you don’t dry yourself thoroughly after the bath, says it’s so moist down there you must be growing a jungle. His genitals smell unoffensive, milder than your own.

Cole’s parents are very together, very solidly, defensively middle class. They don’t think you’ll look after their son well enough. His mother communicates all her vigour through her cooking and is horrified you’ve only recently learnt how to do a roast. She sends correspondence, persistently, to Mr and Mrs C. McCain despite you telling her you haven’t changed your name.

Cole thinks your family is eccentric. It used to be delightfully, exotically so, until he got to know them. Your great-great-grandfather made his fortune importing tea from India and your father’s cousin frittered away the remains of the family wealth on drinking and drugs. Your father was from the poor side of the family and was meant to work but never got around to it. He was charming and roguish, all blond hair and cheekbones in his youth, until drink sapped his looks. You adored him because you never saw him enough. He survived by periodically cashing in shares of the family business until he died, when you were nineteen, of drunkenness and poverty and a spineless life.

It broke your heart. Seeing him during your teenage years seemed to consist, almost entirely, of a series of journeys to and from school. He’d pick you up in his old black Mercedes that looked like a relic from some totalitarian regime, and drive and drive, picking the smallest, most winding country lanes to get you to London. It was only in the car that you ever seemed to talk, because his girlfriend, Karen, always made it difficult when you were in their flat; butting into your time and crying over God knows what. Your father’s affection was reserved for the road or the odd moments when Karen was out of the room, when he’d lean across and whisper I love you as if it was a secret between you. His voice, now, is what you remember most.

Your parents’ marriage lasted four months. Your mother left its volatility two weeks after you were conceived, left it to hunt for fossils. She’d studied palaeontology at university but had halted the career to be the wife. Your father refused to live anywhere but London even though your mother was an asthmatic who dreamt of a light that would sing in her lungs. Work provided that, and so as a child you lived in a succession of places that were singed by the sky until the courts intervened, at your father’s orders (the only thing he ever managed to do in his life, snapped your mother, more than once) and you were sent back to England, the land of soft days, and, when you grew up, orgasmless fucks.

People who know nothing of your family find it fascinating and charming and extreme but Cole now knows the truth, that little of that extremity has rubbed off on you; it’s only reinforced your own caution. You’ve had to be sensible, had to make a living amid all the chaos.

Cole says your mother is bruised by bitterness, that she’s menopausal and mad and he fears you’ll turn into her. He doesn’t enjoy visiting her cottage on the north Yorkshire coast, an area that’s rich in the fossils of marine reptiles and fish. It’s wilfully remote and she’s hardly ever home because she’s always off on a dig. He doesn’t enjoy the way she absently picks up his toothbrush to scrub at a piece of sandstone she’s working on (or perhaps deliberately, but you could never tell Cole that) and clutters her house with old bones and rocks. Cole finds her selfish and sloppy: she’s the type of person who washes up in lukewarm water, he said once, and you laughed at the time but didn’t forget.

You’ve tried hard to be nestled within Cole’s family, to be the good wife, but they never trust you enough. Cole doesn’t understand that a stable family’s one of the most desirable things of all when you’ve come from a fractured childhood, doesn’t understand the terrible, Grand Canyon loneliness you feel within his. But you have each other, a sure path, a certainty. Home fills his heart when Cole’s on the road, he just longs for the vivid tranquillity of your flat. It’s his sanctuary from all the anxiety of the world: paintings too traumatised to repair and canny fakes and deadlines impossible to meet. You’re careful not to butt anything too unsettling into his stressful life for you’re so lucky, you know that. Your husband’s a modern man who’s generous and thoughtful, who cooks and cleans; who’s devoted, Theo says, you’re one of the few couples who are truly happy. And she should know. She’s seen a lot of couples. When the women bring their men for coaching sessions to her studio she literally gets into the bed with them both, armed with a pair of latex gloves and a vibrator.

I’d love to have a session with you guys, she’s said, as if she wants to bottle the secrets of why your relationship works.

God no, you’d replied, laughing, appalled. You’ve never been able to shit in a public loo if another woman was in the room, let alone have sex. When you shared a shower with Theo, at the age of thirteen, it was so excruciating that you vowed you’d never get yourself into such a situation again. You could strip off at a doctor’s surgery or in a public gym, where you were utterly anonymous, but it was another matter entirely with someone you knew, and so well.

No one, though, has any idea of the churn of a secret life. Your desire to crash catastrophe into your world is like a tugging at your skirt. But only sometimes, and then it’s gone. With the offer of a bath, or a cup of tea, or the dishes done.

Lesson 23

the importance of needlework and knitting

You have a book given to you by your grandfather that’s a delicious catalogue of unseemly thoughts:

That a wife should take another man if her husband is disappointing in the sack.

That a woman’s badness is better than a man’s goodness.

That women are more valiant than men.

That Adam was more sinful than Eve.

It was written anonymously, in 1603. It’s scarcely bigger than the palm of your hand. The paper is made of rag, not wood pulp, and the pages crackle with brittleness as they’re turned. You love that sound, it’s like the first lickings of a flame taking hold. The book is tided A Treatise proveinge by sundrie reasons a Woemans worth and its words were contained once by two little locks that at some point have been snapped off. It smells of confinement and secret things.

You imagine a chaste and good wife writing secretly, gleefully, late at night and in the long hours of the afternoon. A beautiful, decorative border of red and black ink hems each page. It’s a fascinating, disobedient labour of love. You wear cotton gloves to open it. You’ll never sell it.

It’s been in the family for generations. A rumour persists that the author’s skeleton was found in some cupboard under a staircase, that she’d been locked into it after her husband discovered her book. Your father told you stories of her scrabbling at a door and crying out and of her despairing nail marks gouged into the wood, but you suspect the reality is much more prosaic: that your great-grandfather acquired the book at auction, as a curiosity, and it may even have been written by a man, as an enigmatic joke.

Cole calls it The Heirloom, or alternatively, The Scary Book. He teases that he’ll toss it in the bin if you’re naughty, or lock you in the cupboard and never let you out. You love all this banter between you; he makes you laugh so much. You never see any irony in it. He calls the bits and pieces of your father’s furniture dotted about the flat The Ruins. And you, affectionately, The Old Boot. It never fails to get a rise out of you; Cole loves seeing that.

Lesson 24

the chief causes of the weak health of women are silence, stillness and stays; therefore learn to sing and dance, and never wear tight stays

The hanging sky. The air smelling of the sea. You don’t even need an umbrella as you lie on a sunlounger next to the pool. The breeze blowing in from the desert plays havoc with your Herald Tribune and you give up and watch the people around you, you’re more interested in the women’s bodies than the men’s, all women are, Theo has said and she’s right. You remember exactly her body when she was sixteen, the short waist and long legs and moles on her chest, and yet you can hardly remember the men you’ve slept with, any of them. The names or the bodies, only the faces, just, and the shape, vaguely, of penises, whether they were long, or too thick—God, you dreaded that, the grate of it.

The attendant presents you with a gin and tonic on a silver tray and you look around, startled. The man from the lobby smiles his beautiful boy smile from a distant sunlounger and you lower your head and do nothing more, don’t drink, don’t look, you’re confused and you know that Theo’d be cross at this, a missed opportunity.

Theo. Such a pirate of a woman, with a different energy to her. She’s thirsty and needs to drink, it’s in the way she walks and listens and leans and talks. She’s a woman who overlives, she has so much life in her, it shines under her skin. Does that mean you underlive? Your heart dips with panic as if a cloud has skimmed across it.

You look across to the man on the sunlounger now reading his Tribune and tilt back your head and close your eyes. You’re living your days at the moment how a sheep grazes, meandering, not engaged with anything much. And yet, and yet, you’d never wish for Theo’s kind of existence. She’s so free, so answerable to no one that she’s lost.

The sky deepens, bathers pack up their suntan lotion and one by one leave, the baked breeze stiffens and umbrellas are snapped down for fear they’ll cartwheel away. You slip into the pool. The water’s ruffled like corrugated iron. You’re the only one in it and you slide through the coolness and strike out for the first time in years, feel unused muscles creaking into working order and think of your mother and her strong, confident hands and the ribbons of water when you were seven. You’ve no family consistently around you now, your friends have become your closest relations: Cole, of course, and Theo, your sister of sorts, although at times there’s the intensity of lovers between you.

It’s her birthday today, you must call.

You smile as you pull your body through the water and at the end of the pool look up to great plumes of ochre dust blown in from the desert; it’s as if the dusk is being hurried centre stage. The attendants move with crisp deliberation now, clearing towels and cushions from chairs. Most people have gone. Palm trees toss their branches like the manes of recalcitrant ponies, twigs and leaves blow into the pool and you climb out of the water at the first fat splats. You smell the earth opening up as if it’s breathing, feel the thundery day sparking you alive and you lift your chin to it and inhale deep and gather up, reluctantly, your sun gear. You pass the man from the lobby, still reading valiantly. He looks up at you.

You don’t look at him. You walk inside, to your husband, a fluttery anticipation within you.

Lesson 25

lending is, as a rule, the greatest unkindness we can be guilty of, unless we can give

The elderly man who looks after the roses lets you into the room, bowing and smiling his gentle smile. He’s presented you, gallantly, with a single stem and you’ve accepted it graciously; it’s a game played with some seriousness. The petals are deep red, almost black, and you plunge your nose into their oddness: it’s a wild plump garden scent from your childhood, not the tight manufactured whiff from the buds you buy at the supermarket. You enter the room soundlessly, you’ll surprise Cole, he’ll throw you on the bed and make you laugh and kiss you in his special way and you’ll melt, succumb, even though you’re still menstruating. Sexy sex, hmm, grubby, spontaneous, impolite kind of sex, you haven’t done that for years and all of a sudden it seems necessary. The room’s dim from the darkening sky and you can taste the thunder outside and lift your chin to it. Cole’s on the phone. You’re cross, he shouldn’t be doing any work during this trip, he promised.

I can’t wait to get out of here, it’s driving me crazy, the heat, and he says this in his special voice, your voice, but there’s a playfulness, a lightness, it’s a tone you haven’t heard for so long. All she wants to do is run off to the markets and have rides in those fucking carts, I can’t stand it, I get so bored, I just want to relax. He pauses. Diz, Diz, no, you can’t. He chuckles. Yeah, me too. I’ll see you soon, thank God.

Lesson 26

air ventilation oxygen

You’re very still. You walk past Cole without looking at him. You walk through the french doors, to the veranda, and sit, very carefully, on the wicker chair.

Your thudding heart, your thudding heart.

You sit for a very long time, soundlessly, into the rich silence after the storm. At the end of it the sun feebles out and nothing has cooled down, nothing, it is as hot as it ever was.

II

My soul waiteth on thou more than they that watch for the morning,

I say more than they that watch for the morning.

Psalm 130

Lesson 27

there ought to be no cesspool attached to the dwelling

The Monday after the return from Marrakech. A cafe in Soho, alone. An old London chophouse selling beans on toast and Tetley’s tea in stainless-steel pots, the menu padded and plastic covered. Reading the paper but not.

Like you are skinned.

I can’t explain it, he has said, reddening, every time. When you’ve asked him again and again. You’re overreacting, he has said. She’s a friend, our friend, we’d just have a drink now and then. And then he stops.

As if what he wants to say can never be said, as if it will never be prised out. But you will not let up.

Just a friend. Uh huh.

You sit back at his words, you fold your arms. At his explanations that are scattered bits of bone, that are never enough.

You haunt the cafe in Soho. Want to crawl away from the world, curl up; want to shrink from the summery lightness in the air, the flirty pink on the girls in the streets.

Within this God-tossed time he’s never stopped telling you he loves you but you’ve no desire to listen any more. For the relationship has been doused in a cold shower and you are chilled to the bone with the shock.

Just a friend. Uh huh.

You will not let up.

Now it’s a week since you’ve known; now two. Everything is changed and nothing is changed, you’re reading the paper but not. You prefer this cafe in Soho over the American coffee chains that seem of late to be everywhere, despite Cole’s certain horror at the choice. Before, you’d let his likes and dislikes shape the movement of your day, even when he wasn’t with you. But you’re disobedient often now, in little ways. For realisation of the affair has snapped upon you as fast as a rabbit trap, and you are exiled from your marriage and home and life.

The elderly man behind the till senses something of all this; he smiles warmly in greeting, now, and hands you your cup of tea without waiting to be asked.

We’d. just. have, a drink, now. and. then. All right?

I don’t believe you. I’m sorry, I can’t.

It’s the truth, I am so sick of telling you that.

I don’t believe you. I can’t.

Your hands hover, frozen, by your head. Your fingers are clawed, your knuckles are bone-white. You have turned into someone else. You do not recognise the voice.

Day after day you shelter in this cafe in London’s red light district. It’s a small indication of something that’s burst within you. You’re not sure why you’ve picked this place, you never go to cafes or restaurants by yourself, it’s too exposing. All you know is that the two people closest to you have gone from your heart, it’s flinched shut. And it’s only as you spread your newspaper and pour the milk into your tea that you feel the tin foil ball, tight within you, unfurling. No one would guess just by looking at you, the quiet, suburban housewife, that recently in a hotel room in Marrakech your entire future had been crushed by a single blow from a rifle butt.

And all that’s left is rawness, too deep for tears.

She’s a friend, just a friend, it’s all he can ever say and in this Soho cafe, the third week of your purgatory, your teacup is slammed down. So hard, the saucer cracks.

Lesson 28

disease is the punishment of outraged nature

A month after your return from Marrakech. A stagnation sludges up. You’re not bored or angry but stopped; nothing engages, nothing interests, you’re at a loss over what to do next, with the next hour and with all the days of your life. Sleep is the short-term solution. London’s good for that. Its light is milky, filtered, unlike the light from your childhood that stole through the shutters in bold blocks in the morning, nudging you awake and pushing you out. The sky in London is like the water-bowed ceiling of an old house and you doze whole mornings away now and on waking there’s a panicky sickness in your gut. Then you walk the streets, seeing but not seeing, husked.

Selfridges lures you inside, its sleek promise. You haven’t been here for so long, you used to trawl it with Theo, she’d always have you trying on things you didn’t want. You browse the accessories counters. Buy six rings. Space them out on your fingers, blurring your marital status; your engagement and weddings rings are swamped and you smile as you stretch out your hand.

But then it’s back, his voice. It always comes back. The tone of it as he spoke to her on the phone. It’s not so much the thought of them physically together, it’s the intimacy in his voice. It wasn’t until you overheard it in the hotel room that you realised how long it’d been since you had heard it. And you missed it, violently so.

Your voice.

Your teeth are clenched as you walk to the tube and with effort you soften your jaw and rub at your brow, at a new wrinkle between your eyes. At the end of each night you knead it, your fingertips dipped in the chilly whiteness of Vitamin E cream. Beyond you, the flat ticks. The rooms are dark except for the bedroom. Cole’s away a lot now, working late; that’s his excuse. There’s no light in the hallway to welcome him home. At the end of each night, seated at the dressing table, your fingertips prop your forehead like scaffolding. For it’s the long, long nights that defeat you.

When you are blown out like a candle.

Lesson 29

friends are too scarce to be got rid of on any terms if they be real friends

The buzzer, too loud, blares into your morning. You groan: you’re still in bed. The intercom’s broken, you’ll have to go down three flights of stairs and open the front door to find out who it is; in your old bathrobe, without your face.

Theo. Red lips and red shirt, the colour of blood. On her way to work.

You close the door. This is ridiculous, she says, come on, we need to talk. You lean your hands on the door with your arms outstretched. Can’t we just talk, she pleads. Her knocks become thumps, they vibrate through your palms. You straighten, walk up the stairs, do not look back; your fingers, trembling, at your mouth.

Theo’s betrayal is magnificent, astounding, incomprehensible. It’s her actions you can’t understand, not Cole’s. You always assumed she was the one person you’d have your whole life, not, perhaps, your mother or your husband. She’s a woman, she knows the rules. Men do not. You’re not interested in an excuse, nothing can put it right, for anything she says will be overwhelmed by the violence of the loyalty ruptured and your howling, pummelled heart.

You can’t bear to think of them together. You have no idea how Theo is with a man. How she operates, if she turns into someone else; if she changes her manner and voice. It’s a side of your girlfriends you’ve never intruded upon. All you know is that your husband is trapped in her hungry gravitational pull: his voice told you that.

As you were once. Theo was sloppy with your relationship—never turned up to dinner parties with a bottle of wine, never sent thank you cards, cancelled nights out at the last minute, was often late – but she was always forgiven for she made your hours luminous with the gift of her presence; as soon as you saw her all the irritation would be lost.

Now, she tries to contact you again and again but the phone’s hung up no matter how quickly she rams in talk, her e-mails are deleted unopened, her letters ripped. You’re good at cutting people off, it’s always been a skill, a small one but effective; making things neat, moving on. Theo will hate being ignored. It’s what she fears most. You feel a strange sense of power, the extreme passivity makes you strong; it’s how you can protest, it gives you a voice. Like, sometimes, with sex.

Lesson 30

old medicines should not be kept, as they are seldom wanted again and soon spoil

Cole needs you for a party. It’s hosted by a gallery owner with a painting that needs cleaning, a Venetian landscape by a pupil of Canaletto. Cole’s hungry for it; he suspects there’s something from the master hidden underneath. You don’t want to go. Don’t want to give him anything yet.

Please, Cole says.

I hate that kind of thing. You know that.

Simon likes you. I need this job.

You know the wife Cole wants for this. He’s told you before you’re good arm candy: everyone likes you, thinks you’re sweet, lovely, wants to chat with you, but it means the supreme achievement is that everyone is admiring of Cole, for he’s showing off a possession, like a car or a gold watch or a suit, and you’re flavouring people’s impressions that he’s a success. You’d loved it when he told you this: to be so prized. You’ve always brought out the best in each other in social situations. At parties your sentences lap over each other as you tell your old anecdotes, at dinners with friends your meals are absently shared, during your own dinner parties it’s a smooth double act of cooking and serving and clearing up. You’re both good at playing the married couple, you prop each other up.

Please, Cole says now.

All right. All right.

Your hand rests at your throat. You always give in, have done it your whole life; where does it come from, this stubborn need to be liked?

A mews house, not far from your flat. Simon is tall in the centre of the crowded room. He judges his success by his proximity to famous people, he name-drops a lot, he can’t be by himself. He likes you because you read show business gossip and respond, wide-eyed, to his talk. He’s in a relationship, fractiously, with a pop star from Dublin who had a good haircut and a summer Number One whose title you can never recall. She’s not at the party. There are no famous people at the party. Simon will be keenly disappointed. You look at all the guests darting eyes over shoulders, mid-conversation, checking out everyone else, it is as if the sole reason everyone is here is to see someone famous.

You want out.

You’re alone in a corner on a black leather couch that creaks like a saddle. There’s a lava lamp beside you. It’s no longer working. You’ve never been voracious about partying. You’re too good at blushing, and awkward silences, and saying something jarring and wrong. You’re not very accomplished with big groups, have always been more comfortable with one on one, the small magic you can work is always dissipated in a crowd. You look at the guests. Hate the thought of being single again, of meeting every man with intent. You redden in front of anyone you’re attracted to and have never grown out of it, your body often lets you down. You imagine Theo here with an admiration that hurts: see her sparkling in the centre of the room and poking her head into circles of talk and floating from group to group.

You’re wearing a black satin dress that has antique kimono panels through its bodice and you usually love this dress but tonight it’s wrong, you’re overdressed. You have to get back to your flat. You can’t walk home by yourself: there are two crack houses on your street and just last week a woman was stabbed. You need Cole. He’s in good form, he’s working the room; you wish he’d hurry up. You hate the feeling of entrapment you can get at parties, hate being reliant upon someone else for your means of escape. You’re stuck, in a black satin dress that tonight is too much.

Cole’s with Simon. Neither likes the other much but they keep in touch for they never know when the contact may be useful. They’re not talking about the Canaletto, anything but that: it’s not Cole’s way to be so blunt. There’s a lull in the talk and you stand and tell them, politely, you’re going home. You walk to the door. A hand is splayed across your lower back. There’s steel in it. It propels you to a balcony knotted with people and you shy away but the hand is still firm round your back.

I have to go home, you say, very low, very old.

I just need an address. Five minutes. OK?

You time it, then pull him out.

Cole and you have both won tonight but Cole has won more. He always wins the most.

Lesson 31

children should never sleep with their heads under the bedclothes

What you’re thinking as the two of you walk home, in silence, a metre apart: My husband’s name is Cole and that is the most remarkable thing about him, and is it enough? To keep you with him. For doubt has worked through you like poison now, doing its dirty work.

He will never tell you what happened. Perhaps the only chance you had was the afternoon of the hotel room, during the storm, still brittle with the shock of it. And what did you do? You chose to sit, with your thudding heart. Nothing else. For that’s always been your way, the retreat, the silence, and it’s only later, much later, that you find the words you should have said. But they’re never uttered in time, you’re too careful of hurting even when hurt, and too cowardly, yes that. You wonder what would happen if you ever let loose with the anger that’s silting up your heart. You look across at your husband and know you’ll never crack his closed face now, the moment’s lost, you’ve asked him what happened once too often and he’s thoroughly sick of your distrust: he’s shut up shop, the shutters are rolled down, the lights have been put out. You don’t recognise your husband any more, he’s become someone else. A stranger to you, who undresses Theo, bends to kiss her, holds her hips, brushes her closed eyelids with his lips, laughs with her in bed: you shut your eyes for a moment, trying to slam out the thoughts.

Cole opens the front door and strides inside without checking that you’re behind him. He goes straight to the bathroom. You stand on the doorstep, staring at the ghost town of a relationship ahead of you and not knowing if you want to step into it. So, it has come to this. In another life you’d be ringing Theo and getting her out of bed, asking if you could crash on her sofa and have a good cry. You imagine her saying of course, Lovebug, of course; you imagine her jumping in her car and collecting you because she doesn’t trust you could drive yourself, from the wobble in your voice.

You have nowhere to go.

You don’t know what to do.

You have no job, at Cole’s insistence, and you feel a hot little rush of anger at that; how dare he cripple you, how dare he diminish you on purpose.

You step across the threshold. Walk to the bedroom. Sit down at the dressing table, your head bowed, your temples propped.

Lesson 32

a selfish girl’s face often looks sour

Mid-July. A burst of audacious heat. Summer has finally begun and you can feel the exuberance on the streets: people are jumping into the fountain at Trafalgar Square and skipping work to lounge on deckchairs in Hyde Park.

Your mood, wine-dark.

You don’t have, any more, a sanctuary in kindness and good deeds and surrender; you’re changing, you can feel the souring. A thrill plumes through you when couples split, a feeling that order’s restored, that it’s the way we’re all meant to be, alone. You feel a little electric charge when friends lose their jobs or their new magazine’s panned, when a baby’s miscarried or the heavens hurl rain on a wedding day. What have you become? Unhinged, no longer a doormat, just like everyone else?

But something is beginning to unfold within you. An idea: to live less tentatively, more selfishly. You’re intrigued by people who seem foolish and passionate and ridiculous, but alive with all the mess that that entails. You’ve always been too cautious. Too gentle for newsroom journalism, Cole said once, not scary or neurotic enough, thank God.

Trapped by blandness. And fear. And a knowing that it’s easier to instruct than to act.

You wonder about those people who just disappear. Theo had a friend who was stuck in a life she didn’t want and one day she said I’ve just got to pop into Tesco and she left her husband in the car park, and never came out. He waited for three hours before raising the alarm.

You wonder about mining a more dangerous seam of yourself. You’d like to try harder to be beautiful, or at least interesting; beauty is power, your mother’s taught you that. She’d say for God’s sake get rid of those glasses, when you were a teenager, try and make yourself presentable, as if you couldn’t possibly be hers.

You glimpse your first grey hair and twang it out, and then you pluck at the tiny almost invisible hairs on your chin and your belly and feel a thrill as they slide out, feel as if your life, your real life, is perhaps beginning. You have to make it begin, you can’t just give up. Before, life was something that always seemed to happen to other people. Like Theo.

Lesson 33

the great necessity of life is continued ceaseless change

A resolution, in mid-August. You have to move beyond this mewly time, all whingy and wrong, you have to haul yourself out. A resolution that some of the momentous issues in a relationship can in the end only be ignored if you want the relationship to survive, they can’t be worked through and tossed out. Which is why, perhaps, some people in long-term partnerships have learnt to to live with what they don’t like. To reclaim the calm. You’ve seen it in marriages that’ve weathered infidelity, have seen them contract into a tightness in old age. Do you want the relationship to survive?

It’s easier to stay than to go.

You can’t bear the thought of parties again and singles columns and intimate dinners that don’t work, of always trying to find a way to fill up a Friday night. And you were meant to be trying for a baby soon. Cole wants to be a father some day. When you found him it was like a candle to a cave’s dark and to throw it all away after you’ve got to this point, you just can’t. You’ve had the most satisfying relationship of your life with him: you’re sure the glow of companionship can come back.

Cole wants the marriage to last. Everything is denied. He doesn’t want to bail out.

You don’t want Theo to win. Sometimes you fear this consideration drowns out everything else. You can beat her with this; you can’t recall beating her at anything.

So, a resolution.

You will live with the silences between Cole and you now. For you’ve stopped the talk, both of you, you’re away in your separate rooms: he in his study, you in the bedroom, too much. At least there’s no sex and you’re relieved at that, for the memory of it has now distilled to two things: when he didn’t come it was frustrating and when he did it was messy, often over your stomach and face, like a dog at a post claiming ownership.

So many ways to live like a prisoner.

But a resolution, to find a way back into a happy life. Although God knows when the fury will soften from you.

You concentrate for the moment on making the flat very beautiful, very spare and pale, like the inside of a white balloon. To your taste, for compromise has been lost. You’ve never dared impose your will so much. The builders come to know a woman who’s never been allowed out before, especially with Cole, a woman stroppy, shorttempered, blunt.

And the flat, the beautiful flat, fit for a spread in Elle, is as silent as a skull when you enter it.

An emptiness rules at its core, a rottenness, a silence when one of you retires to bed without saying goodnight, when you eat together without conversation, when the phone’s passed wordlessly to the other. An emptiness when every night you lie in the double bed, restlessly awake, astounded at how closely hate can nudge against love, can wind around it sinuously like a cat. An emptiness when you realise that the loneliest you’ve ever been is within a marriage, as a wife.

Lesson 34

provide yourself with a good stock of well-made underlinen

The café in Soho. The Friday before the August Bank Holiday. Hot, festively so. A man is at the table beside you, reading a newspaper, The Times. You notice the nape of his neck: how odd to be attracted to someone just by a glance at their neck. The hair’s black, like the night-time deep in the country.

You’re outside on the pavement. A water main has burst nearby and water’s spreading lazily across the street. No one seems bothered, yet. Two men and a woman shout and laugh into the water and kick it about, they’re in their twenties, they shouldn’t be doing this. They’re oblivious to their audience and soon drenched.

You smile. Your Evening Standard is folded into your bag, you’ll finish it on the tube – God, rush hour, you’ve left it too late, you’ll be standing all the way. You’ve left it too late because you don’t want to be in the flat by yourself, in the silence like a skull. You hate the emptiness when Cole’s there and yet when he isn’t, too, when he’s deliberately out; it’s like nothing, now, is quite right in your life. You stand, ready to step into the stream of commuters with their faces anxious for the cloistering of home, and a car careers round the corner and carves through the water, veering away from the trio, and a fan of water arcs up: you’re hit. You’re stricken, can’t move, your mind blanks as if someone has told you a joke and you’re meant to get it quick.

You look across to the man next to you. He, too, is wet. You blurt a laugh; here at last is the joke. So does he.

You need some help, you say.

So do you.

You look down. Your white cotton dress is triumphantly wet in a huge patch at the front, it clings like a piece of recalcitrant silk slicked about a tree. You throw back your head and grimace: oh God. And then a man’s jacket is wrapped round your shoulders, a man’s leading you back to the table, he’s holding you in a way that only a husband should hold you: with ownership.

It is, of course, your man with the beautiful nape.

Lesson 35

hooks and eyes

Everything is changed.

Gabriel Bonilla, that is his name. You repeat it; the sound is all mealy in your mouth. You smile in apology at that. You must wait until your dress has dried to decency; it may take some time and this Gabriel Bonilla asks if you need to get home straight away – no, it’s all right, there’s nothing to go home to – and you laugh, too loud, and as it comes out it’s as if something within you has cracked.

Well, hello.

So there you are, an hour or two in that greasy spoon of a café and you’re both talking about everything and nothing, voices tumbling over the top of each other, learning lives.

Shaking free.

You’d never talk with this freedom, this lightness, if you were unattached. Being married gives you a bloom of certainty, a confidence. But it doesn’t stop the blushing. Gabriel Bonilla blushes too, just like you, fully, completely, ridiculously and you dare to think it means something. You’re hesitant to ask about a partner and a family, you want to know, must know, but fear the effort of asking will reveal too much, that you’ll redden once again. Like after the water splash when you realised he’d seen your body so vulnerably, too many things, the thighs too fat and the nipples through your bra, God, all of it, and your hand flies to your mouth at the recollection but he drops his eyes as if he doesn’t want to intrude, as if he’s opened a door by mistake to your thoughts.

There’s something fascinating about this man sitting before you in his summer-weight suit. You can’t quite put your finger on it but it’s something decent, old-fashioned, polite. Wrong for this world, for this cram of sex shops and neon lights where a girl languid by a doorway has a junky’s spots. This Gabriel Bonilla shouldn’t be here. He’s from another time, another place; the type of person who wouldn’t expect a woman to be driving a car if there was a man in it. There’s his Spanish name and yet fluent English – my mother is English, my father Spanish – and again there’s your laugh, bursting out; ah ha, so that explains it.

What do you do, you ask.

Guess.

You lean forward, cup your chin in your palm: a teacher, doctor, spy?

I’m an actor, he says.

You sit back. Retract, just a touch. You don’t know any actors, you’re not sure you want to.

I don’t recognise you. Should I?

No, no, he chuckles. No one does, any more. I was famous once, for about a week, in my late teens. I did a dreadful soap – and he holds up his hand at your question, he’s not going to divulge – and then two Hollywood films that bombed, and I haven’t done much ever since. I now live in terror of appearing on one of those ‘Where Are They Now?’ shows.

You laugh. You’ve always been distrustful of actors, have suspected that they’ve never really muddied their paws in the mess of life, they’ve lived it second-hand. This is unfair but you’re suddenly brisk. How on earth do you live, you ask.

Voice-overs. Ads. Foreign video rights. The occasional guest role. And I was sensible when I was young. I bought a flat.

What happens in between? How do you fill up your days?

Let me see, I sleep until one p.m. Have a Scotch for breakfast. Do a line of coke. You both laugh. No, no, I go to the gym and do classes as the Actors Centre, go to casting, that type of thing. Read a lot, travel a lot, row, go to the movies, drink too much tea.

You can’t grasp a life like this, none of your peers lives as loosely any more. This Gabriel Bonilla answers your questions as if he’s answered them a thousand times before and he couldn’t care less. The lack of concern over welfare and career path and what he’s doing with his life is intriguing, silly, odd. He strikes you as a man who’s not hungry for anything, he has a flat and enough money to get by; there’s no need to grasp or to rush. It’s not unattractive, this lightness. Then he says he’s working on a script about something else he’s addicted to and you lean forward: what, come on, tell me?

Bullfighting.

The gulp of a laugh. You stuff the little girl down, sit on the lid of her box.

Bullfighting?

He’s laughing too, his father was a matador but he was never much of a success because he wasn’t suicidal enough, he liked his life too much. His father only ever fought in provincial rings but he’s got an idea for a film, he’s told his family he’s finally embarking on a proper life and he’s burying himself in London’s wonderful libraries, the world’s best, and he’s up to his ears in research. He’s writing in them, too, because he’d go mad if he didn’t get out. You examine his hands, long and lean, like a priest’s, you take them in yours and he tells you the strength in a matador’s wrist is what they rely on to make their mark and your hands slip under his and try to encircle them like two rowlocks for oars and you feel their weight, clamp them, soft.

Are your father’s anything like these, you ask.

Absolutely. The spitting image. I also have his cough. And his laugh.

But they’re so thin, you tease, they couldn’t kill a bull!

It’s not about aggression or force. Oh dios mio, you have so much to learn, and his head is bowing down to his palms still in yours.

How did it get to this, so suddenly, so quickly? You sit back. Look at him. The lower lip puffy, pillowed, ripe for splitting. The long, black lashes like a child’s. The tallness in the seat, the slight self-consciousness to it, as if he was mocked, perhaps, at school. The body kept in shape. There’s a beauty to him, to his shyness, his decency, you’ve never been with a man who has a beauty to his body, it’s never mattered, you’ve never cared about that enough. You imagine this Gabriel Bonilla naked, your palm on his chest, reading the span of it and the beating heart, and you cross your legs and squeeze your thighs and smile like a ten-year-old who’s just been caught with the last of her grandmother’s chocolates.

I’ll take you to a bullfight some day, he says. You’ll love it, I promise.

You feel the heat in your cheeks, you try to still it down, you see the heat in his too. You recognise his shyness for you’ve always been shy yourself. You rarely see shyness in a man, it’s always disguised as arrogance, abruptness, aloofness. You’re too alike, this Gabriel and you. You recognise it in the way he doesn’t sit quite comfortably in the world, can’t quite keep up. A jobbing actor, still, and he’s OK with that. He smiles, right into your eyes, you’re distracted and all your questions are suddenly wiped out. He turns the conversation back upon yourself, interviews you as if he’s trying to extract the marrow of your life: your marriage, flat, family, job, colleagues, boss. You answer openly, easily, talk slips out smooth, it’s all ripe with a dangerous kind of readiness, a lightness is singing within you.

But you tell yourself you will never spoil it all by sleeping with him, will never have the connection stained by that. You don’t want sudden awkwardness, don’t want sour sleeper’s breath in the morning or unflushed toilets and smoker’s breath or farts. It took you a year to fart when Cole was in an adjoining room, two to fart in the same room. You sometimes bite the inside of your mouth so furiously that blood’s drawn and the rabbity working of your lips is a private, peculiar thing that no one but Cole ever sees. You cut your toenails in front of him, wear underwear that’s falling apart, defecate, piss. You open yourself to your husband in a way you don’t for anyone else but perhaps he knows too much: all the magic’s been lost.

Cole.

You used to talk like this with him once, when you were lovers just starting out. You don’t want Gabriel Bonilla ever to be disappointed in you, to drift before anything’s begun. So the situation will be preserved just exactly as it is, like a secret document that’s tucked deep into a pocket of your wallet, always hidden, always close, that you can take out and dream about at will, a safe’s combination, a treasure map, a prisoner’s plan of escape.

Gabriel takes out a fountain pen that opens with a click as agreeable as a lipstick. He scribbles down a number on the back of the bill. A man hasn’t given you his number for so long. What does it mean, what comes next, is he playing with you, is it a game? And when your fingers brush you draw back, too quick.

He knows you’re married. He says he’d like to meet Cole. Which throws you.

Lesson 36

happiness and virtue alike lie in action

On the tube hurtling home your fingers worry at the slip of paper like an archaeologist with a snippet at a dig. Connections like this happen so rarely, once or twice in a lifetime perhaps. You would have seized it once, when you were young; you would have dreamt it was the kernel for a big, consuming love, perhaps. But now? A tall, shy, out-of-work actor who’s about your age and yet seems somehow unformed, as if he hasn’t quite stepped into life. A drifter and a dreamer, hanging by the phone, hostage to his agent, always living by the will of someone else.

Everything Cole is not.

With his days to himself.

You smile. You hold the paper to your lips as if you’re anointing it. You’ll call tomorrow, just hello, as a friend, just that. You feel like you’ve dived into the shallow end of a cold pool in one foolhardy zoom but it’s all right, you haven’t cracked your spine; you can smile as you power through the resistance, your body peels away from the danger, you’ve survived the risk.

Everything is changed and you feel shawled by that, anticipation wraps itself around you, a thrill at the secret, secret thought of him.

Lesson 37

upon girls and women depend almost entirely the domestic happiness of men

Where were you all night?

The movies.

What did you see?

Some Iranian thing, you’d hate it.

Hmm.

Cole’s eating a bowl of Heinz tomato soup at the kitchen bench, a weekend jumper over his business shirt. The fridge is now a tomb for items with strange smells and growths: mouldering cheese, blue-speckled bread, jars of tomato paste hosting a soft pale fur. Neither of you has cared enough lately, the oven’s used to store pots and pans, it’s been a long time since a Sunday roast. There was such a tenderness to your little home, once: Theo used to drop in often, unexpected, as if she was cleaving herself to its warmth.

Now, Cole and you have stopped trying. You dreaded that once, that as a couple you’d stop the offers of a bath run or a cup of tea or the dishes done. Actually, it’s survivable. The opposite of love isn’t hate, it’s indifference. Indifference emotionally, indifference physically. You haven’t made love since the hotel room of fresh roses every two days, but tonight you kiss him on the crown of his head and let your lips linger and it wakens something in your groin.

I’m going to bed, you say.

Hmm, again; deep in The Simpsons and the soup.

He doesn’t seem to notice your gesture, or doesn’t want to buy into it right now: The Simpsons has ten minutes to

You smile. You don’t care. For you’ve walked back into the sun, it’s warm on your back. You have a new friend in your life, to play with, to be young again with, to wake you up.

Lesson 38

a cold bath will enable a person to sleep who otherwise cannot

Cole stays up late, it’s not unusual, he’s often gone to bed at a different time from yourself. He’s at his laptop most likely, trawling for porn. He was embarrassed when you first caught him, several years ago: he snapped down the screen. Now all he does is turn the computer away. The stutter of a courtesy, and it’s not enough.

Cole told you once, early on, that he stayed up late because he liked the bed warm, you’re my hot-water bottle, he’d said and you’d giggled and licked him behind the ear. You used to think your husband wasn’t near as churning and smudged as yourself but even: clean, open, uncomplicated. Now you know there’s a secret life you know nothing of and never will, and no one knows anyone’s secret life.

You see him more clearly now. A man who’s glided through his adulthood with the serenity and distance of someone who doesn’t want any questions too close. He hides behind a mask of absolute calm, it gives the impression that he’s always reserving his energy for someone else. He seems comfortable with his lot, maybe he’s happy, maybe not. No one ever really asks him. He’s happy to maintain a slight gap between himself and the world and not give himself away too much.

You, now, want to be pushed up close. You no longer want the marriage retreat, the little bubble of togetherness that was so cosy once.

You’d visit Cole’s studio in the early days and sit on a high stool among the easels and palettes and harsh, blue-white lamps, the bottles of white spirits and surgical gloves. The room smelt of oil paints and varnish and turps, and had the clutter of a cobbler’s shop. You loved the man hidden underneath who emerged so spectacularly in this private space. His apron over his business shirt, sleeves carefully rolled, was always spattered with plaster and paint.

He was working at the time on an early nineteenth-century portrait of Madame Recamier, a renowned French beauty of her day. The canvas was flat on a heated table, to soften the surface, and he talked you through it as he bent over it. She was brought up in a convent and married off at sixteen to a wealthy banker. The union was never consummated; there was a rumour that her husband was really her father. Cole told you, as he worried her pale cheek with a cotton-tipped spatula, that to compensate for the desert of the marriage she used her looks to snare dozens of men, but remained a virgin her entire life.

She was cursed by every single bastard who fell in love with her, he said, standing and assessing the bright square of his work. She had this incredible calm about her. They all fell for it.

I can see it, you said. In her smile.

You watched your husband bend over the crazed surface of the canvas with the care of a stonemason at the block, clearing away the soot and grime until Madame Recamier’s face and then body glowed pale before you both. You were transfixed by his fingers that fussed with the attentiveness of love, bringing to life the lips, just the lips, in one golden afternoon, the pale swell of her breast in another.

Cleaning is always the riskiest part of the process, he told you. It’s all so unknown. What you find underneath might be magnificent, or something you just want to throw out. You never know.

You could watch him and listen to him for ever in those days: you loved the seductiveness of a man deep in work. You knew, then, it was a reciprocated love and it was a canopy of joy over your life.

You see your husband now. A man who hides in art, and porn, who’s nourished by an interior world you know nothing of. His work is a world you can never really be a part of, he burrows away into it, just as he does with his moated, secret life.

Why did you marry him?

Because he said yes. And you’d reached the stage where you never expected any man to want you that much. And he was such a good friend, right from the beginning, he was a mate; never one of those lovers where you wondered what you had in common apart from sex. And there’s the deep urge within you as your thirties gallop on, the furious want.

Give me children or else I dye, wrote the anonymous Elizabethan author of your old book.

Oh yes.

Cole has a favourite photograph of you, he says it reveals your secret self. It was taken for a magazine article about bright young things, the ones to watch, and their mentors. You’d been chosen by an old student of yours, now an ITV news reader, a hungry young woman who’d straightened her West Country vowels and had a meteoric rise from the local Bristol paper into prime time TV. There was also a celebrated violinist, a geneticist, an architect, a novelist.

You didn’t want to do it but didn’t say no, of course: it was good publicity for your faculty. You’d never actually liked her enough, had been jealous and a little afraid of her steely greed to succeed. She hid her determination within friendliness and flattery but you saw straight through it.

The photographer was Colombian. He was exasperated with you all, wanted the group to relax. He asked you to think of the most sensuous thing you could imagine and yell it out, and there was uncomfortable laughter and then silence.

Skin to skin said your former student suddenly. Someone else, foie gras. The softness of a baby’s thighs. Swimming, naked, at midnight. The smell of freshly cut grass. Fauré’s ‘Sanctus’. A girlfriend’s laugh.

Until there was only you left.

Kissing the back of your husband’s neck, you said, while he was absorbed in his work. Your voice stumbly and hesitant, your blush deep. The photo was taken and when it was published it was all, still, in your face.

Cole loved your look, he knew it well but had never seen it caught.

He had no recollection of you ever kissing his neck while he was at work.

Lesson 39

there should not be overcrowding in bedrooms

Night, bed, alone, and the glare of what’s happened during that meeting with Gabriel is imprinted in your head like the too-bright fluorescent lights that were never switched off in your school’s corridors. Cole’s fallen asleep on the couch in front of the television. You cannot sleep, cannot sleep, and then it’s dawn. Love is attention and you’re not getting any: you’re like a balloon that’s jerked free from the fist holding it down and is now climbing and swerving in a choppy sky.

You think of other things, in bed, alone. They’re with you most nights, to lull you to sleep. A group of men watching you being penetrated by a broom handle. You don’t know any of the perpetrators very well. It’s never intimate or tender. It’s filmed. Sometimes women will be watching the penetration; by candlesticks, by animals, sometimes the women will be participating. And the men. Hands will be running over your naked body, parting your legs, probing, slipping inside. Almost every night you imagine these things to drop you into sleep. The movies in your head were most vivid during your teenage years, you can still remember the effect twenty years later, the intensity of them. And now, following the afternoon of Gabriel, you’re vastly awake and holding your fingers snug between your legs and wanting to feel again with the spark of those teenage years, wanting that combusting under your skin.

You want to ring Theo, you miss your confidante, it’s a huge silence in your life. She was the only person you ever felt comfortable ringing beyond ten. You’d talk sex with her endlessly, what you wanted, what you didn’t; all the things you never said to a man. You loved her expression to describe a good fuck – dirt – meaning it’d be dirty, it’d be sexy sex. A man who’s dirt, you’d always loved the idea of that. And sexy sex.

Now, alone, you’re bound by caution. Have you ever acted, as an adult, exactly as you wished? You’ve been battened down for so long; the good teacher, friend, wife. And you’re most passive in bed, all surrender and wanting to please so much. Your fantasy life has never leaked into your real life. But in bed, now, alone, possibility is putting its key in the lock, like a stream of desert light in the morning, luring you out.

Cole stumbles into the room at five and presses his body into you, as if he’s trying to draw the warmth from your flesh. You shrug him off.

Lesson 40

there are few who wilfully injure their health, but many thoughtlessly destroy it

Ten a.m.

You reach for your handbag, hope you’re not ringing too soon, don’t even know what to say, just hello, will that do, and I wanted to say thanks for the other day; you’ve rehearsed it, the lightness in your voice. You’re living more boldly, you’re beginning, and Theo’s words sound in your head: it’s no use waiting for the light to appear at the end of the tunnel, you just have to stride down and light the bloody thing yourself. There’s nothing wrong with a new friend for there seem to be less and less as the years roll over in your narrowing life.

Ten a.m. and your thudding heart, your thudding heart.

The slip of paper isn’t there.

You’re scrabbling through your wallet and searching the floor and the steps and the ground outside but it’s gone and your fingers are dragging through your hair and your teeth are tearing at your nails, there’s no phone number under directory enquiries and you have no address, of course, and then you sit on the hallway floor, your head thrown back against the wall, for a very long time, very still, in the flat, with its silence like a skull.

He’s gone.

As if chunks have been ripped from the book of your future.

You can’t move, your whole life feels slumped: you don’t know what to do next. You sit there for so long, your hand tucked into your knickers, against your bare flesh. When you withdraw your fingers you stare at the glutinous shine on them, the shout of it. You gasp, your hand trembles; a teenager all over again, so abruptly.

But you have no number, no address. And he doesn’t have yours. He is gone.

You feel drained. It took so much effort to get to this point, to overcome the nausea and nerves, to resolve to pick up the phone. You didn’t realise how much you were counting on the possibility of him, a new something to fill your life, until he was lost.

Lesson 41

remember to walk briskly and not saunter about or be forever peering into shop windows

You return to the café in Soho, alone, through September, through October, and he never comes back.

On a Monday of cold sunshine a young woman is beside you. She’s reading the sex issue of The Face magazine; she’s strongly by herself, as if this cafe is her office and she’s been this at ease in her skin her whole life. You wish you could be that. You buy The Face on the way home, flushing as the newsagent takes your money. You’ll never go back to his shop, you’re not that young woman.

That night, alone, in the bedroom, words you’ve never heard before:

Californicate: copulating shamelessly in every possible position. Chili dog: defecating on a woman’s chest, then masturbating with her breasts. Daisy chaining: a number of people connecting through oral sex. Flooding the cave: urinating into a partner’s vagina. Hum job: oral sex given to a man while humming a tune. On and on and you close the magazine and smooth the cover down, you place it in the bottom of your bedside drawer, you check it’s well tucked.

Repelled. Horrified. Wet.

Thinking of the woman in the cafe, and the man who never came back. Thinking of anonymous, uncomplicated sex. Arousing yourself with it all, now, rather than sedating yourself into sleep; wanting it in your life.

Lesson 42

every girl her own dressmaker

The next day at the café you’re like an anemone unfurling within the silky coaxing of the water because you’ve decided that for the next six months you’ll live your life differently from the way you’ve ever lived it before: indulgently, selfishly, wilfully, before marriage and motherhood close over you. You dream of no commitment to anything but your own pleasure, you dream, with renewed vigour, of finding a satisfying fuck. If you’d ever have the courage for that.

You were a serial sleeper once, during your final year of university, propelled by the thought of launching yourself into the world without any experience of men, a virgin at twenty-two and full of shame and self-loathing at the fact.

You had an innocence then, in your early twenties. You could pass as sixteen, as still needing to be taught, your face hadn’t yet settled. So one Saturday night at a friend’s you became drunk and emboldened, you had to get it done. There was a man next to you in the doorway; he was taller than you, had clear skin, he’d do. Everyone else was deep into a double episode of The Young Ones, they’d never notice you’d gone.

You took a deep breath: do you want to go upstairs, you asked.

What, he said, leaning close.

Let’s go upstairs, come on.

You took his hand; he had no idea of your pounding heart. You never saw him again, didn’t want to, his name was quickly lost. There were many after that. They were always snatching the bait, thinking it was you, in fact, who’d fallen prey and not realising that the girl with the face who needed to be taught had become a collector, an archivist of sexual experiences. All disappointing; too dry, painful, anticlimactic, fumbling, bleak.

So you tried something else. An older man. Your neighbour, a graphic designer who’d never settled down. The age difference was nineteen years. It was worse. He was from an era when sex was purely for the man’s satisfaction; he thought a good fuck was just hammering away vigorously while you lay there and thought of England; he thought condoms were a joke. He told you afterwards as he rubbed your flat belly that he could never sleep with a woman over thirty, he didn’t like them enough: the sagging skin on their necks, the lines on their faces, the bodies thickening out. But you know another reason, now; because by then women have lost their docility, they have awareness, they know too much.

And they want things themselves.

So, nothing sparked. Theo, meanwhile, seemed to be sailing her way through men and through life. For you the best moment was always the anticipation, the thrill of giving the men what they wanted and as soon as the clothes were off something was lost. It always seemed to be two people connecting but utterly failing at it, too, and there was a gulf of loneliness in that, and after several years you gave up and slipped into your dream world every single night. So your twenties passed.

Whenever you did make love it was your thoughts that stirred you more than the touch of the man. He never knew that he wasn’t at the centre of your focus while he was on you, that he was merely kick-starting the film in your head. As he pushed inside you’d slip into concentrating on a scenario that would trigger your pleasure. It all had little to do with the person making love to you. You never found the sex sexy; maybe it would come with the next man or the next but it never combusted for you. What was all the fuss about?

You were much better at it by yourself, in your head.

Lesson 43

the law for everyone is duty first, pleasure next

What you want:

The lights turned off. A touch that’s gentle, slow, provocative, that builds you up, that makes you want it too much. An orgasm; it doesn’t have to be at the same time as the man, just one orgasm so that you know what everyone’s talking about. Eye contact. A quick coming that’s not on your breasts or your face. Holding afterwards, skin to skin. Oral sex, precisely where you ask, for as long and as soft and as slow as you’d like. Sex that’s uncomplicated, with no ties, where the man will do exactly what you want. Claiming happiness for yourself: you’re so used to focusing on your partner’s pleasure at the expense of your own.

What you do not want:

To suck a penis. The smell of stale smoke. A tongue in your ear. Underwear involving satin or g-strings or leopard print or lace. The vaginal sex to go on too long. A thrusting so hard that it burns, it hurts. Swallowing. Breast sucking, breast licking, breast anything. To be asked what are you thinking. For it to be pushed upon you when you’re tired, grubby, not yet wet. Being pinned down. A rush to get in. A penis that’s too big. Loud snorting at climax, or groaning, or any expression like ‘ooh yes, baby’ and ‘c’mon’. For the roll-over after the coming to be too abrupt. To be kicked out too quick.

What you love:

The arch of the foot, its bones, rake-splayed. Wide, blunt, clean fingernails. Michelangelo wrists. Cleanliness. The nape of your neck nuzzled. Your eyelids kissed. Burrowing deep under the blankets. Clothes to be drawn off slowly, in exquisite anticipation. Cold, smooth walls you are rammed against. The sound of a lover’s breath close to your ear. Your hair pulled back when he’s inside. Your name spoken aloud just before he comes. Connecting, a holiness fluttering within you both. Seduction that’s slow, intriguing, unique, by flattery, extravagant gestures, text: poem scraps on napkins, filthy e-mails that should never be sent, love letters scrawled on Underground passes, a line composed in lipstick on your back as you sleep, written backwards, to be read in the mirror; oh yes, all that.

Lesson 44

if you have a dog and never let him out the poor fellow will bark and howl miserably

Cole has a gift. He hasn’t given you one for so long, since Marrakech, when you received chocolates and magazines and jewellery from the souks. You protest but you’re smiling, you can’t help it, for it signals a thaw, a softening back into an easier way. You can both feel it, time is smoothing things out. You both want this.

It’s an envelope. You slide your fingers beneath the heavy, cream flap.

Private membership to the London Library. The writers’ library. It’s too ironic, heartbreaking, apt and your heart swells with light and guilt. Your husband’s blackmailing you with generosity and you know exactly what you’ll do, for a writers’ library might, just might, have an actor in it, who’s researching a screenplay, perhaps.

I thought it might give you a kick start, Cole says. For the book.

Ah, the book.

For you’d told him once that one day you’d like to take your cheeky seventeenth-century text and do something with it. It was one reason why he was so insistent you give up the drudgery of teaching, to try something you’d always wanted to do – although sometimes you suspected it was just to keep you all to himself. You’d showed him the section where the author stated that women married not for pleasure but for the propagation of children; and her conclusion that the wives of barren men should be allowed to sleep with other men fit and lusty. Isn’t that gorgeous, you remember teasing him, when can I start? And Cole had grabbed you firmly by the arm and had smacked you, stingingly, on the bum.

The cupboard. Quick.

And you’d laughed and laughed.

You’d told Cole that there was a novel in the text, or a history perhaps, the intimate kind that cracks open private lives. It felt good to tell him, as if it would give some weight to your own life. You’re not sure, now, though, you ever really meant it.

But he didn’t forget.

No one except your husband knows of the cautiousness at the heart of your life. Your adulthood has been a progressive retreat from curiosity and wonder, an endless series of delays and procrastinations. You wanted to be so much, once, but life kept on getting in the way. You shone during your journalism degree but were never quite hungry enough for a newsroom. You dreaded the cold calling, of intruding so much on people’s lives. You did an MA and drifted into teaching and were always doubting your abilities: said shouldn’t it be someone else when your colleagues urged you to apply for a higher post, asked me? Really? when offered a promotion, never pushed for a pay rise. You settled. Shunned creativity, flight, risk, never had the courage to give a dream, any dream, a go.

And now you hold the envelope to your lips and smile and kiss your husband on the forehead. You’ll go to the Library tomorrow, you say it’s the perfect gift. You don’t tell him you’ll be looking for a man in a very neat suit, with a beautiful nape. For Cole is seducing you with thoughtfulness and you want him to know how grateful you are.

But something is all skittery within you and there’s the light and the guilt of that.

You know what Theo would do in this situation. You wonder about your Elizabethan wife. If she ever acted on her words, if she was that courageous, or stupid. Indulgent. Selfish. Bold.

Lesson 45

God helps those who help themselves

The London Library arrests time, it drags you into its rich dark depths and holds you there, captive and absorbed and lost. You find a space to write in the old encyclopaedia room; it has discreet plugs for laptops embedded in the floor. Your little volume sits demurely on your desk, with its shiny coffee-coloured leather cover and broken clasps. And its shocking declarations in their firm, neat hand.

Eve be more excellent than Adam. Eve be less sinful than Adam.

A husband they desired to have, not so much to be accounted wives, as to be made mothers. For they know that woemen should be saved by childbearing.

Where, know yee, shall we finde a man be he ever so old, barren, weak and feeble that hathe been so kind and curteouse to his wife that was willing to substitute another more able man in his place, that his wife might have issue.

Woemen bare rule over men.

Why was the author compelled to write such things? What is the remoteness, the chafing within you? Why do you always do things you don’t want to, now that you’re embedded in this relationship? You tolerated so much before, within the glow of new love, now you don’t. Why do you feel stronger and more serene when you’re by yourself, that you don’t want your husband around too much? Everyone’s always considered you an excellent candidate for the role of wife; you’re compliant and companionable, you endure, with feigned enthusiasm, in-law dinners, action films, client drinks. If only they knew of the restlessness within you, the tapping at your elbow, the tugging at your skirt.

You’re not sure what to do with the book, it’s like walking under water when you try to find a way in. But it will come. And there are many distractions – magazines and newspapers and the Internet and the looking for Gabriel, always that.

Especially in the Reading Room, at lunch hour, just in case.

The space is joyous with light from tall windows and hushed with cerebration, thick with an atmosphere of scholarship and sleep. Several old leather armchairs are in a line, in stately repose, their bellies now grazing the floor. You get to know the regular visitors. The beautifully dressed elderly man who places a white linen handkerchief on a seat before taking a very long time to lower himself into it. The large man always asleep, head thrown back, mouth agape, hands crossed protectively over a book on his chest like a dead man’s Bible placed by a widow. The mousy woman who arrives promptly at noon every day and kneels on the floor by a reading man and rests her head on his knees. His fingers sift, absently, through her hair and they don’t speak for half an hour and then they leave and your heart fills with tenderness for what they have together as a couple – for you had it once – and then tightens for what, perhaps, they’ll become.

The Library gives you a feeling of industriousness, props your life. You dress as if going to work; you’re not the only one doing this. A middle-aged man in a pinstriped suit does nothing but read The Times every day from cover to cover and you guess an unsuspecting wife is behind the creamy stiffness of his collars and cuffs, and wonder how long he can sustain it.

Soon you’re frequenting the Library ravenously, you want it every day, just as you needed your cafe, once. In the cram of London, amid its grubby, muscular energy, the narrow building is a refuge and a tonic. And always, you’re searching. For you’re infected by the idea of Gabriel and you feel, with an odd certainty, that he will come.

Lesson 46

lazy, stay-indoors persons frequently have diseases

The Library’s computer room, where you write e-mails to your friends and trawl the newspapers for show business gossip: the latest marriages that have crumbled, the best and worst gowns from recent award ceremonies, Hollywood pregnancies, arrests. You’re sitting at a desk with your shoes flipped off and knees drawn up – it has something to do with wanting to be young again, with living a more vivid life.

A man peers playfully over your shoulder, trying to read what you’re reading and you look up, startled. He asks if you’d like to come for a drink with some of the regulars after work. You look around the room, at the six other people in it and realise they all know each other, it’s a gang. Instinctively you begin to say no, it’s always your way to refuse the second cup of tea, the seat on the tube, the drink after work. But something, this time, makes you stop.

Yes, I’d love to.

The man smiles. He glances at your wedding ring, perhaps, among your jumble of rings. You look at him as if for the first time. Prematurely balding, with his hair clipped close to his scalp. Wearing luxurious black velvet trousers that sit oddly with a striped shirt. Younger than what you’d first imagined, weeks ago, from a distance, better-looking than what you’d dismissed him as. You know in a second you’d never sleep with him, it’s a mental game you play with every man you meet. It’s not just the velvet, he’s not your type. He won’t make your lip tremble, won’t draw a blush, won’t make you seize up. You smile at him warmly; you can relax.

Lesson 47

every girl can dance and should learn to do it well

There are three men and a woman at the pub and swiftly you’re telling them more than you ever intended, eager for contact, slightly drunk. They know nothing of you. It’s exhilarating, like moving to a foreign country where no one knows of your past; you can make yourself up as you go. As you explain your book you become authoritative, confident, witty, brisk, and plans for the project spark as you speak. You talk of the obedient wife writing secretly, late at night, galloping her pen through page after page and hiding it away when she hears her husband at the door and opening her Bible and stilling her face with her fingertips on her flushed cheeks. Hinting to her lover that she’s writing a book, for she has to have a lover; yes, yes, she must.

Her husband finds out. He drags her by the hair to the cupboard and locks her in, he shuts his hands over his ears at her cries; she begs him for mercy, he does not speak. Eventually, over many days, her screams become whimpers, they die out. The lover never knows what happens. He’s told by her maidservant the wife has been sent to a harsh and distant nunnery; he can’t find her, he searches the breadth of the land. And he never knows if she really loved him, or if she was making it all up. He dies a broken man. As does the husband.

Perhaps, perhaps.

Tonight works, magnificently. The group doesn’t have to know you’ll be going home to a very still flat. You watch, astounded, the woman you’ve become, insisting on the next round and then asking when they’ll be meeting next.

Tomorrow, says your man in the velvet trousers. Most nights, in fact.

I’ll see you then; and you’re out the door quick, as if you’re off to something else. The sense of the illusion, triumphantly executed, buoys you down the street.

Lesson 48

to know right is well, but to do right is better

The following Sunday.

You flick through the newspapers’ magazines. Stop at Theo’s column. Since Marrakech you’ve not been able to read it, until now. You’ve been slipping that section into the bin before Cole gets a chance to look.

This week, it’s the usual kind of queries:

Dear Dr Theo, my new boyfriend’s getting frustrated. He loves me on top during sex but I feel so self-conscious; it just makes me freeze. It’s driving him crazy as he says he’s the only one making any effort.

Dear Frozen, ah, yes, sex on top. It can be wonderful, but only if you’re completely uninhibited with how you look. If you’re at all body conscious, it’s an extremely vulnerable position for a woman to be in. So, what to do? Well, girl, you need to get used to some friendly, relaxed nudity with your boyfriend. If that’s too big a step for now, why don’t you try wearing one of his shirts? Men usually love that.

Dear Dr Theo, my ex-husband took forever to climax and I worry I didn’t provide him with enough grip. Could it be possible that my vagina is just too big?.

Dear Worried, you know what, maybe your ex just liked to savour the whole experience. Did you ever ask? We girls just don’t ask enough, you know! But some simple exercises can strengthen your pelvic floor muscles – to find out where they are, try halting the flow when you’re on the toilet. If you do them regularly, you’ll be able to grip your men deliciously tight!

You always read her columns because she expected you to but never really applied them to your life; they were good for a giggle, that’s all. Your mother looked out for them voraciously. It always seemed slightly obscene to you that a post-menopausal woman would enjoy them so much. She was devastated when you told her that Theo made up most of the letters.

But then, but then, to a question about a lover who’s providing great sex, and is that enough to leave her husband and two kids, Theo writes in stern, condemning response:

No, it’s not enough. And just remember, it’s a strong person who has the courage to end a relationship that isn’t working, before embarking on a fresh one. It’s a weak person who cheats on someone.

Your heart pounds as you read. You push the magazine into the bin. How dare she write that; how dare she publicly pretend she’s squeaky clean; someone else. And whom is she writing that for? Cole? You, to throw you off the scent? Women are so accomplished at battling in subtle, ingenious, covert ways; at clothing their betrayers’ fingers in the smoothest of kid. And it’s usually other women they’re competing with, not men.

Lesson 49

paraffin is highly inflammable

You ration your evenings with the writers to once, perhaps twice, a week; it doesn’t seem right, as a wife, to be out every night. Cole was amused when you’d told him of the gatherings; he felt it was a new hobby for you, a way to open out your life. You’d been careful to tell him all the men were attached, with boyfriends or girlfriends or wives.

A Friday night. There are eight of you in the pub; you’ve all come from the Library with your laptops and papers in shoulder bags. And then another man appears and the group exclaims and arms reach out.

He reddens, to see you, and the rest of them look at you afresh. The new persona dissolves in an instant, in that moment of seeing him, you’re back to your old self: your top lip trembles in its greeting.

We know each other, Gabriel says, quizzing you with his eyes.

How’s it going? Your voice is hoarse, the three words are all you can push out.

He’s just popped by for a drink and the rest of the group want to know how he is and where the hell he’s been and when is he going to get a computer and enter the twenty-first century like everyone else. You stand back and watch. You’re struck, again, by the peculiar gentleness, the shyness, still. He’s been in LA, at some castings for pilot season, it’s where all the English actors end up around this time of year, and then he stopped off in Rome and there was Barcelona too, a family wedding, and he speaks politely and affably but he’d much prefer to talk about something else. You recognise it; he’s not good in big groups. You’re struck, again, by the hair washed in night and the small clearing behind his ear, its vivid white. You want to lick it. You tighten your inner thighs as he leans across you to the bar, to pay for his wine, not beer like the rest. Another suit, of course, as if it would never cross his mind to wear anything else, as if he always visits his mother and attends church. No one in your life attends church. The suits have a vintage line to them; maybe they’re his peculiar style, or they’re his father’s, or he’s poorer than you thought. There’s so much to ask.

He doesn’t bother fitting in with everyone else. Why shouldn’t he wear a suit and write in longhand and disappear for several months? He’s a man very loved; he’s like a rock that’s been struck by the sun for a long time and is warm with it. You see him as the only boy in his family with many adoring older sisters, the late child, the lovely mistake: there’s none of the responsibility or gravity of an eldest child. There’s such a sweetness to him. It’s all in his smile.

Your breathing is wrong, it’s all jerky and light, you cannot still it. The others joke about the screenplay that’s taking a bloody long time to complete.

A woman called Martha jumps in. You’ve noticed her a lot: she walks with a heavy brow, as if her fists are clenched. She teases that Gabriel’s finished twenty-eight pages and they’re the work of a genius but they’ve taken eleven months to produce and there’s doubt among the rest of them that another twenty-eight will ever be completed, and you can see in that moment you’re not the only one caught.

What’s it called, you stumble the words out.

I don’t know, yet.

His boyish beam, his shrug. You want to get away from this bar, it’s all stilted and jostly and wrong. He’s blushed upon seeing you and it must mean something and you make an effort to still your breathing and a sip of wine slips into a gulp. One by one the others are drifting away, even Martha, lingering Martha, and finally, finally you’re alone. Silence, for a moment, then laughing from you both.

Well.

Well.

You apologise for not calling, tell him you lost his number and were terribly upset and then hate yourself for revealing that. But he’s flattered, delighted, in fact. I’m glad you were miserable, he says, it makes me feel good. And you look at him, trying to work him out: he’s not interested in shielding himself.

Then the talking, an hour or two or thereabouts, everything and nothing, the way Cole and you used to talk, in the giddy time following the first fuck when the friendship had burst into something else. The time when you’d fuck greedily, when you’d tail off with exhaustion at the wilting end of one night and pick it all up again the next. When the more sex you had the more you wanted as all the rusty cogs within you were oiled up. Before familiarity and exhaustion and stress wound you down and the less you had, the less you wanted. And you stopped.

You’d never want that to happen with Gabriel.

He’s making you feel so alive, just being around him. You’ve always loved people like that: heart lifters, not heart sinkers. He’s making you laugh again, with your eyes. You talk as if this is the last time you’ll ever talk and there’s so little time and you need to know everything, now, before it’s too late.

How did it go, in LA?

I don’t know. I never know. I’m always being told I was second-best. The list of failures is very long.

There’s no anger, frustration, angst; maybe the affability is an extremely smooth defence but you suspect your Gabriel is not very good at pushing his way through life. Is it such a bad thing? Everyone’s so good at seizing now, especially Theo; her life is all about hunting down the best deals, perks, sales, nothing rare and desirable escapes the vigour of her grasp. Gabriel is content to let all the grabbing slip by him. He has a sunniness in his character that makes you want to protect him and preserve what he’s got.

When he listens, his head leans on one side. He says interesting after your sentences a lot; savouring what you say. He’s hungry to know you. You used to be like that once, with strangers, at dinner parties and weddings and blind dates, you had the zeal of a collector then, firing off questions and hiding yourself. Before it was all buried in the cotton wool of complacency, and Cole, and you weren’t near as interested in anyone else. Gabriel wants to know what you think, he’s giving you space in the conversation: it’s refreshing in a man. You’re responding like a neglected child at the back of the class who has a new teacher and flowers under the attention. And turns into someone else.

He’s making you feel beautiful. Wanted. Confident. Unique. Cole never sees you as any of that, he loves to tell you how you are, what you’re like; to box you up tight.

At the end of the night you say goodbye to Gabriel – no kiss, just a brush of warm cheek – and you walk down the street propelled by a zinging high, it’s as if you could leap and brush the sky. You have his number and he has yours and on the tube, once again, you anoint his slip of paper with your lips.

This one you will not lose.

Lesson 50

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.

Lesson 51

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.

Lesson 52

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.

Lesson 53

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.

Lesson 54

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.

Lesson 55

at the end of the year you must see that your window box is tidy and in good order

Darkness is greedy now, it crowds into the afternoons. The year is galloping towards Christmas. Cole’s away a lot, networking at festive functions: drinks parties in creamy Belgravia drawing rooms and St James studios and private Soho clubs. For the first time since you’ve known him he hasn’t asked you to accompany him. He recognises, now, that he can’t get you to do things quite so easily any more.

Gabriel’s in Spain, with his extended family, he’s not sure when he’ll be back. He might do Prague afterwards, and then Greece again, to visit a friend. You don’t feel abandoned for you’re secure in the knowledge that he’ll return; the situation will resume exactly as it left off. There’s a glamour to Gabriel’s existence because he doesn’t do the everyday. His contentment with few possessions is glamorous, and his lack of striving with his job, and his winging off constantly to some other place; it’s all so brazen, flippant, audacious, light.

You tell yourself there’s no crime in a cup of tea or a gallery visit or a skipping heart. You tell yourself your husband deserves your unfaithfulness because it keeps you with him, it keeps your marriage together, which is what you both want.

It will go no further. You don’t want guilt like a sickness.

But during those long December nights you wonder why some people have a compulsion to allow chaos into their lives. To get attention? Sympathy? Love, to have it affirmed? Are you doing all this for Cole, perhaps; for him to notice you again, to be attentive, your best mate, like he was once?

Christmas is endured. Swiftly packed away.

I hate this between us, Cole says suddenly, on a very quiet New Year’s night.

So do I.

Nothing else is said, it does not need to be said, there’s just an unspoken acknowledgement that both of you want to slip back into an old way. The night is curiously healing even though nothing, still, has been sorted out. You’re both in bed by ten. Cole wraps his warmth around you and you do not shrug him off. You cannot explain why your marriage works, now, but it does, enough. Enough not to have to set up your life somewhere else, to go back to the grind of City University, to rethink the baby plan. You’ve stopped asking Cole at every opportunity about Theo, the truth of what went on, for you’ve learnt that invading the mystery of each other’s psyche will be more destructive to your marriage than a simple letting go ever is. So, you’ve let go. To reclaim your life. To navigate a way back into calm, if you can.

January. Cole has a job in Athens. It’s for an old acquaintance who’s in shipping, a billionaire who collects pre-Raphaelite nudes. But he’s got something different this time, a portrait from the waist up of an exquisite medieval Venus and he doesn’t want her out of his sight. Cole’s shown you the photographs, he did the condition report, the paint is blistering and flaking off. There are several losses, patches of canvas totally bereft of paint, and Cole will have to take his palette and brushes and create a seamless match. He can’t wait to get his hands on her. Her skin is pale and cold, as if it’s been carved in marble. She has tiny buttons for nipples, like flesh-coloured smarties, with no aureole, of course. There’s a snake winding round her elongated neck with scales as soft and luxurious as black velvet.

Cole’s gone for three weeks and your true self uncurls in this time. It makes you wish that throughout the years of knowing your husband you’d let him see more of who, exactly, you are. You can only bring her out when he isn’t at home.

This.

The music up loud, your music, all the secret pop songs from your youth, Wuthering Heights and Blondie and the soundtrack from Grease and Nina Simone at her gravelly best, the type of music he hates, it’s all crammed on compilation cassettes stored under the bed like a dietitian’s secret chocolate box. You’re dancing and singing off-key, too loud, drunk with the alone. You’re rearranging furniture, dragging it in great grating shudders, how perfect you could make this space if it were just your own – out with that overlarge TV, off with the Scotch bottles and cheap detective novels! You’re eating nothing but chocolate biscuits for dinner, a whole packet, or just a slice of toast and a glass of red wine and the dishes languish and the candles burn to their quick and at the end of each night you stretch on the couch and feel young and alive and sated and content. For alone you’re refinding a glittering, a clarity, you’re finding your distilled self.

You feel an intoxicating freedom when Cole is not with you, and yet you don’t want him to be gone. You think of the two types of aloneness you’ve known recently: this wonderful, sparkly, soul-refreshing type, and the despairing loneliness that sucks the breath from your life.

Lesson 56

nothing impure should be left in a bedroom one minute longer than is necessary

A letter, heavy on the doormat. Thick, creamy paper, watermarked, Italian, its edges feather-soft. A sensuality to it you want to kiss. The words typed, the thud of them as careful as braille.

I want to remove your clothes in the darkness, I want to unpeel you. I want to feel you, inch by inch.

Your fingertips run over the words, deft as a lizard. You’re trembling, you cover the letter with your hand, you have to sit with the strangeness of it.

I feel like you’re helping me to live.

No name, no return address. Your dipping heart, seduced by text. You stand by the lounge room window with one hand holding the letter to your chest and the other spidered wide on the cold pane and your breath frosting the glass and your cheeks are hot. It’s as if you’re entering, tentatively, a strange new path and swiftly the trees are closing over you and the sky is gone and the light, you’re lost, and in the thick of it, in a clearing, you’ll be tugged down, drowned, in a bed of silk.

Come away. Start afresh.

The phone. Cole. All fired up. You know what’s coming next: he’ll be a couple of days late, he’s still bent over that painting, can’t drag himself away. He’s always loved telling you the minutiae of his work, you’re a good listener.

You’re looking at your watch and the letter as he speaks, wanting him off the phone. He’s worried about his Venus’s lips, some idiot somewhere along the line has had a go, clumsily, at touching them up and it’s tricky to get them right.

Don’t change them too much. No botox, mate.

Yeah, yeah, and he chuckles.

The point of his job is to work to a minimum, to do the least amount possible of fixing up because he’s tampering with an original artwork. But sometimes, Cole’s told you, he just wants to be let loose.

I want to cover her nipples, he says, she looks so cold. She needs some clothes, poor love.

Maybe she’s blissfully happy, darling. Maybe there’s a man under her skirt.

Oy, Cole laughs. Steady down. What’s got into you?

Nothing, nothing, and you hang up the phone, grinning at the irony of a husband so absorbed in his job he hasn’t seemed to have noticed the changes in his own wife’s face over the past few months.

Lesson 57

do good and lend

How they’ve seduced:

Slow, enquiring fingers on your skin in an Edinburgh flat and you took off your pyjamas as something flooded through you and you could not dam it.

Marijuana, once, but you fell asleep.

Alcohol. Champagne always worked best.

Porn. A video to soften you up and you were intrigued at first but the monotony quickly repelled and it was the coldest, most unimaginative fuck you’d ever had.

The urgency in a kiss.

An expensive hotel room that made you feel guilty.

A song that turns you on every time you hear it, a line in it: she only comes when she’s on top: crazeeeee.

Compilation cassettes; and how many men have given you those? Why do they always think they know best? You’d never impose your own taste on them.

Letters. Letters have always worked.

But how would you seduce? How would you guard against scaring a man off?

They seem, often, so flighty, difficult, contrary, easily spooked. And you’re not convinced that it’s the men always chasing for in most of your experiences and your girlfriends’ it’s always the woman biting the bullet and doing the asking out, the hunting down. The looking, the not finding.

Lesson 58

you ought never to keep anything whatever under a bed

Only Martha and you are left at the bar, for the Library men have all gone home to their families, and after an awkward pause Martha asks if you’ve had a shag lately and you laugh and say no, not for ages, you’ve forgotten how to do it, it’s been so long. Martha tells you she’s slept on the couch for the last six years while her husband’s in the bedroom, it’s all very English, she tells you. We’re high Catholic, we won’t split. You laugh from deep in your belly, suddenly liking this woman very much. How seductive is honesty. You ask her, casually, about Gabriel, what she knows about him, you can’t work him out. She looks at you sharply. Ah, Gabriel, she says, Gabriel, and she tells you she has a theory and leans close.

I don’t think he’s had much practice with women. He’s probably only had one or two girlfriends in his life. I think he needs a bit of help.

What?

It’s kind of exciting, don’t you think?

God, I don’t know, and you’re knuckling your hands into your temples, you’re thinking of the letter and the suits and the kind of man who wouldn’t let a woman drive a car if he’s in it, perhaps.

He’s so…odd, Martha says. I mean, gorgeously so, but you know. There’s something of the hermit about him, don’t you reckon, the way he disappears for months on end and then suddenly turns up. God knows what he really does, or how he ever makes a buck. He doesn’t open up to any of us. It’s all just a bit strange.

You rub the line between your brow, trying to knead it out, and Martha laughs that everything’s speculation, of course, and there’s even vague talk of a girlfriend, once, who broke his heart but there’s been no sighting of anyone since.

You know nothing of him. You’ve never even been to his flat. There’s so much you’ve never asked. Deliberately, because you don’t want to hear about a girlfriend in the wings, or a wife. It’s better if you don’t know, so that the spell is never broken; you’re not ready for that.

But you feel a fatigue, now, at living within the web of your own tightly woven imaginings. Since a real man stumbled into it and began plucking at the silk.

Lesson 59

some use pillows stuffed with hops, but the best preparation for sleep is honest hard work and a good conscience

Cole’s bags and coat crowd the hallway on your return from a late morning trip to Tesco. He’s home from Athens a day early, without warning. Another letter’s arrived but he hasn’t had a chance to sort through the mail and you push the envelope deep into a pocket, listening but not listening to his travel chat.

The bathroom, as soon as you can. You sit on the toilet seat, tear at the flap.

Some days apart from you I’m in pain, my yearning is so strong. At times you settle over me like a great warmth. I catch myself smiling into space. I dream of us running away, getting out.

The fierce pull as you read, like a hand inside your stomach. The words so close you feel you could almost put out a hand. You touch the letter against your belly, feeling the smooth, cold paper against your skin. You get up, you’ve been too long, you kiss Cole absently on the crown of his head as he unpacks his bag and it plunges you back to a time when the love glowed, for a moment, and then it’s gone. You sit at the kitchen table with the day’s paper unread before you, your hands cradling your forehead.

Perhaps Gabriel is like Ruskin who, it’s rumoured, idolised women so much he was incapable of consummating his marriage when he discovered to his horror that his wife had pubic hair. Perhaps he’s happily married in Spain, has seven kids; perhaps Martha’s made it all up to throw you off the scent. Perhaps he’s having an affair, is gay, caught by fear, can’t bear to let anyone see who he really is. Perhaps he’s one of those men who fell through the cracks – you know several, brothers and uncles of friends, lost men who’ve never found a sure footing with life, who are crushed by the challenge of living in this world and opt out and become loners or drunks. And put their parents, and lovers, through hell.

And then it hits.

What if he’s never been with a woman.

What if he doesn’t know how. A virgin, perhaps, and it all makes sense. The shyness. The pulling back at your touch. The ear tips blushing at a farewell kiss. Is it so implausible? You have an ex-colleague who’s a virgin at thirty-two and you’ve never been sure about Rupert, your cousin. And he, like Gabriel, is a tall, virile, masculine-looking man, and he, like Gabriel, never seems to be attached.

Would Gabriel be diminished in your eyes, if that were it?

No. It’s oddly endearing. And exciting.

An idea, beautiful in its simplicity. To initiate Gabriel, to teach him exactly what you want. To create a pleasure man, purely that, the lover every woman dreams of. You’ll be in control, for the very first time, you’ll be able to dictate exactly what you want. And there’ll be no expectation of how you should act.

That night Cole slips into your bed and curves his body in a question mark around your back.

An idea beautiful in its simplicity. And impossible.

For you don’t do that type of thing. It’s in the quietness of your clothes, your wholesome face, your ready blush. It’s in your horror at hearing of affairs, your stock response: but I could never do that to another woman.

Or Cole. You don’t think.

Lesson 60

some people are terribly afraid of draughts and would rather be poisoned slowly than feel the breath of fresh air. this is grossly unwise and leads to many diseases

A gift box is delivered. It’s beautifully wrapped.

A vibrator.

You gasp. There’s no note. It’s obscene, fascinating, ridiculous, you’ve never seen one up close. You don’t touch it for a long time and then you turn it round, sink back on the bed, turn it on. You can control it, make it go exactly where you want, for as long as you want, or as short.

It’s small enough to keep in your handbag and your fingers brush it often, imagining exotic trips and Customs officers searching your luggage, having to explain it, stammering. You’ve never been searched, you’ve always been too innocent-looking and respectable for that.

There’s no note with the package but the address label is typed. Your fingertips run over the letters, the heavy imprint of them.

Anonymous, of course. How long has he been back? Did he ever go? Is this another game? You ring, leave messages on his machine, he will not return your calls.

Another letter.

I want to be the hand in the small of your back pushing you forward.

Trembling, wet, slumping back against the wall.

Snared.

Lesson 61

it is mostly easier to do wrong than right

Another letter, until there are four. All typed, all short, and their words are etched like acid upon you.

Just to hold you, I ache for it, just to put my lips to the valley of your neck and slide down your body. I don’t like being apart from you, not hearing your voice, not having you close.

The phone rings, five minutes after you’ve opened the last.

Heeeey. He draws out the word, he’s always so playful with his greeting, as if it’s such a lovely surprise to hear your voice.

Hey stranger, you respond.

I’m back, he says in a gleeful sing-song.

Since when?

Since right this second. When can we meet? Are you free?

Yes, yes, hang on, give me an hour, no two.

It’s beginning to feel like infidelity as you get ready all stumbly and distracted, and the shower’s too hard and too hot and you force your body into stillness with the slow warm ooze of red wine and then you close your eyes to some music, the Jeff Buckley CD Cole can’t stand, she tied you to her kitchen chair, she broke your throne and she cut your hair and from your lips she drew the hallelujah, and you smile at the gathering wet, the expectation.

You walk tall out the door, alive, greedy, knowing. Possibility is wide open before you, as vast as a lake and you want to plunge in, dive deep.

No underpants.

Lesson 62

the cold plunge: nothing can be more invigorating and delightful to a robust girl

He’s already seated and you feel a tremor deep inside you at the sight of him, you’re aching with tenderness as he sits in the café, across the street. He looks up and blooms a grin; your heart is filled up.

You run across to that greasy cafe with its beans on toast and stewed tea that’s never hot enough, to where it all began eight months ago with a water splash. The letters are in your handbag and you’re bold now, sure, and so thoroughly sick of all the uncertainty and tension, the games, the teasing, the waiting. You need to get this said, there are two red patches on your cheeks and you ask him straight out: why do we go on like this, we could, you know, just get a hotel room, or perhaps go back to your flat, or, I don’t know, and you stop, you smile, so confident of his response.

His face.

Pardon, he asks.

His bewilderment.

Um, you hear yourself laughing, off-key, too much, OK, I’m sorry, and your face is stinging with embarrassment. But the letters you begin to say and then you stop and you snap: it doesn’t matter. You excuse yourself, you have to go, you have to get out. You grab your bag, it’s caught round the chair leg and you stumble out and walk down the street, bashing into shoulders and almost walking into posts and wait…wait…you hear behind you, but you don’t turn back and at last there’s the mouth of the tube station in which to disappear, to sink.

What have you done, what have you done?

Your head is in your hands on the tube hurtling home, knuckling your temples, trying to press it all out.

Fool, fool.

To think you knew him.

Lesson 63

never remain in wet clothes or boots

There’s a light from under your front door. Your face is rearranged. Cole’s cooked dinner, it’s a mess, the water that was steaming the vegetables has boiled dry and the apartment’s filled with the sour smell of a saucepan caked black. But he’s tried.

A tight smile.

You haven’t been writing me any letters, have you, the jittery blurt.

Letters, no. Why would I do that? What letters?

Oh nothing, nothing. I got a couple of letters. They were a bit strange. It might be this kid down the street.

What’s going on? Is someone harassing you? Should we call the police?

God no, forget it. It’s silly, harmless. What’s to eat?

There’s a Pandora’s box of questions flying open in Cole’s head, it is all in his face. You excuse yourself, can’t force food down, feel sick. You’ve blundered from Gabriel, he’s slipped from your life.

Fool, fool.

Is there something you want to tell me? Cole’s voice is at the locked bathroom door.

No, no, forget it.

Let me see the letters. Who is this kid? There’s concern in his voice, he will not let up.

I lent him some money for the bus and he’s been on at me ever since. It’s nothing, really, I can handle it. You manage a laugh. It’s OK. All right? Your fingers twist your hair until it hurts.

OK, OK. A pause. Want a cuppa?

You wilt, you slam your eyes shut, you smile with your lips pressed tight.

Yes. Yes, thanks; your voice all choked. And then in the gap under the bathroom door a slim bar of Lindt chocolate appears. You can hardly voice your thank you. For at moments like these the charge in your marriage is suddenly, beautifully, back.

You succumb.

Lesson 64

sweeping and dusting

But not for long.

For the next day there’s no call from Gabriel, or the next. Through late winter and early spring there’s no contact, just an answering machine to receive your carefully rehearsed messages and he never returns your calls. The wind of agitation blows through all your nights, blowing away sleep until you fall, finally, into fitful technicolor dreams at dawn. Involving him, more often than not. He’s wended his way into every corner of your life, he’s a plasterer’s fine residue, dust under a bed, a white film on a shower screen that keeps coming back and back no matter how furiously you wipe. You will him to surprise you, knowing in your heart he won’t.

Just to hear his voice, so you can have your strength back.

You never imagined you had the capacity for such annihilation, never dreamt you could be reduced to something like this. The days stretch on, and the silence in the flat, and your nails are gnawed to the ragged quick and you draw blood chewing on your inner lips. You replay his bewilderment over and over in your head and exclaim out loud at the horror of it. It’s like when your faculty boss years ago told you that his wife had just had a baby and how sad you’d replied, God knows why, how sad, and your strange, stupid words have haunted you ever since.

Why won’t he call, to put your mind at rest? Did he never want to fuck you? Did he just want a friendship, do heterosexual male friends ever just want that? Was he stricken with embarrassment? Did he find himself falling for you and think it could never work? Your Elizabethan author’s no help, she just ignites more questions, more doubt:

Witness the man who loved a woman so wretchedly and dishonestly that he could not be at rest until he defiled her; he forced her to lie with him, and afterwards, to make up the measure of his wickedness, he hated her more than he loved her before.

Is it easier to just disappear?

The questions, the questions and the wind blows through all your nights, rattling the panes and whining to be let in. You toss and turn, as if you’re vomiting sleep.

Lesson 65

poisons act in a way which are injurious to life

But then another letter, more beautiful, more urgent than all the rest.

…You help me to live. You soak through the skin of my days, it’s wonderful, torturous, transcendent all at once.

Rubbing and rubbing at the line between your brow. Why won’t he just ring, why is he so opaque, does he always retreat? You’re singed by the uncertainty, can’t be strong in it by yourself, you’ll run from the mess of your world if you have to and be alone, maddened, if you must.

There’s no one to talk to, to ask advice. You want Theo’s blunt opinion, miss the small pop when the cigarette is taken from her mouth and the talking begins, well, this is what you must do, girl. How many times has she said that in your past? She told you early in your relationship with Cole that she wasn’t sure he was good enough for you; she said remember the Madonna song, don’t settle for second-best, baby. But then she changed her tune when she saw over the years his kindness to you; she stopped her doubt after you told her that his capacity for tenderness always floored you and she was very still as you spoke: she had no answer to that. You wonder where she is now and what she’s doing, as curious as an ex-lover and unhinged, hating yourself, lost.

You crawl on your knees in the kitchen, cramming your mouth with chocolate, block-sized bars of it and then biscuits, whole packets of sweetness, and ice cream and peanut butter from the jar, slurping it and sucking it from your fingers in great dollops of crunch, wanting to hurt hurt hurt and forgetting for an instant the power of slim. Unable to think, read, shop, write, to concentrate on anything very much for Gabriel invades all your actions and thoughts. All the efficiency and control of your professional self has been lost, and you’re sleeping until all hours and then lying on the couch and staring into space, trashy gossip magazines unread on your lap. You can’t bring yourself to ring any of your girlfriends, to see them for coffee or lunch, you’re not ready to explain anything, can’t. You don’t want them judging your lank hair and spots, don’t want their rallying or pity or fuss. You’re phoning Gabriel and hanging up after two rings, you’re phoning Theo and doing the same. You can hardly remember the woman you once were, the sensible university lecturer promptly awake, every morning, at six fifty-six.

Is it love, obsession, infatuation? You don’t know. You think of a strange and beautiful word you read about once, Limerance, a psychological term, meaning an obsessive love, a state that’s almost like a drug. Need like a wolf paces the perimeter of your world, back and forth, back and forth, never letting up. You’re in a state that’s focused entirely on the prey, and your fingers, often, are between your legs, stroking, teasing, stirring as Cole sleeps. You’re appalled by the new appetites within you, kicking their feet and clawing to get out.

You find a calming, over the days, within the pages of your little book. The author’s strong, singular voice never wavers, there’s such a rigour to the text and its exquisite borders of red and black. Was she ever crawling on the floor over a man? You can’t see it.

Maybe she never had a lover, maybe it was all in her head.

You wonder, suddenly, if she was unmarried, in a convent, perhaps; celibate, and so much stronger because of that.

Maybe her isolation was something she revelled in, for it enabled her to work.

Was the author contemptuous of the married state? Wanting to shake it up? Perhaps the book is even more subversive than you thought. You suspect she was writing it for any woman but herself.

Not woemen be in subjection to men but men to woemen.

How had she been released?

Lesson 66

happiness and virtue alike lie in action

May. The weather is unclenching, there’s a lightness in the air.

The library stacks. The light’s buoyant outside but gloomy inside. It’s been a long time since you’ve come here. Each narrow passageway is illuminated by tugging a string at the end of it and your footsteps ring out on the cast-iron grates with the deadening clang of a jailer. A librarian returning books glances up from a floor below and you remember, too late, that you shouldn’t be wearing a skirt in this place, it’s an old Library lore: the wide spaces in the grates allow people to look up. To give you a shot of erotic courage you’ve not worn underpants but it feels suddenly wrong, you being here, in this state; trying to work but wondering if you’ll see Gabriel by chance, trying to erase one obsession with another and in a place so soaked with them both.

He’s not here. You just want to talk, to put your mind at rest. As you walk from the grills some of the grates shift slightly underfoot and the effect’s dizzying and unpleasant and you’re hating this ragged need in you that doesn’t sit at all comfortably with your public face.

You sit at a desk. Grip its edge. Breathe deep. You have to concentrate on your own book, you must make it work: you need a spine to your life.

And then it comes to you, as beautifully and obediently as a tangle of necklaces that you’ve spent so long trying to unpick, and with the simple looping of one set of beads through another the knot of them magically comes apart.

You will respond to your mysterious seventeenth-century author.

You will write a book in secret, just like her. Why not? All writing is revenge, is it not. Yes, yes. You lick your lips. Reach for your notebook. And in an afternoon lost within the deep, deep peace of solid, consuming work, you produce three lists:

Men you have slept with, what you remember most.

How they seduced.

And on what.

Lesson 67

feather beds are a greater luxury than mattresses but are said to be less healthy

Beds, of course:

A stained futon on the floor. A sister’s bed that smelt of grass. An attic eyrie mattress. A caravan bed that was vaguely damp. Your parents-in-laws’ stern spare bed with sheets so slippery you fell off. A deliciously broad hotel bed in Hong Kong, wider than its length. Two single mattresses zipped together and you felt they’d break apart at any moment, they’d swallow you up.

And the non-beds:

A car bonnet. Shag-pile carpet that burned. A field of curious cows. A swimming pool at three in the morning, with the water buoying you under a circus tent of stars. There was the quiet as you fucked, you remember that so clearly, just the water’s soft trickle and swish as you clung to each other and didn’t speak, not a word, focusing on the intensity of the touch and the water’s caress.

A hire car. Sand. A kitchen table at a maiden aunt’s.

All the cliches. It’s remarkable how similar most of the men’s techniques were and yet how distinct each one is in your memory even if the name is not. You remember the unpleasant experiences more vividly than the pleasant ones; you remember why they didn’t work. And your let-down. That it wasn’t better than what you’d hoped, at the start, as your clothes were coming off. You always masked it.

It’s a shame, that.

Lesson 68

April is the hopeful month for gardening

You visit the Library again and again. You walk the bold iron skeleton of the beautiful building, your building as much as his. Just because he comes here doesn’t mean you can’t, and you slip off your shoes and arch your soles and your stockinged feet thrum on the iron. Strips of fluorescent tubing cast baubles of brightness here and there; above and below you readers sit or squat, isolated in their little circles of light. Old wooden desks wait at the ends of the passages like rest bays on a highway and there’s the intoxicating smell of paper and leather, of words, waiting. You begin, finally, to tackle the book. To ask questions:

Why are women so constrained about pleasing themselves, why are they so focused on everyone else’s pleasure at the expense of their own?

What happens if they try to live selfishly?

But then a pool of light, philology, one vaulting spring day.

Your heart somersaults.

He is sitting on the ground with his back to a wall, reading and jotting on a notebook by his side. You do not go to him, you just look: his nape, his hair flopping into his eyes, his hand curled round the pen that clicks as agreeably as a lipstick, his watch from the forties with its broad, age-spotted face.

Something makes him glance up. He catches your eye.

His smile, like an umbrella whooshed inside out.

Yours back.

You’re both trapped in this, you can see that. It’s in his face.

Lesson 69

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