The Bride Stripped Bare. Nikki Gemmell
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.
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.
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.
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