style="font-size:15px;"> 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.
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.
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
