1
Each has her past shut in her like the leaves of a book known to her by heart, and her friends can only read the title
Four a.m. The prowling hour. The wakefulness comes into Connie like a blade flicked open, for ours is essentially a fearful age and she is a child of it. All her choices in adult life have been dictated by fear and now, in the early hours, it curdles.
Fear of entrapment. Of being found out. Of turning into one of those women for whom indecision has become a vocation, of a silent slipping into that. Of emotional sledging, that she is becoming less resilient, not more, as she sails beyond youth. Of softening into fat, of men who take note as if she’s ripe for a mugging, of life settling like concrete around her and judgement; of what people think of her, yes, that most of all. Women! How awful they can be.
When does the unliving start? For a particular female of this particular age, it is incremental. For Connie – ensconced in her five-storey villa in London’s Notting Hill that was once splashed creamily across the pages of Architectural Digest – it has begun.
2
The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages
But there is one small pocket of Connie’s life where there is no fear.
Quite the opposite, in fact.
None of the people in her regular world of kick-boxing with her private trainer in Kensington Gardens, of ladies lunching around the communal table at Ottolenghi and of shop scouring, endlessly, on Westbourne Grove, knows of this place. In this one tiny corner of her existence all the blushing is left behind; she is unbound. Connie blooms in this world, into someone else entirely. It is a place that is open with possibility, with the potency of power, and she has so little of that in her regular life. It bequeaths her little moments of vividness that have become like scooping a hand into cool, clear creek water in summer’s heat.
3
Blame it or praise it, there is no denying the wild horse in us
Cliff has called. He has asked Connie to be ready in two hours. He is taking this late afternoon off – rare in the silky world of a Mayfair hedge fund manager – and a car will pick her up. Her stomach rolls in anticipation, as he speaks, it rolls as if a steamroller is gently travelling over it. The tugging, deep in her belly, the wet; at the whispered command, it has been a long time, too long, since this.
‘Prepare yourself.’
Connie waits for the car on the Lockheed chaise longue – made entirely of riveted aluminium – by its tall window in a mewly winter light. She loves how the metal of her coveted design piece looks like a giant goblet of mercury, like something else entirely; thrills at the sternness of it against her flesh. Its arresting cold. She is shaved, perfumed; this is all necessary now. To her, and to Cliff, dear Cliff, to whom she has been married for four years and with him for five before it.
Connie is dressed well. Always, she is dressed well. A woman who has the instinctive touch of looking impeccably ‘right’, on every occasion; conservative, with a flick of cool. Today, it is the shortened Chanel skirt of grey bouclé with veins of red through it. The iron-grey, silk Chloé blouse that slips like water from Connie’s hands and hangs below the jacket cuffs with something of the loucheness of the seventies to it; a touch of Bianca Jagger in her prime. The black lace Rigby and Peller bra, fitted by the Queen’s fitters. Wolford stockings. No knickers. Shoes, vintage McQueen’s, that look like the snout of a bull terrier. Fearsome, hobbling, but Connie has mastered them; everything in her rarefied life appears gilded, effortless.
She must be entirely shaved, of course. ‘I need you bare,’ Cliff has whispered, his voice dropping an octave as Connie squeezes her thighs together, tight, so tight, upon the thought. Bare for whom? What?
The car, sleek and panther black, purrs to a stop outside their villa which backs onto one of Notting Hill’s finest communal gardens, an expanse of several hidden acres now silent with snow on this January afternoon. A pristine, waiting brittleness. It has been a particularly long winter. One pair of footprints, heavy workman’s boots, smear the glary expanse of the great lawn like the restless prowl of a lone wolf; but no child plays, no adult wanders. The sky is pale, almost white. Everything waits. But for what …?
The lady of the house picks her way carefully down the icy marble steps. She smiles her too wide, too unEnglish smile at Lara Deniston-Dickson, her neighbour, who is nudging recalcitrant window boxes into spring preparation after winter’s clench; checking on the wilted cyclamens that withstand so much. Lara is one of the few Brits left on this square. Her dilapidated house is crammed with fabulous but shabby heirlooms, oak dressers and chairs, a dining table piled with books, washstands, a zebra rug, ancestral portraits, a Modigliani from Granny, several pianos and a lot of dust – the servants have long gone, as has the heat. It is one of the few houses left like this on the square as the bankers have sharked in, mainly from foreign countries, everyone, it seems, but the Russians because this is still not Belgravia, still a bit too ragged, edgy, loose for that lot. Lara has a grand disdain for this new world that has gone into lockdown, barricading the riff-raff out. Even her husband, dear Rupert, a man of some standing, thank you very much, yet treated like a tramp, asked by the new committee if he ‘owned’ – if he deserved a key to this very garden – merely because he was old and a touch scruffy with it. Oh yes, Lara has a disdain for these shiny, refulgent newcomers with their babies in cashmere and men in their too-new Barbour coats, all of them; except for the poor, lost girl next door with her dazzle of a smile that illuminates her face as if she is lit from within, but she doesn’t see it enough.
She does now. ‘Going out?’ The older woman smiles in approval, for she likes to see her sweet slip of a neighbour getting some fresh air, cheeks flushed; bound as she is to her workaholic husband and his precise demands. Connie knows little of his previous life, she has told Lara that.
‘I have no idea where,’ Connie laughs. ‘Do you? No, I didn’t think so. It’s a complete surprise. He adores them. To a quite ridiculous extent.’ She is talking of her husband as if he is a little boy.
‘He’s a keeper, that one.’ Lara nods, smiling, a woman who has lived through three marriages and four children. ‘A good marriage is fed with kindness, of course, but surprise, the gift of it – now that is the hidden ingredient. To sparkle things up now and then. Absolutely necessary in my book.’
‘Oh yes.’ Connie waves a pale hand nonchalantly, a hand manicured three times a week, upon which sits a single ruby within a protective ring of diamonds that once encircled the finger of Wallis Simpson. ‘Oh yes,’ she repeats, stepping into the warmth of the idling car and staring into her husband’s eyes as he waits in the back seat, spinning in the deft fingers of his left hand his Mont Blanc Bohème Noir pen. The pen that has been everywhere, that has begun all this; with the words it wrote, with the secret world it sprang into life.
4
She had the perpetual