The Bride Stripped Bare

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.