The Bride Stripped Bare Set: The Bride Stripped Bare / With My Body. Nikki Gemmell

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