Touch, intimacy, and consent

Touch, intimacy, and consent form a recurring physical language in Gerry and Stella’s relationship, but not a simple one. A joined hand can mean tenderness, protection, or an assumption of control; the difference depends on whether Stella is choosing the contact. The novel tests that distinction in Amsterdam’s streets and galleries, then places it beside private intimacy, prayer, and the fragile gestures through which the couple try to remain connected.

Holding hands between care and control

Gerry habitually takes Stella’s hand when they cross a road in Amsterdam. He knows she has little sense of the speed of approaching traffic, and that looking the wrong way there can be dangerous. At home, she uses pedestrian crossings by herself. He experiences the handholding not as her hooking onto him but as skin meeting skin: to him, the fit feels intimate, almost made for them. His understanding is affectionate, yet it is still his understanding of what the contact means.

The canal walk makes that tenderness tangible. Beside a bridge crowded with abandoned bicycles, their flat tyres and rusted frames seem to Stella like the remains of a flood, or bare, forked animals. Gerry offers his hand, and she takes it. When she is cold, he puts their joined hands in his pocket and jokes that the other two hands must manage alone. The gesture offers warmth and turns the surrounding wreckage into a moment of shared physical shelter. Their hands are not merely a symbol: they are held together against the cold.

The next crossing unsettles that apparent ease. Gerry takes her hand but keeps hold as they wait; when a gap opens, he leads her towards the middle of the road. Stella is nervous and freezes as a black four-by-four approaches. Gerry tightens his grip, but she wrenches her hand away. He crosses and waits on the far pavement while she stands in the road, looking both ways, before running to him as the vehicle passes. His fear is expressed as a warning that she might get them both killed; her reply insists that he cannot judge on her behalf. The scene does not dismiss the danger or his concern. It shows that care can become coercive when he treats his assessment as a substitute for hers. Their closeness is real, but it does not cancel her right to decide.

The painting’s grammar of permission

At the Rijksmuseum, The Jewish Bride gives Stella a visual language for thinking about touch. The large painting draws a crowd: its reds, browns, and yellows surround a man and woman poised at the edge of intimacy, or just beyond it. Gerry attends to the painterly handling of the man’s hand and sleeve; Stella reads the couple’s gestures. She sees tenderness in the husband and a woman who is shy but not fully sure. His hand rests at her shoulder and breast, while the bride touches his hand and protects her stomach with the other.

For Stella, the hands make the question of permission visible. The woman allows one touch, but her other hand guards her body; affection and reserve occupy the same image. Stella argues that the subject is the woman’s permission, while Gerry initially objects to her suggestion that the hands seem too large. Their exchange makes the painting more than a picture of romantic closeness: it becomes a debate about how touch is represented and who has the authority to interpret it. Stella’s account does not reduce intimacy to either refusal or surrender. The woman’s gestures hold consent and caution together, and the painting’s hands make that tension impossible to overlook.

The image also returns to the couple’s own physical language. Gerry watches Stella studying the painting, then excuses himself and threads through the crowd to stand beside her. Later, when he holds up his hands as if unsure what to do with them, he reaches out and touches her, in an echo of the husband in the painting. The sequence links art to action, but it does not make the two equivalent: Stella has spoken about permission, while Gerry’s uncertain gesture is followed by their making love. Afterwards, in the warm, darkening room, he puts his arm around her. The scene presents physical intimacy as part of their marriage without turning the painting’s interpretation into a universal rule or claiming that a gesture alone resolves every question of consent.

Touch, prayer, and forms of presence

Gerry also encounters Stella’s private religious practice through the body. One night he sees her kneeling beside the bed in her white nightdress, hands joined in prayer. He has been about to make a joke, but stops; at home they often go to bed at different times, and he had not known that she still prayed this way. The unexpected sight makes visible a life she carries on beyond his view. Her joined hands belong to a steady nightly practice, not a performance for him.

Stella’s prayers move through her loved ones, her family, and gratitude for her survival. She remembers her father lying in the front room after his death, watched so that he would not be alone, his hands tied with a rosary. The memory connects touch and presence with care for a vulnerable body, while her present prayers extend to refugees and people fleeing war. Gerry waits, washing his hands slowly rather than interrupting. When she finishes, makes the sign of the cross, and stands, the scene’s intimacy rests partly in his restraint: he witnesses a practice he does not share in the same way without converting it into a joke or demanding access to it.

At Christmas Mass, touch takes on a public and ritual form. Gerry remembers the invitation to offer a sign of peace: he kisses Stella and shakes hands with strangers around them. Stella then tells him that she and Sister Francis are Eucharistic ministers. She leaves him, receives communion with the nun, and later distributes hosts from a gold chalice to the people approaching the altar. From his seat, Gerry sees her bending slightly towards each person. Her movements make him newly conscious of her age and of how much he does not know about her. When she returns, kneels, and covers her face with her hands, he hears her breath catch. He wonders whether her dry eye condition prevents her from crying, but does not intrude. The remembered scene places familiar marital contact beside religious service and private distress: being close does not mean that Gerry can read everything in Stella’s body, or that he should presume to enter every silence.

The hand as a fragile renewal

Later, Gerry finds Stella reading in the Begijnhof church. The encounter matters to him partly because the sight of her, caught unawares, still gives him a thrill. It is an intimacy grounded in attention rather than possession: he sees her absorbed in something beyond their shared life, and approaches her there.

At the airport, after Stella has concluded that an all-female religious collective is no longer an option, she says the flat may not have to be sold if Gerry keeps his word about giving up drinking. He nods and puts a hand on her arm. The gesture follows a condition, not a declaration that the problem has vanished. Silence comes before he offers reassurance, and Stella asks him to repeat it, answering with a small pedalling motion that suggests the words should continue. Across these scenes, touch never guarantees agreement or repair. Its significance lies in the choices around it: when Gerry holds on, when Stella pulls away, when he waits, and when a hand rests on her arm after she has set terms for what comes next.