Читать книгу Rosie Thomas 4-Book Collection: Other People’s Marriages, Every Woman Knows a Secret, If My Father Loved Me, A Simple Life - Rosie Thomas - Страница 12

Nina waited all of that same day for Gordon Ransome to telephone her. She went up to her studio and sat at her drawing board, automatically dipping the tip of the fine brush into her paints, but she was only pretending to work.

She felt loose in her joints, and as languid and sleepy as if she had eaten a heavy meal. Sometimes she found herself smiling when she remembered some detail of the night’s intimacy. She tried to manufacture irritation with this new hypnotized condition, but there was only a stubborn satisfaction. She began to imagine what certain of her women friends would say if she told them, and their various shades of scepticism or envy.

At first she was happy, with an edge of anticipation warmed by certainty when she looked at the telephone beside her. But then, as the hours crept by, she grew colder and less confident. She thought more often of Vicky full-blown in her pregnancy, and the new baby, and of her own thoughtless capitulation to a man she hardly knew. The night they had shared seemed to change its significance, losing its recollected warmth and becoming merely sordid, shameful. From longing to hear his voice she swung to embarrassment at the thought of ever having to encounter him again.

The telephone rang only once, at five o’clock, and she snatched it up immediately, betraying herself. It was Janice Frost.

‘Nina? Andrew and I wondered if you’d like to come over and have supper on Sunday. Nothing elaborate, just the Cleggs and the Roses after golf, and probably Gordon Ransome before Vicky comes home on Monday. Not the Wickhams, because they’re busy.’

Nina said at once, ‘That sounds nice.’

Then she became flustered at the thought of facing Gordon under the scrutiny of the smiling couples and lied hastily, ‘But … I had thought of going to London for the weekend. I don’t know if I’d be back in time …’

‘Don’t worry,’ Janice said easily. ‘It’s only a kitchen supper. Come along by eight if you’re back, and if you feel like it. Have a good weekend. Bye.’

At last, at seven o’clock, Nina could bear the silence no longer. She had made no plans for the weekend, but she ran down to her bedroom and crammed some clothes into a bag and then telephoned Patrick. It would be better to leave Grafton, to make herself unavailable. That would be the right statement to make. As she walked through the wintry rain to the station, Nina wished for the first time since leaving London for the freedom of a car.

Patrick’s panelled rooms in the Spitalfields house were reassuringly the same as always. He had lit candles in the old black iron sconces, and there was a smell of melted wax and wood smoke.

‘What has happened?’ he asked Nina.

Nina tilted her wine, looking at the pinhead bubbles faintly distorted and rainbowed by Patrick’s handblown Venetian glass. Small details of the physical world seemed suddenly to have become very clear; there were the tiny stitches in a tapestry cushion beneath her elbow, a faint smear of wood ash on the oak table, the whispered scratch of nylon mesh as her calves rubbed together.

‘Happened?’

‘Yes. Is it a man?’

There was a different look to her. He had noticed it as soon as she arrived.

Nina laughed. ‘Clever you.’

‘Not especially. It’s plain to see.’

Patrick stood up and put another log on the fire. The half-burned ones were mantled in white ash seamed with glowing scarlet threads. Watching him, and seeing his economical, faintly old-maidish movements as he tidied the stone hearth, Nina thought how much she loved him, and also loved this room where everything had been chosen for its beauty and placed with care and attention. It drew her back to Richard’s world and made a contrast with the Grafton houses that she had visited, bursting with children and haphazard furniture and colour supplement chintzes. This small piece of superiority distanced her from Gordon who had filled her mind through the train journey. The recognition of their differences reassured her.

‘It’s nothing. One night, that’s all. He’s married, with about a dozen children. But it was very nice, just for the one night.’

Patrick did not give any sign of approval. He was wary and tentative in his own relationships, and celibate now. He had shared the months of Nina’s grieving for her husband and he was glad to see her sudden brightness, but the circumstances were not what he would have wished for her.

‘Be careful,’ he said, knowing that he sounded joyless.

She nodded her head to acknowledge the warning, moral and emotional and physical.

‘I was. I shall be.’

But she felt wonderful, sitting and drinking her wine and watching the fire in Patrick’s company. It was wonderful to have given and received love again, however briefly. The shame had faded away, leaving her with clear eyes to admire the miniature perfections of the ordinary world. Her head teemed with ideas, silently drifting like thick snowflakes. She began to think of her alphabet paintings, and it came to her that she might paint a rainbow in the bowl of a glass, like Patrick’s, with a medieval room reflected in it like a jewel.

‘Nina? What would you like to do? We could go to a late film, if there is anything you want to see.’

Patrick watched her.

‘I don’t want to go out. Unless you do.’

He could remember the precise mixture of dreaminess and sharp awareness, although he had not felt it himself for a long time. The contemplation of it made him both envious and sad.

‘Are you hungry? Shall I cook something?’

Nina uncrossed her legs and stood up, going to Patrick and putting her arms around him. There was a tiny hole at the shoulder seam of his vicuna sweater, and the fairish hair at the neat shaved line beside his ear glittered with silver. When they hugged each other she felt that he stood solid and there was no longer an involuntary recoil from the old crudity of her grief. She patted his shoulder gently, like a mother, and released him.

‘Let’s cook something together. It’s ages since I made a proper meal.’

She was hungry, she realized.

Nina followed Patrick into his austere kitchen. She opened the door of his refrigerator and looked in at the neat single portions of food. She had not been expected, of course.

They were both lonely. The various modes and varieties of loneliness confronted her like the meat and vegetables on the white racks. She remembered the Grafton couples with their big warm kitchens and pine tables and easy hospitality, and the façades of smiles.

Her first judgement of them had been a simplification. It had been born out of envy, and the over-awareness of her own solitude. Last night with Gordon Ransome she had glimpsed confusion behind the smooth faces, and now she felt a beat of gratitude for the past happiness of her own marriage.

She held the refrigerator door open wider.

‘What shall we make?’ she asked Patrick.

At seven-thirty, after a day of meetings and a distant site visit, and after he had been to the hospital and come home at last, Gordon dialled Nina’s number. There was no answer, not even the bland invitation of an answering machine. He held the receiver for a long time, listening to the hollow ringing tone.

He tried again and again, through the slow weekend until the digits were imprinted in his head like a mantra, but there was never any reply.

For Nina it was a London weekend like many others she had known. The form of it was both familiar and already consigned to history. She went with Patrick to the theatre to see a play by a new feminist writer, and to Blooms for dinner with Patrick’s friends. On Sunday morning they went to Brick Lane market to rummage for treasures amongst the faded bric-à-brac, and then to Hampstead for a lengthy lunch with more old friends who only noted with pleasure that Nina looked well, almost herself again.

At the lunch there was an architect, recently divorced, whom she had not met before, although he claimed to have known Richard. After they had eaten they went out to walk on the heath amongst the Sunday crowds of dog-exercisers and kite-flyers and children on tricycles. The architect walked beside Nina, and after a little way he asked her if she would like to have dinner with him one evening.

Nina’s hands were in the pockets of her coat. She rubbed the residue of crumbs and fluff between her fingers, and looked ahead at the silhouettes of walkers against the greenish sky on the crest of Parliament Hill. This afternoon was perfectly familiar to her, like the wider axis that contained it, and she had felt herself growing impatient with it as the hours passed. She was thinking about Grafton, and wanting to hurry back there.

She smiled at the architect. ‘I can’t, but thank you. I don’t live in London any longer. I moved away to the country and I have to go back this evening.’

‘Next time you are in town then, perhaps,’ the man said, observing the conventions.

It was getting dark, with the rapid sinking into gloom of a December afternoon. The party broke up as one couple with their children turned at an angle across the heath towards their own house.

‘I should get back to Grafton,’ Nina said to Patrick. She calculated that if she caught the six o’clock train she could be at the Frosts’ house by not long after eight. She did not let herself reckon beyond that. Patrick heard the note of urgency in her voice.

‘I’ll drive you to Paddington,’ he offered.

At the station Nina hugged him again. He made a surprised face, to indicate that he was unused to such an abundance of affection.

‘Next time, will you come down to stay with me?’ she asked. Her face was bright. She had discovered something, some seam of happiness, and she wanted to share it with him or to have him admire it. ‘There are nice people. I’d like you to meet them.’

He accepted that she was being generous. ‘Of course I will come.’

‘Good. Maybe I’ll give a party.’ There had been lots of parties before Richard died.

‘Be careful, won’t you?’ Patrick repeated.

‘Certainly.’ She laughed, and again he found himself envying her abandonment to whatever would come. He stood on the platform and waved as the train pulled away, and then drove slowly back to Spitalfields through the Sunday blackness of the City.

All the way back to Grafton Nina willed the train to go faster, like a schoolgirl longing for the hour of a crucial party.

Jimmy Rose held up the television remote control, aiming it at the screen as if he wanted to shoot and kill. He made the circuit of the channels and discovered what he already knew, that there was nothing he wanted to watch. He depressed the volume control and watched Harry Secombe’s face swell to fill the screen, silently mouthing.

Stella was upstairs somewhere. The Roses lived in a small modern house and without the noise from the television Jimmy could hear the creaks that she made, crossing the bedroom floor to open a cupboard, and then the metallic rasp as she set up the ironing board.

Jimmy stretched his legs in front of him and drank the remains of a beer from the can. It was dark outside, but he had not yet drawn the curtains across the big window that looked into the garden. He could see himself fishily reflected in the black glass.

Usually Jimmy enjoyed Sundays. He made it a rule not to do any work, nor even to think about work if that was feasible, and to concentrate on pleasing himself. It was a matter of satisfaction to him that he and Star had long ago come to a comfortable agreement about this. Star liked to garden on Sundays, or to sit quietly and read, whereas Jimmy was not interested in the garden and he read only occasional thrillers or sports biographies. Jimmy’s preference was to stay late in bed, to go off to play squash or golf with one or more of the Grafton men, and afterwards to drink with them in the bar or the clubhouse. Sometimes Star and the other wives would join them for the drinking part, although he preferred it when they did not. Sunday evenings, if they were not entertaining or invited out anywhere, were a pleasantly hazy slide towards bedtime and the jolt of Monday morning.

This Sunday, however, had not been one of the best. Darcy Clegg was Jimmy’s usual golf partner, but today Darcy had proposed a swap. Darcy himself had partnered a regular golfer called Francis Kelly, and Jimmy had ended up with Michael Wickham. Michael had hardly spoken to Jimmy or anyone else throughout the round, and he seemed to take a grim satisfaction in playing extremely badly. He had hooked most of his drives into the rough halfway along the fairway, and putted as if he were using a yard broom.

Through Jimmy’s efforts they had managed to hold level as far as the short fifteenth hole, but they lost that one and the next three in succession. By the time they reached the clubhouse bar Jimmy was in as bad a mood as Michael himself. He did not like to lose at any game, and he particularly disliked losing to Darcy.

The clubroom was crowded with golfers, most of them men, although not many of the members had braved the wintry fairways beforehand. The bar was a popular Sunday drinking place for the prosperous and established Grafton set who considered the Eagle on the cathedral green to cater only for tourists, and the other city pubs to be spoiled by kids and electronic games and loud music. Francis and Jimmy edged through the knots of convivial drinkers, with Michael frowning in their wake.

‘A man could die of thirst,’ Jimmy said, eyeing the press at the bar.

The other three had had to shoulder their way forward, but Darcy did not. A way opened into the groups in front of him as heads turned and hands reached out in greeting. Satisfaction was perceptible, as if the drinkers were now reassured that they were in the right and proper place because Darcy had arrived.

‘Darcy Clegg, the man himself.’

‘You haven’t been out there this morning, Darcy? It’s much more comfortable in here with a glass in your hand, I can tell you.’

Darcy nodded his big head, smiling a faint but amiable smile and bestowing a word here and there. He reached the bar, and held up a finger to the sweating barman.

‘Morning, Mr Clegg. What’ll it be?’

‘Four pints, Gerry, and whatever you are having.’

Darcy did not ask his companions what they were drinking, nor did anyone question his right to buy the first round. He handled the exchange adroitly, as he did everything else, but his expression indicated that he was part of this only so far as he wanted to be, and also somewhat above it.

The clubroom was unusually crowded, and once their drinks were served they had to perch on stools around one of the low tables in the main body of the room because there was no space at the bar.

‘What’s up, Michael?’ Jimmy drank, and tiny wings of froth were left at the corners of his mouth. He added, ‘Apart from your golf, that is.’

Michael shrugged. ‘Nothing’s up. Sorry to lose you the game.’

He turned his glass on the table. He was a dark, lean man with crisp hair turning grey. He had doctorly hands, faintly reddened and with prominent wristbones. He was never forthcoming, but his moroseness this morning was beginning to affect everyone.

Jimmy felt almost physically pained that this precious and pleasant Sunday time should be spoiled. Darcy’s big frame seemed uncomfortable on the small stool, and he was already glancing over Francis Kelly’s shoulder to the noisy crowd at the bar. In a minute, Jimmy knew, he would get up and go to join them. Jimmy’s response to this, for which he disliked himself, was to talk too much, clowning for the benefit of the three other men. He told a story about events at a recent conference his small company had organized, but he did it too hurriedly and with too much false comic emphasis. Darcy looked at him with his eyebrows slightly lifted, and only Francis laughed.

When Jimmy saw Hannah Clegg in the doorway he was relieved. Normally he would not have been pleased to have this Sunday session disrupted, although in most other circumstances he liked Hannah as well as admiring her appearance. But today she was welcome. Now, at least, Darcy would not stroll away in search of better company.

Hannah came across to their table trailing appreciative glances. She was wearing a sleeveless suede jerkin over a cream sweater, and cream knitted trousers that showed the vee between her thighs. She kissed the four of them in turn, Darcy last.

‘I thought I’d catch you in here,’ she said gaily. ‘Just a small gin and tonic for me, Darcy. I’m on my way to pick up Freddie.’

‘Is he all right now?’ Michael asked, looking up from his beer.

‘Yes, thanks, Michael, he’s fine. A lot of fuss about nothing, as it turned out.’

Freddie was the Cleggs’ six-year-old. Hannah explained to Francis and Jimmy that the little boy had developed a startlingly high temperature a few days before, when Darcy was away on business, and their GP had been slow to arrive. In a panic Hannah had telephoned Michael, who was at least a doctor although his field was orthopaedic surgery not paediatrics. Michael had driven round to the Cleggs’ mansion to examine the boy and reassure Hannah.

Jimmy and Francis listened to this recital without much interest. Hannah was inclined to talk at length about her children. She put her hand out and touched Michael’s shoulder. Her fingers with elongated pale pink nails rested lightly for a moment.

‘Thank you,’ she said again.

Michael’s body skewed sideways as he tried unobtrusively to lean away from her, but his manner lost some of its stiffness.

‘It was nothing. I said so at the time. I was glad to do what I could, which was not much.’

‘Just the same, thank you.’

Hannah’s soft face was pink, and her lower lip jutted out to reveal the darker pink tissue within. Michael looked full at her, unnoticed by the others, and then dropped his gaze back to his drink. Hannah settled comfortably at the table. She told Jimmy that they would be meeting later at the Frosts, and that Nina Cort would be there, and then she turned away to talk to Michael.

Jimmy bought another round and concentrated on drinking steadily, hoping to recapture some of the sense of Sunday camaraderie that stayed with him like a blessing through the following week. He loved the way the men were friendly and informal at these times, but were yet held together by unwritten rules. It offended him when someone failed to obey the rules, as Michael had done this morning.

Hannah showed no sign of leaving. She accepted Jimmy’s offer of a second gin and tonic, and when the drinks had been consumed Darcy checked his watch and announced that they must go. Hannah made no protest, and five minutes after they had left Michael followed them. Finally Francis also drifted away.

Jimmy went to the bar and drank a quick whisky, wondering if he should join another group, but the day was already spoiled. He went home and found the house empty. Star had told him she was going out somewhere, although he had forgotten exactly where. He made himself a sandwich and fell asleep in front of the television, and then woke up with a headache when Star came back.

He heard her coming downstairs now, and then clicking across the woodblock floor of the hall.

‘Why are you sitting with the curtains open?’ she asked when she saw him.

‘Why not? Nobody can see in.’

Star went across and closed them. She was wearing a shirt cut like a man’s, but made of peacock-blue silk, and a pair of tight trousers in some elasticated material that showed the lines of her good legs. She did not usually take so much trouble with her appearance for a Sunday supper at the Frosts’.

‘You look nice,’ Jimmy said lazily. He held out a hand. ‘Come over here.’

She came and stood in front of him for a moment. Jimmy reached up and put his hands on her hips, kneading the flesh over her long bones and then sliding his palms inwards over the slight protuberance of her stomach so that the smooth silk slithered under his fingers.

‘I like this shirt. Is tonight something special?’

He was looking forward to it, he realized, after the fiasco of the day. He liked well-upholstered Janice and her dark eyes as much as he liked Hannah Clegg, and his ears had sharpened at the news that Nina Cort was also coming, although he had not betrayed his interest to Hannah.

‘Special? No, I don’t think so. Aren’t you going to change?’

He stood up. Star was two inches taller than he was, and with him in his socks the difference seemed greater than that. He had always liked it, ever since they had first met, this feeling of being overreached by her. He pressed his face forward and with his mouth found her neck, warm inside the collar of her shirt.

‘Mmm. You smell lovely.’

‘Aren’t you going to change?’ Star repeated.

Jimmy sighed. His mood had completely altered. He felt light-hearted and optimistic.

‘If I must.’ He made his eyebrows into beguiling peaks as he looked at her. ‘Won’t you come up?’

‘It’s a quarter to eight.’ She had turned away and bent down to straighten the sofa cushions behind him.

Jimmy sighed again, more theatrically. ‘A quarter of an hour used to be plenty,’ he cajoled.

She seemed not to hear what he was saying. Jimmy hesitated, and then shrugged and went whistling upstairs in his good humour to change out of his golf clothes.

Nina was the last to arrive at the Frosts’. As she paid off her taxi at the gate she saw Gordon’s car parked further along the road. She rang the doorbell, remembering the night of Hallowe’en, and Andrew came to open the door. Instead of a dinner suit he was wearing a patterned jumper that proclaimed Sunday.

The Frosts’ other guests were sitting in the room where they had danced at the party. Nina remembered that there had been coloured lights revolving overhead, and she had felt a premonitory beat of happiness to find herself momentarily set free from her grief, dancing amongst people who knew nothing about her.

Now she saw Darcy Clegg’s handsome, heavy face, and Hannah with her hair pinned up in a sleek chignon, and Star in a bright blue shirt. To her left, a dark shape in an armchair, was Gordon. Nina could not look directly at him.

Of the three women only Star greeted her with friendly attention. Janice distractedly offered her cheek to be kissed, and Hannah waved her ringed fingers from the other side of the room. There was a cool edge to the atmosphere, Nina thought, or perhaps she was beginning to distinguish these people more clearly.

She found her way to a place on the sofa beside Darcy. Andrew put a glass into her hand and she cupped her hands around the slippery bowl of it. There were soft cushions behind her, and when she tasted the wine there were the complicated flavours on her tongue. The physical world took on sharp significance again.

‘You’ve just come back from London?’ Darcy asked. He too was wearing the Sunday uniform of a sweater and corduroys, but the trousers were Italian and the sweater was cashmere.

‘Yes. I went up to stay with an old friend of Richard’s and mine, to see a play and have lunch with some people.’

She offered this simple account to Gordon, without glancing in his direction, and she knew that he listened to her.

Darcy had read the reviews of the play in the Sunday papers, and they began to talk about what Nina had thought of it. The conversations elsewhere in the room started up again, although Nina did not hear Gordon speak. Someone was describing a disastrous round of golf, and generating a good deal of brittle laughter. It was Jimmy Rose, of course. Each of Nina’s senses, not only her hearing, seemed abnormally sharpened. She could hear the unspoken words underlying the bantering talk. Jimmy had been upset and disappointed to lose the game. The clarity of her perceptions made her feel strong and lively.

Darcy was watching her from beneath the shield of his thick eyelids. There was a faint flush over her cheekbones and her fingers fluttered up and down the stem of her glass.

And then, without warning, the recollection that had stirred in him when they were first introduced delivered itself to him, almost complete. Somebody had described the circumstances of Richard Cort’s death, and then had made an allegation that did not particularly interest him at the time. But he remembered it now, with a sharpening of curiosity. It was a woman who had told him the story, a woman he knew quite well, at a useful party in London a few months before.

The theatre conversation continued while Darcy idly speculated.

‘Did you see the Arthur Miller?’ he asked, and Nina offered her response still with the faint colour in her face. Across the room Jimmy Rose was grinning at them, although neither Darcy nor Nina paid him any attention.

The elder Frost boy, Toby, came in. His hair was shaved close at the nape of his neck and a long hank at the front fell forward over his eyes. He was wearing a loose top with a hood and enormous shoes.

‘Hi, all.’

With this generalized greeting he seated himself on the edge of the low table that filled the middle of the room. With one hand he swept back the lock of hair that immediately fell forward again. Nina noticed with interest that he was perfectly at ease, and thought that at the same age both she and Toby’s father would have been paralysed with shyness in the unlikely event of being asked to confront a roomful of their parents’ friends.

I’m getting old, she thought, amused.

‘Have you done your homework, Toby?’ Andrew de- manded.

‘Yeah, Dad, it’s okay,’ the boy answered, raking at his hair again.

‘I hear you played well yesterday,’ Darcy offered.

‘Not too badly.’

They began to talk about a school football match. Nina had nothing to contribute, and in any case she did not know how to talk to twelve-year-old boys. Under the cover of momentary invisibility she let herself glance across at Gordon. His eyes met hers.

She was shaken at once by a sense of intense familiarity.

Her knowledge of his shape and of the lines of his face was so intimate and tender that it seemed shocking to contemplate it in the midst of this neutral gathering of friends.

She felt that she knew this man so well that it was as if Richard was here, sitting in an armchair in Andrew Frost’s den. The room would certainly be called the den. Nina’s mouth curved and she saw her smile answered in Gordon’s eyes. They looked at each other with amazed pleasure for another two seconds, and then Nina turned her head away.

It was inconceivable that the conversation around them had not stopped, that everyone else in the room had not fallen into silence as they took stock of what must be blind-ingly obvious. But they were all still talking, and no one had even glanced at them. Nina’s heart was knocking irregularly and her mouth seemed full of sand.

She took a long gulp of her wine and at once she felt drunk, her head and limbs seeming to drift an alarming distance apart.

Janice leaned forward with her hand on her son’s shoulder.

‘Is Will ready for bed? And if you’ve finished your work, Toby, you could think of an early night as well.’

‘Oh, Mum.’

‘Do as your mother says,’ Andrew told him.

There was no real protest in the boy’s response, or reprimand in Andrew’s. With her sharpened perceptions Nina understood that they were playing the roles of parents and child in the ordinary loving Frost family for the benefit of the rest of them. Hannah Clegg was nodding and smiling. Façades, Nina thought, and remembered the handsome, happy couples as she had first seen them. The sense that she was beginning to look beyond the obvious came sharply back to her. Her eyes met Gordon’s again, guiltily, greedily.

‘I’ll go up to check on Will, and then we can eat,’ Janice was saying. The boy gave his hair a last shake and wished them a languid goodnight.

A moment later there was a general move. Darcy escorted Nina, with the fingers of one hand just touching the small of her back. She knew that Gordon followed behind her, but her legs functioned well enough to carry her through to the kitchen.

Janice was in her apron, behind the kitchen counter. ‘I told you it was only a family supper,’ she apologized to Nina. ‘If we eat in the dining room it seems rather formal and serious, like entertaining clients.’

Andrew passed behind her and patted her bottom. ‘I prefer the dining room, myself.’

‘Stay home in the morning to do the extra clearing up then,’ she answered coolly. ‘Nina doesn’t mind. Do you, Nina?’

‘Of course not.’

‘Sit where you like, everyone. Not next to your partners, please.’

Nina found herself placed between Darcy and Jimmy Rose. Gordon was on Jimmy’s other side, out of her sight. The table was elaborately laid with linen napkins, heavy silver cutlery and thickets of polished glasses, contradicting Janice’s insistence that this was a casual evening. Evidently perfectly at home, Darcy walked behind the chairs pouring white Alsace into a glass at each place.

‘Toast,’ Hannah declared loudly, when everyone’s glass had been filled. With her luxuriant hair pinned up she looked different, and older, as if her eyes and mouth were drawn upwards by tiny, taut threads.

‘To friendship.’

‘To loving friendship.’

Surprisingly, it was Star who amended it. From her place opposite she nodded her grave head at Nina. There was a moment’s silence around the table, until Jimmy satirically echoed his wife.

‘To loving friendship.’

They all drank, except for Janice who was busy behind her kitchen counter.

She brought an oval dish to the table. Resting in a bed of green salad leaves was a terrine of vegetables, in which tiny batons of carrot and courgette and flowers of broccoli floated in a clear golden jelly amidst a rain of green peppercorns. Nina knew how long such things took to concoct, and wondered again about the protestations of simplicity. This was competitive cooking.

‘Oh, Janice, look at this. It’s so pretty,’ Hannah said.

Janice pursed her lips. ‘Have you ever seen Marcelle’s version? This is a pale imitation. Hers just glows with goodness.’ She added, for Nina’s benefit, ‘Marcelle is a wonderful cook.’

‘I remember, from your Hallowe’en party,’ Nina said. Then she heard Gordon’s quiet voice, only it seemed to set currents stirring in the air between them.

‘Michael is a lucky man.’

‘Is he, would you say?’ Jimmy Rose smirked.

Janice took her place at the end of the table opposite to Andrew. She was pleased by the reception of her terrine. Raising her glass, she said, ‘I want to drink the toast, too. To loving friendship, Star. That’s what it’s all for, isn’t it? The hard work and the risks and the planning and the worrying, all the difficult things each of us does, to make the lives we have and to keep hold of them … It’s so we can enjoy the pleasure of evenings like this, with our friends around us. Good friends, loving friends. We’re missing Vicky, but she’ll be home tomorrow, and at the same time we’re welcoming Nina.’ She looked earnestly around the table. ‘This is what counts, isn’t it? Us being here together, for food and wine and talk?’ Janice’s cheeks were crimson.

‘Of course it is, darling,’ Andrew murmured.

‘Eloquently put, Janice,’ Darcy said, and she gave him a defiantly grateful smile.

‘Well, I don’t care. You know I’m not particularly clever, and you may think I’m sentimental. But I love you all, and this is my favourite way to spend a Sunday evening.’ She emptied her glass with a flourish.

Hannah clapped her hands. ‘Hear, hear,’ she called. ‘May there be many more evenings like this one.’

‘Darling, there will be. Exactly like this,’ Darcy said softly. ‘Why should there not?’

Nina listened more than she talked.

It occurred to her that the edge of uneasiness lay within the partnerships themselves, and not between the couples. The couples clung together in their group, to affirm themselves and their partnerships.

The voices rose around her and wove themselves in and out of the clink of cutlery and glasses and she chose to pick out one voice at a time and follow it through the twists of the conversation like a coloured thread through fabric. She heard Star, and the way that she spun her words so fluently and punctured Jimmy’s nonsensical chatter, and then she heard Darcy who pronounced and knew that his lazy drawl would be listened to, and Hannah’s cries and giggles, and Janice’s gossip that grew less coherent as the wine influenced her and Jimmy distracted her by grinningly stroking her bare forearm. Andrew directed the turns of the conversation from the head of the table, and through it she strained to hear Gordon’s low, unemphatic comments although he spoke almost as little as she did herself.

Nina tried to yoke the couples together in her mind, making Hannah’s trills counterpoint Darcy’s bass, setting Star’s sarcastic wit against Jimmy’s sly Irish loquacity and Andrew’s faint pomposity against Janice’s tipsy skittishness. But now they resisted her efforts to pair them and so to eavesdrop on them as couples. They split away into individuals, and then coalesced again into a group of friends, a group whose homogeneity in the end surprised her.

Andrew filled another set of the good glasses, this time with second-growth claret. Janice brought beef Wellington to the table and covered the plates with overlapping circles of rosy meat rimmed with golden pastry. There were immaculate vegetables in white and gold dishes, and Janice was praised again for the excellence of her dinner.

‘You’re not a very great talker,’ Jimmy said to Nina as they ate their beef.

The conversation had turned from ski-ing to cars. Hannah was resting her chin in her hands as she sighed, ‘I love my little 325. It’s soooo sexy.’

‘I don’t know much about cars,’ Nina answered neutrally.

‘But are you not interested in what they tell you about their owners?’

She thought, I can’t remember Gordon’s. She had spent more than an hour sitting in it, but she had no idea what variety it was. Something grey and solid. Not like him. That’s a stupid game.

‘What would you guess Darcy drives?’ Jimmy pursued.

‘Let me think. I know, a red Porsche.’

‘Wrong,’ he scoffed. ‘That’s what I would choose, if I could afford it. No, Darcy has a Maserati. Obviously. And a Range Rover for the mud and when he mixes with the county. Which are usually one and the same thing.’

‘Quite true,’ Darcy said equably from her other side. ‘Jimmy is only jealous, of course.’

Nina found herself laughing. Jimmy Rose was amusing, in his sharp way.

‘Who would not be jealous of the man who possesses Wilton Manor, a Maserati and Hannah?’

‘I thought I might buy myself a car,’ Nina heard herself saying.

‘Haven’t you got one? No heavenly chariot?’ Jimmy’s eyebrows peaked.

Quickly she said, ‘I used to have an Alfa Romeo Spyder, but I sold it.’

‘Beautiful machines,’ Andrew pronounced.

‘Sexy machines,’ Jimmy added.

‘You must buy another glamorous car because you are a glamorous person,’ Hannah told her with slightly drunken assertiveness, and Nina found herself smiling across the table at Star. Even though Star had talked and laughed almost as much as the others her voice was cool, and Nina had the impression that she had held herself aloof from the mood of the party. Perhaps it was her intention to act as an antidote to Jimmy, who had made more noise than anyone else.

‘Then you will have to advise me, Hannah.’

Andrew had cleared away the dinner plates and now there were individual chocolate souffles, with cocoa-brown crusts puffed high above the white rims of their dishes. There was another chorus of admiration.

‘The person to ask is Gordon.’ Hannah waggled her spoon at him. ‘Gordon knows the most, Gordon is an engine expert even more than Andrew, even though he’s staying pretty buttoned up tonight. What’s the matter, Gordon? Post-natal depression?’

Janice stood up, not very steadily. ‘Coffee for everyone? Andrew, what else have we got for people to drink?’

He sighed, ‘She’ll have a headache all day tomorrow, you know.’

‘So long as she doesn’t have one tonight.’ Jimmy winked.

Nina slipped out of her chair. Jimmy hopped to his feet and drew it back for her with a flourish. Janice waved a hand.

‘Use my bathroom, Nina. First on the left up the stairs. The downstairs one is probably full of trainers and rugby shorts. The boys never pick up a thing.’

It was a relief to escape the hot room and the smoke from Darcy’s cigar. The hall was cool and dark. Nina went slowly up the stairs, peering in the dimness at the gilt-framed pictures on the walls. She opened a door and saw the Frosts’ bedroom, with a light on in the bathroom beyond it. There was a thick carpet sculpted into patterns, and a long wall of mirrored cupboards. Janice’s negligee was laid out across one corner of the plump bed. Nina tiptoed like an intruder. On a tallboy there was a silver-framed photograph of a slimmer Janice in her wedding dress, one hand holding back a billow of net veiling. Nina picked it up, and the breath of her curiosity fogged the polished silver. She replaced the picture hastily and went on into the bathroom.

There were more mirrors in here, and polished chrome rails with neatly folded towels. The towels were cream with satiny flowers appliqued in the corners. Nina wondered if Andrew and Janice liked to admire themselves in their mirrors when they made love in here or in the bedroom, watching the reflections of their coupling receding into infinity.

She sat down without locking the door.

Gordon had left the table. He could think of nothing but finding Nina, and securing a few seconds of her for himself, away from the intolerable repetitive babble of the dinner party.

He opened the bathroom door and saw her. She looked up at him, shocked, like a scared little girl with her tights twisted around her knees and her ankles crossed.

‘What are you doing here?’

He was touched by her anger and shame at being caught in the act of peeing.

‘I wanted to see you. There’s nothing to hide.’

She finished, then dried herself and straightened her clothes with the neat womanly movements that he loved.

‘They’ll notice we’re both missing.’

‘No, they won’t. They’ll think I’m downstairs with the rugby shorts.’

They moved together, and after they had kissed he held her face between his hands and examined it intently.

‘I called you. I called you all weekend.’

‘I ran away,’ she told him simply.

‘Don’t run away again.’

‘There’s nowhere to go.’

‘I’d find you anyway.’

He was pushing against her and Nina put her arm up to one of the mirrors to support herself. As he turned his head Gordon saw the reflection of her, and the way the loose sleeve of her blouse fell back to reveal the bluish-white, egg-shaped hollow of her armpit. He was swept by a wave of tenderness that contradicted and intensified his need for her.

‘Nina, Nina. Can I see you again? When can I see you?’

‘Yes. I don’t know when.’

‘Yes is enough for now.’ He kissed her again, wanting to fuse himself to her but she slipped away from him.

‘We must go back downstairs. You first.’

He loved her carefulness and self-control. ‘I wish we didn’t have to. It’s a particularly silly evening.’ He wanted to apologize for its deficiencies.

‘No it isn’t,’ she argued. ‘It’s warm and friendly, like Janice said. You must go now, or they’ll guess what’s happening.’

He kissed her again, his mouth scraping hers. Then he went, and Nina was left staring in the mirror into her own anxious eyes.

Jimmy and Janice were the only ones left in the kitchen. Jimmy cleared the table and Janice haphazardly loaded plates into the dishwasher. He brought a stacked tray round to her and put it to one side while she bent over the wire racks.

‘God, Janice, look at you. You know you’ve got a great arse on you.’

Jimmy said it half-jokingly, as he always did, but there was enough wistful sincerity in his voice. Janice straightened up at once. Her face was damp and flushed and wisps of dark hair stuck to her cheeks. Her hostess manner of the early evening had evaporated.

‘Great’s the word. Half of it would be plenty. Don’t be an idiot, Jimmy.’

He had reached out and with the tips of his fingers lifted one of the strands of hair. She was alarmed and almost eager. Jimmy twisted the coil of hair, his face flat.

‘An eejit, that’s what I am.’ Gently he withdrew his hand.

They contemplated each other for a minute more, their eyes on a level. Then Janice frowned, groping for something through her sudden tiredness and the effects of the wine.

‘Are you and Star all right?’

His smile came back as quickly as it had vanished, with the associated repertoire of eyebrow contortions.

‘As right as rain. As right as ever. Shall I carry through the coffee tray for you, madam?’

When Nina came back to the den she found that someone had put on some slow music, and Janice and Jimmy and Hannah and Andrew were dancing in the space in front of the fire. Hannah rested her head on Andrew’s shoulder. Gordon and Star were sitting apart talking intently together. Nina sat down beside Darcy.

‘Would you care to dance?’

She felt the full weight of his disconcerting charm. He was very handsome although there were pads of flesh almost obliterating the strong bones of his face. Even after the drink he had taken in his eyes remained sharp under the puffy lids.

She smiled. ‘I think I would rather sit.’

Nina was tired now. She wanted to go back to the peace of her own house, but she did not know how to go away from Gordon.

‘Let’s sit, then,’ Darcy said. After a moment in which they watched the two couples slowly gyrating he leaned closer to her, with an effective intimacy that closed off the rest of the room. Nina smelled cigars and cologne, and whisky on his breath.

‘Tell me,’ he invited, ‘what do you think of our provincial little world?’

‘What do I think of Grafton? I grew up here, remember.’

‘Yes, I remember that. I meant, do you ever regret ex- changing everything in London for this?’

He nodded at the dancers.

Nina realized that he was trying to set the two of them apart, at a sophisticated, metropolitan distance from the others, even Hannah. He wanted her to conspire with him in noticing the ways that Janice’s furniture and food and even their shared friends fell short of their London counterparts.

Nina felt dislike of Darcy instantly flare up inside her, in defence of Gordon and the evening’s warmth. She tried to resist the impulse, but her eyes slid across the room to where Gordon was sitting with Star. Star’s head was bent and she was shading her eyes with her fingers. She looked as if she was trying not to cry.

‘I don’t regret the exchange at all,’ Nina answered sharply, trying to focus her attention on Darcy. ‘I’m very happy to be here. Besides, the advantages of living in Grafton far outweigh the disadvantages. There is the way I have been made to feel welcome, for instance. I probably wouldn’t have encountered anything like it if I had made the move in the opposite direction.’

Some of her dislike was for herself. She had noticed the details of the Frosts’ hospitality that would have told her immediately, even if she had known nothing else, that these were not London people. She had probably noted them with an eye just as sharp as Darcy Clegg’s. But that did not mean that she wanted to collude with him.

Darcy’s intentions seemed to change at once, with alcoholic unpredictability.

‘I miss it,’ he said. ‘More than I am usually prepared to admit. More than most people would guess, given everything I have here.’

‘I wouldn’t have guessed,’ Nina said. Her dislike of him melted away again. She had drunk her share of the wine too, she remembered.

Darcy added, ‘But we provincials have to find our challenges and diversions where we can.’

She had no idea what he meant. He lifted his hands with his fingers bunched, as if he were holding strings. She had the impression suddenly that he was the puppet master of the group, and the others, tired and more or less drunk as they were at the end of the evening, were the puppets who danced for him. Her skin prickled down the length of her spine. At the same moment she became aware that Jimmy Rose was watching the two of them over Janice’s lolling head.

Across in their corner, Star said softly to Gordon, ‘It isn’t just tonight. It’s every night. I think to myself that I don’t mind, that I don’t care what he does, but I do. I care for myself, for being humiliated in front of my friends. I’m sorry, Gordon. I’ve drunk too much. Not for the first time, eh?’

Gordon was vividly aware that Nina had looked at them, then looked away again. What was Darcy whispering to her about?

Star reached out her hand, and reluctantly he took it.

‘If he makes you unhappy, why don’t you leave him?’ he asked her.

Star raised her head. ‘Will you have me, if I do?’

It was a joke, and not a joke.

‘Star, how could I?’

‘You couldn’t, of course. But you know it’s you I’d have, if I could.’ She smiled at him then, a lopsided smile of self-mockery.

The record ended and Hannah stepped back from Andrew, making an elaborate curtsey of thanks. He put his arm around her waist and steered her back towards Darcy.

Nina saw that Star was on her feet, apparently quite composed. It was clear that the evening was over.

The three women went away with Janice to find their coats, and Gordon and Andrew murmured together about some business that they needed to attend to in the morning. Jimmy and Darcy found themselves standing together by the front door.

‘Well then,’ Jimmy said softly. ‘It’s La Belle Veuve, is it?’

‘What do you mean?’ It pleased Darcy to appear not to catch his meaning.

‘She likes you.’

‘Does she?’ He accepted Jimmy’s tribute without betraying any interest in it, although he felt a flicker of satisfaction that was strengthened by his certainty that he felt no reciprocal liking for Nina Cort. Such aloof, contained women had never attracted him.

Jimmy laughed, and having sown the idea was subtle enough to leave it to germinate alone.

‘What was the matter with Mike Wickham today, do you think?’

Darcy shrugged. ‘How would I know? Time of the month, probably.’

Jimmy laughed again. ‘Just the same, I’d prefer not to be landed with him next week.’

Darcy dropped his heavy arm around Jimmy’s shoulder and patted it reassuringly. ‘Back to the usual set-up on Sunday, then. That way we can be sure of winning.’

The women came in a group down the stairs. Jimmy allowed himself a moment’s luxurious contemplation of their separate possibilities, abundant Hannah and tawny, mys-terious Nina, juicy unobtainable Janice and Star, his own.

He called cheerfully to Nina, ‘We’ll give you a ride home, since we’re the nearest to you.’

‘Thank you. Star kindly offered already,’ Nina said.

They reached the door in a flurry of thanks and good nights. Nina was caught up with the Roses and swept out, away from Gordon, and she was only aware that he watched her going and wanted to hold her back. The evening was finally over.

When everyone had gone Janice leant against the ban- isters.

‘Have I drunk a lot?’

Her eyes were smudged, as if they were melting into the frail surrounding skin, and the rosy pencil line with which she had outlined her lips at the beginning of the evening had turned brown as it faded. When she had been drinking and came to the end of an evening’s high Janice’s confidence sometimes collapsed, leaving her confused and vulnerable, and vividly reminding Andrew of the much more tentative girl he had married.

‘You have,’ he told her. She followed him when he went back into the kitchen.

‘Not badly too much?’

‘No. You were enjoying yourself. It was a good evening.’

Andrew opened the window and a draught of cold air tasting of earth and rain penetrated the smoke and perfume that hung in the room. He peered inside the dishwasher and began to rearrange the dirty plates in the proper sequence. Behind him Janice asked, ‘We do give good evenings, don’t we?’

Andrew straightened up. The dish that had held the beef contained a layer of congealed fat, and the butcher’s string made a greasy curl on the countertop. He wanted to tidy the kitchen and then to spend a few minutes in the dark and silence of the garden before bed. But Janice stumbled towards him, needing reassurance, and he gave it.

‘We do. Thanks to you. You do the arranging and the shopping and the cooking. All I do is open the wine.’ He referred to what was an old joke between them, a joke that had worn thin and shiny with time.

‘No, you do such a lot more than that.’ She reached out and caught his hand. ‘You are a very good husband.’ She groped for the words, mistily now. ‘You are, very good to me. We all love you. I love you.’

Andrew hugged her, feeling her weight in his arms. Her hair smelt of the cooking she had done, the afternoon spent chopping and sautéeing. Without knowing that he did it he leaned slightly away from her towards the washing up that still waited to be done. It was the understanding between them on these evenings that Janice prepared and he cleared away.

‘I love you too.’ The formal exchange. It was not an untruth, not exactly, rather a truth that had changed its colouring. Andrew closed off the thought. He did not want to pursue it.

‘Jimmy was very lively tonight,’ Janice began. She wanted to make amends in case her flirtatiousness had disturbed him.

‘Jimmy is Jimmy.’

‘I know that,’ she sighed. Andrew heard a whisper of regret in her admission, but he let this second thought follow the first into limbo.

‘I’ll help you finish here,’ Janice said after a moment. ‘It won’t take a minute.’ She had regained some of her briskness.

They worked side by side, stepping around each other in the familiar space. Janice imagined the pattern of their footsteps on the tiled floor, like the intricate movements of some domestic dance.

The unaccustomed whimsy of the idea made her smile.

Sometimes Andrew’s footsteps would diverge, leaping to work and away from them all, whilst hers would lay down more regular loops, to school and to other houses. But still the centre of the pattern would be printed here on the kitchen tiles. It was a comforting notion.

The kitchen was tidy enough to satisfy them both. Andrew wiped the top of the units with a cloth, sweeping the crumbs and remnants carefully into the cup of his hand. He had always been neater around the house than Janice.

‘I’m going to bed,’ Janice said, giving a little yawn like a cat’s.

‘I’ll be with you in a minute. Five minutes’ fresh air, and then I’ll lock up.’

It had been raining, but now the sky was partially clear. There was a ribbon of thick cloud overhead, marked by a paler rim, and beyond it in the west a few stars were visible.

Andrew made a slow circuit of the garden. It was too dark to see much and he made each step carefully, testing his familiarity with the ground against the confusion of darkness. He ducked his head under the branches of a cherry tree that overhung the path, and then found a bench set back between the bare twigs of dogwoods. He sat down, feeling the damp grainy wood under his fingers. The small noises of the garden were magnified, much greater in importance than the low note of distant traffic on the bypass.

Andrew let his head fall back against the seat. His eyes closed and the damp air sealed them like a compress. He had also drunk a good deal. The voices of the evening sounded briefly within his skull, and then he dismissed them. The silence was sweet.

When he looked again with dark-adjusted eyes he saw the irregular bulk of the house and the loose composition of trees that framed it. One corner of the trellis that supported a wisteria against a wall had come loose, he recalled. He would have to fix it on Saturday, bringing out his toolbox and a ladder from the garage.

With the domestic certainty of the intention he felt unexpected happiness lifting and ballooning within him. There was this house and its gardens, and the solid, inarticulate love he had for his sons, and there was Janice. He remembered her blurred glance at him this evening when she brought up Jimmy’s behaviour, and her need for love and reassurance, and the kitchen smell in her hair.

The happiness was as taut as a drum beneath his rib-cage.

As he got up and walked back towards the house he was thinking that it was not an audacious life, but it was round, sufficient. It was what he had. Upstairs in the silence of the house Janice was already asleep. Andrew undressed and got into bed beside her, warming himself against the generous curve of her back.