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 15

On Christmas Eve Wilton Manor was lit up like a cruise ship at anchor in a sea of parked cars.

Michael and Marcelle Wickham walked the short distance to the house in silence, but as soon as the door opened to them they found their smiles and went into the party together.

Marcelle glimpsed Jimmy’s crest of sandy hair, and the Clegg twins, one in ankle-length and the other in thigh-high black Lycra, and Gordon Ransome’s narrow, handsome head politely inclined as he listened to something Hannah was whispering to him. Hannah was wearing a tight sheath of gold that seemed barely to contain her.

Marcelle took a glass of champagne from the tray someone held out and drank half of it. Now that she had escaped her own house she was eager for company and conversation and the comfort of a drink. As if the pressure in her ears was suddenly equalized the hubbub of the party broke in on her. She heard music, and raised voices, and the chorus of greetings. Her spirits lifted in response.

‘Marcelle, Michael, at last!’

Darcy’s cowboy-fringed arm descended around her shoulders.

‘Merry Christmas, Darcy.’

‘Have you got a drink? Hey, that’s only half a drink. Let me fill it up for you.’

More champagne foamed into her glass. She was aware that Michael had moved away from her side. She could see Janice, and the Kellys, and a dozen other familiar faces in the hallway under the Christmas tree and amongst the crowd of people in the drawing room. She let herself be carried forward to meet them, to the kisses and the greetings and the gossip, her fingers curled firmly around the glass in her hand.

Gordon watched her go. Then, involuntarily, he searched out Nina. She looked pale, thinner than usual, in a simple black dress that revealed the bony wings beneath her throat. Their eyes met, and then jerked away again.

The manor house was polished and scented, elaborately decorated with great silvered garlands of pine and holly, and warmed with log fires in all the wide grates. Hannah and her stepchildren had overseen the preparations, because Darcy was unusually preoccupied with his work. The little Clegg children had stayed up to greet the first guests and were now asleep upstairs, with their name-appliqued stockings hung over the ends of their beds, but Darcy’s three grown-up children were a noticeable presence at this year’s party.

Lucy, Cathy and Barney had invited a contingent of their own friends, and these younger people with their different haircuts and impromptu clothes wove a contrasting thread through the fabric of the party. They asked the disc jockey behind his turntables in the conservatory to play unfamiliar music in place of the sixties and seventies hits, and they danced differently, waving their arms in loose groups instead of two by two.

The Grafton parents, whose own visiting mothers and fathers were mostly at home watching over their grandchildren, were made suddenly aware that there was another generation crowding up behind them.

Michael and Darcy stood shoulder to shoulder in their dinner jackets, watching the young. Michael had refused champagne and was drinking whisky from a tumbler.

He said to Darcy, over the rim of the glass, ‘Did you ever believe you would grow old? We children of the sixties always knew we had it, whatever it was, the big secret, the elixir of life. We always thought we’d hold on to it, too. It makes it doubly hard to accept that it’s already gone, spent, inherited by this lot.’

He tilted his glass towards them, not quite sober by this time, and the whisky slopped.

Darcy shrugged. ‘Did even doctors buy that hippie rubbish? I was a son of the fifties, and I wanted everything my old man never had. I couldn’t grow up quick enough.’

Darcy was preoccupied. He was only giving Michael Wickham’s rambling talk a fraction of his attention. All evening he had only been able to forget his anxiety for a moment, as the party commanded his concentration, and then it would come skittering back to him like a black spider emerging from a web.

Michael glanced at him, noticing for the first time that Darcy was not as eager as usual to play the role of expansive host. He seemed tired, and his tanned face had a greyish tinge. He wondered if he might be ill.

‘No, Darcy, you are an example to us all. Nobody could ever accuse you of left-over hippie idealism. And look what you have to show for growing up so eagerly – Wilton Manor, several cars, wives and children. A place at the very epicentre of Grafton society.’

Darcy would not rise to the bait. He turned away from the dancers. ‘Let’s get another drink. You’ve spilled most of that one.’

Jimmy Rose was less affected by the spectre of his middle age. He had no children to catch him up, and his wife knew better than to follow him around at parties. He felt entirely free to admire Lucy Clegg’s exposed thighs and the twists of coloured cloth she had wound in her hair, and to melt into the noise in the conservatory in pursuit of her.

The Clegg twins drew him into the dance, one on either side of him. They smiled and waved their fingers and undulated their slim hips in time to the music. None of the hulking boys in the vicinity seemed inclined to lay a claim on either of them. Jimmy slid his arm around Lucy’s waist, and danced for a moment with his cheek pressed against hers. She smelled very young and fresh, like a bluebell stalk.

When she wriggled out of his grasp he grinned at her in rueful acknowledgement, and lifted a full glass of champagne from a passing tray as a consolation. Jimmy had been drinking steadily, but the only effect that alcohol ever had on him was to increase his capacity for mischief.

A little later he looked across the dance floor and saw Marcelle. She was standing on her own, her head and arms seeming to hang awkwardly. He left the twins and their friends and skirted around the edge of the floor until he reached her.

‘Dance with me?’ he asked.

‘Yes. I will.’ She held out her hands, rather stiffly, and he guided her. He knew that they made an odd contrast, a pair of waltzers with the loose-limbed young around them. He drew her closer to him. She was wearing a full-skirted dress made of blue-green taffeta that rustled around his legs. Her head drooped, and then rested on his shoulder. Her perfume was heavy and musky, quite unlike Lucy’s, and intensified to the point of sickliness by the dry heat of her skin.

‘You don’t want to dance.’

‘Not really,’ she admitted.

‘Let’s sit out, then.’

He took her hand and drew her behind him. Marcelle focused on his shoulders, and on the reddish prickle of hair at the back of his neck that reminded her of an animal’s scruff.

Jimmy knew Darcy’s house as well as he knew his own. He opened the door to a small room under the angle of the stairway. It was half cloakroom, half gunroom, furnished with hung-up coats and mackintoshes, dismantled fishing rods in green canvas cases, creaking wicker chairs and too-pristine sporting prints introduced by Hannah. It was empty, as Jimmy had known it would be.

Marcelle sank down into one of the chairs, letting her head fall back with a long sigh.

‘Too much champagne,’ she said, swallowing a laugh and a hiccup together.

Jimmy sat beside her. He turned her wrist in his fingers to expose her underarm, where the skin puckered in tiny folds towards her armpit. He put his mouth to the blue vein in the crook of her elbow. Marcelle looked down from what seemed like a great distance on to his bent head.

‘Tell me all,’ he commanded, rubbing his mouth in the hollow.

‘Nothing to tell.’

He lifted his head and circled her with his arm. ‘Yes, there is, I can see there is.’

Now he bent forward so that his mouth reached the top of her breast left exposed by the taffeta bodice.

Marcelle knew that there were minute crepey folds between her breasts, too. They reminded her of the vertical seams in a dowager’s top lip. She was afraid that the dusting of powder she had applied there might have turned into grey wormy threads in the heat. She felt suddenly shy, inexperienced and full of anxiety about her body’s imperfections, like an awkward adolescent. Michael had not found the time to tell her that she was looking pretty when she had hustled him out of the house earlier on.

‘Jimmy, don’t.’

‘Ah, why ever not? Isn’t it nice?’

It felt good to him. At this minute Jimmy loved Marcelle, and he loved Hannah and Janice as well. All the women with their different shapes and textures and scents appealed to him, like so many dishes on an endless table, and the fact that he couldn’t consume all of them did nothing to diminish his appetite.

‘Yes,’ Marcelle said sadly. ‘It is nice. Only not now.’

Jimmy grinned at her. ‘When? When Mike’s at the hospital?’

‘You know I didn’t mean that.’

This was how Jimmy was, each of the wives knew it. Marcelle always parried his advances, very gently and with a touch of regret. She didn’t know what the others did, not exactly, not even Janice, although they joked together out of Star’s earshot about there always being Jimmy to fall back on.

‘What a shame. Well then, talk to me instead. Tell Jimmy your troubles.’

The combined effect of his attention and sympathy following on from the champagne made Marcelle’s eyes fill with unwelcome tears.

‘Oh, it’s nothing. Just domestic bickering.’

‘Only that?’

He stroked her wrist with the tip of his finger, little soothing strokes. She watched the movement, hypnotized by it, wishing that she had not drunk so much. Drink always loosened her tongue. She hesitated, trying to think of something light to say, then she opened her mouth and the words came spilling out anyhow, although she wanted to keep them in, to preserve the marriage myth.

‘No, not only that. It’s much more. And less, in a way. Michael seems to have … gone away somewhere. I don’t mean actually away, although God knows he’s in the house with us less and less of the time, the hospital and patients and committees seem to consume him. It’s as if he’s retreated into himself, closed a door on me, and I find myself … at one minute angry with him for rejecting me, and bitter and resentful, and at the next what must seem, I don’t know, cloyingly there, with my claims and expectations, wifely, needing to be loved. Like an obligation.’

Marcelle took a breath.

‘I don’t know when we stopped being partners, and became antagonists. The two of us, drawn up on either side of some battle line. Looking back, I don’t know when it happened, only that it has happened. We quarrel and the arguments are never resolved, and then there are silences, and times when we preserve this terrible politeness, and then there are arguments all over again.’

She was crying properly. Tears spouted out of her eyes and she felt them making hot runnels down her face. There would be tracks in the foundation she had applied to give herself some colour.

Jimmy murmured, ‘Poor thing, poor old Mar. Here you are.’

He produced a big, clean white handkerchief, right on cue. Marcelle sniffed into it and bit her lips to stop herself crying any more.

‘This evening, for instance. We were late, it made me anxious, and then my anxiety made us both irritable so we quarrelled.’

‘You hate being late, you hate apparent failures. Nobody notices them except you, but then you are a perfectionist.’

‘Am I? I don’t believe I am. Do you and Star make each other happy?’

As she looked at him then, through the sodden blur of tears and champagne, Marcelle thought she saw an evasive mask slip over Jimmy’s cunning-fox features.

‘Oh, Star and I have evolved our own systems. After so many years long-married couples do, don’t they?’

Marcelle thought of Star’s aloof dignity at the parties where Jimmy flirted and murmured and kissed. She had seen her tonight, with a diamante star clip holding her hair back behind one ear, dancing with Andrew Frost while Jimmy skimmed between the Clegg twins. The Roses would have to have a system.

‘Michael and I loved each other, I thought that was our arrangement, but it seems not to be. I don’t believe he loves me any longer.’

Jimmy was still stroking. ‘I’m sure it’s not as bad as that. Do you think he’s got someone else?’

Marcelle shook her head. ‘No. He seems too cold for that, too frosted up inside himself.’

‘Have you got someone else?’

‘Of course not.’

They were quiet for a minute. The music from the conservatory filtered through to them, a thumping bass beat. The party was reaching full momentum. Gathering her wits, Marcelle wished she had not cried, had not been seen to give way, even here, even only by Jimmy. She cast around for some way of diminishing in his eyes what had seemed only a moment ago to be such an important confession.

‘It’s probably our age, just restless ennui before we settle down to a comfortable twilight together.’

‘Perhaps,’ Jimmy said. He shrugged, a little comic contrivance of bafflement. Then he rolled her hand into a fist for her, placing it back in her lap, ready to fight.

Partly to reinforce her claim, partly to shift the focus from herself, and a little because she wanted to reward him for this moment of intimacy that she knew was ending, Marcelle smiled faintly and said, ‘It isn’t just Michael and me who are having our problems.’

‘Hmm?’

Jimmy’s face sharpened, but his eyes held hers.

‘Perhaps we are all going through it, in our different ways.’ It was a comfort to identify herself with the group. She wanted to share what she knew. ‘I saw Gordon, the other day, with Nina. They were in Nina’s car together.’

As soon as it was out she regretted it, but it was said and she smiled at him again, a smile of complicity now.

‘Together?’

‘Oh, yes. I don’t know exactly how I knew, but I did as soon as I saw them. It was unmistakable. I felt it, here.’ Her fist, still clenched, gestured at the pit of her stomach. ‘They were horrified to see me.’

Jimmy grinned. ‘I imagine they would have been.’

He looked pleased, smiling his narrow-eyed smile, and intent, as if he was so busy digesting this new piece of information that he had forgotten her. The tip of his tongue appeared at the corner of his mouth. The look of him made Marcelle feel slightly disgusted, and this distaste surprised her.

‘How interesting,’ he mused, more to himself than her. ‘How interesting it all is. Don’t you think so?’

‘I don’t know. I suppose so, if you can detach yourself sufficiently not to feel concern.’ It was as if Nina and Gordon and Vicky had dwindled away to tiny organisms that divided and recombined in some Petri dish under Jimmy Rose’s observation. ‘You won’t say anything, Jimmy, will you?’ she asked.

He touched her hand once again. ‘You know me,’ he assured her.

Marcelle reluctantly nodded. ‘I suppose we should go back and join in, shouldn’t we?’

He leaned forward and kissed her on the mouth, but only very lightly, dismissively.

‘I think we must, but you should go and fix your face up first.’

Outside the gunroom they went their separate ways.

Jimmy strolled into the noisy thick of the party, his hands in his pockets, smiling and joking his way through the various groups. At the buffet in the dining room he helped himself to a plateful of the excellent food that Hannah’s caterers had prepared. He made himself comfortable in the niche of a padded window seat half-hidden by a curtain, and watched the procession in front of him as he ate.

He saw Nina in her black dress, and noted the way her face fell into sad lines when she thought nobody was looking at her. He watched Gordon solicitously steering Vicky to a comfortable chair, and bringing her a plate of food and cutlery and a napkin, and then looking up over his wife’s bent head towards Nina, standing with her back turned to him. Jimmy fluently read the brief contraction of his dark features as an expression of powerful longing.

Jimmy took a long, meditative swallow of his wine. It was very palatable, of course. Darcy never served plonk at his parties. Jimmy spent an enjoyable minute calculating how much this year’s party must be costing the Cleggs.

From his vantage point he also saw Andrew, flushed with champagne, and Janice following him with Marcelle, her face now freshly powdered. Hannah was commanding them to come and eat, laughing a great deal and wobbling slightly on her pin-thin heels. Behind them came his own wife with her arm in Michael Wickham’s. They were the same height. Jimmy tried to imagine what he would want if he were seeing Star for the first time. He thought her androgynous, mys-terious air would still interest him.

There was no sign of Darcy, the person he really wanted to see. Jimmy left his dirty plate on the window seat cushions and slipped away in search of him.

He found him in the drawing room, leaning with his arms outstretched on the mantelpiece, smoking and observing his guests.

‘Howdy, pardner,’ Jimmy drawled, flicking at the fringes on Darcy’s Gaultier jacket.

Darcy said nothing. It was silently recognized between them that they needed one another as a focus for aggression, but tonight he could not summon up the energy to spar with Jimmy, who ranged himself beside him gazing outwards into the room. Darcy felt, as he sometimes did, that the disparity in their sizes made them both appear a little absurd.

‘There are demons abroad tonight,’ Jimmy announced.

‘That was Hallowe’en, surely. The last time we all gathered together.’

‘Ah yes, it was indeed. The first time we saw your Belle Veuve. And now you’ve lost her.’

Darcy turned his head. ‘Lost her to whom?’ His voice was soft.

The currents between them shifted like dry sand.

‘To Gordon Ransome, I believe.’

The tick-tick of mutual reckoning was almost audible. At first Jimmy was pleased with the effect of his news; he liked to overturn Darcy’s easy assumption of sexual pre- eminence.

‘How do you know?’

Jimmy shrugged. He hazarded, ‘Ask any of the women. The women always know these things.’

To Jimmy’s surprise Darcy began to laugh. It was a big, genuine laugh that welled up out of his chest, betraying none of the disappointment or pique that he had expected.

‘Gordon Ransome? Is that so? Good for Gordon, then. It was bound to be somebody, I suppose.’

‘Not you?’

Darcy was still laughing. ‘I’m not going to live out your fantasies for you, James, you should know that by now. Has Vicky heard about it, according to your information?’

‘I wouldn’t have thought so. Not yet. No doubt she will.’

Jimmy was irritated. It seemed that he had traded his information for no return.

Darcy patted him on the shoulder. ‘Happy Christmas,’ he said triumphantly.

Jimmy couldn’t gauge quite why Darcy was so pleased with himself. He looked at his watch, trying to conceal his annoyance.

‘Thanks. The same to you. And thanks for the party. I have to go.’

‘So early?’

‘I’m going to midnight mass.’

‘Forgive me, I’d forgotten that. Pray for us sinners, Jim, won’t you?’

Jimmy left him. He went out into the cold, clear night and found his small car in the lines of bigger, glossier models. Star would get a lift home with the Frosts.

Vicky sat feeding Helen in the armchair in the corner of the Cleggs’ big bedroom. Mandy, Hannah’s Australian au pair girl, had searched her out to tell her that the baby was crying in her basket upstairs. It gave her an unreal, dislocated but none the less pleasant feeling to be suddenly translated from the brightness of the party to the silence upstairs, and to the familiar small intimacies of ministering to Helen.

She had laid a towel on Hannah’s quilted bedcover and changed the baby’s nappy, gently swabbing the inward-turning folds of skin with her concentration pleasingly blurred by champagne. Then she undid her dress and sat down in the armchair. After a minute’s hungry attack Helen’s sucking gradually moderated into a sleepy rhythm. Vicky began to hum to her, long, low notes that did not connect into any recognizable tune, but were soothing to both of them.

Darcy found her sitting there. ‘Do you mind if I come in?’ he asked.

Vicky smiled, caught out in her humming, ‘Of course not. It’s your bedroom.’

Instead of edging around the room, as she would have expected, in search of a fresh shirt or a stud or a handkerchief, he came directly to her and stooped down, turning back the corner of Helen’s white cellular blanket with one finger so he could see the baby’s face.

‘She is beautiful,’ he said.

The floor of the bedroom vibrated under their feet with the bass notes of the music pounding below. There was the distant sound of shouting, and then the crack of breaking glass.

‘Is that your conservatory?’ Vicky whispered.

‘I don’t care about the conservatory.’

Darcy knelt down. He put out one hand to cup the baby’s head and felt hard bone under silky skin. The currents of air in the room slowed and became still, and the noise from the party grew irrelevant and then inaudible.

As he stroked the small head Darcy felt a sudden calm. The shocks of anxious energy and fear that made his muscles jerk entirely subsided. He forgot about the party and Hannah and Jimmy, and about the business and all the coloured balls of his concerns that were about to fall out of their juggled sequence.

In their place there was an intense and luminous fascination with the small distance that separated him from Vicky and her baby. It was as if he could see the components of the air, the Brownian movements of the atoms, minuscule and at the same time vast in their significance and simplicity.

He found that he hardly dared to breathe in case he upset the physical balance of light and air and warmth that held the three of them suspended here. Very gently, flexing his heavy fingers, he stroked again, once and then twice. He heard the contented sound that the baby made, a soft half sigh as her jaws slackened and released her mother’s nipple. Darcy withdrew his hand and Vicky laid her in the hollow of her lap.

‘Half time,’ Vicky explained. Her lightness, her matter-of-fact acceptance of his observation, filled him with amazement and pleasure.

While Darcy watched, mesmerized, Vicky drew the white elasticated cup of her bra over the breast and clipped the silvery hooks into the corresponding eyelets. Then, with the deft opposite movement, she released the other side.

He saw the rounded, down-drawn heavy weight, and the net of blue distended veins around the nipple, and the brown shiny nipple itself. It seemed to Darcy, in his trance state, that she was offering it directly to him.

Darcy leaned forward over the bundle of the baby in her lap and put his lips over the nipple.

He heard Vicky gasp, the tiny but sharp indrawing of breath making the exact opposite of the baby’s satisfied exhalation. At once his mouth filled with the thick, sweet, secret taste of milk.

The effect of it was extraordinary.

It took him back to the jealous possessiveness he had felt when he watched his mother feeding his next youngest brother, and way beyond that, back past the boundaries of memory, to his own connection to his mother and his infantile need for her. Even as with one part of his adult, analytical mind Darcy recognized this, the rest of him was overwhelmed by the physical shock of his longing for Vicky Ransome once his mouth had connected with her breast.

He became aware that her hand had come to rest at the back of his head, neither drawing him closer nor pushing him away, but simply holding him, as he had cupped the baby’s head a moment before.

If it had not been for the baby between them he could not have done anything but push her backwards, covering her, pinning her underneath him on the wide space of the bed.

As it was he painfully withdrew his head and saw a whitish dribble of milk trickle down the lower curve of the exposed breast and threaten to drip on to her unfastened evening dress. He put out one finger to stop it, and then licked the fingertip. The taste in his mouth was an echo of his longing. He wanted to submerge himself in Vicky, to submerge himself and simultaneously to obliterate everything else as he had never wanted anything else before.

‘Darcy? Darcy?’

He made himself look up into her face. There was no hostility in it, only the aftermath of surprise and – was this possible? – the faintest kindling of a response to him.

They held still for a moment, staring at each other.

Darcy had come straight from Jimmy Rose to look for Vicky. He had come in concern and sympathy, which was commendable enough, but he knew that there had also been a baser intention to measure and then, perhaps, to make use of her vulnerability. He had always found Vicky attractive, and in the last months of her pregnancy and since the birth he had found her even more interesting. The peaks of his interest in his two wives had also coincided with the production of his own children. There was a secretive, intent side to a woman absorbed in a baby that was intensely arousing.

Yet now, as Vicky lifted Helen once again and pinched the nipple – his nipple – expertly between fingers and thumb for the baby to latch on, Darcy recognized a counterpoint to his expendable desire.

Vicky was watching him, not her baby. She had round brown eyes, he saw, with bronze flecks at the outer rim of the iris. It came to him that he loved her as well as wanting to smother himself inside her.

‘My God,’ Darcy said aloud.

He would not let anything harm her. He would not let her gauche husband and his skinny widow breathe any hurt on her, nor anyone else in Grafton either. He would protect her and defend her.

Vicky put her fingers over his mouth.

‘Shh.’

It was to make him contain his promises, even before any of them could be formulated.

He was still kneeling in front of her, between the end of the quilted bed and the padded and filled armchair Hannah liked to curl up in with her copies of The World of Interiors. The noise from downstairs swelled up to them again. Darcy had forgotten that there were more than a hundred people drinking and dancing in his house.

‘Darcy?’

It was Hannah who called his name, not Vicky. Hannah had come in behind them.

Darcy turned around to look at her. She was flushed, a breadth of crimson skin showing above her gold dress and two red patches burning through the creamy makeup on her cheeks. Hannah walked forward into the room. Her hips swung in the tight swathe of satin.

‘I’ve been looking everywhere for you. One of Barney’s friends was fooling round with a chair, pretending to dance with it or something stupid, and managed to fall through the French windows and cut his hand open. Didn’t you hear the noise?’

‘Yes, I did. Is he hurt? Is Mike Wickham still here? Or David Poynter? How many other medics have we got on the bloody premises?’

‘Bloody’s about right. Mike’s seeing to him. You’d better come down. What’s the matter with everyone this evening?’

Hannah faced them, the red spots burning in her face. Darcy stood up, stiff from kneeling and suddenly conscious of his age in front of the younger women.

He remembered Jimmy’s words. ‘Demons are abroad,’ he murmured.

‘What?’

Hannah was angry. Her face reminded him of Laura’s in the midst of one of her fits of temper. Darcy glanced down, and saw there was a white stain of milk on the satin lapel of his coat.

‘Don’t worry, I’ll sort everything out downstairs,’ he said, and left them.

Hannah looked coldly at Vicky. ‘Have you got everything you need?’

Vicky blushed. She felt caught, by Darcy and by her own surprised and guilty pleasure in what had happened. She was further trapped by her semi-nakedness, by the weight of the baby, by the splendour of Hannah’s bedroom.

‘Yes, thanks. I’ll finish her feed, and then I must take Gordon home.’ And then she offered, because she felt that she must say something even if it was not the truth, ‘Darcy was only keeping me company while I did this.’

Hannah shrugged. ‘It’s quite all right. I know what Darcy likes. He is my husband, after all.’

Nina had been dancing with Andrew when a boy with one of Hannah’s curlicued-metal garden chairs in his arms had tripped and crashed forward through the glass doors. For a long moment he had lain quite still with the chair on top of him, under a ragged blanket of glass, while the music thumped on over his head.

Nina was the first to reach him. The glass crunched under her thin shoes as she lifted the chair away.

‘Christ,’ the boy said, blinking.

More people pushed beside Nina. There was a confused babble of orders and instructions. The boy raised his arm to look at it and a broad, bright fountain of blood sprayed from his wrist.

‘Christ,’ he repeated.

Nina knelt over him. She put her hand down to balance herself and felt a sharp stab.

‘Keep still,’ she said. ‘Keep your arm up like that.’

Andrew fumbled beside her with a big white handkerchief in his hands. Nina snatched it and tied it around the boy’s arm, knotting it over the shirtsleeve that was already soaked in blood. Tight, she told herself. Is that an artery? The boy’s face had turned paper white. How long before I must loosen the tourniquet?

‘Where’s Michael?’ Andrew was shouting. ‘Get Mike, will you?’

Nina heard herself saying to the boy, ‘It’s all right, you’re all right.’

There was more shoving in the crowd of people surrounding them and then Michael Wickham emerged. He had stripped off his jacket and rolled up the sleeves of his shirt. Hannah hovered in a nimbus of gold behind him.

‘Let’s see.’

Michael pressed his thumb over the cut and undid the handkerchief. Nina saw the blood ooze and felt her head swim. Michael glanced briefly at her.

‘It’s all right,’ he echoed her own words. ‘He’ll live.’

Someone helped Nina to her feet.

‘Well done. Give them some room. Oh, God, you’re covered in blood too. Look at your dress.’

Nina recognized Darcy’s big, blond son. Janice Frost had pointed him out to her earlier.

‘It doesn’t matter.’ But she spread her hands out in front of her in helpless disgust. They were smeared scarlet like a murderer’s.

The large young man took hold of one of them regardless. ‘Come on. Let me take care of you. Tom will be okay with Mike.’

She let him lead her away. A path lined with sympathetic faces opened for them through the onlookers.

In the huge kitchen he made her sit down, and then filled a bowl with warm water and brought it to her. He sponged her hands and Nina saw the brown clouds of blood shadow the water when he rinsed the cloth.

‘You’ve cut yourself, too.’

She looked at the clean slice in the fleshy base of her thumb. ‘Only a scratch.’

He took a packet of Elastoplast out of a drawer, found a dressing of the right size then applied it for her. Nina noticed that his large hands were clean, but roughened and split at the fingertips as though he did heavy work with them.

‘I’m Barney Clegg,’ he said.

‘I know. I’m Nina Cort.’

They shook hands, Nina’s undamaged left held in his right.

‘I don’t know what we can do about your dress.’

There were dark, sticky patches on the bodice and the skirt. Barney dabbed at a fold of skirt with his cloth.

‘Don’t worry. Please, don’t. You’ve done everything.’ Now that the drama had subsided Nina felt a bubble of laughter rising inside her. ‘It’s just that I can’t stand the sight of blood.’

Barney began to laugh too. ‘Neither can I. I never have been able to. A guy at college put a rake through his foot and I was the one who passed out.’

‘We have both been heroically brave tonight, then.’

They continued to laugh. The party had taken over the kitchen once again; there were caterers clearing up at the sinks and guests passing through in search of one another and the music had boomingly restarted in the conservatory. Then Nina saw Gordon watching them across what seemed like an acre of quarry-tiled floor.

Her laughter faded. She wanted him to come to her and take Barney Clegg’s place, but she knew that he wouldn’t. He would look and then look away, and afterwards he would ignore her as he had done all evening in case anyone else saw them and made an incriminating connection between them.

Michael Wickham led the pale-faced Tom into the kitchen and made him sit down near Nina. His shirtsleeve had been cut away, and his arm was bandaged from wrist to elbow and supported in a makeshift sling made from someone’s silk evening scarf.

‘Are you all right, my son?’ Barney enquired in mock Cockney.

‘Yeah. Sorry, all.’ To Nina he said, ‘Sorry about the mess.’

Gordon had turned away, as she had known he would. Nina made herself smile at the boy. ‘Don’t worry. I’m glad it’s not as serious as it looked.’

Michael said, ‘Still, he needs someone to drive him to casualty to get that arm stitched. I’m damned if it’s going to be me.’

Barney sighed. ‘I guess that’s my job. I’m just about fit to drive.’ He patted Nina on the shoulder. ‘See you again, I hope. Come on, Thomas. Let’s go and join the festivities in the accident department.’

When they had gone Michael rolled down his sleeves and fished for his cufflinks in his trousers pocket. Without thinking, Nina held out her hand for the gold links, and when he gave them to her she threaded them through the double cuffs for him as she had always done for Richard.

‘Well done,’ he commended her.

‘Well done, doctor,’ she returned.

Michael sighed. ‘It’s one of the hazards of the job, never quite to get away from it.’

She saw that when he was not frowning he had a good, plain, likable face.

‘Join me for one last drink?’ he asked her. ‘Before we head home for Christmas? A proper drink, not bloody champagne.’

‘I will. Thank you.’ She already knew that Gordon was nowhere to be seen.

When Gordon crossed the hall Marcelle stepped out and put her hand on his arm. Gordon stopped at once. They saw Darcy hurrying down the stairs but he brushed by them, unseeing, heading for the kitchen.

‘I feel like the Ancient Mariner.’ Marcelle’s mouth made a sad, acknowledging twist. ‘Can we talk for a minute?’

He looked down at her fingers, the red-painted fingernails against his black sleeve. She had capable domestic hands and the red varnish seemed slightly incongruous. Gordon’s head was full of Nina’s pale, imploring face and the little swimming movements she had made with her smeared hands. He answered vaguely, but with a cold sense of impending catastrophe, ‘Talk? Yes, of course.’

‘In here.’

Marcelle opened the door of the gunroom. There were the two creaky wicker chairs that she and Jimmy had occupied, and Jimmy’s empty glass on the floor where he had left it.

‘Parties, these parties. Getting together and talking and drinking and being good fun. At all costs, good fun.’ She put her hand up to her neck, where she could feel a vein pumping. She was very tired now.

‘Marcelle? What do you want to say?’

She nodded, feeling that her skull was too heavy for her spine. Was it only this evening, how many hours ago, that Jimmy had kissed her in here and she had worried about the creases in the skin between her breasts?

‘I know it isn’t any of my business,’ she began, and then faltered. ‘Gordon, I’m sorry. That’s what malicious gossips always say, isn’t it?’

‘I wouldn’t know.’ His mouth became a grim line. ‘Do you listen to gossip?’

She felt rebuked, but also that the rebuke was justified. ‘All right. I’ll just tell you how it is. You know what I saw the other day, and you should also know that until this evening I hadn’t mentioned it to anyone, not to Michael or anyone else.’

He said stiffly, ‘Thank you. You were right, of course, at the beginning. It isn’t any of your business.’

A retrospective, wasted prickle of anger went through Marcelle.

‘Even though Vicky is my friend?’

‘It would be an act of friendship, wouldn’t it, not to pass on speculative whispers about a brief glimpse of two people? A glimpse that might easily have been mistaken or misinterpreted?’

‘But I don’t think I was mistaken, was I?’

When Gordon said nothing she rushed at her admission, wanting to get it over with so she could escape from the horrible room,

‘This isn’t coming out the way I meant it to, not that I know how I meant it. We know each other well enough, don’t we? I wanted to say that I meant to keep my mouth shut, but I didn’t, stupidly, and I’m very sorry. I told Jimmy Rose about it.’

Gordon repeated, ‘You told Jimmy?’

His fuddled mind filled up with images of Jimmy’s cunning fox-head bent close to a circle of heads, and then the heads turning to more circles of listening heads, and mouths whispering, all of them Jimmy’s mouth, on and on in widening ripples into infinity.

‘I’m very sorry. It was a thoughtless and damaging thing to do.’

‘Yes.’

He could think of nothing else to say, other than to acknowledge the truth of it.

Marcelle’s hand wavered towards him, as if to offer meaningless comfort, but he made no move and she let it fall to her side. Then she turned sharply and ran to the door.

Gordon watched the door close behind her. He stood and stared at it, his eyes retaining the blue-green swirl of her skirt. He felt a leaden pity for Vicky and Nina, for himself, even for Jimmy and Marcelle, which he knew would shortly flower into pain.

The party was coming to an end. Couples were filtering into the hallway to stand in their coats under the pine garlands and exchange the last words of the evening. The music had turned smoochy and it was punctuated by the slamming of car doors outside and by headlamp beams raking over the conservatory glass. The smashed door had been hastily patched up with a flattened cardboard box.

Darcy had stationed himself near the front door to say good night to his guests.

Gordon and Vicky came down the stairs together, Gordon carrying the baby basket. Darcy kissed Vicky on the cheek and she leaned against him for an instant, looking up at him, her fingers closing on his arm. Gordon was stiff and dark beside her.

‘Good night. Merry Christmas.’

The Wickhams followed the Ransomes out into the cold darkness, with the Frosts and Star not far behind them. They called out, wishing each other a happy Christmas, separating into the old pairs for the drive home into Christmas Day.

Marcelle stared ahead, watching the way the car’s headlights sliced at angles over the flat-topped hedges. She wanted to build a bridge to Michael now, before they reached home, where Michael’s visiting parents might not yet be in bed.

‘Was the boy all right?’

‘Yes, more or less. He was quite lucky.’ Michael glanced at her. ‘Did you enjoy the party? I didn’t see much of you.’

He was aware of all the evenings of their years together meshed behind them. He thought of the parties they had been to following the one at which they had first met, the clothes and places and friendships that had been discarded, temporary attractions to other people flaring and fading, leaving just the two of them. The weight of so much history pulled at his shoulders as if he was wearing a heavy train.

Marcelle thought of Jimmy with his head bent to kiss her lined skin, and Gordon’s rebuke, and his cold face. She also remembered the furtive delight that she had glimpsed in the red Mercedes.

‘Yes,’ she lied. ‘Yes, I did.’

Michael took one hand off the wheel to touch her arm. ‘Let’s try to have a happy Christmas, shall we?’

‘Of course,’ Marcelle answered.

Vicky rested her head against the cool glass of the passenger window. She was smiling. There had been a guilelessness in Darcy’s advance, a childish directness that she found deeply appealing. She was also pleased that he had so plainly wanted her; after what seemed like years of feeling huge and milky and bovine it was good to be reminded that she was alive and interesting. She could feel the stirred-up blood now, singing inside her.

Vicky had no idea what would happen next, or if anything would happen, but she contemplated whatever it would be with sleepy equanimity.

Gordon negotiated the familiar twists of the country road with frozen concentration. He could see the lights of another car, probably the Frosts’, winding ahead of him. He thought Vicky must have dropped into a doze and he tried to drive smoothly in order not to wake her or the baby. He needed this interval to think.

He was certain that he would have to tell Vicky the truth, before she heard someone else whispering the story.

He would have to tell her as gently and as honestly as he could manage, although he could not imagine what words he would use. Nor did he have any idea of what might happen once Vicky did know. But even in the midst of his dread he knew that he couldn’t bear to give Nina up, even though that was what he must certainly do.

His whole head was alive with images of her this evening, in her black dress, with her head held up and her long hands painted with blood. It had been hard enough not to run to her then, to have to leave her to Barney Clegg.

How could he tell Vicky what he barely understood himself, only clung to with all the selfish and vivid need that had woken up in him?

And when could he tell her? He must warn Nina first, somehow, and that would be a second betrayal. A wild impulse to leave Vicky at home and then to turn round and drive straight to Dean’s Row fuelled him for a second and then shrivelled away.

There was nothing to be done today.

There would be the enactment of a family Christmas with his children and their grandparents, and he would have to live through that with his knowledge of what was waiting for them. The next day, or the day after that, he would somehow find a way to tell the truth before Jimmy Rose did it for him.

Then, at the end of it, he would be left without Nina. As he considered this Gordon noticed, as dispassionately as if he were registering it in a third person, the first sharp twist of pain.

Darcy sat down on the edge of the bed and took off his shoes. Hannah was already in bed, lying curled up with her back to him.

‘What’s the matter?’ he asked her. ‘It was a good party. Good enough, anyway.’ When she said nothing he undid his tie and shirt and then took off his trousers, dropping each item on to Vicky’s chair. He could see the print of her body in the cushions.

‘Is this to do with Vicky Ransome?’ he asked. Hannah muttered something he could not hear. He told her irritably, ‘Don’t sulk, darling, it doesn’t suit you.’

Darcy padded naked into the bathroom and looked at himself in the mirror as he stood at the lavatory. There was a thick roll of flesh around his midriff and the hair on his chest was grey, but the muscles of his belly remained satisfyingly taut. He was not, he told himself, in bad shape for his age.

When he slid into bed beside her, Hannah still had not moved. Darcy eased across and pressed himself against her bulky warmth. He loved the generosity of flesh; it was Jimmy Rose’s mistake to imagine that he could have been drawn to Nina’s dry bones.

‘Hannah?’

He reached an arm over her shoulder and found her breasts. The looseness of them connected him to Vicky again and he felt himself harden.

‘Stop it, Darcy. The kids will be awake in three hours’ time.’

‘Let Mandy see to them, or the twins.’

‘It’s Christmas.’

‘All the more reason to spread a little cheer.’

Her only response was to push his hand away and hunch her shoulders in self-protection. Darcy was too sleepy to make more than a token protest; he knew this was Hannah’s revenge for his interlude with Vicky, and he also knew that by tomorrow it would be forgotten.

When he reached to turn out the light Darcy was smiling. He had remembered his earlier absolute conviction that he loved Vicky Ransome. He wanted to fuck her, that was true; he still did. But there was no need for love to be a factor in the equation.

Jimmy came out of the church. He shook hands with the priest and nodded a greeting to some of the other worshippers, although he knew none of them well. This was a matter of choice; he preferred to slip out of the currents of the day and come to mass alone.

The Catholic church was a modern brick building in a quiet road. Jimmy walked a little way away from it, down the street, to get away from the people and their cars. It was a cold, clear night. The street lights spread a murky orange canopy overhead, but he could see through it to the sharp brilliance of the stars. When he was alone he stopped, and heard the tiny echo of his own footsteps.

He tilted his head back to look at the stars.

It was Christmas morning, and Jimmy felt entirely at peace.