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 16

The door of the house in Dean’s Row was opened by a man Gordon had never seen before. His pale, indoor clothes looked incongruous in the metallic winter light and his feet were bare. It was the afternoon of Boxing Day.

‘Is Nina here?’

Patrick said, ‘Yes, she is.’ He knew at once that this was the man. Reluctantly he held the door open wider. ‘Come in. She’s upstairs.’

Nina and Patrick had been watching a film, the Branagh Henry V. They had spent many afternoons like this together, immersed in a movie, barricaded by sofa cushions. There was a box of Belgian chocolates on the floor, and a comfortable litter of empty coffee cups and wine glasses. The King’s dirty, weary army limped across the television screen in the corner.

‘I much prefer the Olivier version,’ Patrick had sighed, before the knock at the door. ‘Such romantic Plantagenet splendour.’

‘You would.’ Nina laughed at him through a mouthful of chocolate. ‘Don’t you think mud and dead horses are more realistic?’

‘And is realism a real benefit?’

Now Gordon stood in the doorway. Nina was startled, still warm with laughter, sitting in her corner of the sofa with her knees drawn up against the cushions. Gordon saw the evidence of an indulgent, adult afternoon of a kind that he had almost forgotten. His own house today was a dense, humid mass of children and grandparents and festive detritus. Nina’s bare, elegant drawing room and even the unknown languid man formed a tableau that entirely excluded him.

‘I’m sorry. I’m disturbing you.’

Nina jumped to her feet. She was wearing leggings and a loose cashmere tunic that he remembered seeing before. It had felt soft enough to melt under his hands.

‘No, you’re not. Of course you’re not.’

He clearly saw the pleasure and anticipation in her face, and wished that he had come to tell her something different.

‘Only I thought, today …’

She gestured with her long fingers that he wanted to take hold of. She meant that it was Boxing Day, a time of new dolls’ houses and noisy parlour games and family attachments.

‘I said I had a headache and needed some fresh air. The truth, as it happens.’

For a moment he had forgotten the pale-coloured man behind him, but Nina had not.

‘Gordon, this is Patrick Forbes, an old friend of mine. Patrick, this is Gordon Ransome.’

Gordon said stiffly, ‘How do you do?’

Patrick shrugged, smiling a little. ‘Hi.’

They shook hands, conscious of immediate mutual dislike. Gordon saw, now that they faced each other, that Patrick must be queer. He was always uncomfortable with homosexuals, and Patrick’s defensiveness of Nina made him prickly.

Gordon was also disconcerted to realize that he had never considered that Nina might not be alone, even on the day after Christmas. They hadn’t discussed their separate holiday plans. Patrick’s presence, among the cushions and pairs of wine glasses, conjured up another world of Nina’s friends and diversions and allegiances in which he played no part. He felt a desolate, paradoxical jealousy.

He said, with his eyes fixed on her face, ‘I hoped we might be able to talk for a few minutes.’

Patrick’s eyebrows lifted. ‘I’ll go and make some tea, shall I?’

Nina smiled at him. ‘Could you?’

Gordon felt as if he had blundered into a game in which the unwritten rules were too subtle for him to comprehend. But as soon as Patrick had gone Nina came to him, putting her hands on his arms and reaching up to kiss him. He held her, longingly and unwillingly.

‘He knows about us, doesn’t he?’ Gordon asked.

‘I had to talk to somebody. I couldn’t keep so much so secret. Do you mind very much?’

She was bright-faced with happiness. He considered, briefly, whether he might not be able to conceal the real reason for his visit. Then they could sit down together in comfort amongst the discarded television pages and hollowed cushions. He hesitated, but her face was already changing, the happiness fading out of it.

‘What is it?’ she asked.

He noticed that in the time he had been in the room the light outside had faded from midwinter afternoon to premature dusk. In a moment the street lamps would come on at the margins of the green. When he didn’t answer at once she repeated,

‘What is it? Tell me.’

He sat down on the edge of the warm sofa. He remembered that he had lit the fire for her, on the first afternoon, and they had admired the view of the west front before it was obscured by scaffolding. Not many weeks ago. He could number them exactly, and the days, counted out in intervals by the number of times they had managed to see each other. In retrospect they seemed very few, for the weight of what he was having to do now.

‘Marcelle told Jimmy Rose that she saw us together.’

Nina gazed at him. The firelight polished her cheeks and the golden shields of her earrings.

‘Well. That is a pity.’

He waited, but she had nothing else to say. Her passivity irritated him until he remembered that she was an outsider and did not understand the shorthand of the Grafton couples.

‘If Jimmy knows it means everyone knows. Jimmy has never been one for keeping a titbit of gossip to himself.’

‘Vicky?’

‘Vicky will know soon enough, obviously. Someone will tell her.’

Nina was silent again.

Gordon had not thought directly of Vicky since he came into the room, but now he saw her as she had been when he left home with his headache to drive to the cathedral. Her mother and father had been with her, and he had noticed the way their features foretold her progress into old age just as Vicky’s predicted her own daughters’ maturity.

He had been quick with his gabbled excuses, and his wife had sighed, not looking him in the face. Her silence had made him afraid that somehow she must know the truth already, and the fear had made him hurry away to do what had to be done.

Nina raised her eyes to meet Gordon’s. In his head the features of the two women were briefly superimposed, as he had once envisaged their bodies at the start of the affair.

She said very quietly, ‘I see. What does this mean?’

‘It means that I must tell her the truth, before somebody else gives her a distorted version of it. And it also means that I can’t go on seeing you. I’m sorry. I wish I didn’t have to be so clumsy. I feel as if I have broken something that is irreplaceable.’

Nina sat still. Her eyes slid away from his, to the fire. When she spoke it was in the same quiet voice.

‘Don’t worry. Nothing’s broken.’

Whatever it was that Gordon had been afraid of, tears or protests or blame, did not come. Her face was immobile, and her silence meant that he had to talk, continuing to offer her some other currency now that the old, thrilling one had become invalid.

‘This is very painful, Nina. You made me so happy. Guilty, but happy as well. I went through our tapes, in the racks at home, and dug out the old rock numbers and fed them into the deck in the car. I used to drive along, going to work or some bloody site meeting, with the volume turned up, music blasting out. Singing along, grinning and drumming my fingers on the wheel. I felt like a boy.’

He spread his hands out, offering her this.

‘A middle-aged engineer, burdened with debt and children and responsibilities. I couldn’t believe that it was happening.’

Nina said nothing.

‘I loved you. I love you now.’

She looked at him at last.

‘And so what happens to it, this love?’

He considered it, knowing that he owed her as much.

To feel love had been seductive and intriguing and flattering, and it had lent him an animation that he had not felt for years. This woman, whom he had believed he understood and now suspected that he did not, had accepted and reciprocated his love, and all of this had been enclosed within a frame of secrecy that had been part of its delight. Gordon had enjoyed having a secret, after so many years when his interior life had been as clean and plain and colourless as the external world. The possession of it had added an extra erotic charge to everything that he and Nina did together.

But once the secrecy was gone, he did not see how the rest could remain. Whatever different gloss he wished to give it, it had been a private affair that was now public property.

‘I love you still,’ he said helplessly.

That was the truth. Greedy and possessive as he knew it was, he wanted to keep her. Even now it would have been easy, delightful, to reach out, to undo buttons and expose the white, tea-freckled skin.

Gordon touched the tip of his tongue to his lips.

‘But I am married, and therefore responsible to people other than myself. I thought you understood that. Nina?’

‘Understood that wives must be protected at all costs?’

Her eyes were as flat as the discs of her earrings.

‘Wives, and children …’ Gordon said.

As he spoke the words he gained another surprising perspective. This loss of love and Nina hurt him, and would continue to hurt him, but he also wanted to be saved. Salvation was in sight, and this glimpse of it filled him with relief.

‘What about me?’ Nina asked. Her voice was dry, toneless.

He shook his head slowly, from side to side, accepting the darts of pain inside his skull as his due. He was eager for the pain of losing her to begin, too, as the penance he must undergo.

‘I don’t want to hurt you. I want to wrap you up and make it better for you, but I can’t. I can’t bear the thought of hurting you.’

‘But, clearly, you can bear it.’

It was fully dark outside. The street lamps made an ugly, amber haze in drifted snow-shapes of condensation at the corners of the window panes.

In the silence that followed Nina went to the nearest of the tall windows and unfolded the shutters from their panelled niches, carefully fitting the old iron catch with its curled tail into the slot to hold them securely closed. She did the same with the other two windows, moving carefully behind the Christmas tree to reach them. Nina’s tree was hung with silver trinkets and illuminated with pure white light. Gordon made an automatic comparison with Vicky’s, which was loaded with crayoned ornaments made by the girls and lit with multi-coloured lanterns.

Nina finished the task of closing out the darkness, and came back to her place.

‘Thank you for coming to tell me first,’ she said. ‘Before Vicky.’

He had never seen this coldness, this composure, in her before. After the very beginning she had always been warm and eager, generous with herself in a way that had been enticingly at odds with her physical slightness. He wanted to defend Vicky, who had done nothing, but he restrained himself.

‘I’m truly sorry,’ was all he could think of to say.

‘Yes. However, nothing is broken,’ Nina repeated.

But she is strong, Gordon thought. Much stronger than I am.

Her strength unbalanced him, and revealed his own weakness.

Now that the business was done he felt a terrible, humble urge to throw himself at her, to hide his face and to cry and wail in her arms and have her comfort him, the way Vicky soothed Alice with inarticulate murmurings after a bad dream. The smell of her and the texture of her skin and hair returned sharply in his imagination. He propped his elbow on his knee, and rested his head in his hand. She did not reach out to soothe or console him, as he wanted her to do. Instead she looked at her watch, and the loose cuff of her tunic fell back to expose her thin wrist and the freckles on her arm.

She said in her cool, unemphatic voice, ‘I wonder where Patrick is with the tea.’

Gordon lifted his head again.

‘I don’t want any tea.’

‘Yours will be waiting for you at home, of course.’

The glimpse of her bitterness stirred him. She was not unaffected, after all, and he felt himself melting. He made a tiny move towards her, but she held up her hands, fending him off.

The conversation was over. He could not put any other interpretation on it. She would not look at him now.

There was nothing for him to do but stand up and take the coat that he had put aside when Patrick led him into the room.

He blurted foolishly, ‘Will I … will we see each other again?’

Nina sat amongst the cushions, one side of her face gilded by the firelight.

‘At the Frosts, or the Cleggs, I imagine.’

‘Don’t be hard.’

‘Don’t you be soft, then.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he attempted for the last time.

‘Yes,’ Nina said. He was dismissed.

Gordon nodded. Then he went down the stairs and let himself out into the Row. His Peugeot was parked beyond the archway that led on to the green. He drove out of the city in the opposite direction from home, and stopped in a field gateway off a lane that led in the direction of Wilton. In the distance he could see the lights of Darcy’s house on its little hill.

He sat for a long time with the car heater making a small burr of warmth around him. The hedge trees loomed in the darkness, and no other car passed. Once he reached out to the tongue of the cassette tape protruding from the player, but he stopped before pushing it in to play. He thought about all the households between here and the city, imagining the rooms and the decorations that had been put up for the holiday and the complicated arrangements of families gathered for Christmas. He felt omniscient, elevated by his sadness, as if he could look into each of the houses and interpret its secrets.

Then he thought about his own fireside, with a sudden affection coloured by relief. It only remained for him to make his confession to Vicky, and then he would be safe.

At length, when he began to feel stiff and cold even with the heater running, he restarted the engine and turned the car back in the direction he had come.

In the empty room Nina leant forward and picked up a shred of gold wrapping paper from the rug. She folded it and buffed it with her fingernail to make it shine, and then twisted it around her ring finger to make a wedding band, as she had done as a child in games of getting married.

My husband will be handsome and rich, and we’ll have eight children, four of each.

My husband will buy us a big house in London and another by the sea, and we’ll have eight children as well.

The paper made a gaudy triplet with Richard’s rings.

She asked him, Why aren’t you here? Why did you go and leave me, when I needed you? We had our houses and your money and our happiness.

No children. I’m sorry for that, my love.

And then you had to go and die, and leave me here.

Nina stared at the blank wooden shutters that closed out the cathedral and the restoration works. A month ago, even a week ago, she would have cried and battered herself against the wall of her own grief. Nothing had changed, only herself, but this time she did not cry.

Now that he had stumbled away with his needs and his confusion, Nina knew that she had only tried to make herself a shadow husband out of Gordon Ransome. She had imagined his strength and protection, and her instincts had been hardly more developed than those of the little girl playing weddings.

It was harsh to be angry with Gordon because his strength had turned out to be an illusion, and because his protective instincts were all for himself and his wife and his children and not for her.

She took off the paper ring and screwed it into a ball before throwing it at the fire. The only strength that was valuable to her was her own, and for the protection of friendship there was always Patrick.

She found him sitting in the kitchen, the room she still disliked with its faux-rustic cupboards and tiles. The tea tray was immaculately laid and waiting on the table beside him. He was smoking a coloured Balkan Sobranie with gold filter, a Christmas indulgence.

‘I heard him leaving,’ Patrick said.

‘The final exit.’

He raised his eyebrows at her, squinting through the smoke, making his Noel Coward face. Nina began to laugh.

‘Funny?’ Patrick enquired.

‘Not really. No.’

‘Tell me, then.’ He lifted the teapot and poured for her, passed her the cup.

‘It’s just how you would have predicted. You warned me at the beginning, didn’t you?’

He made a gesture modestly dismissive of his own prescience, and now they both laughed.

‘One of the wives, one half of one of the couples, happened to see us together. She told someone else, one of the husbands, who will in his turn tell the others. And so Gordon’s wife will get to hear of it. And so it has to end, so that he can confess to her and ask for forgiveness.’

Patrick demanded, ‘How can you bear it? This provincial world of couples pecking away at each other, at each other’s secrets?’

Nina drank some of her tea. ‘It isn’t quite like that. This isn’t a metropolitan world, there isn’t the same luxurious privacy that cities give. But there is a feeling of us all being here together. Of having committed ourselves to the same life. It was a mistake to have an affair. I suppose I had overlooked the fact that it would be more … significant here.’

She was thinking of the different faces of the Grafton couples and the ways that their friendships and allegiances seemed to knit them together, and remembering her reluctance to join Darcy Clegg in his mild mockery of them.

Patrick was watching her face. ‘So it is over, your love affair?’

‘Oh, yes.’

There was a moment’s silence. ‘He was wearing those shoes. The ones that look like pork pies that have been left out in the rain.’

‘Don’t laugh at him, Patrick. I liked him very much.’

‘And now he’s made you sad.’

‘Yes.’

Patrick took hold of her hand and then he put his arms around her. She rested her forehead against his shoulder.

‘Why don’t you come back to London instead of staying out here in bandit country, with bandits in pork pie shoes?’

Nina shook her head. ‘I like it here,’ she said. She was thinking of the statues in their cathedral niches, and their faces re-emerging from the lime bandages, images of regeneration.

Patrick let her go. ‘Well. I suppose that’s that, then. Do you want to watch the end of the film?’

‘Why not? We could have a glass of champagne at the same time. It is Christmas.’

‘That’s my girl.’

They finished their tea, and then drank champagne in front of the television. Later there was another knock at the door, and Nina went downstairs to answer it. A car was parked with two wheels on the pavement, and Barney Clegg and his friend with the bandaged arm stood on the step. Barney held up two bottles and Tom carried an ivory-flowered plant wrapped in green tissue paper in the crook of his good arm. They both beamed at her.

‘You did live, then,’ Nina said to Tom.

‘I did. We’ve called to say thank you. And to give you this. Whatever it is.’

‘It’s a Christmas rose,’ Barney Clegg protested. ‘Helleborus niger. For your garden. I suppose you’ve got a garden, back there?’

She took the offering. The fragile cup-shaped flowers were tinged with green, with a central boss of golden anthers. ‘How beautiful. My garden isn’t worthy of it. Would you like to come in and have a drink? Provided you don’t bleed on anything.’

The boys trampled in, seeming huge in her hallway.

‘Eleven stitches,’ Tom said proudly, holding out his arm.

‘After eleven hours sitting in casualty, or thereabouts,’ Barney cheerfully complained.

They followed Nina up the stairs, filling the quiet house with noise.

‘We’ve been round to Mike Wickham’s, to thank him as well.’

‘And how were they?’

The boys snorted with laughter. ‘Pretty dire. Howling kids everywhere.’

‘Like Barney’s place, in fact.’

Nina opened the drawing room door for them.

‘Well, there are no kids here, howling or otherwise. Only Patrick and me.’

Patrick uncoiled himself from the sofa.

‘This is Barney and his friend Tom. They’ve come to thank me for doing not very much when Tom cut his arm on Christmas Eve.’

After the handshakes Barney offered his bottles of wine.

‘I don’t know what these are. Is it drinkable? I lifted them from Dad’s cellar.’

Patrick examined the labels. ‘Better than drinkable. A rather good Pomerol.’

‘Shall we open them? Let them breathe, and the rest?’

More glasses were brought, logs were put on the fire and the humming television was switched off. The boys made themselves comfortable, arms and long legs folded somehow into Nina’s cushions. Patrick and Nina refilled glasses and passed plates, and learned among other things that Barney was a student of landscape design and horticulture at agricultural college, and Tom was at the nearby poly. They had been friends since their not-very-distant schooldays. They had been vaguely planning to move on to Grafton’s one disco later in the evening, but Barney complained that it was full of kids, ‘Lucy and Cathy’s crowd’. Soon it became clear that Barney and Tom were staying to dinner.

When Patrick and Nina found themselves alone for a moment in the kitchen, Patrick said, ‘I thought you said you knew no one in Grafton except middle-aged married couples.’

‘Surprise, surprise.’

It was a convivial supper. Patrick was never predatory or even openly camp, but the wine melted his reserve and made him funny and loquacious. It was clear that he liked the company of the two large boys. He seemed too often to be an observer nowadays. For herself, she was amused by Barney and Tom’s good humour and their enthusiasm for everything from her food to Patrick’s wry jokes.

When she remembered Gordon and experienced the twist of angry sadness that came with the thought of him, she made herself close him off and concentrated instead on the friendly faces around her kitchen table. It was odd to hear the laughter and clatter of plates in this room, when she had so deliberately determined that it would always be empty and silent.

The Christmas rose stood stripped of its paper on the draining board. There were crumbs of earth around the lip of the clay pot, and more mud rimming the bottom of it. Nina brushed some of it away with her fingertips. Barney came with a neat pile of dirty plates to stand beside her at the sink.

‘I lifted it from the nursery bed especially for you,’ he told her. He was a head taller than Nina, and she had to look up at him.

‘Did you lift one for Mike Wickham too?’

‘No, of course not.’

They both gazed at the ivory petals with their faint suffusion of green. Nina was disconcerted to find that she was blushing. Behind them she heard Tom explaining to Patrick the rules of some complicated word game that he had suddenly decided they must play.

‘Shall I plant it for you?’ Barney asked her. ‘It’s too hot for it to be happy in here.’

Nina turned on the outside light and led Barney to the doors that looked out on to her tiny courtyard garden. It was a dismal prospect of bare earth drifted over with dead leaves and windblown litter.

‘I did say that my garden wasn’t worthy of it.’

Barney unlocked the door and carried the plant outside. Nina watched him as he found a sheltered corner and tenderly heaped up dead leaves around the pot to protect it from the frost. He rubbed his large hands on his jeans and ducked back into the kitchen.

‘I’ll come in the daylight to plant it properly for you. I could tidy up the rest and plant some other stuff as well, if you like.’

He waited.

Nina said gently, ‘That’s very kind of you. But I don’t think you should spend your time doing my neglected garden for me.’

Richard had always been the gardener. He had loved his garden in Norfolk, the garden where he had died. Carefully Nina picked up the last specks of earth from the stainless steel ribs of the sink drainer.

Barney shrugged. ‘That’s okay. It’s my job; or it will be if I ever get qualified.’

Tom called to them, ‘Are we going to play this game, then?’

They had had a good deal to drink, Nina realized. But she took another bottle of wine from the rack and opened it, and sat down at the table again.

The game was a rambling, open-ended affair of inventing words and then supplying meanings for them. Patrick was the best at devising words and definitions; he had always been good at crosswords and riddles and charades, but Barney came in a surprisingly sharp second. Nina was hopeless, her wits were too scattered, but it was a pleasure to see Patrick enjoying himself so much.

At length, long after midnight, the boys decided that they must after all make a late raid on the disco. They tried to persuade Nina and Patrick to accompany them, without success, and finally, with promises to come back another day, they left in search of new diversions.

Patrick leaned against the duck-egg blue cupboards and drank the last of a glass of wine.

‘Do you think I’m a silly old queen?’ he asked, ‘Enjoying a pair of nice, straight boys like those?’

‘No more than I’m a silly old woman,’ Nina answered. She was smiling, but Patrick was not deceived.

‘Are you thinking about pork-piefoot?’

‘Yes.’ And about Richard, too, only she would not burden him with that.

‘Then don’t,’ Patrick ordered her.

Vicky’s parents went home on the day after Boxing Day. Gordon carried their tartan suitcases out to the front of the house and stowed them side by side in the boot of Alec’s Vauxhall. The old people moved slowly in his wake, arranging their car rug and Marjorie’s handbag on the back seat, arguing protractedly with each other about the need for petrol and the best route to take home. Mary and Alice ran out after their grandmother and hung on to her arms, while Vicky stood in the doorway holding Helen wrapped in a white shawl.

Patiently Gordon helped his parents-in-law to settle themselves ready for the short journey, answering Alec’s queries about the nearest filling station likely to be open and reassuring Marjorie that of course he would make sure Vicky got enough rest.

At the same time, he was trying to imagine how he and Vicky would be together when they had reached the same age as her father and mother. He thought that the small irritations with one another and the tetchiness generated by minor interruptions to routine would be solidified in just the same way, set in the rock of another twenty-five years. They would go visiting at Christmas time and Mary’s husband would humour him, exactly as he was humouring Alec now. The idea was profoundly depressing.

At last the old people were ready to go.

Vicky came out and stood beside him in the driveway, and Alice and Mary waved, and Alec revved the engine too fiercely before letting in the clutch, as he always did. The Vauxhall bucked forward, narrowly missing the rose bushes bordering the front lawn, and then achieved the correct momentum to pass between the gateposts and swing left into the roadway.

The children shouted gamely, ‘Goodbye, Granny, goodbye, Grandad,’ and Gordon and Vicky raised their arms in salute, frozen for an instant in a happy-family tableau.

When the Vauxhall had finally passed out of sight they turned back into the house. Vicky lifted the baby to her shoulder and massaged her back through the thickness of the shawl.

Gordon looked carefully around him, as if he was seeing the interior of his home for the first time. There was a hard, yellowish light that revealed the chipped paint of the skirting boards and the sticky handprints on the walls, and now that he and Vicky were alone together again the rooms seemed to contain a sullen, implacable silence.

They went into the untidy kitchen, and while Vicky put the baby into her basket Gordon covertly watched her face. The skin seemed puffy and unhealthily smooth, as if water had seeped underneath it. It came to him that she was suffering too.

He had decided that he would talk to her this evening, when the children were asleep. It was the anticipation of what he must do that gave the house and surroundings their queasily unfamiliar aspect, and for the hundredth time he played with the idea of saying nothing, of trusting to luck and the hope that Vicky would never hear what had happened. But ever since Christmas Eve he had been imagining the invisible snake of gossip twisting between the Grafton couples, and he knew he would have to make his confession because he couldn’t hope that the secret would be kept.

Vicky was listlessly piling toys into the wicker hamper where they were supposed to live. Someone had spilled sugar on the kitchen floor, and her slippers made a gritty protest as she moved.

Gordon said, ‘I thought I might take them all out for a walk, down as far as the river. I could put Helen in the buggy. You could go to sleep for an hour, if you like.’

She straightened up, and he saw her brief flicker of surprise replaced by disbelief.

‘You look tired,’ he offered. ‘Go on, have an hour’s rest.’

Vicky dropped another toy into the basket, looking away from him again. ‘Thanks. I might, if you don’t mind.’

After he had searched for and found the necessary pairs of mittens and wellingtons, and helped Mary and Alice into their coats and wound scarves around their necks, and once Helen was zipped into her padded bag and strapped into the nest of her buggy, Gordon’s patience was almost exhausted. Vicky had gone upstairs without a backward glance.

‘Off we go,’ he encouraged his daughters.

They set off down the road. Gordon felt conspicuous wheeling the high-framed white buggy, but the world seemed deserted. The neighbours’ front doors were tightly closed and their windows were screened by the scrawny arms of winter trees. Alice wanted to stop at every corner, but he made her hurry on with the objective of the park beside the river in his mind.

‘Mummy always lets me say hello to the spotted dog,’ she complained.

‘Don’t you want to get to the swings?’ he coerced.

When they reached the park after their slow journey they stood in a line and peered through the railings at the river. It was swollen and brown, carrying crests of dirty foam on its back. The wind was very cold. Helen’s tiny nose had turned red, although the rest of her was almost invisible in her swaddling covers.

‘Sometimes we throw sticks,’ Mary told him.

‘Shall we swing, today?’ Gordon asked, recognizing that this numbing outing must be a regular part of Vicky’s routine. He left the baby parked against the railings.

Mary ran to a swing and hoisted herself on to the seat.

‘Push me,’ she called.

Alice ran to one side, to a yellow plastic cockerel mounted on a heavy spring.

‘How high can you go?’ Gordon asked Mary, giving the small duffel-coated back a tentative push.

‘Much higher. Push harder,’ Mary shouted, sticking her legs straight out in front of her. ‘That’s better. Like that.’

To Gordon she seemed terribly fragile, a small cargo of precious humanity rushing backwards and forwards through the hostile air. Her hair streamed out under her knitted hat and she shouted with excitement, defying his adult anxiety.

A second later he saw the red blur of Alice’s coat out of the corner of his eye. She had abandoned her cockerel and was rushing towards them.

He shouted, ‘Look out!’, but he was frozen in mid-push with his hands stretched vertically in front of him. Alice zigzagged in front of the swing and the sole of Mary’s wellington boot caught her on the temple before the seat soared on upwards over her head.

Alice collapsed on the tarmac and the arc of her sister’s swing returned above her. Gordon caught at the chains and held them, arresting Mary at the high point and almost wrenching his arms out of their sockets. He stilled the swing and scooped Mary out of it before sprinting to where Alice lay in a heap.

‘She ran in front,’ he heard Mary babbling.

He bent over Alice and saw her face contract and her lips draw back from her teeth. There were three full seconds of silence before the first howl found its way out of her. He was almost crying with relief himself as he snatched her up and held her. Her screams grew louder, and she went rigid.

There was a blue and white graze on her temple, and as he looked at it tiny scarlet beads sprang out between the shreds of skin. The caterpillar print of Mary’s sole was clearly visible.

‘Mummy puts cold water,’ Mary said, pointing to the drinking fountain. Gordon carried the screaming child over to the metal cup and soaked his handkerchief in icy water. The side of Alice’s head was already turning red and beginning to swell. Gordon pressed the cold compress to it and soothed her, feeling the panicky jumps of his heart.

‘It isn’t too bad, darling. It will hurt for a bit and then it will go away. It’s just a bump. Just an old bump. Something that happens at the swings.’

After a while the child’s screaming diminished and then stopped, fading away into hiccuping sobs.

‘Good girl,’ he whispered to her, rocking her in his arms. ‘Brave girl.’

‘She’s stupid,’ Mary said at his elbow, needing to state her own case now that the panic was subsiding. ‘She ran in front. It wasn’t my fault.’

‘It wasn’t anyone’s fault, it just happened.’

Gordon extended his other arm to hold Mary too. He hugged his daughters close to his chest, daunted by their vulnerability and by the scale of the work involved in keeping them safe, helping them to grow. He felt weighed down by the responsibility of parenthood, but at the same time a different, narrow perspective opened up, of reluctant admiration for Vicky and satisfaction in their partnership. They had achieved these three tiny individuals, at least. After this evening, he thought, he would make sure that everything was set right again.

The lump on the side of Alice’s head had grown to the size of a small, shiny egg, but the graze had stopped bleeding and he could see that there was no serious damage done. Gordon stood up, setting the two girls side by side on the tarmac.

‘We had better go home,’ he told them. ‘Helen will be waking up soon and needing her feed.’

In the evening, after the children had been put to bed, Vicky made dinner, a random assemblage of leftovers that seemed even more half-hearted than her recent efforts in the kitchen.

‘I’ll do a big shop tomorrow,’ she defended herself, before Gordon could complain. Her brief nap in the afternoon seemed only to have increased her tiredness. She moved heavily between the table and the fridge with the congealed dishes.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Gordon said. He felt clumsy and guilty. He opened a bottle of wine, and made himself a cold turkey sandwich. When they were both sitting down he began, ‘Can we talk about something?’

‘I’m very tired,’ Vicky answered.

‘It’s important.’

She waited in silence, holding her wine glass between her hands. The puffiness of the skin around her eyes had narrowed the sockets, giving her a Chinese look.

Gordon put down his sandwich. Staring at the plate in front of him he said, ‘There isn’t any gentle way to tell you this, I wish there were. I have been having an affair with Nina. It’s over now.’

Behind him the refrigerator gave its familiar shudder as the motor started into life.

Vicky looked as if he had hit her. Gordon made a move to touch her, but she pushed him away with a stiff, panicky gesture.

‘Nina?’ she repeated.

‘I’m so sorry about it. I wanted to tell you.’

After a moment Vicky sank down, her shoulders sagging against the back of the kitchen chair.

‘I knew there was something. Oh, God, I knew there was something.’ She shaded her eyes with her hand. ‘How long have you been having this affair?’

‘It started when you were in hospital.’

‘When I was in hospital? When I was in hospital, having our baby?’ She shook her head from side to side, as if she couldn’t quite make sense of the words.

Gordon thought, This is terrible. He had tried to imagine how it would be, over and over, but he had never envisaged this sick, shocked look of Vicky’s.

‘When did it end?’ she asked.

‘I went to tell her yesterday afternoon.’

‘Why yesterday afternoon?’

He paused, and then said, ‘Marcelle Wickham saw the two of us together a few days ago. She told Jimmy about it on Christmas Eve.’

‘But why did you end it?’

‘Because I wanted to,’ he lied. ‘And because I wanted you to hear about it from me, not from Janice or Star or somebody else.’

Vicky nodded her head, his words seeming to come clear to her at last.

‘Christmas Eve? You ended it because you had to.’

‘No, that’s not true.’

She let her hand drop away from her eyes. They stared at each other as if in the last minutes they had become different people. Gordon felt himself beginning to shake.

‘So, what was she like in bed, your Nina? Was the sex wonderful?’

‘No,’ he lied again.

Vicky was still staring. Then, with terrible suddenness, her face began to melt. Her mouth split wide open, showing her teeth and her tongue, and her eyes narrowed to slits. She started to cry, the tears running down her face. Her shocked composure followed by this collapse reminded Gordon of Alice’s stunned silence and then her screams of pain and outrage in the park. He reached out now and did manage to take Vicky’s hand.

‘I’m very sorry,’ he said humbly. ‘It was a terrible thing to have done.’

Vicky was sobbing aloud, thick uncontrolled sobs that went ahahah in her throat.

‘What can I say?’ Gordon muttered wretchedly.

Vicky tore her hand away from his. She made a grand sweep with her arm and knocked her glass to the floor, and the red wine splashed up the cupboards and over a drawing of Mary’s that was pinned to one of them. Broken glass glinted on the tiles and Vicky got to her feet, staggering as if she was drunk, and ploughed through it to the sink. With another sweep of her arm she cleared the draining board of cups and plates, sending a wave of china crashing around her.

‘Don’t say anything,’ she shouted at him. ‘Don’t! I don’t want to hear it, whatever you say.’

She stretched out, her fingers clawing for something else to throw and smash. Gordon jumped to his feet and ran through the sea of broken crockery to catch her wrists.

‘Stop it,’ he ordered her.

Vicky jerked one hand free. She swung it back and delivered an open-handed blow to the side of his face. His jaw snapped upwards, catching his tongue between his teeth and making his eyes water with humiliating pain. He stepped away from her, angry now, his shoes crunching in the shards of china.

With a last wild swing Vicky knocked the bottle sterilizer off the worktop. As it hit the floor the top came off, sending a plume of sterilant and dancing bottles that descended over Gordon’s feet. He thought she was laughing as she whirled away from him, out of the kitchen, slamming the door so that the unbroken plates on the shelves perilously rattled.

Gordon stood still, breathing hard and tasting the blood on his tongue. Feeding bottles rolled and settled amongst the mess of broken plates, and sterilant ran in uneven tongues towards the bulwarks of the cupboards.

He put his fingers to his stinging cheek, and then wiped the blood from his tongue on the back of his hand. The refrigerator motor cut out, and the machine shrugged itself comfortably into silence again.

Gordon stooped down and picked up the first pieces of broken plate.

He set to work slowly and methodically, mopping up the wet, then sweeping up the debris and wrapping it in newspaper before putting it in the outside dustbin. He came in and locked the back door carefully behind him, then filled a bucket with soapy water and washed the wine stains and splashes of sterilant off the walls and cupboard doors. His cleaning went beyond the immediate damage; he swept up a mixture of crumbs and spilt sugar from under the table, and flicked the accumulation of household dust from the corners of the room.

After half an hour his anger and guilt had subsided.

He went out of the kitchen, intending to look for Vicky, and saw that the front door was open. Cold air funnelled down the hallway. There was a bulky pile of what looked like jumble heaped in the driveway beyond the front step.

As he stood there, slow-witted, Vicky came down the stairs. In one arm she carried a tangle of his belongings. He saw the jacket of his Tory suit, and his squash racket. The other hand dragged the largest of their suitcases. It bumped down the stairs in her wake.

Vicky threw his things on to the pile outside, and pushed the suitcase after them. She was panting with exertion, wiping her mouth with her hand.

‘Go on!’ she shouted at him. ‘Go on, we don’t want you. Get out of here. Go to her, if that’s what you want.’

Her face was burning. He had never seen such anger in her.

Still only half comprehending what was happening, Gordon ran outside to see what she had done with his things.

The front door slammed behind him.

He turned round and heard her sliding the bolts, and the rattle of the chain as she secured that. Then there was the faint, bland beep that signalled the switching on of the burglar alarm.

It was a bitterly cold night, and he was in his shirtsleeves.

Over his head, in the room that looked out over the driveway, one of the girls had woken up. He heard her, Mary or Alice, whichever it was, beginning to cry.