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 17

The chalet rented by three of the Grafton families for their February skiing holiday was in the upper, quieter part of Méribel, near the Rond Point and the ski school. It was a modern building, but the exterior was pleasantly faced with wood and it had a first-floor balcony in rustic Alpine style. Inside, most of the walls and ceilings were lined with tongue-and-groove pine boarding.

Darcy lay on the bed in the best bedroom in the chalet, the only one with its own adjoining bathroom. His hands were folded behind his head and he was staring up at the wooden ceiling. The window opposite him was partly masked with snow and snow was still falling in thick, aimless flakes.

‘This is like living inside some damned great sauna. It even smells the same. I keep wondering why I’m not sweating,’ Darcy remarked.

Hannah was unpacking, taking her silk shirts out of wreaths of tissue paper and hanging them in the tiny wardrobe.

‘Don’t start complaining already,’ she said sharply, without turning.

Darcy did not answer. Hannah was not usually tart, but recently she had become increasingly so. He continued to stare at the ceiling, counting the knotholes in the wood, irritated at the margin of his consciousness by being unable to arrange them into a satisfactory pattern.

He was thinking about money, about the shifting and massaging and redeployment of figures, and making flurried computations in his head. Darcy’s business was money. In all the years he had worked in the City, looking after money for other people and earning it for himself, he had dealt in it with confidence, certain of his own expertise. Then, when he had semi-retired to Wilton with Hannah, he had retained responsibility for half a dozen of his previous clients. He managed their assets from his office in the manor house, making the journey to London as often as it was necessary.

But in the last few months it had begun to seem to Darcy that money was not the abstract, docile commodity he had once imagined. It had started to assume characteristics that he did not understand, slyness and capriciousness, like an irresistible but unreliable woman that he was obliged to court and propitiate.

As he lay on his bed in the chalet Darcy’s heart began to thump uncomfortably. The knotholes in the pine boards jumped and then blurred as he gazed at them too intently.

He closed his eyes, forcing himself to breathe evenly to suppress the anxiety that heaved inside him. There was a telephone here in the chalet, but no fax machine. He was glad of that; he needed the respite and the altered perspective of this week in the snow. He was away, legitimately away, on holiday. There was nothing to be done now.

When he looked again, Hannah was finishing unpacking clothes. She placed the last folded pile in a drawer and then zipped up the empty suitcase with a vicious rasp. The door opened and Freddie appeared, already dressed in his brand new ski suit. Laura had been left at home with the au pair because Hannah had judged that she was too young to learn to ski, but this was Freddie’s initiation and he was boiling with excitement.

‘Can we go out in the snow? Jon and William are having a snowball fight, and I want to as well. Mummy, can we?’

Hannah turned to Darcy. ‘Why don’t you take him out?’

It had been a long drive from the airport up to Méribel. Outside it was almost dark. The snowflakes spun out of the darkness to bat themselves briefly against the wet glass.

‘For Christ’s sake, not now,’ Darcy said. ‘There’s plenty of time for that tomorrow. I’m going downstairs for a drink.’

He rolled sideways off the bed, feeling weighty and sluggish, as if his body was too heavy for him to carry.

‘Thanks,’ Hannah called after him.

The chalet telephone was in the first-floor living room, sitting on an orange linen table mat on top of a pine cabinet. In Darcy’s mind the personification of money as a tantalizing woman had become entangled with thoughts of Vicky. As he came into the room he glanced at the phone, but he knew he couldn’t call her. Perhaps there would be a chance later in the week, when everyone was out on the slopes.

Michael Wickham was the only person in the room. He was drinking whisky and reading a Sunday newspaper that he had brought out on the plane from England. Darcy had not bought any liquor on the journey, because he could not be bothered to stand in a line in a duty-free shop in order to get a few pounds off a bottle of Scotch, but he was pleased to see Michael with his large bottle of Johnny Walker uncapped at his elbow.

Michael glanced up, then pointed out an empty glass to Darcy. Darcy poured himself a measure, drank it at a gulp, and then refilled the glass.

‘Thanks.’ He stood at the window, gazing through a patch of condensation at the falling snow. ‘Should be a good week, when it stops.’

Michael folded his newspaper. ‘Yeah. For those of you who can ski.’

Darcy had momentarily forgotten that Michael had not yet progressed beyond shaky blue runs.

‘Hannah will keep you company.’

Hannah was the same standard as Michael; it was one of the reasons why the Cleggs had agreed to accompany the Frosts and Wickhams this year. Darcy himself was an excellent skier.

Michael smiled only rarely, but when he did his face was entirely lit up by it. The illumination came now, surprising Darcy.

‘There is that to look forward to,’ Michael agreed. ‘What’s your room like?’

‘Like the sauna in a council-run sports centre.’

‘Lucky. Ours is like a locker outside the sauna in a council-run sports centre.’

The two men laughed.

In the next room the chalet girl was banging the cutlery as she laid the table for the children’s supper. The Grafton couples had already annoyed her by asking for the children’s meal to be served early, before their own. The back door of the chalet blew open to admit a blast of cold air and a swirl of snow, together with the Frost boys and Jonathan Wickham who had been pushing snowballs down each other’s backs. The boys fell into the room, a tangle of arms and legs and crimson faces.

‘Close the bloody door!’ Michael shouted at them.

Hannah came downstairs, dressed in black velvet jeans and suede ankle boots, with Freddie trailing sulkily behind her.

‘Why couldn’t I play in the snow like the others?’ he was demanding.

‘Any chance of a drink?’ Hannah sighed, not looking at Darcy. Michael stood up and poured her one.

‘Happy holiday,’ she said, firmly clinking her glass against his.

Later in the evening, after the children had dispersed to their bunk beds and the dinner had been eaten, the parents gathered in the pine living room with their drinks. It was still snowing, and the unmarked depth of it beyond the windows seemed to enclose the six of them, silently cutting them off from the ordinary world and heightening the intimacy between them. They felt cosy and at the same time adventurous, as if there were some unacknowledged risk in finding themselves isolated together.

No one said as much, but they knew that what had happened to Vicky and Gordon and Nina had unexpectedly shaken up the pieces of some tidy, established pattern. It had caused them to look differently at one another, speculatively, as if after so long they knew each other much less well than they had always imagined.

After Christmas Gordon had bleakly camped out in his office, and then he moved into the modern hotel on the fringe of the business park. Then, some time later, the others heard that he was at home once more. Evidently Vicky had taken her husband back.

In the weeks since Christmas no one had seen very much of the Ransomes, either together or separately. Andrew told Janice that Gordon was working very hard. ‘And a good thing too,’ he had muttered in conclusion. Janice told the other women what she had also heard from Andrew, that Nina had gone back to London for a while, but none of them had anything else to report.

Each of the women, in turn, had taken care to let Vicky know that she was there for her, if there was any need. Vicky had thanked them, but in the end she hadn’t talked much to any of them. It seemed that she was busy with her children.

But some of this new awareness of a break in the old pattern had accompanied the Frosts and the Wickhams and the Cleggs to Méribel.

Hannah stretched out in front of the fire. She had left her hair loose and a thick, shiny cascade of it half-covered her face and hid the hand propping up her head. Her jeans accentuated the hollow of her waist and the rounded swell of her hips. Andrew and Michael were both looking at her, and Hannah knew that they were looking. There was a triumphant curve to her lips that went with all the other curves of her, still just confined on the right side of the dividing line between voluptuous and fat.

Darcy was the only one who seemed unaware of the effect Hannah was having. He had been drinking steadily since before dinner, and his attention was fixed on the window where the snowflakes were visible in the last instant before they melted against the glass.

‘Well,’ Janice said softly, breaking a little silence, ‘Are we all glad to be here?’

She glanced round at them, waiting for an answer.

Janice was wearing a loose, silky kaftan because she was at the upper limit of her weight range, the phase she described as Fat Jan. Soon a savage bout of dieting would reduce her to Plump Jan once more, and then the cycle would begin again.

‘Of course we’re glad,’ Michael murmured. Away from the hospital and his bleeper and the considerations of tomorrow’s list he was cheerful, almost light-hearted. The wine at dinner and the whisky seemed to have unpinned him. His legs splayed out in front of him and his long arms and surgeon’s fingers dangled over the arms of his chair.

Andrew sleepily laced his hands over the small mound that his stomach made under his sweater.

‘I need a holiday,’ he said.

It had been a difficult couple of months. The recession was affecting business, and until recently Gordon hadn’t been pulling his weight. Andrew told himself with satisfied conviction that he deserved a break, if anyone did.

Marcelle said nothing. She was wearing jeans and a sweat-shirt, an ordinary, workaday translation of Hannah’s velvet and cashmere, and she knew that she looked old and faded. It had seemed a bigger struggle than usual, this year, to find everyone’s ski belongings and to wash them and pack them, and to close up the house and to arrange a week’s cover at work, and she had not found time to buy anything new for herself. She was worried that there were no other girls in the party to keep Daisy company. She was irritated that the dinner cooked by the sulky chalet girl had been less good than anything any one of her students could have produced, with the possible exception of Cathy Clegg. She felt tired, and anxious, and sad, and she would have liked to tell Michael so, and have him comfort and reassure her. But she knew that she could not tell him, indeed that she would have to pretend to be cheerful and to enjoy herself, so as not to increase either his irritation with her or her own sense of disappointment in him. They had existed since their last big argument in a state of careful politeness.

‘Mar?’ Janice was looking at her, her smooth forehead puckered with concern.

‘Oh, yes.’ Marcelle summoned a smile, only just able to remember what the question had been. ‘So long as the ski-ing’s good.’ She had been a keen skier from childhood, and was probably the strongest in the group, better even than Darcy. Until this year, perhaps even this month, the promise of a week in the snow would have raised her spirits from any depths. That it failed to do so now only increased her fear and sadness.

‘So, what shall we do with the rest of this evening?’ Hannah asked. ‘It’s late, but it’s too early for bed.’

She shook her hair back from her face, revealing her white throat. Behind her head a log fell in the hearth, sending up a tiny shower of sparks.

There was another small silence.

In the quiet room, hemmed in together by the snow while their children slept, they were reminded of Nina and Gordon. Even Marcelle, through the isolation of her sadness, sensed the possibility of something new and dangerous happening; even unimaginative Andrew sensed it.

‘Play a game?’ he suggested, not meaning quite that, but wanting to deflect this moment and steer the evening back to normality. There had been a period when the Grafton couples had been enthusiastic about after-dinner games, in the time when they had felt they knew everything there was to know about each other and needed new diversions.

‘For Christ’s sake, no. Not some fucking game.’

Darcy looked away from the window at last. The strength of his objection made the others realize that he was drunker than they were. But the tradition of deference to Darcy meant that no one tried to argue in favour of starting up a game.

Hannah looked at him, her smile disappearing for a second. Then she stood up, lazily reaching out her arms and flexing her fingers. She had taken off her suede boots, and her toenails were painted with the same bronze varnish as her long fingernails.

‘I know.’

She went across to the cassette player provided as part of the chalet’s equipment. There was a neat stack of cassettes beside it and she flipped through them until she found one that suited her. Michael and Andrew watched her as she bent down to fit the tape into the player. Janice lay back in her place with her head resting on one arm, waiting to see what would happen.

‘I think we should dance,’ Hannah said.

The tape she had chosen was Tina Turner’s Private Dancer, no longer particularly new, more or less familiar to each of them. She began to hum, low down in her throat, while she searched for the place she wanted in the tape. Then, when she had found it, she stretched her arms wide, threw back her head and began to dance.

They had seen Hannah dance before, all of them, dozens of times, but not quite like this. Her eyes were half-closed but she was still smiling, moving her hips rhythmically to the music, slow gyrations that seemed to ripple up the length of her spine and down her arms to her fingertips. She was absorbed in herself but sang as she danced, ‘I’m your private dancer, a dancer for money, I’ll do what you want me to do …’

Nobody else moved.

As a performance it was overdone, veering close to parody, and there was a second when someone might have laughed and then the laughter would have spread and Hannah’s solo would have lost its power to transfix any of them. But there wasn’t a sound except for the music and Hannah’s singing, and there was a crackle of tension in the room.

Janice lifted her head from her arm and watched, her mouth slightly open. Andrew was fully awake, and Michael put a finger up to rub a bead of moisture away from his top lip. Each of them thought, in their different ways, of the change that Gordon and Nina had begun. The imminent unravelling of the old pattern and the possibility that a new one might catch them up was threatening but now, also, it was made fascinating by Hannah’s erotic dance.

Only Darcy had turned his attention back to the window and the snow drifting beyond the glass.

Hannah held out her hands to Andrew, not inviting but insisting that he dance with her. He groped his way to his feet as if he was hypnotized and at once Hannah’s arms snaked around him. Her head rested on his shoulder and her eyes closed.

‘Dance, all of you,’ she said.

Michael’s limbs had connected themselves again, and he leaned across to Janice.

‘Will you?’

He had wanted to dance with Hannah; he was amazed to discover how much he had wanted to dance with her when she had chosen Andrew.

Janice’s silky robe swished as she uncrossed her legs and stood up.

She half stumbled, because she had drunk plenty of the wine at dinner, but Michael caught her hand. Her loose sleeves fell back, baring her pretty, rounded arms to the elbows as she made a mock-subservient offer of herself to him.

Michael took hold of her and as they began to dance she came closer, and he let his hands slide down over the soft stuff masking her back. She felt much bigger than Marcelle and there were pads of flesh on her shoulders and over her hips; confusingly the ampleness of her became identified with the image of Hannah dancing that he carried behind his eyelids. The perfume of Janice’s hair and skin caught in his throat and nose, making him think that he would sneeze.

Past the swaying bodies of the other couples Darcy saw Marcelle sitting awkwardly in her place. Her head was up, but something in the stiffness of her posture betrayed her unhappiness. He left his place and edged past the dancers, feeling as he had done earlier that his own body had grown too bulky to manoeuvre properly.

‘Marcelle?’

‘You don’t have to be kind, Darcy.’

The expression in her eyes made him suddenly angry with Hannah for doing this. It was her way of demonstrating her displeasure with him, of course, and she would not bother to consider beyond that.

‘It isn’t a kindness,’ he said roughly.

When he took them between his, Marcelle’s surprisingly small, cold hands reminded him of a little boy’s, of Barney’s years ago when he had come in from playing in a wintry garden. She felt brittle, too, as they moved together, unfamiliarly light and dry, quite unlike Hannah or Vicky, and tall, so that her eyes were almost level with his.

They danced clumsily together, and to smooth over this and to turn the moment to advantage against Hannah, Darcy pressed his cheek against Marcelle’s, and then found the corner of her mouth with his own. He heard the small catch of breath in her throat, and opened his mouth to kiss her. As he did so he noticed that with Hannah’s limbs wound around him Andrew had begun to look like a rabbit caught in the headlights of a car, and that Janice and Michael danced with their eyes shut, heads close together, seemingly unaware of anyone else.

He brought his attention back to the business in hand, that of kissing Marcelle. She was the opposite physical type to the one that attracted him, but there was an interesting novelty in exploring the contours of her lips and face. He moved his face, rubbing himself against her, but Marcelle neither responded to him nor removed herself. He had the impression that her eyes were open and she was looking away somewhere beyond him.

Another track began, slower than the last, and the three couples swayed and circled. The fire had burnt down to a red glow, and the room had grown dimmer.

Darcy wondered if they were going to continue with this, if the clinches would get closer and if they would slip away, each pair in turn, to bedrooms that did not contain their own clothes that had been folded and packed at home in Grafton. The scenes played themselves in his head, while he went on slowly circling with Marcelle Wickham and nuzzling her motionless face. He tried to work out what he would do, who would make the first move. The bizarreness of these imaginings, together with the possibility that they might become reality, made him speculate whether the ordinary old procedures of marriage and friendship were about to change, and to move in new and uncontrollable directions as his business life was doing. His heart began its uncomfortable thumping again, and he felt a small, needling pain in his chest.

Somewhere else in the chalet, from somewhere over their heads, someone began to scream.

Darcy thought for an instant that the sound might be to do with the sensations within him, but the three couples froze and then broke apart. They were blinking, momentarily bewildered and embarrassed. The screaming stopped, broken off short with a different cry, and then there was a long second’s silence followed by a loud thump. The parents heard the sound of a child’s bare feet running overhead.

‘Who is it?’ Marcelle cried.

Janice was already on her way to the door, with Michael behind her. The others heard panicky feet thudding down the stairs. A moment later William Frost appeared in the doorway with Janice swooping to catch him. His face was flushed and wet with tears and his round eyes stared only half-seeing at the semicircle of adults.

‘A dream,’ he sobbed. ‘Terrible dream.’

Janice put her arms around him and smoothed his pudding-basin of blond hair.

‘It’s all right,’ she murmured, ‘I’m here. Only a dream, nasty old dream.’

They made way for her to lead him to the sofa, stumbling a little in adjusting to this different focus, no longer quite catching each other’s eyes. Janice sat down and hugged William and Andrew leant over him.

‘It’ll go away, Will. You’re awake now. He’s been having these dreams,’ he explained to the others.

Hannah pushed her hair back from her face, gathering it up with one hand into a bunch at the nape of her neck. Michael looked at the crescent of white skin that was momentarily exposed, and then made himself bend down to see William Frost instead.

‘Poor old chap,’ he said pleasantly. He felt the child’s forehead and then ran his fingers lightly under his jaw. ‘Nothing to worry about, I’m sure. Some hot milk, perhaps?’

‘I’ll do it,’ Hannah said. With her hair pulled back, in the changed atmosphere, she appeared almost matronly. Marcelle sat down in her old place, and Darcy went to the table where the whisky bottle was waiting. Someone turned off the music and the room became bright and ordinary, as it had been at the evening’s beginning.

Janice sat on the edge of the bed to take off her slippers, and then slid sideways into the warmth under the covers. She reached to turn off the light, then curled herself beside Andrew.

‘Are you asleep?’ she asked. She had waited up to make sure that William had settled down properly again.

‘Not quite. Is Will all right?’

‘I think so.’

Out of habit Janice listened for the ticking of their bedside clock, as she always did in the intervals of their night-time conversations, then remembered that they were not in their own bedroom. The evening had left her with a knot of anxiety that she knew would keep her awake.

‘What were you doing with Hannah?’

Andrew sighed. ‘What was Hannah doing with me, don’t you mean?’

‘Is there a difference?’

‘Of course there is. She was trying to make some point for Darcy’s benefit, I suppose. Whatever it was, do we have to analyse it now?’

‘You didn’t look as if you minded.’

‘I didn’t. That was then, and now is now and here we are in bed, my love, and it’s time to go to sleep.’

He settled the hard French pillow under his head, offering more of himself to her as he did so, but it was as a comforting gesture, without any suggestion of sex.

Janice mumbled to him, with her face pressed against the warmth of his shoulder, ‘Do you mind that I don’t look like Hannah?’

‘What? Certainly not. What do you think I want? Anyway, in a couple of years Hannah will look like you.’

She waited in the absence of the clock’s ticking for Andrew to realize what he had said, and when he did not she was nearly angry.

Then she understood that he was sliding into sleep, and she knew that it was easier not to have an argument than to wake him up and insist on one. She found suddenly that she was smiling, out of affection for his clumsiness and relief that the evening had harmlessly ended.

Marcelle lay on her back and stared up into the darkness. She was thinking about the separate wooden cubes of the chalet rooms stacked above and below her, and of the walls that separated the couples from each other, two by two.

Michael was breathing evenly beside her. She was not certain that he was asleep, but when she had put out her hand to touch his side he had made no response. That was the pattern now. If one of them was awake the other was asleep, or seemed to be.

She turned away from him, on to her side, and began to think about the evening. It was Hannah who had set it off, but Marcelle knew that she had only been the trigger. Since the day she had seen Gordon and Nina together at the level crossing she had known that the possibility of collapse, of the destruction of their tidy lives, lay quietly just beneath the surface of these featureless days. Dissatisfaction and the desire for change, for the sharpness of some new feeling, whether pleasure or pain, was like a virus that had reached Grafton with Nina Cort. The virus must spread, Marcelle thought, whichever direction it took.

She put her hand to where Darcy’s mouth and cheek had rubbed against hers. She could still taste the whisky from his tongue.

She closed her eyes, willing sleep to come.

If it had been Jimmy, Marcelle thought. If it had been Jimmy, tonight, what would I have done then?

She was not certain, but she thought that she might have clung to him, and begged him to rescue her.

Hannah put on the oyster-grey silk robe that matched her pink and grey lace and silk nightgown, and loosened her hair from the bunch she had tied at the nape of her neck. Standing in front of the small square of mirror fixed to one wall, she examined her reflection. She gave it her full attention, knowing that by doing so she was avoiding the necessity of thinking about less pleasant things. She spread her hair over her shoulders, admiring the way it rippled over the sheen of the silk.

Not bad, Hannah thought. Not bad for thirty-four, after having had two children. Better than Vicky Ransome, anyway.

She had seen the way Andrew and Michael had looked at her. It had given her a wonderful surge of power, to switch on the magnetism and see that it worked. The pleasure of their admiration stayed with her, energizing her. She lifted her chin, and met her own eyes in the mirror. There had been a time, when she and Darcy had met and fallen in love, when Darcy had looked at her like that every time she came near him.

But it was not all bad. Whatever Darcy thought, whatever he thought he wanted, the truth was still partly palatable. She was still objectively desirable.

She watched the reflection of her mouth, and saw how the corners of it had begun to take on a downward curl. She made herself smile, reversing the expression.

Darcy came out of the box of a bathroom and walked across to the bed without glancing in her direction. He took off his robe and lay down in his pyjamas, easing himself into the unfamiliar bed. Watching him, as he turned on to his side and his body slackened under the sheets, Hannah realized that he looked heavy and old. She felt a quick and surprising beat of sympathy, as she might have done for her father, or for Freddie if he was unhappy or ill.

She turned out the lights and got into bed beside her husband. Carefully, she fitted herself against the loose curve of his back. Then she edged her arms over and under him. She waited, acknowledging to herself and waiting for Darcy’s acknowledgement that the evening had excited her. Darcy did not pull away, but he did not respond either.

Hannah whispered against the meaty slab of his shoulder, ‘Come on, come to Mummy.’

Darcy turned over then.

He did not say anything, but he put his hands under her nightdress and spread them over her breasts.

Hannah pulled him closer, needing to exact another tribute from the evening. Without saying anything more to each other they went through the customary agenda of their love-making.

Afterwards, when they lay side by side again, Darcy said to the empty space over his head, ‘I didn’t very much like what you did this evening.’

Hannah made a small sound in her throat, not quite a laugh. ‘Were you jealous?’

‘No, not at all. The opposite. I didn’t like the way what you did affected Marcelle, and Janice.’

‘I’m sure they understood. Women do understand these things, don’t they? They have to.’

‘What is that supposed to mean?’

Hannah felt the sudden tension in him. It made his arm and leg quiver, tiny shivers that were transmitted to her own warm limbs. She felt the charge of power again, this time the power that her knowledge gave her. She chose her words with pleasurable care.

‘It means what I said. Women have to understand what their husbands do. Their little lapses, their small betrayals and the lies that don’t quite cover them up. They have to look on, don’t they, and pretend not to see, or not to mind? It’s kind of you to feel for Janice and Marcelle. But why doesn’t your ready sympathy extend to me? Or is it used up on poor, poor Vicky?’

‘On Vicky?’

‘Yes, on Vicky. Alone in that house with her lovely, innocent baby girls, without her wicked, unfaithful husband.’

‘Hannah –’

‘Don’t Hannah, with all your pretend bewilderment. I know you’re fucking Vicky. What else would you be doing on the mornings your car is trying to hide itself in her driveway? Advising her on her investments? Why did you think you could get away with it, in a place the size of Grafton, when Gordon and his widow woman couldn’t?

‘Linda Todd who lives opposite the Ransomes is a customer of mine. She couldn’t wait to tell me how many times she’s seen you there. I drove past myself, just to check. Including the day you said you were going to Bristol.’

Darcy said calmly, ‘There’s no reason why I shouldn’t call on Vicky. She does need advice, as it happens. That doesn’t mean I’m sleeping with her.’

Hannah drew away from him so she could no longer feel the quivers under his skin. She said softly and finally, ‘But you are, Darcy, aren’t you?’

‘What can I say to convince you otherwise, as you seem to have made up your mind?’

‘Nothing, darling. We were talking about what women are obliged to understand. I’m not going to worry about Janice and Marcelle because their husbands can’t take their eyes off my backside.’

Hannah turned over. She was surprised to find that she was sleepy, that her body felt pleasantly warm and heavy. She had told Darcy what she knew and there was nothing else she wanted to say. He didn’t speak again, and after a few minutes Hannah drifted into sleep.

Darcy lay awake for much longer. He was thinking about Vicky.

Apart from a handful of trivial lapses that were easy enough to discount, Darcy had been faithful to Hannah ever since their marriage – until a month ago.

After Vicky had locked Gordon out of their house she had stayed alone with the children for a night and half a day. And then, emerging from a daze of distress and needing to talk about what was happening to her, she had telephoned Hannah at Wilton. Only on that day Hannah had gone to her shop to make everything ready for her post-Christmas sale, and it was Darcy who answered the telephone.

‘I’ll come over,’ he said at once.

In the Ransomes’ house he found a litter of toys and children’s detritus underfoot, a half-eaten meal on the kitchen table, a broken-down central heating boiler and Vicky in her dressing gown with Helen in her arms.

Darcy had tidied up some of the mess and called out his own central heating repair man. He had made tea and toast for Vicky, fed the older children and found the whisky bottle. The business of creating order for her had filled him with happy energy and he whistled softly as he worked.

Vicky watched Darcy moving around her house.

‘It seems that I can’t manage on my own,’ she said sadly.

‘Yes, you can,’ Darcy told her.

Neither of them mentioned Christmas Eve in Hannah’s bedroom. But when it was time to feed the baby he saw the tender and businesslike way that Vicky settled herself to the task, and it tightened some string inside him that pulled at his heart. He reached out and with the tips of his fingers he brushed her cheek. The colour came into her face, but she kept her eyes fixed on the baby in her arms.

Darcy left her with the name and telephone number of his London solicitor, and promised to come back the next day.

It was not very long before all the couples in the Grafton circle knew Vicky had turned Gordon out.

The wives visited or telephoned her, offering their different versions of support and advice, but it was Darcy she looked forward to seeing. She knew that he came unknown to Hannah, and his secret presence in the house seemed to change the quality of it for her – the light in the rooms became sharper and brighter, and the weight of her anxiety dropped away to leave her feeling calm and decisive. When she told him this Darcy laughed and said that Hannah would say the opposite about him at Wilton, but Vicky could see that he was pleased.

Gordon telephoned constantly, from his office and then from the hotel, but Vicky told him that she did not want to see him until she had had more time to think. As the days passed her first hot anger with him curdled into weary disappointment, but she held firm, telling him that she did not want him to come back yet. She surprised herself with the strength of her own resolution.

One morning, after Gordon had been away for two weeks, Darcy came to visit Vicky, leaving his Range Rover parked to one side of the house where it was hidden from the road by a screen of evergreens. It was a clear day, and as she went to let him in Vicky saw in the changed angles of the shadows the first intimation of spring.

Darcy sat at her kitchen table while she made coffee for him. The older girls were at school, Helen was asleep in her cot and there was a thick, expectant silence in the house. Vicky turned to the table with his cup in her hand, and when she had put it down she hesitated beside him.

‘I’m very grateful,’ she told him. She meant for the solace of his company, as well as for the practical advice he had given her.

Darcy reached out and took her hand and she looked down gravely at him. He remembered in that instant that he had imagined himself in love with her, as well as wanting to take her to bed. He stood up, and she did not move when he held her by the shoulders and kissed her. She smelt of baby scents, innocent soap and milk.

‘Come upstairs with me,’ Darcy said.

The double bed was unmade, with lacy pillows tumbled on the floor and the quilt still rucked in the contours of her solitary sleep. Standing beside the bed Darcy unbuttoned her loose shirt, and rediscovered her distended breasts and the curves of her belly marked with pregnancy. She made a move to cover herself with her hands but he pushed them aside and knelt so that he could follow the silvery lines with his eyes and the tips of his fingers.

‘Vicky.’ He said her name to himself, confirming their arrival together, here and now.

Her hands rested on his head, and she stroked his hair absently, almost maternally.

‘Take your clothes off too,’ she said. ‘Then I won’t feel so exposed. I’m ashamed of the way I look these days. I wish I was thin and tight-skinned, like Nina. I wish I had long legs like knitting needles, and no tits. That must be what Gordon wants.’

‘It isn’t what I want. I want you. Look at you.’ He weighed her breasts in his hands, and saw that a colourless bead of liquid appeared at the brown nipples.

‘Take your clothes off, then,’ Vicky said again. ‘Before Helen wakes up.’

He loved this brisk practicality in her. Hannah liked the transactions of sex to be swathed in the ribbons and tulle of romance, even after seven years of marriage.

Vicky helped him to undress, putting his clothes tidily to one side as he discarded them. She thought that for a handsome man he had a surprisingly ugly body. His chest and shoulders were covered in thick grey hair and the muscles of his stomach must recently have given way because when he was not holding it in his belly coyly protruded as if it were not quite part of him. His small, thick penis looked like some hairless burrowing rodent. When he took her in his arms the grey pelt crinkled minutely against her skin.

They lay down together in her bed, and while one part of her mind was occupied with the attentions that Darcy required, the rest of it seemed free to wonder if this act was revenge against Gordon, or if it was something she had wanted for the sake of itself.

It was startling to discover that Darcy was not such an adept lover as her own husband.

He came quite quickly, very noisily, and the detached part of her remained untouched and unaroused, dreamily watching this scene as if it were nothing to do with her. She wondered what it could be that Hannah liked, and it came to her in a moment of pure perception that Hannah liked herself – it was her own vanity that gave her her habitual glow, and Darcy functioned as a suitably impressive mirror to reflect her back at herself. The certainty of this insight lessened Vicky’s guilt.

‘You didn’t do that out of gratitude, did you?’ Darcy asked afterwards. They had been lying with their arms around each other, separately contemplating the room and his presence in it.

‘No. I did it because I wanted to.’

That was the truth. For the two weeks that Darcy had been visiting her she had known it would happen, and she had been waiting for it, neither putting it off nor willing it to come.

‘Will you let it happen again?’

‘Yes,’ Vicky said, because she knew that she would.

And so Darcy had called on her the next morning, and the one after that. On the third morning, after they had made love, she found herself examining his blunt, handsome face on the pillow in Gordon’s place. There were creases and pouches in it that she could not remember noticing before.

‘You look tired.’

‘I don’t sleep well, at the moment.’

‘Are you worried about something? About business?’

He was startled by her percipience. Hannah never asked him about his work.

‘There are some investments I have made on behalf of other people that haven’t performed as I hoped they would.’

Her clear eyes gazed into his. ‘Is it serious?’

‘No,’ Darcy said.

‘Do you want to talk to me about it? Would it help?’

‘It wouldn’t be very interesting for you.’ With the tip of his forefinger he touched the hollow of her throat. ‘And it isn’t very important, because it is easily put right.’

‘That’s good.’ Vicky smiled, and it touched him to see her relief. He kissed her, and burrowed deeper into the warmth and safety of the bed.

It was another two weeks before Vicky answered one of Gordon’s telephone calls and heard him say,

‘Won’t you let me come home? I miss the girls. I miss you.’

It was the middle of the morning, the safe, domestic time that she had always liked and which had lately come to belong to Darcy’s visits, or to the possibility of a visit. She looked at her kitchen, seeing the cups and plates in glass-fronted cupboards and hearing the industrious thrum of the washing machine and the dishwasher.

This is the life Gordon and I made, she thought, seeing it as a once-clear picture now confusingly cross-hatched with images of Nina and Darcy.

The few hours that she had spent with Darcy had been stolen, and retaliatory, but they had also woken her out of some stale, isolated maternal trance. She felt grateful to Darcy, and under his spell like some narcissistic girl newly and shallowly in love, but she also felt strong. She was suddenly sure that she was much, much stronger than Gordon.

Vicky looked down at her hand, with her engagement and wedding rings, and extended her fingers for her own pleased contemplation as if she had just had a manicure.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘All right. I’d like you to come home.’

She had told Darcy the same day, ‘I said he could come back.’

‘Is that what you want?’

After a moment she had answered, ‘Yes. I was angry with him, but I’m not any longer.’ She touched his hand gently. ‘Doing what you and I have done has made me less … less censorious of Gordon. Do you mind that?’

‘How could I? What about you and me? May I still see you?’

‘Like Gordon seeing Nina, do you mean?’

‘Yes, I suppose I do mean like that.’

He had heard the smile in her voice before he met her eyes and saw it. ‘I don’t know. I’m not sure. But you know where I am, and I know where you are. Is that enough, for the time being?’

‘I suppose it will have to be,’ he had answered. Darcy had felt slow, and out-manoeuvred, and he had also felt hurt. He remembered again that at Christmas he had momentarily imagined himself to be in love before dismissing the idea with a coarser intention.

He had been right the first time, Darcy thought. His mistakes seemed now to multiply in thickets around him.

Later, in Méribel, Darcy carried the telephone to the window as he dialled her number, and stood staring across the balcony to the sunny slopes while he listened to the ringing tone.

‘Hello?’

‘Hello.’

He did not need to identify himself, that was an acknow-ledgement of their intimacy, but there was an infinitesimal pause before Vicky said,

‘Darcy? Is that you? Is something wrong?’

‘Why do you think there’s something wrong because I’ve called you?’

‘You’re on holiday with Hannah and Freddie … I didn’t expect to hear from you.’

He looked out at the skiers, coloured matchstick people zigzagging in the sunshine. Everyone was out in the snow, except for him.

‘I wanted to talk.’

‘Oh. Well, do you know what’s happened? I’m going back to work part-time. I had a call yesterday from the director of therapy at the centre, and they need someone to take on a limited caseload, just two or three days a week, and I talked it over with Gordon last night and we agreed that I should do it. I’ve got to find someone to come in and take care of Helen …’

Darcy listened to her plans, leaning against the window glass with the telephone crooked under his chin. There was snow on the balcony floor, and a white rim in the rustic cut-outs and on the curved rail of the wooden balustrade. The light danced and sparkled, hurting his eyes.

‘That’s good, I’m glad,’ he heard himself say. He felt dirty and creased in the sunshine, full of a weariness that seemed to spread all through him, and weak as a child in comparison with Vicky’s procreative strength.

‘Why did you call?’ she asked him at last.

It was too much of an effort to dissemble.

‘I talked to Hannah last night. Or, rather, she talked to me. Someone called Linda Todd, who lives opposite you, has been monitoring my movements. Does that sound likely?’

‘Yes. Shit. Yes, it does. What exactly did Hannah say?’

‘Not much. It was more what she did. A bit of a dance, not quite a striptease, for the benefit of Michael and Andrew, and a warning shot for me at the same time. It stirred up the passions a bit.’

‘I can imagine.’

Vicky knew how it would have been. Hannah dancing, lit up with pleasure at herself. She had been friends with Hannah for a long time, and she wondered if she liked her at all. She said quietly, so quietly that he had to think for a moment before he was sure that he had heard her correctly,

‘I think you and I have come to the end of the road, Darcy.’

‘This particular road, perhaps. For now,’ he said, wishing that he could contradict her.

A moment later they had said goodbye, and he replaced the receiver in its cradle.

Darcy slid open the glass door and stepped out on to the balcony. The cold air caught in his throat. He leaned on the balcony rail, and looked across at the nearest slope. Suddenly he saw Hannah in her silvery ski suit with its fur-trimmed hood, and Michael Wickham in navy-blue that appeared black at this distance. Their ski teacher made a series of fluent turns, and Hannah and Michael obediently followed him.

Hannah had improved, Darcy noticed.

She lifted her arms in triumph and waved her poles as she completed the last turn. Michael punched the air in front of him in laughing acknowledgement of their achievement.