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 20

Vicky was giving Mary and Alice their breakfasts. She was dressed for work, in a cream blouse and a pleated skirt, so she moved carefully to avoid splashes of milk. The little girls sat at the kitchen table eating Rice Krispies out of blue bowls with their names spelt out in white lettering around the rims. Helen was strapped in her bouncing chair with a string of coloured plastic balls suspended in front of her. Gordon came downstairs in his shirtsleeves, collecting the morning’s post from where it lay scattered on the hall floor.

Vicky put his breakfast in front of him as he slit open envelopes and frowned and placed the bills in a pile beside his plate. The radio was tuned to the Today programme, because that was what Gordon preferred. The two girls chattered through the election news; Alice had turned five now and joined her sister at proper school. The kettle boiled, and Vicky caught it before the whistling properly started. She spooned tea into the pot from a blue tin caddy.

Gordon glanced up at her as she put the teapot on the table. She saw anxiety contract to a dark pinpoint in his eyes, but Vicky only smiled and turned tranquilly back to spread honey on Alice’s toast.

It gave her a twist of satisfaction, after the months of confusion that had followed Helen’s birth, to look at the domestic order that contained them. Gordon was back in his place at the table and Nina’s name was no longer mentioned between them. Even Mary had stopped asking, in fearful moments, if Daddy would have to go away again. Vicky had heard him reassuring her once,

‘No, darling, I’m not going away anywhere any more.’

She had not tried to meet his eyes because she had felt no need of it, any more than she did now.

Vicky was not sure how she had done it, when she had imagined that she was weak and defenceless, but by some instinct she had won a victory in the campaign between them.

As soon as she had shut Gordon out of the house, and the fearful days immediately afterwards had passed, she felt strength coming back to her. She had cooked for the children, and put them to sleep and wakened them again with a kind of robotic determination that was centred in herself and not in her dependence on anyone else.

It had made her feel stronger to take Darcy in, and then to discover that it was her motherliness he craved, the very part of herself that had seemed so undesirable in comparison with Nina Cort.

Darcy had sat where Gordon was sitting now, and she had made tea for him too, and listened to his talk and then calmly taken him into herself. She did not trouble herself with feeling guilty about her affair, as she would once have done. What had happened was past, as she believed that Gordon’s love affair was also past. Instead she looked back with interest, even curiosity, as if it had happened to someone else.

Vicky understood that she had taken pleasure in going to bed with Darcy because it had been a retaliation, and an unexpected tribute, and a comfort in her solitude. She had felt greedy, and the greediness itself had reassured her that she was still alive, better than alive, a functioning woman as well as a mother and a wife. But it had also left a part of her untouched.

The truth was that Darcy’s attentions had sharpened her appreciation of Gordon. She had no wish to be Darcy Clegg’s mother. In fact the exposure of his secret infantile interior within the familiar, assertive shell had been surprising, and faintly repulsive.

The end of their affair had come as a relief.

Vicky knew all through the weeks that Gordon was away from them that she would eventually let him come back. She counted off his begging telephone calls like beads on a rosary, and finally, almost languidly, she judged that he had paid enough.

When he was home, and had fallen with wary gratitude into the old pattern of their life, Vicky made another discovery. Although the acknowledged transactions between them indicated that Gordon looked after her, the underlying reality was the opposite. It was she who did the caring, mothering again.

Perhaps, she thought, Gordon had discovered this too. Now he knew that he could not survive without her and his children, whereas they could survive without him, and had done. Vicky thought that it must be this awareness that made the pinpricks of anxiety show in her husband’s eyes.

But she was not complacent, not any more. She did not know for sure, and it was equally possible that Nina had rejected him; or that he had decided it was simply more comfortable to live with the wife he knew rather than the lover he did not. It was here that Vicky’s reasoning began to blur, and she allowed herself to shrug off the speculation. He was home, and she did not think he would wander again.

All she did know for certain was that the balance of power had subtly shifted between them. She felt calm and strong. If Gordon heard about Darcy, from Linda across the road, or Hannah, or Jimmy Rose or anyone else, she would deal with it. Vicky knew she would survive. She felt secure, and content with what she had.

Vicky looked at the oven clock. It was half-past eight. Marcelle would be here in five minutes. It was Marcelle’s day for the school run and she was never, ever late. Gordon looked at the clock too, and put his breakfast aside to wipe the toast and honey from the girls’ round faces and find their belongings.

Marcelle’s shadow appeared at the front door.

Mary ran down the hall, chanting, ‘It’s time, it’s time!’

The women briefly smiled at each other on the doorstep. Marcelle would drop five children off today before driving on to the Pond School. The map of her day was already laid out in her head like some endurance course that she must negotiate before she could subside into sleep again.

Vicky stood on the step and waved until the car was out of sight, as she always did, then turned back into the house.

In the kitchen, Gordon had lifted Helen out of her seat and was holding her up to the window to see the cats in the garden. Her small fists waved in the air to show her pleasure.

‘Marcelle seems tired,’ Vicky said.

‘Marcelle will never rest while there is some arrangement within her reach that falls short of perfection. She must be exhausting to live with.’

‘Not like me, then.’

He looked at her over the baby’s head, with the dark points in his eyes again, to see if this was contentious. Vicky only smiled, and scooped the breakfast detritus, crusts and eggshells and teabags, into the sink where they settled around the cups and plates that she had already stacked there.

‘No, not like you,’ he agreed.

‘Have we got time for another cup of tea?’

Gordon checked his watch. The middle-aged woman who came in to look after Helen on Vicky’s working mornings had not yet arrived; when she came they would leave together.

‘I should think so.’

Vicky poured tea into two cups. The tea was stewed, but the cups were clean. Gordon supposed that Helen’s carer would put the breakfast things in the dishwasher while the baby was asleep, or that Vicky would do it when she came in, or that he himself would do it at the end of the day. He told himself it didn’t particularly matter which it was. They stood at the sunny end of the kitchen and drank their tepid tea, aware of the silent re-establishment of normality between them, like a long-awaited truce.

Later he drove her to her therapy centre, and watched her walk briskly away from him with her leather bag full of case notes swinging at her side. She was still wearing her hair in the short bob that she had had cut just after Helen’s birth. He remembered that he had come home one evening from Nina and found her looking quite different, and he had stared helplessly at her as if she were the stranger, and not Nina. But as Vicky left him now he saw that a younger man on the pavement glanced after her, following her with his eyes. Gordon was touched with admiration for his wife, for her grace and strength and good humour.

He turned the Peugeot around and headed through the town towards the office. The windows of many of the buildings were plastered with election posters. Most of them were blue, because Grafton was at the centre of a safe constituency, but the Conservative candidate was a new man, an unknown, and both Labour and the Liberal Democrats were fielding strong candidates. Gordon had voted Conservative all his life, but he was beginning to be afraid that some tide had finally turned against them, and that the new government would be a Labour one.

At lunch only the day before, Andrew had complained, ‘If they get in this time there will be no end to this recession. I can’t see how the building trade can ever hope to recover.’

Andrew was on the committee that had selected the new Conservative candidate, a barrister from London. Inevitably, the Frosts were holding an election night party.

‘Let’s damn well pray there’s something to celebrate,’ he had said to Gordon when he delivered the invitation.

Gordon’s mind was elsewhere as he negotiated the traffic in the town centre. He was thinking that the time he had spent away from home, sleeping in his office and then the hotel, pleading with Vicky and all the time longing for Nina, had faded until it had taken on almost the remembered quality of a vivid dream. He had felt as if he was in a dream when he met Nina yesterday outside her house.

He had longed to touch her when they stood side by side staring up at the stained glass. It made no difference that he could not, and that they both knew he would not; the longing was no less intense. The reality that had replaced the dream was home, and Vicky, and his daughters, but he still loved Nina.

He knew that he was probably an object of pity amongst their friends: Poor Gordon, whose wife had thrown him out and who had eventually been allowed to creep back home once he had come to his senses. He did not even mind that. He had failed some test of bravery or initiative and turned back instead of running forwards, to Nina and whatever would come after, so pity was no less than he deserved.

The loss of her, his recognition that he was the man who would stand still with his eyes open instead of leaping into space, that was the worst he would have to live with.

Gordon reached the bypass, driving the route he took every day without seeing a metre of it. But as he turned towards the business park he recognized a car coming the other way. It was driven by Michael Wickham, who raised one hand to him in a negligent wave.

Michael drove on, towards Pendlebury, in the opposite direction from the hospital. He and a group of other surgeons were to spend the day attending a fund management conference, but the first session that was relevant to his own speciality did not start until midday. He had started out too early, knowing that one of the routes he could choose would take him close to Wilton. He had hardly seen Hannah since Méribel, and when he rounded a corner and caught a glimpse of the house on its hill he knew that he had intended all along to call on her this morning.

His car rolled slowly up the gravel drive under the trees that were fuzzed with the first green of spring. Michael eyed the house when he reached it. There seemed to be far too many windows, each with the glass polished and the white paint fresh and clean, and with the internal layers of blinds and thick curtains and ruched pelmets hinting at the further opulence within. There was no expense spared at Wilton.

But Darcy could afford it, Michael thought. Why should Hannah not enjoy the benefits, if that was what pleased her?

The Range Rover and Hannah’s BMW were parked to one side of the house, but Darcy’s Maserati was missing. Michael had been perfectly prepared to encounter Darcy. He would have drunk a cup of coffee with him and declined the offer of an early drink, and they would have talked desultorily about the election prospects and health service funding before he drove on to his conference. But he was pleased to discover that there would be no necessity for that. Nor was there any sign of the cars belonging to Darcy’s grown-up children, or the au pair girl’s Fiat.

He left his own car and walked swiftly around the side of the house. There were banks of daffodils in the narrow beds along the wall, and a bird singing somewhere in the trees on the other side of the path. Michael skirted the conservatory, where the pane of glass smashed by the boy on Christmas Eve had long ago been replaced, and crossed a paved yard at the back of the house. The garages in the stables were empty too. Michael tapped on the glass of the back door, and then when there was no response he opened the door.

‘Hannah?’ he called out.

There was no answer, but he thought he could hear a radio playing somewhere in the depths of the house. He called her name again. A black-and-white marble tiled corridor in front of him led through the conservatory to the kitchen.

A second later Hannah appeared at the opposite end with a bread knife in her fist, blade upwards and outwards. She confronted him in the humming silence of the house.

‘Hannah, it’s only me,’ he said.

‘Michael? Oh God, you frightened me.’

‘I’m sorry. I did knock and call.’

‘I thought you were an intruder.’

He went to her and took the knife away. Her hand was trembling slightly.

‘And you were going to go for him with this?’

‘Yes, I suppose so. Protecting the nest. I don’t know. What should I have done?’

He put his arm round her, sorry for having frightened her and admiring of her absurd courage again.

‘Called the police or pressed the burglar alarm.’

She shrugged. ‘Well I didn’t, did I? Lucky, seeing it was only you. What are you doing here, anyway?’

He released her, so he could look at her properly.

‘I was just passing.’

‘No, you weren’t. Nobody just passes this place.’

‘I wanted to see you, then. Not at a party or at dinner in someone’s house or in town, but simply to see you.’

‘I wish you’d called first. I’ve got a filthy cold and I look a mess.’

The thought that she might want to look her best for him delighted Michael. He saw that her eyes were puffy and reddened, and her nose and lips were flaky and swollen. Her face was bare of make-up and her hair was loose, in need of washing. Two or three darkened strands clung to her neck, inside the collar of her housecoat. There were marks down the front of the silky fabric, and she held it closed with fingers that revealed chipped nail varnish. She was barefoot, and her toenails were similarly neglected. Michael found this spectacle of her sluttishness entirely beguiling.

Hannah suddenly smiled at him, forgetting her fright.

‘You’d better come in properly, now that you’re here and I haven’t stabbed you.’

He followed her into the kitchen. The room was messy but Hannah appeared not to notice it. Marcelle would have launched into embarrassed apologies. Hannah simply went to the coffee pot that was keeping warm on the Aga, poured out and handed him a cup. Michael put the bread knife down amidst the clutter on the table.

‘It’s funny to see you dressed like that,’ she said.

He was wearing a business suit. It surprised him to realize that Hannah only saw him on holiday, or in the evening and at weekends.

‘I’m on my way to a conference.’

She made a small face, pulling down the corners of her lips, mocking his importance.

‘Where’s Darcy?’

She had removed her hand from the front of her housecoat and it gaped a little where there was a button missing. Michael imagined the texture and taste of the warm, unwashed skin underneath. This private, unkempt revelation was far more enticing than any of the public versions of Hannah in her shiny golden party frocks or her silvery furred ski suit. Hannah shook her head, pushing her hair back from her face in irritation. He tried to concentrate on what she was saying.

‘London again, or so he said. Working, anyway. Dealing or fixing or whatever it is.’

‘Don’t you know?’

‘Who knows anything, with Darcy? He isn’t exactly easy to predict, because he always does what he wants and he never wants the same thing for two days at a time. He makes me angry.’

‘All husbands make their wives angry. It’s axiomatic.’

He had said it flippantly but then he saw bleakness behind the chapped planes of her face. Without any preconsideration he reached across the corner of the table, resting his forehead against hers for an instant, and then kissed her. After a moment she tilted her chin and kissed him back. Automatically, awkwardly because of the table separating them, he lifted his hand and slipped it inside her housecoat, where the missing button left a place to admit him.

‘Well, Doctor Wickham.’ Hannah’s voice was amused now. She caught his fingers and held them away from her.

‘Mister, actually.’

‘Oh. Sorry.’

The legs of his chair scraped on the tiled floor as he stood up. He went to her and lifted her to her feet so he could reach her better. She smelt of Vick, and tasted of coffee and very faintly of toothpaste. After a moment Hannah raised her arms and locked them around his neck but she was neither actively encouraging nor positively discouraging.

‘I’ve wanted to do this ever since Méribel,’ Michael whispered. He thought of her dancing on the first night of the holiday, and back beyond that, seeing a long line of colourful, sinuous Hannahs weaving through the plain fabric of Grafton. ‘No, that’s not true. Since long before.’ At the corner of his mouth he felt the sly curve of Hannah’s smile. ‘What are you wearing underneath this thing?’

‘Nothing.’

‘I want to take it off you.’

Her hand held it closed against him. She laughed properly this time, a deep sound in her throat.

‘You can’t just walk in here like a burglar and expect me to let you do that.’

‘Why not? Wouldn’t it be nice?’

‘What about Marcelle?’

Michael tilted his head. He could see her bare neck, and her hair pushed back behind her ear, and the criss-cross stitching of the quilted fabric covering her shoulder.

‘What can I tell you about Marcelle?’

As he spoke he saw his wife, first of all her face with its neat brown bird-like features, and then Marcelle in her kitchen at home with cooking utensils professionally laid out in front of her, her quick hands moving and her head turned aside in concentration on what she was doing. He tried to shuffle the images to find a more pleasing one, but he could only conjure up Marcelle hurrying children into the car, or jabbing the iron over the empty limbs of a shirt, or holding Daisy on her lap and looking accusingly at him over the child’s head. He knew that there were happy recollections buried under these sharper images, but he couldn’t reanimate them. Always he could see her face with her mouth compressed in its thin line of disapproval of him, and he couldn’t recollect exactly when this later mask had disguised the girl he had married.

‘She is my friend,’ Hannah said piously.

‘Yes. I don’t know whether she’s mine, any more.’

Michael looked down at her, and she unwound her arms from his neck.

‘Is that what you want?’

‘I think it’s what everyone wants, isn’t it, once the beginning is past? Companionship and continuity. A shared history and the understanding that comes with that.’

Hannah hitched her robe more closely around her. She sat down again in her place and wrapped her hands with the flawed nails around her cup of coffee. He immediately regretted the change of mood and wished that they could go back to where she had put her arms around him. He felt awkward, hovering over her in his dark suit, and so he reluctantly moved back and sat down facing her in his own chair.

‘It isn’t what I want,’ Hannah declared. ‘Anyway Darcy and I don’t have that much shared history. His stretches right back through Barney and Lucy and Cathy to the first wife and the first business, and the businesses after that, and includes all the old friends and the old places that I know nothing and care less about, not to mention the women who came before, during and after the first wife and then after her and before me.’

‘But you have Laura and Freddie and this place together.’

‘I have them. It’s not really a joint enterprise. They’re my children and I run the house and Darcy pays the bills.’

Michael was amused by the casual dismissiveness of a rich man’s wife. ‘And so what do you want?’

Hannah regarded him. ‘I want to be loved, of course. Loved madly, passionately, addictively, to the exclusion of all others.’

She said this grandly, with a red-tipped flourish of her hand, but Michael understood that she also meant it.

‘And doesn’t Darcy love you?’

‘Oh, Michael. What do you think?’

‘I think he does.’

‘Wrong. Darcy loves himself, getting the best of a deal, making money, drink, food and cigars, in that order.’ She counted off on her fingers. ‘The children, me, our life here, are just home comforts to him. I’m not sure where Vicky Ransome fits in. A non-home comfort, perhaps?’

Michael stared at her. ‘Vicky?’

‘Didn’t you know?’

‘No. I had no idea.’ Vicky Ransome had always seemed a quiet, faintly bovine presence in the Grafton circle. He was amazed, and embarrassed by his innocence, and troubled by the beginning of a sense that as well as Gordon and Nina and now Vicky and Darcy there were a hundred other secrets and nuances that he had never even dreamed of as he plodded to the hospital and home again.

‘On Christmas Eve I found him with her up in my bedroom, after that boy sliced his arm open. Then after she pitched Gordon out he was there the whole time. He’s got a real thing about women with babies, it’s what turns him on. Mothers. Breasts, mothers’ milk. It’s what he wants himself, inside, in the secret place under the skin. He wants to be mothered. He’d like me to be his mother, only I get tired of it.’

Hannah gave the faintest shrug, tolerant and dismissive at the same time, and she seemed to Michael wonderfully female and knowing as if she had seen and accepted all the quirks and weaknesses of men.

‘I don’t want you to be my mother,’ he told her.

‘Good,’ Hannah said, looking straight into his eyes.

The kitchen seemed to expand around Michael until it became an infinite space filled with light, a much warmer and more liquid light than the brittle spring sun shining into the conservatory. He felt an unfamiliar awareness of limitless possibilities, energy in his limbs, the luxury of the day, of this minute, and realized it was happiness.

He reached out for Hannah’s hand.

‘I’m sorry that I came in and made a clumsy pass at you.’

Her other hand held the strands of hair back from her cheek. He had never seen her look plain before, and he had never wanted so much to go on looking at her, holding her face in front of him.

Her hand linked in his. She was tolerant of him as well as of Darcy. ‘Isn’t that what men do?’

Michael hesitated. He thought it must be what men did to women who looked and acted as Hannah did, and so that must be all she knew.

‘Not necessarily.’

Then, miraculously, she leant closer to him and touched her hand to his mouth. ‘I didn’t mind. I’m glad you did.’

The light intensified around him. ‘I still want to take this thing off you.’

‘Not now. I can’t let you now. Mandy will be back soon with Laura.’

‘Then when?’

‘I don’t know. Does that matter?’

He smiled at her. ‘No. So long as it is when, not if.’

‘When,’ Hannah said, softly and seriously.

On election day the windows of the Frosts’ house were papered with blue posters, and there was a blue rosette fastened with blue and white streamers to the front door knocker. Andrew and Janice had invited their Grafton friends to a late supper and to watch the election results, and an hour before the polls closed the couples began to arrive. They parked their estate cars in the quiet road and greeted one another with questions and predictions about the night’s outcome as they crowded into the house. They congregated in the den where a big blank television screen faced the room. There was an air of uneasy but pleasurable expectancy.

‘A hung Parliament, I think,’ Michael said in answer to someone’s question. ‘And another election within a year.’

Andrew overheard him. He was jovially busy, pouring wine with a bottle in each hand while his face radiated confidence and satisfaction.

‘Don’t you believe it. Share prices are up, the word is that exit polls are promising. I wouldn’t have bet on it a week ago but the last couple of days have been crucial. My money’s on a small majority for us.’

Gordon was standing in the same group. He had searched quickly through the rooms for Nina, with a beat of illogical hope, even though he knew she had not been invited. Andrew had explained to him discreetly that he need not worry. Janice and he had nothing particular against Nina Cort, he said, because it took two people to create such involvements and in any case it was none of his business, but it was much easier for everyone not to ask her to the same evenings as Vicky and Gordon. Gordon had even thanked him. He glanced around the crowded room and remembered how she had looked in her chiffon dress on the night he met her, and how the revolving lights had made different colours in her hair. They had only talked about politics once, lying in the bath together in a motel room. He looked back on that as if on some remote, precious time of unrecoverable happiness.

To Andrew and the other familiar irrelevant faces gathered around him he said something like, ‘I wish I felt as confident. I think we may well have a Labour government tomorrow morning.’

Gordon had gone with Vicky to vote before he dropped her at the clinic. They had walked past the playground railings and into the primary school that was their polling station. There had been the usual officials, local people all known to him but wearing expressions of absorbed self-importance for the day, and the representatives of the parties sitting behind their rosettes at rickety card tables, and voters with too little else to do lingering to gossip. Inside the big classroom he had taken his ballot paper into the usual flimsy half-screened cubicle and held the string-tied stub of pencil poised over the list of names.

He had been overcome by a feeling of ennui, by a suffocating recognition of his own predictability and the predictability of Grafton.

He read the candidates’ names and their parties, and he wondered if there would be a flash of lightning and a clap of thunder if he voted Labour, or Green, or Dog-Lovers Rights or Monster Raving Loony. There seemed little enough to choose between the neatly printed inscrutable English names even though he knew that the Labour man was considered sound, that the Conservative had an irritatingly patronizing manner and the Green woman was an energetic housewife married to a man in the county planning department. He thought of everyone else, of the seventy or so per cent of franchised adults in the country who would take the trouble to go to the polling stations that day, and wondered how many of them felt clogged as he did with repetition and banality and the unheard voice of mediocrity.

The voters in the cubicles on either side of him had come and gone. Gordon felt the scrutiny of one of them directed at his back as he passed. If only by making a different mark he could change the condition of England or even himself in the smallest detail, he thought.

Gordon’s pencil wavered.

Then he marked a firm cross in the space beside the Conservative’s name, folded his paper and dropped it through the slot in the black tin box before walking to the door where Vicky was waiting for him. She looked serene, with an air of pleasure in having done the right thing.

‘Trouble making up your mind?’ she joked as they left.

‘A brief meditation on the responsibility of the voter.’ He smiled at her.

At Andrew’s party Jimmy Rose answered him. ‘The night will tell, but I hope to God you’re wrong. Still, they can’t make me pay tax on what I’m not making, can they?’

Star had left his side as soon as they arrived. She was wearing a black-and-white striped jacket with a red rosebud in the buttonhole. It was a joke among the couples that Star was the only Labour voter who was allowed to cross Andrew Frost’s threshold, and Star had been known to retort that Andrew was as guilty of tokenism as the BBC.

The noise level was rising. There was a deliberate gaiety as they absorbed enough wine to fortify themselves for the results. Andrew plied his bottles and Janice ordered everyone to come and eat while there was nothing else going on. There was an elaborate cold buffet laid out in the dining room.

The Cleggs arrived late, complete with Barney and the twins. Barney was carrying a case of Bollinger which Darcy presented to Andrew.

‘Put the whole lot in the fridge. We’ll crack it as soon as we know we’ve won, and I’m not going home until it’s all drunk.’

There was a mottled flush across Darcy’s cheeks and a new looseness about his throat that made him look unkempt, although his hair was sleekly brushed and he was wearing one of his emphatic chalk-striped suits. He declined wine, and filled himself a tumbler of whisky.

The three younger Cleggs and Hannah melted into the thick of the party. Hannah was wearing a bright green dress made of some shimmery material.

‘I’m announcing what I voted,’ she proclaimed.

‘Save the Hedgerows, Hannah?’ someone teased her. ‘Andrew, did you know we’ve got a traitor to the cause here?’

‘It’s not quite obligatory to vote Conservative,’ Marcelle protested. ‘I voted Lib Dem, as it happens.’

‘The Pantsdown party? Adulterers unite?’

There was a small, shivery silence in the heart of the party before someone else’s boisterous laughter crashed over it and the waves of talk washed it away.

‘Please come and eat,’ Janice begged.

They crowded into the dining room and spooned her good food on to their plates, settling to eat and drink and talk before the television coverage began. Only Lucy Clegg ignored the food, but she filled and refilled her glass of wine. Marcelle found a corner of a sofa and picked at a salad until Jimmy came and sat beside her.

‘Sad face,’ he said gently. ‘Why’s that?’

Marcelle gazed at the animation round them. She could hear the ebb and flow of three different conversations but couldn’t think of anything to contribute to any of them. Tiredness dragged at her.

‘Do I look sad? I don’t mean to.’

Darcy was in the nearest group, talking loudly and stabbing with his fork to emphasize his words. Marcelle thought wearily that she must have been to a hundred Grafton evenings with the same or similar permutations of people.

‘Talk to Uncle Jimmy,’ he cajoled her. He did not look much like an uncle, with his bright eyes and demonic smile.

‘I talk too much as it is.’ Gordon and Vicky were across the room, in a group that included Barney Clegg and the Kellys. Jimmy followed the direction of her glance.

‘These things pass,’ he said smoothly. ‘See?’

*

At eleven o’clock the big television was turned on. Jon Snow’s face filled the screen.

‘Is that a positively impartial tie or has he just spilled something?’ Hannah called.

There were other cries for quiet. The experts’ view at the close of polling was that the result was too close to call. There were ironic cheers and whistles.

Andrew had photocopied the newspapers’ lists of marginal and key seats and he distributed them amongst the watchers. The political enthusiasts prepared themselves for the first results while the rest of the party congregated in noisy groups in the kitchen and elsewhere. Cathy Clegg indicated to Lucy that they might slip away soon, but Lucy mutely shook her head. She hovered at the margin of the gathering, holding firmly to her glass and keeping her face turned away from Jimmy. She was paler and less pretty than usual.

Star sat on a tall stool by one of the kitchen counters with a half-full bottle of wine beside her. She looked elegant in her striped jacket. The rosebud in her buttonhole was beginning to unfurl in the warmth. Gordon slid into the place next to her and filled his glass from her bottle.

‘How long until Darcy’s champagne, I wonder?’ he murmured.

‘For ever, I hope,’ Star said crisply.

He smiled at her. ‘I’m sorry, I forgot. And you’re wearing your party badge, as well.’

There was a shout from the television room as the first result was declared.

‘Don’t you want to go and watch?’ she asked.

‘No. It won’t make much difference, whoever gets in.’

‘Yes, it will.’ Her contradiction was vehement, and Gordon envied her the conviction that altered and animated her face. But he did not want to embark on a political argument with Star tonight.

‘How are you?’ he asked instead.

‘Nothing has changed. You know how I am.’

It was an acknowledgement of some unfinished business between them that now never would be completed. Star drank her wine and Gordon noticed as he had done before that she wore her sadness like armour.

Vicky was watching the television in the other room and no one else in the kitchen was in earshot.

Star looked up and said, ‘I have been seeing Nina. I like her. We made a kind of agreement that we might be friends.’

It gave him pleasure to hear her name spoken with plain affection.

‘I’m glad. I know she needs a friend, and she couldn’t find a better one than you.’ He was aware that he had been less than stalwart for both Nina and Star, and there was the flat taste of disappointment in his mouth.

There was a chorus of groans and some booing from the television room.

‘Sounds like we won one,’ Star said.

Darcy looked at his watch. It was not yet one o’clock, and although the signs were promising there was no clear victory yet. He glanced around for Hannah, but could not see her. He did not particularly want champagne. His head felt fuzzy as if his skull no longer properly defined it and there was a weight beneath his diaphragm that threatened to expand into pain. But the moment of victory and the uncorking of champagne to mark it gave him something close at hand on which to focus his attention. He heard himself shouting some imprecation at the red and blue figures on the television screen. They suddenly began to dance in front of his eyes, and the burst of laughter that followed seemed to come from a long way off. He reached out for his glass which had been empty and found that it had been refilled for him. He drank down some more of the whisky.

Barney sat on the stairs talking to the two Frost boys. They had been allowed to stay up for the first results, and Janice had not yet noticed that they were still out of bed.

‘We had a mock election in our class,’ Toby told him. He was much more confident and articulate than his younger brother. ‘I was the Labour candidate and I got seven votes.’

‘Seven? That’s not much,’ William jeered. In William’s face the rounded contours of babyhood were plainly visible, whereas his brother’s were just firming into the beginnings of maturity. Barney did not usually take much notice of children, even Laura and Freddie, but he was struck by this difference in the boys.

‘Wait a minute,’ Barney said. ‘How many in the class? Eighteen? So Toby polled about forty per cent. That’s not bad, William. I think even Mr Kinnock would be fairly pleased with that.’

Lucy had been sitting in Janice’s bathroom. It had been a welcome refuge for a few minutes, but Jimmy had not noticed that she was missing and come in search of her. It made her angry that he was so easily able to ignore her in the midst of this braying, opinionated party of her parents’ friends. She took a comb out of her bag and tried to rearrange her hair. As she stared at herself, the wine she had drunk made an acid knot in her stomach and she leaned experimentally over the basin to see if she would be sick. When nothing happened she straightened up and decided that if Jimmy would not come and find her she would search him out instead.

Hannah had grown tired of listening to Darcy and Jimmy shouting out their politics in front of the television. She wandered through the chintz-patterned drawing room where quieter groups were sitting and talking, and past the stairs where Barney was good-naturedly entertaining Janice’s boys. Hannah patted his shoulder and wandered into the deserted dining room. She hesitated beside the wreckage of the supper table, and then realized that Michael was standing with his back to her, staring out through the French windows into the dark garden. She felt a distinct lift of happiness at the sight of him.

When she went across and put her hand on his arm he moved a little to one side, as if he had been waiting for her.

‘Don’t you care about the results?’ she asked.

He shook his head. Then he quietly opened the door.

‘Come out here with me,’ he said.

They stepped out into the darkness. The mild air tasted damp and clean. It was exhilarating to walk away from the over-lit house into the less familiar territory of the garden. There was a pergola along the side of the house and an expanse of paving and lawn, monochrome flat in front of them. Michael took her hand and they stumbled away from the lights of the party. Beyond an arch in a black hedge they came to the swimming pool, closed up under its winter cover. Michael guided her around the perimeter until they came to the cedarwood pool house. He tried the door and it creaked open. Inside they could just distinguish the black outlines of summer garden furniture. There was a dried-out scent of grass clippings and canvas and mower oil.

Hannah shivered and Michael took off his jacket and covered her shoulders. They felt their way forward through the thicket of wood and metal until they came up against a paler glimmer. There was a crackle of polythene sheeting as Michael pulled the cover off the Frosts’ canopied swing seat.

‘Sit here with me,’ he whispered.

The swing rocked and creaked under their weight. Hannah found that she could remember the fabric exactly. It was a pattern of green leaves and blowsy coral flowers against a white background.

‘It’ll soon be summer,’ she murmured.

‘And then autumn again, and Hallowe’en, and Christmas,’ Michael said with his mouth against her hair.

From the refuge of the seat they could see through the half-open door down the length of the pool towards the house and the curtained windows of Andrew’s television room. They were both recalling summer afternoons when children dived and splashed with their wet, dark heads like seals and the couples basked in deck-chairs with drinks in their hands, and there was the scent of charcoal smoke and grilled meat and sun-cream.

Hannah asked, ‘Does everything break up in the end?’

It seemed that there were long cracks underlying these remembered images, although the surface of them remained unbroken like the glassy pool water before the swimmers shattered it.

Michael reassured her, without any certainty of his own, ‘No, not everything.’

He kissed her because he didn’t want to think of anything beyond here and now. They lay back against the flowered cushions and his hands found her bare shoulders under his jacket and the tight band of the top of her green dress.

‘Is it when now?’ he asked her and she laughed softly into his ear.

‘The beginning of when.’

The seat rocked and gave out its mild summer creaking as he undid the zip of the dress. His tongue moved slowly over her skin and he tasted the faint spiritous burn of her evaporated perfume.

Lucy stalked through the party, feeling that no one could have paid her less attention if she were invisible.

She found her father in the middle of an augmented crowd in front of the television, but to her relief Jimmy was no longer ensconced beside him. She saw Star Rose leaning in the doorway, looking at the television watchers with her habitually superior expression. Lucy slid past her, eel-like, with her face turned away. Barney was nowhere to be seen. She thought he must already have gone off in his own car in search of livelier company. Even Cathy seemed to have deserted her.

The dining room smelled unpleasantly of congealed food and cigarette smoke, even though Janice and Marcelle Wickham were pecking about in it with trays and cloths. She breathed shallowly against her nausea and then in a group at the far end containing the Kellys and a quartet of dull, golfing people Lucy caught sight of Jimmy.

She darted to his side, and as the faceless people made room for her she turned her shoulder on them to isolate Jimmy from the group.

‘I want to talk to you,’ she said. Her voice had risen in pitch.

‘Lucy, my lovely girl. Talk away,’ he said warmly. His brogue seemed to have thickened and she thought he half winked over her shoulder at the eavesdroppers.

‘Somewhere else. Please.’

Jimmy’s benevolent expression didn’t change but when he took her arm he gripped it a little too tightly. Jovially he excused them both from the group and steered Lucy away. Out in the empty hallway she saw that his mouth made a tight line and his eyes had gone flat. She had made him angry, and the thought that all she had wanted to do was to have him to herself for a moment in public as well as in thick, fumy secret, caused her eyes to sting with tears.

Jimmy glanced around them and then opened the front door and propelled her outside. He hustled her through the cold until they reached the safety of his car. Once they were inside it in the dark Lucy felt they were in their own territory where he had acknowledged her as the queen.

‘I needed to see you,’ she said with a touch of hauteur.

‘Don’t be an idiot. In front of your father, and everyone else in there?’

Lucy understood that he was still angry even though they were alone. Her imperiousness dissolved at once into helpless tears.

‘I love you. I can’t bear to see you and not to be with you.’

‘I know that, but you must. How do you think it is for me?’

He was softer-voiced now. Lucy flung herself against him and sobbed. ‘I want you, I need you now.’

‘How much have you had to drink?’

‘Quite a lot. I feel sick.’

He sat upright against her. ‘Are you going to be sick?’

‘It isn’t that.’ She pushed her hair back from her smudged eyes and turned to look full at him. She made her face solemn with the importance of what she had to say. ‘I think I feel sick because I’m pregnant.’

As she looked at him in the dim light reflected from the house his features seemed to contract, sharpening and hardening as the reactions ticked through him.

‘I thought you took the pill?’

‘I do. Only I don’t always remember it …’ Lucy bit her lip and her voice trailed away.

‘How many days late are you?’

‘Eight.’

Jimmy relaxed a bit. ‘Ah, that’s not so much. It might not be what you think. A week’s no time.’

Lucy found her own determination in this softening of his. ‘And what if it is that?’

‘We’ll fix it, don’t worry.’

She put her fingers on his arm. They felt claw-like as she dug into the layers of his clothes.

‘I don’t want it fixed. If it’s your baby, our baby, I want to have it. I’ve thought of nothing else for a week, Jimmy –’

He shook off her hand and then grabbed her by the shoulders. Her head wobbled and she sobbed a little because his face in the half-light combined all the familiar features that she loved with a different and frightening expression that made her want to get out of the car and run.

‘You can’t have any baby. I’m not your husband, I’m married already, and you’re nineteen years old. See sense.’

‘Sense? Is that sense? Don’t you want a child, your own baby? You haven’t got any children. I can give you this one. You must want to be a father!’

Her teeth rattled in her head with the shake he gave her.

‘No, I don’t. Not like this. Neither do you.’

Lucy breathed in a gulp of air against the wails of loss and fear rising up through her chest and into her throat. Her thoughts and intentions blurred and skittered in her head and then began to slip ahead of her, out of her reach, dragging her in their wake.

‘If you won’t hear me I’ll tell your wife. I’ll tell Star and she will know you want to murder your own baby.’

Jimmy grabbed at her but Lucy had already flung open the car door. She staggered for two steps and then tensed as she heard him springing after her. Fear made her run faster as she fled up the Frosts’ driveway and plunged in through their front door.

A burst of noise seemed to strike her in the face. There were people in the hallway cheering and jostling, chanting, ‘Five more years.’

Lucy slipped past them, searching for Star in her black and white stripes, needing to find her before Jimmy caught up with her. She sensed rather than saw that he had been enveloped in the hubbub inside the door, and she stumbled on with the crowd around her into the kitchen.

Lucy saw her father in the middle of the room with a dozen people laughing around him. Darcy himself was not laughing. His face was solemn as he lifted a bottle of champagne in the air in front of him like a trophy. Lucy could see his thumbs whitening as he pressed upwards on the cork.

The room was full of noise but there was an eye of silence in the centre of it, containing him. The effort of forcing the cork showed in his face. His mouth drew back from his teeth and his eyes began to close.

Everything seemed to happen very slowly, there in the silent eye.

As Lucy watched him her father’s face darkened and distorted into a mask of pain. There was a sheen of sweat on him that glinted in the light. The champagne bottle fell out of his hands and rolled away, unopened.

Then Darcy’s body buckled underneath him and he slipped sideways, toppling into the thicket of people.

There was a gasp that shivered into the silent bubble, but even as she heard it there was a jubilant voice beside Lucy.

‘A majority of at least twenty. Break out the bubbly,’ it cried out.

‘Darcy!’ Someone else was calling out his name. A note of shock and disbelief.

A press of people surged around him, and he disappeared from her sight.

Andrew and Vicky were closest to him. Andrew tried to fend off the willing hands and looming faces.

‘Keep back. Give him some air.’

Vicky knelt beside the tumbled body. She put her hands to Darcy’s grey face and found that it was clammy. Then she lowered her face to his in the parody of a kiss and felt the faint stirring of his exhaled breath. With fingers thickened with fear she struggled to loosen his tie and dragged open the neck of his shirt. There was a violent movement in the silent circle above her head and Lucy fell beside her.

‘Daddy? Daddy?’

Andrew put his arm around her and tried to lift her away but she was clinging to her father’s hand. Vicky looked down into Darcy’s face. She had no idea what she should do. She heard her own voice begging,

‘Find Michael. Somebody get Michael.’

She bent over Darcy again. Her fingers pinched his nose and she dipped her head once more so that her mouth covered his. She blew air into his lungs and when she listened she heard the sigh of his exhalation. His lips moved, forming a word that she could not distinguish. The realization that he was alive fanned her desperation.

‘For God’s sake, where’s Michael?’

The question rippled outwards. No one in the kitchen had seen him. Lucy and Vicky knelt on either side of Darcy with Andrew at his head. His face was grey but he was breathing. They could hear the painful indrawn gulp and the rasp in his throat as the air escaped again. His mouth was open and a thread of saliva looped from it. Vicky wiped it away.

‘Call for an ambulance,’ Andrew ordered.

Lucy heard Jimmy using the kitchen extension a yard from her head. She looked up and saw him with Star at his side.

There were voices beyond the kitchen, calling for Michael. Marcelle and Janice came in from the dining room, their faces white with shock.

‘He’s here somewhere,’ Marcelle was saying. ‘Isn’t he watching the television?’

Barney and Cathy appeared together, from the upstairs room where they had been playing games on William Frost’s computer. The kitchen doorway was jammed with murmuring people.

‘Keep everyone else out, Jan,’ Andrew said.

‘Where’s Hannah?’ Barney asked from his father’s side.

The flesh of Hannah’s inner thigh was as soft as butter. Michael rolled the tight nylon skin down to her plump knee and then knelt to slide his tongue upwards. Hannah lay back against the cushions, a serene odalisque in the darkness. When he lifted his head he could just see the lazy glint of her smile.

He heard a voice, and then several voices calling out, but he did not listen. No one would come to the pool house, and his senses were occupied with the taste and the scent and the softness of Hannah.

Then he heard his name. It was his name that was being called. The seat creaked and Hannah sat up, and then they did listen, frozen into stillness.

‘Michael. Where’s Michael?’

‘Someone is hurt,’ he whispered. ‘Shit.’

He scrambled to his feet, brushing at his clothes and raking his hair with his fingers, a pantomime adulterer. Hannah held out his jacket and he took it from her, pushing his arms into the sleeves.

‘Wait here for a few minutes,’ he told her.

He left the pool house and ran, slipping on the damp grass. The French windows were open and light spilled through the pergola and over the flower beds. There were knots of anxious people peering into the garden. He stopped running when he saw them, and tried to stroll with his hands in his pockets.

‘He’s out here, in the garden,’ someone called.

‘What’s going on?’ Michael asked, as he stepped into the house.

Darcy was lying on the kitchen floor with his children and Vicky and Andrew kneeling around him like saints in some religious tableau. His eyes were open.

‘Don’t crowd him,’ Michael snapped. ‘Has someone rung for an ambulance?’ They moved back, silently and obediently, to let him through with his package of doctorly skills.

As he bent over Darcy, he could hear the murmuring voices, ‘Where’s Hannah? Somebody must tell Hannah.’

‘We’ll have to get you to the hospital, Darcy,’ Michael said. ‘Can you hear me?’

Darcy looked up at him, his eyes unnaturally dark in his ghastly face. Then, just perceptibly, he nodded.

‘You have had some kind of cardiac seizure. I can’t tell much more until you’ve been examined. Lie still until the ambulance comes.’

There was a flurry amongst the watchers and then Hannah appeared in the midst of them. She stared down wide-eyed at Darcy. Barney stood up and put his arm protectively around her. Hannah’s bare arms and shoulders were goose-pimpled with cold, and there was a bracelet of earth and grass around the two black satiny spikes of her stiletto shoes. She could only have been outside. Another small shock-wave travelled outwards from the centre of the circle. Across Darcy, and over the heads of his twins, Michael saw Marcelle look at Hannah, and then turn her brown eyes on him.

‘He’s all right,’ Michael said to Hannah. ‘We’ll get him to hospital as soon as we can.’

She put the back of her hand up to cover her mouth, from where he had kissed away her lipstick.

The ambulance came, and the men with their stretcher to carry Darcy out to it. Michael and Hannah followed them, and Marcelle stood to one side of the kitchen door to let them through.

‘I’ll get home when I’ve made sure how he is,’ Michael murmured to her as they passed, but Marcelle did not look at him.

In the speeding ambulance, Michael and the crew man watched attentively over Darcy while Hannah sat huddled in the opposite corner. They did not speak to each other. Barney and the twins followed behind the flashing blue light in Barney’s Golf.

The party was abruptly over, and almost everyone had gone quietly home. Marcelle sat at Janice’s kitchen table with her hands folded around a mug of tea, as she had done a thousand times before. This normality, the reminder of familiar domestic life, made what she had seen appear all the more ugly. Michael had been out in the garden making love to Hannah. She kept seeing their faces when they stumbled in, over and over, and having to understand that there was no explanation other than the obvious, humiliating one.

Marcelle unwrapped her hands and ducked her head to the comfort of her mug of tea, seeing Michael again with cobwebs on his clothes and Hannah, shivering with cold in her grassy shoes.

Janice came to sit beside her and put her arm around her shoulders.

‘You okay?’

‘Yes, I’m fine.’

She would not let even Janice know that she was not, because that would be too much to give away. Small currents of anger, and bitterness, fear and disbelief passed through her like electric shocks.

‘Andrew’ll take you home,’ Janice said. ‘Or we could call a taxi.’

‘No, I’m fine to drive. I’ll finish my tea and then I’ll go.’ She kept her voice cheerful, denying the possibility of Janice’s sympathy, as if neither of them had seen anything.

Janice sighed. ‘These parties,’ she said. ‘All of us, giving and going to parties. What is it we want, I wonder?’

It was seven o’clock in the morning, fully light, but the day was dim and cold, promising no warmth.

Nina had been awake for more than an hour. She was lying on her back, staring up at the ceiling from her boat bed, when she heard someone knocking at her front door. It was a gentle, interrogative knock and not a summons, but she got up at once and wrapped herself in her dressing gown.

Barney stood on the doorstep. He was unshaven and seemed utterly exhausted.

‘What has happened?’ Nina asked, with fear in her throat. Her first irrational thought was of Gordon.

‘Can I come in?’

‘Yes. Yes, of course you can.’ She held the door open wide for him.

In the kitchen, where it was warm, he told her what had happened to Darcy.

‘It’s all right. Michael was very good, and then the cardiologist or whoever he was came and told us he’d had a heart attack, but it was a minor one. He’s in intensive care now, under observation. There was nothing else for us to do there. I took Hannah and the girls home, but I didn’t want to go to bed.’

He lifted his shoulders, and then dropped them again helplessly. He looked very young.

Nina went to him and put her arms around him.

‘Don’t worry,’ she soothed.

‘I went back to Wilton and I saw Hannah and the twins to bed. But I knew I wouldn’t sleep. I wanted to talk to you.’ He moved a little, circling her with his arms in return so that they held each other. ‘Do you mind?’ he asked.

Nina shook her head. ‘No. Do you want to try to go to sleep here?’

Barney’s hand found hers, and he held it between them. They looked at each other for a long, quiet moment.

‘I’d like to lie down if you will come with me.’

She knew she should have laughed, as if she were being teased, and gently extricated herself. But she also knew how comfortable and natural it would be to lie down against the warmth of him. The subtraction sum, the difference in their ages, slipped out of her head.

‘I’ll come and hold you until you fall asleep.’

Upstairs in her bed the rumpled quilt still held the warmth of her sleep.