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 21

Michael was driven home from the hospital in a taxi. He had a busy list for the next day, and he had already reassured himself that Darcy was out of danger for the moment. It was four o’clock in the morning, and the darkness seemed to enclose the cab like some cube of solid matter that travelled with him and closed off all the avenues of escape.

He was thinking about Marcelle and his children; he could clearly see Marcelle’s face as it had been when he had stepped in from the garden, but he was thinking mostly about Jonathan and Daisy.

Michael knew that he had never been a wholehearted, enthusiastic father to them in the way that he had blithely imagined he would be before Jonathan was born. He loved his children, but quite often they seemed to be unpredictable obstacles that needed to be negotiated in the pursuit of a civilized life. They consumed Marcelle’s time, and his own, and although he was proud of them he knew that they did not entirely repay this investment of energy. They did not always act in the way he wanted them to. Sometimes they turned on him and gazed with mute, accusing faces and he felt his heart twist inside him with the knowledge of his own guilty inadequacy.

Now, on the over-familiar road with the silent, tired cabdriver hunched beside him, there was a different perspective. Michael knew that with Hannah he was trying to meet a need that Marcelle no longer answered, but he also knew that in doing it he was risking Marcelle and his children. And when he imagined the state of being without children he suddenly saw them much more clearly. He saw Jonathan’s stubborn, interrogative stare and Daisy’s convex upper lip buckling with the onset of her too-frequent tears, and they seemed both complicated and separate from himself and Marcelle. He felt the demands of his responsibility for them sharpening, and he was fearful for their safety, and yet he was filled with a kind of awe because they were themselves, and unique.

He remembered how Darcy had looked in the hospital A and E room, lying grey-faced at the mercy of the cardiac crash team. Michael had known most of the nurses and doctors at least by sight, some of them much better than that, and it had been shocking to see Darcy solitary in the midst of them, robbed of his personal stature, reduced to a body on a trolley. With the thought of him, and with the fear for his children, Michael found his eyes so blurred with tears that he could barely see.

When he went into the house, carefully relocking the doors behind him, the silence and the darkness were even blanker and thicker than outside. There was a faint smell of stale food, a fainter trace of the clear varnish that Jonathan used to finish his model aeroplanes. Michael trod softly, his steps weighted by familiarity.

Marcelle was awake. She had not slept, although she had come home a long time ago from the Frosts’. She lay in bed, having heard the crunch of car tyres on the gravel outside and then the small, blindfold movements of Michael within the house.

The bedroom door opened and then closed again. The floor creaked as he passed the end of the bed and Marcelle was gripped by the fear that it was not Michael, but an intruder.

‘I am awake,’ she said in a clear voice edged with alarm.

‘Are you? It’s very late.’

It was him, of course, but she did not feel any sense of relief. She clicked on her bedside light.

‘How is he?’

Michael was standing with his shoes in one hand and his jacket in the other, the picture of stealth.

‘Oh. Probably all right, in the short term.’

Marcelle listened as he told her about Darcy and the hospital. He undressed as he talked, putting his cufflinks in the carved wooden dish that stood on the chest of drawers, dropping his shirt and underclothes into the wicker laundry basket. Marcelle thought of the thousands of other nights that had slipped by and now stretched behind them, their joint history.

‘And Hannah?’

Michael lay down on his side of the bed.

‘Worried, naturally. But coping with it well enough.’

Marcelle wanted him to put his arms round her, making some gesture of reassurance, but she knew that he would not.

‘So what was going on tonight?’ she asked.

There was a small silence, and then he said, ‘I’m sorry, I know how it must have looked. We’d both had a few drinks, we’d agreed that we were sick of the election. So we went outside, that’s all. There was a bit of fooling around. You know what Hannah’s like.’

‘Not really, evidently,’ Marcelle said.

Within her head gnawed the conviction that Michael was lying to her. She turned his words over and over, trying to prise the truth out of them, but they stayed defiantly flat, refusing to admit her.

‘What does “fooling around” mean?’ she persisted. The expression was not quite right. She had never heard him use it before. Was that the false note?

‘I kissed her. A friendly, flirtatious kiss. These things happen between people.’

‘Do they?’

Michael moved his arm awkwardly, and then found her hand. He squeezed it.

‘Yes, they do. I’m sorry if you were hurt.’

She knew that she would get no more out of him, and in a way she was relieved. There was nothing for her to do but accept what he told her, and it was easier to do so than otherwise because it allowed her to step aside from her anxieties. These things did happen, she told herself. Between people of their age, with their histories behind them. She knew as much, from Jimmy.

Michael withdrew his hand, settling himself for sleep.

‘I’m tired,’ he said. ‘And I’ve got a busy day tomorrow. How about you?’

‘The same.’

Marcelle closed her eyes experimentally, and they lay next to each other with their separate thoughts.

Nina lay on her side and looked at Barney’s naked back. His spine was a strong groove like a thumb-line pressed in soft clay.

Barney was sitting on the edge of her bed, talking on the telephone to the hospital. She closed her eyes, and then opened them again. There was still the narrow space of crumpled sheet and then the startling, solid shape of him. She stared at the lines of his neck, and imagined the hard outline of his skull under the scrolls of hair. His face was hidden from her but his questioning voice sounded like an anxious boy’s, contradicting what she saw.

Barney replaced the receiver and turned back to Nina.

‘He’s stable, and his heart is being monitored. He’s asleep at the moment.’

‘Good. That’s good news.’

‘May I call Hannah now?’

‘Of course. Don’t tell her where you are, will you?’

‘Not if you don’t want me to.’

He dialled again, and almost at once began talking to Hannah. Nina knew that she must have been sitting at Wilton waiting beside the telephone. She turned over on to her back and thought about the morning in order to disconnect herself from Barney’s conversation with his stepmother.

They had come upstairs together, and in the shuttered silence of her bedroom Barney had seemed neither a tired boy nor a predatory man, but simply himself. He kissed her and undid her dressing gown, and she stood quietly while he looked at her. Then he touched her arm.

‘Don’t get cold,’ he said.

He lifted the quilt and she slid into the warmth underneath it. He took off the clothes that he had put on for the Frosts’ party, ages of time ago, and gratefully lay down beside her. She held out her arms to him.

‘May I?’ he had asked, and he had sounded so much like a polite boy at a birthday party that it made Nina laugh.

‘Well, yes, since we’ve come this far.’

Barney laughed too, with relief, leaning over her and kissing the corner of her mouth.

‘Thank you. It would be quite difficult to go to sleep right now.’

Nina had not wanted to compare him with Gordon, but she could not help it. Barney would not make her forget herself, and the time and the place and everything else except what he did, as Gordon had been able to do, nor did she want that from him. She could feel his eagerness, and his clumsiness, and she wanted to reassure him.

‘It’s all right. I want you to be here. I’m glad you are.’ Barney closed his eyes and sighed, and then murmured, ‘I wanted to be. I have for ages. I thought you knew.’

‘I did.’

They both laughed again, acknowledging that the gap between them was temporarily diminished.

It was easier, after that. She had given him confidence, and he was as warm and natural as she had imagined he would be.

Afterwards Barney said with his mouth against her cheek, ‘Thank you. Did I tell you that you are beautiful?’

‘I think you did, more or less.’

‘Less isn’t enough. You are.’

Nina smiled. ‘Thank you,’ she said in her turn.

She was pleased that they had safely negotiated their way to this comfortable moment. She dismissed the hovering spectres of common sense and responsibility, and concentrated instead on the joint pattern her breathing made with Barney’s. After a moment she realized that he had drifted into sleep and saw from the looseness of his mouth and the circles under his eyes that he was exhausted.

Barney slept for an hour, while she lay quietly beside him. Then he opened his eyes again, at once wide awake and seeming completely rested. It made her realize again how young and healthy he was.

‘I should telephone,’ he said.

After he had spoken to the hospital and to Hannah his anxiety visibly lifted.

‘I told her she should go to bed and try to sleep,’ he said to Nina, adding, ‘She thinks I’m at Tom’s.’

He lay down beside her again. They contemplated each other openly for a moment, squinting a little because of the closeness of their faces, each of them evaluating this new stage of their intimacy and trying to work out what should happen next. Nina put her fingers up to his mouth, approving of the shape of it, and the other remembered details of the early morning. It came to her that she liked him being where he was, and then she felt afraid and unwilling to be the predatory widow who had lured him to her bed.

‘This is just between you and me, Barney. It was very nice, very surprising, but I don’t want the rest of the world to know about it.’

‘I want to tell everyone. To climb up on the roof and shout about it. How could I not?’

His wide smile disclosed his white teeth as he propped himself on one elbow to look down at her. His uncertainty had evaporated now. He was pleased with himself and his conquest. Cocksure was exactly the word, Nina thought with a touch of weariness, feeling herself to be dry and disparaging and ancient by comparison. She would have been relieved to dislike him, but recognized that the truth was the exact opposite. The spectres gathered around the bed again.

‘Even so, I don’t want anyone to know.’

‘Of course not, if that’s what you prefer. Are you ashamed of me, is that what it is?’

‘Not at all. Perhaps ashamed of myself.’

He was surprised. ‘Why is that? Didn’t you like what we did?’

‘Yes, Barney, I did like it. But there’s the matter of … suitability.’

‘Because we aren’t quite exactly the same age? If you and I feel that this is suitable then who else matters?’

His very reasonableness was appealing. Seeing that he had gained a point Barney persisted.

‘If no one knows about us, whatever it is we are, can I come and see you again? I’ll steal in secretly, in the dead of night, if you insist.’

She saw that he was laughing, and his lightness lifted her too. She had been thinking of Gordon, and preparing herself instinctively for pain to be connected with the acceptance of pleasure. Barney’s view of the world was so simple that she wanted to respond to it.

She reminded herself that they were both adults, of free will and corresponding inclination, however temporary that inclination might turn out to be.

‘You’ll have to visit under cover of darkness, and wearing a false beard and a long raincoat.’

‘Whatever turns you on,’ Barney said philosophically. ‘Can I, then?’ Nina nodded, and the flash of pleasure in his face was her reward.

Cathy and Lucy went to the hospital to see Darcy. Two days after his heart attack he was sitting up in bed in a general ward. His face was still an unhealthy colour, but he seemed to have recovered some of his impatient energy.

‘Diet and exercise,’ he complained to them. ‘These damned doctors come and stand around the bed with their long faces, telling me what I can’t eat and can’t drink and how I must walk and swim and guard against stress. What kind of a life does that sound like?’

‘You must do what they say,’ Cathy told him. She turned to her twin. ‘Mustn’t he?’

Lucy sat with her chair at an angle, winding new knots in the teased and plaited tails of her hair.

‘Yeah. Give up cigars and eat grapefruit.’

Darcy flapped the covers around him. ‘I’ll promise them whatever they want, so long as they’ll let me out of here. And if I don’t get some answers soon I’m just going to get up and walk out.’

Cathy shook her head. ‘What’s the hurry? Why not have a proper rest?’

‘I don’t need a rest. There are things that I want to do. Need to do.’ She was startled by the vehemence that broke through his predictable complaining. Darcy wiped his mouth and Cathy glanced uneasily at her sister, but Lucy appeared to be intent on the knots of hair that hung in front of her eyes.

‘Listen to what they tell you, Dad. We love you, you know.’ She put her hand over his, and her father’s eyes settled on her face although she could feel the currents of impatience jerking within him.

‘Do you? All of you? Even you two and Barney?’

‘You know we do,’ she reassured him.

Lucy peered through the curtain of her hair. She had gnawed the skin of her lower lip until it was sore.

‘Barney said he’d be in to see you tonight,’ she contributed.

‘Did he? Where is he? At college, I hope.’

‘I dunno.’ She pushed back her hair and shrugged. Lucy felt how difficult it was to hide her exhaustion, especially confronted with this unpleasant sight of her vigorous father beached and helpless in a hospital bed. She was relieved when Cathy looked at her huge black watch and said,

‘We should go, Dad. Marcelle’ll kill me if I miss any more of her demos.’

‘Off you go, then.’

They kissed him, one on each cheek as they used to do when they were tiny. Darcy straightened up for them, but he allowed himself to sag against his pillows as soon as they turned away down the ward together. He could feel the muscles in his face and neck pulling in different directions, and his heart seemed too big, and dull, and heavy for his chest.

Cathy was driving the Renault.

‘Can you stop in town? I want to get something,’ Lucy asked her as they skidded out of the hospital car park.

‘Where?’

‘Boots.’

‘Okay.’

She was away from the car for only five minutes. When she came out of the chemist’s she was stuffing the plastic bag containing her purchases into the neck of her black rucksack.

The following morning Lucy did the pregnancy test that she had bought, carefully following the instructions on the leaflet enclosed in the box with the chemicals and the test tube. She left the glass tube in the holder provided and went downstairs.

Cathy had already left for her day at the Pond School but Hannah was in the kitchen with Freddie and Laura and their au pair. The children were eating boiled eggs while Mandy cut buttered toast into fingers for them. Lucy went to lean against the warmth of the Aga and tried not to look at the mess of food.

‘Coffee’s fresh,’ Hannah offered.

‘No, thanks,’ Lucy said through dry lips.

Hannah regarded her. Lucy was supposed to be studying to retake the A levels she had failed and searching for a part-time job, but there was no sign of either activity. She looked pale and heavy-eyed this morning, and sulky as well. Irritation with the girl broke through Hannah’s preoccupation.

‘What’s the matter?’ she snapped at her. ‘Were you in late last night?’

‘No, I wasn’t. Nothing’s the matter, why should there be? Everything’s utterly wonderful.’

Lucy whirled and ran out of the kitchen, leaving Mandy and the children making round-eyed mock-gloomy faces at each other.

Hannah poured herself another cup of coffee and stood at the window, staring at the gardener’s rows of soldier-red tulips without deploring the colour as she usually did. She had enough to worry about, she fretted, without having to take on Lucy’s problems. Privately, she considered that all three of Darcy’s older children were hopelessly spoiled, and that Lucy was the worst. It was a pity that the girl’s own mother was not closer to hand, but Darcy’s first wife had remarried and was living in San Diego. The children had opted to stay in England with their father.

Responsibility weighed heavily on Hannah. With her eyes still fixed on the brash tulips she prayed that Darcy would be better quickly. And then, like glittering fish escaping a net, her thoughts flicked to Michael again. What if Darcy did not get better? What if she found herself married to an invalid, or worse?

Upstairs Lucy stood and stared at the test tube. There, reflected in the mirror thoughtfully provided with the kit, was a ring exactly like the one in the leaflet illustration. It was a positive result, there was no doubt. There was a baby – her baby, and Jimmy’s.

The telephone rang on Jimmy’s desk. His secretary had taken the morning off, so he looked up from his outline plans for a cosmetics sales conference and answered it himself.

‘I need to see you,’ Lucy said at once.

Jimmy picked up his pen and rotated it in his fingers.

‘How is Darcy?’ he asked cautiously.

‘Okay. It isn’t about that.’

‘Do I know what it’s about?’ Twin images of her, the responsive woman and the uncontrollable girl, collided uncomfortably in his mind. What had he said to her? We’ll fix it, don’t worry …

‘I need to see you.’

‘How about lunchtime?’ It was a fine morning and it had always been a pleasure to have a couple of drinks in the middle of the day and to admire Lucy’s long legs revealed by one of the tiny skirts she wore. Jimmy named a country pub they had visited in the past.

‘I haven’t got the car. Cathy’s taken it.’

‘Then borrow Hannah’s, or take Darcy’s or the bloody au pair’s. How many cars have you got out there?’

‘I’m not insured,’ Lucy’s voice wobbled. She was about to cry.

‘You’re a big girl,’ Jimmy told her. The afternoon seemed less inviting in prospect. ‘I’ll be there at one. I have to go now.’

Jimmy arrived early. He was already sitting at the bar with a drink in his hand when he saw the Range Rover swing into the car park. Lucy seemed surprisingly small perched up behind the high steering wheel. When she came into the bar in her little skirt with her blonde hair tangled as if she had just got out of bed, Jimmy thought how young and fresh and irresistible she was. The recognition warmed his smile of greeting.

‘I’m not insured to drive that thing,’ Lucy said. ‘I took Dad’s keys. You’ll have to say it was you, if anyone’s seen it.’

‘You looked entirely the part,’ he said, grinning at her.

Lucy would not have a drink. He bought her a Coke and they went to sit on an oak settle with a high back that partly shielded them from the rest of the room. She faced him at once, pushing her hair back from her forehead.

‘I did a test,’ she announced. ‘One of those pee in a test tube things. I’m pregnant.’

Jimmy glanced around them. No one’s head had turned in their direction.

‘For sure?’

‘For certain.’ Lucy’s eyes were fixed on his face with an intensity that he did not like. He had been reassuring himself that it was drink that had made her hysterical the other night, but now he was not so confident. He took hold of her hand and rubbed it as if she had complained of the cold.

‘Have you seen your doctor?’

‘Dr Robertson? The family physician? “Doctor, I’m expecting a baby.” “I see. And is the young man pleased about it?” “Actually he’s my father’s best friend.”’

Her fingers clenched on his, pinching him, reminding him uncomfortably of the scene outside the Frosts’.

‘Lucy, Lucy, don’t do this. It’s difficult for you, it’s a bad thing to have happened, but we’ll make it all right, don’t worry.’

Jimmy looked round the bar again. Several conversations in the vicinity seemed to have faltered. He finished his beer and pushed the glass away. ‘I can’t talk to you in here. Let’s go for a walk, shall we?’

To his relief, she stood up to follow him.

Outside the sun was shining. Across the road there was a green footpath signpost, and beyond it a stile and a path running beside a ploughed field. Jimmy had noticed the path before, and the wood on the far side of the field. He took the lead over the stile, and Lucy followed again.

The thorn hedges were fresh with still-curled leaves, and there were pale, starry clumps of primroses along the bank. Somewhere overhead a lark spiralled in the light sky.

‘Spring has sprung,’ Jimmy said in an attempt to be cheerful, but Lucy gave no sign that she had heard him. She was walking quickly, with her eyes on the ground and her clenched fists pulled up within the sleeves of her baggy sweater. He took her arm, making her slow her pace.

‘What would you like to do?’ he asked, as gently as he could.

Lucy shrugged and shook her head so that the knotted hair bobbed over her forehead.

‘I don’t know. It’s a baby, isn’t it? It’s our baby, yours and mine.’

‘Not yet, it isn’t. It’s a cluster of cells, no more. We can arrange for you to have an abortion, you know. It will be quick, and safe, and when it’s over you will be absolutely relieved.’

They had reached the second stile that led out of the field and into the wood. The sunlight slanted through the trees and made pale green and silver vaults ahead of them. Lucy swung her legs over the stile. She looked back over her shoulder at him.

‘I thought you were a Catholic,’ she said.

‘I am.’ It was Holy Week.

‘I thought you didn’t believe in abortion, then.’

It was quiet in the wood. Lucy had turned to face him and she walked backwards, away from him, with her arms stiff at her sides.

Jimmy said, ‘I don’t, in general. In this specific instance I do.’

‘That’s nice and convenient for you, isn’t it?’

A flicker of anger ignited in him. He lunged forward and held her before she could scramble out of his reach. As soon as she was caught Lucy confronted him and he saw the mixture of sullenness and defiance and fear in her. Her skin was pasty and her lips were chapped. For Jimmy her appearance had always possessed the ability to change itself almost by the minute. It was one of the things about her that appealed to him, and now she looked positively plain. As she scowled at him he felt the flame of his anger slyly transmuting itself into desire.

There was a wood-pigeon in the trees, he could hear its throaty call.

Jimmy didn’t loosen his grip on her, but he moved his head forward and touched her ragged lip with the tip of his tongue.

‘You are like a snake,’ Lucy said.

‘Is that so?’’

He slid his hands down her back to her small, hard bottom, and drew her hips against his. He moved his tongue between her teeth, forcing the kiss on her until at last her mouth opened to him. Then her arms went around his neck and it was Lucy who was kissing him. She clung to him, almost hanging from his neck so that he had to ease her weight in his arms.

‘I love you,’ she groaned. ‘I really love you, you know.’

Over her shoulder, Jimmy glanced left and right into the undergrowth. There was a clearing to one side under a canopy of trees.

This would have to be the last time, he told himself.

He half lifted her, half drew her after him into the clearing. The grass was damp and brambly with bare patches of earth in between the weedy tufts, but he was too eager for her to want to search for a better place. He pulled off his jacket and put it on the wet grass, and Lucy wriggled out of her sweater and threw it down too. She unlaced her shoes and then peeled down her thick tights. Jimmy knelt in front of her, his eyes on the white skin of her thighs and the lick of fair hair exposed by the ridden-up elastic hem of her skirt.

He undid himself, thick-fingered with haste, and Lucy leaned forward, greedily taking him in her mouth.

He let her for a moment, and then he forced her backwards on to the crumpled bed of their clothes. He ran his fingers over the veins that were faintly visible under the white skin, and then he slid his fingers inside her and watched her face as her eyes closed and her mouth opened, inviting him.

‘Jimmy,’ she whispered.

He withdrew his fingers so that a recollection of a scowl formed between her eyebrows, and then he extricated himself from his own clothes, hurrying, and pushed himself inside her.

‘Jimmy.’ He felt the breath in his ear, rather than hearing her voice. Her legs tightened around his waist and her fingers knotted in his hair as he thrust at her. They rolled over, locked together and blind to everything, and brambles tore at Lucy’s hair and her bare legs. Jimmy’s anger with her melted into his greed and became one and the same thing, and he bit at her mouth and her throat as they twisted over and under each other. He knew he was hurting her but her fingers still dug into the muscles of his shoulders, and her legs wound more tightly around him to hold him where he was, buried in her.

When she cried out there was a whirring of wings in the trees overhead as the wood-pigeons took fright. Jimmy didn’t hear her or the birds; his eyes were closed and his lips were drawn back from his teeth as if he were snarling. At last, after he came, he collapsed on top of her, his ginger fox’s head resting at an exhausted angle on her shoulder. Lucy lay back, staring up at the sky laced with twigs and fresh, optimistic leaves. Her face was burning and her throat felt dry and sore.

After a while Jimmy lifted himself so he could look at her. There were leaves in her hair, and long bramble scratches, beaded in places with droplets of blood, on her calves and thighs. He sat up, pulled his clothes together, then found a handkerchief in the pocket of his trousers and gently dabbed at the blood. When he looked at her face he saw that she was silently crying. He touched the handkerchief to her cheek but she rolled on to her side, drawing her knees up to her chest.

‘Don’t cry,’ he said.

‘I’m crying because I’m angry. It isn’t fair. Why is it like this? We could be happy, couldn’t we, if you weren’t married. If you were mine –’

He interrupted her. ‘I don’t want you saying anything to Star. Do you hear me? I don’t want anything like the other evening. You are not to run after her and tell her any of this.’

Something in his voice or the set of his mouth reminded Lucy of the different, frightening Jimmy she had tried to run away from that night. It came to her that the other Jimmy had always been there, only she had not looked at him hard enough. Her voice when she answered him came out somewhere between a sob and a whine.

‘I wish I was her. I wish I was your wife.’

To her relief, his hard face softened. ‘No, you don’t,’ he said. ‘You don’t really wish that.’ He stroked her hair, and picked the leaves out of it.

‘What’s going to happen?’ Lucy whispered.

‘What will happen is what you know must happen.’

While he waited for her to assimilate this, Jimmy listened as patiently as he could to the repetitive calls of the wood-pigeons.

Lucy shivered, and then plucked at the blades of grass a few inches from her eyes.

‘You don’t want our baby. You don’t want me.’ Her expression changed from disbelief to desolation.

Jimmy summoned up his patience again.

‘Lucy, darling, the truth is that I can’t have you. I am married already.’

He helped her to sit up, and then shook out her sweater and pulled it over her head. When she was dressed he took her face between his hands and gazed into it for a moment, and then he kissed her on the lips.

‘There,’ he said. ‘That tells you what I feel for you, and what you mean to me. But I thought you understood how things have to be between us. Hmm?’

He tilted her chin up with the tip of his finger. Even now her distraught look was half irritating, half enticing. He murmured, ‘Don’t worry. We’ll see each other through this. I promise you. And in time you’ll look back on it, and on me, and wonder why you ever thought you wanted me.’

Lucy rubbed her face with the cuff of her sweater.

‘I do love you,’ she mumbled. ‘Only I’m so confused.’

‘I know you are. Of course you are. Now, do want me to find out what you should do? Where you should go?’

‘No,’ Lucy said. Her chin had lost its wobble. ‘I will do that, if I have to. If that’s what I must do.’

‘If you need money …’

‘Okay.’

She picked up her black tights from the tangle of his jacket, and held the jacket out to him. He watched her roll the black Lycra up over the scratched white skin of her legs. She put on her shoes and then stood up, towering over him until he scrambled to his feet. He tried to lean close and kiss her, but she turned away from him. They began to walk back along the path, the way they had come.

Jimmy was not angry any more; he was relieved and also sad, for the end of their affair but much more for the extinguishing of the baby. Only it was not a baby, not yet; he had assured Lucy of that, whatever might be taught to the contrary. This much he told himself too, but he knew he would have to make his own amends for the severance of its thread of life. Only he would not let Lucy know this, any more than he had let her know one of his true thoughts. Nor would Lucy ever come close to guessing it.

They reached the car park.

Lucy was pale, remote, entirely occupied with her perception of herself at the centre of some broad, tragic canvas. Jimmy walked with her in silence to Darcy’s Range Rover, and with the ritual glance around them to make sure that no one was watching they let their lips just touch. Then Lucy stepped into the driver’s seat, and checked her reflection in the driver’s mirror before putting on her Ray-Bans. Jimmy stood back, lifting one arm in a salute as she drove away. Once she was out of sight he crossed to his own car and drove gratefully back to work.

When Lucy reached Wilton Cathy was parking the Renault in its place at the side of the house.

‘Where on earth have you been in Dad’s car?’ she gasped.

‘I had to go somewhere. To see someone.’

Lucy took off her dark glasses. At once her face crumpled and she began to cry properly, without regard for how she looked or sounded.

Cathy ran to her and put her arms around her.

‘You have to tell me what’s been happening. Please, Lucy?’

‘Oh, Cath. I need to tell you. I really do need to.’

With their arms around each other, both of them in tears now, they went into the house and up the stairs to Lucy’s bedroom.

After they had held hands sitting on Lucy’s bed, and Lucy had poured out everything between sobs and half-smoked cigarettes, the twins sat back to look at one another. They felt their childhood closeness, somewhat lapsed of late, renewing itself.

‘Why didn’t you tell me about him, about this, before now?’ Cathy demanded.

‘I don’t know. I suppose I felt partly ashamed of myself, but I did love him. I do love him.’ Lucy blew her nose, ran her fingers through her knotted fringe and reached for another French cigarette.

‘I think I’d guessed, without knowing I’d guessed, you know?’

‘I should have told you. Only I was afraid of what you would think of me.’

‘How could you have been afraid of that? You must have known what I would think. That if he made you happy that was fine, and if he hurt you or made you sad then I would want to kill him.’

‘He did make me happy.’

‘So I won’t kill him. What do you want to happen?’

Lucy stared down at her hands, at her fingertips with bitten nails and raw skin. She was thinking. Then at last she said,

‘I suppose I wanted to have the baby, for him to leave Star and marry me, for us to be together. A family.’

Cathy waited, but her expression betrayed her scepticism.

‘And I suppose what I realized, in the wood today, is that it won’t happen. He won’t leave her for me. He never even thought about it. He won’t stand by me. Isn’t that what they say?’ Then Lucy laughed, sniffing back her tears at the same time. ‘Dumb of me to think he would, really.’

They heard a car coming too fast up the drive and a peppering of thrown gravel as it braked in front of the house.

‘Barney’s back,’ Cathy remarked.

Lucy looked up. There were more tears in her eyes. ‘I’m so lucky I’ve got you, and Barney. Now Dad’s ill, and Jimmy’s not here where I thought he was. We can stick together, the three of us, can’t we?’

‘You know we can.’

They sat on the bed, with cigarette smoke curling around their heads, knowing they were allies.

‘Luce, what do you want us to do about this?’

With the thought of Cathy and Barney to support her, Lucy’s will reasserted itself. She said with new determination, ‘I don’t want Dad or Hannah to know anything about it. I don’t want Star to, either.’

‘That will suit Jimmy,’ Cathy said.

There was even defiance now. ‘It suits me, too. And I don’t want his help. If it has to be done, we’ll do it on our own.’

And then, as the tide of her momentary courage ebbed again, Lucy curled on her bed as she had done beside Jimmy in the clearing, and gave herself up to tears once more. Cathy sat beside her, patting her shoulder and rubbing the curve of her spine, waiting for the storm to blow itself out.

They heard running feet on the stairs, and Cathy leaned to look out of the window. A moment later she saw Barney jump into his Golf and drive away again.

‘I wonder where Barney’s going in such a hurry, all smartly dressed?’ she mused.

At last Lucy sat up, swollen-eyed. Cathy lit yet another cigarette and gave it to her. ‘Thanks.’ Lucy blew out a long, meditative plume of smoke. The first glimmer of considerations beyond her own broke through to her. ‘Why are you home? I thought you had to be at the Pond today or get thrown off the course.’

‘Yeah, I did. But Marcelle was ill, so her class was cancelled. She came in, but she had to go home with a migraine. She looked pretty awful. Not like her, really. I’ve never known Marcelle call in sick before.’

Lucy was sitting smoking with her chin resting on her drawn-up knees. She had no views on Marcelle to contribute.

Michael walked down Southgate, the best shopping street in Grafton. He had left his car in the multistorey park, in a remote corner of the top level, although in these last few minutes of the shopping day there were plenty of spaces lower down. Most of the shops along the street were already closing. The jeweller’s steel shutters had been drawn down, and also those of the expensive wine merchant two doors further along.

He had already seen that La Couture was still open; the curly gold lettering on the navy-blue shop front was lit by two brass spotlights. There was a single dress in the bow window, a black velvet sheath with a nimbus of gold-coloured gauze around the bodice. He could imagine Hannah wearing it, with her creamy shoulders set off to perfection by the golden halo.

Michael paused at the door of the shop. There was a sign hanging against the glass that announced ‘Open’ in the same curly script as the shop front. Then he looked beyond the sign into the honey-coloured interior. He saw Hannah sitting at a spindly desk towards the back of the shop. She was reading, with a pair of tortoiseshell-rimmed glasses slipping down her nose. A bell tinkled somewhere over Michael’s head as he pushed the door open.

Hannah looked up. Her hair was piled up on top of her head and she was dressed in a navy-blue suit with big gold buttons down the front. The clothes and her spectacles gave her a businesslike appearance that was new to Michael, and completely enticing.

‘I’m afraid I haven’t come to buy a cocktail dress,’ he said.

Hannah took off her glasses and chewed meditatively on one of the arms.

‘No? You don’t want a little number for the golf club dance? The parents’ party? I’m sure I could find something to suit you.’

‘Ah, I don’t think so. But do you mind my calling by like this?’

Hannah folded her glasses and placed them on the desk in front of her. She put her stocklist aside and stood up. He thought she was coming to him and he clumsily lifted his arms, but she slipped past in the confined space and went to the door instead.

‘Do I mind? No, I don’t mind. I looked up and there you were at the door like the beginning of a fantasy. I was about to lock up. It’s gone six, isn’t it?’

She flipped over the sign, turned a key, and locked them inside the shop. Then she went to a row of switches, and the lights illuminating the window and the shop front blinked out. They were left cocooned in the glowing interior.

Michael gazed around him. He had never been inside La Couture before. It was like stepping into a box of elaborate, expensive fondant sweets. Everything was pale and soft and scented, and every surface was padded and buttoned and puffed. There were thick carpets and curtains and drapes in cream and honey beige and dull gold, and in the middle of the floor was a plump satin-covered chaise longue heaped with glossy magazines. The clothes hung around the walls, spotlit at intervals like pieces of modern art. They were all velvets and silks and clouds of net; there was nothing here that acknowledged the world of work, of lives lived before six o’clock in the evening.

Michael felt the exotic scent and softness of the place rising around him like a tide. The remoteness from reality seemed female and mysterious and drowningly erotic, and he saw Hannah in the midst of it, pale-skinned and luscious, the very embodiment of these sensations. He remembered the pool house, the creaking of the swing seat and the contrasting musty scents of canvas and creosote and dried grass.

‘Are we safe here?’ he whispered to her.

Hannah nodded, smiling, her mouth incurving and offering him dimples and tiny cushiony recesses.

‘Yes. No one will come in now.’

‘But they can see in, from out there.’ He gestured to the wet cobbled reality of Southgate, Grafton, beyond the curved glass of the window.

‘Not through here, they can’t.’

Hannah took his hand to guide him. He followed her at right angles beneath an arch. There were more curtains here, striped cream and honey, and thick gold tassels to fasten them. Michael saw a wall of mirrors, and the fabric over their heads gathered like an Ottoman tent. Hannah turned off more lights, and then let a curtain fall behind them so they were enclosed in the secret space with only their own reflections to observe them.

‘Fitting rooms,’ she whispered. ‘Women need privacy to be pinned and tucked and stitched into their own fantasies.’

Michael stood behind her as they faced the mirrors. For a long moment they just looked at one another.

Then he put his hands up to cover her breasts. There was a deep V at the front of her dark vendeuse’s jacket. Watching himself as he did it, and with Hannah’s reflected wide eyes on his face, Michael undid the gold buttons one by one. Underneath there was black lace, and her white powdered skin, and the cleft between her breasts. Little rims of flesh were pushed up above the waistband of her tight skirt, which had been hidden from him by the peplum of her jacket. He loved the ampleness of her, the promise of softer folds and curves to be released from the constriction of her clothes. He found the zip at her waist, and Hannah dreamily arched her back against him.

‘Have you done this in here before?’ he said into the curve of her neck. ‘In front of these mirrors?’

‘No. But I have imagined how it would be.’

‘Like this?’

‘No,’ Hannah confessed. ‘Not nearly as good as this.’

She turned to face him, and over her bare shoulder he watched his hands slipping over her hips and her bottom, then greedily drawing her against him. He ducked his head to kiss her, closing out the mirror images, so there were only the two of them left in the world.

Hannah undid his buttons.

‘Striped shirt, gold cufflinks,’ she murmured. ‘The very picture of a professional man.’

‘Half-dressed? In the changing room of a ladies’ frock shop?’

They were laughing as they stripped off the last obstacles of each other’s clothes. Michael let the shreds of her black lace drop on the floor behind him. And then, as suddenly as it had begun, the laughter stopped.

He put his hands on her waist and Hannah raised herself on tiptoe to bring her mouth level with his. He looked down at the roundness of her belly and the heavy swell of her hips, and at her small hand closed around him and the red marks in her flesh left by her constricting clothes, and he was filled with tenderness and longing for her.

‘Lie down,’ he told her.

Obediently she knelt and then lay back, and he knelt beside her and lifted her arms and then her legs so that she made a star for him against the pale carpet. He leaned over her and let his mouth travel slowly, exploring the map of her skin, until her head fell back and she lifted her hips and he found the soft centre of her.

‘Yes,’ he heard her whisper. ‘Yes, oh please, yes.’

Their striped and mirrored tent became a miraculous kingdom.

As he entered her, Hannah’s legs wound around his waist and they looked sideways to see their reflections, light and dark, locked together. Their faces appeared suffused, abstracted, unlike themselves and yet like each other, conspirators in pleasure. It was a long time since Michael had known pleasure like it. He felt that he was drowning in it, a death he reached out for, welcoming as it came.

Afterwards, when they lay wrapped in each other, Michael whispered to her, ‘I don’t want this moment ever to end. I don’t ever want to have to leave you.’

Her fingers touched his spine. He felt the caress of her fingers with their painted nails so intensely that he could see them, and he lost the distinction between felt and seen, mirrored and plain.

Hannah’s face had all the taut lines rubbed out of it. She lay gazing at Michael, half smiling, blurred by her own hair.

‘You make me happy,’ she said. ‘I didn’t expect you to.’

‘I can’t ever remember feeling so happy. I love you.’

She touched his mouth, warning him. ‘Be careful.’

‘I can’t be careful. It’s too late to be careful. I love you, Hannah.’

Warmth spread through her, under her skin, unpinning her. It’s too late to be careful.

‘I know,’ Hannah said simply, with her mouth against his.