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 22

‘I could have done this,’ Janice said in her comfortable, insistent way. ‘I should have done. It’s our tennis court that’s being christened, after all.’

She stood with her hands on her hips, head on one side, contemplating the two garden tables and the company of unmatched chairs arranged on the Ransomes’ terrace. Janice wore candy-striped Bermuda shorts, familiar from other summers, although this May Sunday evening was their first appearance this year. Their re-emergence seemed to mark the official opening of the summer season. The cuffs of the shorts came just above Janice’s plump, pretty knees.

Vicky shook out a William Morris print tablecloth and smoothed it over the sun-warmed wooden slats of one of the tables.

‘No, I wanted to do it. It’s time I did. We haven’t had anyone over for ages.’

She couldn’t even remember the last time she and Gordon had properly entertained the Grafton couples. It must have been before Helen was born. Long ago.

‘Will this be all right, do you think?’ she asked. ‘If we sit at this one, and put the children over there?’

‘Of course it will,’ Janice said. She was laying knives and forks on the flowered cloth, polishing each one with a tea towel before placing it. ‘There. Two, four, six, eight, and two more if the Cleggs make it. And six children, eight if the Cleggs ditto. Perfect.’

Janice wished she could bring everything else to order as easily as she marshalled the cutlery. She was troubled by the suspicion that too many familiar features of their lives were changing, and by a more obscure and generalized fear that she could not place, and found all the more alarming for that. She kept her anxiety under control by her attention to the glasses and plates.

Star had been wandering in the garden. It had been a hot day for early May, and the first cool of the early evening was welcome. The Ransomes’ garden was not as big as the Frosts’ but she had always liked it better. There were damp, wild corners here under the shade of tall trees, and even the flower beds nearer to the house were tangled with an unkempt mass of foliage that was the opposite of Andrew’s manicured borders.

She came back across the grass towards the house, with her hands full of lilies of the valley and scilla. She was thinking as she skirted the children’s noisy game of rounders that the three women on the terrace made a pleasing picture. Marcelle was sitting in a deck-chair, with one arm crooked behind her head. Janice and Vicky in their pale summery clothes moved calmly between the tables, and the sun slanted on the glasses they were laying out, making them look as if they had been poured full of light. The scents of grass and leaf mould mingled with barbecue charcoal, smoke and warmed earth.

Star held out her flowers to show Vicky. ‘I picked these for the table, is that all right?’

‘They’re lovely. Here, put them in these.’ Vicky held out two of the glasses and Star arranged the flowers in them, admiring the freshness of the tiny white and azure bells.

‘I was saying that I should have done dinner for everyone,’ Janice explained. ‘But really this is much better, thanks to Vicky. Otherwise it would have been tennis all evening as well as afternoon.’

‘It’s nice here,’ Star reassured them, as she was meant to do.

It had been a tradition amongst the five Grafton families to come together for a barbecue party in the first spell of fine weather of every summer. It was one of the cycle of parties and gatherings that made the landmarks in their year.

This year there was a new development. Andrew had recently installed an all-weather tennis court in his garden, and he had invited the men to play an inaugural afternoon match. And so the women had gathered in the Ransomes’ garden with the children to make companionable preparations for the evening, as they had done often enough before.

Only this evening everything was not quite the same.

The absence of the Cleggs was part of the difference. Darcy was out of hospital and installed at Wilton again, but the couples had not seen much of him. They agreed amongst themselves that he did not look fully recovered, although Hannah was determinedly cheerful. He needed rest, she insisted, that was all. She had promised that they would try to come to the barbecue, if Darcy was not too tired, but there was no question of his playing tennis. The others felt the chill of that. A month ago Darcy would have pitched himself into any match, energized by the competition and his own determination to win.

And yet, it was not only Darcy’s illness that had altered the pattern. Marcelle sat in her deck-chair with her head turned slightly to one side, seemingly a part of the little group but also separate from it.

Janice leaned over her once and asked, ‘Are you okay?’

‘Yes,’ Marcelle said immediately. ‘It’s just so nice, sitting here watching the children. But there must be something I can do to help. Vicky, what is there?’

‘Nothing. Sit right where you are.’

Marcelle did not know whether they exchanged concerned glances behind her head. She remembered how the women had murmured their anxiety for Vicky, and the concern that Janice and the others sometimes privately voiced for Star when Jimmy behaved badly, but she felt too withdrawn even to speculate about what they might think of her. Marcelle let these reflections slip away out of her head almost as soon as they had entered it. It was enough to do to hold herself quietly, only half listening and half watching.

Vicky was smiling, busy with her arrangements for the evening, and Star was intent on arranging her flowers, her dark face momentarily lightened by her pleasure in them. Janice strolled across the lawn to the children, her hands in the pockets of her shorts.

The women had drawn closer. No one had mentioned the change in the air, but each of them was aware of it. There was the thin vibration of watchfulness and anxiety between them, but also the low, steady note of friendship.

Marcelle’s eyes fixed on her children again.

Jonathan was almost the same age as William Frost, but he was physically much smaller. There seemed to be an anxiety about him, a tentativeness that made him poke nervously at the rounders ball instead of hitting out when it was pitched to him. When her turn came, Daisy was bolder. She swung out with the bat and the ball soared in a triumphant arc and dropped into the green waves of ivy and honeysuckle at the far end of the garden.

‘Daisy, Daisy’s lost the ball, we’ll never find it in there …’

‘It’s not fair …’

The children’s voices rose in complaint and then faded again as Janice found another ball and threw it to them.

‘They should be here soon,’ Vicky said, meaning the husbands.

But it was another half-hour before they did arrive, in their tennis shoes, wet-haired from their swim in the Frosts’ pool. They came out into the garden with beer cans in their hands, full of the reports of their game, breaking the net that the women had woven between them.

Jimmy and Gordon had beaten Andrew and Michael, but the match had been close enough for them to feel satisfied. Gordon put his hand on Vicky’s shoulder.

‘Are we very late? I’m sorry. They took us to five sets, by some fluke, and it was eight six in the last one. Do you want me to start barbecuing?’

‘Well done, Daddy,’ Mary Ransome said. She wound her arm around his leg and he rested his other hand on the top of her head, feeling the fine hair warmed by the sun. The three of them stood for a moment, connected by his hands, until Vicky moved easily away.

‘Do the children’s sausages first,’ she ordered him.

‘And what about me?’ Jimmy demanded of Mary. ‘Don’t I get a well done?’

He swung her up by her arms so that she shrieked with delighted fear, and then he settled her on his shoulders and cantered across the grass.

‘You’re a horse, well done, horse,’ Mary shouted.

Marcelle sat in her deck-chair. She had watched Michael as he came out of the French doors, the last of the group, and saw how he glanced at her, lifted one hand in a wave and then went to where Star and Andrew and Janice were standing, laughing at something one of them said as he wiped the froth of beer from his top lip. Marcelle did not even know what she had been hoping for from him, but the denial of it cut her so she had to blink and the hard edges of the terrace in front of her grew threateningly blurred.

Jimmy lifted Mary over his head and set her on the ground again. His shoulders and arms ached pleasurably from the hours of tennis, and the glow of the win was still with him. He stood in front of Marcelle’s deck-chair, his shadow falling across her. He noticed that she was wearing big earrings that looked too large for her face.

‘Hey, Mar, you haven’t got a drink.’

‘I haven’t, have I? I’ll have a glass of wine, whatever there is.’

He brought her one, and one for himself, and then sat down on the flagstones at her feet, resting his back against her legs.

There were wood-pigeons in the tall trees. The thought of Lucy came into Jimmy’s head, followed by a surge of relief that Darcy was not here. It was more than a week since he had heard from Lucy, and he was beginning to be afraid that she might tell her father. Jimmy had resolved on each successive morning that he would telephone her and determine when the abortion would take place, but each day he had found some reason for not making the call.

Marcelle felt the warmth of Jimmy’s shoulder. It seemed to spread through her, and she realized that she was cold. She touched the collar of his shirt with the tips of her fingers, intrigued in spite of her detachment by the solidity of him, the prickle of rufous hairs at the nape of his neck and the scent of beer and swimming pool that emanated from him. By contrast Michael had become insubstantial, slipping away from her, so that on the rare occasions when they did touch it surprised them both and they drew back, unsure of themselves. Neither of them spoke of this new degree of separation between them.

Marcelle found that she wanted to press her face against Jimmy’s neck. She wanted to cry and have him stroke her hair and murmur comfort to her. She was appalled by her own weakness.

‘Your fingers are cold, Mar,’ Jimmy said, turning to face her. She withdrew her hand at once but he seized it and began to rub it between his own.

‘Talk to me,’ Marcelle said, to cover her distress.

‘What shall I tell you?’

She saw that Jimmy was pleased with himself and the evening.

Tell me you can see me, that I’m not invisible, that I still exist, Marcelle cried silently. Aloud she said, ‘Oh, whatever you like. Some gossip.’

He pretended to think. He did not like the idea of gossip now; it had become uncomfortable to him. The throaty calls of the wood-pigeons seemed to grow louder.

‘Hmm. Gossip. Do you know, I don’t think there is any? Dull bunch, aren’t we?’

Michael sat astride one of the garden chairs, watching Gordon flipping sausages on the barbecue. As soon as he’d arrived in the Ransomes’ street Michael had been hoping for the sight of one of the Cleggs’ cars, and he had carried his disappointment inside with him in the vain hope that Hannah might somehow have arrived with one of the other couples, or even have sent some innocent-sounding message via Janice for him to hear. But there was no sign of her, and no word either, and now the evening stretched pointlessly ahead of him. He fiddled with the tongs, getting in Gordon’s way and not knowing what else to do.

At length the children were called to the table. The parents had another drink while Gordon turned their steaks on to the heat. The sun moved behind the trees and the dimensions of the garden seemed to change, expanding beyond the indistinct margins of green and grey.

The four couples were already sitting down to eat when the doorbell rang. Gordon went to answer it while Vicky hastily relaid the two places she had removed.

A moment later Darcy and Hannah emerged into the garden with Gordon at Darcy’s elbow on the other side from Hannah. The talk around the table stopped expectantly.

At first Michael could take in nothing but Hannah. She was wearing a vivid yellow linen shirt, and white trousers that stopped short of her bare ankles. The evening light seemed to brighten again and settle around her head. With this focusing came sharpened recollections, how taut and silky her skin had felt, the entire scent and taste of her, the wonderful secrecy of the curtained ottoman tent within her exotic shop and the infinity of mirrored reflections. He realized that he had half risen from his place, and made himself sit down again, awkwardly bumping the table as he did so. Darcy was no more than a dark shape beside Hannah.

There was a confused babble of greetings, but the only voices were the women’s. Jimmy sat unnaturally silent in his place, and Andrew was staring at Darcy.

Darcy detached himself from Hannah and Gordon and seemed to launch himself at the table. He loomed suddenly at the end of it, fists on the back of Gordon’s chair, surveying them. There was an instant’s quiet, even the children at their table falling silent, and then Darcy demanded,

‘What is this? Don’t I get a drink?’

‘Darcy –’ Hannah began.

He didn’t turn his head. ‘I can have a fucking glass of wine, can’t I?’

Hannah lifted one buttercup-yellow shoulder. She sat down between Andrew and Jimmy without looking at Darcy again. It was Vicky who stood up, walked to the other end of the table and poured the drink for him. Everyone stared at the glass, as if the Californian Cabernet had taken on some significance of its own. Darcy sat in Gordon’s place, pushing away Gordon’s plate with his forearm. He drank half of the wine and then set his glass down with exaggerated care. It was obvious that it wasn’t his first drink of the day.

‘So who won the big match?’ he asked. ‘Jim?’

Jimmy was rigid with the anticipation of a different question. The certainty that Lucy must have talked to her father began to break up, permitting different, more hopeful interpretations of Darcy’s mood. He grinned at Darcy.

‘Ah, Gordon and me. Piece of cake.’

Jimmy heard the little musical jingle of Marcelle’s improbable earrings as he dropped one arm around her shoulders, and he absent-mindedly squeezed her as if she were the trophy.

Andrew protested that it had been no piece of cake. Conversation resumed in relieved eddies. Darcy had been drinking, that was all.

Michael’s eyes guardedly met Hannah’s across the table. He saw now that she was carefully made up but the artifice did not quite hide some shadow in her face. She seemed less pretty than usual. He found this juxtaposition of public Hannah with the other Hannah he had discovered both touching and disconcerting. He made himself look away, to Darcy.

Darcy was loudly talking, tilting his glass, complaining that he had not been able to play tennis. Michael was belatedly shocked by what he saw.

There was a flush over Darcy’s cheeks and nose, but the skin seemed loosened on the bone. There was a bluish tinge to his lips that bled out into the lined flesh around his mouth. He was still handsome, even imposing, but it was as if the good looks had all along been only pasted on to some crumbling substructure.

Michael’s professional mind began to tick. He recalled the name of the Cleggs’ GP, and resolved that he must have a quiet word with his colleague, Darcy’s cardiac specialist.

Then, fully-formed, the thought delivered itself to him. What happens if he dies? What happens to Hannah? Hannah …

Once it had come to him, it seemed absurd that he had not asked himself the question before. But Darcy had always been a solid, massive presence amongst the couples and in Grafton itself. How much more invincible must he seem to Hannah? Yet he had suffered one heart attack in front of them, and he was plainly ill.

A new set of reckonings took root and multiplied as Michael looked across the table again, to Hannah. He shivered, torn between apprehension and desire for her. Hannah was talking, making Andrew laugh at something she said, and her hands moved fluently between them.

The children dispersed indoors. Gordon brought candles in holders to the table and the flames steadied within their glass chimneys. At once the darkness concentrated beyond the margin of the circle. Tiny moths were drawn to the light, and spiralled upwards in the treacherous heat.

The talk within the fragile dome of light fragmented, growing thin, as if they were each aware of other, unspoken and more significant conversations.

Darcy barely touched his food, but he drank steadily. He could not let the smallest talk begin at the other end of the table without leaning forward, his bulk weighty against the table, scowling and demanding, ‘What? What the hell are you talking about?’

It was as if he wanted to demonstrate his supremacy here, at least, in the company of friends. The couples were kindly to him, making space for him as his interruptions and pronouncements grew louder, more insistent and less rational, until conversation almost foundered. Darcy’s words began to slur and he frowned, as if affronted to find his tongue beyond his control.

‘What do you know?’ he pursued some argument in Andrew’s direction. ‘What the … what the fuck do you know?’ His face contorted with anger and frustration, but the reason for the disagreement had already escaped him. His helplessness was apparent to all of them.

Hannah would not look at him.

Gordon left everyone’s glasses empty. But then, with a small cunning smile, Darcy bent down and reached out for an uncorked bottle that was left half-hidden in the shadow beside the barbecue. It clearly cost him a physical effort to bend and twist and there was an instant, with the bottle in his grasp, when it seemed that he would not be able to heave himself upright again. But Darcy did sit up, and he placed the full bottle beside his glass with a hiss of triumph.

‘Anyone join me?’ he called.

His fist tightened around the neck of the bottle. He lifted it, brandished it over his glass, and then tilted. Misjudging the distances, he clipped the rim of the glass with the bottle. The wine gushed but the glass was already falling. Darcy tried to catch at it, but his confused hands fumbled and the bottle fell too, a dark plume of wine making a twisted arc in the candlelight. A crimson jet sprayed across the cloth and the wine glass rolled over the edge of the table to smash on the paving.

There was a confusion of movement. The bottle was caught, hands reached to mop up the rivulets of wine.

Michael said, ‘Darcy? Are you all right?’

Darcy did not answer. His head was bowed, so that he seemed to be staring down at the shattered glass. Very slowly, painfully, he lifted one arm and then the other until his elbows rested on the table. Then he covered his face with his hands.

Very quietly he said, ‘Oh God.’

In the candlelight the faces except Hannah’s were like pale moons, reflecting their separate concerns and their diffidence and embarrassment.

Michael had begun to stand, but Vicky was quicker. She reached Darcy’s side before he lifted his head from his hands.

‘Yes, I’m all right,’ Darcy said.

He seemed suddenly completely sober, surprised to see them staring at him.

Vicky touched his shoulder. ‘Come inside. I’ll make you a cup of coffee. It’s getting cold out here.’

‘Yes. Yes, it is.’ Darcy went with her, heavy-footed but as obedient as a child.

Gordon watched them go. He was impressed by the calm directness of Vicky’s intervention, and he felt a quiver of renewed love for her as she led Darcy out of sight into the house. And at the same time, as if some subconscious recognition swam towards the surface of his mind, a question formed in his head.

Janice began to collect the plates and Gordon bent to pick up the broken pieces of glass. The others pushed back their chairs, feeling the release of tension. A buzz of concern centred on Hannah.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said to Gordon. ‘We shouldn’t have come. Only he wanted to, and he isn’t stoppable when he wants something.’ She spread her hands helplessly.

‘How is he?’ Michael asked. The others were quiet, deferring to his superior medical insights.

Hannah hesitated. ‘Well … perhaps if I could talk to you about it, some time …’

Their eyes met again, mutely signalling to each other, I must see you, I need you.

Gordon was prompt. ‘If you want to have a quick chat, if you think Mike can help, why don’t you go in there, in my study?’

There were French windows, open on the garden, on the other side of the house from the kitchen. Hannah nodded.

‘I’d be grateful. That’s if you don’t mind, Michael? I’m sorry the evening’s ruined.’

Marcelle held herself still, listening to the rushing sound her blood made in her ears.

With the yellow linen shirt brushing against his sleeve, Michael walked with Hannah into the house.

Inside, Gordon’s study was dim. He closed one half of the doors behind them, leaving the other ajar, wondering how closely Marcelle was watching. Hannah faced him, stepping backwards a little in the thick blue dusk. He saw the cushiony oval of her half-open mouth. Without saying anything Michael took hold of her. There were seams in her tight clothes that constricted the flesh beneath and made him think of the swollen hemispheres of summer fruit. He breathed in the scent of her hair and her skin as he kissed her, his fingers at the neck of her yellow shirt. Michael’s head revolved with dizzy calculations about the desk and the open windows, and the compound scents of the Frosts’ pool house came back to confuse him.

‘Not now,’ Hannah whispered. ‘We can’t now.’

Michael felt the tiny twist of her smile as she kissed him in return. Hannah liked her own power, and it gave him a pleasurable, abject sense of his own helplessness to be made her victim.

‘Yes, we can. No one will come in.’

She was already half lying on Gordon’s desk. Michael could just make out a neat pile of household bills, a dish of paper clips.

‘No. Marcelle’s outside. Darcy’s somewhere, you saw how he was.’

Irritation blurred Michael’s desire. He knew that Hannah would not give way, and he wondered why he was trying to coerce her.

‘When, then?’

‘Come to the shop on Tuesday evening. At closing time.’

She had planned it already, and his desire for her renewed itself. There was no question that he would not go; he could not even remember what he was supposed to be doing on Tuesday evening.

‘Yes. I’ll come. You know that I will, I suppose?’

Hannah slipped away from underneath him. Outside a light clicked on, illuminating the garden. They could see each other clearly, and the arrangement of Gordon’s paperwork on his desk, and they both heard the clink of plates and the scrape of chairs as the tables were cleared. Michael walked slowly around the desk and sat down in the chair. He swivelled it through an arc, and pressed his fingers together at the point of his chin.

‘What about Darcy?’ he asked reluctantly.

Hannah sat down in another chair. They were both aware of this parody in their positions of the doctor and his patient. Michael thought that anyone looking in from the garden would see them sitting in exactly the blameless way that they ought.

‘You can see how he is tonight. I don’t know if he feels afraid, or weakened, and can’t bear to show it even to me. There are all these’ – Hannah’s hands chopped at the air – ‘side issues of the booze, and his aggression, and the determination to go on doing business as if nothing has happened, and he makes them so dense that I can’t see through them to the reality. But I think he is afraid. I can feel it seeping out of him when he’s asleep. He sleeps badly, and his muscles quiver like a dog’s.’

‘Do you think there is anything else he is worrying about? Beyond the fact that he suffered a heart attack a month ago?’

After a moment Hannah said, ‘No. What could there be?’

‘I imagine that it is difficult for a powerful individual like Darcy to admit the truth of his own physical vulnerability. His reaction might take a dozen different forms. There might well be other manifestations yet, before he comes properly to terms with it. And Darcy is a complicated man.’

Michael offered her the reassurance, although he thought that Darcy’s brand of bullish confidence was in fact rather straightforward.

Hannah nodded. She said, as if it was important to make the point, ‘I still love him. And I think I hate him as well.’

‘I don’t think that is particularly uncommon,’ Michael said softly. ‘Do you? Sitting where we are now?’

He felt as if his ears were tuned to previously inaudible frequencies. He could hear the high-pitched humming of sexual conspiracy minutely disturbing the air between the couples and radiating beyond them, through his own and Hannah’s and other people’s marriages outwards into infinity.

Darcy might die, he thought again. All the possibilities of confusion, of responsibilities that he might have to bear nudged at him. I still love him, Hannah had said. She had her own weakness, he understood, in spite of her apparent power. He looked at her now, as if she were really a patient in the chair beside his desk, and felt himself caught between pity and desire.

‘No,’ Hannah agreed at length. ‘I suppose it is quite ordinary.’ Then she smiled at him, her face warming and lightening. ‘I’m glad you are here. I’m glad of this, between us.’

‘That’s good,’ Michael said, feeling his own fraudulence.

Star and the Frosts had gone inside with Vicky and Gordon, and Marcelle and Jimmy were left alone in the garden. Jimmy had secured the half-spilled wine bottle, and he refilled their glasses. Marcelle drank in the vague hope that alcohol might anaesthetize her. She wished that she was not here, but could not think of anywhere else to be. The lights on the house wall shone too brightly overhead; she closed her eyes for a second and a painful red glare burned behind her eyelids. There was no light showing at the window of Gordon’s study.

‘Let’s walk down the garden,’ Jimmy proposed, breaking the silence. He offered her his arm in an old-fashioned gesture.

The garden was dark and soothing beyond the glare of the terrace lights. The rank scent of earth and crushed grass grew stronger, released by their silent feet. It made Jimmy think of the last time he had seen Lucy, and the brambled clearing in the wood. He swallowed his anxiety slightly more easily. If Darcy knew anything, it would have come out tonight.

Jimmy and Marcelle sat down together on a wooden seat at the end of the garden, hidden from the house by the rounded bulwark of a silver-frosted ilex. Marcelle wrapped her arms around herself. She felt as if she were slipping out of sight, down some treacherous slope into a mire of isolation. She wondered, as she identified the sensation, if this were no more than weakness and whether some act of self-discipline might set her upright again in the landscape of ordinary life. Jimmy stuck up in the middle of the slope like a healthy tree that might break her sliding descent.

‘Do you think I’m a fool?’ she asked abruptly.

He answered at once, ‘No. Not any kind of fool. What makes you ask?’

Marcelle’s head fell back. Jimmy’s arm rested along the seat behind her; it was a luxury to lie against him. She had felt the same earlier, when she had touched his collar and noticed the prickle of reddish hair at the nape of his neck. The confirmation of touch, she thought absently. The comfort of it. There had been nothing with Michael, neither touch nor comfort, for a long time. Her loneliness focused sharply, burning like the pinpoint of sun through a magnifying glass. And then, with a sudden flare of anger she thought, Why should I be denied it, why only me? When everyone else takes what they want …

Without any warning, she was overtaken by a jolt of longing, a need for love that was stronger and seemed more affirmative than anything she had felt for a long time.

She had almost blurted out her fears about Michael and Hannah, but now her queasy anxiety contracted, diminished by the urgency of the new feeling. She remembered clearly what had happened on Christmas Eve, the secret she had shared with Jimmy and then wished she could take back into her own custody. Jimmy was not the right recipient for her confidences, if there were anything to confide. But Jimmy felt like her friend. More than a friend, as he had offered to be on dozens of occasions in the past. Jimmy was what she needed.

‘What makes you ask?’ Jimmy repeated softly. She could tell he was smiling.

Marcelle was thinking that they were like dominoes standing in a tidy row. Then Nina had been set down carelessly at the end of the line and she had toppled over, and the couples had begun falling on top of each other in obedient sequence all along the line, and now the momentum had reached her and it was her turn to fall too. The thought made her want to laugh, and then to her surprise she realized that she was laughing, out loud, resting her head against Jimmy’s arm and looking up at the stars in the dark sky.

‘Nothing. Nothing,’ she managed to say.

‘I’m glad it’s funny, whatever it is,’ Jimmy said.

Marcelle stretched her arms and legs, cat-like, recognizing the cords of tension that had kept her hunched into herself for weeks.

The need for love and attention had not evaporated with her laughter. It had become a quite specific itch.

Slowly she turned her head to him. There was the outline of his small-nosed, tidy profile. Like a pleased dog, she thought. Or some nocturnal animal, tilt-eared and poised. When she lifted her hand to the nape of his neck the hairs felt very soft under her fingers. She stroked, tiny encouraging movements in the reddish fur. There was a thick, viscid heat between her thighs.

Jimmy’s top lip lifted, showing his teeth. He looked full at her. Marcelle was singingly glad of the darkness. She felt beautiful and queenly in it.

Then Jimmy leaned forward an inch and kissed her. It was a light, brotherly little kiss that fell at the corner of her dry mouth. Marcelle waited, imagining that she could trace the course of her blood through the cells and ventricles of her body. Then, in the flush of warmth, she tilted her head so that their lips touched again, and opened her mouth and kissed Jimmy in return. She had kissed him before, in the hazy glow of evenings when the couples drank and laughed and danced in each other’s houses, but there had never been an invitation in it until now. Tonight she made the invitation explicit with her tongue and her fingers knotting in his hair, drawing him towards her.

Jimmy’s arm was awkwardly trapped behind Marcelle’s shoulders. He noticed that her skin was hot; there was a faint, scorched scent coming off it as if she had a fever.

Jimmy liked Marcelle, because she was part of the spread of other men’s wives that was there for him to admire, but also because she was herself. He had imagined, quite pleasurably and not infrequently, what kind of lover she might be. Nor had he ever dismissed, in their amiable skirmishes, the interesting possibility that one day one of them might lead to his discovering whether or not his predictions were accur-ate. But now, with Marcelle’s tongue in his mouth and the pulse in her cheek ticking wildly against his, his only feeling was of dismay. He shifted on the bench, resisting the need to clear his throat.

Marcelle’s other hand came to rest, palm up, on his thigh. He grabbed hold of it and used the business of kissing her knuckles as an excuse to detach his mouth from hers.

He could only think of Lucy, Lucy white-limbed in the clearing in the wood and all the other times they had been together, but without any flicker of retrospective passion that might have come to his rescue now. He could only think of her as pregnant, a confusing double identification of her as both his innocent victim and the malevolent repository of a brood of accusations that might swarm out of her at any time, to home in on himself. He was smitten simultaneously with longing for her, and with the desire to escape from Grafton as quickly as possible before Darcy came for him. The relief he had felt at dinner was eaten up by certainty that it was only a matter of time before he was found out. Darcy had acted freakishly enough tonight to make Jimmy afraid of what there might be to come.

And now there was the painful irrelevance of Marcelle.

Jimmy wondered, with a tangential flicker of curiosity, if had it not been for Lucy he might have taken up Marcelle’s offer. A brief image entered his head of the two of them on this bench, with Marcelle straddled barelegged across him, her face tipped back in a spasm of pleasure. He dismissed the thought, with the possibility that he might return to it later, as he kissed the knuckle of Marcelle’s little finger again.

‘You don’t really want this, do you?’ he chuckled.

Marcelle hesitated. He felt the shiver of confusion in her.

‘This? Oh yes, I do.’

Who was he to tell her what she might or might not want?

There had been perhaps a minute for Marcelle when everything had seemed sweet and intense and also perfectly simple. She was desirable and desired and Jimmy would love her out here in the rustling garden and later, without knowing exactly how, she was sure she would close up this secret and carry it safely back into the couples’ evening and all the other evenings like an amulet.

Only now, she understood too late, she had opened herself up, like some saleswoman opening a case, and Jimmy had declined her.

‘Mar’ – his voice was cajoling, cracked with their mutual embarrassment – ‘you know I love you, but –’

Marcelle coldly interrupted him. ‘But you don’t want to fuck me. Have I got that right?’

Anger foamed up inside her. She would not try to laugh, to make it easy for him, so they could dismiss this as another episode in the saga of Jimmy’s flirtations. He had asked her often enough. What did he say, with his foxy little grin?

When? When Mike’s at the hospital?

He had allowed her – no, made her – think of him as her resort, for when she needed him. But it had been only to flatter himself, and nothing to do with her or her feelings and least of all to do with the unsavoury package of her needs and desires.

Marcelle had never felt such anger.

Mercifully the anger burned up her humiliation. She drew away her hand and wondered whether she should slap him with it. Her fingers itched, and she could already hear the way the sharp, satisfying crack would be taken up and amplified by the black air.

‘Of course I do,’ he mumbled. ‘Only here, in the garden, with Star and Mike in the house …’

‘Don’t lie about it,’ Marcelle said. ‘Don’t you know how disgusting it makes you seem?’

The desire to hit out left her. She stood up instead, and then ran back over the grass to the house.

‘Marcelle, wait a minute,’ Jimmy called after her.

Marcelle could see Michael. He was standing in the kitchen, his back to the window, talking to Gordon and Andrew. She put her fingertips up to her face and pushed the folds of burning skin back, taut, to open her eyes and drag her mouth into a smile. She stepped on to the terrace, into the glare of the lights. She was afraid of the feelings that would come later, but for the moment she had the armour of her clean, bright anger. She opened the door and walked into the kitchen, where all of them could see her.

Jimmy sat on the bench. He took out a cigarette and lit it, but he smoked only half before he threw it away from him with a quick gesture of distaste. Then he stood up and followed Marcelle to the house, stepping in his turn into the lights.

Vicky’s bedroom was the same, but Darcy’s memories of it seemed to belong to a much more distant past than the reality of a few months. He sat tentatively on the end of the bed in a ruck of cushions and what looked like a crocheted shawl with long, tangled fringes.

He was thinking back to the other times when he had come here, of Vicky standing in the thin, chilly sunshine of wintry mornings to unbutton the loose layers of her maternal clothes. He had entirely submerged himself, forgetting everything, in the blue-veined folds of her exposed body. He could recall the precise choreography of their passion as clearly as he could see the lace-bordered cushions, the intimate terrain of the white bedcover, but it was like studying a series of photographs of their encounters. He was cut off from that sweet series of mornings by the intervention of chaotic time as effectively as if by a steel door. He was possessed by the knowledge that he could not go back, or obliterate what had intervened, or even hope to make a partial repair. An overwhelming sense of loss weighed him down, and a nostalgia for his life as it had been then. His heart contracted and expanded in his chest, forcing a muddy and sluggish current around his body.

It was only when he was drunk that a proper perspective opened to him. Sober, Darcy knew, it was possible to feign a kind of busy blindness, to deceive himself as well as he deceived the others. But the day’s drinking had cleared his sight and he wondered if he should make some move before it was too late.

Still he went on sitting at the end of Vicky’s bed. He was tired, and he had no idea where to run to.

Vicky put a slopped cup of black coffee into his hand. ‘There. Drink it.’

He bent his head. As the warmth fogged his face some other recollection stirred, the pale eye of a cup held for him, the elusive warmth of his mother.

Vicky sat down beside him. ‘How do you feel?’

Darcy considered the possible responses. ‘Drunk,’ he offered. ‘Sorry about the evening.’

‘The evening doesn’t matter in the least. But you shouldn’t drink so much.’

Simple, he thought. Good, wholesome advice. Too late.

‘Hannah …’

‘No.’ Very gently. ‘It’s Vicky.’

‘I know that. I’m not so far gone. Vicky, Vicky. I remember. I was going to say, Hannah tells me the same thing. And the doctors. Ha. Bad for the heart. Only I keep thinking it might have been easier to go the first time. Saved a … saved what? I don’t know.’ Darcy shrugged. ‘Saved a lot of formalities.’

Vicky took the empty cup away from him. He felt the mattress absorbing the shift of her weight and he was reminded again, with the same detachment, of the far-off mornings they had spent on this bed. Vicky put her arms around him. She was murmuring to him, cajoling.

‘You mustn’t say that. You mustn’t even think it. You’ve been ill, but you’re getting better. You have to let yourself get better, wait for it to happen naturally, not think it’s something you can fix like you’re able to fix everything else.’

Her broad hands rubbed his shoulders, her fingers cupped his jaw, holding the weight of his head for him. The associations stirred in him again.

‘Was able to.’

Slowly Darcy let his head drop forward until it rested against her and Vicky held him, her words becoming indecipherable croonings as she cradled him in her arms.

‘I’m tired,’ Darcy said. It was true. He could feel sleep thickening at the back of his eyes.

‘I know.’

Then he told her, ‘I’m afraid, as well.’

To Vicky he sounded like a child acknowledging his fears at the end of the day.

‘I know,’ she said again. ‘It’s all right.’

‘No. It isn’t. It can’t be.’

‘Darcy, don’t go to sleep now. Hannah will want to take you home.’

Later, after the couples had gone, Gordon went upstairs. Vicky was already in bed, sitting up in her nightdress. He perched on the edge beside her so she had to put down what she was reading.

‘What did you make of Darcy?’ he asked.

‘Beyond the obvious, you mean? He told me that he was afraid.’

‘Of what?’

‘I don’t know. The same things that we are all afraid of, I suppose.’

His wife’s smooth face and clear eyes seemed to Gordon to deflect his questions. He could have asked her if she had had an affair with Darcy, but he did not think Vicky would divulge her secrets. He understood that perhaps he should not try to make her, and that more probably he did not want to know the truth.

He stood, and she calmly picked up the magazine she had laid aside. He was thinking of Nina as he undressed, in her cool house in the close. He wondered if it would be his fate to think of her with longing every night from now until he was an old man.

The next morning Darcy was downstairs early, before anyone else in the house was awake. He had not been able to sleep and so went to the kitchen and made tea. He sat at the table with his cup, staring out at the garden and the view beyond it.

A car came up the driveway from the lane. It was quiet enough in the house for Darcy to hear the driver leave the car and cross the expanse of gravel to the front door. A moment later the bell rang. Darcy pulled his bathrobe tighter around him and went to answer it.

There was a man standing under the umbrella of wisteria that shielded the front door. Darcy knew him quite well. He was an accountant called Geoffrey Lawson. The last time they had met was when both men had played in a charity golf tournament.

‘Geoffrey? You’re very early. We’re not scheduled to meet today, are we?’

‘No. But may I come in?’

The man followed Darcy through the quiet house to the kitchen. He stood in the doorway holding his briefcase, stiff in his dark suit.

‘What can I offer you? Coffee? Or breakfast, perhaps?’ Darcy asked. He glanced pointedly at the kitchen clock. It was not yet eight a.m.

‘Nothing, thank you. Darcy, I’ll come straight to the point. I had a call from Vincent Templeman yesterday evening.’

Darcy stood without moving. He could only wait for what would come next.

The man said, ‘Could we go through into your office?’

‘Of course,’ Darcy said.

In his briefcase, Geoffrey Lawson had the books of his client Vincent Templeman’s private company. Templeman was a property magnate, now retired to Jersey. Darcy had managed his private funds and assets for almost five years. Lawson laid the books on Darcy’s desk.

‘When Vincent called me last night, he told me that there are one or two aspects of these figures’ – he tapped the folders under his hand – ‘that are troubling him. I promised him that I would drive down here first thing to see you.’

There was a moment’s silence. From upstairs, Darcy heard one of the children, Laura or Freddie, running the length of the landing. The au pair girl was calling them to get dressed. Soon Hannah would be downstairs.

‘May I see the company cheque books?’ Geoffrey Lawson asked.

Darcy went to the safe, took them out and handed them to the accountant.

‘And may I sit here?’ Lawson indicated Darcy’s desk chair.

‘Of course,’ Darcy said again. Now that this was happening, after the weeks of convincing himself that it could not, he felt only a merciful detachment. He watched the man set out his papers, his neat silver pen and his calculator in a leather folder.

‘I will go and put some clothes on,’ Darcy said. He left the man, head bent over the accounts at his own desk, like some threatening doppelgänger.

Hannah was out of bed. When he went into their bedroom Darcy heard her singing ‘Eleanor Rigby’ in the shower. He went into his own bathroom and shaved, and then dressed himself in a dark suit, better cut than the accountant’s, and a silk tie, as if it were one of his days for going to London. Then he went slowly back down the stairs. He could hear Mandy talking to Laura and Freddie over their breakfast in the kitchen. The man in his office looked up at Darcy when he came in, then returned to his work.

A little while later he replaced the cap on his silver pen. His fingers rested on the calculator keypad while he spoke. His voice was perfectly level.

‘Darcy, it appears that five unaccounted cheques have been drawn on the Templeman company account. Three are in your own name, the others are to Kleinwort Benson. The sum in question amounts to something over nine hundred thousand pounds. Is there any explanation you would like me to relay to my client?’

‘Not immediately,’ Darcy said. The explanations would come. He would have to begin the counterplay, even though he was so tired that he wondered if he could even lift the telephone.

‘I shall have to call Templeman. You do understand that, don’t you?’

Darcy inclined his head. He watched as Lawson gathered up his papers and the cheque books and locked them in his briefcase. He escorted the man to the front door and watched him as he climbed into his car and drove away.

Hannah came down the stairs. ‘Who was that?’

‘Geoff Lawson. Came to pick up some papers.’

Hannah clicked her tongue as she kissed his cheek. He could smell her scent. It was one he liked, but he couldn’t remember the name of it.

‘How do you feel? I didn’t know you were going to town today.’

‘I’m not,’ Darcy said vaguely, turning away from the door. ‘I forgot, when I got dressed.’

He went back into his office, and sat down at the desk.

Hannah put her head round the door to say goodbye before she left for the shop. He heard Mandy leaving to drive the two children to nursery and school, and then Cathy scrambling downstairs and running out to the Renault. It was another sunny morning, he noticed, as the light warmed and brightened the silent room.

Darcy sat at his desk, and waited. Somewhere in the house either Lucy or Hannah’s cleaner was playing loud music. The cheerful sound intensified his sense of isolation. He gazed at the black file drawers ranged against the opposite wall, but he did not move to look into them.

The fingers of sunlight crept across the wall. Darcy drank the cup of coffee that the au pair brought him at lunchtime, but he ate nothing. Once his hand reached out to the telephone, but he did not pick up the handset. He thought of how Vicky had held him the night before, and her assurance that everything was all right. He would have liked to speak to her, but he remembered that she was at her clinic. His business line rang only two or three times and he sat motionless in his chair, letting the answering machine click and hum in response.

In the afternoon the house came to life again. Laura and Freddie were at home; he saw Laura run past his window and across the striped breadth of lawn. The sun had moved round the house; his desk was in shadow. Hannah came back too, although she did not look in to see him.

Then, at gone six o’clock, when he was stiff and chilled from sitting for so long in the same position, he heard another car coming up from the lane. The front doorbell rang again. Darcy waited, his senses strained to anticipate what would come next.

He heard the sound of voices, and the swift click of Hannah’s high heels. And then she knocked at his door.

‘Darcy? There are some people here to see you.’

There were three of them. They wore dark blazers, unemphatic striped ties and cheap watches. When the door had closed on Hannah one of the men introduced himself and his colleagues. They were from the Fraud Squad.

The senior policeman explained that they came with a search warrant, under the special procedure provisions of section 9, Police and Criminal Evidence Act. Still Darcy sat at his desk, where he had been waiting all day for this. He turned his head and saw Laura running back over the mown grass to Mandy.

And then, because there was nothing else he could do, he gave the three policemen access to his safe and file cabinets. They stayed in his office for three-quarters of an hour. When they left, they took with them most of the books and ledgers and files relating to Darcy’s business.

When they had gone, with their evidence, in the grey Ford Scorpio that had brought them, Darcy walked into the sunlit drawing room. There were bowls of fat blood-red peonies on the tables on either side of the chimneypiece. Hannah and the twins were standing in the middle of the room, watching.

‘Who were they?’ Hannah said. She came to him and put her hands on his arms, but the twins stood together, defending each other. ‘Darcy, what’s happening?’

‘They were policemen,’ Darcy said.

He saw the identical stiffening of shock and fear in his daughters’ beautiful faces and the way that the colour changed in his wife’s, leaving two dull blotches of crimson high on her cheekbones.

Darcy said, ‘Don’t worry, it’s all right. There’s nothing to worry about.’ His voice sounded brittle, with the bass resonance gone. He turned away from the eyes of the three of them.

‘I have to go and ring my solicitor,’ he said, in his different voice.