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 23

‘Mrs Clegg for you,’ the medical secretary’s nasal voice announced to Michael in his poky office at the hospital on Tuesday morning.

‘Put her through,’ Michael said. The long day ahead with its cargo of patients was like some sentence that must be served before the evening, and Hannah, could be delivered to him.

‘Michael?’

He smiled into the receiver. ‘You only just caught me. I’m about to do rounds.’

‘Something’s happened. To Darcy.’

‘His heart?’

The complex of possibilities that he had already imagined delivered themselves to him again. Even as he envisaged them, Michael realized that his own heart leapt with a momentary wild hope.

‘No. He’s all right. Nothing like that.’

‘Then what?’

‘Michael, it’s very weird. The police came yesterday evening. They had a special warrant. They took away Darcy’s files and books, everything to do with the business.’

‘What does Darcy say? Is he there?’

‘Yes. He says it’s a mistake. He was on to his solicitor for an hour last night after the police left, and the man has just arrived. They’re shut in Darcy’s office. It means I can’t see you tonight, although I want to so much. I have to be here if Darcy needs me, don’t I?’

‘Of course you do. Don’t worry. It must be some kind of mistake, if Darcy says it is.’

But even as he reassured her Michael was already sifting the grains of likelihood in his mind, weighing the possibility that Darcy might in truth be guilty of something. There had often seemed to be too much money at Wilton, an over-heated largesse spilling out of Darcy in a way that Michael suddenly and perfectly clearly recognized to be ominous.

‘I hope you are right,’ Hannah whispered.

A vibration of doubt and anxiety in her voice was plainly to be heard, the rich confidence faltering. Michael understood that she was not convinced by Darcy’s protests either.

‘Listen,’ he said. He had to grasp at a thread of hope because the promise of their evening had been snatched away.

‘Next week I had planned to go to a medical conference. Two nights away, Wednesday and Thursday. Marcelle knows I’m going. I’m supposed to be presenting a paper, but David Keene, who is one of my colleagues and the co-author, came to ask me this morning if he could read it instead. There isn’t the funding for us both to go. If you could manage to be away too, we could go somewhere together instead. Could we?’

Since Darcy had further hemmed them in with uncertainties it seemed vital to have this much to hold on to.

‘I don’t know.’ Hannah was distracted. He couldn’t blame her, but it was imperative that she should agree to what a minute ago had only been the vaguest possibility.

‘Please,’ Michael said.

‘I … I could do it, if I said I was going on a buying trip for the shop. If this is resolved by then …’

‘It will be. That’s what we’ll do.’ Michael could see a posse of white coats in the corridor outside. He was already late for rounds. ‘I have to go. Hannah, I love you.’

He had said it before, in the cushiony sanctuary of her shop. He wasn’t even certain that he meant it, but in the shabby and pressured reality of the hospital morning it seemed better, even nobler, to feel this threatening and disorientating love rather than to feel nothing.

‘Do you?’ Hannah doubted him too, but he could not stay to tell her any more.

‘I’ll call you tomorrow,’ Michael promised.

On the evening of the same day, Cathy and Lucy Clegg sat in the upstairs room at Wilton that Hannah had designated as the older children’s sitting room. The room had a pretty view of the garden and the fields that dipped towards Grafton, but it was underdecorated compared with the rest of the house. The curtains were no more than striped ticking hung on plain wooden poles, and the walls were bare except for a series of tired Guns n’ Roses posters that were beginning to peel away from their Blu-Tak anchorages. There were two sofas, on either side of the empty fireplace, both of them heaped with magazines and cracked paperbacks, and a folding snooker table belonging to Barney rested against one wall. In the past, the room had been a place of refuge for the twins and Barney from Hannah and the upholstered extravagance of the rest of the house.

Lucy was sitting on one of the sofas with her hands folded behind her head. Cathy flicked at the pages of a book. They had been sitting in silence for what seemed a very long time.

Then Lucy said, ‘I hate this waiting. It’s horrible being suspended, not knowing how to go forwards or back. I don’t know what to do, and now there’s this with Daddy too. What’s going to happen?’

Cathy watched her as she stood up and went to the window. They were waiting for Barney to arrive, because Darcy had said that he wanted to speak to the three of them together. The house was full of a queasy silence within which the confusion of the day was barely contained.

‘I don’t know,’ Cathy answered. ‘I don’t understand what’s going on. But I do know one thing. You can’t wait much longer. You have to decide what to do.’

Lucy did not turn from the window.

‘He’s not going to do anything, is he?’ she whispered. ‘I thought he might. I thought he might come after all, when he had had time to realize what it meant. Me, and his baby. And then how would it have been, if I had already had an abortion?’

‘Jimmy isn’t going to come for you,’ Cathy said. ‘How could he? Think of the damage it would cause.’

They had trodden this circuit before.

‘He hasn’t even called me.’

‘I know that. Lucy, do you want to go ahead and have the baby by yourself?’

Lucy crossed her hands over her chest and massaged her arms. Even up until today, although she understood the reality perfectly well, she had let herself hope that Jimmy might contradict everything she had learned about him and come to her rescue. That he had not was not surprising, but it was the tiny hope itself that had become precious. She longed to hold on to it.

But now there were other reckonings to be made.

Darcy had always been the secure and generous rock in his children’s lives. Yet here he was, not only ill, betraying a frailty that she had never imagined before, but there were also other more disturbing intimations of his fallibility. Lucy could only dimly conceive what the visits from policemen and lawyers and the urgent telephonings, and Hannah’s half-concealed tears might really mean, but she felt that some entire structure of security and insulation, never so much as questioned before, was being knocked out from underneath her. Lucy began to be afraid that not only might her father not be able to look after her for ever, however shockingly the world might assault her, but that he might without warning have ceased to be her protector and be instead in need of her protection.

The thought made her feel exposed and precarious, but also suddenly and surprisingly older. She pressed her fist into her stomach, as if she wanted to reach inside herself.

‘No,’ Lucy said. ‘I don’t want to go ahead and have the baby by myself.’

‘Then there’s only one possibility, isn’t there?’ Cathy lifted her blonde head. ‘Listen. I think Barney’s here.’

They heard Barney’s voice, and the rumble of their father’s. Then the door opened and Barney appeared with Darcy behind him. Darcy was wearing a shapeless sweater. His shoulders hunched forward.

He’s old, Lucy realized with a surge of panic stronger than anything she had felt when she witnessed his heart attack. He’s an old man.

Darcy waited while his children sat down. Barney glanced at his sisters, his face telling them that he didn’t understand this mysterious summons or the air of foreboding in the room any more than they did.

Darcy wouldn’t sit himself. He began to walk, traversing the floor and back again, his big head half turned away from them. As he walked, he told them that they had better hear what would soon be public knowledge.

‘I am accused of theft,’ he said. ‘My client Vincent Templeman and his accountant claim that I have by means of forgery and false accounting misappropriated certain funds belonging to Templeman’s private company for my own use.’

Darcy turned, completing one negotiation of the room and beginning another. It seemed that he was intent on fitting his words to the number of paces. His children sat waiting, with their eyes fixed on him. Lucy had opened her mouth in protest but Barney took her hand and held it, silencing her.

‘The police were informed, which is why they came here last night. They have taken away various sets of books, without which I can’t continue to do business. My solicitor advises me that there will be some charges to answer. I don’t know yet exactly what will happen. But I think there will be … publicity, difficulties before everything is set right again. Because the business is based in this house it won’t only be difficult for me, but for you and Hannah too. I wanted to tell you.’

Darcy reached the window yet again. This time he stopped and stood as Lucy had done, with his back to them.

‘I wanted to tell you myself, and to say I am sorry.’

There was a silence as his words began to make threatening sense out of random impressions.

Lucy sat upright. ‘They can’t accuse you!’ she shouted. ‘They can’t just say you’ve done something you haven’t. This is a free country not … not some police state.’

Barney still held her hand. She realized that he was hurting her by trying to hold her down, and she snatched it away.

‘Dad?’

Darcy turned again, and each of them could see from the sluggishness of the movement the weight he was carrying.

‘I know you didn’t do it,’ Barney said, ‘but what’s the basis of the accusation?’

Darcy smiled, the upward lift of the muscles not quite aligning and his upper teeth showing so he looked momentarily, grotesquely, as if he had suffered a stroke.

He’s being brave, Lucy thought. He’s being brave because he has to be.

‘I haven’t done anything dishonest. But you know who I am. I’m not always conventional. I have been a maverick. I wouldn’t be where I am now, would I, if I had never broken a rule?’

He shrugged his shoulders with a gesture of dismissal. Out of bravado he was trying to be the father they had always known, and the threadbare attempt made the difference in him all the more disturbing. For a few seconds none of them could think of anything to say, so that the fragile construction of Darcy’s assurances might not be dislodged. The three children sat, looking nowhere, trying to assimilate what he had told them and to piece together their own interpretation out of the windy spaces between his words.

‘Then that’s all right,’ Cathy said at last. She stood up and went to Darcy, and he put his arms gratefully around her, stroking her hair as she leaned her head against him.

‘That’s my girl,’ he said.

Lucy and Barney followed her lead. They wrapped their arms around their father, and their combined strength made his discovered frailty more apparent to each of them.

‘Don’t worry,’ Lucy told him.

‘I’m not worried. Only for what it might mean for the three of you, and Hannah, and Laura and Freddie. If I hadn’t been ill, I could have put everything back in order. No trouble. A matter of days, that was all it was.’

They did not want to ask him any more. Their conjectures were enough.

‘There we are then,’ Darcy said, with his terrible, hollow, confident bluster. ‘Now you know everything there is to know. Thanks for being such good kids. I’d better go back downstairs to your mother.’

This vagueness was telling. ‘To Hannah, that is,’ Darcy corrected himself.

Hannah was in the drawing room. The space filled with warm, diffused light and the planes and angles of polished surfaces and billows of soft fabrics seemed newly precious to him, and also troubling because of his fear.

‘Did you tell them? Did they understand?’ Hannah asked.

‘Yes, of course they did. Why not?’ Darcy responded in the cheerful, positive manner that it seemed important for him to adopt. He went to the silver tray and picked up a bottle from the shining rank of them. Alcohol would blunt the sharp edge of his anxiety, he knew that, although it would not dispel the dark mass itself. ‘Let’s have a drink, shall we? Celebrate getting to the end of today?’

Upstairs Lucy had begun to cry. She cried in thick sobs that bubbled out of her slackened mouth. Barney looked at her, his good-humoured face creased in concern.

‘He’ll put it right. It doesn’t sound too healthy now, but I’m sure he will.’

‘It isn’t only that.’ She took a ragged breath, staring at him with streaming eyes. Lucy was ugly when she cried. She shouted at him, ‘I’m pregnant. I don’t know what to do. I want to tell Dad about it.’

Barney turned to Cathy, who nodded sombrely.

‘Who?’ Barney asked.

Lucy told him brutally, ‘Jimmy Rose.’

While his sisters watched him, Barney assimilated this.

‘Then you can’t tell him.’ Barney was rarely angry, but they saw his anger kindling now. ‘You can’t bloody well dump that on him as well. You can see how he is, can’t you?’

Lucy’s cheeks wobbled with her sobbing. Her outrage at this turn that her life was taking emerged in her cry, ‘What about me?’

‘I’m sorry about you.’

‘You sound it.’

‘Barney,’ Cathy warned him. ‘Look at her.’

Barney sighed. His big hands floundered in the air around his sisters’ shoulders.

‘I am sorry, Luce. I am. Only you can’t run down to Dad, at this minute of all times, and tell him his best friend’s got you pregnant. What were you doing with Jimmy Rose anyway? He’s old enough to be your father himself. How can you have let it happen?’

‘The pill. I forget it sometimes. And I thought I loved him.’

‘Jimmy Rose?’ Barney let out a long, derisive breath. And then he nodded, understanding her even though it was unwillingly. ‘Yeah. Okay. I can imagine how. Poor Lucy, but you can’t tell Dad about it. What you have done is tell me instead. And what I ought to do right now is go round to see Jimmy Rose and kick his arse up his windpipe.’

‘Put his balls in the Magimix?’ Cathy murmured.

‘Yeah. And his dick on a skewer. The little rat.’

There was a small sound from Lucy that wasn’t a sob or a sniff. She had let out an unexpected squirt of laughter.

‘That’s better,’ Barney said. He sat down next to her, holding her and cradling her head against him. He murmured with his mouth close to her ear, persuading her that there was a chink in her misery, ‘So we can sort this out ourselves?’

Lucy slowly nodded her head. ‘I want to have an abortion. And get away from Grafton.’

‘Sure thing.’ Barney promised her.

Nina opened her front door and saw Barney standing on the step.

‘Are you working?’ he asked her.

‘Yes.’

‘Can I come in anyway?’

She held open the door. Nina was not surprised to see him; Barney had taken to calling on her without telephoning first, as if he felt that it might be too easy for her to turn him down on the telephone. What was surprising to her was that she was not displeased by his arrival in the middle of her working day.

Barney followed her down to the kitchen. He gestured for her permission, then went to the refrigerator and took out a can of the beer she had begun to keep there for him. Nina also liked this familiarity and freedom he took with her tidy arrangements. It made her empty house seem populated. Barney pulled at the metal ring and over the hiss of gas before he drank asked her his invariable question.

‘How’s it going?’

Instead of irritating her this made her feel much younger, as if she were part of some conspiracy in which work and responsibility were inconveniences to be negotiated before the real business of pleasure could continue.

Nina laughed as she told him, ‘Well, thank you. I’ve done lots of work. Been to London about a new commission. And you?’

Barney drank some more of his beer. ‘Not so good.’

Nina recomposed her face, ready for a recital of catastrophes that might have befallen Barney’s car or his studies.

‘Tell me.’

He stood up from the corner of the table where he had been leaning and came across the kitchen to her. He was awkward with surplus energy and also graceful, and she knew before he reached her that she wanted to touch him. When he took hold of her she let herself fit neatly against him.

‘Come upstairs?’ he asked, when he had kissed her.

‘We can’t always go up to bed.’

‘Why not?’

‘Um. I can’t think of any specific reason, now you ask me. Just that one shouldn’t always give way to one’s urges. As a matter of principle. Self-discipline.’

‘Crap,’ Barney said.

In the end, she led him upstairs to her room.

In bed he was awkward and graceful in the same way as when he sloped across her kitchen or worked in her square of garden. He acknowledged his over-eagerness and occasional clumsiness and when he smiled at himself, with their faces close together, his eyes seemed to flatten and slide apart so she imagined that she was looking into the mask of some friendly, healthy, silent animal. Then if she tried to guide him with a small movement of her thighs or wrists, his face would sharpen with the intensity of his concentration, like an animal again, and she would be quick to reassure him with another movement in order that he should not misunderstand her intention and be hurt.

The second or third time he came into her bed Nina asked him, ‘How many girls have you made love to?’

‘Half a dozen. Six,’ he corrected himself in case this should sound dismissive. ‘Including you.’

‘The same as me. Lovers, that is,’ Nina said.

This limited history of hers diminished the distance between them. But unlike Gordon, Barney did not ask her to talk about Richard or any of the other features of her invisible and therefore irrelevant past. Barney’s appetites were for the present. After Gordon, and the rawness from him that was left under her skin, Barney’s puppyish immediacy seemed natural, and inevitable, and welcome to her.

With the palms of her hands Nina traced the solid muscles of his back while Barney made love to her. She began by dreamily staring up at the ceiling, beyond him, but his insistence drew her in and made her an equal participant as it had done each of the times before. This, as well as other things about him, surprised and pleased her.

‘You said before that something was the matter,’ Nina said afterwards. ‘Was that why you came to see me?’

‘Nope.’ He moved his finger along the prominent ridge of her collar bone and grinned at her, flat-eyed, like the satisfied animal. ‘But there is something. Can I tell you?’

‘Of course you can.’

He told her first about Lucy and Jimmy Rose. Nina listened, and although Barney’s account of Lucy’s difficulty was brief and bloodless it propelled her back fifteen years into her own late teens.

In her first year away from home Nina had fallen in love for the first time, with a painter of difficult and uncommercial abstracts who also taught at her art school. Within three months she was pregnant, and within as many weeks the painter had faded out of her orbit and resubmerged himself in his life with a wife and two small children.

After she had listened to what Barney had to tell her, Nina offered her own story in response.

‘His name was Dennis O’Malley,’ she confessed. ‘He was not that unlike Jimmy. I haven’t thought about him for years.’

‘What did you do?’

‘Had an abortion.’

The thought of Lucy Clegg sharpened the memories of it for her. Nina found that she could recall exactly the metal-framed furniture in the office where an unsympathetic doctor had interviewed her, the street in a London suburb where she had walked up and down under the plane trees for an hour before deciding finally to enter the clinic, and the nauseous complex of feelings, fear and loneliness and anger, with the alarming longing for the baby itself that was all the more disturbing because it must be pinched down and denied. When it was over she had felt empty and stricken.

Those brief weeks carrying the flutter of fear had been the only pregnancy Nina had achieved. When Gordon Ransome had admired her flat and unmarked belly, she had not told him quite the whole truth. Nor had she kept the promise to herself, made when she re-emerged into the suburban street, that she would never again entangle herself with a married man.

She thought of Star, and the cool and dignified way she moved through the Grafton parties with her face turned away from Jimmy’s antics, and the offer of friendship she had extended to Nina. Nina wondered how many other Lucys there were, and whether Star knew about them, and, with a kind of internal shrinking as if to deflect a blow, she also thought of Vicky Ransome. Nina shifted, turning away from Barney on to her back, so she could look up again at the impassive ceiling.

‘Lucy is going to have an abortion too,’ Barney said.

‘As long as that is what she wants. And Jimmy?’

‘Jimmy nothing.’

‘Yes, I see.’

Barney moved closer to her. She could feel the tiny currents of displaced air between them in the places where their naked skin did not quite touch.

Barney said, ‘There is an added complication. To do with Darcy. Maybe I shouldn’t tell you this, but I can’t ask for your help without letting you know why. Can I?’

Nina sighed. ‘I don’t know. I think you imagine I’m much wiser than I really am. The truth is that I’m full of confusion and misgiving.’

‘Please. I need to tell you.’

‘Then do.’

She listened again, this time to Barney’s much longer account of the police arriving at Wilton, and the suppressed concern in the house, and Darcy’s blustering, clay-footed explanation of the events to his children. Nina was filled with sympathy for Hannah, and for Darcy, because she liked him, although she did not believe that he would be entirely incapable of a criminal act.

And then an image came into Nina’s head, as pin-sharp as if it were projected on to the blank plaster above her. She saw the Grafton couples dancing, two by two, as she had first seen them at the Frosts’ Hallowe’en, only the smiles they wore were the Hallowe’en masks, and behind the masks there were the hollowed faces made unfamiliar by the shadows of secrets and fallibility. She saw herself amongst them, first with Gordon and then, in response to some unseen dance-master, changing her partner for Barney. Around her the couples changed their partners too, and danced on in their broken gavotte with their faces hidden behind the grinning masks.

‘Are you asleep?’ Barney whispered.

She had kept very still, but she had heard every word he said. He had not asked her what she thought, nor even suggested that his father was anything but innocent. Nina liked him the more for it. She thought that Darcy would be generously supported by his family.

Nina turned her head. ‘No, I’m not asleep. Poor Darcy. I’m sorry.’

She kissed the corners of the boy’s mouth, and held him. Now she did feel the span of the years separating them.

‘Do you see what it means?’ Barney was intent on his explanation. ‘Lucy wants to tell Darcy what’s happened to her, so he can make it better. That’s what he does, always has done for her. Only she mustn’t, now. He shouldn’t have to worry about anything else.’

‘I think your instinct is right,’ Nina said.

‘It’s just that Lucy isn’t particularly … stable, or reliable. She needs someone who knows what to do, to help her get through it. So I’m asking you. Is that trespassing too much, on this?’

The small movement he made took in their proximity, and the tiny world they made together between the curled ends of Nina’s bed.

‘No. It isn’t trespassing. I could give Lucy the number of my gynaecologist. He’s in Harley Street, although there are plenty of other places and different agencies that Lucy could go to. But I know that Mr Walsh will understand what she needs and how it should be handled. I should think that with his help Lucy could be in and out of a clinic within a couple of days.’

‘How much will it cost?’

The memories of that distant, suburban clinic and the doctors behind their metal desks and her own long-ago desolation gathered around Nina again. She was not sure whether to interfere in Lucy Clegg’s life would be damaging, but since she had come this far she resolved that she might as well go on.

She said very carefully, ‘You can tell Lucy that I can easily afford to help with that too. Perhaps she can pay me back one day.’

Barney touched her cheek, and then her mouth, with the tips of his fingers. She could see the relief in his eyes. Nina was pleased to be able to offer him what he and Lucy needed, but she knew she was also doing it for Star’s sake. If Star could be shielded from at least this much, then it would be something.

‘And if Lucy would like somewhere in London to stay, before or afterwards, just for a day or so, we could always ask Patrick.’

‘Thank you,’ Barney said humbly.

‘Not at all,’ Nina murmured. He answered by kissing her, and she felt the neat contraction of her own pleasure in response to him.

*

It was raining. Thick ropes of rain twisted out of the grey layers of sky overhead, bouncing up and breaking into steely threads as they hit the streaming pavements. Hannah and Michael ran, hand in hand, with the wetness plastering their hair to their skulls and cheeks and soaking in black patches across their shoulders to glue their clothes to their skin. They ran and dodged the rain-stalled London traffic until Hannah was gasping for breath and stumbling in her ruined shoes.

‘I can’t run any more.’

‘It’s not far,’ Michael called to her.

There were lines of taxis in the streets but not one of them offered the comfort of a yellow light. He pulled her on behind him, across the murky rivers swirling in the gutters, until they turned a corner and saw the windows of their hotel. A minute later, with the doorman offering them the pointless protection of his umbrella, they reached the revolving door and were delivered by its rotation into the mirrored warmth of the hotel lobby.

‘Safe,’ Michael proclaimed. He was exhilarated by the dash through the rain. He took Hannah’s soaking arm and steered her into the lift, and they were swept upwards in the company of their own dripping but flatteringly tinted reflections. Down the corridor to the door of their room they left a trail of watery steps.

‘Let me dry you,’ Michael said. He came out of the bathroom with an armful of towels, and he unbuttoned Hannah’s clothes, bundled them away from her and knelt down to unstrap her shoes from her feet. He swathed the towels around her and patted her face dry, seeing how the black stuff with which she made up her eyes had touchingly blotted over the soft, pouchy skin beneath the lashes. The rain clattered against the windows, isolating them in the hotel bedroom with its glazed chintzes and empty cupboards. Michael thought the moment was both sexy and melancholy, but when he turned his mind to try to pin down either his excitement or sadness they both slid away from him, leaving him standing awkwardly in his wet clothes, with Hannah in her towels held against him.

‘I’m cold,’ she said.

‘Have a bath and get into bed. I’ll order us some tea.’

It was five in the afternoon. They had already spent one night together, under the grey eye of the television perched at the foot of the bed. Michael had tried to submerge himself in Hannah, until his insistence had made her ask him, only half-jokingly, ‘What are you trying to prove, Mister Wickham? This isn’t a competition.’

‘I just want you,’ he had answered. ‘I can’t help it. Do you want it to be different?’

Only he had not been able quite to submerge himself, however intimately he connected himself to the folds and fissures of Hannah’s body, and so he was troubled by a sense of separation from her. She was still herself, and desirable to him, but they were not quite easy with each other. Michael found that he was thinking about Marcelle and his children, that their faces and voices inserted themselves between Hannah and himself when he had wanted to dismiss them for these few hours.

Today Michael had followed Hannah to some designers’ showrooms. He had sat apart, uncomfortable in a visitor’s chair, while house models paraded clothes in front of Hannah. He had liked to see this other, businesslike side of her, but she shrugged at his questions.

‘It’s just a matter of picking what I like, what I think I can sell. I don’t even need to go to the showrooms, really. I made the appointments to give myself an alibi for being here with you.’

He had been flattered by that, but the sense of distance between them had not been dispelled. They ate an indifferent lunch in a restaurant he had chosen from The Good Food Guide, and afterwards, without admitting that they felt at a loss, they went into the National Gallery. They had wandered through the Sainsbury Wing with the tourists, exiled from their proper setting along with the Japanese groups and elderly American couples, and had emerged into the downpour.

Michael felt energized by the plunge through the streets, and the stinging rain, as if the woolly insulation between Hannah and himself had been washed away. When she emerged from her hot bath, pink and glowing, his desire for her recharged itself without any tinge of guilty melancholy. The tray of tea with silver teapot and thin china was brought by a white-coated waiter, but when he had withdrawn they left it to go cold on the side table. Michael knelt over Hannah’s rosy body so she could close her warm mouth around him.

He felt as he had done the first time, within the curtains of her shop, and afterwards clean, hollowed out, reconciled. He lay for a while, drifting in the trivial backwaters of his own imagination.

Then, when he looked at Hannah’s face on the pillow beside him, he was amazed to see that she was crying.

‘What is it? Hannah, what have I done?’

At first she wouldn’t say anything. She shook her head, and more tears squeezed out from beneath her eyelids.

‘You must tell me. I can’t put it right, unless you tell me.’ A flicker of irritation came with a sense of his own powerlessness.

‘It’s all right,’ she muttered, contradicting everything he could see. ‘It’s nothing to do with you. Or not really. I felt lonely, suddenly.’

‘Lonely, when we are this close?’ He smiled, with his mouth against her cheek, to comfort her. But his awareness of the distance between them returned, intensified by Hannah’s recognition of it too. Looking at the close tangle of her hair, robbed by the rain of its springy lift from her skull, he saw that the roots were darker than the honey-coloured strands. Her vulnerability oppressed him.

Hannah cried for a minute, snuffling damply against his shoulder. Then she lifted her head and stretched her round arm to the brocade-boxed bedside tissues.

‘Sorry.’

‘Don’t be silly. But I don’t like to see you cry.’ That was true. It was the courageous, chair-lift Hannah he valued, the foil to his own cowardice, and her erotic mutation into the woman he had discovered within the Ottoman tent of her shop. He did not care so much for this weepy, sniffing version of his love.

‘I’m worried about Darcy. I’m afraid of what will happen next, and he won’t tell me anything except that it’s going to be all right.’

‘Of course you are worried.’ Michael stroked her hair.

‘I’m worried mostly that I won’t be able to cope with whatever it is that’s coming. Arrest, trial, I don’t know. I want to be able to withstand whatever he has to face up to, and I’m afraid of letting him down.’

The tears had started to gather again at the corners of her eyes. She dabbed at them with her wodge of tissues.

‘I am completely certain that you will be able to cope,’ Michael assured her. ‘I know you well enough for that.’

‘Do you think?’

‘I know.’

Hannah blew her nose. ‘I think I just needed a good cry.’ Then she laughed, with the corners of her mouth wobbling as if she were a film actress who had been told to go for a close-up. ‘That’s better. Stupid, isn’t it? If this isn’t letting him down, I wonder what is.’

‘Do you wish we hadn’t come?’

‘No,’ Hannah said, after she had thought. ‘I don’t wish that.’ She snuggled closer to him and he put his arm around her, settling his chin against her ruined hair.

‘What would you like to do this evening?’ Michael asked.

‘Nothing. Stay here like this and watch television. Have room service later, with those silver domes on a heated trolley disguised as a table.’

He picked up the television remote control and clicked it.

They lay back amidst the tangle of sheets and pillows and watched the end of Channel 4 News. Michael felt that the fragile shell of their intimacy had been tossed like a tiny boat through some storm and had pitched through it, waterlogged but still afloat, into a calmer sea.

It was this pleasure at the survival of some delicate organism that Michael took back with him to Grafton. Hannah had caught an early train, and Michael drove home alone. He realized that their brief, awkward time together had left him with a residue of happiness, and the happiness coloured the dull route and softened his apprehension at returning. He turned on the radio, and whistled as he drove. He felt a generalized affection and tolerance for all the world, and a new tenderness for his wife and children.

When he reached his house he first saw the front garden, the neat oval of raked gravel under the cherry tree and the peony bush heavy with red, taut buds, and then Marcelle’s car parked in front of the garage doors. He had expected that Marcelle would be at the school at this time of day, but there was still the ghost of a whistle in his head as he lifted his briefcase out of the car. He put his key in the front door and let himself in. The house was quiet but there was a comforting note that it took him a second to identify as the smell of cooking.

Michael walked through to the kitchen. Marcelle was there. She was standing at one of the worktops in a muddle of bowls and utensils. When she looked at him he saw that her face was like a cold blade.

‘How was the conference?’

He hesitated, apprehension prickling him. ‘Fine. Like the others. Interesting in parts. Why aren’t you at the school?’

‘Was your paper well received?’

‘Yes. Very well. Rather gratifying.’

Michael picked up the handful of letters waiting for him and flipped through them, seeing nothing. The tension in the air was like a smell, poisonous, the opposite of the wholesome scent of food.

‘What are you cooking?’ he asked.

When Marcelle didn’t answer he looked across at her. Her hands were jerking in a mound of flour. A little puff of it rose and drifted like incense.

‘I don’t know,’ Marcelle whispered. ‘Isn’t that funny? I’ve no idea what I’m doing.’

Her head fell forward, and the cords in her neck tightened as her mouth gaped and she began to cry. Appalled, Michael stared at her.

‘You haven’t been to the conference,’ Marcelle said.

Michael thought of the volleys of accusations and lies that would follow if he attempted a denial.

‘No,’ he agreed.

‘Where have you been?’

‘In London.’

‘Why did you lie to me?’ The knifelike accusation had gone from her face. It was contorted with pain instead. Michael hunched his shoulders to protect himself against it.

‘Because I didn’t want you to be hurt.’

‘Who were you with?’

‘Marcelle, do you have to know that? Does it make any difference?’ He took two steps across the immensity of space that separated them and tried to touch her arm.

Marcelle put her head on one side, as if giving the question due consideration.

‘I suppose not. Not to the fact that everything has ended.’ She lifted her hands and the flour puffed up again, as if it could whiten the blackness. ‘This is how marriages end, isn’t it? Ever since I met Caroline Keene on Wednesday and she told me how generous she and David thought you were to let him go in your place and present the paper, I’ve been thinking, so this is how it happens. Even to us. It just finishes.’

Michael tried to think back to a time when he and Marcelle had been happy in this house. He knew that there had been such a time, but he could not locate it now by a date, a particular year. Had it been when the children were smaller? Before they were born? It seemed that his feelings of tenderness as he drove down from London had been no more than post-coital sentimentality.

‘If you say so,’ he answered tonelessly.

‘I telephoned Wilton,’ Marcelle went on. ‘Cathy told me that Hannah was in London for a couple of days.’

Caroline Keene, Michael reflected. It must be a year since she and Marcelle had last met. Why should they encounter each other on this particular, critical day? Then he was surprised by his own resentment. It was, wasn’t it, inevitable that they should have done?

‘This isn’t anything to do with Hannah. It’s to do with you and me, first, Marcelle, do you understand that? Hannah is only what happened next.’

Marcelle was crying again. These were not pretty, photogenic tears that asked to be brushed away, like Hannah’s.

‘What do you want to do?’ Michael asked.

‘I want you to leave. You can’t come back here, strolling in with your bag and your fully-fucked smile expecting to be fed and fuelled and serviced ready for the next adventure. What happens is that you lose me and your children and your home. But you’re half-gone already. Why not the whole way?

‘You can find out how it is without us. See if you like it better out there. Perhaps Hannah will be able to do everything for you. If she can stir herself. If it doesn’t mean she might break a red bloody fingernail.’

‘You’re angry. Don’t be angry with Hannah. She has enough difficulties of her own, whatever you think of her at this minute.’

‘Yes. I’m angry.’

There were white flecks at the corners of Marcelle’s mouth and she ran her powdered fingers through her wild hair. He was afraid of her.

‘I’m so angry that I want to kill you. I want to hurt you. I want it so that …’ The words evaded her, and she licked her smirched lips and then clenched her fists, staring at the knuckles as if they belonged to someone else.

‘… I want it so you know what it feels like.’

Then she turned her back on him. She stumbled away to the window and stood there, her face hidden and her whole body stricken with her crying.

‘I’m sorry it’s such a shock. I’m sorry for what I did,’ Michael said helplessly.

Marcelle turned once more. ‘I want you to go,’ she screamed at him. ‘Get out of here.’

‘What have you told the children? What do you think it’s going to mean to them, if their father suddenly isn’t here any longer?’

‘Why didn’t you think about that?’ She ran at him, with her arms swinging, and struck at his face and head with her floury hands. He had to struggle to hold her, to keep her at bay.

‘Stop it. Marcelle, fuck you!’

They were both shouting. The front doorbell rang.

‘It’s the children. Janice brings them home on Fridays.’

Marcelle stepped back from him, panting. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and pulled at the whitish horn of hair that sprang from her forehead.

Michael walked down the hall to the front door. Through the frosted glass panels he could see the dark heads of his children and the comfortable bulk of Janice behind them.

‘Hello,’ she called. ‘All well?’

Jonathan and Daisy sidled past him, pale-faced.

‘Yes, thanks, Janice. Have a nice weekend.’

He closed the door against the bright outside.

‘Hi, kids. Had a good day?’ His voice sounded as false as a clown’s red nose.

‘Where’s Mum?’ Jonathan asked.

In the kitchen the two of them stood on either side of Marcelle. Trembling, she put her arms around their shoulders.

‘What is this?’ Michael asked, seeing how they ranged themselves against him. He was rebuffed by the stares of his children.

‘Daddy wants to tell you something,’ Marcelle said.

‘Marcelle,’ he warned her. ‘Don’t do this in front of them.’

‘Why not? Why not this? Are you ashamed now? And don’t you think they have a right to know what their father does?’

The rounded eyes glanced from one parent to the other.

‘It’s okay,’ Jonathan said. His mouth was tight with his efforts not to cry.

‘Why do you always have to be like this?’ Daisy burst out. Jonathan kept his anxiety within a shell of control but his sister was accusatory.

Michael wondered, are we always like this? He didn’t even know how much of the discord between himself and Marcelle had seeped into the children’s lives. He felt vanquished, defeated by the impossibility of trying to reassure them.

‘Come here.’

He opened his arms to encourage them, but they stayed at Marcelle’s side. Michael hated her for forcing this division on them, but then he thought that she would claim he had created the divide himself, long ago. Yet it seemed that Jonathan and Daisy had always belonged first to Marcelle, and to him only secondarily. That was the way Marcelle had ordained it.

Michael let his arms fall to his side. He said quickly, to get it over, ‘Your mother is very angry with me, and she’s right to be. I told her a lie about where I have been for the last two days. But that isn’t the only trouble between us. We haven’t been making each other very happy. I’m sure you know that, in a way.’

‘So what’s going to happen?’ Jonathan asked, out of his tight mouth.

‘I think I am going to have to leave. To live somewhere else, for now.’

Jonathan nodded very quickly two or three times, as if he were merely satisfied to get the facts.

‘Daddy, I love you,’ Daisy shouted. She ran to him and threw her arms round his waist, noisily crying. Over her head Michael looked at Marcelle. This was indeed how it ended, he thought. With a strip of the kitchen floor between them like a crevasse.

‘See? Do you see what you have done?’ he said.

She spat at him. ‘I didn’t do it. You did.’

Michael knelt down so he could look at Daisy. ‘I love you too. I always will, and we’ll always be your parents, whatever happens.’

Daisy began to wail. ‘No. Nooo. I can’t bear it.’

He stood up again. As firmly as he could, he steered her back to her mother. Then he left the kitchen and went upstairs, noting the scratches in the wallpaper and the chips like little eyes gouged out of the paint, the honourable scars of family life. He packed another suitcase and came down the stairs again. The house had fallen silent once more. He could not think how he would say goodbye, and so he did not try. He closed the front door softly behind him.