Rosie Thomas 4-Book Collection: Other People’s Marriages, Every Woman Knows a Secret, If My Father Loved Me, A Simple Life. Rosie Thomas
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her head there was a rich collage of decorated stone and candlelight and fluttering surplices.
‘I hope I didn’t bore you,’ Gordon said stiffly. He was suddenly aware that he had talked, and she had barely spoken.
‘No.’ Nina smiled at him. The choir had begun to rehearse a Te Deum. The boys’ voices climbed up, and higher, as invincible in their harmony as the soaring steps they had just come scuffling down.
Outside it was dark. Gordon wondered disconnectedly where he should offer to take her, trying to calculate how much time was left to him. Could they go to the Eagle? Across to the Dean’s Row house again? He couldn’t bear the idea that he must lose sight of her, but he knew he would soon have to go to the hospital and somewhere within himself find the buoyancy to lift Vicky out of her depression.
Nina was still smiling. The splendour of the cathedral, and the singing, and the startling pleasure she felt in Gordon’s company had lapped together with the images of regeneration in the conservation work to produce a high, curling wave of happiness. She knew that since Richard’s death she had been walking inside a blank-walled box and had been unable to raise her head to look beyond it. She understood in the same moment that she was afraid of what Gordon Ransome threatened, of the edge they were balanced upon, but at the same time she longed to pitch herself over it, for the affirmation of physical response, as a release from the steady and monotonous solitary confinement of her days. The directions forward seemed to multiply entrancingly ahead of her.
She thought that Gordon was going to reach out and touch her. She stepped away, containing herself.
‘I should get back now. I have some work to finish,’ she muttered.
Her immediate need was for solitude. She had no doubt that there would be tomorrow for Gordon and herself, tomorrow and other days. This confidence surprised her, but she did not question it.
Gordon found that he almost ran after her, like a boy. He dodged to stand in front of her, cutting off her line of retreat.
‘Shall we meet again? Perhaps I could buy you lunch tomorrow?’
No, not lunch, he remembered. He was committed to lunch with Andrew and a pair of retailing entrepreneurs for whom they did a great deal of work.
‘Or dinner, rather? Could you manage that? It would have to be late, perhaps, after the hospital …’
He heard her cutting short his bluster.
‘Dinner would be fine. Thank you.’
‘I’ll pick you up at about half past eight.’ He had to call after her. Her heels clicked musically on the cobbles as she swung away from him. Gordon was happy as he went to retrieve his car from the malodorous recesses of the multistorey park.
*
He was early for visiting. Vicky looked up in pleased surprise as he edged around the floral curtain protecting her bed. Helen was in her arms, a white bundle of hospital cellular blanket, and Marcelle Wickham was sitting in the single armchair next to her.
‘Hello, darling, is everything all right?’ Vicky asked him. He acknowledged silently that it was a matter for concern nowadays if he arrived anywhere before the last minute.
‘Of course it is. I wanted to see you both, that’s all.’ He kissed her overheated forehead and laid one finger against the baby’s cheek. He kissed Marcelle, too, noticing her perfume, reminded by it of dancing with her at parties. Then he glanced around for somewhere to sit. The curtained space was full of bunches of flowers, fading fast in the heat. The flowers pushed into inappropriate vases that were mostly too small looked as uncomfortable as he felt. There was a faint but distinct smell of vomit in the ward, underlying the perfume and flower scents. Gordon put his coat down on the end of Vicky’s bed and loosened the knot of his tie.
‘Sit here, Gordon. I’m on my way back to pick up the kids from nativity play rehearsal.’ Marcelle stood.
‘No, Marcelle, you don’t have to rush away because Gordon’s arrived.’
‘Stay a bit longer. I haven’t seen you for weeks.’ They spoke in unison, unwilling to have the buffer removed from between them.
‘This baby is gorgeous.’ Marcelle bent over to admire her once more. ‘You are so lucky.’
Her face was drawn with sadness. Gordon wondered if she wanted another baby herself, and if dour Michael Wickham wouldn’t agree to it. He remembered how one summer barbecue afternoon, with his tongue loosened by beer, Michael had complained to him, ‘Bloody kids. They’re like vampires, aren’t they? They take every hour of the day and every ounce of your energy, and your wife’s and they still want more. Why do we do it?’
They had been surrounded by the children of the various families, by the noise of a rounders game, and the cries of ‘It’s not fair’ and ‘He hurt me’. Gordon couldn’t remember what he had said in response.
Marcelle had gone. Gordon sat down in the chair and Vicky gave the baby to him. He gazed down at the little face, seeing Mary and Alice in the compressed features. The same, each time, but different. He held this tenacious fragment of optimistically combined genes for a moment, and then laid her in the crib beside the bed.
‘Marcelle brought me a picnic from the school. I was hungry,’ Vicky explained. There was a white box on the bed table, and when he looked into it he saw the remnants of some savoury pie and two brandy snaps. Vicky had a sweet tooth. He felt criticized, because he had not thought to bring her anything to eat himself, although he knew the hospital food was poor. He took her hand and wound his fingers through hers. Her fingers had swollen up at the end of the pregnancy, and she had had to take off her rings.
‘Are you still feeling blue?’
‘Not too bad.’ Vicky hoisted herself up against the pillows, making a face at the discomfort as she did so. ‘It’s only the stitches, really.’
Gordon had not seen the wound since he had watched the delivery itself. He imagined the line of stitching above the curling hair where he had liked to kiss her. It would be like a closed mouth, he thought. The scar would fade to a faint white line. The doctors had told them that.
‘You’ll be better soon.’
‘I know. It’s okay. Have you had a busy day?’
Very clearly, he heard the tonelessness of their questions and the other, unspoken dialogue concerning their separate and irreconcilable needs.
‘Not particularly. I came here straight from the cathedral. The scaffolding is going up.’
Vicky was even less interested in the conservation work than Andrew was. ‘It’ll be up for ever, I suppose. What a shame it has to be done now.’
Now or in a hundred years, Gordon mused. I might have missed seeing it. He felt privileged to be part of this regeneration, and the thought of seeing it with Nina made him falter, on a dancing beat of pleasure, so that he had to lean sideways, twitching at a parched flower that hung out of a vase to hide his joy from Vicky.
Visiting time was in full flood. The ward hummed with camcorders, and with the noise of older siblings who slid on the polished floor and swung on the high ends of the beds.
‘I called the girls this afternoon after I spoke to you,’ Vicky said, with her eyes on the other mothers’ children.
‘Is everything okay?’
‘Mum says they’re both a bit weepy and anxious. Alice wet her bed last night.’ She hesitated, and then said without looking at him, ‘I wondered if it might be a good idea for you to bring them back early? They could have the weekend at home with you, and come in to see the baby before we bring her back.’
It was a challenge to him, like an unorthodox move in a chess game. Vicky was giving him an opening to show his concern for his children’s well-being by removing them from their grandparents and attending to them himself through a winter weekend. Like a drowning man, Gordon glimpsed a series of