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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the restaurant because it was some miles away from Grafton and not much frequented by anyone he knew. When he arrived with Nina they found they were almost the only people in the over-frilled dining room. They sat facing each other across a daunting table, feeling themselves under the scrutiny of the tiptoeing waitresses. The food was pretentious and poor, and soupy music washed over them as they ate.
Gordon was angry with himself for his bad choice, and as embarrassed as an adolescent on a disastrous first date. He dissected the food on his plate, chewing and tasting nothing, while Nina barely touched hers. Gordon was made more uncomfortable by his conviction that Nina and her husband would have been familiars in whichever London restaurants were the fashion of the week, and that she must be judging this provincial disaster with a cold eye. Gordon did not know London well, and he was mistrustful of city gloss. He understood himself well enough to be aware that he was a success in a small place, and to have been satisfied with that, until he contemplated his distance from Nina.
Their talk was stilted. They made openings and waited for one another to respond, but the beginnings were not bold enough to overcome the music and the eavesdroppers, and they faltered and dried up one by one. In the end they discussed their work and the cathedral project and Grafton, and the achievements of Gordon’s daughters, like the strangers they were. Nina was wearing a scarlet jacket braided and frogged with black silk, and with her pale face Gordon thought she looked like some androgynous, doomed hussar. He wanted to hold her, shielding her from the cavalry, instead of sitting over tepid food and talking about education provisions. Gordon wondered if yesterday’s intimacy had been a hallucination.
At last the meal was over. He paid for it without totalling the bill and they went out into the cold air. He held open the door of his car for her and she sat in the passenger seat, composedly arranging her limbs and her large hands and feet and then keeping still in the way that he now recognized, with a helpless wash of admiration.
They drove in silence for a while. Then Gordon said, because he thought that he must say something or they would drive all the way to Grafton without speaking, ‘Sorry. That was bloody awful.’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
She said it as a statement of fact. He realized that she was telling him the truth. She was not judging him or the restaur-ant, or adopting a faint air of martyrdom over a disappointing evening as Vicky would have done. The meal had not been important, whether it was magnificent or mediocre; it was simply a rite that they were enacting together.
‘I wanted to take you somewhere special, that you would remember,’ he explained. The intimacy had not disappeared. He felt the softness of it between them, in this leathery space dimly illuminated by the dashboard lights.
‘I will remember.’
To his amazement she reached out and took his hand, lifting it off the wheel so that he drove one-handed, and then she linked her fingers through his. She held both their hands tight against her warm thigh. In his happiness and gratitude Gordon wanted to close his eyes and rest his head in her lap.
‘Let’s go home,’ Nina said.
They reached Grafton and Gordon parked his inconspicuous car in an inconspicuous corner a short distance from the cathedral. They walked quickly through the narrow entry that gave access to the green where a street lamp shone on them and made them hurry, not looking at one another, on and out to the relative darkness of the green itself. The cathedral was a black perpendicular to their left. They turned right down Dean’s Row, passing the secure doors and curtained windows of Nina’s neighbours. Gordon thought fleetingly of the families behind them, within their domestic defences. He knew that he was about to leave his own married castle with its moat and battlements behind him, and that he was doing it gladly.
They reached Nina’s front door. She unlocked it and turned off the alarm and let him into her house.
They stood in the hallway, with the street door secured behind them. There was a light burning over their heads in a plain glass lantern, too bright for their eyes. Gordon watched her as she unbuttoned her coat and put her bag aside.
It was such a pleasure to be here in this safe place after the prissy constraints of the restaurant. They were both smiling, sidelong, not yet confronting one another.
Then she turned to him and he caught her by the elbows and held her against him. She turned her face up and he kissed her. Her mouth opened at once and he tasted her tongue, and suddenly both of them were full of hot confusion, rubbing their faces together and panting a little. He pushed her backwards so that she was caught against the wall. His fingers fumbled with the frogging of her jacket until somehow it opened and he found a silky layer underneath it with lace and straps, and into his head swam the memory of Vicky’s drawer filled with the same female things. Only they were not the same, and his surprise and pleasure at the difference shot through him like a scalding wire, burning him, so that he closed his eyes and knotted his fingers in her hair while their mouths sucked greedily together.
The light was very bright. When he looked again he saw Nina’s eyes staring into his, with the reflections in the black pupils receding to a point beyond his reach. She wriggled sideways and slipped out of his grasp. With the same movement she shrugged off her coat and left it hanging over the banister rail. The open front of her jacket showed a black slip and some black lace over white skin faintly marked with tea-coloured freckles.
‘Come upstairs,’ she said in her clear voice.
She held her hand out to lead him but he followed at once, watching the swing of her hips and the tightening of her calf muscles as she climbed the stairs.
Her bedroom was on the second floor, above the drawing room, with the same view of the cathedral front. Nina released the shutters from their wooden recesses and folded them across the windows, securing them neatly with the old catches. Gordon waited at the foot of the bed, watching her. She switched on a lamp on a low table and he saw a scrolled wooden headboard and a plain white cover. There were none of the lace-edged pillows or ancestral teddy bears favoured by Vicky.
Nina took off her red jacket and put it aside. She stepped out of her skirt and he saw that she was wearing stockings with lace tops, and ribbon suspenders. Vicky always wore tights, and he recalled how the mesh paled over the half-moons of her buttocks when she bent down in the closed space of their bedroom.
He stumbled to Nina, reaching for her, his mouth dry. But she evaded him, smiling a little, and he was left standing while she bent and stretched to pull her short slip over her head by the lacy hem. Then she raised first one foot and then the other on to a chair to unhook her stockings from the ribbon tongues. He saw the bunching of the gluteal muscles as she peeled the nylon skin down the freckled whiteness of her thighs.
Nina watched him watching her, evidently gauging the impact of this half-ironic sketch of a striptease.
She shook out the wisps of stocking and laid them tidily across her folded skirt and slip. Then she stood upright, in her black knickers and brassiere, with one arm folded across her chest and the other over her belly.
‘It’s a long time since I undressed in front of a man.’
A man not her husband, Gordon translated, a man not connected to her by the daily familiarity of body textures and scents, sweet or stale, in the uncritical and mundane condition of marriage.
‘You are lovely,’ he said, although he had not yet arranged his impressions into an opinion. ‘Let me look at you.’
Wanting to match her, he unbuckled his belt and undid the trousers of his second-best suit, navy blue with a faint pinstripe. Vicky called it his Tory suit because she thought it made him look like the Home Secretary. He put the trousers over the back of another chair and faced her in his socks and shirt-tails, with his erection tenting the white cotton in front of him. Nina unwound her arms and slid against him, quickly, so he only glimpsed her white belly and the blue shadow between the lace cups of her bra. She unbuttoned his shirt and slid her hands inside it, over the lateral muscles and the collar of flesh around his midriff.
‘Getting fat,’ he whispered with his mouth against her hair.
‘Merely