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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year that they had held the party, and it had long been established as the social centrepiece of the couples’ year.
Nina put the Cleggs’ invitation on the mantelpiece in her drawing room, from where Gordon picked it out from amongst the Christmas cards. He had called to see her after a visit to the cathedral. The whole of the west front was now masked with scaffolding and protective sheeting.
‘Are you going to this?’
‘Yes, I am. Why not, really?’
They were edgy with each other today, although she had run downstairs at the sound of his knock and when the door was closed they had fallen back against it in a rush of eagerness for one another.
‘I can only stay for a few minutes,’ he had whispered, while his fingers were already busy with the buttons of her shirt.
Afterwards they had pulled their clothes together again, and stood uneasily in the drawing room in front of the cold afternoon hearth. Gordon had refused her offer of tea, explaining that Andrew was waiting for him at the office.
Nina was galled by what she interpreted as a suggestion that she should stay away from the party. It would be the first time Gordon would have to face her with Vicky beside him.
‘I didn’t mean that you shouldn’t come,’ he said at once, taking her hands. ‘I want to see you, every possible time, wherever it is. I’m only afraid that I won’t be able to hide how much I do want it.’
‘You will be able to. It will be like at the Frosts’. Easier than that, because Vicky will be there.’
‘It isn’t easy.’
His answer was so simple, so heartfelt, that Nina saw she was unreasonable. It was no more than the unpalatable truth that she would be jealous of Vicky, and it was also true that she would have to learn to swallow her jealousy and digest it, because there was nothing else to be done.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said at once.
They held on to each other as if they could keep everything else at bay with the tenderness between them. Their separate identities miraculously melted together, and they were convinced that they understood each other entirely. So it was that they swung in a moment from distance to delight.
To Gordon, the spare Georgian house across from the cathedral was both a sanctuary and a snare. When he was away from it he thought of it constantly, yet when he came into it he moved cautiously, always reckoning the time he could spare in minutes and replaying in his head the evasions he had made in order to reach it.
Today Andrew had been clearly impatient when he had announced that he must make another visit to the cathedral. Had he only imagined it was the dawn of suspicion? There had been several half-explained absences lately. Yet Gordon could not bear to think of staying away from Dean’s Row. Nina filled his head and his imaginings. He believed that he now knew how a compulsive gambler or an addict felt, and at the same time was repelled by his connection of Nina with such things.
He asked her, with his mouth moving against her forehead, ‘When can we meet again?’
He felt the small movement of her shoulders, a gesture of impotence rather than carelessness.
‘When you next can spare an hour.’
That was how it had been since the day of buying Nina’s car. They had met four or five times, always hurriedly, always with a sense of the rest of the world lying in wait for them.
The minutes of an hour added up for Gordon now. He could almost hear them ticking, like a bomb. It was a long time; it was hardly time to draw breath.
‘I’m sorry,’ he offered in his turn. ‘That is just how it is. I’d spend every hour with you, if I could.’
Nina nodded, and then lifted her head. He could see the tiny whorls and knots of colour in her irises, and the black pupils fractionally dilating. He imagined the pull of the ciliary muscles on the tiny lens within her eyes, and the twin inverted images of himself laid on the retina only to be righted again by the brain’s conviction.
That was the brain’s power, he thought, to make logic out of what it saw clearly to be the wrong way up.
‘I’m going to drive to Bristol tomorrow. I want to give the car a proper trial,’ Nina said.
Since she had taken delivery of the red Mercedes it had spent almost all its time in the garage of the cobbled mews behind Dean’s Row.
She added, ‘I need to buy some materials for Marcelle’s nativity costumes.’
‘I’ll come with you,’ Gordon said, obliterating with a grandiose stroke the next day’s obligations. Her pleasure immediately rewarded him.
‘Will you?’
‘Somehow,’ he promised, already ambushed by his own anxiety.
Marcelle was driving to work at the Pond School. She was currently teaching on one of the college’s best money-spinners, a twelve-week intensive course designed to bring novices up to the standard where they might look for work as ski-chalet cooks. Her current set included Cathy Clegg, one of Darcy’s nineteen-year-old twins, who was a perfect example of the Pond’s introductory cooking student. Cathy’s only real interest in food was in how much or how little of it she could consume before a millimetre of surplus flesh appeared on her miniskirted hips.
As she drove Marcelle was reflecting on the lack of enthusiasm from her class, and in another compartment of her mind she was running through the afternoon’s demonstration. She would be showing the students how to make ciabatta bread, and enlarging on some techniques associated with bread and dough preparation before the next morning’s practical session.
Her attention was fully engaged and she drove the familiar route automatically, almost unseeingly.
Marcelle had taken a roundabout way via the outer bypass instead of facing the morning’s traffic through the middle of the town. By this route she would cross a branch of the main railway line that ran out to the west of Grafton. The fading echo of mainline expresses heard from the cathedral green was supposed to mean that rain was coming.
The branch line was not much used, but today, as she looked ahead over the flat crowns of the hawthorn hedges, Marcelle saw the red and white arms of the level-crossing barrier begin to descend. When she rounded a bend and could see the crossing itself, the gates were already down and the red warning lights were flashing to indicate that a train was coming. Marcelle muttered, ‘Damn’ and slowed to a stop in front of the gate.
On her own side of the line hers was the only waiting car. At first, because she was busy with her thoughts, she registered only that there was another vehicle drawing up on the far side beyond the tracks.
Then, after two or three seconds, some recollection of shine and redness made her look again.
Immediately she recognized Nina’s new Mercedes. The flashness of the car had given rise to some wry remarks amongst the Grafton wives. Marcelle saw that it was Nina at the wheel of the red car, and that there was a passenger with her.
The train was approaching. She could hear the rumble of it, and out of the corner of her eye she saw a blur of movement as the dark shape rolled around a bend towards the crossing.
In that moment Marcelle realized that Nina and her passenger were laughing together, and that there was a shiver of intimacy between them that she couldn’t have described, or accounted for by their expressions or postures. She was only certain that it was there, and that the couple had not seen her, and that the man was Gordon Ransome.
A second later the engine of the train hid them from her sight. It was a heavy diesel pulling a line of clanking goods wagons. Marcelle counted them as they went by, sixteen in all, and then the swaying brown box of the guard’s van at the end. In the minute that it took the train to pass she collected her thoughts, and began to compose the simple explanations that would account for Gordon and Nina laughing together, alone in her car on a weekday morning, enjoying a closeness that seemed to