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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of her, who must have skipped out without doing her share of the clearing. Cathy ran down the steps towards a young man who had just clambered out of an illegally parked Golf. Loud music issued from the wound-down window.
Cathy shouted, ‘Barney!’
Marcelle paused at the top of the steps, wrapping her arms around her chest to keep out the cold. Her breath clouded in front of her.
Barney Clegg greeted his sister with a double feint to her head, and then a bear-hug.
‘Hey, I’m home, are you pleased? Good day’s cooking?’
‘Great. The cooking was okay. Here, have some bread, you’re always hungry.’
He took the chunk that she produced for him and gnawed enthusiastically at it.
‘This is great. Did you make it?’
‘Don’t be a dope. Marcelle did. She’d be thrilled if I had. Wouldn’t you, Marcelle?’
She had come quietly down the steps behind Cathy. The two Cleggs turned their smiles on her. They both had long upper lips, and very white, perfectly even teeth that proclaimed expensive orthodontistry. Marcelle could see their joint resemblance, presumably to their mother, whom she had never met.
‘You could, Cathy, if you felt like it.’ She knew she sounded like a schoolmistress, not the bestower of culinary inspiration to last a lifetime. The realization depressed her. ‘Hello, Barney. Are you home for Christmas?’
Darcy’s eldest child was away studying at agricultural college.
‘Yup. Come to liven the old place up a bit.’ He grinned engagingly at her, displaying his father’s charm and what would turn into the same creases at the corners of his eyes. Barney was over six feet tall, broad-shouldered and blond-haired, with a healthy aura that suggested he spent much of his time in the fresh air. In his trainers and American baseball jacket with white leather sleeves he seemed huge, towering over Marcelle like some benevolent if not very intelligent giant.
‘So, how’re you, Marcelle? Apart from having to teach Cathy, that is? And the family?’
Cathy swiped at him with her black leather rucksack. They were like healthy animal cubs, Marcelle thought, playing outside the nest. She smiled up at Barney.
‘Very well, thank you. But I must go and pick them up from Janice’s, or they’ll be wondering where I am. Have a happy holiday, won’t you?’
As Marcelle crossed the road to the car park the two Cleggs piled into the Golf and slammed the doors, calling their goodbyes to her. The car accelerated away in a diminishing blast of noise and music.
It was Janice’s day for the school run. When Marcelle reached the Frosts’ house the winter daylight had all but gone and the street lights made the sky look thick and black. Janice’s car was already in the driveway. The children were in the kitchen, and so was Vicky Ransome with her baby and the two little girls.
Marcelle took the mug of tea that Janice handed her and gave her children the attention they needed. Jonathan had scored a goal in a football game, and Daisy was anxious about the evening’s singing rehearsal.
‘Well done, Jon. There’s plenty of time, Daisy. We’ll have supper and then go to the cathedral. Look, William isn’t worried, is he?’
William didn’t take his eyes from the television screen.
Marcelle sat down at the table with her mug of tea, facing Vicky.
Vicky’s open blouse showed the strong stalk of her neck, and her head nodded tenderly over the contented baby. While she watched Vicky Marcelle became sure that she could not possibly say anything about what she had seen. Her anxiety about what it meant together with the responsibility for keeping silent pressed heavily on her. She wondered if there were other secrets, secrets that she could not guess at, inhabiting the room and separating the three of them.
‘How are you?’ she heard herself asking Vicky.
Vicky looked up. Her wings of hair swung back to expose her cheeks and the collar of flesh, not yet dissolved, that pregnancy had laid down around her jawline.
‘It’s tiring, with three of them. Alice wakes up often at night, always when this one has just gone off. I spend a lot of time creaking across the landing from one bedroom to the other, hurrying to stifle the cries. And then sitting in the baby’s room, feeding her, imagining we are the only people in the world who are awake. There is that particular silence in the small hours that seems unbreakable.’
‘I remember.’
‘But Gordon is being very good. Better by far than he was with the other two.’
Marcelle could well imagine that Gordon would come home and guiltily try to compensate for what he did elsewhere. She felt hot shivers of indignation directed at him, and at Nina.
‘That’s nice,’ she said pointlessly, seeing the red car again and the two bewitched profiles sliding apart from each other.
Later the same evening Vicky was watching television. She was sitting in her usual chair with her feet curled up beneath her and her hands wrapped around a mug of hot milk. It was only the reminder that the milk must not be spilt that kept her from dozing off. She was tired, but there was no point in going to bed to sleep before Helen had woken for her last feed. The baby lay in her basket on the sofa. Vicky drank some of her milk, and the skin that had formed on the surface of it caught on her top lip. The act of rubbing it away reminded her strongly of being a little girl, sitting in her dressing gown ready for bed while her mother listened to The Archers. The comforting childhood feeling of being secure and in the right place pervaded the present, too, falling around her and enclosing the children and Gordon in its warmth.
In the kitchen Gordon tidied up after their dinner, a Marks & Spencer curried chicken dish that he was not particularly fond of. There was a milk-rimed saucepan filled with tepid water on the draining board, and Vicky had stood a bunch of dirty cutlery in it to soak. Yellow-crusted eggshells and toast fragments left from the children’s tea had fallen out of a bent tinfoil dish on the worktop, and there was a high water mark of tea leaves and whitish scum clinging to the sides of the sink. Next to the tinfoil dish was the clear polycarbonate sterilizing drum for Helen’s feeding equipment. The bottles and teats floated murkily inside it.
Gordon set about tidying up. Vicky was not a fastidious housekeeper, and he preferred domestic order and cleanliness. For a long time, they had tried not to let this difference be a source of irritation between them.
As he worked, Gordon thought deliberately about Nina. He set himself the test of recalling the shape of her hands and fingernails, the way her hair grew back from her forehead, the exact timbre of her voice. The details came to him without effort, but invested with clear importance that was separate from the jumble of everything else that made up his life. He knew that he was in love with her.
When he was satisfied with the order of the kitchen he went through to the living room to find Vicky. When she saw him she pushed out her jaw in a yawn that turned into a lazy smile, and stretched her arms with the fingers bent inwards at the knuckles in a way that made him think of a cat.
‘Vicky?’
He was exhausted with the weight of having to keep the truth from her, and by the opposing need to tell her, to blurt out what was happening and share the bewilderment of it with her.
‘Mmm?’
I’ve fallen in love with Nina. I want to live with her. I don’t know how not to be with her all the time. How can I explain that to you?
‘Did you see Marcelle today?’
She saw us at the level crossing. I know what she saw, and therefore what she knows.
‘Yes. She came to pick the kids up from Janice’s while I was over there this afternoon. Why?’
Marcelle had said nothing, then. Not yet.
‘No