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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dance.
Only Darcy had turned his attention back to the window and the snow drifting beyond the glass.
Hannah held out her hands to Andrew, not inviting but insisting that he dance with her. He groped his way to his feet as if he was hypnotized and at once Hannah’s arms snaked around him. Her head rested on his shoulder and her eyes closed.
‘Dance, all of you,’ she said.
Michael’s limbs had connected themselves again, and he leaned across to Janice.
‘Will you?’
He had wanted to dance with Hannah; he was amazed to discover how much he had wanted to dance with her when she had chosen Andrew.
Janice’s silky robe swished as she uncrossed her legs and stood up.
She half stumbled, because she had drunk plenty of the wine at dinner, but Michael caught her hand. Her loose sleeves fell back, baring her pretty, rounded arms to the elbows as she made a mock-subservient offer of herself to him.
Michael took hold of her and as they began to dance she came closer, and he let his hands slide down over the soft stuff masking her back. She felt much bigger than Marcelle and there were pads of flesh on her shoulders and over her hips; confusingly the ampleness of her became identified with the image of Hannah dancing that he carried behind his eyelids. The perfume of Janice’s hair and skin caught in his throat and nose, making him think that he would sneeze.
Past the swaying bodies of the other couples Darcy saw Marcelle sitting awkwardly in her place. Her head was up, but something in the stiffness of her posture betrayed her unhappiness. He left his place and edged past the dancers, feeling as he had done earlier that his own body had grown too bulky to manoeuvre properly.
‘Marcelle?’
‘You don’t have to be kind, Darcy.’
The expression in her eyes made him suddenly angry with Hannah for doing this. It was her way of demonstrating her displeasure with him, of course, and she would not bother to consider beyond that.
‘It isn’t a kindness,’ he said roughly.
When he took them between his, Marcelle’s surprisingly small, cold hands reminded him of a little boy’s, of Barney’s years ago when he had come in from playing in a wintry garden. She felt brittle, too, as they moved together, unfamiliarly light and dry, quite unlike Hannah or Vicky, and tall, so that her eyes were almost level with his.
They danced clumsily together, and to smooth over this and to turn the moment to advantage against Hannah, Darcy pressed his cheek against Marcelle’s, and then found the corner of her mouth with his own. He heard the small catch of breath in her throat, and opened his mouth to kiss her. As he did so he noticed that with Hannah’s limbs wound around him Andrew had begun to look like a rabbit caught in the headlights of a car, and that Janice and Michael danced with their eyes shut, heads close together, seemingly unaware of anyone else.
He brought his attention back to the business in hand, that of kissing Marcelle. She was the opposite physical type to the one that attracted him, but there was an interesting novelty in exploring the contours of her lips and face. He moved his face, rubbing himself against her, but Marcelle neither responded to him nor removed herself. He had the impression that her eyes were open and she was looking away somewhere beyond him.
Another track began, slower than the last, and the three couples swayed and circled. The fire had burnt down to a red glow, and the room had grown dimmer.
Darcy wondered if they were going to continue with this, if the clinches would get closer and if they would slip away, each pair in turn, to bedrooms that did not contain their own clothes that had been folded and packed at home in Grafton. The scenes played themselves in his head, while he went on slowly circling with Marcelle Wickham and nuzzling her motionless face. He tried to work out what he would do, who would make the first move. The bizarreness of these imaginings, together with the possibility that they might become reality, made him speculate whether the ordinary old procedures of marriage and friendship were about to change, and to move in new and uncontrollable directions as his business life was doing. His heart began its uncomfortable thumping again, and he felt a small, needling pain in his chest.
Somewhere else in the chalet, from somewhere over their heads, someone began to scream.
Darcy thought for an instant that the sound might be to do with the sensations within him, but the three couples froze and then broke apart. They were blinking, momentarily bewildered and embarrassed. The screaming stopped, broken off short with a different cry, and then there was a long second’s silence followed by a loud thump. The parents heard the sound of a child’s bare feet running overhead.
‘Who is it?’ Marcelle cried.
Janice was already on her way to the door, with Michael behind her. The others heard panicky feet thudding down the stairs. A moment later William Frost appeared in the doorway with Janice swooping to catch him. His face was flushed and wet with tears and his round eyes stared only half-seeing at the semicircle of adults.
‘A dream,’ he sobbed. ‘Terrible dream.’
Janice put her arms around him and smoothed his pudding-basin of blond hair.
‘It’s all right,’ she murmured, ‘I’m here. Only a dream, nasty old dream.’
They made way for her to lead him to the sofa, stumbling a little in adjusting to this different focus, no longer quite catching each other’s eyes. Janice sat down and hugged William and Andrew leant over him.
‘It’ll go away, Will. You’re awake now. He’s been having these dreams,’ he explained to the others.
Hannah pushed her hair back from her face, gathering it up with one hand into a bunch at the nape of her neck. Michael looked at the crescent of white skin that was momentarily exposed, and then made himself bend down to see William Frost instead.
‘Poor old chap,’ he said pleasantly. He felt the child’s forehead and then ran his fingers lightly under his jaw. ‘Nothing to worry about, I’m sure. Some hot milk, perhaps?’
‘I’ll do it,’ Hannah said. With her hair pulled back, in the changed atmosphere, she appeared almost matronly. Marcelle sat down in her old place, and Darcy went to the table where the whisky bottle was waiting. Someone turned off the music and the room became bright and ordinary, as it had been at the evening’s beginning.
Janice sat on the edge of the bed to take off her slippers, and then slid sideways into the warmth under the covers. She reached to turn off the light, then curled herself beside Andrew.
‘Are you asleep?’ she asked. She had waited up to make sure that William had settled down properly again.
‘Not quite. Is Will all right?’
‘I think so.’
Out of habit Janice listened for the ticking of their bedside clock, as she always did in the intervals of their night-time conversations, then remembered that they were not in their own bedroom. The evening had left her with a knot of anxiety that she knew would keep her awake.
‘What were you doing with Hannah?’
Andrew sighed. ‘What was Hannah doing with me, don’t you mean?’
‘Is there a difference?’
‘Of course there is. She was trying to make some point for Darcy’s benefit, I suppose. Whatever it was, do we have to analyse it now?’
‘You didn’t look as if you minded.’
‘I didn’t. That was then, and now is now and here we are in bed, my love, and it’s time to go to sleep.’
He settled the hard French pillow under his head, offering more of himself to her as he did so, but it was as a comforting gesture, without any suggestion of sex.
Janice mumbled to him, with her face pressed against the warmth of his shoulder, ‘Do you