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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gown with Helen in her arms.
Darcy had tidied up some of the mess and called out his own central heating repair man. He had made tea and toast for Vicky, fed the older children and found the whisky bottle. The business of creating order for her had filled him with happy energy and he whistled softly as he worked.
Vicky watched Darcy moving around her house.
‘It seems that I can’t manage on my own,’ she said sadly.
‘Yes, you can,’ Darcy told her.
Neither of them mentioned Christmas Eve in Hannah’s bedroom. But when it was time to feed the baby he saw the tender and businesslike way that Vicky settled herself to the task, and it tightened some string inside him that pulled at his heart. He reached out and with the tips of his fingers he brushed her cheek. The colour came into her face, but she kept her eyes fixed on the baby in her arms.
Darcy left her with the name and telephone number of his London solicitor, and promised to come back the next day.
It was not very long before all the couples in the Grafton circle knew Vicky had turned Gordon out.
The wives visited or telephoned her, offering their different versions of support and advice, but it was Darcy she looked forward to seeing. She knew that he came unknown to Hannah, and his secret presence in the house seemed to change the quality of it for her – the light in the rooms became sharper and brighter, and the weight of her anxiety dropped away to leave her feeling calm and decisive. When she told him this Darcy laughed and said that Hannah would say the opposite about him at Wilton, but Vicky could see that he was pleased.
Gordon telephoned constantly, from his office and then from the hotel, but Vicky told him that she did not want to see him until she had had more time to think. As the days passed her first hot anger with him curdled into weary disappointment, but she held firm, telling him that she did not want him to come back yet. She surprised herself with the strength of her own resolution.
One morning, after Gordon had been away for two weeks, Darcy came to visit Vicky, leaving his Range Rover parked to one side of the house where it was hidden from the road by a screen of evergreens. It was a clear day, and as she went to let him in Vicky saw in the changed angles of the shadows the first intimation of spring.
Darcy sat at her kitchen table while she made coffee for him. The older girls were at school, Helen was asleep in her cot and there was a thick, expectant silence in the house. Vicky turned to the table with his cup in her hand, and when she had put it down she hesitated beside him.
‘I’m very grateful,’ she told him. She meant for the solace of his company, as well as for the practical advice he had given her.
Darcy reached out and took her hand and she looked down gravely at him. He remembered in that instant that he had imagined himself in love with her, as well as wanting to take her to bed. He stood up, and she did not move when he held her by the shoulders and kissed her. She smelt of baby scents, innocent soap and milk.
‘Come upstairs with me,’ Darcy said.
The double bed was unmade, with lacy pillows tumbled on the floor and the quilt still rucked in the contours of her solitary sleep. Standing beside the bed Darcy unbuttoned her loose shirt, and rediscovered her distended breasts and the curves of her belly marked with pregnancy. She made a move to cover herself with her hands but he pushed them aside and knelt so that he could follow the silvery lines with his eyes and the tips of his fingers.
‘Vicky.’ He said her name to himself, confirming their arrival together, here and now.
Her hands rested on his head, and she stroked his hair absently, almost maternally.
‘Take your clothes off too,’ she said. ‘Then I won’t feel so exposed. I’m ashamed of the way I look these days. I wish I was thin and tight-skinned, like Nina. I wish I had long legs like knitting needles, and no tits. That must be what Gordon wants.’
‘It isn’t what I want. I want you. Look at you.’ He weighed her breasts in his hands, and saw that a colourless bead of liquid appeared at the brown nipples.
‘Take your clothes off, then,’ Vicky said again. ‘Before Helen wakes up.’
He loved this brisk practicality in her. Hannah liked the transactions of sex to be swathed in the ribbons and tulle of romance, even after seven years of marriage.
Vicky helped him to undress, putting his clothes tidily to one side as he discarded them. She thought that for a handsome man he had a surprisingly ugly body. His chest and shoulders were covered in thick grey hair and the muscles of his stomach must recently have given way because when he was not holding it in his belly coyly protruded as if it were not quite part of him. His small, thick penis looked like some hairless burrowing rodent. When he took her in his arms the grey pelt crinkled minutely against her skin.
They lay down together in her bed, and while one part of her mind was occupied with the attentions that Darcy required, the rest of it seemed free to wonder if this act was revenge against Gordon, or if it was something she had wanted for the sake of itself.
It was startling to discover that Darcy was not such an adept lover as her own husband.
He came quite quickly, very noisily, and the detached part of her remained untouched and unaroused, dreamily watching this scene as if it were nothing to do with her. She wondered what it could be that Hannah liked, and it came to her in a moment of pure perception that Hannah liked herself – it was her own vanity that gave her her habitual glow, and Darcy functioned as a suitably impressive mirror to reflect her back at herself. The certainty of this insight lessened Vicky’s guilt.
‘You didn’t do that out of gratitude, did you?’ Darcy asked afterwards. They had been lying with their arms around each other, separately contemplating the room and his presence in it.
‘No. I did it because I wanted to.’
That was the truth. For the two weeks that Darcy had been visiting her she had known it would happen, and she had been waiting for it, neither putting it off nor willing it to come.
‘Will you let it happen again?’
‘Yes,’ Vicky said, because she knew that she would.
And so Darcy had called on her the next morning, and the one after that. On the third morning, after they had made love, she found herself examining his blunt, handsome face on the pillow in Gordon’s place. There were creases and pouches in it that she could not remember noticing before.
‘You look tired.’
‘I don’t sleep well, at the moment.’
‘Are you worried about something? About business?’
He was startled by her percipience. Hannah never asked him about his work.
‘There are some investments I have made on behalf of other people that haven’t performed as I hoped they would.’
Her clear eyes gazed into his. ‘Is it serious?’
‘No,’ Darcy said.
‘Do you want to talk to me about it? Would it help?’
‘It wouldn’t be very interesting for you.’ With the tip of his forefinger he touched the hollow of her throat. ‘And it isn’t very important, because it is easily put right.’
‘That’s good.’ Vicky smiled, and it touched him to see her relief. He kissed her, and burrowed deeper into the warmth and safety of the bed.
It was another two weeks before Vicky answered one of Gordon’s telephone calls and heard him say,
‘Won’t you let me come home? I miss the girls. I miss you.’
It was the middle of the morning, the safe, domestic time that she had always liked and which had lately come to belong to Darcy’s visits, or to the possibility of a visit. She looked at her kitchen, seeing the cups and plates in glass-fronted cupboards and hearing the