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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it as a once-clear picture now confusingly cross-hatched with images of Nina and Darcy.
The few hours that she had spent with Darcy had been stolen, and retaliatory, but they had also woken her out of some stale, isolated maternal trance. She felt grateful to Darcy, and under his spell like some narcissistic girl newly and shallowly in love, but she also felt strong. She was suddenly sure that she was much, much stronger than Gordon.
Vicky looked down at her hand, with her engagement and wedding rings, and extended her fingers for her own pleased contemplation as if she had just had a manicure.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘All right. I’d like you to come home.’
She had told Darcy the same day, ‘I said he could come back.’
‘Is that what you want?’
After a moment she had answered, ‘Yes. I was angry with him, but I’m not any longer.’ She touched his hand gently. ‘Doing what you and I have done has made me less … less censorious of Gordon. Do you mind that?’
‘How could I? What about you and me? May I still see you?’
‘Like Gordon seeing Nina, do you mean?’
‘Yes, I suppose I do mean like that.’
He had heard the smile in her voice before he met her eyes and saw it. ‘I don’t know. I’m not sure. But you know where I am, and I know where you are. Is that enough, for the time being?’
‘I suppose it will have to be,’ he had answered. Darcy had felt slow, and out-manoeuvred, and he had also felt hurt. He remembered again that at Christmas he had momentarily imagined himself to be in love before dismissing the idea with a coarser intention.
He had been right the first time, Darcy thought. His mistakes seemed now to multiply in thickets around him.
Later, in Méribel, Darcy carried the telephone to the window as he dialled her number, and stood staring across the balcony to the sunny slopes while he listened to the ringing tone.
‘Hello?’
‘Hello.’
He did not need to identify himself, that was an acknow-ledgement of their intimacy, but there was an infinitesimal pause before Vicky said,
‘Darcy? Is that you? Is something wrong?’
‘Why do you think there’s something wrong because I’ve called you?’
‘You’re on holiday with Hannah and Freddie … I didn’t expect to hear from you.’
He looked out at the skiers, coloured matchstick people zigzagging in the sunshine. Everyone was out in the snow, except for him.
‘I wanted to talk.’
‘Oh. Well, do you know what’s happened? I’m going back to work part-time. I had a call yesterday from the director of therapy at the centre, and they need someone to take on a limited caseload, just two or three days a week, and I talked it over with Gordon last night and we agreed that I should do it. I’ve got to find someone to come in and take care of Helen …’
Darcy listened to her plans, leaning against the window glass with the telephone crooked under his chin. There was snow on the balcony floor, and a white rim in the rustic cut-outs and on the curved rail of the wooden balustrade. The light danced and sparkled, hurting his eyes.
‘That’s good, I’m glad,’ he heard himself say. He felt dirty and creased in the sunshine, full of a weariness that seemed to spread all through him, and weak as a child in comparison with Vicky’s procreative strength.
‘Why did you call?’ she asked him at last.
It was too much of an effort to dissemble.
‘I talked to Hannah last night. Or, rather, she talked to me. Someone called Linda Todd, who lives opposite you, has been monitoring my movements. Does that sound likely?’
‘Yes. Shit. Yes, it does. What exactly did Hannah say?’
‘Not much. It was more what she did. A bit of a dance, not quite a striptease, for the benefit of Michael and Andrew, and a warning shot for me at the same time. It stirred up the passions a bit.’
‘I can imagine.’
Vicky knew how it would have been. Hannah dancing, lit up with pleasure at herself. She had been friends with Hannah for a long time, and she wondered if she liked her at all. She said quietly, so quietly that he had to think for a moment before he was sure that he had heard her correctly,
‘I think you and I have come to the end of the road, Darcy.’
‘This particular road, perhaps. For now,’ he said, wishing that he could contradict her.
A moment later they had said goodbye, and he replaced the receiver in its cradle.
Darcy slid open the glass door and stepped out on to the balcony. The cold air caught in his throat. He leaned on the balcony rail, and looked across at the nearest slope. Suddenly he saw Hannah in her silvery ski suit with its fur-trimmed hood, and Michael Wickham in navy-blue that appeared black at this distance. Their ski teacher made a series of fluent turns, and Hannah and Michael obediently followed him.
Hannah had improved, Darcy noticed.
She lifted her arms in triumph and waved her poles as she completed the last turn. Michael punched the air in front of him in laughing acknowledgement of their achievement.
All through this time, the work on the west front of the cathedral went on behind the contractors’ screens of scaffolding and tarpaulins.
One afternoon in February Nina stood at a corner of the green, where a gap in the coverings offered a narrow view of one column of saints and archangels. The stone figures in their niches were enveloped in dust or swathed in dingy protective coverings, and workmen passed in front of them with plaster-coated tools and buckets. Watching them, Nina could not imagine how the details of folded hands and serene stone faces could ever be recovered from this desecration.
The wind was cold. At length, wrapping her arms around herself, Nina turned away from the cathedral front and began slowly to cross the green. She would have liked to go on in through the west door, to look at the columns and arches of the interior, but she did not. Ever since Christmas she had avoided the cathedral, because it was associated with Gordon. She had been afraid to begin with that she might meet him there, and so be thought guilty of pursuing him. Lately she had simply preferred to keep away from the places that were most closely connected with him in her mind, because she missed him and it was easier to spare herself this much.
When she reached the opposite, sheltered side of the green she saw a woman sitting on one of the benches that bordered it. The woman was wearing a flamboyant long mackintosh made of some light, banana-coloured material. She was watching Nina coming towards her, and eating a sandwich. Nina recognized Star Rose.
‘Hello,’ Star said, in her cool voice. ‘I heard on the bush telegraph that you’d left and gone back to London.’
Nina hesitated. Of the Grafton couples, she had seen only Janice and Hannah since Christmas and those meetings had been accidental. The women had not been unfriendly, but just as it had been easier for Nina to avoid the places that were connected in her mind with Gordon, so it had also been her choice not to meet his friends, and Vicky’s.
‘I did go back for a time. But I’m here again now. This is where I live.’
She had spent almost three weeks staying in the Spitalfields house with Patrick, but it had become increasingly hard to ignore the truth that she had left London for Grafton to escape the memories of one man, and had then fled back to London for the same reason and a different man. Patrick had not tried to hide his concern.
‘You can’t flit to and