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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humour beamed out of him.
‘You needn’t agree to anything, Nina. Only I know that practical experience, actually doing the job, beats any amount of classroom theory. I’ve never been any good on paper.’
Belatedly Nina understood that there was a whole subtext to this talk of hosepipes and practical experience, that the boy was flirting with her, and that she was not displeased by the discovery. She began to laugh, and Barney laughed with her, and their amusement sealed the impromptu celebration between them.
At last Nina took a deep breath. ‘Yes. Well. You’re old enough to know your own mind. But if you’ve finished your wine and had enough to eat, Barney, I should think about doing some work now.’
‘I’ll see you on Wednesday,’ he said, as she opened the front door for him. ‘I’ll bring along everything to finish the job.’
‘I’m sure you will,’ Nina said crisply.
She glanced across the green to the tarpaulins masking the west front. In the spring sunshine, the world looked newly bright and clean. The statues would surely re-emerge from their lime poultices as crisp as unfurling leaves.
‘Where are you going?’ Cathy asked her sister.
Lucy was examining her face in the magnifying mirror that extended on a bracket from the wall of their shared bathroom. She had been plucking her eyebrows and now she turned her head from side to side with a sharply critical expression.
‘Just out, okay?’
‘I’m sorry. I only asked.’
‘You’re in my light, actually.’
‘You’re always going just out. Who is it?’
‘Shut up, Cathy, will you? And move, so I can see what I’m doing.’
‘You look divine, darling. But that’s my shirt.’
Lucy snapped the cap on to her lipstick. She gave her reflection a last narrow-eyed appraisal, then she turned her back on the glass and faced her sister. The mirrored walls doubled and redoubled their twin likenesses, but the effect was too familiar for them to notice it.
‘You don’t mind, Cath, do you? And can I take the car?’
Cathy sighed. ‘I hope it isn’t who I think it is.’
Lucy crammed her Chanel purse into her handbag. ‘Don’t say anything. Just don’t. I’ve got to go now.’
Cathy followed her, frowning with concern. They met Barney coming up the stairs. He was whistling, but he stopped and took his hands out of his pockets when he saw Lucy.
‘Hey. You look real.’
‘Don’t try to be hip, Barn. You’re too old.’
Lucy framed a kiss in the air. On her way out she looked into the kitchen. Hannah was standing in front of the Aga in her dressing gown, heating up bedtime milk for Freddie with a fretful Laura balanced on one hip. Hannah had a cold, and so did the two children. Her eyes were puffy and her nose was red.
‘See you,’ Lucy called to her.
‘Your father telephoned.’
Hannah yanked the milk pan off the heat.
‘Is he okay?’
‘Mmm. I think. He won’t be back for a few days, he said. He’s still got some things to sort out.’
Darcy had gone to London and then, saying he had some business to do, had told Hannah he had to go to Germany. He had never been away from Wilton for so long before.
At least Vicky Ransome was at home, where she should be. Hannah had seen her, from a distance, in town. Hannah tilted the pan, staring at the flat moon of milk without seeing it, but Lucy was too busy to interpret her anxiety.
‘Bye, Hannah. Don’t worry if I’m late.’
Lucy ran out to the car she shared with Cathy. It was dark, but there was a faint luminosity in the sky that promised lighter evenings. She backed the car hastily and made a turn that sent an arc of gravel pattering over the grass beyond the driveway. Hannah, carrying Laura and the hot milk, saw her tail lights through the glass of the front door as a pair of red eyes in the darkness.
Jimmy Rose waited in his car.
They had arranged to meet at a place they had used before, in a quiet lane between Grafton and Wilton. It was the same field gateway where Gordon had sat on Boxing Day after making his last visit to Nina, and Jimmy also could see the distant lights of Darcy’s house on its hill. After a few moments he was able to distinguish the lights of a car coming towards him. The glow brightened and switched direction with the sharp bends in the lane, and he knew that she was driving much too fast.
The dazzle of lights approached him, separated abruptly into twin beams as Lucy braked her Renault, and raked over his face as she swung into the gateway beside him. In the darkness that followed the door of her car opened and slammed shut, and he saw the pale blur of her face and hands as she ran to the passenger door of his car. A second later she was inside in the warmth beside him.
They kissed without speaking, her fingers splayed on the back of his neck as she pulled him closer to her.
‘You were driving too fast,’ he said at last, when he lifted his head.
Lucy’s smile showed her white teeth and the glint of her tongue in the dim light.
‘I always drive too fast.’
‘You’re a silly girl. I don’t want you to smash yourself up.’
She answered him by winding her arm around his neck again, searching for his mouth with her tongue, an eager girl. Jimmy’s hand found her knee, then her long thigh in some thick, dark stocking material and the stretchy hem of her tiny skirt.
‘Ah, God, Lucy, I’ve missed you. A week’s too long.’
‘It isn’t my fault that we haven’t seen each other for a week.’ Her voice was soft, teasing him, but Jimmy had sharp enough ears to hear the scratch of complaint in it.
‘Of course it isn’t. If I could do anything more I would, you know that. Only the truth is that you shouldn’t be wasting your time with an old married man like me.’
He felt the muscles of her smooth cheek move against his. Her hand touched his leg and then insinuated itself between his inner thigh and his groin. Jimmy winced pleasurably at the effect of it and shifted his position a little.
‘It isn’t a waste of time,’ Lucy whispered.
Jimmy knew that. It wasn’t difficult to respond to Lucy Clegg, but she took her own pleasure in him in turn as eagerly and directly as anyone he had ever known. He shifted his hand under her jacket to the front of her blouse, sliding his fingers inside it to find warm silky skin as his mouth searched for hers again.
But Lucy sat up abruptly and flicked her hair back from her face.
‘Where are we going tonight?’ she asked.
‘Ah, to heaven and back, I hope.’
‘Where are we going first? I want to go somewhere, Jimmy, not just to sit in the car. I’ve got all dressed up for you.’
There was a distinctly plaintive note now. Jimmy sighed inaudibly.
‘I can see. You look, and smell, fantastic.’
In fact he did not much mind what Lucy wore, so long as it came off easily. But she rewarded him for the compliment by sliding closer again, warming his face with her breath.
‘I want to go somewhere with you, for once, the two of us as if you were really mine.’
For once? Jimmy thought. He had only been seeing Lucy Clegg for two months, but perhaps that brief interval felt like a much longer time to a nineteen-year-old.
‘I