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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look that made the tastes and styles of Grafton, even Wilton Manor, seem effortful and hopelessly provincial.
They went back to the drawing room on the first floor. Nina poured wine and gave Star hers in a thin glass with a knobbed stem.
‘Are you rich?’ Star asked her. ‘You must be, to have a house like this, with these things in it. That’s an impertinent question, isn’t it? You see, I have forgotten how to talk.’
‘My husband was rich. I didn’t really know, until he died.’
Star felt something that it took her a moment to recognize as envy.
Nina was free, she possessed the luxury of wealth and independence. It would be easy for Nina to go where she wanted, to make herself whatever she wished. It was no wonder, she thought, that Gordon had been attracted to her. Gordon was as defined by the limits of Grafton as she was herself.
‘I know what you’re thinking,’ Nina said.
‘I rather hope you don’t. I’m not proud of it.’
‘I found it harder, rather than easier, to have so much, and still to be alone. To have it because I didn’t have him. In the beginning, just after he died, I wished that my external circumstances matched the way that I felt inside. I sold the houses in London and the country, the cars, put his art collection in storage. I wanted to dispense with what he had left me, as brutally as I could, because he had left me so brutally.
‘I came here because he had never been here. It was my past, not our joint history. And I was so jealous of you, when I first arrived. All you couples.’
‘Ah. Us couples. But you are right, that’s what I was thinking without thinking about it carefully enough. Are you still very sad?’
Nina rested her head against the high back of her chair. It was her instinct to deflect the question, but Star herself made her want to answer it.
‘Sometimes. At other times not. And sometimes when the grief does fade I feel guilty, as if I ought to keep it fresh. Then occasionally I feel sharply happy, as if I’ve never really noticed what it was like to be happy before. Gordon made me feel like that. And so did you, when we had our walk the other day. And Barney Clegg, who came to do my garden for me.’
‘Barney Clegg?’
‘Why not?’ Nina protested, but they were both laughing. It seemed that they had passed over some interim stage of acquaintanceship and had become allies.
‘And you?’ Nina asked.
Star gave her shrug.
‘You said you wanted to talk,’ Nina prompted. ‘You haven’t forgotten how to. It happens like this, like we are doing now. Was it about Gordon?’
‘No, not about Gordon.’
‘About Jimmy, then?’
Star examined the rim of her glass, and then tapped it very lightly with her fingernail. It gave a tiny, clear ring.
‘Are you still envious of us? Now that you have seen us more closely?’
Nina said, ‘Now that I know about Vicky and Darcy, do you mean, as well as what happened between me and Gordon?’
She did not try to speculate beyond that, not out loud, but she had the sense that the couples were held in some precarious suspension, as if another breath of passion might overbalance the prosperous order and send them toppling.
She added, very softly, ‘It was you who said that none of us can look in on other people’s marriages. I don’t know what Vicky and Gordon are like, or Darcy and Hannah, or you and Jimmy. I can only see the surface. It seemed smooth and shining when I first came here.’
Star lifted her hands and chopped a box shape in the air.
‘Did you ever feel that there was nowhere to go?’
‘Yes, I did. But there always is. There is somewhere to go, if you look hard enough for it.’
Star drank her wine, admiring the glass again, and the carved wooden arms of her chair, and the pretty room that contained them.
‘Could we be friends, do you think?’ she asked at length.
Nina nodded her head. ‘Yes. I think perhaps we could.’
On Wednesday, Barney came as he had promised with two lengths of different piping, an armful of garden hose and a toolbag. He whistled as he carried the load through the kitchen into the garden.
‘Have this fixed for you in a trice, lady,’ he called. ‘Nice place you got here.’
Nina watched him roll up the sleeves of his overalls and set to work. She had not realized that he planned to install an outside tap for her.
‘I’ll have to turn the water off at the mains for half an hour, is that OK? I like plumbing,’ Barney said confidently. ‘I can always be a plumber, if all else fails, can’t I?’
‘I don’t think all else will fail, somehow.’
She had begun to believe that Barney possessed the necessary talents to make a success of whatever he chose.
He quickly became engrossed in the job. Nina put her red jacket on, and went to where he was laying plastic piping under the sill of the door.
‘I’m going out for half an hour, Barney, to buy us some food for lunch.’
He sat back on his heels, rubbing a grease mark on his cheek.
‘I was hoping you might let me take you out for lunch. Only to the pub, or somewhere, if you wouldn’t mind that?’
She looked down at him. ‘I would like to. But I still need to do some shopping. I’ll be back soon.’
Nina pulled the front door to behind her, but she lingered for a moment on the top step. It was a pleasure to feel the spring sun on her face, and the warmth trapped in the black paint of the iron handrail under her fingers. The green was dotted with people, the first of the new season’s tourists, and the benches on the opposite side where she had met Star eating her lunch were occupied.
Gordon saw her before she saw him. His first thought was that she had changed, and then he realized that she seemed different because the lines in her face had somehow altered.
‘You look beautiful,’ he said, when he reached her. ‘You look happy.’
‘Do I?’ She was startled by his sudden materializing in front of her, when she had almost stopped wishing for him.
‘I wanted to see you.’
‘Did you? Why, after all these weeks?’
‘You had every right to be angry,’ he said humbly. ‘You still have. Nothing has changed. I can’t offer you anything, any more than I could at Christmas. I wanted to see you, to see –’
‘To see how I am surviving without you? Well enough, thank you. Did you think I wouldn’t be?’
Even as she spoke she was disappointed with herself, for making a pointless charade of anger that she no longer felt.
‘Please, Nina, couldn’t we go inside and talk?’
‘No. Barney Clegg is here, doing some work in the garden for me.’
‘Barney Clegg?’
He said it in exactly the same tone of disbelief as Star had done.
Nina smiled, and he noticed the difference in her face again. Nina said, ‘Let’s walk, instead.’
She took his arm, folding her own comfortably within it, and they crossed the cathedral green between the knots of tourists to the west door.
Inside there were scaffolding towers around the pillars on the left side of the nave. They were screened with polythene sheeting but the screens did not cut off the clamour of high-speed