Rosie Thomas 4-Book Collection: Other People’s Marriages, Every Woman Knows a Secret, If My Father Loved Me, A Simple Life. Rosie Thomas
Читать онлайн книгу.
Although the acknowledged transactions between them indicated that Gordon looked after her, the underlying reality was the opposite. It was she who did the caring, mothering again.
Perhaps, she thought, Gordon had discovered this too. Now he knew that he could not survive without her and his children, whereas they could survive without him, and had done. Vicky thought that it must be this awareness that made the pinpricks of anxiety show in her husband’s eyes.
But she was not complacent, not any more. She did not know for sure, and it was equally possible that Nina had rejected him; or that he had decided it was simply more comfortable to live with the wife he knew rather than the lover he did not. It was here that Vicky’s reasoning began to blur, and she allowed herself to shrug off the speculation. He was home, and she did not think he would wander again.
All she did know for certain was that the balance of power had subtly shifted between them. She felt calm and strong. If Gordon heard about Darcy, from Linda across the road, or Hannah, or Jimmy Rose or anyone else, she would deal with it. Vicky knew she would survive. She felt secure, and content with what she had.
Vicky looked at the oven clock. It was half-past eight. Marcelle would be here in five minutes. It was Marcelle’s day for the school run and she was never, ever late. Gordon looked at the clock too, and put his breakfast aside to wipe the toast and honey from the girls’ round faces and find their belongings.
Marcelle’s shadow appeared at the front door.
Mary ran down the hall, chanting, ‘It’s time, it’s time!’
The women briefly smiled at each other on the doorstep. Marcelle would drop five children off today before driving on to the Pond School. The map of her day was already laid out in her head like some endurance course that she must negotiate before she could subside into sleep again.
Vicky stood on the step and waved until the car was out of sight, as she always did, then turned back into the house.
In the kitchen, Gordon had lifted Helen out of her seat and was holding her up to the window to see the cats in the garden. Her small fists waved in the air to show her pleasure.
‘Marcelle seems tired,’ Vicky said.
‘Marcelle will never rest while there is some arrangement within her reach that falls short of perfection. She must be exhausting to live with.’
‘Not like me, then.’
He looked at her over the baby’s head, with the dark points in his eyes again, to see if this was contentious. Vicky only smiled, and scooped the breakfast detritus, crusts and eggshells and teabags, into the sink where they settled around the cups and plates that she had already stacked there.
‘No, not like you,’ he agreed.
‘Have we got time for another cup of tea?’
Gordon checked his watch. The middle-aged woman who came in to look after Helen on Vicky’s working mornings had not yet arrived; when she came they would leave together.
‘I should think so.’
Vicky poured tea into two cups. The tea was stewed, but the cups were clean. Gordon supposed that Helen’s carer would put the breakfast things in the dishwasher while the baby was asleep, or that Vicky would do it when she came in, or that he himself would do it at the end of the day. He told himself it didn’t particularly matter which it was. They stood at the sunny end of the kitchen and drank their tepid tea, aware of the silent re-establishment of normality between them, like a long-awaited truce.
Later he drove her to her therapy centre, and watched her walk briskly away from him with her leather bag full of case notes swinging at her side. She was still wearing her hair in the short bob that she had had cut just after Helen’s birth. He remembered that he had come home one evening from Nina and found her looking quite different, and he had stared helplessly at her as if she were the stranger, and not Nina. But as Vicky left him now he saw that a younger man on the pavement glanced after her, following her with his eyes. Gordon was touched with admiration for his wife, for her grace and strength and good humour.
He turned the Peugeot around and headed through the town towards the office. The windows of many of the buildings were plastered with election posters. Most of them were blue, because Grafton was at the centre of a safe constituency, but the Conservative candidate was a new man, an unknown, and both Labour and the Liberal Democrats were fielding strong candidates. Gordon had voted Conservative all his life, but he was beginning to be afraid that some tide had finally turned against them, and that the new government would be a Labour one.
At lunch only the day before, Andrew had complained, ‘If they get in this time there will be no end to this recession. I can’t see how the building trade can ever hope to recover.’
Andrew was on the committee that had selected the new Conservative candidate, a barrister from London. Inevitably, the Frosts were holding an election night party.
‘Let’s damn well pray there’s something to celebrate,’ he had said to Gordon when he delivered the invitation.
Gordon’s mind was elsewhere as he negotiated the traffic in the town centre. He was thinking that the time he had spent away from home, sleeping in his office and then the hotel, pleading with Vicky and all the time longing for Nina, had faded until it had taken on almost the remembered quality of a vivid dream. He had felt as if he was in a dream when he met Nina yesterday outside her house.
He had longed to touch her when they stood side by side staring up at the stained glass. It made no difference that he could not, and that they both knew he would not; the longing was no less intense. The reality that had replaced the dream was home, and Vicky, and his daughters, but he still loved Nina.
He knew that he was probably an object of pity amongst their friends: Poor Gordon, whose wife had thrown him out and who had eventually been allowed to creep back home once he had come to his senses. He did not even mind that. He had failed some test of bravery or initiative and turned back instead of running forwards, to Nina and whatever would come after, so pity was no less than he deserved.
The loss of her, his recognition that he was the man who would stand still with his eyes open instead of leaping into space, that was the worst he would have to live with.
Gordon reached the bypass, driving the route he took every day without seeing a metre of it. But as he turned towards the business park he recognized a car coming the other way. It was driven by Michael Wickham, who raised one hand to him in a negligent wave.
Michael drove on, towards Pendlebury, in the opposite direction from the hospital. He and a group of other surgeons were to spend the day attending a fund management conference, but the first session that was relevant to his own speciality did not start until midday. He had started out too early, knowing that one of the routes he could choose would take him close to Wilton. He had hardly seen Hannah since Méribel, and when he rounded a corner and caught a glimpse of the house on its hill he knew that he had intended all along to call on her this morning.
His car rolled slowly up the gravel drive under the trees that were fuzzed with the first green of spring. Michael eyed the house when he reached it. There seemed to be far too many windows, each with the glass polished and the white paint fresh and clean, and with the internal layers of blinds and thick curtains and ruched pelmets hinting at the further opulence within. There was no expense spared at Wilton.
But Darcy could afford it, Michael thought. Why should Hannah not enjoy the benefits, if that was what pleased her?
The Range Rover and Hannah’s BMW were parked to one side of the house, but Darcy’s Maserati was missing. Michael had been perfectly prepared to encounter Darcy. He would have drunk a cup of coffee with him and declined the offer of an early drink, and they would have talked desultorily about the election prospects and health service funding before he drove on to his conference. But he was pleased to discover that there would be no necessity for that. Nor was there any sign of the cars belonging to Darcy’s grown-up children, or the au pair girl’s Fiat.
He left his own car and walked swiftly