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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in the black tin box before walking to the door where Vicky was waiting for him. She looked serene, with an air of pleasure in having done the right thing.
‘Trouble making up your mind?’ she joked as they left.
‘A brief meditation on the responsibility of the voter.’ He smiled at her.
At Andrew’s party Jimmy Rose answered him. ‘The night will tell, but I hope to God you’re wrong. Still, they can’t make me pay tax on what I’m not making, can they?’
Star had left his side as soon as they arrived. She was wearing a black-and-white striped jacket with a red rosebud in the buttonhole. It was a joke among the couples that Star was the only Labour voter who was allowed to cross Andrew Frost’s threshold, and Star had been known to retort that Andrew was as guilty of tokenism as the BBC.
The noise level was rising. There was a deliberate gaiety as they absorbed enough wine to fortify themselves for the results. Andrew plied his bottles and Janice ordered everyone to come and eat while there was nothing else going on. There was an elaborate cold buffet laid out in the dining room.
The Cleggs arrived late, complete with Barney and the twins. Barney was carrying a case of Bollinger which Darcy presented to Andrew.
‘Put the whole lot in the fridge. We’ll crack it as soon as we know we’ve won, and I’m not going home until it’s all drunk.’
There was a mottled flush across Darcy’s cheeks and a new looseness about his throat that made him look unkempt, although his hair was sleekly brushed and he was wearing one of his emphatic chalk-striped suits. He declined wine, and filled himself a tumbler of whisky.
The three younger Cleggs and Hannah melted into the thick of the party. Hannah was wearing a bright green dress made of some shimmery material.
‘I’m announcing what I voted,’ she proclaimed.
‘Save the Hedgerows, Hannah?’ someone teased her. ‘Andrew, did you know we’ve got a traitor to the cause here?’
‘It’s not quite obligatory to vote Conservative,’ Marcelle protested. ‘I voted Lib Dem, as it happens.’
‘The Pantsdown party? Adulterers unite?’
There was a small, shivery silence in the heart of the party before someone else’s boisterous laughter crashed over it and the waves of talk washed it away.
‘Please come and eat,’ Janice begged.
They crowded into the dining room and spooned her good food on to their plates, settling to eat and drink and talk before the television coverage began. Only Lucy Clegg ignored the food, but she filled and refilled her glass of wine. Marcelle found a corner of a sofa and picked at a salad until Jimmy came and sat beside her.
‘Sad face,’ he said gently. ‘Why’s that?’
Marcelle gazed at the animation round them. She could hear the ebb and flow of three different conversations but couldn’t think of anything to contribute to any of them. Tiredness dragged at her.
‘Do I look sad? I don’t mean to.’
Darcy was in the nearest group, talking loudly and stabbing with his fork to emphasize his words. Marcelle thought wearily that she must have been to a hundred Grafton evenings with the same or similar permutations of people.
‘Talk to Uncle Jimmy,’ he cajoled her. He did not look much like an uncle, with his bright eyes and demonic smile.
‘I talk too much as it is.’ Gordon and Vicky were across the room, in a group that included Barney Clegg and the Kellys. Jimmy followed the direction of her glance.
‘These things pass,’ he said smoothly. ‘See?’
*
At eleven o’clock the big television was turned on. Jon Snow’s face filled the screen.
‘Is that a positively impartial tie or has he just spilled something?’ Hannah called.
There were other cries for quiet. The experts’ view at the close of polling was that the result was too close to call. There were ironic cheers and whistles.
Andrew had photocopied the newspapers’ lists of marginal and key seats and he distributed them amongst the watchers. The political enthusiasts prepared themselves for the first results while the rest of the party congregated in noisy groups in the kitchen and elsewhere. Cathy Clegg indicated to Lucy that they might slip away soon, but Lucy mutely shook her head. She hovered at the margin of the gathering, holding firmly to her glass and keeping her face turned away from Jimmy. She was paler and less pretty than usual.
Star sat on a tall stool by one of the kitchen counters with a half-full bottle of wine beside her. She looked elegant in her striped jacket. The rosebud in her buttonhole was beginning to unfurl in the warmth. Gordon slid into the place next to her and filled his glass from her bottle.
‘How long until Darcy’s champagne, I wonder?’ he murmured.
‘For ever, I hope,’ Star said crisply.
He smiled at her. ‘I’m sorry, I forgot. And you’re wearing your party badge, as well.’
There was a shout from the television room as the first result was declared.
‘Don’t you want to go and watch?’ she asked.
‘No. It won’t make much difference, whoever gets in.’
‘Yes, it will.’ Her contradiction was vehement, and Gordon envied her the conviction that altered and animated her face. But he did not want to embark on a political argument with Star tonight.
‘How are you?’ he asked instead.
‘Nothing has changed. You know how I am.’
It was an acknowledgement of some unfinished business between them that now never would be completed. Star drank her wine and Gordon noticed as he had done before that she wore her sadness like armour.
Vicky was watching the television in the other room and no one else in the kitchen was in earshot.
Star looked up and said, ‘I have been seeing Nina. I like her. We made a kind of agreement that we might be friends.’
It gave him pleasure to hear her name spoken with plain affection.
‘I’m glad. I know she needs a friend, and she couldn’t find a better one than you.’ He was aware that he had been less than stalwart for both Nina and Star, and there was the flat taste of disappointment in his mouth.
There was a chorus of groans and some booing from the television room.
‘Sounds like we won one,’ Star said.
Darcy looked at his watch. It was not yet one o’clock, and although the signs were promising there was no clear victory yet. He glanced around for Hannah, but could not see her. He did not particularly want champagne. His head felt fuzzy as if his skull no longer properly defined it and there was a weight beneath his diaphragm that threatened to expand into pain. But the moment of victory and the uncorking of champagne to mark it gave him something close at hand on which to focus his attention. He heard himself shouting some imprecation at the red and blue figures on the television screen. They suddenly began to dance in front of his eyes, and the burst of laughter that followed seemed to come from a long way off. He reached out for his glass which had been empty and found that it had been refilled for him. He drank down some more of the whisky.
Barney sat on the stairs talking to the two Frost boys. They had been allowed to stay up for the first results, and Janice had not yet noticed that they were still out of bed.
‘We had a mock election in our class,’ Toby told him. He was much more confident and articulate than his younger brother. ‘I was the Labour candidate and I got seven votes.’
‘Seven? That’s not much,’ William jeered. In William’s face the rounded contours of babyhood