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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found her own determination in this softening of his. ‘And what if it is that?’
‘We’ll fix it, don’t worry.’
She put her fingers on his arm. They felt claw-like as she dug into the layers of his clothes.
‘I don’t want it fixed. If it’s your baby, our baby, I want to have it. I’ve thought of nothing else for a week, Jimmy –’
He shook off her hand and then grabbed her by the shoulders. Her head wobbled and she sobbed a little because his face in the half-light combined all the familiar features that she loved with a different and frightening expression that made her want to get out of the car and run.
‘You can’t have any baby. I’m not your husband, I’m married already, and you’re nineteen years old. See sense.’
‘Sense? Is that sense? Don’t you want a child, your own baby? You haven’t got any children. I can give you this one. You must want to be a father!’
Her teeth rattled in her head with the shake he gave her.
‘No, I don’t. Not like this. Neither do you.’
Lucy breathed in a gulp of air against the wails of loss and fear rising up through her chest and into her throat. Her thoughts and intentions blurred and skittered in her head and then began to slip ahead of her, out of her reach, dragging her in their wake.
‘If you won’t hear me I’ll tell your wife. I’ll tell Star and she will know you want to murder your own baby.’
Jimmy grabbed at her but Lucy had already flung open the car door. She staggered for two steps and then tensed as she heard him springing after her. Fear made her run faster as she fled up the Frosts’ driveway and plunged in through their front door.
A burst of noise seemed to strike her in the face. There were people in the hallway cheering and jostling, chanting, ‘Five more years.’
Lucy slipped past them, searching for Star in her black and white stripes, needing to find her before Jimmy caught up with her. She sensed rather than saw that he had been enveloped in the hubbub inside the door, and she stumbled on with the crowd around her into the kitchen.
Lucy saw her father in the middle of the room with a dozen people laughing around him. Darcy himself was not laughing. His face was solemn as he lifted a bottle of champagne in the air in front of him like a trophy. Lucy could see his thumbs whitening as he pressed upwards on the cork.
The room was full of noise but there was an eye of silence in the centre of it, containing him. The effort of forcing the cork showed in his face. His mouth drew back from his teeth and his eyes began to close.
Everything seemed to happen very slowly, there in the silent eye.
As Lucy watched him her father’s face darkened and distorted into a mask of pain. There was a sheen of sweat on him that glinted in the light. The champagne bottle fell out of his hands and rolled away, unopened.
Then Darcy’s body buckled underneath him and he slipped sideways, toppling into the thicket of people.
There was a gasp that shivered into the silent bubble, but even as she heard it there was a jubilant voice beside Lucy.
‘A majority of at least twenty. Break out the bubbly,’ it cried out.
‘Darcy!’ Someone else was calling out his name. A note of shock and disbelief.
A press of people surged around him, and he disappeared from her sight.
Andrew and Vicky were closest to him. Andrew tried to fend off the willing hands and looming faces.
‘Keep back. Give him some air.’
Vicky knelt beside the tumbled body. She put her hands to Darcy’s grey face and found that it was clammy. Then she lowered her face to his in the parody of a kiss and felt the faint stirring of his exhaled breath. With fingers thickened with fear she struggled to loosen his tie and dragged open the neck of his shirt. There was a violent movement in the silent circle above her head and Lucy fell beside her.
‘Daddy? Daddy?’
Andrew put his arm around her and tried to lift her away but she was clinging to her father’s hand. Vicky looked down into Darcy’s face. She had no idea what she should do. She heard her own voice begging,
‘Find Michael. Somebody get Michael.’
She bent over Darcy again. Her fingers pinched his nose and she dipped her head once more so that her mouth covered his. She blew air into his lungs and when she listened she heard the sigh of his exhalation. His lips moved, forming a word that she could not distinguish. The realization that he was alive fanned her desperation.
‘For God’s sake, where’s Michael?’
The question rippled outwards. No one in the kitchen had seen him. Lucy and Vicky knelt on either side of Darcy with Andrew at his head. His face was grey but he was breathing. They could hear the painful indrawn gulp and the rasp in his throat as the air escaped again. His mouth was open and a thread of saliva looped from it. Vicky wiped it away.
‘Call for an ambulance,’ Andrew ordered.
Lucy heard Jimmy using the kitchen extension a yard from her head. She looked up and saw him with Star at his side.
There were voices beyond the kitchen, calling for Michael. Marcelle and Janice came in from the dining room, their faces white with shock.
‘He’s here somewhere,’ Marcelle was saying. ‘Isn’t he watching the television?’
Barney and Cathy appeared together, from the upstairs room where they had been playing games on William Frost’s computer. The kitchen doorway was jammed with murmuring people.
‘Keep everyone else out, Jan,’ Andrew said.
‘Where’s Hannah?’ Barney asked from his father’s side.
The flesh of Hannah’s inner thigh was as soft as butter. Michael rolled the tight nylon skin down to her plump knee and then knelt to slide his tongue upwards. Hannah lay back against the cushions, a serene odalisque in the darkness. When he lifted his head he could just see the lazy glint of her smile.
He heard a voice, and then several voices calling out, but he did not listen. No one would come to the pool house, and his senses were occupied with the taste and the scent and the softness of Hannah.
Then he heard his name. It was his name that was being called. The seat creaked and Hannah sat up, and then they did listen, frozen into stillness.
‘Michael. Where’s Michael?’
‘Someone is hurt,’ he whispered. ‘Shit.’
He scrambled to his feet, brushing at his clothes and raking his hair with his fingers, a pantomime adulterer. Hannah held out his jacket and he took it from her, pushing his arms into the sleeves.
‘Wait here for a few minutes,’ he told her.
He left the pool house and ran, slipping on the damp grass. The French windows were open and light spilled through the pergola and over the flower beds. There were knots of anxious people peering into the garden. He stopped running when he saw them, and tried to stroll with his hands in his pockets.
‘He’s out here, in the garden,’ someone called.
‘What’s going on?’ Michael asked, as he stepped into the house.
Darcy was lying on the kitchen floor with his children and Vicky and Andrew kneeling around him like saints in some religious tableau. His eyes were open.
‘Don’t crowd him,’ Michael snapped. ‘Has someone rung for an ambulance?’ They moved back, silently and obediently, to let him through with his package of doctorly skills.
As he bent over Darcy, he could hear the murmuring voices, ‘Where’s Hannah? Somebody