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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same time. ‘Dumb of me to think he would, really.’
They heard a car coming too fast up the drive and a peppering of thrown gravel as it braked in front of the house.
‘Barney’s back,’ Cathy remarked.
Lucy looked up. There were more tears in her eyes. ‘I’m so lucky I’ve got you, and Barney. Now Dad’s ill, and Jimmy’s not here where I thought he was. We can stick together, the three of us, can’t we?’
‘You know we can.’
They sat on the bed, with cigarette smoke curling around their heads, knowing they were allies.
‘Luce, what do you want us to do about this?’
With the thought of Cathy and Barney to support her, Lucy’s will reasserted itself. She said with new determination, ‘I don’t want Dad or Hannah to know anything about it. I don’t want Star to, either.’
‘That will suit Jimmy,’ Cathy said.
There was even defiance now. ‘It suits me, too. And I don’t want his help. If it has to be done, we’ll do it on our own.’
And then, as the tide of her momentary courage ebbed again, Lucy curled on her bed as she had done beside Jimmy in the clearing, and gave herself up to tears once more. Cathy sat beside her, patting her shoulder and rubbing the curve of her spine, waiting for the storm to blow itself out.
They heard running feet on the stairs, and Cathy leaned to look out of the window. A moment later she saw Barney jump into his Golf and drive away again.
‘I wonder where Barney’s going in such a hurry, all smartly dressed?’ she mused.
At last Lucy sat up, swollen-eyed. Cathy lit yet another cigarette and gave it to her. ‘Thanks.’ Lucy blew out a long, meditative plume of smoke. The first glimmer of considerations beyond her own broke through to her. ‘Why are you home? I thought you had to be at the Pond today or get thrown off the course.’
‘Yeah, I did. But Marcelle was ill, so her class was cancelled. She came in, but she had to go home with a migraine. She looked pretty awful. Not like her, really. I’ve never known Marcelle call in sick before.’
Lucy was sitting smoking with her chin resting on her drawn-up knees. She had no views on Marcelle to contribute.
Michael walked down Southgate, the best shopping street in Grafton. He had left his car in the multistorey park, in a remote corner of the top level, although in these last few minutes of the shopping day there were plenty of spaces lower down. Most of the shops along the street were already closing. The jeweller’s steel shutters had been drawn down, and also those of the expensive wine merchant two doors further along.
He had already seen that La Couture was still open; the curly gold lettering on the navy-blue shop front was lit by two brass spotlights. There was a single dress in the bow window, a black velvet sheath with a nimbus of gold-coloured gauze around the bodice. He could imagine Hannah wearing it, with her creamy shoulders set off to perfection by the golden halo.
Michael paused at the door of the shop. There was a sign hanging against the glass that announced ‘Open’ in the same curly script as the shop front. Then he looked beyond the sign into the honey-coloured interior. He saw Hannah sitting at a spindly desk towards the back of the shop. She was reading, with a pair of tortoiseshell-rimmed glasses slipping down her nose. A bell tinkled somewhere over Michael’s head as he pushed the door open.
Hannah looked up. Her hair was piled up on top of her head and she was dressed in a navy-blue suit with big gold buttons down the front. The clothes and her spectacles gave her a businesslike appearance that was new to Michael, and completely enticing.
‘I’m afraid I haven’t come to buy a cocktail dress,’ he said.
Hannah took off her glasses and chewed meditatively on one of the arms.
‘No? You don’t want a little number for the golf club dance? The parents’ party? I’m sure I could find something to suit you.’
‘Ah, I don’t think so. But do you mind my calling by like this?’
Hannah folded her glasses and placed them on the desk in front of her. She put her stocklist aside and stood up. He thought she was coming to him and he clumsily lifted his arms, but she slipped past in the confined space and went to the door instead.
‘Do I mind? No, I don’t mind. I looked up and there you were at the door like the beginning of a fantasy. I was about to lock up. It’s gone six, isn’t it?’
She flipped over the sign, turned a key, and locked them inside the shop. Then she went to a row of switches, and the lights illuminating the window and the shop front blinked out. They were left cocooned in the glowing interior.
Michael gazed around him. He had never been inside La Couture before. It was like stepping into a box of elaborate, expensive fondant sweets. Everything was pale and soft and scented, and every surface was padded and buttoned and puffed. There were thick carpets and curtains and drapes in cream and honey beige and dull gold, and in the middle of the floor was a plump satin-covered chaise longue heaped with glossy magazines. The clothes hung around the walls, spotlit at intervals like pieces of modern art. They were all velvets and silks and clouds of net; there was nothing here that acknowledged the world of work, of lives lived before six o’clock in the evening.
Michael felt the exotic scent and softness of the place rising around him like a tide. The remoteness from reality seemed female and mysterious and drowningly erotic, and he saw Hannah in the midst of it, pale-skinned and luscious, the very embodiment of these sensations. He remembered the pool house, the creaking of the swing seat and the contrasting musty scents of canvas and creosote and dried grass.
‘Are we safe here?’ he whispered to her.
Hannah nodded, smiling, her mouth incurving and offering him dimples and tiny cushiony recesses.
‘Yes. No one will come in now.’
‘But they can see in, from out there.’ He gestured to the wet cobbled reality of Southgate, Grafton, beyond the curved glass of the window.
‘Not through here, they can’t.’
Hannah took his hand to guide him. He followed her at right angles beneath an arch. There were more curtains here, striped cream and honey, and thick gold tassels to fasten them. Michael saw a wall of mirrors, and the fabric over their heads gathered like an Ottoman tent. Hannah turned off more lights, and then let a curtain fall behind them so they were enclosed in the secret space with only their own reflections to observe them.
‘Fitting rooms,’ she whispered. ‘Women need privacy to be pinned and tucked and stitched into their own fantasies.’
Michael stood behind her as they faced the mirrors. For a long moment they just looked at one another.
Then he put his hands up to cover her breasts. There was a deep V at the front of her dark vendeuse’s jacket. Watching himself as he did it, and with Hannah’s reflected wide eyes on his face, Michael undid the gold buttons one by one. Underneath there was black lace, and her white powdered skin, and the cleft between her breasts. Little rims of flesh were pushed up above the waistband of her tight skirt, which had been hidden from him by the peplum of her jacket. He loved the ampleness of her, the promise of softer folds and curves to be released from the constriction of her clothes. He found the zip at her waist, and Hannah dreamily arched her back against him.
‘Have you done this in here before?’ he said into the curve of her neck. ‘In front of these mirrors?’
‘No. But I have imagined how it would be.’
‘Like this?’
‘No,’ Hannah confessed. ‘Not nearly as good as this.’
She turned to face him, and over her bare shoulder he watched his hands slipping over her hips and her bottom, then greedily drawing her against him. He ducked his head to kiss her,