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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shirt, gold cufflinks,’ she murmured. ‘The very picture of a professional man.’
‘Half-dressed? In the changing room of a ladies’ frock shop?’
They were laughing as they stripped off the last obstacles of each other’s clothes. Michael let the shreds of her black lace drop on the floor behind him. And then, as suddenly as it had begun, the laughter stopped.
He put his hands on her waist and Hannah raised herself on tiptoe to bring her mouth level with his. He looked down at the roundness of her belly and the heavy swell of her hips, and at her small hand closed around him and the red marks in her flesh left by her constricting clothes, and he was filled with tenderness and longing for her.
‘Lie down,’ he told her.
Obediently she knelt and then lay back, and he knelt beside her and lifted her arms and then her legs so that she made a star for him against the pale carpet. He leaned over her and let his mouth travel slowly, exploring the map of her skin, until her head fell back and she lifted her hips and he found the soft centre of her.
‘Yes,’ he heard her whisper. ‘Yes, oh please, yes.’
Their striped and mirrored tent became a miraculous kingdom.
As he entered her, Hannah’s legs wound around his waist and they looked sideways to see their reflections, light and dark, locked together. Their faces appeared suffused, abstracted, unlike themselves and yet like each other, conspirators in pleasure. It was a long time since Michael had known pleasure like it. He felt that he was drowning in it, a death he reached out for, welcoming as it came.
Afterwards, when they lay wrapped in each other, Michael whispered to her, ‘I don’t want this moment ever to end. I don’t ever want to have to leave you.’
Her fingers touched his spine. He felt the caress of her fingers with their painted nails so intensely that he could see them, and he lost the distinction between felt and seen, mirrored and plain.
Hannah’s face had all the taut lines rubbed out of it. She lay gazing at Michael, half smiling, blurred by her own hair.
‘You make me happy,’ she said. ‘I didn’t expect you to.’
‘I can’t ever remember feeling so happy. I love you.’
She touched his mouth, warning him. ‘Be careful.’
‘I can’t be careful. It’s too late to be careful. I love you, Hannah.’
Warmth spread through her, under her skin, unpinning her. It’s too late to be careful.
‘I know,’ Hannah said simply, with her mouth against his.
‘I could have done this,’ Janice said in her comfortable, insistent way. ‘I should have done. It’s our tennis court that’s being christened, after all.’
She stood with her hands on her hips, head on one side, contemplating the two garden tables and the company of unmatched chairs arranged on the Ransomes’ terrace. Janice wore candy-striped Bermuda shorts, familiar from other summers, although this May Sunday evening was their first appearance this year. Their re-emergence seemed to mark the official opening of the summer season. The cuffs of the shorts came just above Janice’s plump, pretty knees.
Vicky shook out a William Morris print tablecloth and smoothed it over the sun-warmed wooden slats of one of the tables.
‘No, I wanted to do it. It’s time I did. We haven’t had anyone over for ages.’
She couldn’t even remember the last time she and Gordon had properly entertained the Grafton couples. It must have been before Helen was born. Long ago.
‘Will this be all right, do you think?’ she asked. ‘If we sit at this one, and put the children over there?’
‘Of course it will,’ Janice said. She was laying knives and forks on the flowered cloth, polishing each one with a tea towel before placing it. ‘There. Two, four, six, eight, and two more if the Cleggs make it. And six children, eight if the Cleggs ditto. Perfect.’
Janice wished she could bring everything else to order as easily as she marshalled the cutlery. She was troubled by the suspicion that too many familiar features of their lives were changing, and by a more obscure and generalized fear that she could not place, and found all the more alarming for that. She kept her anxiety under control by her attention to the glasses and plates.
Star had been wandering in the garden. It had been a hot day for early May, and the first cool of the early evening was welcome. The Ransomes’ garden was not as big as the Frosts’ but she had always liked it better. There were damp, wild corners here under the shade of tall trees, and even the flower beds nearer to the house were tangled with an unkempt mass of foliage that was the opposite of Andrew’s manicured borders.
She came back across the grass towards the house, with her hands full of lilies of the valley and scilla. She was thinking as she skirted the children’s noisy game of rounders that the three women on the terrace made a pleasing picture. Marcelle was sitting in a deck-chair, with one arm crooked behind her head. Janice and Vicky in their pale summery clothes moved calmly between the tables, and the sun slanted on the glasses they were laying out, making them look as if they had been poured full of light. The scents of grass and leaf mould mingled with barbecue charcoal, smoke and warmed earth.
Star held out her flowers to show Vicky. ‘I picked these for the table, is that all right?’
‘They’re lovely. Here, put them in these.’ Vicky held out two of the glasses and Star arranged the flowers in them, admiring the freshness of the tiny white and azure bells.
‘I was saying that I should have done dinner for everyone,’ Janice explained. ‘But really this is much better, thanks to Vicky. Otherwise it would have been tennis all evening as well as afternoon.’
‘It’s nice here,’ Star reassured them, as she was meant to do.
It had been a tradition amongst the five Grafton families to come together for a barbecue party in the first spell of fine weather of every summer. It was one of the cycle of parties and gatherings that made the landmarks in their year.
This year there was a new development. Andrew had recently installed an all-weather tennis court in his garden, and he had invited the men to play an inaugural afternoon match. And so the women had gathered in the Ransomes’ garden with the children to make companionable preparations for the evening, as they had done often enough before.
Only this evening everything was not quite the same.
The absence of the Cleggs was part of the difference. Darcy was out of hospital and installed at Wilton again, but the couples had not seen much of him. They agreed amongst themselves that he did not look fully recovered, although Hannah was determinedly cheerful. He needed rest, she insisted, that was all. She had promised that they would try to come to the barbecue, if Darcy was not too tired, but there was no question of his playing tennis. The others felt the chill of that. A month ago Darcy would have pitched himself into any match, energized by the competition and his own determination to win.
And yet, it was not only Darcy’s illness that had altered the pattern. Marcelle sat in her deck-chair with her head turned slightly to one side, seemingly a part of the little group but also separate from it.
Janice leaned over her once and asked, ‘Are you okay?’
‘Yes,’ Marcelle said immediately. ‘It’s just so nice, sitting here watching the children. But there must be something I can do to help. Vicky, what is there?’
‘Nothing. Sit right where you are.’
Marcelle did not know whether they exchanged concerned glances behind her head. She remembered how the women had murmured their anxiety for Vicky, and