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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closely Marcelle was watching. Hannah faced him, stepping backwards a little in the thick blue dusk. He saw the cushiony oval of her half-open mouth. Without saying anything Michael took hold of her. There were seams in her tight clothes that constricted the flesh beneath and made him think of the swollen hemispheres of summer fruit. He breathed in the scent of her hair and her skin as he kissed her, his fingers at the neck of her yellow shirt. Michael’s head revolved with dizzy calculations about the desk and the open windows, and the compound scents of the Frosts’ pool house came back to confuse him.
‘Not now,’ Hannah whispered. ‘We can’t now.’
Michael felt the tiny twist of her smile as she kissed him in return. Hannah liked her own power, and it gave him a pleasurable, abject sense of his own helplessness to be made her victim.
‘Yes, we can. No one will come in.’
She was already half lying on Gordon’s desk. Michael could just make out a neat pile of household bills, a dish of paper clips.
‘No. Marcelle’s outside. Darcy’s somewhere, you saw how he was.’
Irritation blurred Michael’s desire. He knew that Hannah would not give way, and he wondered why he was trying to coerce her.
‘When, then?’
‘Come to the shop on Tuesday evening. At closing time.’
She had planned it already, and his desire for her renewed itself. There was no question that he would not go; he could not even remember what he was supposed to be doing on Tuesday evening.
‘Yes. I’ll come. You know that I will, I suppose?’
Hannah slipped away from underneath him. Outside a light clicked on, illuminating the garden. They could see each other clearly, and the arrangement of Gordon’s paperwork on his desk, and they both heard the clink of plates and the scrape of chairs as the tables were cleared. Michael walked slowly around the desk and sat down in the chair. He swivelled it through an arc, and pressed his fingers together at the point of his chin.
‘What about Darcy?’ he asked reluctantly.
Hannah sat down in another chair. They were both aware of this parody in their positions of the doctor and his patient. Michael thought that anyone looking in from the garden would see them sitting in exactly the blameless way that they ought.
‘You can see how he is tonight. I don’t know if he feels afraid, or weakened, and can’t bear to show it even to me. There are all these’ – Hannah’s hands chopped at the air – ‘side issues of the booze, and his aggression, and the determination to go on doing business as if nothing has happened, and he makes them so dense that I can’t see through them to the reality. But I think he is afraid. I can feel it seeping out of him when he’s asleep. He sleeps badly, and his muscles quiver like a dog’s.’
‘Do you think there is anything else he is worrying about? Beyond the fact that he suffered a heart attack a month ago?’
After a moment Hannah said, ‘No. What could there be?’
‘I imagine that it is difficult for a powerful individual like Darcy to admit the truth of his own physical vulnerability. His reaction might take a dozen different forms. There might well be other manifestations yet, before he comes properly to terms with it. And Darcy is a complicated man.’
Michael offered her the reassurance, although he thought that Darcy’s brand of bullish confidence was in fact rather straightforward.
Hannah nodded. She said, as if it was important to make the point, ‘I still love him. And I think I hate him as well.’
‘I don’t think that is particularly uncommon,’ Michael said softly. ‘Do you? Sitting where we are now?’
He felt as if his ears were tuned to previously inaudible frequencies. He could hear the high-pitched humming of sexual conspiracy minutely disturbing the air between the couples and radiating beyond them, through his own and Hannah’s and other people’s marriages outwards into infinity.
Darcy might die, he thought again. All the possibilities of confusion, of responsibilities that he might have to bear nudged at him. I still love him, Hannah had said. She had her own weakness, he understood, in spite of her apparent power. He looked at her now, as if she were really a patient in the chair beside his desk, and felt himself caught between pity and desire.
‘No,’ Hannah agreed at length. ‘I suppose it is quite ordinary.’ Then she smiled at him, her face warming and lightening. ‘I’m glad you are here. I’m glad of this, between us.’
‘That’s good,’ Michael said, feeling his own fraudulence.
Star and the Frosts had gone inside with Vicky and Gordon, and Marcelle and Jimmy were left alone in the garden. Jimmy had secured the half-spilled wine bottle, and he refilled their glasses. Marcelle drank in the vague hope that alcohol might anaesthetize her. She wished that she was not here, but could not think of anywhere else to be. The lights on the house wall shone too brightly overhead; she closed her eyes for a second and a painful red glare burned behind her eyelids. There was no light showing at the window of Gordon’s study.
‘Let’s walk down the garden,’ Jimmy proposed, breaking the silence. He offered her his arm in an old-fashioned gesture.
The garden was dark and soothing beyond the glare of the terrace lights. The rank scent of earth and crushed grass grew stronger, released by their silent feet. It made Jimmy think of the last time he had seen Lucy, and the brambled clearing in the wood. He swallowed his anxiety slightly more easily. If Darcy knew anything, it would have come out tonight.
Jimmy and Marcelle sat down together on a wooden seat at the end of the garden, hidden from the house by the rounded bulwark of a silver-frosted ilex. Marcelle wrapped her arms around herself. She felt as if she were slipping out of sight, down some treacherous slope into a mire of isolation. She wondered, as she identified the sensation, if this were no more than weakness and whether some act of self-discipline might set her upright again in the landscape of ordinary life. Jimmy stuck up in the middle of the slope like a healthy tree that might break her sliding descent.
‘Do you think I’m a fool?’ she asked abruptly.
He answered at once, ‘No. Not any kind of fool. What makes you ask?’
Marcelle’s head fell back. Jimmy’s arm rested along the seat behind her; it was a luxury to lie against him. She had felt the same earlier, when she had touched his collar and noticed the prickle of reddish hair at the nape of his neck. The confirmation of touch, she thought absently. The comfort of it. There had been nothing with Michael, neither touch nor comfort, for a long time. Her loneliness focused sharply, burning like the pinpoint of sun through a magnifying glass. And then, with a sudden flare of anger she thought, Why should I be denied it, why only me? When everyone else takes what they want …
Without any warning, she was overtaken by a jolt of longing, a need for love that was stronger and seemed more affirmative than anything she had felt for a long time.
She had almost blurted out her fears about Michael and Hannah, but now her queasy anxiety contracted, diminished by the urgency of the new feeling. She remembered clearly what had happened on Christmas Eve, the secret she had shared with Jimmy and then wished she could take back into her own custody. Jimmy was not the right recipient for her confidences, if there were anything to confide. But Jimmy felt like her friend. More than a friend, as he had offered to be on dozens of occasions in the past. Jimmy was what she needed.
‘What makes you ask?’ Jimmy repeated softly. She could tell he was smiling.
Marcelle was thinking that they were like dominoes standing in a tidy row. Then Nina had been set down carelessly at the end of the line and she had toppled over, and the couples had begun falling on top of each other in obedient sequence all along the line, and now the momentum had reached her and it was her turn to fall too. The thought made her want to laugh, and then to her surprise she realized that she was laughing, out loud, resting her head against Jimmy’s arm