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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Nothing,’ she managed to say.
‘I’m glad it’s funny, whatever it is,’ Jimmy said.
Marcelle stretched her arms and legs, cat-like, recognizing the cords of tension that had kept her hunched into herself for weeks.
The need for love and attention had not evaporated with her laughter. It had become a quite specific itch.
Slowly she turned her head to him. There was the outline of his small-nosed, tidy profile. Like a pleased dog, she thought. Or some nocturnal animal, tilt-eared and poised. When she lifted her hand to the nape of his neck the hairs felt very soft under her fingers. She stroked, tiny encouraging movements in the reddish fur. There was a thick, viscid heat between her thighs.
Jimmy’s top lip lifted, showing his teeth. He looked full at her. Marcelle was singingly glad of the darkness. She felt beautiful and queenly in it.
Then Jimmy leaned forward an inch and kissed her. It was a light, brotherly little kiss that fell at the corner of her dry mouth. Marcelle waited, imagining that she could trace the course of her blood through the cells and ventricles of her body. Then, in the flush of warmth, she tilted her head so that their lips touched again, and opened her mouth and kissed Jimmy in return. She had kissed him before, in the hazy glow of evenings when the couples drank and laughed and danced in each other’s houses, but there had never been an invitation in it until now. Tonight she made the invitation explicit with her tongue and her fingers knotting in his hair, drawing him towards her.
Jimmy’s arm was awkwardly trapped behind Marcelle’s shoulders. He noticed that her skin was hot; there was a faint, scorched scent coming off it as if she had a fever.
Jimmy liked Marcelle, because she was part of the spread of other men’s wives that was there for him to admire, but also because she was herself. He had imagined, quite pleasurably and not infrequently, what kind of lover she might be. Nor had he ever dismissed, in their amiable skirmishes, the interesting possibility that one day one of them might lead to his discovering whether or not his predictions were accur-ate. But now, with Marcelle’s tongue in his mouth and the pulse in her cheek ticking wildly against his, his only feeling was of dismay. He shifted on the bench, resisting the need to clear his throat.
Marcelle’s other hand came to rest, palm up, on his thigh. He grabbed hold of it and used the business of kissing her knuckles as an excuse to detach his mouth from hers.
He could only think of Lucy, Lucy white-limbed in the clearing in the wood and all the other times they had been together, but without any flicker of retrospective passion that might have come to his rescue now. He could only think of her as pregnant, a confusing double identification of her as both his innocent victim and the malevolent repository of a brood of accusations that might swarm out of her at any time, to home in on himself. He was smitten simultaneously with longing for her, and with the desire to escape from Grafton as quickly as possible before Darcy came for him. The relief he had felt at dinner was eaten up by certainty that it was only a matter of time before he was found out. Darcy had acted freakishly enough tonight to make Jimmy afraid of what there might be to come.
And now there was the painful irrelevance of Marcelle.
Jimmy wondered, with a tangential flicker of curiosity, if had it not been for Lucy he might have taken up Marcelle’s offer. A brief image entered his head of the two of them on this bench, with Marcelle straddled barelegged across him, her face tipped back in a spasm of pleasure. He dismissed the thought, with the possibility that he might return to it later, as he kissed the knuckle of Marcelle’s little finger again.
‘You don’t really want this, do you?’ he chuckled.
Marcelle hesitated. He felt the shiver of confusion in her.
‘This? Oh yes, I do.’
Who was he to tell her what she might or might not want?
There had been perhaps a minute for Marcelle when everything had seemed sweet and intense and also perfectly simple. She was desirable and desired and Jimmy would love her out here in the rustling garden and later, without knowing exactly how, she was sure she would close up this secret and carry it safely back into the couples’ evening and all the other evenings like an amulet.
Only now, she understood too late, she had opened herself up, like some saleswoman opening a case, and Jimmy had declined her.
‘Mar’ – his voice was cajoling, cracked with their mutual embarrassment – ‘you know I love you, but –’
Marcelle coldly interrupted him. ‘But you don’t want to fuck me. Have I got that right?’
Anger foamed up inside her. She would not try to laugh, to make it easy for him, so they could dismiss this as another episode in the saga of Jimmy’s flirtations. He had asked her often enough. What did he say, with his foxy little grin?
When? When Mike’s at the hospital?
He had allowed her – no, made her – think of him as her resort, for when she needed him. But it had been only to flatter himself, and nothing to do with her or her feelings and least of all to do with the unsavoury package of her needs and desires.
Marcelle had never felt such anger.
Mercifully the anger burned up her humiliation. She drew away her hand and wondered whether she should slap him with it. Her fingers itched, and she could already hear the way the sharp, satisfying crack would be taken up and amplified by the black air.
‘Of course I do,’ he mumbled. ‘Only here, in the garden, with Star and Mike in the house …’
‘Don’t lie about it,’ Marcelle said. ‘Don’t you know how disgusting it makes you seem?’
The desire to hit out left her. She stood up instead, and then ran back over the grass to the house.
‘Marcelle, wait a minute,’ Jimmy called after her.
Marcelle could see Michael. He was standing in the kitchen, his back to the window, talking to Gordon and Andrew. She put her fingertips up to her face and pushed the folds of burning skin back, taut, to open her eyes and drag her mouth into a smile. She stepped on to the terrace, into the glare of the lights. She was afraid of the feelings that would come later, but for the moment she had the armour of her clean, bright anger. She opened the door and walked into the kitchen, where all of them could see her.
Jimmy sat on the bench. He took out a cigarette and lit it, but he smoked only half before he threw it away from him with a quick gesture of distaste. Then he stood up and followed Marcelle to the house, stepping in his turn into the lights.
Vicky’s bedroom was the same, but Darcy’s memories of it seemed to belong to a much more distant past than the reality of a few months. He sat tentatively on the end of the bed in a ruck of cushions and what looked like a crocheted shawl with long, tangled fringes.
He was thinking back to the other times when he had come here, of Vicky standing in the thin, chilly sunshine of wintry mornings to unbutton the loose layers of her maternal clothes. He had entirely submerged himself, forgetting everything, in the blue-veined folds of her exposed body. He could recall the precise choreography of their passion as clearly as he could see the lace-bordered cushions, the intimate terrain of the white bedcover, but it was like studying a series of photographs of their encounters. He was cut off from that sweet series of mornings by the intervention of chaotic time as effectively as if by a steel door. He was possessed by the knowledge that he could not go back, or obliterate what had intervened, or even hope to make a partial repair. An overwhelming sense of loss weighed him down, and a nostalgia for his life as it had been then. His heart contracted and expanded in his chest, forcing a muddy and sluggish current around his body.
It was only when he was drunk that a proper perspective opened to him. Sober, Darcy knew, it was possible to feign a kind of busy blindness, to deceive himself as well as he deceived the others. But the day’s drinking had cleared his sight and he wondered if he should make some move before it was too late.
Still he went on sitting at the end of Vicky’s