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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had touchingly blotted over the soft, pouchy skin beneath the lashes. The rain clattered against the windows, isolating them in the hotel bedroom with its glazed chintzes and empty cupboards. Michael thought the moment was both sexy and melancholy, but when he turned his mind to try to pin down either his excitement or sadness they both slid away from him, leaving him standing awkwardly in his wet clothes, with Hannah in her towels held against him.
‘I’m cold,’ she said.
‘Have a bath and get into bed. I’ll order us some tea.’
It was five in the afternoon. They had already spent one night together, under the grey eye of the television perched at the foot of the bed. Michael had tried to submerge himself in Hannah, until his insistence had made her ask him, only half-jokingly, ‘What are you trying to prove, Mister Wickham? This isn’t a competition.’
‘I just want you,’ he had answered. ‘I can’t help it. Do you want it to be different?’
Only he had not been able quite to submerge himself, however intimately he connected himself to the folds and fissures of Hannah’s body, and so he was troubled by a sense of separation from her. She was still herself, and desirable to him, but they were not quite easy with each other. Michael found that he was thinking about Marcelle and his children, that their faces and voices inserted themselves between Hannah and himself when he had wanted to dismiss them for these few hours.
Today Michael had followed Hannah to some designers’ showrooms. He had sat apart, uncomfortable in a visitor’s chair, while house models paraded clothes in front of Hannah. He had liked to see this other, businesslike side of her, but she shrugged at his questions.
‘It’s just a matter of picking what I like, what I think I can sell. I don’t even need to go to the showrooms, really. I made the appointments to give myself an alibi for being here with you.’
He had been flattered by that, but the sense of distance between them had not been dispelled. They ate an indifferent lunch in a restaurant he had chosen from The Good Food Guide, and afterwards, without admitting that they felt at a loss, they went into the National Gallery. They had wandered through the Sainsbury Wing with the tourists, exiled from their proper setting along with the Japanese groups and elderly American couples, and had emerged into the downpour.
Michael felt energized by the plunge through the streets, and the stinging rain, as if the woolly insulation between Hannah and himself had been washed away. When she emerged from her hot bath, pink and glowing, his desire for her recharged itself without any tinge of guilty melancholy. The tray of tea with silver teapot and thin china was brought by a white-coated waiter, but when he had withdrawn they left it to go cold on the side table. Michael knelt over Hannah’s rosy body so she could close her warm mouth around him.
He felt as he had done the first time, within the curtains of her shop, and afterwards clean, hollowed out, reconciled. He lay for a while, drifting in the trivial backwaters of his own imagination.
Then, when he looked at Hannah’s face on the pillow beside him, he was amazed to see that she was crying.
‘What is it? Hannah, what have I done?’
At first she wouldn’t say anything. She shook her head, and more tears squeezed out from beneath her eyelids.
‘You must tell me. I can’t put it right, unless you tell me.’ A flicker of irritation came with a sense of his own powerlessness.
‘It’s all right,’ she muttered, contradicting everything he could see. ‘It’s nothing to do with you. Or not really. I felt lonely, suddenly.’
‘Lonely, when we are this close?’ He smiled, with his mouth against her cheek, to comfort her. But his awareness of the distance between them returned, intensified by Hannah’s recognition of it too. Looking at the close tangle of her hair, robbed by the rain of its springy lift from her skull, he saw that the roots were darker than the honey-coloured strands. Her vulnerability oppressed him.
Hannah cried for a minute, snuffling damply against his shoulder. Then she lifted her head and stretched her round arm to the brocade-boxed bedside tissues.
‘Sorry.’
‘Don’t be silly. But I don’t like to see you cry.’ That was true. It was the courageous, chair-lift Hannah he valued, the foil to his own cowardice, and her erotic mutation into the woman he had discovered within the Ottoman tent of her shop. He did not care so much for this weepy, sniffing version of his love.
‘I’m worried about Darcy. I’m afraid of what will happen next, and he won’t tell me anything except that it’s going to be all right.’
‘Of course you are worried.’ Michael stroked her hair.
‘I’m worried mostly that I won’t be able to cope with whatever it is that’s coming. Arrest, trial, I don’t know. I want to be able to withstand whatever he has to face up to, and I’m afraid of letting him down.’
The tears had started to gather again at the corners of her eyes. She dabbed at them with her wodge of tissues.
‘I am completely certain that you will be able to cope,’ Michael assured her. ‘I know you well enough for that.’
‘Do you think?’
‘I know.’
Hannah blew her nose. ‘I think I just needed a good cry.’ Then she laughed, with the corners of her mouth wobbling as if she were a film actress who had been told to go for a close-up. ‘That’s better. Stupid, isn’t it? If this isn’t letting him down, I wonder what is.’
‘Do you wish we hadn’t come?’
‘No,’ Hannah said, after she had thought. ‘I don’t wish that.’ She snuggled closer to him and he put his arm around her, settling his chin against her ruined hair.
‘What would you like to do this evening?’ Michael asked.
‘Nothing. Stay here like this and watch television. Have room service later, with those silver domes on a heated trolley disguised as a table.’
He picked up the television remote control and clicked it.
They lay back amidst the tangle of sheets and pillows and watched the end of Channel 4 News. Michael felt that the fragile shell of their intimacy had been tossed like a tiny boat through some storm and had pitched through it, waterlogged but still afloat, into a calmer sea.
It was this pleasure at the survival of some delicate organism that Michael took back with him to Grafton. Hannah had caught an early train, and Michael drove home alone. He realized that their brief, awkward time together had left him with a residue of happiness, and the happiness coloured the dull route and softened his apprehension at returning. He turned on the radio, and whistled as he drove. He felt a generalized affection and tolerance for all the world, and a new tenderness for his wife and children.
When he reached his house he first saw the front garden, the neat oval of raked gravel under the cherry tree and the peony bush heavy with red, taut buds, and then Marcelle’s car parked in front of the garage doors. He had expected that Marcelle would be at the school at this time of day, but there was still the ghost of a whistle in his head as he lifted his briefcase out of the car. He put his key in the front door and let himself in. The house was quiet but there was a comforting note that it took him a second to identify as the smell of cooking.
Michael walked through to the kitchen. Marcelle was there. She was standing at one of the worktops in a muddle of bowls and utensils. When she looked at him he saw that her face was like a cold blade.
‘How was the conference?’
He hesitated, apprehension prickling him. ‘Fine. Like the others. Interesting in parts. Why aren’t you at the school?’
‘Was your paper well received?’
‘Yes. Very well. Rather gratifying.’
Michael picked up the handful of letters waiting