Rosie Thomas 4-Book Collection: Other People’s Marriages, Every Woman Knows a Secret, If My Father Loved Me, A Simple Life. Rosie Thomas
have a mound of paperwork to do, love. If I clear it while you are in here I’ll have more time once you do get home. And I think it’ll be more unsettling for the girls to whisk them back again when they are expecting to stay longer with Marjorie and Alec. They’ll think something is wrong.’
Vicky pleated the white sheet between her fingers. Her stomach still made a noticeable mound under the covers.
‘It was just a thought.’
He put his hand over hers. ‘Mary and Alice are fine. How could they not be, with a mother like you?’
‘And a father like you.’ There were a dozen edges to her words.
Gordon felt the stubborn base rock of his resistance when he smiled back at her. ‘We’ll be okay. You rest and get your strength back.’
It was almost the end of visiting time. He leant over Vicky and kissed her as he had done when he arrived, but she would not look at him. Gordon’s queasy swell of tenderness and rancour was spiked with premonitory guilt.
‘See you tomorrow.’
‘Yes. Gordon?’
‘What is it?’
‘Is everything all right?’ The bland formula of a searching question, repeated. It delivered her fears up to him, a package that he should unwrap.
‘Of course it is. I want you to come home, that’s all.’ Bland and tidy lies, also, putting aside the parcel.
‘Only two or three more days.’ She leaned back against the pillows, relinquishing him.
On his way out Gordon found the ward sister in her office. He mentioned Vicky’s depression as if she might offer some potion to dispel it.
‘Nothing to worry about,’ she reassured him. ‘Mums with two or three children already at home often worry if they will be able to cope with the new one, you know. It can seem a daunting prospect, especially after the physical stress of a Caesar.’
The sister seemed young for a position of responsibility. She had a round face and short hair under her cap. Gordon noted her attractiveness, automatically, without further speculation.
‘Vicky will cope,’ he said. It was the rampart of maternal competence that she had erected that made him feel excluded, or at best edged out on to the margins of their female-strong family. The petulant thought eased his guilt a little.
‘With the right back-up,’ the sister said. Gordon caught the suggestion of a rebuke, but now that he was almost free he was ready to ignore it.
‘Naturally.’ He smiled at her.
He made his way down the corridors with the stream of departing visitors and out to his car.
The quiet house soothed him. Gordon walked through the rooms with a tumbler of whisky in his hand. He didn’t want anything to eat and in any case the spirit tasted much better than food, good and fiery in the back of his throat.
He went upstairs and into the children’s bedroom, and knelt beside Alice’s bed to bury his face in her pillow. He smelt the ghost of her in the sheets, and in her nightgown pushed under the quilt. The absence of his daughters’ antiphonal breathing, of the hot exhalations of childish dreams, made him long for them to be home again. But at the same time he savoured this brief isolation in his own house. He listened to the sounds of it, to the boiler firing and the swill of water in the pipes, with a freshly attuned ear.
Gordon stood up again and smoothed Alice’s pillow to remove the imprint of his face. He went through into the big bedroom and made a slow circuit of the bed. He had made it this morning but he could never make the white cover lie in the right folds, as Vicky did. The bed seemed lumpy, dishevelled, as if it was concealing something. Gordon picked up an ornate perfume bottle from the dressing table, and put it down again without sniffing at it. He moved the boxes and photographs, seeing the prints of them left in a faint film of dust. One of the top drawers was slightly open. He drew it out further, and looked in at the satiny straps and bones and folds of Vicky’s underwear.
He turned away and sat down heavily on his side of the bed. He picked up the bedside telephone and sat with it on his lap while he groped on a lower shelf for the directory. When he found it he flipped impatiently through the pages, searching for the name of the couple who had owned the Dean’s Row house before Nina. He found it quickly, and then dialled the number beside it without waiting to think.
She answered after two rings, saying her name rather than hello. Her voice sounded amused, as if she was smiling into the mouthpiece.
‘Nina, it’s Gordon. Gordon Ransome.’
‘Yes.’
It was a statement, not a question, making him think that she had even been expecting his call.
‘I wanted to talk to you.’
It was much easier to say it over the telephone. He felt suddenly that he might confess anything, and that she would listen with sympathy. ‘I couldn’t wait until tomorrow evening.’
He had crossed a divide. He couldn’t go back and pretend just to be a friendly conservationist. There was a new pressure within himself, like an inflating balloon, and he realized that it was happiness.
‘I’m glad you called. I wanted to talk, too. I thought you might be a friend of mine, Patrick, from London.’
Gordon was fired with jealousy of this unknown man.
‘Are you disappointed that it isn’t?’
Nina laughed then. ‘No. Not disappointed at all.’
Gordon felt this first avowal like a thread between them, stretching through the air from the well-worn territory of his house away into the darkness to some new terrain that was lying in wait for him to discover.
‘What are you doing?’ he asked.
‘Sitting in my kitchen. Looking at all these doors and cupboards with nothing much behind them.’
She had not wanted to sit in the upstairs drawing room because the view, and the ashes of the fire he had lit lying in the grate seemed too closely connected with him. She was as eager as a girl, and also fearful of whatever manoeuvres tomorrow evening would bring.
Gordon recalled the bareness of her house. ‘You are travelling light.’
‘It seemed the easiest way.’
He knew this was an acknowledgement of her reason for coming to Grafton and of the attendant truths that she would reveal to him in time, in their own shared time. He imagined these truths peeling away, like layers of fine tissue, each layer matched by a discarded layer of his own, until they knew each other entirely.
The vision made him confident and he asked, ‘Would you like me to come over now?’
After a fractional pause she answered, ‘No. Let’s meet tomorrow, as we arranged.’
It was illogical, but she felt the need to preserve some propriety, in case it became necessary to defend herself against him. She also wanted to give herself the pleasure of anticipation. It seemed a long time since she had looked forward to anything. She tried to imagine Gordon at the other end of the line, in some orderly domestic setting like Janice Frost’s, amidst children’s toys and family-dented furniture. A black wing shadowed her for an instant and then flew on.
‘Gordon?’
‘I’m still here.’
‘Is everything all right?’
The same question that Vicky had asked, meriting an altogether different answer.
‘Yes,’ he said simply, knowing that it was, and that if it was not they would make it so between them.
‘Good night, then,’ Nina whispered.
‘Good night. I will be there tomorrow.’
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