Rosie Thomas 4-Book Collection: Other People’s Marriages, Every Woman Knows a Secret, If My Father Loved Me, A Simple Life. Rosie Thomas
with homosexuals, and Patrick’s defensiveness of Nina made him prickly.
Gordon was also disconcerted to realize that he had never considered that Nina might not be alone, even on the day after Christmas. They hadn’t discussed their separate holiday plans. Patrick’s presence, among the cushions and pairs of wine glasses, conjured up another world of Nina’s friends and diversions and allegiances in which he played no part. He felt a desolate, paradoxical jealousy.
He said, with his eyes fixed on her face, ‘I hoped we might be able to talk for a few minutes.’
Patrick’s eyebrows lifted. ‘I’ll go and make some tea, shall I?’
Nina smiled at him. ‘Could you?’
Gordon felt as if he had blundered into a game in which the unwritten rules were too subtle for him to comprehend. But as soon as Patrick had gone Nina came to him, putting her hands on his arms and reaching up to kiss him. He held her, longingly and unwillingly.
‘He knows about us, doesn’t he?’ Gordon asked.
‘I had to talk to somebody. I couldn’t keep so much so secret. Do you mind very much?’
She was bright-faced with happiness. He considered, briefly, whether he might not be able to conceal the real reason for his visit. Then they could sit down together in comfort amongst the discarded television pages and hollowed cushions. He hesitated, but her face was already changing, the happiness fading out of it.
‘What is it?’ she asked.
He noticed that in the time he had been in the room the light outside had faded from midwinter afternoon to premature dusk. In a moment the street lamps would come on at the margins of the green. When he didn’t answer at once she repeated,
‘What is it? Tell me.’
He sat down on the edge of the warm sofa. He remembered that he had lit the fire for her, on the first afternoon, and they had admired the view of the west front before it was obscured by scaffolding. Not many weeks ago. He could number them exactly, and the days, counted out in intervals by the number of times they had managed to see each other. In retrospect they seemed very few, for the weight of what he was having to do now.
‘Marcelle told Jimmy Rose that she saw us together.’
Nina gazed at him. The firelight polished her cheeks and the golden shields of her earrings.
‘Well. That is a pity.’
He waited, but she had nothing else to say. Her passivity irritated him until he remembered that she was an outsider and did not understand the shorthand of the Grafton couples.
‘If Jimmy knows it means everyone knows. Jimmy has never been one for keeping a titbit of gossip to himself.’
‘Vicky?’
‘Vicky will know soon enough, obviously. Someone will tell her.’
Nina was silent again.
Gordon had not thought directly of Vicky since he came into the room, but now he saw her as she had been when he left home with his headache to drive to the cathedral. Her mother and father had been with her, and he had noticed the way their features foretold her progress into old age just as Vicky’s predicted her own daughters’ maturity.
He had been quick with his gabbled excuses, and his wife had sighed, not looking him in the face. Her silence had made him afraid that somehow she must know the truth already, and the fear had made him hurry away to do what had to be done.
Nina raised her eyes to meet Gordon’s. In his head the features of the two women were briefly superimposed, as he had once envisaged their bodies at the start of the affair.
She said very quietly, ‘I see. What does this mean?’
‘It means that I must tell her the truth, before somebody else gives her a distorted version of it. And it also means that I can’t go on seeing you. I’m sorry. I wish I didn’t have to be so clumsy. I feel as if I have broken something that is irreplaceable.’
Nina sat still. Her eyes slid away from his, to the fire. When she spoke it was in the same quiet voice.
‘Don’t worry. Nothing’s broken.’
Whatever it was that Gordon had been afraid of, tears or protests or blame, did not come. Her face was immobile, and her silence meant that he had to talk, continuing to offer her some other currency now that the old, thrilling one had become invalid.
‘This is very painful, Nina. You made me so happy. Guilty, but happy as well. I went through our tapes, in the racks at home, and dug out the old rock numbers and fed them into the deck in the car. I used to drive along, going to work or some bloody site meeting, with the volume turned up, music blasting out. Singing along, grinning and drumming my fingers on the wheel. I felt like a boy.’
He spread his hands out, offering her this.
‘A middle-aged engineer, burdened with debt and children and responsibilities. I couldn’t believe that it was happening.’
Nina said nothing.
‘I loved you. I love you now.’
She looked at him at last.
‘And so what happens to it, this love?’
He considered it, knowing that he owed her as much.
To feel love had been seductive and intriguing and flattering, and it had lent him an animation that he had not felt for years. This woman, whom he had believed he understood and now suspected that he did not, had accepted and reciprocated his love, and all of this had been enclosed within a frame of secrecy that had been part of its delight. Gordon had enjoyed having a secret, after so many years when his interior life had been as clean and plain and colourless as the external world. The possession of it had added an extra erotic charge to everything that he and Nina did together.
But once the secrecy was gone, he did not see how the rest could remain. Whatever different gloss he wished to give it, it had been a private affair that was now public property.
‘I love you still,’ he said helplessly.
That was the truth. Greedy and possessive as he knew it was, he wanted to keep her. Even now it would have been easy, delightful, to reach out, to undo buttons and expose the white, tea-freckled skin.
Gordon touched the tip of his tongue to his lips.
‘But I am married, and therefore responsible to people other than myself. I thought you understood that. Nina?’
‘Understood that wives must be protected at all costs?’
Her eyes were as flat as the discs of her earrings.
‘Wives, and children …’ Gordon said.
As he spoke the words he gained another surprising perspective. This loss of love and Nina hurt him, and would continue to hurt him, but he also wanted to be saved. Salvation was in sight, and this glimpse of it filled him with relief.
‘What about me?’ Nina asked. Her voice was dry, toneless.
He shook his head slowly, from side to side, accepting the darts of pain inside his skull as his due. He was eager for the pain of losing her to begin, too, as the penance he must undergo.
‘I don’t want to hurt you. I want to wrap you up and make it better for you, but I can’t. I can’t bear the thought of hurting you.’
‘But, clearly, you can bear it.’
It was fully dark outside. The street lamps made an ugly, amber haze in drifted snow-shapes of condensation at the corners of the window panes.
In the silence that followed Nina went to the nearest of the tall windows and unfolded the shutters from their panelled niches, carefully fitting the old iron catch with its curled tail into the slot to hold them securely closed. She did the same with the other two windows, moving carefully