Rosie Thomas 4-Book Collection: Other People’s Marriages, Every Woman Knows a Secret, If My Father Loved Me, A Simple Life. Rosie Thomas
even Laura and Freddie, but he was struck by this difference in the boys.
‘Wait a minute,’ Barney said. ‘How many in the class? Eighteen? So Toby polled about forty per cent. That’s not bad, William. I think even Mr Kinnock would be fairly pleased with that.’
Lucy had been sitting in Janice’s bathroom. It had been a welcome refuge for a few minutes, but Jimmy had not noticed that she was missing and come in search of her. It made her angry that he was so easily able to ignore her in the midst of this braying, opinionated party of her parents’ friends. She took a comb out of her bag and tried to rearrange her hair. As she stared at herself, the wine she had drunk made an acid knot in her stomach and she leaned experimentally over the basin to see if she would be sick. When nothing happened she straightened up and decided that if Jimmy would not come and find her she would search him out instead.
Hannah had grown tired of listening to Darcy and Jimmy shouting out their politics in front of the television. She wandered through the chintz-patterned drawing room where quieter groups were sitting and talking, and past the stairs where Barney was good-naturedly entertaining Janice’s boys. Hannah patted his shoulder and wandered into the deserted dining room. She hesitated beside the wreckage of the supper table, and then realized that Michael was standing with his back to her, staring out through the French windows into the dark garden. She felt a distinct lift of happiness at the sight of him.
When she went across and put her hand on his arm he moved a little to one side, as if he had been waiting for her.
‘Don’t you care about the results?’ she asked.
He shook his head. Then he quietly opened the door.
‘Come out here with me,’ he said.
They stepped out into the darkness. The mild air tasted damp and clean. It was exhilarating to walk away from the over-lit house into the less familiar territory of the garden. There was a pergola along the side of the house and an expanse of paving and lawn, monochrome flat in front of them. Michael took her hand and they stumbled away from the lights of the party. Beyond an arch in a black hedge they came to the swimming pool, closed up under its winter cover. Michael guided her around the perimeter until they came to the cedarwood pool house. He tried the door and it creaked open. Inside they could just distinguish the black outlines of summer garden furniture. There was a dried-out scent of grass clippings and canvas and mower oil.
Hannah shivered and Michael took off his jacket and covered her shoulders. They felt their way forward through the thicket of wood and metal until they came up against a paler glimmer. There was a crackle of polythene sheeting as Michael pulled the cover off the Frosts’ canopied swing seat.
‘Sit here with me,’ he whispered.
The swing rocked and creaked under their weight. Hannah found that she could remember the fabric exactly. It was a pattern of green leaves and blowsy coral flowers against a white background.
‘It’ll soon be summer,’ she murmured.
‘And then autumn again, and Hallowe’en, and Christmas,’ Michael said with his mouth against her hair.
From the refuge of the seat they could see through the half-open door down the length of the pool towards the house and the curtained windows of Andrew’s television room. They were both recalling summer afternoons when children dived and splashed with their wet, dark heads like seals and the couples basked in deck-chairs with drinks in their hands, and there was the scent of charcoal smoke and grilled meat and sun-cream.
Hannah asked, ‘Does everything break up in the end?’
It seemed that there were long cracks underlying these remembered images, although the surface of them remained unbroken like the glassy pool water before the swimmers shattered it.
Michael reassured her, without any certainty of his own, ‘No, not everything.’
He kissed her because he didn’t want to think of anything beyond here and now. They lay back against the flowered cushions and his hands found her bare shoulders under his jacket and the tight band of the top of her green dress.
‘Is it when now?’ he asked her and she laughed softly into his ear.
‘The beginning of when.’
The seat rocked and gave out its mild summer creaking as he undid the zip of the dress. His tongue moved slowly over her skin and he tasted the faint spiritous burn of her evaporated perfume.
Lucy stalked through the party, feeling that no one could have paid her less attention if she were invisible.
She found her father in the middle of an augmented crowd in front of the television, but to her relief Jimmy was no longer ensconced beside him. She saw Star Rose leaning in the doorway, looking at the television watchers with her habitually superior expression. Lucy slid past her, eel-like, with her face turned away. Barney was nowhere to be seen. She thought he must already have gone off in his own car in search of livelier company. Even Cathy seemed to have deserted her.
The dining room smelled unpleasantly of congealed food and cigarette smoke, even though Janice and Marcelle Wickham were pecking about in it with trays and cloths. She breathed shallowly against her nausea and then in a group at the far end containing the Kellys and a quartet of dull, golfing people Lucy caught sight of Jimmy.
She darted to his side, and as the faceless people made room for her she turned her shoulder on them to isolate Jimmy from the group.
‘I want to talk to you,’ she said. Her voice had risen in pitch.
‘Lucy, my lovely girl. Talk away,’ he said warmly. His brogue seemed to have thickened and she thought he half winked over her shoulder at the eavesdroppers.
‘Somewhere else. Please.’
Jimmy’s benevolent expression didn’t change but when he took her arm he gripped it a little too tightly. Jovially he excused them both from the group and steered Lucy away. Out in the empty hallway she saw that his mouth made a tight line and his eyes had gone flat. She had made him angry, and the thought that all she had wanted to do was to have him to herself for a moment in public as well as in thick, fumy secret, caused her eyes to sting with tears.
Jimmy glanced around them and then opened the front door and propelled her outside. He hustled her through the cold until they reached the safety of his car. Once they were inside it in the dark Lucy felt they were in their own territory where he had acknowledged her as the queen.
‘I needed to see you,’ she said with a touch of hauteur.
‘Don’t be an idiot. In front of your father, and everyone else in there?’
Lucy understood that he was still angry even though they were alone. Her imperiousness dissolved at once into helpless tears.
‘I love you. I can’t bear to see you and not to be with you.’
‘I know that, but you must. How do you think it is for me?’
He was softer-voiced now. Lucy flung herself against him and sobbed. ‘I want you, I need you now.’
‘How much have you had to drink?’
‘Quite a lot. I feel sick.’
He sat upright against her. ‘Are you going to be sick?’
‘It isn’t that.’ She pushed her hair back from her smudged eyes and turned to look full at him. She made her face solemn with the importance of what she had to say. ‘I think I feel sick because I’m pregnant.’
As she looked at him in the dim light reflected from the house his features seemed to contract, sharpening and hardening as the reactions ticked through him.
‘I thought you took the pill?’
‘I do. Only I don’t always remember it …’ Lucy bit her lip and her voice trailed away.
‘How many days late are you?’
‘Eight.’