Rosie Thomas 4-Book Collection: Other People’s Marriages, Every Woman Knows a Secret, If My Father Loved Me, A Simple Life. Rosie Thomas
He felt the breath in his ear, rather than hearing her voice. Her legs tightened around his waist and her fingers knotted in his hair as he thrust at her. They rolled over, locked together and blind to everything, and brambles tore at Lucy’s hair and her bare legs. Jimmy’s anger with her melted into his greed and became one and the same thing, and he bit at her mouth and her throat as they twisted over and under each other. He knew he was hurting her but her fingers still dug into the muscles of his shoulders, and her legs wound more tightly around him to hold him where he was, buried in her.
When she cried out there was a whirring of wings in the trees overhead as the wood-pigeons took fright. Jimmy didn’t hear her or the birds; his eyes were closed and his lips were drawn back from his teeth as if he were snarling. At last, after he came, he collapsed on top of her, his ginger fox’s head resting at an exhausted angle on her shoulder. Lucy lay back, staring up at the sky laced with twigs and fresh, optimistic leaves. Her face was burning and her throat felt dry and sore.
After a while Jimmy lifted himself so he could look at her. There were leaves in her hair, and long bramble scratches, beaded in places with droplets of blood, on her calves and thighs. He sat up, pulled his clothes together, then found a handkerchief in the pocket of his trousers and gently dabbed at the blood. When he looked at her face he saw that she was silently crying. He touched the handkerchief to her cheek but she rolled on to her side, drawing her knees up to her chest.
‘Don’t cry,’ he said.
‘I’m crying because I’m angry. It isn’t fair. Why is it like this? We could be happy, couldn’t we, if you weren’t married. If you were mine –’
He interrupted her. ‘I don’t want you saying anything to Star. Do you hear me? I don’t want anything like the other evening. You are not to run after her and tell her any of this.’
Something in his voice or the set of his mouth reminded Lucy of the different, frightening Jimmy she had tried to run away from that night. It came to her that the other Jimmy had always been there, only she had not looked at him hard enough. Her voice when she answered him came out somewhere between a sob and a whine.
‘I wish I was her. I wish I was your wife.’
To her relief, his hard face softened. ‘No, you don’t,’ he said. ‘You don’t really wish that.’ He stroked her hair, and picked the leaves out of it.
‘What’s going to happen?’ Lucy whispered.
‘What will happen is what you know must happen.’
While he waited for her to assimilate this, Jimmy listened as patiently as he could to the repetitive calls of the wood-pigeons.
Lucy shivered, and then plucked at the blades of grass a few inches from her eyes.
‘You don’t want our baby. You don’t want me.’ Her expression changed from disbelief to desolation.
Jimmy summoned up his patience again.
‘Lucy, darling, the truth is that I can’t have you. I am married already.’
He helped her to sit up, and then shook out her sweater and pulled it over her head. When she was dressed he took her face between his hands and gazed into it for a moment, and then he kissed her on the lips.
‘There,’ he said. ‘That tells you what I feel for you, and what you mean to me. But I thought you understood how things have to be between us. Hmm?’
He tilted her chin up with the tip of his finger. Even now her distraught look was half irritating, half enticing. He murmured, ‘Don’t worry. We’ll see each other through this. I promise you. And in time you’ll look back on it, and on me, and wonder why you ever thought you wanted me.’
Lucy rubbed her face with the cuff of her sweater.
‘I do love you,’ she mumbled. ‘Only I’m so confused.’
‘I know you are. Of course you are. Now, do want me to find out what you should do? Where you should go?’
‘No,’ Lucy said. Her chin had lost its wobble. ‘I will do that, if I have to. If that’s what I must do.’
‘If you need money …’
‘Okay.’
She picked up her black tights from the tangle of his jacket, and held the jacket out to him. He watched her roll the black Lycra up over the scratched white skin of her legs. She put on her shoes and then stood up, towering over him until he scrambled to his feet. He tried to lean close and kiss her, but she turned away from him. They began to walk back along the path, the way they had come.
Jimmy was not angry any more; he was relieved and also sad, for the end of their affair but much more for the extinguishing of the baby. Only it was not a baby, not yet; he had assured Lucy of that, whatever might be taught to the contrary. This much he told himself too, but he knew he would have to make his own amends for the severance of its thread of life. Only he would not let Lucy know this, any more than he had let her know one of his true thoughts. Nor would Lucy ever come close to guessing it.
They reached the car park.
Lucy was pale, remote, entirely occupied with her perception of herself at the centre of some broad, tragic canvas. Jimmy walked with her in silence to Darcy’s Range Rover, and with the ritual glance around them to make sure that no one was watching they let their lips just touch. Then Lucy stepped into the driver’s seat, and checked her reflection in the driver’s mirror before putting on her Ray-Bans. Jimmy stood back, lifting one arm in a salute as she drove away. Once she was out of sight he crossed to his own car and drove gratefully back to work.
When Lucy reached Wilton Cathy was parking the Renault in its place at the side of the house.
‘Where on earth have you been in Dad’s car?’ she gasped.
‘I had to go somewhere. To see someone.’
Lucy took off her dark glasses. At once her face crumpled and she began to cry properly, without regard for how she looked or sounded.
Cathy ran to her and put her arms around her.
‘You have to tell me what’s been happening. Please, Lucy?’
‘Oh, Cath. I need to tell you. I really do need to.’
With their arms around each other, both of them in tears now, they went into the house and up the stairs to Lucy’s bedroom.
After they had held hands sitting on Lucy’s bed, and Lucy had poured out everything between sobs and half-smoked cigarettes, the twins sat back to look at one another. They felt their childhood closeness, somewhat lapsed of late, renewing itself.
‘Why didn’t you tell me about him, about this, before now?’ Cathy demanded.
‘I don’t know. I suppose I felt partly ashamed of myself, but I did love him. I do love him.’ Lucy blew her nose, ran her fingers through her knotted fringe and reached for another French cigarette.
‘I think I’d guessed, without knowing I’d guessed, you know?’
‘I should have told you. Only I was afraid of what you would think of me.’
‘How could you have been afraid of that? You must have known what I would think. That if he made you happy that was fine, and if he hurt you or made you sad then I would want to kill him.’
‘He did make me happy.’
‘So I won’t kill him. What do you want to happen?’
Lucy stared down at her hands, at her fingertips with bitten nails and raw skin. She was thinking. Then at last she said,
‘I suppose I wanted to have the baby, for him to leave Star and marry me, for us to be together. A family.’
Cathy waited, but her expression betrayed her scepticism.
‘And I suppose what I realized, in the wood today, is that it