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 were merely satisfied to get the facts.
‘Daddy, I love you,’ Daisy shouted. She ran to him and threw her arms round his waist, noisily crying. Over her head Michael looked at Marcelle. This was indeed how it ended, he thought. With a strip of the kitchen floor between them like a crevasse.
‘See? Do you see what you have done?’ he said.
She spat at him. ‘I didn’t do it. You did.’
Michael knelt down so he could look at Daisy. ‘I love you too. I always will, and we’ll always be your parents, whatever happens.’
Daisy began to wail. ‘No. Nooo. I can’t bear it.’
He stood up again. As firmly as he could, he steered her back to her mother. Then he left the kitchen and went upstairs, noting the scratches in the wallpaper and the chips like little eyes gouged out of the paint, the honourable scars of family life. He packed another suitcase and came down the stairs again. The house had fallen silent once more. He could not think how he would say goodbye, and so he did not try. He closed the front door softly behind him.
The front door bell began to ring. Once it had started it seemed that it would never stop; whoever was doing it must be holding his thumb pressed to the bell push.
Darcy was already awake, lying in bed beside Hannah in the room flooded with yellow early morning light, but the sound pierced his skull like a dart. He had not heard any car.
Hannah stirred and mumbled, ‘What is it?’
Darcy left the bed, put on his dressing gown over his pyjamas.
‘I’ll see to it,’ he said.
He met Hannah’s au pair girl at the top of the stairs, also in her dressing gown.
‘I’m going,’ Darcy said to her. The bell stopped shrilling and there came a barrage of knocking. The stairway dipped in front of him, and the wide mouth of the hallway, and the slivers and lozenges of reflected sunlight lay like broken glass on the floor. He could hear the sounds of his children waking up, disturbed by the thunderous noise.
Darcy descended the stairs, flat-footed in his slippers.
He opened the door, but he already knew who would confront him.
There were five of them this time, not the same men but enough like the ones who had come before. They wore shirts and ties and short casual jackets, aggressive clothes, and in his nightwear Darcy felt disabled and exposed.
‘Why are there so many of you?’ he asked. It was half-past six in the morning, nearly the end of May.
‘Darcy Clegg?’ one of the policemen said.
‘You know who I am. Yes. I’m Darcy Clegg.’
‘My name is Detective Inspector Hely, Serious Fraud Office.’
The other four men had come into the house, and they stood in a phalanx around Darcy as if they feared that in defiance of them and his faltering heart muscle he might break out and try to run away across his own lawns and into the dewy countryside.
‘I have a warrant for your arrest.’
The policeman recited the charges, and cautioned him. To Darcy the scene had a cardboard quality, like the cheapest of cheap police dramas. In his cold and rational moments he had understood that they would come in just this way, and had feared and dreaded it, yet now that it was happening it seemed insignificant, almost comical. He might even have laughed, until he turned and looked behind him and saw the ring of faces at the head of the stairs.
Freddie and Laura stood fenced behind the banisters, gripping the oak spindles with their hands, staring down in bewilderment. Cathy hovered beside them, her suntanned legs bare underneath her short robe. Lucy had gone to London for some reason, Darcy recalled. He knew that the policemen were staring up at his daughter too. Her beauty struck him anew, and he felt a spasm of despair that he should have exposed her to this scrutiny. He saw Barney with her, rubbing his face in disbelief, and then Hannah pushing past them and running down the stairs.
Hannah’s robe was silk, like her nightdress, and the sheeny double skin seemed to slide over the loose curves underneath it as she ran. The policemen looked at her too, and Darcy knew that they would talk about this afterwards, and laugh about it. He clenched his fists and in a welter of hot images wondered if he tried to hit them whether they would pinion his arms behind him and warn him to come quietly. The urge to inappropriate laughter renewed itself and his heart squeezed, a needle of pain in his chest before inflating again, to remind him that he was old, and guilty.
Hannah grabbed his arm. ‘What do they want?’
She held her hair back with one hand, and down the calyx of her sleeve Darcy saw the way the soft flesh of her underarm sagged away from the bone. This evidence of her ageing reminded him that he loved her, and the life here that he had seemingly destroyed by trying to preserve it. That was all he had tried to do, wasn’t it? The mechanism of self-exculpation quivered wearily within him again and the detachment of a spectator at a bad drama faded and left him.
‘We shall have to ask you to come with us,’ Hely said.
Darcy wanted to lay his head on his wife’s shoulder. He was tired enough to close his eyes.
‘They have come to arrest me,’ he said.
At the top of the stairs Mandy was trying to lead Laura and Freddie away. Laura began to howl.
Hannah spun round to the policeman. She looked ready to fight him herself, shouting at him, ‘You can’t come to an innocent man’s house and drag him away in front of his children.’
‘Don’t, Hannah,’ Darcy said. ‘It’s all right. There’s nothing to worry about.’ It was the litany he had repeated to her a hundred times already, but the crack of disbelief that he saw widening in her face made it seem a pointless reiteration. ‘I may get dressed first, I suppose?’ he asked the policemen.
Barney and Cathy were beside him.
‘Can they do this?’ Barney said to Darcy.
‘Oh yes, we can,’ one of the younger men said with relish. ‘Even to your Dad.’
Two of the policemen accompanied Darcy upstairs. They let him dress in a dark suit, but they did not give him time to shave. When they came down again Darcy seemed shrunken inside the dark envelope of his clothes.
‘When will you let him out?’ Hannah demanded.
‘I couldn’t say,’ the senior policeman replied. ‘The charges are serious, and bail depends on a number of factors.’
‘It shouldn’t take long, perhaps only a few hours,’ Darcy said. ‘Call McIntyre and tell him what’s happened. Tell him to come as soon as he can.’
The men took Darcy outside, the two of them who walked on either side of him holding his upper arms. They ducked into one of the waiting cars with him. Hannah, Barney and Cathy went out after them but Darcy did not look round as he was driven away.
Barney muttered, ‘Oh, Christ, I can’t believe it. Why didn’t he say it meant this? What has he done?’
Hannah rounded on him, hard-eyed, as angry as when she had faced up to the policemen.
‘He’s done nothing.’ Her forefinger with its red nail jabbed at Barney, as if she would gouge it into him. ‘Nothing at all. Remember that, when they ask you.’
Then she turned away from them and ran into the house.
The news travelled quickly enough. By the evening of the same day the Grafton couples and apparently most of the rest of the world had heard about Darcy’s arrest. Hannah grimly answered the telephone every time it rang. To the newspapers and the reporters with their insinuating or openly insulting