ROSIE THOMAS 4-BOOK COLLECTION
Other People’s Marriages
Every Woman Knows A Secret
If My Father Loved Me
A Simple Life
Rosie Thomas

Copyright

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2015

Copyright © Rosie Thomas 1994, 1996, 2004, 1995

Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015

Rosie Thomas asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780007560653, 9780007560523, 9780007560554, 9780007560516

Ebook Edition © January 2015 ISBN: 9780008115364

Version: 2014-10-15

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Other People’s Marriages

Every Woman Knows a Secret

If My Father Loved Me

A Simple Life

Keep Reading – THE ILLUSIONISTS

Keep Reading – THE KASHMIR SHAWL

About the Author

Also by Rosie Thomas

About the Publisher

Other People’s Marriages
BY ROSIE THOMAS

Contents

Cover

Title Page

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

One

It was the end of October. As London receded and the motorway bisected open country they saw the flamboyant colours of the trees. Autumn in the city was a decorous affair of fading plane trees and horse chestnuts, just one more seasonal window display, but here the leaves made fires against the brown fields and silvery sky.

‘Look at it,’ Nina said. ‘There’s no elegant restraint out here, is there? That’s real countryside. Where I belong now. How does the poem go?’

She knew it perfectly well, but she shifted cautiously through the layers of her memory that contained it. Memory could still play tricks on her, bringing her up against some scene or a view or simply some remembered words that would make her cry. She had cried more than enough for now.

‘“Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,”’ Patrick supplied for her.

‘Yes, that’s it.’

The poem brought to mind completion, or rather the conclusion of some important cycle, and the slow but inev-itable stilling of the blood and consequent decay that must come after it.

Nina turned her head and stared out of the rear window as if she hoped to catch a last glimpse of London. There was nothing to be seen except the road, and the traffic, and the unreticent scenery. She had left London, and had not yet arrived anywhere else. It was as if the expansive world she had unthinkingly occupied had shrunk until it was contained within Patrick’s car. ‘It’s how I feel, rather.’

‘You are not particularly mellow.’

She laughed, then. ‘Nor fruitful.’

‘You have your work, that’s fruit. And you are only thirty-five.’

And so even though she was a widow there was still time for her to meet and marry another man, and to mother a brood of children if she should wish to do so. Not much time, but enough. In his kindly way Patrick did not want her to lose sight of this, although he was too tactful to say it aloud. She was grateful for his consideration, but with another part of herself Nina also wished that her loving friends would stop being so careful now. She thought that she needed someone to shout at her:

Your husband is dead but YOU are ALIVE and you must bloody GET ON with it.

It was what she was trying to shout at herself. Going to Grafton, coming to Grafton, rather, now that they were on the road and more than halfway there, was part of getting on with it.

Nina reached out one hand and put it on Patrick’s leg, above the knee, and felt the solid warmth of him caught in the thickness of his clothes. He didn’t shrink, didn’t even move, but Nina quickly lifted her hand and settled it back with the rest of herself, where it belonged. She felt, as she quite often did nowadays, that Richard’s death had removed her from the corporeal world just as conclusively as it had removed him. Widows didn’t touch. They accepted unspeaking hugs and silent pats on the shoulder and strokings of their cold hands, but they didn’t reach out themselves for the reassurances of the flesh.

‘Thank you for driving me all this way.’

He took his eyes off the road for a single second to look at her. Patrick was a careful driver, as his car proclaimed. It was a sensible estate model, armoured with heavy bumpers and crumple zones. Today the rear seats were folded down and the most precious and valuable of Nina’s belongings were packed inside. The rest of her things were in the removal van, somewhere on the same road.

‘I wanted to drive you. I want to see you properly settled in the house.’

He returned his eyes to the road. A German tour bus swelled in the rear window, and he moved aside at once to let it pass. Richard would have stamped down hard on the accelerator and sent his frivolous car swirling ahead. Nina peered up at the faces behind the skin of glass. They were elderly couples, on a good holiday, intent on enjoyment together. She pinched on the blister of her own sadness before it could pointlessly inflate.

‘Do you want to stop off somewhere for a cup of tea?’ Patrick asked her.

‘No, not unless you do. Let’s just get there.’

There was a basket in the back of the car in which she had packed the kettle, cups and tea for themselves and the removal crew, as an article on moving house in a homemaking magazine had advised her to do. In the days before the move Nina had become a paragon of organization. She had made dozens of lists, adding and crossing off, defining and redefining her intentions. She would not be caught out in the small issues, at least. Every box and carton and piece of furniture was labelled with its eventual destination in the new house, she had measured and checked every dimension twice, she knew the whereabouts of every necessary key and switch and security code.

It was the large issues that were more problematic, like whether she was right to be moving, or whether she was insane to do it, as most of her loving friends certainly suspected.

‘Are you okay?’ Patrick asked.

She smiled sideways at him. ‘Fine.’

The countryside unscrolled alongside them. In an hour, more or less, they would be in Grafton.

The great twin towers of the cathedral were visible first. They stood with the town drawn around them in the quiet and fertile fields enclosed by a rim of little grey hills. It was a perfectly English prospect. The pilgrims who came to Grafton five hundred years before would have had the same view as they wound their way down from the chalk uplands.

The town had grown some ugly outskirts since Nina’s childhood. Coming from the London road they did not go by the new business park set in its landscaped gardens. Instead, on this eastern side, there was a huge red-brick supermarket, an estate of miniature red-brick houses shuffled close together, a pair of petrol stations confronting one another across a stream of cars, and a Little Chef. The road became a maze of roundabouts and traffic lights, and litter whirled up in the wind.

‘Drive straight through,’ Nina said, wanting to apologize for this modern mess. Patrick pointed the car towards the cathedral towers.

Once they had crossed the river by the Old Bridge, they were in the old town where the medieval streets curled in their protective pattern towards the cathedral and the close. It was four o’clock in the afternoon, the traffic was curdled and there were crowds of shoppers on the pavements, mothers with buggies and schoolchildren and pensioners outside Boots, but the sight of the place made Nina happy. The superficial look of it had changed, but the bones of it were the same as they had been when she was growing up, the same as they had been for hundreds of years, and the bones were beautiful.

The pale limestone of the buildings was butter-soft in the late sun. The curves of the streets, Southgate and Coign Street and Drovers, were graceful, and the proportions of the houses and the lines of their roofs were intimate and pleasing. There was a glimpse of a cobbled square through an archway, and the grey front of a Norman church.

‘Where now?’ Patrick asked.

‘That way.’

Nina pointed. There was a narrow entry, just wide enough for the car, where the stone of the old walls was pocked and darkened with the rubbing of countless shoulders.

They passed through the entry and came out into the glory at the heart of Grafton, the cathedral green with the close to one side behind high walls and the great west front of the cathedral itself.

Patrick looked up at the wide tiers of golden stone, the carved companies of faceless saints and archangels in their niches, ranked upwards and rising between the exuberance of columns and piers, to the vast darkened eye of the west window and the height of the Gothic pinnacles towering above.

‘I had forgotten how very grand it is,’ he murmured at last.

Nina was pleased, possessive.

‘I forget, too. Every time it amazes me. There’s my house.’

To one side of the green, forming its northern border, there was a terrace of fine Georgian houses. There were four wide steps with iron railings leading up to each front door, and the balconies to the tall first-floor windows were an intricate tracery of wrought-iron leaves. Nina’s new house was in the middle of the row, looking directly out over the mulberry tree in the centre of the green.

As she climbed out of Patrick’s car, stretching her legs and easing her shoulders after the confinement of the long drive, she stopped for a moment to gaze up at her own blank windows.

‘When I was a little girl I always said that I wanted to live in Dean’s Row. My mother used to laugh. “Why settle for that?” she used to say. “Why not the Bishop’s Palace itself?” The answer was always that I didn’t want to marry the Bishop because he had funny teeth.’

Patrick came to stand beside her.

‘And now here you are.’

She heard the silent rider, Maybe it isn’t such a half-arsed scheme to come and live down here, as clearly as if he had enunciated it.

‘Have you got the keys?’

Nina took the heavy bunch out of her bag and held it up. ‘Yale, Chubb and burglar alarm.’

Patrick waited beside his car and let her go alone up the four steps to unlock the door.

She liked the house empty, like this. She could see and admire the ribs and joints of it. In the drawing room the oak floorboards were two handspans broad, smooth and glowing with age. The window shutters folded into their own recesses in the panelling with seductive precision, and the thin glazing bars divided the glass and the late afternoon light into eighths, sixteenths, tidy fractions. Over her head in the hallway the curving wrought-ironwork of the stair rails sprang up from each stone tread and drew her upwards through the centre of the house. The bedrooms were square, well-proportioned, each with its iron grate and painted overmantel. The house was much too big for her, but that did not matter particularly. Richard had left her wealthy. The memory of that, the surprising figures contained in his will, could still catch her off-balance.

At the top of the house the previous owners had created a studio. The slope of the pitched roof, concealed by a low parapet from the green and the cathedral’s west porch, was a sheet of glass. There were the Gothic pinnacles, seeming to float above Nina’s head in the breadth of the sky.

It was here that she would work. Her plan chests and her drawing board and her desk would be installed, neat and complete, with her boxes of paints and coloured ranks of inks and pencils. Nina was an illustrator of children’s books, her work much admired.

‘Nina?’

Patrick’s voice rose from a long way beneath her.

‘I’m coming.’

He was standing outside the drawing room. The door stood ajar behind him, to admit a view of the mulberry tree and of the saints and archangels in their stone niches.

‘What do you think?’

‘It’s wonderful. A beautiful house.’

She put her arms around him and hugged him. Again she felt the resistance – not rejection, but containment – that told her he didn’t know what to do with her. It wasn’t that she expected anything. Patrick was gay. She had known that for all the ten years they had been friends. But his awkwardness emphasized that her bereavement and the sympathy which followed it had set her apart. She was separate. She was to be treated with care, when in reality her grief and her needs made her long to be pulled in, peremptorily handled, to be loved so roughly that the memories were obliterated. Nina longed for it, bled for it.

‘Shall we go down to the kitchen and have some tea?’

Patrick patted her shoulder. ‘Excellent.’

He had unloaded the boxes from the back of his estate car and stacked them inside the front door.

‘You should have waited for me to help you carry that in.’

‘Nina, darling, if I can’t manhandle a few packing cases, who can?’

Patrick dealt in antiques, singlehandedly and rather discriminatingly, from his house in Spitalfields. His speciality was early English oak.

Nina said quickly, ‘I’m grateful for everything you’ve done. Not just today, but ever since Richard died.’

Patrick had come to her directly, on that first afternoon, after the telephone call from the house in Norfolk.

‘It’s okay,’ Patrick said. ‘You know where I am if you need me.’

She did know, but she was also convinced, with a sudden lift of her spirits, that she had done the right thing to sell the houses and the cars, to put Richard’s modern art collection in store, and come to Grafton. She couldn’t remake herself in London except as Richard Cort’s widow. Here, she was free to make herself what she would.

‘Tea.’

The kitchen was in the basement. There were Smallbone cupboards, painted teal blue, expanses of brick and slate. French windows looked out on a small paved yard at the back of the house. Nina took the kettle out of the basket, filled it, plugged it in and set out the cups and saucers. Patrick prowled behind her, opening the doors into the larder and the utility room, inspecting empty cupboards and wine bins and sliding drawers in and out on their smooth runners.

Nina did not much care for this kitchen. The opulent rusticity of it was not to her taste. In London, with Richard and for their friends, she had cooked in a functional space of stainless steel and black granite. But she did not plan to change this place, because it would not be the centre of this house as her old kitchen had been in the last one. She would cook for herself, as quickly as possible, and that would be all.

She poured out the tea and handed Patrick his cup. For the lack of anywhere else to sit they hoisted themselves up and perched side by side on one of the worktops. Patrick gave his characteristic short snuffle of amusement.

‘Look at these dinky cut-outs and finials. I’m surprised there are no stencilled flowers.’

‘I could paint some in. You’re right, though. Richard wouldn’t have liked it, would he?’

In London they had also lived in a Georgian house. But Richard’s architect had gutted the interior. He had made it a series of huge, light spaces and they had furnished it sparsely. Richard had also owned a modern apartment, where he set out the growing collection of paintings and sculpture and where they sometimes gave parties, and then there had been the house near the sea in Norfolk, stone-floored and thick-walled. These solid, geometric places had contained their life together, and after his death Nina had been unable to contemplate their emptiness. She had sold them, and added even more money to his startling legacy. Richard had been a lawyer, who had also bought and converted and sold property. The mid-eighties had made him rich, although it was not until after he died that Nina realized exactly how rich.

Patrick drank his tea and regarded her. Nina sat with her shoulders hunched forward, her fingers laced around her cup. She looked composed, quite well able to make her own decisions and order her life, as she had always done. He admired her, and her strength. He had witnessed other deaths recently and observed their effects on those who were left behind, and Nina’s levelness impressed him.

He asked, ‘Is that why you’ve come here?’

‘Because a cathedral close, a little place like Grafton, and this house are so much not Richard’s kind of thing?’

‘Yes.’

‘Partly so. Also I like the feeling that I belong here. There is a sense of being rooted. That’s important, isn’t it?’

Patrick, who had grown up in Ilford, let it pass.

‘Don’t you know anyone here any more?’

‘Not a soul.’

Nina was an only child. She had spent her childhood and youth in Grafton, but she had left to go to art school when she was eighteen. Her parents had moved away less than a year later, and both of them were dead now. Her remaining links with the town had long ago broken. She laughed suddenly.

‘I’ll be able to recreate myself entirely, with no one looking over my shoulder. Don’t you envy me the chance to get rid of those tiresome labels that people attach to one over the years? Nina doesn’t like curry, knows nothing about music, always cries in those sentimental French films.’

He nodded, agreeing with her. ‘Patrick drives like an old lady, is such a coffee snob, will never learn to ski.’

They were both laughing now, with affection.

‘Don’t make yourself too different. All your friends who love you like you are will miss you.’

‘I won’t.’ Nina was thinking, If I start again, away from the places we knew together, I won’t feel left behind. Is that a naive expectation?

Upstairs there was a heavy double thump on the door knocker. The men had arrived with the van.

*

Patrick directed the unloading. The job took less time than he had expected, because Nina had brought so little with her. There were a few pieces that he remembered from the London house, a Queen Anne chest on chest, some Beidermeier that would look well in the plain, square rooms, sofas and chairs, and a French bateau lit. Within two hours the van was emptied and the men were on their way home again.

After they had gone Nina and Patrick had a drink in the drawing room. It was furnished so sparsely that their voices faintly echoed. The illuminated cathedral front swam in the darkness beyond the windows.

‘Will you be comfortable enough?’ Patrick asked at length.

‘I wanted to bring as little as possible.’ She was not sure, now. She remembered how the storage people had come to wrap the pictures and modern pieces in burlap and polythene before carrying them away.

‘This will be fine for the time being. I can always add more things.’

Different things, she meant, not the old ones.

‘Would you like me to stay? I could take you out to dinner somewhere.’

‘Thank you, that’s nice of you. But it’s a long drive back. And I should unpack a bit, I suppose.’

Patrick understood that she wanted him to go, to leave her alone to confront whatever it was she intended. He drank a second glass of wine, reluctant to leave her, and then stood up. Nina went down the stairs with him, and out to the green where his car was parked. They made arrangements for a weekend and promised to telephone one another. Then Patrick kissed her on both cheeks, climbed into his car and drove away.

Nina went back into the house and shut the door. She walked slowly up the stairs to her bedroom and stood at the foot of the bed, her fingertips resting on the high, smooth scroll of polished wood. Richard had bought the French bed for her as a wedding present.

On their wedding night he had held her in his arms, rocked her and told her to imagine that they were in a real boat adrift on a benign ocean. She had smiled at him, drowsy with happiness and sex, and the sea of contentment had seemed boundless.

Nina wrapped her arms around herself now, digging her nails into the flesh of her shoulders to feel the confirmation of pain.

‘Why did you leave me?’ she asked the empty air. ‘I can’t bear it without you.’

To have come home to Grafton seemed a pointless gesture. Even if she sold everything she and Richard had jointly owned, shedding the possessions of a shared life, his absence would still come at her out of the mundane actions of each successive day.

Nina began to cry, noisily, into the silence of her new house.

Two

Janice Frost and Marcelle Wickham were the first to notice Nina. They were in the big supermarket and in the distance, as if the perspective lines of the shelves held her vividly spotlit just before the vanishing point, they saw a tall, thin woman in a long black skirt. Her red hair was pinned up in an untidy nest on the top of her head and her mouth was painted the same colour, over-bright in her white face.

‘Who is that?’ Janice wondered. Janice knew everybody interesting in town, at least by sight.

Marcelle looked. As they watched, the woman moved away with her empty wire basket and disappeared.

Marcelle lifted a giant box of detergent into her trolley and squared it up alongside the cereals and tetrapacks of apple juice.

‘Haven’t a clue. Some visitor, I suppose. Crazy hair.’

They worked their way methodically up one side of the aisle and down the other, and then up and down the succeeding avenues as they always did, but they didn’t catch sight of the red-haired woman again.

Nina paid for her purchases, sandwiching them precisely on the conveyor belt between two metal bars labelled ‘Next Customer Please’, all the time disliking the frugal appearance of the single portions of meat, vegetables and fish. She loved to cook, but could find no pleasure in it as a solitary pursuit.

She had no car in Grafton. She had sold the Alfa Romeo that Richard had bought her, along with his Bentley coupé, in the grief-fuelled rejection of their possessions immediately after his death. To take her back into the centre of town there was a round-nosed shuttle bus that reminded her of a child’s toy. She squeezed inside it with the pensioners and young mothers with their folding pushchairs, and balanced her light load of shopping against her hip. The bus swung out of the car park immediately in front of Janice and Marcelle in Janice’s Volvo.

The next person to see Nina was Andrew Frost, Janice’s husband. Andrew did recognize her.

Nina had been working. She was painting the face of a tiger peering out of the leaves of a jungle, part of an alphabet book. For a long morning she had been able to lose herself behind the creature’s striped mask and in the green depths of the foliage. She worked steadily, loading the tip of her tiny brush with points of gold and emerald and jade, but then she looked up and saw blue sky over her head.

It was time to eat lunch, but she could find no enthusiasm for preparing even the simplest meal. Instead she took a bright red jacket off a peg and went out to walk on the green.

Andrew had left his offices intending to go to an organ recital in the cathedral. He was walking over the grass towards the west porch, pleased with the prospect of an hour’s music and freedom from meetings and telephones. He saw a red-haired woman in a crimson jacket crossing diagonally in front of him, and knew at once who she was. She had worn a costume in the same shade of red to play Beatrice.

He quickened his pace to intercept her.

‘It’s Nina Strange, isn’t it?’

Nina stopped. She turned to see a square man with thinning fair hair, a man in a suit who carried a raincoat even though the sky was blue.

‘You don’t remember me,’ the man said equably.

A thread of recollection snagged in her head.

‘Yes, yes I do. Wait a minute …’

‘“When I said I would die a bachelor, I did not think I should live till I were married.”’

‘Oh, God, I do remember! It’s Andrew, isn’t it?’

‘Andrew Frost. Benedick to your elegant Beatrice.’

‘Don’t try to remind me of how long ago.’ Nina held out her hand and shook his. She was laughing and her face was suddenly bright. She remembered the plump teenaged boy who had played opposite her in the joint Shakespeare production of their respective grammar schools.

‘You were very good. I was dreadful,’ he said.

‘No, you weren’t. And your calves were excellent in Elizabethan stockings.’

Andrew beamed at her. ‘I was going to hear some music, but why don’t we go across to the Eagle instead? Have you had lunch?’

Nina hesitated.

Small fragments of memory were rapidly coalescing and strengthening, swimming into focus in front of her like the images in a developing Polaroid snapshot. She could see the boy now, inside this grown man, and as she looked harder at him the boy’s features grew more pronounced until it seemed that it was the man who was the memory. The sight of the young face brought back to her the long hours of rehearsal in the school hall smelling of floor polish and musty costumes, the miniature and tearful dramas of adolescence, the voices of teachers and friends. It was disorientating to find herself standing on the green again, almost within the shade of the mulberry tree, but clothed in the body of a middle-aged woman instead of a schoolgirl’s.

‘I can’t. I really shouldn’t today. I’m working. I’ve only come out for five minutes’ fresh air.’

It was three days since she had spoken more than half a dozen words to anyone. She didn’t want the questions to start in the saloon bar of the Eagle. She was afraid that if she was given a chance she would let too many words come pouring out, and she didn’t want Andrew Frost to hear them.

‘Working? Are you staying in Grafton?’ He was standing with one hand in his pocket, the other hitching his raincoat over his shoulder. He was friendly and relaxed, no more than naturally curious.

‘I … I’ve come back to live. I bought a house, in Dean’s Row.’

Andrew pursed his mouth in a soundless whistle, ‘Did you, now?’

Nina asked quickly, ‘What about you? Did you follow on from Benedick and find your Beatrice?’ There was a gold wedding ring on his finger.

‘I married Janice Bell. Do you remember her?’ Nina shook her head.

‘Perhaps she came after your time.’

Nina wanted to move on. It was reassuring to have made this small contact, but she needed a space to adjust Andrew Frost in her mind. She pointed to the cathedral porch.

‘You can still get into the recital. Perhaps we can have lunch together another day?’

Andrew took a business card out of his wallet and wrote on the reverse. When he handed it to her she read the inscription ‘Frost Ransome, Consulting Engineers’, with Andrew’s name beneath followed by a string of letters. Nina pursed her lips to whistle too, mimicking his gesture.

The boy’s face was swallowed up again now by the fleshier man’s.

‘We’re having a party, at home, on Thursday evening. That’s the address. It’s Hallowe’en,’ he added, as if some explanation was necessary.

‘So it is.’

‘Spook costumes are not obligatory. But come, won’t you? Janice’ll like to meet you.’

‘Thank you. I’m not sure … I’ll try.’

‘Who do you know in Grafton these days?’ He was looking at her with his head on one side.

‘Not a soul.’

‘Then you must come. No argument.’ He reached out and shook her hand, concluding a deal. ‘Thursday.’

Nina would have prevaricated, but he was already walking away towards the cathedral. She went back to her desk and bent over her tiger painting with renewed attention.

She had not intended to go. She had thought that when Thursday came she would telephone Andrew’s office and leave an apology with his secretary. But when the morning and half the afternoon passed and she had still not made the call, she recognized with surprise that her real intention must be the opposite.

Nina finished her painting and carefully masked it with an overlay before placing it with the others in a drawer of the plan chest. She was pleased with the work she had done so far. The new studio suited her, and she was making faster progress than she and the publishers had estimated. She would go to the Frosts’ party, because there was no reason for not doing so. Quickly, as if to forestall her own second thoughts, she looked in the telephone directory for the number of a minicab company and ordered a car to collect her at eight-thirty.

*

Marcelle Wickham was a professional cook, and she was spending the afternoon at Janice’s to help her to make the food for the party. The two of them worked comfortably, to a background murmur of radio music.

Janice admired the rows of tiny golden croustades as they came out of the oven, taking one hot and popping it into her mouth.

‘Delicious. You are a doll to do this, Mar, do you know that?’

‘Pass me the piping bag.’ Marcelle wiped her hands on her apron. The logo of the cookery school at which she worked as a demonstrator was printed on the bib.

‘I like doing it. I like the’ – she gestured in the air with her fingers – ‘the pinching and the peeling, all the textures, mixing them together.’ Her face relaxed into a smile, elastic, like dough. ‘I love it, really. I always have, from when I was a little girl. And I love seeing the finished thing, and the pleasure it gives.’

Janice sighed. ‘You’re lucky.’

Marcelle filled the piping bag with aubergine purée and began to squeeze immaculate rosettes into pastry shells.

‘I read somewhere that cooking is one of the three human activities that occupy the exact middle ground between nature and art.’

‘What are the others?’

‘Gardening.’

‘Ha.’ Janice glanced out of her kitchen window. Her large, unkempt garden functioned mainly as a football ground for her two boys.

‘And sex.’

‘Ha, ha!’

They glanced at one another over the baking sheets. There was the wry, unspoken acknowledgement, of the kind familiar to long-married women who know each other well, of the humdrum realities of tired husbands, demanding children and sex that becomes a matter of domestic habit rather than passion. They also silently affirmed that within their own bodies, and notwithstanding everything else that might contradict them, they still felt like girls, springy and full of sap.

‘Perhaps I’ll concentrate on flower arranging,’ Janice said, and they both laughed.

‘So exactly who is coming tonight?’

‘The usual faces. Roses, Cleggs, Ransomes.’

These, with the Frosts and the Wickhams, were the five families. They ate and relaxed and gossiped in each other’s houses, and made weekend arrangements for their children to play together because all of them, except for the Roses, had young children and in various permutations they made up pairs or groups for games and sport, and went on summer holidays together. There were other couples and other families amongst their friends, of course, and Janice listed some of their names now, but these five were the inner circle.

‘Five points of a glittering star in the Grafton firmament,’ Darcy Clegg had called them once, half-drunk and half-serious, as he surveyed them gathered around his dining table. They had drunk a toast to themselves and to the Grafton Star in Darcy’s good wine.

‘That’s about fifty altogether, isn’t it? No one you don’t know, I think,’ Janice concluded. ‘Except some woman Andrew was at school with, who he bumped into on the green the other day.’

‘Oh well, there’s always Jimmy.’

Again there was the flicker of amused acknowledgement between them. All the wives liked Jimmy Rose. He danced with them, and flirted at parties. It was his special talent to make each of them feel that whilst he paid an obligatory amount of attention to the others, she was the special one, the one who really interested him.

‘What are you wearing?’

Janice made a face. ‘My best black. It’s witchy enough. And I’ve got too fat for anything else. Oh, God. Look at the time. They’ll be in in half an hour.’

The children arrived at four o’clock. Vicky Ransome, the wife of Andrew’s partner, had offered to do the school run even though it was not her day and she was eight and a half months pregnant. Janice’s boys ran yelling into the kitchen with Vicky and Marcelle’s children following behind them. The Frost boys were eleven and nine. They were large, sturdy children with their father’s fair hair and square chin. The elder one, Toby, whipped a Hallowe’en mask from inside his school blazer and covered his face with it. He turned on Marcelle’s seven-year-old with a banshee wail, and the little girl screamed and ran to hide behind her mother.

‘Don’t be such a baby, Daisy,’ Marcelle ordered. ‘It’s only Toby. Hello, Vicky.’

The boys ran out again, taking Marcelle’s son with them. Daisy and Vicky’s daughter clung around the mothers, weepily sheltering from the boys. Vicky’s second daughter, only four, was asleep outside in the car.

Vicky leaned wearily against the worktop. ‘They fought all the way home, girls against boys, boys definitely winning.’

Janice lifted a stool behind her. ‘You poor thing. Here. And there’s some tea.’

The boys thundered back again, clamouring for food. Janice dispensed drinks, bread and honey, slices of chocolate cake. The noise and skirmishing temporarily subsided and the mothers’ conversation went on in its practised way over the children’s heads.

‘How are you feeling?’ Marcelle asked Vicky.

‘Like John Hurt in Alien, if you really want to know.’

‘Oh, gross,’ Toby Frost shouted from across the kitchen table.

Vicky shifted her weight uncomfortably on the stool. She spread the palms of her hands on either side of her stomach and massaged her bulk. Her hair was clipped back from her face with a barrette, and her cheeks were shiny and pink. With one hand she reached out for a slice of the chocolate cake and went on rubbing with the other.

‘And I can’t stop eating. Crisps, chocolate, Jaffa cakes. Rice pudding out of a tin. I’m huge. It wasn’t like this with either of the others.’

‘Not much longer,’ Janice consoled her.

‘And never again, amen,’ Vicky prayed.

The relative peace of the tea interval did not last long. Once the food had been demolished there was a clamour of demands for help with pumpkin lanterns and ghost costumes. William Frost had already spiked his hair up into green points with luminous gel, and Daisy Wickham, her fears momentarily forgotten, was squirming into a skeleton suit. Andrew had promised to take his own children and the Wickhams trick-or-treating for an hour before the adults’ party.

‘I’ll leave you to it,’ Vicky said, bearing away her six-year-old Mary who screamed at being removed from the fun. ‘See you later. I’ll be wearing my white thing. You can distinguish me from Moby Dick by my scarlet face.’

After she had gone Marcelle frowned. ‘Vicky’s not so good this time, is she?’

Janice was preoccupied. ‘She’ll be okay once it’s born. Look at the time. Toby, will you get out of here? Please God Andrew gets himself home soon.’

‘Shouldn’t bank on it,’ Marcelle said cheerfully.

Nina chose her clothes with care. She was not sure what Andrew had meant when he said that fancy dress was not obligatory. Did that mean that only half of the guests would be trailing about in white bedsheets?

In the end she opted for an asymmetric column of greenish silk wound about with pointed panels of sea-coloured chiffon. The dress had cost the earth, and when she first wore it Richard had remarked that it made her look like a Victorian medium rigged out for a seance.

And as she remembered it, the exact cadence of his voice came back to her as clearly as if he were standing at her shoulder.

She stood still for a moment and rested her face against the cold glass of her bathroom mirror. Then, when the spasm had passed, she managed to fix her attention on the application of paint to her eyes. At eight-thirty exactly her car arrived.

The Frosts’ house was at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac on the good, rural side of the town. From what was visible of the dark frame to the blazing windows, Nina registered that the house was large, pre-war, with a jumble of gables and tall chimneys. There were pumpkin lanterns grinning on the gateposts, and a bunch of silver helium balloons rattling and whipping in the wind. Nina’s high heels crunched on the gravel.

When the door was opened to her she had a momentary impression of a babel of noise, crashing music, and a horde of over-excited children running up and down the stairs. Something in a red suit, with horns and a tail, whisked out of her sight. She stopped dead, and then focused on the woman who had opened the door. She was dark, with well-defined eyes and a wide mouth, and was dressed in a good black frock that probably hid some excess weight. On her head she wore a wire-brimmed witch’s hat with the point tipsily drooping to one side. She looked hard at Nina, and then smiled.

‘You must be Andrew’s friend? Nina, isn’t it? Come on in, and welcome.’

The door opened hospitably wide. Once she was inside, Nina realized that Andrew’s wife had spoken in a pleasant, low voice. The noise wasn’t nearly as loud as it had at first seemed, and there were only four children visible. Nina understood that it was simply that she had undergone a week’s solitude, and was unused to any noise except her own thoughts.

‘I’m Janice,’ Janice said.

‘Nina Cort. Used to be Nina Strange, when Andrew knew me. I’m sorry I haven’t come in fancy dress.’

Janice waved her glass. ‘Your dress is beautiful. I only put this hat on at the last minute, and Andrew is defiantly wearing his penguin suit.’ Her mouth pouted in disparagement, but her eyes revealed her pride in him. ‘Come on, come with me and I’ll get you a drink and introduce you to everyone.’

Nina followed her down the hallway towards the back of the house. The man in the devil suit was sitting at the foot of the stairs, and he glanced up at her as she passed. His eyebrows rose in triangular points.

Andrew Frost kissed her in welcome, and gave her a glass of champagne. Nina drank it gratefully, quickly, and accepted another.

She was launched into a succession of conversations, but felt as if she was bobbing on a rip tide of unfamiliar faces. The effect was surreal, heightened by the fact that some of the faces were ghoulishly made up, swaying above ghost costumes or witches’ robes, while others sprouted conventionally painted from cocktail dresses or naked and pink from the necks of dress shirts constricted by black ties. The man in the devil suit prowled the room, flicking his arrow-headed tail. A delectably pretty girl of about eighteen threaded through the crowd offering a tray of canapés and the devil man capered behind her, grinning.

Nina loved parties, but for a long time Richard had been there for her like a buoy to which she could hitch herself if she found she was drifting away too fast. Now she was cut loose, and the swirl of the current alarmed her.

The room was hot, and confusingly scented with a dozen different perfumes. There was a woman in a long white dress, majestically pregnant, and another, younger, in a shimmering outfit that exposed two-thirds of her creamy white breasts. There was a dark man with a beaky profile, two more men who talked about a golf tournament, a thin woman with a reflective expression who did not smile when Nina was introduced to her.

Nina finished her third glass of champagne. She had been talking very quickly, animatedly, moving her hands like fish and laughing too readily. She realized that she had been afraid of coming alone to this house of strangers. Now she was only afraid that she might be going to faint.

She wanted to hold on to someone. She wanted it so badly that her hands balled into fists.

She held up her head and walked slowly through the chattering groups. It was only a party, like a hundred others she had been to, perhaps a little rowdier because these people seemed to know each other so well. Grafton was a small place.

The kitchen was ahead of her, more brightly lit than the other rooms. There were people gathered in here too, only fewer of them. In the middle of them was Janice, without her hat, and another woman in an apron. They were laying out more food on a long table.

‘Can I help?’ Nina asked politely.

‘No, but come and talk,’ Janice answered at once. ‘Have you met Marcelle? This is Marcelle Wickham.’

The woman in the apron held out her hand and Nina shook it. It was small and warm and dry, like a child’s.

‘Hi. We saw you in the supermarket, Jan and I. Did she tell you?’

‘I’ve hardly had a chance to speak to her. I’m sorry, Nina. I’m just going to tell everyone that the food’s ready …’ Janice pushed her hair off her damp forehead with the back of her hand.

‘We wondered who you were,’ Marcelle explained.

Nina’s hands moved again. ‘Just me.’

‘Who, exactly?’ a man’s voice asked behind her.

‘Look after her for me, Darcy, will you?’ Janice begged as she hurried past. The man inclined his head obediently and passed a high stool to Nina. She sat down in the place that Vicky Ransome had occupied earlier.

‘I’m Darcy Clegg,’ the man said.

He was older than most of the Frosts’ other friends, perhaps in his early fifties. He had a well-fleshed, handsome face and grey eyes with heavy lids. He was wearing what looked like a Gaultier dinner jacket, conventionally and expensively cut except for a line of black fringing across the back and over the upper arms and breast, like a cowboy suit. He had a glass and his own bottle of whisky at one elbow.

‘That is a spectacular dress,’ Darcy Clegg drawled.

Nina liked men who noticed clothes, and bothered to comment on them.

‘How long have you been in Grafton?’ he asked.

Sitting upright, in the kitchen light, Nina sensed that the inquisition was about to begin.

She explained, as bloodlessly as she could, who she was and what she was doing. Darcy listened, turning his whisky glass round and round in his fingers, occasionally taking a long gulp. This new woman with her green eyes and extraordinary hair was interesting, although evidently as neurotic as hell. There was some strange, strong current emanating from her. Her fingers kept moving as if she wanted to grab hold of something. Darcy wondered what she would be like in bed. One of those hot-skinned, clawing women who emitted throaty cries. Nothing like Hannah.

‘And has your husband come down here with you?’ Darcy asked. Nina still wore Richard’s rings.

‘He died nearly six months ago. Of an asthma attack, at our house in the country. He was there alone.’

‘I’m very sorry,’ Darcy murmured. A recollection stirred in him, troubling although he couldn’t identify a reason for it, and he made a half-hearted effort to pursue it. Who had told him a similar tragic story? When the connection continued to elude him Darcy shrugged it away. In many trivial ways he was a lazy man, although he was tenacious in others.

‘What about you? Do you live in Grafton?’ Nina felt that it was her turn.

‘Outside. About three miles away, towards Pendlebury.’

‘And are you married?’

Darcy turned his grey eyes on her and he smiled, acknow-ledging the question. ‘Yes. My wife’s name is Hannah. In the silver décolleté.’

Of course. The luscious blonde with the bare breasts. Nina was beginning to fit the couples together, pairing the unfamiliar smiling faces two by two.

‘And the girl handing round the canapés is Cathy, one of my daughters. By my first wife.’ The smile again, showing his good teeth. Darcy Clegg was attractive, Nina was now fully aware. Politely he filled her glass and they began to talk about how Grafton had changed since Nina’s school days.

More guests filtered into the kitchen, following the scent of Marcelle’s cooking, and the noise swelled around Nina once more.

*

Gordon Ransome brought his wife a plate of food and a knife and fork wrapped in a napkin. Vicky was sitting in a low chair in a corner of the drawing room, where a side lamp shone on the top of her head. He glanced down at her for an instant and saw the vulnerable pallor of her scalp where her hair parted. He had not noticed before that it grew in exactly the same way as their daughters’, and he felt a spasm of exasperated tenderness. She had collapsed into a chair that was too low for her, and she would need help to struggle to her feet again. The voluminous white folds of her dress emphasized her bulge.

When she looked up he saw also that there were dark circles under her eyes and her face was small, and sharp- pointed.

Vicky took the plate and hoisted herself awkwardly upright, wincing as she did so. She began to eat, ravenously, even though she knew that after half a dozen mouthfuls the burning would begin under her breastbone. She was made more uncomfortable by Gordon looming impatiently above her.

‘We mustn’t be too late,’ she said. Alice had a cough and their sitter was only fifteen.

‘I don’t want to go yet,’ Gordon snapped. ‘We’ve only just got here.’ He swung away with his hands in his pockets, feeling immediately ashamed of his bad temper. But he often felt that his helplessly pregnant wife and his little daughters were like tender obstacles that he had to skirt around, day by day, walking softly lest somebody should start to cry. He loved them all, but they took so much of his care.

Darcy Clegg came to Vicky with a cushion for her back.

Later the dancing began in another room that extended sideways from the main part of the house. There was a woodblock floor in here, and tall windows in one of the gable ends that looked out across a swimming pool covered over for the winter. Andrew had hired a mobile disco, a boy with two turntables and a set of speakers who had set up some lights that made globs of colour revolve softly in the beamed recess of the roof. The young DJ quickly sized up his audience and opted for an opening medley of pounding sixties rock. The innocent exuberance of lights and music and jigging couples were suddenly so powerfully reminiscent of the student parties of fifteen years ago that Nina found herself laughing to see it. It also made her want to leap up and dance.

Gordon watched the dancers too. He was trying to identify exactly what it was that he wanted, on top of several glasses of champagne and a malt whisky he had swallowed quickly, in the kitchen, with Jimmy Rose. There was Cathy Clegg in some tiny stretchy tube of a skirt that showed off her thighs and small bottom, or Hannah, with her expanse of white breast and her habit of biting her cushiony bottom lip between her little white teeth. Darcy’s women, of course. Not either of those.

He did want a woman, Gordon recognized. In the hot, impatient way he had done when he was much younger. He had to be so careful with Vicky now. Her fugitive sleep, her cramps, her tiredness.

Gordon liked Stella Rose, Jimmy’s wife, who everyone called Star. He enjoyed dancing with her at the Grafton parties, and talking to her too. She had a quick, acerbic intelligence that challenged him and a tight-knit bony body that did the same. To single out Star also made some kind of retort to Jimmy, who was always whispering to and cuddling other men’s wives. But he did not feel drawn to Star tonight. She had been drinking hard, as she sometimes did, and he had last seen her in the kitchen, haranguing kindly Marcelle about something, with dark patches of smudged mascara under her eyes.

There were others, amongst the wider group, but Gordon did not move on to search for any of them. Instead, deliberately, he let his consideration circle back to the new woman in the look-at-me dress. He had met her briefly at the beginning of the evening, what seemed like many hours ago now. She had been polite, but slightly remote. He thought she was aloof, probably considering this party of the Frosts’ to be dully provincial. Then, a while later, she had slipped past in a knot of people and her exotic draperies had fluttered against him.

He noticed that she was standing on her own, apart, and apparently laughing to herself. One of the discs of revolving light, a blue one, passed slowly over her face and then over her hair. It turned a rich purple, like a light in a stained-glass window, and faded as soon as he had seen it. Gordon felt a tightening in his throat.

‘Would you like to dance?’

Nina, that was her name. It came to him, once he had asked her.

‘Thank you.’

She let him take her hand, quite easily and naturally, and lead her into the throng of people. They began to dance. He saw how she let herself be absorbed into the music, as if she was relieved to forget herself for a moment. Some of the stiffness faded out of her face, and left her looking merely pretty instead of taut and imperious.

‘Do the Frosts often give parties like this?’

‘Often. And always exactly like this.’

The flip of his fingers, she saw, acknowledged the combination of sophistication and hearty enthusiasm, champagne and student disco, fancy dress and cocktail frock, that she herself had found so beguiling. Nina had forgotten this man’s name, but she felt an upward beat of pure pleasure to find herself here, dancing, amongst these people who knew nothing about her.

Darcy was lounging in the doorway, observing the dancers, with Jimmy beside him. Jimmy had pulled off the red hood of his devil suit and had then raked his fingers through his hair so that it stood up on top of his head in a crest.

Jimmy murmured to his companion, ‘Who is La Belle Dame Sans Merci? Nobody will introduce me.’

Nina and Gordon were on the far side of the room, absorbed in their dance.

Mick Jagger sang out of the speakers, Pleased to meet you, hope you guessed my name … and all the couples in their thirties obligingly sang back, Whhoo hoo …

‘Perhaps she doesn’t want to meet the Devil,’ Darcy suavely answered. ‘But her name is Nina something, and she has bought the house in Dean’s Row where the Collinses used to live. She is a widow, apparently.’

‘La Belle Veuve, then,’ Jimmy said. And then he added with relish, ‘I smell trouble, oh yes I do.’

Nina had arranged for the car to come back for her at twelve-thirty, and she was ready for it when the time came.

Her dancing partner had been claimed by his rosy, pregnant wife. The little Irish devil man had made a surprising pair with the tall woman with the reflective face. Andrew and Janice had come to the door together, to see Nina off, and had stood shoulder to shoulder, smiling and waving.

In the taxi Nina leaned her head back and closed her eyes.

Two by two, the people swam up in her mind’s eye out of the swirl of the party. She could recall all the faces, not so many of the names. Somebody and somebody, somebody and somebody else. It seemed that everyone was half of a pair. The whole world was populated by handsome, smiling couples, and behind them, behind the secure doors of their houses, were the unseen but equally happy ranks of their children.

Nina’s loneliness descended on her again. It was like a gag, tearing the soft tissues of her mouth, stifling her.

‘Dean’s Row, miss,’ the driver called over his shoulder.

Inside her house, the silence felt thick enough to touch. Nina poured herself a last drink and took it upstairs to the drawing room. She stood at the window, without turning on the lights behind her. The floodlights that illuminated the west front were doused at midnight, but Nina felt the eternal presence of the saints and archangels in their niches more closely than if they had been visible.

She rolled her tumbler against the side of her face, letting the ice cool her cheek.

To her surprise, she realized that the pressure of her solitude had eased a little, as if the statues provided the company she needed. Or perhaps it was the party that had done it.

It was a good evening, and she had met interesting people. They were nothing like her London friends, these Grafton couples, but she was glad that she had met them.

‘And so, good night,’ Nina said dryly to the saints and archangels.

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