you working?’
He was naked now, but not in the least vulnerable. He stepped into the water, so that Alice had to sit up to make room for him. Heavily scented water slopped over the edge of the bath as he sank backwards.
‘Yeah.’
She didn’t say anything and after a beat of silence he added, ‘I had a mass of paperwork. Invoices, bills, all kinds of shit. I hate doing all that.’
‘I know you do. Pete?’
She was going to say, I had a moment this afternoon when I thought is this all? She had intended to ask him if he was happy, if what they had between them was good. If it was enough. But this, she knew, was what Pete would dismiss as a quintessential woman’s question.
‘Yeah?’ He locked his legs round her. Bubbles of foam popped close to their ears. Pete gave her a misted glass of champagne, clinked his own against it and drank. He licked a silver rim of froth off his top lip.
‘I’ve been asked to spend a season in Antarctica.’
‘And?’
And what? she wondered. What if I said, ‘I’m going, and I won’t be back for six months?’ Instead she murmured, ‘Well, I said no, of course.’
Pete nodded. That was what he would expect. He was used to her, to her precise ways, to the regularity of their life together that provided a framework for his erratic behaviour. When they were first together he used to steal pages of her work and frown over the stratigraphical analyses of rock structures. He would turn the equations that represented deformations upside down, playing up his bafflement. Alice used to try to explain to him that these equations were like pictures, abstract illustrations of dynamic relationships that to her were far more vivid than words or photographs. They were the same to her as his sculptures were to him: a shorthand expression of a solid state and at the same time an airy thumbnail sketch of sublime reality. They rendered down the universe, or they tried to.
Alice suddenly smiled. She was thinking in artists’ language.
Pete sat up, sending another wave slopping over the side of the bath. He took her face in his hands and drew her closer so their mouths touched. Her champagne glass tipped sideways and she spilled some in the water.
‘You know, Al. You’re incredibly beautiful when you smile like that.’
She closed her eyes as he kissed her. But not before she had seen a twist at the corner of his mouth and a flash in his black eyes that she couldn’t read.
Pete was the one who ended the kiss. He drank the rest of his champagne at a gulp and stood up, brandishing his glass. Water and bubbles slicked the black hairs on his legs into sleek lines.
‘We’re going to have a great party,’ he said. He didn’t ask any more about Antarctica. Alice had said that of course she wasn’t going, so there was no need to pursue it.
It was a good party.
Pete flipped sausages and chicken pieces on and off the barbecue in the back garden. There were candles in little coloured glass vases hanging in the branches of the tree and the night air was so still that the flames burned without a tremor. People brought their paper plates of food and glasses of wine outside to sit in the moth-filled darkness, and music drifted out of the windows over their heads. In between last-minute preparations Alice had found ten minutes to pull on a black frock that showed her cleavage and new stiletto-heeled sandals that made her feel tall but also slightly at risk of toppling forward over her own toes.
‘Nice dress,’ Mark the sculptor said, with his eyes on her front. Alice laughed and put her arm through his to steer him into the middle of the next group. The house and garden overflowed with different people, painters and writers and lecturers and scientists as well as the old friends Alice had grown up with. Oxford had been her home for most of her life and she loved this bringing together and shaking up of different elements from within it. She moved through the crowd, laughing and talking, catching Pete’s eye once in a while, checking that he thought it was going well too. They were good at this, making a celebration together. Recognising that the party was now moving under its own impetus, she gave herself up to the pleasure of it.
Alice’s oldest friend Jo was there and her husband Harry. They had brought their three-month-old twins and put them in their car-seat cradles to sleep in Alice and Pete’s bedroom.
‘Al, I am so knackered,’ Jo muttered. She had black rings under her eyes and her flat hair clung to her cheeks. ‘They never sleep at the same time. I never get more than an hour. What am I going to do?’
‘They’ll start sleeping better soon.’ Alice took her friend’s hands and rubbed them between her own.
‘When?’ Jo wailed. ‘I want my life back. I want to be myself again.’
‘You will be yourself. It’s only time.’
Becky arrived late. Her current man was a psychologist, an unnervingly handsome Indian who didn’t say very much. As always, Becky talked enough for both of them.
‘I’m sorry, Al, have we missed everything? The traffic from London, you wouldn’t believe, Vijay said we should just move to Oxford. Shall I come back, wouldn’t that be a gas? Jo! Come here, baby-mother, give me a hug. Mmm, look at you. God, your boobs are so fabulous.’
Alice and Becky and Jo had been friends since the fourth form. Jo had once said, ‘I’m the good girl, Alice is the clever girl and Becky is the star in the firmament.’
Now Jo said, ‘I’ve just got to go up and check on them again. I don’t know where Harry is.’ She looked as if she was going to cry.
Becky and Alice glanced at each other.
‘Harry’s in the garden with Pete. I’ll go up and make sure they’re still fast asleep, you sit here and talk to Beck,’ Alice told her.
She gave them both a glass of wine and went quietly up the stairs. The dancing had started and loud music came up through the floorboards but it didn’t seem to bother Jo’s babies. They slept in their padded plastic cradles. One of them held his fist against his cheek, the thumb not quite connecting with his mouth. Alice stooped down to look closer and found that she wanted to touch the tip of her finger to his rosy skin. She stopped herself in case he woke up, but she crouched there for a long minute, watching and listening. Downstairs, someone turned the music up even further. The party was changing up a gear.
She stood up again, almost reluctantly, and walked to the door. It was ajar and from the semi-darkness of the bedroom she could see down to the half-landing where a pretty arched window looked over the garden. Pete was standing in the angle of the stairs, just out of sight of anyone who might be in the hallway. His hand slid slowly down the back of a girl who was pressed up against him, came to rest on her bottom. She was wearing a cropped pink top that exposed a broad expanse of skin above lowslung trousers.
Alice stood completely still. He bent his head and kissed her, then whispered something in her ear. She angled herself closer still, the movement eloquent of intimacy and familiarity. The two of them knew one another’s bodies.
A second later the girl ducked away from him. She used her thumbs to flick her long hair back behind her ears and smiled at him from beneath her eyelashes before she skipped down the stairs. Pete leaned
