ready to ignite.
‘It’s nothing to do with me. Except that I have to live with you. Why is it me who has to be married to a frigid dyke?’
Star closed her book and it slid to the floor. She stood up and stepped deliberately towards him. Then she swung her hand and slapped him in the face. His head jerked backwards and a thread of spittle whipped from the corner of his mouth.
‘Don’t call me a dyke,’ she whispered.
Jimmy licked his lips, then smeared them with the ball of his thumb, looking down at it for blood.
‘I’ll call you whatever I bloody like.’
She was already backing away from him but too late. His hand shot out and grabbed her wrist and he dragged her back within his reach.
‘No …’
He hit her, a quick double blow, his knuckles smashing against her cheekbone and then the palm of his hand cracking against the other cheek, mirroring the slap she had dealt him.
‘Fuck you,’ he said.
Then he let go his hold of her, the taste of disgust thick in his mouth. There was an instant’s white print on Star’s cheek that filled with a quick tide of colour.
Star slowly turned, moving cautiously as if she was afraid that her legs would give way. She stooped, holding her back straight, to pick up her book and place it tidily on the coffee table. Then she went out, leaving the house and walking away down the suburban avenue without any particular destination in mind.
Jimmy poured himself a whisky. When he had drunk it he pulled the telephone towards him again.
‘Andrew? Jimmy. Yes, I heard.’ He listened to the snap and rumble of Andrew’s voice.
‘How much did you have to put up?’ His mouth puckered in a soundless whistle. ‘It’ll be in the papers anyway. Two hundred and fifty grand each? Bit of a nuisance if he skips the country.’
Andrew spoke again and Jimmy nodded, looking at the empty room while he listened.
‘Do you feel like a drink, later on? I thought I’d go down to the golf club. No? All right. Saturday, then.’
After Andrew had rung off Jimmy poured himself a second measure, and drank it down straight.
Star found herself walking along the path beside the river. The start of the summer had brought out the first tourists, and even in the intermittent rain there were pairs of them strolling under the snaky fronds of the willow trees. They were mostly elderly couples, filling in the interval between exploration of the cathedral and the hotel dinner. She passed them in her solitude with her head averted, eyes on the water, conscious of the bruises beginning to discolour her face. The wind was licking the surface of the river into glittering silver menisci.
The vista of old stone and water meadow opposite and the low hills in the distance had always pleased her, and numerous other corners and recesses of the city that had been rubbed and rounded by the passage of time, like stones on a beach, pleased her in the same way. It gave Star satisfaction and a sense of peace to have her small daily itinerary defined and contained by these medieval boundaries. She was thinking as she walked that it was such simple things that had kept her in Grafton, and her preference for order and routine over the risk of the unknown that had prevented her from leaving it.
But now she resolved as she threaded her way between the tourists and the flags of the willow branches that there would have to be a time to leave. She did not love her husband any more, if she had ever loved him. It was not even the acceptance of that truth that convinced her, but the recognition that this evening had provided a finishing point, a definitive break in the slow decline of her marriage. There could be no reversal or cosmetic redefinition.
Star began to make her plans. She walked for a long way, following the wide sweep of the river, until Grafton dropped out of sight behind her.
In the evening, twelve hours after his arrest, Darcy was driven home by his solicitor. Hannah, Cathy and Barney had been waiting in a tense huddle in the drawing room, but when they heard the car they stood in unison and hurried into the hallway, not knowing what they should expect. When the car drew up on the gravel sweep in front of the house, two of the pressmen who had watched the day’s traffic to and from the front door jumped from the garden seat where they had been smoking and talking and ran towards it. Darcy emerged from the passenger seat.
Hannah and his children heard him from within the safety of the house.
‘I have no comment to make. This is private property, and you will remove yourselves from it immediately. Either that or I will have you removed.’
Tim McIntyre, the solicitor, hurried in his wake. ‘Mr Clegg told you. He has no comment to make.’
Darcy swept him into the house, slamming the door behind them.
‘Have those rodents been out there all day?’
He was shouting, and he seemed to have swelled again to fill the confines of his dark suit. It was as if leaking air had been pumped back into him, smoothing out the creases in his flesh and puffing away the dark patches in his face. Hannah and the two children glanced at each other, startled and hopeful.
‘Are you all right?’ Hannah began.
‘Of course I am,’ Darcy insisted. ‘Were you afraid I wouldn’t be?’
His solicitor nodded in confirmation as Darcy shepherded them into the drawing room. ‘Bail was granted without too much difficulty. It took a little time to arrange the formalities, as it often does in these cases.’
Darcy stood with his arm around Cathy’s shoulders, surveying the room, once more the host and master.
‘Hannah, we need a drink. Two or three drinks, after the day we’ve had in that place. Tim’s done a good job. Everything is going to be fine.’
In the furnished flat that he was renting from the hospital, Michael waited for Hannah.
The flat was in an annexe to the main building that also housed the nurses’ residence, and it was usually occupied by medical families new to the area while they searched for a permanent home. When he had heard that it was temporarily available it had seemed the answer to his problems, but now that he had moved into it Michael was less sure. The flat occupied an uncomfortable middle ground, neither part of the hospital nor completely separate from it. The kitchen windows looked out on the car park and a set of blue and white signs pointing the way to the X-ray and obstetric departments. The bedroom and living room windows faced the other way, on to a grassy area where groups of student nurses sat in the June evenings with their coffee mugs and ring-binders of revision notes.
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