to bring novices up to the standard where they might look for work as ski-chalet cooks. Her current set included Cathy Clegg, one of Darcy’s nineteen-year-old twins, who was a perfect example of the Pond’s introductory cooking student. Cathy’s only real interest in food was in how much or how little of it she could consume before a millimetre of surplus flesh appeared on her miniskirted hips.
As she drove Marcelle was reflecting on the lack of enthusiasm from her class, and in another compartment of her mind she was running through the afternoon’s demonstration. She would be showing the students how to make ciabatta bread, and enlarging on some techniques associated with bread and dough preparation before the next morning’s practical session.
Her attention was fully engaged and she drove the familiar route automatically, almost unseeingly.
Marcelle had taken a roundabout way via the outer bypass instead of facing the morning’s traffic through the middle of the town. By this route she would cross a branch of the main railway line that ran out to the west of Grafton. The fading echo of mainline expresses heard from the cathedral green was supposed to mean that rain was coming.
The branch line was not much used, but today, as she looked ahead over the flat crowns of the hawthorn hedges, Marcelle saw the red and white arms of the level-crossing barrier begin to descend. When she rounded a bend and could see the crossing itself, the gates were already down and the red warning lights were flashing to indicate that a train was coming. Marcelle muttered, ‘Damn’ and slowed to a stop in front of the gate.
On her own side of the line hers was the only waiting car. At first, because she was busy with her thoughts, she registered only that there was another vehicle drawing up on the far side beyond the tracks.
Then, after two or three seconds, some recollection of shine and redness made her look again.
Immediately she recognized Nina’s new Mercedes. The flashness of the car had given rise to some wry remarks amongst the Grafton wives. Marcelle saw that it was Nina at the wheel of the red car, and that there was a passenger with her.
The train was approaching. She could hear the rumble of it, and out of the corner of her eye she saw a blur of movement as the dark shape rolled around a bend towards the crossing.
In that moment Marcelle realized that Nina and her passenger were laughing together, and that there was a shiver of intimacy between them that she couldn’t have described, or accounted for by their expressions or postures. She was only certain that it was there, and that the couple had not seen her, and that the man was Gordon Ransome.
A second later the engine of the train hid them from her sight. It was a heavy diesel pulling a line of clanking goods wagons. Marcelle counted them as they went by, sixteen in all, and then the swaying brown box of the guard’s van at the end. In the minute that it took the train to pass she collected her thoughts, and began to compose the simple explanations that would account for Gordon and Nina laughing together, alone in her car on a weekday morning, enjoying a closeness that seemed to exclude the rest of the world.
The guard’s van swept by, reopening her view like a curtain being drawn back.
Marcelle saw Nina’s hands still braced on the wheel, two small white patches. She also saw that the two heads were slowly drawing apart, and she knew for certain, as surely as she also knew who the two people were, that they had kissed while they were waiting for the train to pass by.
The red lights at the side of the barrier stopped flashing. In a moment the gates would automatically swing upwards once again. But while the two cars waited, separated by the rails and the red and white bars, Gordon and Nina saw Marcelle watching them.
In her turn, Marcelle saw how their faces turned into stiff ovals pocked with the dark holes of shock.
The rear of the train had disappeared. The gates silently lifted, moving through an invisible arc until the twin arms pointed upwards and the way was left clear.
Both drivers eased their cars into gear and they crept towards each other over the wooden ramp. Marcelle lifted her hand in a wave and Gordon and Nina both smiled back at her. Even as they passed each other Marcelle recognized what it took for them to overlay their expressions of alarm with smiles of conventional greeting.
Then the Mercedes was gone, dwindling in her rear view mirror and vanishing around the bend in the road.
Marcelle drove on towards the Pond School, trying to lay straight in her mind the implications of what she had seen. Two miles further on, while she was still thinking of Vicky with Helen strapped to her front in a baby sling, she caught a glimpse of Gordon’s grey Peugeot. He had left it in a corner of the car park belonging to a roadside restaurant.
‘Did she see you?’ Nina gasped. ‘Did she recognize you?’
‘Of course she did.’
Pale-faced, Gordon stared ahead at the road as he tried to work out the significance of what had happened.
‘She couldn’t have seen us kiss. The train was in the way,’ Nina said.
‘I think she must have seen enough.’
How could they, he wondered, have imagined that they were invisible and impregnable, just because they were so happy to be together?
They were both shaking. Their instinct was to pull off the road and find comfort and reassurance in touching each other, but to do so where they could be seen would be to compound their absurd mistake. Gordon was asking himself, even now, Where can we go in future? Where will we be safe?
‘There could be a perfectly ordinary explanation. Your car could have broken down. I was giving you a lift. I just passed by. Gordon?’
She was seeking his reassurance, and he tried to give it.
‘Yes. Maybe.’
‘What shall we do, then?’
He couldn’t think of anything in particular. It seemed now inevitable that someone would have seen them, and he was amazed by his preceding carelessness. ‘Nothing. I don’t believe there is anything we can do, except brazen it out if we have to with a breakdown story.’
‘Do you think Marcelle will say anything to Vicky?’
He thought about it. ‘No, I don’t suppose so. Not directly. Perhaps she’ll try to warn her in some more oblique way. I don’t know. What do women say to each other in these circumstances?’
‘I have never been in these circumstances before.’
The edginess came back again as they veered from complicity to opposition.
They drove for a little way in silence. Gordon was trying to work out what would happen if he told Nina now that it must end, before anything else happened. But it was only a distant speculation. They had already come too far to imagine retracing their steps.
They came to a crossroads, and a sign indicating that they were only a few miles from the motorway. Nina lifted her hands from the wheel for an instant.
‘What do you want to do? Shall we go on?’
He answered at once, ‘Yes. Let’s get as far away from here as we can, if only for a few hours.’
His certainty won
