a warning; they would be more careful in the future.
She put her foot down and the Mercedes shot forward.
In the demonstration kitchen Marcelle went through the motions of mixing and kneading her bread dough while a dozen students lounging on the benches in front of her yawned and whispered and made notes. Cathy Clegg sat at the front, with her long legs in thick black tights negligently propped up on the dais. She twined an escaped strand of streaky blonde hair through her fingers as she gazed out of the window.
Marcelle had given the lesson often enough to be able to do it on auto-pilot. As she worked and talked a segment of her mind slid over the morning’s conundrum and then away from it, to wonder about the other Grafton couples.
What she had seen made her feel precarious. She had not confessed even to Janice that she was afraid her own marriage was faltering; her communications even with her closest friend about this were always on the level of wry jokes, jokes that turned on the helplessness and childishness of their men. They were never to do with their own loneliness, or disappointment, and even so Janice sometimes shrank from this comic half-truth-telling to reaffirm her own contentment.
‘But they aren’t so bad, the two of them, are they, Mar? They could be much worse, after all.’
She would wrinkle her nose in the pretty way she had, and smooth the loose folds of her skirt over her hips.
Their men could be drunks, or womanizers, Marcelle supplied for her. Or violent, or cruel or criminal – but those were the traits of men in other places, weren’t they? Husbands in television documentaries, newspaper articles. They were nothing to do with the steady couples and the security of Grafton, with its golf club and good schools and with the golden cathedral at its heart.
Marcelle had assumed it was only her own marriage that was dying away into silence, and that it must be doing so through some fault of her own. If she could be better in some way, she reasoned, then Michael would warm to her again. In the meantime she would not admit that she was afraid, even to Janice. She didn’t want to betray too much, to admit that there was so much darkness beneath the smooth, shining surface of their lives.
This morning’s glimpse of Gordon with Nina had not troubled her merely for Vicky’s sake, although that did concern her also. It was more as if in the moment at the level crossing some stretched-taut piece of insulating fabric had been pierced, and now the pinprick was tearing apart to become a gaping hole. Through the hole came a cold and threatening draught of suspicion that blew all around her. It was not just her own life that was in difficulties. The placid and normal world that she struggled to maintain had become as precarious as a conjuring trick. What was the reality in Grafton, Marcelle wondered, and what was the illusion?
The oven pinger interrupted her thoughts.
‘Mrs Wickham? The bread?’ a student helpfully reminded her.
‘Thank you, Emma.’
There had been a time when Marcelle had found it definitely uplifting to cook good food for lovers and friends, although for some reason it had seemed not quite acceptable to admit as much. The young were less worried about such things now. But in the last years – for how long had she felt it? – cooking had become a matter of work, and of repetitive family duty.
Art and nature, Marcelle thought, remembering one of her oblique conversations with Janice. Gardening, and cooking, and sex. Where had the subtle and diverse pleasures gone to?
It was four o’clock. She could hear the clatter of other students in the corridor outside.
‘That’s all for today,’ she told her students.
She left the class and went quickly to the staff room to collect her coat, avoiding the tea-drinking gaggle of other teachers, and emerged from the front door. Immediately she caught sight of Cathy ahead of her, who must have skipped out without doing her share of the clearing. Cathy ran down the steps towards a young man who had just clambered out of an illegally parked Golf. Loud music issued from the wound-down window.
Cathy shouted, ‘Barney!’
Marcelle paused at the top of the steps, wrapping her arms around her chest to keep out the cold. Her breath clouded in front of her.
Barney Clegg greeted his sister with a double feint to her head, and then a bear-hug.
‘Hey, I’m home, are you pleased? Good day’s cooking?’
‘Great. The cooking was okay. Here, have some bread, you’re always hungry.’
He took the chunk that she produced for him and gnawed enthusiastically at it.
‘This is great. Did you make it?’
‘Don’t be a dope. Marcelle did. She’d be thrilled if I had. Wouldn’t you, Marcelle?’
She had come quietly down the steps behind Cathy. The two Cleggs turned their smiles on her. They both had long upper lips, and very white, perfectly even teeth that proclaimed expensive orthodontistry. Marcelle could see their joint resemblance, presumably to their mother, whom she had never met.
‘You could, Cathy, if you felt like it.’ She knew she sounded like a schoolmistress, not the bestower of culinary inspiration to last a lifetime. The realization depressed her. ‘Hello, Barney. Are you home for Christmas?’
Darcy’s eldest child was away studying at agricultural college.
‘Yup. Come to liven the old place up a bit.’ He grinned engagingly at her, displaying his father’s charm and what would turn into the same creases at the corners of his eyes. Barney was over six feet tall, broad-shouldered and blond-haired, with a healthy aura that suggested he spent much of his time in the fresh air. In his trainers and American baseball jacket with white leather sleeves he seemed huge, towering over Marcelle like some benevolent if not very intelligent giant.
‘So, how’re you, Marcelle? Apart from having to teach Cathy, that is? And the family?’
Cathy swiped at him with her black leather rucksack. They were like healthy animal cubs, Marcelle thought, playing outside the nest. She smiled up at Barney.
‘Very well, thank you. But I must go and pick them up from Janice’s, or they’ll be wondering where I am. Have a happy holiday, won’t you?’
As Marcelle crossed the road to the car park the two Cleggs piled into the Golf and slammed the doors, calling their goodbyes to her. The car accelerated away in a diminishing blast of noise and music.
It was Janice’s day for the school run. When Marcelle reached the Frosts’ house the winter daylight had all but gone and the street lights made the sky look thick and black. Janice’s car was already in the driveway. The children were in the kitchen, and so was Vicky Ransome with her baby and the two little girls.
Marcelle took the mug of tea that Janice handed her and gave her children the attention they needed. Jonathan had scored a goal in a football game, and Daisy was anxious about the evening’s singing rehearsal.
‘Well done, Jon. There’s plenty of time, Daisy. We’ll have supper and then go to the cathedral. Look, William isn’t worried, is he?’
William didn’t take his eyes from the television screen.
Marcelle
