open blouse showed the strong stalk of her neck, and her head nodded tenderly over the contented baby. While she watched Vicky Marcelle became sure that she could not possibly say anything about what she had seen. Her anxiety about what it meant together with the responsibility for keeping silent pressed heavily on her. She wondered if there were other secrets, secrets that she could not guess at, inhabiting the room and separating the three of them.
‘How are you?’ she heard herself asking Vicky.
Vicky looked up. Her wings of hair swung back to expose her cheeks and the collar of flesh, not yet dissolved, that pregnancy had laid down around her jawline.
‘It’s tiring, with three of them. Alice wakes up often at night, always when this one has just gone off. I spend a lot of time creaking across the landing from one bedroom to the other, hurrying to stifle the cries. And then sitting in the baby’s room, feeding her, imagining we are the only people in the world who are awake. There is that particular silence in the small hours that seems unbreakable.’
‘I remember.’
‘But Gordon is being very good. Better by far than he was with the other two.’
Marcelle could well imagine that Gordon would come home and guiltily try to compensate for what he did elsewhere. She felt hot shivers of indignation directed at him, and at Nina.
‘That’s nice,’ she said pointlessly, seeing the red car again and the two bewitched profiles sliding apart from each other.
Later the same evening Vicky was watching television. She was sitting in her usual chair with her feet curled up beneath her and her hands wrapped around a mug of hot milk. It was only the reminder that the milk must not be spilt that kept her from dozing off. She was tired, but there was no point in going to bed to sleep before Helen had woken for her last feed. The baby lay in her basket on the sofa. Vicky drank some of her milk, and the skin that had formed on the surface of it caught on her top lip. The act of rubbing it away reminded her strongly of being a little girl, sitting in her dressing gown ready for bed while her mother listened to The Archers. The comforting childhood feeling of being secure and in the right place pervaded the present, too, falling around her and enclosing the children and Gordon in its warmth.
In the kitchen Gordon tidied up after their dinner, a Marks & Spencer curried chicken dish that he was not particularly fond of. There was a milk-rimed saucepan filled with tepid water on the draining board, and Vicky had stood a bunch of dirty cutlery in it to soak. Yellow-crusted eggshells and toast fragments left from the children’s tea had fallen out of a bent tinfoil dish on the worktop, and there was a high water mark of tea leaves and whitish scum clinging to the sides of the sink. Next to the tinfoil dish was the clear polycarbonate sterilizing drum for Helen’s feeding equipment. The bottles and teats floated murkily inside it.
Gordon set about tidying up. Vicky was not a fastidious housekeeper, and he preferred domestic order and cleanliness. For a long time, they had tried not to let this difference be a source of irritation between them.
As he worked, Gordon thought deliberately about Nina. He set himself the test of recalling the shape of her hands and fingernails, the way her hair grew back from her forehead, the exact timbre of her voice. The details came to him without effort, but invested with clear importance that was separate from the jumble of everything else that made up his life. He knew that he was in love with her.
When he was satisfied with the order of the kitchen he went through to the living room to find Vicky. When she saw him she pushed out her jaw in a yawn that turned into a lazy smile, and stretched her arms with the fingers bent inwards at the knuckles in a way that made him think of a cat.
‘Vicky?’
He was exhausted with the weight of having to keep the truth from her, and by the opposing need to tell her, to blurt out what was happening and share the bewilderment of it with her.
‘Mmm?’
I’ve fallen in love with Nina. I want to live with her. I don’t know how not to be with her all the time. How can I explain that to you?
‘Did you see Marcelle today?’
She saw us at the level crossing. I know what she saw, and therefore what she knows.
‘Yes. She came to pick the kids up from Janice’s while I was over there this afternoon. Why?’
Marcelle had said nothing, then. Not yet.
‘No reason, really. It seems a while since we saw the Wickhams. I passed her in the car this morning, which made me think of it.’
The room seemed to shiver around him, with all its accumulated weight of familiarity, curtains and covers chosen, books collected, photographs and mementoes and worn patches accumulated over the years lived through together. It shivered with the precarious balance of the necessary truth against his merciful deception.
Vicky sighed. ‘We should have an evening, I know. But, to be honest, I don’t think I’ve got the energy to do it. Perhaps we could have some people in over Christmas?’
He put his hand on her shoulder. There was a pad of flesh there, and he felt the dent where the broad strap of her nursing bra bit into it. He knew her so well; he saw her set in her separate place like a fly in amber, or a fish held fast in the winter ice, and himself beside her, a way apart. The two of them no longer flowed together, they didn’t blur and coalesce and give off energy by their combination as they once had done.
‘You don’t have to bother about anything like that. We’ll only do it if you want to.’
Vicky stretched herself again, luxuriating in his concern for her.
‘All right. Only if we both feel like it. Is that Helen waking up? Have a look for me.’
He leaned over the basket. The baby’s eyes were open. They were very deep and dark in her tiny red face, and they stared straight up into his.
‘Yes, she is awake. Do you want her?’
Vicky undid her front buttons in answer to him. He saw the armoury of her underclothes, and then the veined blue-whiteness of the overfull breast when she released it. The loose flesh of her belly swelled up in another curve below it. There was a tissue pad in her bra cup that gave off a stale-milk smell. He thought of Nina’s spare, freckled body and its touching knobs of bone.
Gordon lifted the baby carefully out of the basket. Her heavy head wobbled against him and he cupped it in his hand, noticing how the silky skin wrinkled over the hard, fragile skull. As he held her with her tiny face against his cheek he felt a rising up of pain inside him that made him want to cry out. He breathed in the scent from the downy head and the pain grew so acute that he did not know how he could contain it.
Then Vicky held her empty arms out for the baby, and he handed his daughter over to her.
The evening before the dress rehearsal for the nativity play Marcelle and Nina met at the Wickhams’ house. The two women had not seen each other since the morning of the level crossing. Nina brought with her the animal masks that she had made in her studio over the last few days. She had taken a lot of trouble with them, as if doing so would somehow atone for everything else.
In Marcelle’s dining room Nina took the masks one by one out of their wrappings and laid them out for her approval. They were very light and
