knew we had it, whatever it was, the big secret, the elixir of life. We always thought we’d hold on to it, too. It makes it doubly hard to accept that it’s already gone, spent, inherited by this lot.’
He tilted his glass towards them, not quite sober by this time, and the whisky slopped.
Darcy shrugged. ‘Did even doctors buy that hippie rubbish? I was a son of the fifties, and I wanted everything my old man never had. I couldn’t grow up quick enough.’
Darcy was preoccupied. He was only giving Michael Wickham’s rambling talk a fraction of his attention. All evening he had only been able to forget his anxiety for a moment, as the party commanded his concentration, and then it would come skittering back to him like a black spider emerging from a web.
Michael glanced at him, noticing for the first time that Darcy was not as eager as usual to play the role of expansive host. He seemed tired, and his tanned face had a greyish tinge. He wondered if he might be ill.
‘No, Darcy, you are an example to us all. Nobody could ever accuse you of left-over hippie idealism. And look what you have to show for growing up so eagerly – Wilton Manor, several cars, wives and children. A place at the very epicentre of Grafton society.’
Darcy would not rise to the bait. He turned away from the dancers. ‘Let’s get another drink. You’ve spilled most of that one.’
Jimmy Rose was less affected by the spectre of his middle age. He had no children to catch him up, and his wife knew better than to follow him around at parties. He felt entirely free to admire Lucy Clegg’s exposed thighs and the twists of coloured cloth she had wound in her hair, and to melt into the noise in the conservatory in pursuit of her.
The Clegg twins drew him into the dance, one on either side of him. They smiled and waved their fingers and undulated their slim hips in time to the music. None of the hulking boys in the vicinity seemed inclined to lay a claim on either of them. Jimmy slid his arm around Lucy’s waist, and danced for a moment with his cheek pressed against hers. She smelled very young and fresh, like a bluebell stalk.
When she wriggled out of his grasp he grinned at her in rueful acknowledgement, and lifted a full glass of champagne from a passing tray as a consolation. Jimmy had been drinking steadily, but the only effect that alcohol ever had on him was to increase his capacity for mischief.
A little later he looked across the dance floor and saw Marcelle. She was standing on her own, her head and arms seeming to hang awkwardly. He left the twins and their friends and skirted around the edge of the floor until he reached her.
‘Dance with me?’ he asked.
‘Yes. I will.’ She held out her hands, rather stiffly, and he guided her. He knew that they made an odd contrast, a pair of waltzers with the loose-limbed young around them. He drew her closer to him. She was wearing a full-skirted dress made of blue-green taffeta that rustled around his legs. Her head drooped, and then rested on his shoulder. Her perfume was heavy and musky, quite unlike Lucy’s, and intensified to the point of sickliness by the dry heat of her skin.
‘You don’t want to dance.’
‘Not really,’ she admitted.
‘Let’s sit out, then.’
He took her hand and drew her behind him. Marcelle focused on his shoulders, and on the reddish prickle of hair at the back of his neck that reminded her of an animal’s scruff.
Jimmy knew Darcy’s house as well as he knew his own. He opened the door to a small room under the angle of the stairway. It was half cloakroom, half gunroom, furnished with hung-up coats and mackintoshes, dismantled fishing rods in green canvas cases, creaking wicker chairs and too-pristine sporting prints introduced by Hannah. It was empty, as Jimmy had known it would be.
Marcelle sank down into one of the chairs, letting her head fall back with a long sigh.
‘Too much champagne,’ she said, swallowing a laugh and a hiccup together.
Jimmy sat beside her. He turned her wrist in his fingers to expose her underarm, where the skin puckered in tiny folds towards her armpit. He put his mouth to the blue vein in the crook of her elbow. Marcelle looked down from what seemed like a great distance on to his bent head.
‘Tell me all,’ he commanded, rubbing his mouth in the hollow.
‘Nothing to tell.’
He lifted his head and circled her with his arm. ‘Yes, there is, I can see there is.’
Now he bent forward so that his mouth reached the top of her breast left exposed by the taffeta bodice.
Marcelle knew that there were minute crepey folds between her breasts, too. They reminded her of the vertical seams in a dowager’s top lip. She was afraid that the dusting of powder she had applied there might have turned into grey wormy threads in the heat. She felt suddenly shy, inexperienced and full of anxiety about her body’s imperfections, like an awkward adolescent. Michael had not found the time to tell her that she was looking pretty when she had hustled him out of the house earlier on.
‘Jimmy, don’t.’
‘Ah, why ever not? Isn’t it nice?’
It felt good to him. At this minute Jimmy loved Marcelle, and he loved Hannah and Janice as well. All the women with their different shapes and textures and scents appealed to him, like so many dishes on an endless table, and the fact that he couldn’t consume all of them did nothing to diminish his appetite.
‘Yes,’ Marcelle said sadly. ‘It is nice. Only not now.’
Jimmy grinned at her. ‘When? When Mike’s at the hospital?’
‘You know I didn’t mean that.’
This was how Jimmy was, each of the wives knew it. Marcelle always parried his advances, very gently and with a touch of regret. She didn’t know what the others did, not exactly, not even Janice, although they joked together out of Star’s earshot about there always being Jimmy to fall back on.
‘What a shame. Well then, talk to me instead. Tell Jimmy your troubles.’
The combined effect of his attention and sympathy following on from the champagne made Marcelle’s eyes fill with unwelcome tears.
‘Oh, it’s nothing. Just domestic bickering.’
‘Only that?’
He stroked her wrist with the tip of his finger, little soothing strokes. She watched the movement, hypnotized by it, wishing that she had not drunk so much. Drink always loosened her tongue. She hesitated, trying to think of something light to say, then she opened her mouth and the words came spilling out anyhow, although she wanted to keep them in, to preserve the marriage myth.
‘No, not only that. It’s much more. And less, in a way. Michael seems to have … gone away somewhere. I don’t mean actually away, although God knows he’s in the house with us less and less of the time, the hospital and patients and committees seem to consume him. It’s as if he’s retreated into himself, closed a door on me, and I find myself … at one minute angry with him for rejecting me, and bitter and resentful, and at the next what must seem, I don’t know, cloyingly there, with my claims and expectations, wifely, needing to be loved. Like an obligation.’
