disparity in their sizes made them both appear a little absurd.
‘There are demons abroad tonight,’ Jimmy announced.
‘That was Hallowe’en, surely. The last time we all gathered together.’
‘Ah yes, it was indeed. The first time we saw your Belle Veuve. And now you’ve lost her.’
Darcy turned his head. ‘Lost her to whom?’ His voice was soft.
The currents between them shifted like dry sand.
‘To Gordon Ransome, I believe.’
The tick-tick of mutual reckoning was almost audible. At first Jimmy was pleased with the effect of his news; he liked to overturn Darcy’s easy assumption of sexual pre- eminence.
‘How do you know?’
Jimmy shrugged. He hazarded, ‘Ask any of the women. The women always know these things.’
To Jimmy’s surprise Darcy began to laugh. It was a big, genuine laugh that welled up out of his chest, betraying none of the disappointment or pique that he had expected.
‘Gordon Ransome? Is that so? Good for Gordon, then. It was bound to be somebody, I suppose.’
‘Not you?’
Darcy was still laughing. ‘I’m not going to live out your fantasies for you, James, you should know that by now. Has Vicky heard about it, according to your information?’
‘I wouldn’t have thought so. Not yet. No doubt she will.’
Jimmy was irritated. It seemed that he had traded his information for no return.
Darcy patted him on the shoulder. ‘Happy Christmas,’ he said triumphantly.
Jimmy couldn’t gauge quite why Darcy was so pleased with himself. He looked at his watch, trying to conceal his annoyance.
‘Thanks. The same to you. And thanks for the party. I have to go.’
‘So early?’
‘I’m going to midnight mass.’
‘Forgive me, I’d forgotten that. Pray for us sinners, Jim, won’t you?’
Jimmy left him. He went out into the cold, clear night and found his small car in the lines of bigger, glossier models. Star would get a lift home with the Frosts.
Vicky sat feeding Helen in the armchair in the corner of the Cleggs’ big bedroom. Mandy, Hannah’s Australian au pair girl, had searched her out to tell her that the baby was crying in her basket upstairs. It gave her an unreal, dislocated but none the less pleasant feeling to be suddenly translated from the brightness of the party to the silence upstairs, and to the familiar small intimacies of ministering to Helen.
She had laid a towel on Hannah’s quilted bedcover and changed the baby’s nappy, gently swabbing the inward-turning folds of skin with her concentration pleasingly blurred by champagne. Then she undid her dress and sat down in the armchair. After a minute’s hungry attack Helen’s sucking gradually moderated into a sleepy rhythm. Vicky began to hum to her, long, low notes that did not connect into any recognizable tune, but were soothing to both of them.
Darcy found her sitting there. ‘Do you mind if I come in?’ he asked.
Vicky smiled, caught out in her humming, ‘Of course not. It’s your bedroom.’
Instead of edging around the room, as she would have expected, in search of a fresh shirt or a stud or a handkerchief, he came directly to her and stooped down, turning back the corner of Helen’s white cellular blanket with one finger so he could see the baby’s face.
‘She is beautiful,’ he said.
The floor of the bedroom vibrated under their feet with the bass notes of the music pounding below. There was the distant sound of shouting, and then the crack of breaking glass.
‘Is that your conservatory?’ Vicky whispered.
‘I don’t care about the conservatory.’
Darcy knelt down. He put out one hand to cup the baby’s head and felt hard bone under silky skin. The currents of air in the room slowed and became still, and the noise from the party grew irrelevant and then inaudible.
As he stroked the small head Darcy felt a sudden calm. The shocks of anxious energy and fear that made his muscles jerk entirely subsided. He forgot about the party and Hannah and Jimmy, and about the business and all the coloured balls of his concerns that were about to fall out of their juggled sequence.
In their place there was an intense and luminous fascination with the small distance that separated him from Vicky and her baby. It was as if he could see the components of the air, the Brownian movements of the atoms, minuscule and at the same time vast in their significance and simplicity.
He found that he hardly dared to breathe in case he upset the physical balance of light and air and warmth that held the three of them suspended here. Very gently, flexing his heavy fingers, he stroked again, once and then twice. He heard the contented sound that the baby made, a soft half sigh as her jaws slackened and released her mother’s nipple. Darcy withdrew his hand and Vicky laid her in the hollow of her lap.
‘Half time,’ Vicky explained. Her lightness, her matter-of-fact acceptance of his observation, filled him with amazement and pleasure.
While Darcy watched, mesmerized, Vicky drew the white elasticated cup of her bra over the breast and clipped the silvery hooks into the corresponding eyelets. Then, with the deft opposite movement, she released the other side.
He saw the rounded, down-drawn heavy weight, and the net of blue distended veins around the nipple, and the brown shiny nipple itself. It seemed to Darcy, in his trance state, that she was offering it directly to him.
Darcy leaned forward over the bundle of the baby in her lap and put his lips over the nipple.
He heard Vicky gasp, the tiny but sharp indrawing of breath making the exact opposite of the baby’s satisfied exhalation. At once his mouth filled with the thick, sweet, secret taste of milk.
The effect of it was extraordinary.
It took him back to the jealous possessiveness he had felt when he watched his mother feeding his next youngest brother, and way beyond that, back past the boundaries of memory, to his own connection to his mother and his infantile need for her. Even as with one part of his adult, analytical mind Darcy recognized this, the rest of him was overwhelmed by the physical shock of his longing for Vicky Ransome once his mouth had connected with her breast.
He became aware that her hand had come to rest at the back of his head, neither drawing him closer nor pushing him away, but simply holding him, as he had cupped the baby’s head a moment before.
If it had not been for the baby between them he could not have done anything but push her backwards, covering her, pinning her underneath him on the wide space of the bed.
As it was he painfully withdrew his head and saw a whitish dribble of milk trickle down the lower curve of the exposed breast and threaten to
