‘You’ve cut yourself, too.’
She looked at the clean slice in the fleshy base of her thumb. ‘Only a scratch.’
He took a packet of Elastoplast out of a drawer, found a dressing of the right size then applied it for her. Nina noticed that his large hands were clean, but roughened and split at the fingertips as though he did heavy work with them.
‘I’m Barney Clegg,’ he said.
‘I know. I’m Nina Cort.’
They shook hands, Nina’s undamaged left held in his right.
‘I don’t know what we can do about your dress.’
There were dark, sticky patches on the bodice and the skirt. Barney dabbed at a fold of skirt with his cloth.
‘Don’t worry. Please, don’t. You’ve done everything.’ Now that the drama had subsided Nina felt a bubble of laughter rising inside her. ‘It’s just that I can’t stand the sight of blood.’
Barney began to laugh too. ‘Neither can I. I never have been able to. A guy at college put a rake through his foot and I was the one who passed out.’
‘We have both been heroically brave tonight, then.’
They continued to laugh. The party had taken over the kitchen once again; there were caterers clearing up at the sinks and guests passing through in search of one another and the music had boomingly restarted in the conservatory. Then Nina saw Gordon watching them across what seemed like an acre of quarry-tiled floor.
Her laughter faded. She wanted him to come to her and take Barney Clegg’s place, but she knew that he wouldn’t. He would look and then look away, and afterwards he would ignore her as he had done all evening in case anyone else saw them and made an incriminating connection between them.
Michael Wickham led the pale-faced Tom into the kitchen and made him sit down near Nina. His shirtsleeve had been cut away, and his arm was bandaged from wrist to elbow and supported in a makeshift sling made from someone’s silk evening scarf.
‘Are you all right, my son?’ Barney enquired in mock Cockney.
‘Yeah. Sorry, all.’ To Nina he said, ‘Sorry about the mess.’
Gordon had turned away, as she had known he would. Nina made herself smile at the boy. ‘Don’t worry. I’m glad it’s not as serious as it looked.’
Michael said, ‘Still, he needs someone to drive him to casualty to get that arm stitched. I’m damned if it’s going to be me.’
Barney sighed. ‘I guess that’s my job. I’m just about fit to drive.’ He patted Nina on the shoulder. ‘See you again, I hope. Come on, Thomas. Let’s go and join the festivities in the accident department.’
When they had gone Michael rolled down his sleeves and fished for his cufflinks in his trousers pocket. Without thinking, Nina held out her hand for the gold links, and when he gave them to her she threaded them through the double cuffs for him as she had always done for Richard.
‘Well done,’ he commended her.
‘Well done, doctor,’ she returned.
Michael sighed. ‘It’s one of the hazards of the job, never quite to get away from it.’
She saw that when he was not frowning he had a good, plain, likable face.
‘Join me for one last drink?’ he asked her. ‘Before we head home for Christmas? A proper drink, not bloody champagne.’
‘I will. Thank you.’ She already knew that Gordon was nowhere to be seen.
When Gordon crossed the hall Marcelle stepped out and put her hand on his arm. Gordon stopped at once. They saw Darcy hurrying down the stairs but he brushed by them, unseeing, heading for the kitchen.
‘I feel like the Ancient Mariner.’ Marcelle’s mouth made a sad, acknowledging twist. ‘Can we talk for a minute?’
He looked down at her fingers, the red-painted fingernails against his black sleeve. She had capable domestic hands and the red varnish seemed slightly incongruous. Gordon’s head was full of Nina’s pale, imploring face and the little swimming movements she had made with her smeared hands. He answered vaguely, but with a cold sense of impending catastrophe, ‘Talk? Yes, of course.’
‘In here.’
Marcelle opened the door of the gunroom. There were the two creaky wicker chairs that she and Jimmy had occupied, and Jimmy’s empty glass on the floor where he had left it.
‘Parties, these parties. Getting together and talking and drinking and being good fun. At all costs, good fun.’ She put her hand up to her neck, where she could feel a vein pumping. She was very tired now.
‘Marcelle? What do you want to say?’
She nodded, feeling that her skull was too heavy for her spine. Was it only this evening, how many hours ago, that Jimmy had kissed her in here and she had worried about the creases in the skin between her breasts?
‘I know it isn’t any of my business,’ she began, and then faltered. ‘Gordon, I’m sorry. That’s what malicious gossips always say, isn’t it?’
‘I wouldn’t know.’ His mouth became a grim line. ‘Do you listen to gossip?’
She felt rebuked, but also that the rebuke was justified. ‘All right. I’ll just tell you how it is. You know what I saw the other day, and you should also know that until this evening I hadn’t mentioned it to anyone, not to Michael or anyone else.’
He said stiffly, ‘Thank you. You were right, of course, at the beginning. It isn’t any of your business.’
A retrospective, wasted prickle of anger went through Marcelle.
‘Even though Vicky is my friend?’
‘It would be an act of friendship, wouldn’t it, not to pass on speculative whispers about a brief glimpse of two people? A glimpse that might easily have been mistaken or misinterpreted?’
‘But I don’t think I was mistaken, was I?’
When Gordon said nothing she rushed at her admission, wanting to get it over with so she could escape from the horrible room,
‘This isn’t coming out the way I meant it to, not that I know how I meant it. We know each other well enough, don’t we? I wanted to say that I meant to keep my mouth shut, but I didn’t, stupidly, and I’m very sorry. I told Jimmy Rose about it.’
Gordon repeated, ‘You told Jimmy?’
His fuddled mind filled up with images of Jimmy’s cunning fox-head bent close to a circle of heads, and then the heads turning to more circles of listening heads, and mouths whispering, all of them Jimmy’s mouth, on and on in widening ripples into infinity.
‘I’m very sorry. It was a thoughtless and damaging thing to do.’
‘Yes.’
