arms. ‘Brave girl.’
‘She’s stupid,’ Mary said at his elbow, needing to state her own case now that the panic was subsiding. ‘She ran in front. It wasn’t my fault.’
‘It wasn’t anyone’s fault, it just happened.’
Gordon extended his other arm to hold Mary too. He hugged his daughters close to his chest, daunted by their vulnerability and by the scale of the work involved in keeping them safe, helping them to grow. He felt weighed down by the responsibility of parenthood, but at the same time a different, narrow perspective opened up, of reluctant admiration for Vicky and satisfaction in their partnership. They had achieved these three tiny individuals, at least. After this evening, he thought, he would make sure that everything was set right again.
The lump on the side of Alice’s head had grown to the size of a small, shiny egg, but the graze had stopped bleeding and he could see that there was no serious damage done. Gordon stood up, setting the two girls side by side on the tarmac.
‘We had better go home,’ he told them. ‘Helen will be waking up soon and needing her feed.’
In the evening, after the children had been put to bed, Vicky made dinner, a random assemblage of leftovers that seemed even more half-hearted than her recent efforts in the kitchen.
‘I’ll do a big shop tomorrow,’ she defended herself, before Gordon could complain. Her brief nap in the afternoon seemed only to have increased her tiredness. She moved heavily between the table and the fridge with the congealed dishes.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Gordon said. He felt clumsy and guilty. He opened a bottle of wine, and made himself a cold turkey sandwich. When they were both sitting down he began, ‘Can we talk about something?’
‘I’m very tired,’ Vicky answered.
‘It’s important.’
She waited in silence, holding her wine glass between her hands. The puffiness of the skin around her eyes had narrowed the sockets, giving her a Chinese look.
Gordon put down his sandwich. Staring at the plate in front of him he said, ‘There isn’t any gentle way to tell you this, I wish there were. I have been having an affair with Nina. It’s over now.’
Behind him the refrigerator gave its familiar shudder as the motor started into life.
Vicky looked as if he had hit her. Gordon made a move to touch her, but she pushed him away with a stiff, panicky gesture.
‘Nina?’ she repeated.
‘I’m so sorry about it. I wanted to tell you.’
After a moment Vicky sank down, her shoulders sagging against the back of the kitchen chair.
‘I knew there was something. Oh, God, I knew there was something.’ She shaded her eyes with her hand. ‘How long have you been having this affair?’
‘It started when you were in hospital.’
‘When I was in hospital? When I was in hospital, having our baby?’ She shook her head from side to side, as if she couldn’t quite make sense of the words.
Gordon thought, This is terrible. He had tried to imagine how it would be, over and over, but he had never envisaged this sick, shocked look of Vicky’s.
‘When did it end?’ she asked.
‘I went to tell her yesterday afternoon.’
‘Why yesterday afternoon?’
He paused, and then said, ‘Marcelle Wickham saw the two of us together a few days ago. She told Jimmy about it on Christmas Eve.’
‘But why did you end it?’
‘Because I wanted to,’ he lied. ‘And because I wanted you to hear about it from me, not from Janice or Star or somebody else.’
Vicky nodded her head, his words seeming to come clear to her at last.
‘Christmas Eve? You ended it because you had to.’
‘No, that’s not true.’
She let her hand drop away from her eyes. They stared at each other as if in the last minutes they had become different people. Gordon felt himself beginning to shake.
‘So, what was she like in bed, your Nina? Was the sex wonderful?’
‘No,’ he lied again.
Vicky was still staring. Then, with terrible suddenness, her face began to melt. Her mouth split wide open, showing her teeth and her tongue, and her eyes narrowed to slits. She started to cry, the tears running down her face. Her shocked composure followed by this collapse reminded Gordon of Alice’s stunned silence and then her screams of pain and outrage in the park. He reached out now and did manage to take Vicky’s hand.
‘I’m very sorry,’ he said humbly. ‘It was a terrible thing to have done.’
Vicky was sobbing aloud, thick uncontrolled sobs that went ahahah in her throat.
‘What can I say?’ Gordon muttered wretchedly.
Vicky tore her hand away from his. She made a grand sweep with her arm and knocked her glass to the floor, and the red wine splashed up the cupboards and over a drawing of Mary’s that was pinned to one of them. Broken glass glinted on the tiles and Vicky got to her feet, staggering as if she was drunk, and ploughed through it to the sink. With another sweep of her arm she cleared the draining board of cups and plates, sending a wave of china crashing around her.
‘Don’t say anything,’ she shouted at him. ‘Don’t! I don’t want to hear it, whatever you say.’
She stretched out, her fingers clawing for something else to throw and smash. Gordon jumped to his feet and ran through the sea of broken crockery to catch her wrists.
‘Stop it,’ he ordered her.
Vicky jerked one hand free. She swung it back and delivered an open-handed blow to the side of his face. His jaw snapped upwards, catching his tongue between his teeth and making his eyes water with humiliating pain. He stepped away from her, angry now, his shoes crunching in the shards of china.
With a last wild swing Vicky knocked the bottle sterilizer off the worktop. As it hit the floor the top came off, sending a plume of sterilant and dancing bottles that descended over Gordon’s feet. He thought she was laughing as she whirled away from him, out of the kitchen, slamming the door so that the unbroken plates on the shelves perilously rattled.
Gordon stood still, breathing hard and tasting the blood on his tongue. Feeding bottles rolled and settled amongst the mess of broken plates, and sterilant ran in uneven tongues towards the bulwarks of the cupboards.
He put his fingers to his stinging cheek, and then wiped the blood from his tongue on the back of his hand. The refrigerator motor cut out, and the machine shrugged itself comfortably into silence again.
Gordon stooped down and picked up the first pieces of broken plate.
He
