looked away from the window at last. The strength of his objection made the others realize that he was drunker than they were. But the tradition of deference to Darcy meant that no one tried to argue in favour of starting up a game.
Hannah looked at him, her smile disappearing for a second. Then she stood up, lazily reaching out her arms and flexing her fingers. She had taken off her suede boots, and her toenails were painted with the same bronze varnish as her long fingernails.
‘I know.’
She went across to the cassette player provided as part of the chalet’s equipment. There was a neat stack of cassettes beside it and she flipped through them until she found one that suited her. Michael and Andrew watched her as she bent down to fit the tape into the player. Janice lay back in her place with her head resting on one arm, waiting to see what would happen.
‘I think we should dance,’ Hannah said.
The tape she had chosen was Tina Turner’s Private Dancer, no longer particularly new, more or less familiar to each of them. She began to hum, low down in her throat, while she searched for the place she wanted in the tape. Then, when she had found it, she stretched her arms wide, threw back her head and began to dance.
They had seen Hannah dance before, all of them, dozens of times, but not quite like this. Her eyes were half-closed but she was still smiling, moving her hips rhythmically to the music, slow gyrations that seemed to ripple up the length of her spine and down her arms to her fingertips. She was absorbed in herself but sang as she danced, ‘I’m your private dancer, a dancer for money, I’ll do what you want me to do …’
Nobody else moved.
As a performance it was overdone, veering close to parody, and there was a second when someone might have laughed and then the laughter would have spread and Hannah’s solo would have lost its power to transfix any of them. But there wasn’t a sound except for the music and Hannah’s singing, and there was a crackle of tension in the room.
Janice lifted her head from her arm and watched, her mouth slightly open. Andrew was fully awake, and Michael put a finger up to rub a bead of moisture away from his top lip. Each of them thought, in their different ways, of the change that Gordon and Nina had begun. The imminent unravelling of the old pattern and the possibility that a new one might catch them up was threatening but now, also, it was made fascinating by Hannah’s erotic dance.
Only Darcy had turned his attention back to the window and the snow drifting beyond the glass.
Hannah held out her hands to Andrew, not inviting but insisting that he dance with her. He groped his way to his feet as if he was hypnotized and at once Hannah’s arms snaked around him. Her head rested on his shoulder and her eyes closed.
‘Dance, all of you,’ she said.
Michael’s limbs had connected themselves again, and he leaned across to Janice.
‘Will you?’
He had wanted to dance with Hannah; he was amazed to discover how much he had wanted to dance with her when she had chosen Andrew.
Janice’s silky robe swished as she uncrossed her legs and stood up.
She half stumbled, because she had drunk plenty of the wine at dinner, but Michael caught her hand. Her loose sleeves fell back, baring her pretty, rounded arms to the elbows as she made a mock-subservient offer of herself to him.
Michael took hold of her and as they began to dance she came closer, and he let his hands slide down over the soft stuff masking her back. She felt much bigger than Marcelle and there were pads of flesh on her shoulders and over her hips; confusingly the ampleness of her became identified with the image of Hannah dancing that he carried behind his eyelids. The perfume of Janice’s hair and skin caught in his throat and nose, making him think that he would sneeze.
Past the swaying bodies of the other couples Darcy saw Marcelle sitting awkwardly in her place. Her head was up, but something in the stiffness of her posture betrayed her unhappiness. He left his place and edged past the dancers, feeling as he had done earlier that his own body had grown too bulky to manoeuvre properly.
‘Marcelle?’
‘You don’t have to be kind, Darcy.’
The expression in her eyes made him suddenly angry with Hannah for doing this. It was her way of demonstrating her displeasure with him, of course, and she would not bother to consider beyond that.
‘It isn’t a kindness,’ he said roughly.
When he took them between his, Marcelle’s surprisingly small, cold hands reminded him of a little boy’s, of Barney’s years ago when he had come in from playing in a wintry garden. She felt brittle, too, as they moved together, unfamiliarly light and dry, quite unlike Hannah or Vicky, and tall, so that her eyes were almost level with his.
They danced clumsily together, and to smooth over this and to turn the moment to advantage against Hannah, Darcy pressed his cheek against Marcelle’s, and then found the corner of her mouth with his own. He heard the small catch of breath in her throat, and opened his mouth to kiss her. As he did so he noticed that with Hannah’s limbs wound around him Andrew had begun to look like a rabbit caught in the headlights of a car, and that Janice and Michael danced with their eyes shut, heads close together, seemingly unaware of anyone else.
He brought his attention back to the business in hand, that of kissing Marcelle. She was the opposite physical type to the one that attracted him, but there was an interesting novelty in exploring the contours of her lips and face. He moved his face, rubbing himself against her, but Marcelle neither responded to him nor removed herself. He had the impression that her eyes were open and she was looking away somewhere beyond him.
Another track began, slower than the last, and the three couples swayed and circled. The fire had burnt down to a red glow, and the room had grown dimmer.
Darcy wondered if they were going to continue with this, if the clinches would get closer and if they would slip away, each pair in turn, to bedrooms that did not contain their own clothes that had been folded and packed at home in Grafton. The scenes played themselves in his head, while he went on slowly circling with Marcelle Wickham and nuzzling her motionless face. He tried to work out what he would do, who would make the first move. The bizarreness of these imaginings, together with the possibility that they might become reality, made him speculate whether the ordinary old procedures of marriage and friendship were about to change, and to move in new and uncontrollable directions as his business life was doing. His heart began its uncomfortable thumping again, and he felt a small, needling pain in his chest.
Somewhere else in the chalet, from somewhere over their heads, someone began to scream.
Darcy thought for an instant that the sound might be to do with the sensations within him, but the three couples froze and then broke apart. They were blinking, momentarily bewildered and embarrassed. The screaming stopped, broken off short with a different cry, and then there was a long second’s silence followed by a loud thump. The parents heard the sound of a child’s bare feet running overhead.
‘Who is it?’ Marcelle cried.
Janice was already on her way to the door, with Michael behind her. The others heard panicky feet thudding down the stairs. A moment later William Frost appeared in the doorway with Janice swooping to catch him. His face was flushed and wet with tears and his round
