hands rested on his head, and she stroked his hair absently, almost maternally.
‘Take your clothes off too,’ she said. ‘Then I won’t feel so exposed. I’m ashamed of the way I look these days. I wish I was thin and tight-skinned, like Nina. I wish I had long legs like knitting needles, and no tits. That must be what Gordon wants.’
‘It isn’t what I want. I want you. Look at you.’ He weighed her breasts in his hands, and saw that a colourless bead of liquid appeared at the brown nipples.
‘Take your clothes off, then,’ Vicky said again. ‘Before Helen wakes up.’
He loved this brisk practicality in her. Hannah liked the transactions of sex to be swathed in the ribbons and tulle of romance, even after seven years of marriage.
Vicky helped him to undress, putting his clothes tidily to one side as he discarded them. She thought that for a handsome man he had a surprisingly ugly body. His chest and shoulders were covered in thick grey hair and the muscles of his stomach must recently have given way because when he was not holding it in his belly coyly protruded as if it were not quite part of him. His small, thick penis looked like some hairless burrowing rodent. When he took her in his arms the grey pelt crinkled minutely against her skin.
They lay down together in her bed, and while one part of her mind was occupied with the attentions that Darcy required, the rest of it seemed free to wonder if this act was revenge against Gordon, or if it was something she had wanted for the sake of itself.
It was startling to discover that Darcy was not such an adept lover as her own husband.
He came quite quickly, very noisily, and the detached part of her remained untouched and unaroused, dreamily watching this scene as if it were nothing to do with her. She wondered what it could be that Hannah liked, and it came to her in a moment of pure perception that Hannah liked herself – it was her own vanity that gave her her habitual glow, and Darcy functioned as a suitably impressive mirror to reflect her back at herself. The certainty of this insight lessened Vicky’s guilt.
‘You didn’t do that out of gratitude, did you?’ Darcy asked afterwards. They had been lying with their arms around each other, separately contemplating the room and his presence in it.
‘No. I did it because I wanted to.’
That was the truth. For the two weeks that Darcy had been visiting her she had known it would happen, and she had been waiting for it, neither putting it off nor willing it to come.
‘Will you let it happen again?’
‘Yes,’ Vicky said, because she knew that she would.
And so Darcy had called on her the next morning, and the one after that. On the third morning, after they had made love, she found herself examining his blunt, handsome face on the pillow in Gordon’s place. There were creases and pouches in it that she could not remember noticing before.
‘You look tired.’
‘I don’t sleep well, at the moment.’
‘Are you worried about something? About business?’
He was startled by her percipience. Hannah never asked him about his work.
‘There are some investments I have made on behalf of other people that haven’t performed as I hoped they would.’
Her clear eyes gazed into his. ‘Is it serious?’
‘No,’ Darcy said.
‘Do you want to talk to me about it? Would it help?’
‘It wouldn’t be very interesting for you.’ With the tip of his forefinger he touched the hollow of her throat. ‘And it isn’t very important, because it is easily put right.’
‘That’s good.’ Vicky smiled, and it touched him to see her relief. He kissed her, and burrowed deeper into the warmth and safety of the bed.
It was another two weeks before Vicky answered one of Gordon’s telephone calls and heard him say,
‘Won’t you let me come home? I miss the girls. I miss you.’
It was the middle of the morning, the safe, domestic time that she had always liked and which had lately come to belong to Darcy’s visits, or to the possibility of a visit. She looked at her kitchen, seeing the cups and plates in glass-fronted cupboards and hearing the industrious thrum of the washing machine and the dishwasher.
This is the life Gordon and I made, she thought, seeing it as a once-clear picture now confusingly cross-hatched with images of Nina and Darcy.
The few hours that she had spent with Darcy had been stolen, and retaliatory, but they had also woken her out of some stale, isolated maternal trance. She felt grateful to Darcy, and under his spell like some narcissistic girl newly and shallowly in love, but she also felt strong. She was suddenly sure that she was much, much stronger than Gordon.
Vicky looked down at her hand, with her engagement and wedding rings, and extended her fingers for her own pleased contemplation as if she had just had a manicure.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘All right. I’d like you to come home.’
She had told Darcy the same day, ‘I said he could come back.’
‘Is that what you want?’
After a moment she had answered, ‘Yes. I was angry with him, but I’m not any longer.’ She touched his hand gently. ‘Doing what you and I have done has made me less … less censorious of Gordon. Do you mind that?’
‘How could I? What about you and me? May I still see you?’
‘Like Gordon seeing Nina, do you mean?’
‘Yes, I suppose I do mean like that.’
He had heard the smile in her voice before he met her eyes and saw it. ‘I don’t know. I’m not sure. But you know where I am, and I know where you are. Is that enough, for the time being?’
‘I suppose it will have to be,’ he had answered. Darcy had felt slow, and out-manoeuvred, and he had also felt hurt. He remembered again that at Christmas he had momentarily imagined himself to be in love before dismissing the idea with a coarser intention.
He had been right the first time, Darcy thought. His mistakes seemed now to multiply in thickets around him.
Later, in Méribel, Darcy carried the telephone to the window as he dialled her number, and stood staring across the balcony to the sunny slopes while he listened to the ringing tone.
‘Hello?’
‘Hello.’
He did not need to identify himself, that was an acknow-ledgement of their intimacy, but there was an infinitesimal pause before Vicky said,
‘Darcy? Is that you? Is something wrong?’
‘Why do you think there’s something wrong because I’ve called you?’
‘You’re on holiday with Hannah
