I’ll concentrate on flower arranging,’ Janice said, and they both laughed.
‘So exactly who is coming tonight?’
‘The usual faces. Roses, Cleggs, Ransomes.’
These, with the Frosts and the Wickhams, were the five families. They ate and relaxed and gossiped in each other’s houses, and made weekend arrangements for their children to play together because all of them, except for the Roses, had young children and in various permutations they made up pairs or groups for games and sport, and went on summer holidays together. There were other couples and other families amongst their friends, of course, and Janice listed some of their names now, but these five were the inner circle.
‘Five points of a glittering star in the Grafton firmament,’ Darcy Clegg had called them once, half-drunk and half-serious, as he surveyed them gathered around his dining table. They had drunk a toast to themselves and to the Grafton Star in Darcy’s good wine.
‘That’s about fifty altogether, isn’t it? No one you don’t know, I think,’ Janice concluded. ‘Except some woman Andrew was at school with, who he bumped into on the green the other day.’
‘Oh well, there’s always Jimmy.’
Again there was the flicker of amused acknowledgement between them. All the wives liked Jimmy Rose. He danced with them, and flirted at parties. It was his special talent to make each of them feel that whilst he paid an obligatory amount of attention to the others, she was the special one, the one who really interested him.
‘What are you wearing?’
Janice made a face. ‘My best black. It’s witchy enough. And I’ve got too fat for anything else. Oh, God. Look at the time. They’ll be in in half an hour.’
The children arrived at four o’clock. Vicky Ransome, the wife of Andrew’s partner, had offered to do the school run even though it was not her day and she was eight and a half months pregnant. Janice’s boys ran yelling into the kitchen with Vicky and Marcelle’s children following behind them. The Frost boys were eleven and nine. They were large, sturdy children with their father’s fair hair and square chin. The elder one, Toby, whipped a Hallowe’en mask from inside his school blazer and covered his face with it. He turned on Marcelle’s seven-year-old with a banshee wail, and the little girl screamed and ran to hide behind her mother.
‘Don’t be such a baby, Daisy,’ Marcelle ordered. ‘It’s only Toby. Hello, Vicky.’
The boys ran out again, taking Marcelle’s son with them. Daisy and Vicky’s daughter clung around the mothers, weepily sheltering from the boys. Vicky’s second daughter, only four, was asleep outside in the car.
Vicky leaned wearily against the worktop. ‘They fought all the way home, girls against boys, boys definitely winning.’
Janice lifted a stool behind her. ‘You poor thing. Here. And there’s some tea.’
The boys thundered back again, clamouring for food. Janice dispensed drinks, bread and honey, slices of chocolate cake. The noise and skirmishing temporarily subsided and the mothers’ conversation went on in its practised way over the children’s heads.
‘How are you feeling?’ Marcelle asked Vicky.
‘Like John Hurt in Alien, if you really want to know.’
‘Oh, gross,’ Toby Frost shouted from across the kitchen table.
Vicky shifted her weight uncomfortably on the stool. She spread the palms of her hands on either side of her stomach and massaged her bulk. Her hair was clipped back from her face with a barrette, and her cheeks were shiny and pink. With one hand she reached out for a slice of the chocolate cake and went on rubbing with the other.
‘And I can’t stop eating. Crisps, chocolate, Jaffa cakes. Rice pudding out of a tin. I’m huge. It wasn’t like this with either of the others.’
‘Not much longer,’ Janice consoled her.
‘And never again, amen,’ Vicky prayed.
The relative peace of the tea interval did not last long. Once the food had been demolished there was a clamour of demands for help with pumpkin lanterns and ghost costumes. William Frost had already spiked his hair up into green points with luminous gel, and Daisy Wickham, her fears momentarily forgotten, was squirming into a skeleton suit. Andrew had promised to take his own children and the Wickhams trick-or-treating for an hour before the adults’ party.
‘I’ll leave you to it,’ Vicky said, bearing away her six-year-old Mary who screamed at being removed from the fun. ‘See you later. I’ll be wearing my white thing. You can distinguish me from Moby Dick by my scarlet face.’
After she had gone Marcelle frowned. ‘Vicky’s not so good this time, is she?’
Janice was preoccupied. ‘She’ll be okay once it’s born. Look at the time. Toby, will you get out of here? Please God Andrew gets himself home soon.’
‘Shouldn’t bank on it,’ Marcelle said cheerfully.
Nina chose her clothes with care. She was not sure what Andrew had meant when he said that fancy dress was not obligatory. Did that mean that only half of the guests would be trailing about in white bedsheets?
In the end she opted for an asymmetric column of greenish silk wound about with pointed panels of sea-coloured chiffon. The dress had cost the earth, and when she first wore it Richard had remarked that it made her look like a Victorian medium rigged out for a seance.
And as she remembered it, the exact cadence of his voice came back to her as clearly as if he were standing at her shoulder.
She stood still for a moment and rested her face against the cold glass of her bathroom mirror. Then, when the spasm had passed, she managed to fix her attention on the application of paint to her eyes. At eight-thirty exactly her car arrived.
The Frosts’ house was at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac on the good, rural side of the town. From what was visible of the dark frame to the blazing windows, Nina registered that the house was large, pre-war, with a jumble of gables and tall chimneys. There were pumpkin lanterns grinning on the gateposts, and a bunch of silver helium balloons rattling and whipping in the wind. Nina’s high heels crunched on the gravel.
When the door was opened to her she had a momentary impression of a babel of noise, crashing music, and a horde of over-excited children running up and down the stairs. Something in a red suit, with horns and a tail, whisked out of her sight. She stopped dead, and then focused on the woman who had opened the door. She was dark, with well-defined eyes and a wide mouth, and was dressed in a good black frock that probably hid some excess weight. On her head she wore a wire-brimmed witch’s hat with the point tipsily drooping to one side. She looked hard at Nina, and then smiled.
‘You must be Andrew’s friend? Nina, isn’t it? Come on in, and welcome.’
The door opened hospitably wide. Once she was inside, Nina realized that Andrew’s wife had spoken in a pleasant, low voice. The noise wasn’t nearly as loud as it had at first seemed, and there were only four children visible. Nina understood that it was simply that she had undergone a week’s solitude, and was unused to any noise except her own thoughts.
‘I’m Janice,’ Janice said.
