wondered if somewhere in some defiant corner of herself she loved Jimmy still, or if she hated him, or if she was simply tired and ashamed of them both, and finally indifferent. She wondered who he had been with, and if she knew her, or whether she was some mysterious and therefore incalculably alluring stranger.
‘It was exactly the same as usual. Where have you been?’
‘I went over to the golf club for a quick drink. Do you want a nightcap?’
He had opened the sideboard and found a bottle of Johnny Walker about one third full.
‘No, thank you. Who was there?’
‘Where? Oh, nobody much.’
‘Have you eaten?’
‘Yes, I had something at the bar.’
Looking at her, at her angular face, Jimmy thought, She knows, but the realization did not dismay him particularly. She only knew in the way that wives always knew, with a mixture of suspicion and intuition that shied away from wanting to find out the real truth. He wondered how he would feel if she was unfaithful to him, and decided as he always did that he would not care for it at all.
He leaned down to her, intending to kiss the top of her head, to make an offering of affection.
‘You look tired.’
Star jerked away from him, out of his reach, letting her anger show.
‘It’s late,’ she said coldly.
Her arm struck against his as she stood up, making him spill some of his drink. Jimmy felt an answering kick of anger within himself, fuelled by whisky.
He wondered if Lucy’s scent clung to him. He felt immersed in her. After their drinks, in the confined space of the car, she had wound her long legs around him in the gymnastic enthusiasm of their lovemaking. Now he was home and the bloom of guilt he had felt when he arrived was burned off by a jet of resentment. He did not want to come in and see Star with her face made stiff with accusation; there was a way a man’s home should be and Star did not make it so. He hated her when she did this. She could have made things easy and pleasant for both of them, for herself as well as for him, but there was some rigid determination in her that would not adopt the comfortable way.
His free hand grasped her shoulder, his finger and thumb pinching her flesh.
‘What’s the matter with you? I’ve only been out for a couple of drinks.’
Star looked at his face.
His eyes were reddened and there was a flush across his cheekbones that made the fair hairs above the shaving line stand out, but he was a long way from being drunk. A sequence of images passed, dreamlike, through her head. They were violent images, in which she struck out and Jimmy hit back at her, blow for blow. Star shrank. She was bigger, but he was stronger. The scenes in her mind were not all imaginary. Some of them were simply recollected.
Carefully, almost gently, she removed his hand from her shoulder. She walked past him, without saying anything.
Upstairs in their bedroom Star took off her clothes very carefully, and hung them in the old painted wardrobe that they had never quite got around to replacing with fitted alcove models like those in the bedrooms of the other Grafton couples. In bed she turned on her side and waited.
Jimmy followed her up after a few minutes. She heard him in the bathroom, and then he came in and undressed. There was the clink of loose change as he emptied his pockets on to the dressing table. As she lay there Star remembered other evenings that had followed this pattern. She thought, if he tries to touch me, wanting to show what he can do, then he hasn’t been with anyone else. If he doesn’t try, then I’ll know he has.
There was a draught of cold air on her skin as he lifted the covers. Jimmy lay down, turning his back as he composed himself for sleep.
The next day Star telephoned Nina. She felt like some labor-atory animal that had explored all the avenues leading out of a cage and found them blind, except for one that she could not remember encountering before. As she listened to the ringing she imagined Nina in her studio, although she had never seen it. It would be tidy and full of white light.
‘Nina, this is Star. Can we meet? I’d like to talk. I thought I’d forgotten how to, and then I half remembered on our walk. I enjoyed our walk.’
There was a brief silence and then Nina’s warm response. ‘So did I. I’m glad you called. Come round and see me. When? Are you busy this evening? I could make us some supper.’
‘Thank you. I’d like that.’
Star was surprised by the house. Nina showed her over it, right up to the studio at the top. There were pale walls, a very few pieces of furniture, most of them antiques that looked impressive even with Star’s limited knowledge of such things. She liked the feeling of space and air, the sense that fine things had been confidently acquired and then placed exactly where they belonged, without the necessity for compromise. There was nothing makeshift or mass-produced; it was a spare, metropolitan look that made the tastes and styles of Grafton, even Wilton Manor, seem effortful and hopelessly provincial.
They went back to the drawing room on the first floor. Nina poured wine and gave Star hers in a thin glass with a knobbed stem.
‘Are you rich?’ Star asked her. ‘You must be, to have a house like this, with these things in it. That’s an impertinent question, isn’t it? You see, I have forgotten how to talk.’
‘My husband was rich. I didn’t really know, until he died.’
Star felt something that it took her a moment to recognize as envy.
Nina was free, she possessed the luxury of wealth and independence. It would be easy for Nina to go where she wanted, to make herself whatever she wished. It was no wonder, she thought, that Gordon had been attracted to her. Gordon was as defined by the limits of Grafton as she was herself.
‘I know what you’re thinking,’ Nina said.
‘I rather hope you don’t. I’m not proud of it.’
‘I found it harder, rather than easier, to have so much, and still to be alone. To have it because I didn’t have him. In the beginning, just after he died, I wished that my external circumstances matched the way that I felt inside. I sold the houses in London and the country, the cars, put his art collection in storage. I wanted to dispense with what he had left me, as brutally as I could, because he had left me so brutally.
‘I came here because he had never been here. It was my past, not our joint history. And I was so jealous of you, when I first arrived. All you couples.’
‘Ah. Us couples. But you are right, that’s what I was thinking without thinking about it carefully enough. Are you still very sad?’
Nina rested her head against the high back of her chair. It was her instinct to deflect the question, but Star herself made her want to answer it.
‘Sometimes. At other times not. And sometimes when the grief does fade I feel guilty, as if I ought to keep it fresh. Then occasionally I feel sharply happy, as if I’ve never really noticed what it was like to be happy before. Gordon made me feel like that. And so
