I haven’t come in fancy dress.’
Janice waved her glass. ‘Your dress is beautiful. I only put this hat on at the last minute, and Andrew is defiantly wearing his penguin suit.’ Her mouth pouted in disparagement, but her eyes revealed her pride in him. ‘Come on, come with me and I’ll get you a drink and introduce you to everyone.’
Nina followed her down the hallway towards the back of the house. The man in the devil suit was sitting at the foot of the stairs, and he glanced up at her as she passed. His eyebrows rose in triangular points.
Andrew Frost kissed her in welcome, and gave her a glass of champagne. Nina drank it gratefully, quickly, and accepted another.
She was launched into a succession of conversations, but felt as if she was bobbing on a rip tide of unfamiliar faces. The effect was surreal, heightened by the fact that some of the faces were ghoulishly made up, swaying above ghost costumes or witches’ robes, while others sprouted conventionally painted from cocktail dresses or naked and pink from the necks of dress shirts constricted by black ties. The man in the devil suit prowled the room, flicking his arrow-headed tail. A delectably pretty girl of about eighteen threaded through the crowd offering a tray of canapés and the devil man capered behind her, grinning.
Nina loved parties, but for a long time Richard had been there for her like a buoy to which she could hitch herself if she found she was drifting away too fast. Now she was cut loose, and the swirl of the current alarmed her.
The room was hot, and confusingly scented with a dozen different perfumes. There was a woman in a long white dress, majestically pregnant, and another, younger, in a shimmering outfit that exposed two-thirds of her creamy white breasts. There was a dark man with a beaky profile, two more men who talked about a golf tournament, a thin woman with a reflective expression who did not smile when Nina was introduced to her.
Nina finished her third glass of champagne. She had been talking very quickly, animatedly, moving her hands like fish and laughing too readily. She realized that she had been afraid of coming alone to this house of strangers. Now she was only afraid that she might be going to faint.
She wanted to hold on to someone. She wanted it so badly that her hands balled into fists.
She held up her head and walked slowly through the chattering groups. It was only a party, like a hundred others she had been to, perhaps a little rowdier because these people seemed to know each other so well. Grafton was a small place.
The kitchen was ahead of her, more brightly lit than the other rooms. There were people gathered in here too, only fewer of them. In the middle of them was Janice, without her hat, and another woman in an apron. They were laying out more food on a long table.
‘Can I help?’ Nina asked politely.
‘No, but come and talk,’ Janice answered at once. ‘Have you met Marcelle? This is Marcelle Wickham.’
The woman in the apron held out her hand and Nina shook it. It was small and warm and dry, like a child’s.
‘Hi. We saw you in the supermarket, Jan and I. Did she tell you?’
‘I’ve hardly had a chance to speak to her. I’m sorry, Nina. I’m just going to tell everyone that the food’s ready …’ Janice pushed her hair off her damp forehead with the back of her hand.
‘We wondered who you were,’ Marcelle explained.
Nina’s hands moved again. ‘Just me.’
‘Who, exactly?’ a man’s voice asked behind her.
‘Look after her for me, Darcy, will you?’ Janice begged as she hurried past. The man inclined his head obediently and passed a high stool to Nina. She sat down in the place that Vicky Ransome had occupied earlier.
‘I’m Darcy Clegg,’ the man said.
He was older than most of the Frosts’ other friends, perhaps in his early fifties. He had a well-fleshed, handsome face and grey eyes with heavy lids. He was wearing what looked like a Gaultier dinner jacket, conventionally and expensively cut except for a line of black fringing across the back and over the upper arms and breast, like a cowboy suit. He had a glass and his own bottle of whisky at one elbow.
‘That is a spectacular dress,’ Darcy Clegg drawled.
Nina liked men who noticed clothes, and bothered to comment on them.
‘How long have you been in Grafton?’ he asked.
Sitting upright, in the kitchen light, Nina sensed that the inquisition was about to begin.
She explained, as bloodlessly as she could, who she was and what she was doing. Darcy listened, turning his whisky glass round and round in his fingers, occasionally taking a long gulp. This new woman with her green eyes and extraordinary hair was interesting, although evidently as neurotic as hell. There was some strange, strong current emanating from her. Her fingers kept moving as if she wanted to grab hold of something. Darcy wondered what she would be like in bed. One of those hot-skinned, clawing women who emitted throaty cries. Nothing like Hannah.
‘And has your husband come down here with you?’ Darcy asked. Nina still wore Richard’s rings.
‘He died nearly six months ago. Of an asthma attack, at our house in the country. He was there alone.’
‘I’m very sorry,’ Darcy murmured. A recollection stirred in him, troubling although he couldn’t identify a reason for it, and he made a half-hearted effort to pursue it. Who had told him a similar tragic story? When the connection continued to elude him Darcy shrugged it away. In many trivial ways he was a lazy man, although he was tenacious in others.
‘What about you? Do you live in Grafton?’ Nina felt that it was her turn.
‘Outside. About three miles away, towards Pendlebury.’
‘And are you married?’
Darcy turned his grey eyes on her and he smiled, acknow-ledging the question. ‘Yes. My wife’s name is Hannah. In the silver décolleté.’
Of course. The luscious blonde with the bare breasts. Nina was beginning to fit the couples together, pairing the unfamiliar smiling faces two by two.
‘And the girl handing round the canapés is Cathy, one of my daughters. By my first wife.’ The smile again, showing his good teeth. Darcy Clegg was attractive, Nina was now fully aware. Politely he filled her glass and they began to talk about how Grafton had changed since Nina’s school days.
More guests filtered into the kitchen, following the scent of Marcelle’s cooking, and the noise swelled around Nina once more.
*
Gordon Ransome brought his wife a plate of food and a knife and fork wrapped in a napkin. Vicky was sitting in a low chair in a corner of the drawing room, where a side lamp shone on the top of her head. He glanced down at her for an instant and saw the vulnerable pallor of her scalp where her hair parted. He had not noticed before that it grew in exactly the same way as their daughters’, and he felt a spasm of exasperated tenderness. She had collapsed into a chair that was too low for her, and she would need help to struggle to her feet again. The voluminous white folds of her dress emphasized her bulge.
When
