and he couldn’t recollect exactly when this later mask had disguised the girl he had married.
‘She is my friend,’ Hannah said piously.
‘Yes. I don’t know whether she’s mine, any more.’
Michael looked down at her, and she unwound her arms from his neck.
‘Is that what you want?’
‘I think it’s what everyone wants, isn’t it, once the beginning is past? Companionship and continuity. A shared history and the understanding that comes with that.’
Hannah hitched her robe more closely around her. She sat down again in her place and wrapped her hands with the flawed nails around her cup of coffee. He immediately regretted the change of mood and wished that they could go back to where she had put her arms around him. He felt awkward, hovering over her in his dark suit, and so he reluctantly moved back and sat down facing her in his own chair.
‘It isn’t what I want,’ Hannah declared. ‘Anyway Darcy and I don’t have that much shared history. His stretches right back through Barney and Lucy and Cathy to the first wife and the first business, and the businesses after that, and includes all the old friends and the old places that I know nothing and care less about, not to mention the women who came before, during and after the first wife and then after her and before me.’
‘But you have Laura and Freddie and this place together.’
‘I have them. It’s not really a joint enterprise. They’re my children and I run the house and Darcy pays the bills.’
Michael was amused by the casual dismissiveness of a rich man’s wife. ‘And so what do you want?’
Hannah regarded him. ‘I want to be loved, of course. Loved madly, passionately, addictively, to the exclusion of all others.’
She said this grandly, with a red-tipped flourish of her hand, but Michael understood that she also meant it.
‘And doesn’t Darcy love you?’
‘Oh, Michael. What do you think?’
‘I think he does.’
‘Wrong. Darcy loves himself, getting the best of a deal, making money, drink, food and cigars, in that order.’ She counted off on her fingers. ‘The children, me, our life here, are just home comforts to him. I’m not sure where Vicky Ransome fits in. A non-home comfort, perhaps?’
Michael stared at her. ‘Vicky?’
‘Didn’t you know?’
‘No. I had no idea.’ Vicky Ransome had always seemed a quiet, faintly bovine presence in the Grafton circle. He was amazed, and embarrassed by his innocence, and troubled by the beginning of a sense that as well as Gordon and Nina and now Vicky and Darcy there were a hundred other secrets and nuances that he had never even dreamed of as he plodded to the hospital and home again.
‘On Christmas Eve I found him with her up in my bedroom, after that boy sliced his arm open. Then after she pitched Gordon out he was there the whole time. He’s got a real thing about women with babies, it’s what turns him on. Mothers. Breasts, mothers’ milk. It’s what he wants himself, inside, in the secret place under the skin. He wants to be mothered. He’d like me to be his mother, only I get tired of it.’
Hannah gave the faintest shrug, tolerant and dismissive at the same time, and she seemed to Michael wonderfully female and knowing as if she had seen and accepted all the quirks and weaknesses of men.
‘I don’t want you to be my mother,’ he told her.
‘Good,’ Hannah said, looking straight into his eyes.
The kitchen seemed to expand around Michael until it became an infinite space filled with light, a much warmer and more liquid light than the brittle spring sun shining into the conservatory. He felt an unfamiliar awareness of limitless possibilities, energy in his limbs, the luxury of the day, of this minute, and realized it was happiness.
He reached out for Hannah’s hand.
‘I’m sorry that I came in and made a clumsy pass at you.’
Her other hand held the strands of hair back from her cheek. He had never seen her look plain before, and he had never wanted so much to go on looking at her, holding her face in front of him.
Her hand linked in his. She was tolerant of him as well as of Darcy. ‘Isn’t that what men do?’
Michael hesitated. He thought it must be what men did to women who looked and acted as Hannah did, and so that must be all she knew.
‘Not necessarily.’
Then, miraculously, she leant closer to him and touched her hand to his mouth. ‘I didn’t mind. I’m glad you did.’
The light intensified around him. ‘I still want to take this thing off you.’
‘Not now. I can’t let you now. Mandy will be back soon with Laura.’
‘Then when?’
‘I don’t know. Does that matter?’
He smiled at her. ‘No. So long as it is when, not if.’
‘When,’ Hannah said, softly and seriously.
On election day the windows of the Frosts’ house were papered with blue posters, and there was a blue rosette fastened with blue and white streamers to the front door knocker. Andrew and Janice had invited their Grafton friends to a late supper and to watch the election results, and an hour before the polls closed the couples began to arrive. They parked their estate cars in the quiet road and greeted one another with questions and predictions about the night’s outcome as they crowded into the house. They congregated in the den where a big blank television screen faced the room. There was an air of uneasy but pleasurable expectancy.
‘A hung Parliament, I think,’ Michael said in answer to someone’s question. ‘And another election within a year.’
Andrew overheard him. He was jovially busy, pouring wine with a bottle in each hand while his face radiated confidence and satisfaction.
‘Don’t you believe it. Share prices are up, the word is that exit polls are promising. I wouldn’t have bet on it a week ago but the last couple of days have been crucial. My money’s on a small majority for us.’
Gordon was standing in the same group. He had searched quickly through the rooms for Nina, with a beat of illogical hope, even though he knew she had not been invited. Andrew had explained to him discreetly that he need not worry. Janice and he had nothing particular against Nina Cort, he said, because it took two people to create such involvements and in any case it was none of his business, but it was much easier for everyone not to ask her to the same evenings as Vicky and Gordon. Gordon had even thanked him. He glanced around the crowded room and remembered how she had looked in her chiffon dress on the night he met her, and how the revolving lights had made different colours in her hair. They had only talked about politics once, lying in the bath together in a motel room. He looked back on that as if on some remote, precious time of unrecoverable happiness.
To
