It won’t make much difference, whoever gets in.’
‘Yes, it will.’ Her contradiction was vehement, and Gordon envied her the conviction that altered and animated her face. But he did not want to embark on a political argument with Star tonight.
‘How are you?’ he asked instead.
‘Nothing has changed. You know how I am.’
It was an acknowledgement of some unfinished business between them that now never would be completed. Star drank her wine and Gordon noticed as he had done before that she wore her sadness like armour.
Vicky was watching the television in the other room and no one else in the kitchen was in earshot.
Star looked up and said, ‘I have been seeing Nina. I like her. We made a kind of agreement that we might be friends.’
It gave him pleasure to hear her name spoken with plain affection.
‘I’m glad. I know she needs a friend, and she couldn’t find a better one than you.’ He was aware that he had been less than stalwart for both Nina and Star, and there was the flat taste of disappointment in his mouth.
There was a chorus of groans and some booing from the television room.
‘Sounds like we won one,’ Star said.
Darcy looked at his watch. It was not yet one o’clock, and although the signs were promising there was no clear victory yet. He glanced around for Hannah, but could not see her. He did not particularly want champagne. His head felt fuzzy as if his skull no longer properly defined it and there was a weight beneath his diaphragm that threatened to expand into pain. But the moment of victory and the uncorking of champagne to mark it gave him something close at hand on which to focus his attention. He heard himself shouting some imprecation at the red and blue figures on the television screen. They suddenly began to dance in front of his eyes, and the burst of laughter that followed seemed to come from a long way off. He reached out for his glass which had been empty and found that it had been refilled for him. He drank down some more of the whisky.
Barney sat on the stairs talking to the two Frost boys. They had been allowed to stay up for the first results, and Janice had not yet noticed that they were still out of bed.
‘We had a mock election in our class,’ Toby told him. He was much more confident and articulate than his younger brother. ‘I was the Labour candidate and I got seven votes.’
‘Seven? That’s not much,’ William jeered. In William’s face the rounded contours of babyhood were plainly visible, whereas his brother’s were just firming into the beginnings of maturity. Barney did not usually take much notice of children, even Laura and Freddie, but he was struck by this difference in the boys.
‘Wait a minute,’ Barney said. ‘How many in the class? Eighteen? So Toby polled about forty per cent. That’s not bad, William. I think even Mr Kinnock would be fairly pleased with that.’
Lucy had been sitting in Janice’s bathroom. It had been a welcome refuge for a few minutes, but Jimmy had not noticed that she was missing and come in search of her. It made her angry that he was so easily able to ignore her in the midst of this braying, opinionated party of her parents’ friends. She took a comb out of her bag and tried to rearrange her hair. As she stared at herself, the wine she had drunk made an acid knot in her stomach and she leaned experimentally over the basin to see if she would be sick. When nothing happened she straightened up and decided that if Jimmy would not come and find her she would search him out instead.
Hannah had grown tired of listening to Darcy and Jimmy shouting out their politics in front of the television. She wandered through the chintz-patterned drawing room where quieter groups were sitting and talking, and past the stairs where Barney was good-naturedly entertaining Janice’s boys. Hannah patted his shoulder and wandered into the deserted dining room. She hesitated beside the wreckage of the supper table, and then realized that Michael was standing with his back to her, staring out through the French windows into the dark garden. She felt a distinct lift of happiness at the sight of him.
When she went across and put her hand on his arm he moved a little to one side, as if he had been waiting for her.
‘Don’t you care about the results?’ she asked.
He shook his head. Then he quietly opened the door.
‘Come out here with me,’ he said.
They stepped out into the darkness. The mild air tasted damp and clean. It was exhilarating to walk away from the over-lit house into the less familiar territory of the garden. There was a pergola along the side of the house and an expanse of paving and lawn, monochrome flat in front of them. Michael took her hand and they stumbled away from the lights of the party. Beyond an arch in a black hedge they came to the swimming pool, closed up under its winter cover. Michael guided her around the perimeter until they came to the cedarwood pool house. He tried the door and it creaked open. Inside they could just distinguish the black outlines of summer garden furniture. There was a dried-out scent of grass clippings and canvas and mower oil.
Hannah shivered and Michael took off his jacket and covered her shoulders. They felt their way forward through the thicket of wood and metal until they came up against a paler glimmer. There was a crackle of polythene sheeting as Michael pulled the cover off the Frosts’ canopied swing seat.
‘Sit here with me,’ he whispered.
The swing rocked and creaked under their weight. Hannah found that she could remember the fabric exactly. It was a pattern of green leaves and blowsy coral flowers against a white background.
‘It’ll soon be summer,’ she murmured.
‘And then autumn again, and Hallowe’en, and Christmas,’ Michael said with his mouth against her hair.
From the refuge of the seat they could see through the half-open door down the length of the pool towards the house and the curtained windows of Andrew’s television room. They were both recalling summer afternoons when children dived and splashed with their wet, dark heads like seals and the couples basked in deck-chairs with drinks in their hands, and there was the scent of charcoal smoke and grilled meat and sun-cream.
Hannah asked, ‘Does everything break up in the end?’
It seemed that there were long cracks underlying these remembered images, although the surface of them remained unbroken like the glassy pool water before the swimmers shattered it.
Michael reassured her, without any certainty of his own, ‘No, not everything.’
He kissed her because he didn’t want to think of anything beyond here and now. They lay back against the flowered cushions and his hands found her bare shoulders under his jacket and the tight band of the top of her green dress.
‘Is it when now?’ he asked her and she laughed softly into his ear.
‘The beginning of when.’
The seat rocked and gave out its mild summer creaking as he undid the zip of the dress. His tongue moved slowly over her skin and he tasted the faint spiritous burn of her evaporated perfume.
Lucy stalked through the party, feeling that no one could have paid her less attention if she were invisible.
She found her
