looking at the television watchers with her habitually superior expression. Lucy slid past her, eel-like, with her face turned away. Barney was nowhere to be seen. She thought he must already have gone off in his own car in search of livelier company. Even Cathy seemed to have deserted her.
The dining room smelled unpleasantly of congealed food and cigarette smoke, even though Janice and Marcelle Wickham were pecking about in it with trays and cloths. She breathed shallowly against her nausea and then in a group at the far end containing the Kellys and a quartet of dull, golfing people Lucy caught sight of Jimmy.
She darted to his side, and as the faceless people made room for her she turned her shoulder on them to isolate Jimmy from the group.
‘I want to talk to you,’ she said. Her voice had risen in pitch.
‘Lucy, my lovely girl. Talk away,’ he said warmly. His brogue seemed to have thickened and she thought he half winked over her shoulder at the eavesdroppers.
‘Somewhere else. Please.’
Jimmy’s benevolent expression didn’t change but when he took her arm he gripped it a little too tightly. Jovially he excused them both from the group and steered Lucy away. Out in the empty hallway she saw that his mouth made a tight line and his eyes had gone flat. She had made him angry, and the thought that all she had wanted to do was to have him to herself for a moment in public as well as in thick, fumy secret, caused her eyes to sting with tears.
Jimmy glanced around them and then opened the front door and propelled her outside. He hustled her through the cold until they reached the safety of his car. Once they were inside it in the dark Lucy felt they were in their own territory where he had acknowledged her as the queen.
‘I needed to see you,’ she said with a touch of hauteur.
‘Don’t be an idiot. In front of your father, and everyone else in there?’
Lucy understood that he was still angry even though they were alone. Her imperiousness dissolved at once into helpless tears.
‘I love you. I can’t bear to see you and not to be with you.’
‘I know that, but you must. How do you think it is for me?’
He was softer-voiced now. Lucy flung herself against him and sobbed. ‘I want you, I need you now.’
‘How much have you had to drink?’
‘Quite a lot. I feel sick.’
He sat upright against her. ‘Are you going to be sick?’
‘It isn’t that.’ She pushed her hair back from her smudged eyes and turned to look full at him. She made her face solemn with the importance of what she had to say. ‘I think I feel sick because I’m pregnant.’
As she looked at him in the dim light reflected from the house his features seemed to contract, sharpening and hardening as the reactions ticked through him.
‘I thought you took the pill?’
‘I do. Only I don’t always remember it …’ Lucy bit her lip and her voice trailed away.
‘How many days late are you?’
‘Eight.’
Jimmy relaxed a bit. ‘Ah, that’s not so much. It might not be what you think. A week’s no time.’
Lucy found her own determination in this softening of his. ‘And what if it is that?’
‘We’ll fix it, don’t worry.’
She put her fingers on his arm. They felt claw-like as she dug into the layers of his clothes.
‘I don’t want it fixed. If it’s your baby, our baby, I want to have it. I’ve thought of nothing else for a week, Jimmy –’
He shook off her hand and then grabbed her by the shoulders. Her head wobbled and she sobbed a little because his face in the half-light combined all the familiar features that she loved with a different and frightening expression that made her want to get out of the car and run.
‘You can’t have any baby. I’m not your husband, I’m married already, and you’re nineteen years old. See sense.’
‘Sense? Is that sense? Don’t you want a child, your own baby? You haven’t got any children. I can give you this one. You must want to be a father!’
Her teeth rattled in her head with the shake he gave her.
‘No, I don’t. Not like this. Neither do you.’
Lucy breathed in a gulp of air against the wails of loss and fear rising up through her chest and into her throat. Her thoughts and intentions blurred and skittered in her head and then began to slip ahead of her, out of her reach, dragging her in their wake.
‘If you won’t hear me I’ll tell your wife. I’ll tell Star and she will know you want to murder your own baby.’
Jimmy grabbed at her but Lucy had already flung open the car door. She staggered for two steps and then tensed as she heard him springing after her. Fear made her run faster as she fled up the Frosts’ driveway and plunged in through their front door.
A burst of noise seemed to strike her in the face. There were people in the hallway cheering and jostling, chanting, ‘Five more years.’
Lucy slipped past them, searching for Star in her black and white stripes, needing to find her before Jimmy caught up with her. She sensed rather than saw that he had been enveloped in the hubbub inside the door, and she stumbled on with the crowd around her into the kitchen.
Lucy saw her father in the middle of the room with a dozen people laughing around him. Darcy himself was not laughing. His face was solemn as he lifted a bottle of champagne in the air in front of him like a trophy. Lucy could see his thumbs whitening as he pressed upwards on the cork.
The room was full of noise but there was an eye of silence in the centre of it, containing him. The effort of forcing the cork showed in his face. His mouth drew back from his teeth and his eyes began to close.
Everything seemed to happen very slowly, there in the silent eye.
As Lucy watched him her father’s face darkened and distorted into a mask of pain. There was a sheen of sweat on him that glinted in the light. The champagne bottle fell out of his hands and rolled away, unopened.
Then Darcy’s body buckled underneath him and he slipped sideways, toppling into the thicket of people.
There was a gasp that shivered into the silent bubble, but even as she heard it there was a jubilant voice beside Lucy.
‘A majority of at least twenty. Break out the bubbly,’ it cried out.
‘Darcy!’ Someone else was calling out his name. A note of shock and disbelief.
A press of people surged around him, and he disappeared from her sight.
Andrew and Vicky were closest to him. Andrew tried to fend off the willing hands and looming faces.
