knelt beside the tumbled body. She put her hands to Darcy’s grey face and found that it was clammy. Then she lowered her face to his in the parody of a kiss and felt the faint stirring of his exhaled breath. With fingers thickened with fear she struggled to loosen his tie and dragged open the neck of his shirt. There was a violent movement in the silent circle above her head and Lucy fell beside her.
‘Daddy? Daddy?’
Andrew put his arm around her and tried to lift her away but she was clinging to her father’s hand. Vicky looked down into Darcy’s face. She had no idea what she should do. She heard her own voice begging,
‘Find Michael. Somebody get Michael.’
She bent over Darcy again. Her fingers pinched his nose and she dipped her head once more so that her mouth covered his. She blew air into his lungs and when she listened she heard the sigh of his exhalation. His lips moved, forming a word that she could not distinguish. The realization that he was alive fanned her desperation.
‘For God’s sake, where’s Michael?’
The question rippled outwards. No one in the kitchen had seen him. Lucy and Vicky knelt on either side of Darcy with Andrew at his head. His face was grey but he was breathing. They could hear the painful indrawn gulp and the rasp in his throat as the air escaped again. His mouth was open and a thread of saliva looped from it. Vicky wiped it away.
‘Call for an ambulance,’ Andrew ordered.
Lucy heard Jimmy using the kitchen extension a yard from her head. She looked up and saw him with Star at his side.
There were voices beyond the kitchen, calling for Michael. Marcelle and Janice came in from the dining room, their faces white with shock.
‘He’s here somewhere,’ Marcelle was saying. ‘Isn’t he watching the television?’
Barney and Cathy appeared together, from the upstairs room where they had been playing games on William Frost’s computer. The kitchen doorway was jammed with murmuring people.
‘Keep everyone else out, Jan,’ Andrew said.
‘Where’s Hannah?’ Barney asked from his father’s side.
The flesh of Hannah’s inner thigh was as soft as butter. Michael rolled the tight nylon skin down to her plump knee and then knelt to slide his tongue upwards. Hannah lay back against the cushions, a serene odalisque in the darkness. When he lifted his head he could just see the lazy glint of her smile.
He heard a voice, and then several voices calling out, but he did not listen. No one would come to the pool house, and his senses were occupied with the taste and the scent and the softness of Hannah.
Then he heard his name. It was his name that was being called. The seat creaked and Hannah sat up, and then they did listen, frozen into stillness.
‘Michael. Where’s Michael?’
‘Someone is hurt,’ he whispered. ‘Shit.’
He scrambled to his feet, brushing at his clothes and raking his hair with his fingers, a pantomime adulterer. Hannah held out his jacket and he took it from her, pushing his arms into the sleeves.
‘Wait here for a few minutes,’ he told her.
He left the pool house and ran, slipping on the damp grass. The French windows were open and light spilled through the pergola and over the flower beds. There were knots of anxious people peering into the garden. He stopped running when he saw them, and tried to stroll with his hands in his pockets.
‘He’s out here, in the garden,’ someone called.
‘What’s going on?’ Michael asked, as he stepped into the house.
Darcy was lying on the kitchen floor with his children and Vicky and Andrew kneeling around him like saints in some religious tableau. His eyes were open.
‘Don’t crowd him,’ Michael snapped. ‘Has someone rung for an ambulance?’ They moved back, silently and obediently, to let him through with his package of doctorly skills.
As he bent over Darcy, he could hear the murmuring voices, ‘Where’s Hannah? Somebody must tell Hannah.’
‘We’ll have to get you to the hospital, Darcy,’ Michael said. ‘Can you hear me?’
Darcy looked up at him, his eyes unnaturally dark in his ghastly face. Then, just perceptibly, he nodded.
‘You have had some kind of cardiac seizure. I can’t tell much more until you’ve been examined. Lie still until the ambulance comes.’
There was a flurry amongst the watchers and then Hannah appeared in the midst of them. She stared down wide-eyed at Darcy. Barney stood up and put his arm protectively around her. Hannah’s bare arms and shoulders were goose-pimpled with cold, and there was a bracelet of earth and grass around the two black satiny spikes of her stiletto shoes. She could only have been outside. Another small shock-wave travelled outwards from the centre of the circle. Across Darcy, and over the heads of his twins, Michael saw Marcelle look at Hannah, and then turn her brown eyes on him.
‘He’s all right,’ Michael said to Hannah. ‘We’ll get him to hospital as soon as we can.’
She put the back of her hand up to cover her mouth, from where he had kissed away her lipstick.
The ambulance came, and the men with their stretcher to carry Darcy out to it. Michael and Hannah followed them, and Marcelle stood to one side of the kitchen door to let them through.
‘I’ll get home when I’ve made sure how he is,’ Michael murmured to her as they passed, but Marcelle did not look at him.
In the speeding ambulance, Michael and the crew man watched attentively over Darcy while Hannah sat huddled in the opposite corner. They did not speak to each other. Barney and the twins followed behind the flashing blue light in Barney’s Golf.
The party was abruptly over, and almost everyone had gone quietly home. Marcelle sat at Janice’s kitchen table with her hands folded around a mug of tea, as she had done a thousand times before. This normality, the reminder of familiar domestic life, made what she had seen appear all the more ugly. Michael had been out in the garden making love to Hannah. She kept seeing their faces when they stumbled in, over and over, and having to understand that there was no explanation other than the obvious, humiliating one.
Marcelle unwrapped her hands and ducked her head to the comfort of her mug of tea, seeing Michael again with cobwebs on his clothes and Hannah, shivering with cold in her grassy shoes.
Janice came to sit beside her and put her arm around her shoulders.
‘You okay?’
‘Yes, I’m fine.’
She would not let even Janice know that she was not, because that would be too much to give away. Small currents of anger, and bitterness, fear and disbelief passed through her like electric shocks.
‘Andrew’ll take you home,’ Janice said. ‘Or we could call a taxi.’
‘No, I’m fine to drive. I’ll finish
