seen anything.
Janice sighed. ‘These parties,’ she said. ‘All of us, giving and going to parties. What is it we want, I wonder?’
It was seven o’clock in the morning, fully light, but the day was dim and cold, promising no warmth.
Nina had been awake for more than an hour. She was lying on her back, staring up at the ceiling from her boat bed, when she heard someone knocking at her front door. It was a gentle, interrogative knock and not a summons, but she got up at once and wrapped herself in her dressing gown.
Barney stood on the doorstep. He was unshaven and seemed utterly exhausted.
‘What has happened?’ Nina asked, with fear in her throat. Her first irrational thought was of Gordon.
‘Can I come in?’
‘Yes. Yes, of course you can.’ She held the door open wide for him.
In the kitchen, where it was warm, he told her what had happened to Darcy.
‘It’s all right. Michael was very good, and then the cardiologist or whoever he was came and told us he’d had a heart attack, but it was a minor one. He’s in intensive care now, under observation. There was nothing else for us to do there. I took Hannah and the girls home, but I didn’t want to go to bed.’
He lifted his shoulders, and then dropped them again helplessly. He looked very young.
Nina went to him and put her arms around him.
‘Don’t worry,’ she soothed.
‘I went back to Wilton and I saw Hannah and the twins to bed. But I knew I wouldn’t sleep. I wanted to talk to you.’ He moved a little, circling her with his arms in return so that they held each other. ‘Do you mind?’ he asked.
Nina shook her head. ‘No. Do you want to try to go to sleep here?’
Barney’s hand found hers, and he held it between them. They looked at each other for a long, quiet moment.
‘I’d like to lie down if you will come with me.’
She knew she should have laughed, as if she were being teased, and gently extricated herself. But she also knew how comfortable and natural it would be to lie down against the warmth of him. The subtraction sum, the difference in their ages, slipped out of her head.
‘I’ll come and hold you until you fall asleep.’
Upstairs in her bed the rumpled quilt still held the warmth of her sleep.
Michael was driven home from the hospital in a taxi. He had a busy list for the next day, and he had already reassured himself that Darcy was out of danger for the moment. It was four o’clock in the morning, and the darkness seemed to enclose the cab like some cube of solid matter that travelled with him and closed off all the avenues of escape.
He was thinking about Marcelle and his children; he could clearly see Marcelle’s face as it had been when he had stepped in from the garden, but he was thinking mostly about Jonathan and Daisy.
Michael knew that he had never been a wholehearted, enthusiastic father to them in the way that he had blithely imagined he would be before Jonathan was born. He loved his children, but quite often they seemed to be unpredictable obstacles that needed to be negotiated in the pursuit of a civilized life. They consumed Marcelle’s time, and his own, and although he was proud of them he knew that they did not entirely repay this investment of energy. They did not always act in the way he wanted them to. Sometimes they turned on him and gazed with mute, accusing faces and he felt his heart twist inside him with the knowledge of his own guilty inadequacy.
Now, on the over-familiar road with the silent, tired cabdriver hunched beside him, there was a different perspective. Michael knew that with Hannah he was trying to meet a need that Marcelle no longer answered, but he also knew that in doing it he was risking Marcelle and his children. And when he imagined the state of being without children he suddenly saw them much more clearly. He saw Jonathan’s stubborn, interrogative stare and Daisy’s convex upper lip buckling with the onset of her too-frequent tears, and they seemed both complicated and separate from himself and Marcelle. He felt the demands of his responsibility for them sharpening, and he was fearful for their safety, and yet he was filled with a kind of awe because they were themselves, and unique.
He remembered how Darcy had looked in the hospital A and E room, lying grey-faced at the mercy of the cardiac crash team. Michael had known most of the nurses and doctors at least by sight, some of them much better than that, and it had been shocking to see Darcy solitary in the midst of them, robbed of his personal stature, reduced to a body on a trolley. With the thought of him, and with the fear for his children, Michael found his eyes so blurred with tears that he could barely see.
When he went into the house, carefully relocking the doors behind him, the silence and the darkness were even blanker and thicker than outside. There was a faint smell of stale food, a fainter trace of the clear varnish that Jonathan used to finish his model aeroplanes. Michael trod softly, his steps weighted by familiarity.
Marcelle was awake. She had not slept, although she had come home a long time ago from the Frosts’. She lay in bed, having heard the crunch of car tyres on the gravel outside and then the small, blindfold movements of Michael within the house.
The bedroom door opened and then closed again. The floor creaked as he passed the end of the bed and Marcelle was gripped by the fear that it was not Michael, but an intruder.
‘I am awake,’ she said in a clear voice edged with alarm.
‘Are you? It’s very late.’
It was him, of course, but she did not feel any sense of relief. She clicked on her bedside light.
‘How is he?’
Michael was standing with his shoes in one hand and his jacket in the other, the picture of stealth.
‘Oh. Probably all right, in the short term.’
Marcelle listened as he told her about Darcy and the hospital. He undressed as he talked, putting his cufflinks in the carved wooden dish that stood on the chest of drawers, dropping his shirt and underclothes into the wicker laundry basket. Marcelle thought of the thousands of other nights that had slipped by and now stretched behind them, their joint history.
‘And Hannah?’
Michael lay down on his side of the bed.
‘Worried, naturally. But coping with it well enough.’
Marcelle wanted him to put his arms round her, making some gesture of reassurance, but she knew that he would not.
‘So what was going on tonight?’ she asked.
There was a small silence, and then he said, ‘I’m sorry, I know how it must have looked. We’d both had a few drinks, we’d agreed that we were sick of the election. So we went outside, that’s all. There was a bit of fooling around. You know what Hannah’s like.’
‘Not really,
