incurving and offering him dimples and tiny cushiony recesses.
‘Yes. No one will come in now.’
‘But they can see in, from out there.’ He gestured to the wet cobbled reality of Southgate, Grafton, beyond the curved glass of the window.
‘Not through here, they can’t.’
Hannah took his hand to guide him. He followed her at right angles beneath an arch. There were more curtains here, striped cream and honey, and thick gold tassels to fasten them. Michael saw a wall of mirrors, and the fabric over their heads gathered like an Ottoman tent. Hannah turned off more lights, and then let a curtain fall behind them so they were enclosed in the secret space with only their own reflections to observe them.
‘Fitting rooms,’ she whispered. ‘Women need privacy to be pinned and tucked and stitched into their own fantasies.’
Michael stood behind her as they faced the mirrors. For a long moment they just looked at one another.
Then he put his hands up to cover her breasts. There was a deep V at the front of her dark vendeuse’s jacket. Watching himself as he did it, and with Hannah’s reflected wide eyes on his face, Michael undid the gold buttons one by one. Underneath there was black lace, and her white powdered skin, and the cleft between her breasts. Little rims of flesh were pushed up above the waistband of her tight skirt, which had been hidden from him by the peplum of her jacket. He loved the ampleness of her, the promise of softer folds and curves to be released from the constriction of her clothes. He found the zip at her waist, and Hannah dreamily arched her back against him.
‘Have you done this in here before?’ he said into the curve of her neck. ‘In front of these mirrors?’
‘No. But I have imagined how it would be.’
‘Like this?’
‘No,’ Hannah confessed. ‘Not nearly as good as this.’
She turned to face him, and over her bare shoulder he watched his hands slipping over her hips and her bottom, then greedily drawing her against him. He ducked his head to kiss her, closing out the mirror images, so there were only the two of them left in the world.
Hannah undid his buttons.
‘Striped shirt, gold cufflinks,’ she murmured. ‘The very picture of a professional man.’
‘Half-dressed? In the changing room of a ladies’ frock shop?’
They were laughing as they stripped off the last obstacles of each other’s clothes. Michael let the shreds of her black lace drop on the floor behind him. And then, as suddenly as it had begun, the laughter stopped.
He put his hands on her waist and Hannah raised herself on tiptoe to bring her mouth level with his. He looked down at the roundness of her belly and the heavy swell of her hips, and at her small hand closed around him and the red marks in her flesh left by her constricting clothes, and he was filled with tenderness and longing for her.
‘Lie down,’ he told her.
Obediently she knelt and then lay back, and he knelt beside her and lifted her arms and then her legs so that she made a star for him against the pale carpet. He leaned over her and let his mouth travel slowly, exploring the map of her skin, until her head fell back and she lifted her hips and he found the soft centre of her.
‘Yes,’ he heard her whisper. ‘Yes, oh please, yes.’
Their striped and mirrored tent became a miraculous kingdom.
As he entered her, Hannah’s legs wound around his waist and they looked sideways to see their reflections, light and dark, locked together. Their faces appeared suffused, abstracted, unlike themselves and yet like each other, conspirators in pleasure. It was a long time since Michael had known pleasure like it. He felt that he was drowning in it, a death he reached out for, welcoming as it came.
Afterwards, when they lay wrapped in each other, Michael whispered to her, ‘I don’t want this moment ever to end. I don’t ever want to have to leave you.’
Her fingers touched his spine. He felt the caress of her fingers with their painted nails so intensely that he could see them, and he lost the distinction between felt and seen, mirrored and plain.
Hannah’s face had all the taut lines rubbed out of it. She lay gazing at Michael, half smiling, blurred by her own hair.
‘You make me happy,’ she said. ‘I didn’t expect you to.’
‘I can’t ever remember feeling so happy. I love you.’
She touched his mouth, warning him. ‘Be careful.’
‘I can’t be careful. It’s too late to be careful. I love you, Hannah.’
Warmth spread through her, under her skin, unpinning her. It’s too late to be careful.
‘I know,’ Hannah said simply, with her mouth against his.
‘I could have done this,’ Janice said in her comfortable, insistent way. ‘I should have done. It’s our tennis court that’s being christened, after all.’
She stood with her hands on her hips, head on one side, contemplating the two garden tables and the company of unmatched chairs arranged on the Ransomes’ terrace. Janice wore candy-striped Bermuda shorts, familiar from other summers, although this May Sunday evening was their first appearance this year. Their re-emergence seemed to mark the official opening of the summer season. The cuffs of the shorts came just above Janice’s plump, pretty knees.
Vicky shook out a William Morris print tablecloth and smoothed it over the sun-warmed wooden slats of one of the tables.
‘No, I wanted to do it. It’s time I did. We haven’t had anyone over for ages.’
She couldn’t even remember the last time she and Gordon had properly entertained the Grafton couples. It must have been before Helen was born. Long ago.
‘Will this be all right, do you think?’ she asked. ‘If we sit at this one, and put the children over there?’
‘Of course it will,’ Janice said. She was laying knives and forks on the flowered cloth, polishing each one with a tea towel before placing it. ‘There. Two, four, six, eight, and two more if the Cleggs make it. And six children, eight if the Cleggs ditto. Perfect.’
Janice wished she could bring everything else to order as easily as she marshalled the cutlery. She was troubled by the suspicion that too many familiar features of their lives were changing, and by a more obscure and generalized fear that she could not place, and found all the more alarming for that. She kept her anxiety under control by her attention to the glasses and plates.
Star had been wandering in the garden. It had been a hot day for early May, and the first cool of the early evening was welcome. The Ransomes’ garden was not as big as the Frosts’ but she had always liked it better. There were damp, wild corners here under the shade of tall trees, and even the flower beds nearer to the house were tangled with an
