came back across the grass towards the house, with her hands full of lilies of the valley and scilla. She was thinking as she skirted the children’s noisy game of rounders that the three women on the terrace made a pleasing picture. Marcelle was sitting in a deck-chair, with one arm crooked behind her head. Janice and Vicky in their pale summery clothes moved calmly between the tables, and the sun slanted on the glasses they were laying out, making them look as if they had been poured full of light. The scents of grass and leaf mould mingled with barbecue charcoal, smoke and warmed earth.
Star held out her flowers to show Vicky. ‘I picked these for the table, is that all right?’
‘They’re lovely. Here, put them in these.’ Vicky held out two of the glasses and Star arranged the flowers in them, admiring the freshness of the tiny white and azure bells.
‘I was saying that I should have done dinner for everyone,’ Janice explained. ‘But really this is much better, thanks to Vicky. Otherwise it would have been tennis all evening as well as afternoon.’
‘It’s nice here,’ Star reassured them, as she was meant to do.
It had been a tradition amongst the five Grafton families to come together for a barbecue party in the first spell of fine weather of every summer. It was one of the cycle of parties and gatherings that made the landmarks in their year.
This year there was a new development. Andrew had recently installed an all-weather tennis court in his garden, and he had invited the men to play an inaugural afternoon match. And so the women had gathered in the Ransomes’ garden with the children to make companionable preparations for the evening, as they had done often enough before.
Only this evening everything was not quite the same.
The absence of the Cleggs was part of the difference. Darcy was out of hospital and installed at Wilton again, but the couples had not seen much of him. They agreed amongst themselves that he did not look fully recovered, although Hannah was determinedly cheerful. He needed rest, she insisted, that was all. She had promised that they would try to come to the barbecue, if Darcy was not too tired, but there was no question of his playing tennis. The others felt the chill of that. A month ago Darcy would have pitched himself into any match, energized by the competition and his own determination to win.
And yet, it was not only Darcy’s illness that had altered the pattern. Marcelle sat in her deck-chair with her head turned slightly to one side, seemingly a part of the little group but also separate from it.
Janice leaned over her once and asked, ‘Are you okay?’
‘Yes,’ Marcelle said immediately. ‘It’s just so nice, sitting here watching the children. But there must be something I can do to help. Vicky, what is there?’
‘Nothing. Sit right where you are.’
Marcelle did not know whether they exchanged concerned glances behind her head. She remembered how the women had murmured their anxiety for Vicky, and the concern that Janice and the others sometimes privately voiced for Star when Jimmy behaved badly, but she felt too withdrawn even to speculate about what they might think of her. Marcelle let these reflections slip away out of her head almost as soon as they had entered it. It was enough to do to hold herself quietly, only half listening and half watching.
Vicky was smiling, busy with her arrangements for the evening, and Star was intent on arranging her flowers, her dark face momentarily lightened by her pleasure in them. Janice strolled across the lawn to the children, her hands in the pockets of her shorts.
The women had drawn closer. No one had mentioned the change in the air, but each of them was aware of it. There was the thin vibration of watchfulness and anxiety between them, but also the low, steady note of friendship.
Marcelle’s eyes fixed on her children again.
Jonathan was almost the same age as William Frost, but he was physically much smaller. There seemed to be an anxiety about him, a tentativeness that made him poke nervously at the rounders ball instead of hitting out when it was pitched to him. When her turn came, Daisy was bolder. She swung out with the bat and the ball soared in a triumphant arc and dropped into the green waves of ivy and honeysuckle at the far end of the garden.
‘Daisy, Daisy’s lost the ball, we’ll never find it in there …’
‘It’s not fair …’
The children’s voices rose in complaint and then faded again as Janice found another ball and threw it to them.
‘They should be here soon,’ Vicky said, meaning the husbands.
But it was another half-hour before they did arrive, in their tennis shoes, wet-haired from their swim in the Frosts’ pool. They came out into the garden with beer cans in their hands, full of the reports of their game, breaking the net that the women had woven between them.
Jimmy and Gordon had beaten Andrew and Michael, but the match had been close enough for them to feel satisfied. Gordon put his hand on Vicky’s shoulder.
‘Are we very late? I’m sorry. They took us to five sets, by some fluke, and it was eight six in the last one. Do you want me to start barbecuing?’
‘Well done, Daddy,’ Mary Ransome said. She wound her arm around his leg and he rested his other hand on the top of her head, feeling the fine hair warmed by the sun. The three of them stood for a moment, connected by his hands, until Vicky moved easily away.
‘Do the children’s sausages first,’ she ordered him.
‘And what about me?’ Jimmy demanded of Mary. ‘Don’t I get a well done?’
He swung her up by her arms so that she shrieked with delighted fear, and then he settled her on his shoulders and cantered across the grass.
‘You’re a horse, well done, horse,’ Mary shouted.
Marcelle sat in her deck-chair. She had watched Michael as he came out of the French doors, the last of the group, and saw how he glanced at her, lifted one hand in a wave and then went to where Star and Andrew and Janice were standing, laughing at something one of them said as he wiped the froth of beer from his top lip. Marcelle did not even know what she had been hoping for from him, but the denial of it cut her so she had to blink and the hard edges of the terrace in front of her grew threateningly blurred.
Jimmy lifted Mary over his head and set her on the ground again. His shoulders and arms ached pleasurably from the hours of tennis, and the glow of the win was still with him. He stood in front of Marcelle’s deck-chair, his shadow falling across her. He noticed that she was wearing big earrings that looked too large for her face.
‘Hey, Mar, you haven’t got a drink.’
‘I haven’t, have I? I’ll have a glass of wine, whatever there is.’
He brought her one, and one for himself, and then sat down on the flagstones at her feet, resting his back against her legs.
There were wood-pigeons in the tall trees. The thought of Lucy came into Jimmy’s head, followed by a surge of relief that Darcy was not here. It was more than a week since he had heard from Lucy, and he was beginning to be afraid that she might tell her father. Jimmy had resolved on each successive morning that he would telephone her and determine when the abortion would take place, but each day he had found some reason for not making
