style="font-size:15px;"> ‘Do you think there is anything else he is worrying about? Beyond the fact that he suffered a heart attack a month ago?’
After a moment Hannah said, ‘No. What could there be?’
‘I imagine that it is difficult for a powerful individual like Darcy to admit the truth of his own physical vulnerability. His reaction might take a dozen different forms. There might well be other manifestations yet, before he comes properly to terms with it. And Darcy is a complicated man.’
Michael offered her the reassurance, although he thought that Darcy’s brand of bullish confidence was in fact rather straightforward.
Hannah nodded. She said, as if it was important to make the point, ‘I still love him. And I think I hate him as well.’
‘I don’t think that is particularly uncommon,’ Michael said softly. ‘Do you? Sitting where we are now?’
He felt as if his ears were tuned to previously inaudible frequencies. He could hear the high-pitched humming of sexual conspiracy minutely disturbing the air between the couples and radiating beyond them, through his own and Hannah’s and other people’s marriages outwards into infinity.
Darcy might die, he thought again. All the possibilities of confusion, of responsibilities that he might have to bear nudged at him. I still love him, Hannah had said. She had her own weakness, he understood, in spite of her apparent power. He looked at her now, as if she were really a patient in the chair beside his desk, and felt himself caught between pity and desire.
‘No,’ Hannah agreed at length. ‘I suppose it is quite ordinary.’ Then she smiled at him, her face warming and lightening. ‘I’m glad you are here. I’m glad of this, between us.’
‘That’s good,’ Michael said, feeling his own fraudulence.
Star and the Frosts had gone inside with Vicky and Gordon, and Marcelle and Jimmy were left alone in the garden. Jimmy had secured the half-spilled wine bottle, and he refilled their glasses. Marcelle drank in the vague hope that alcohol might anaesthetize her. She wished that she was not here, but could not think of anywhere else to be. The lights on the house wall shone too brightly overhead; she closed her eyes for a second and a painful red glare burned behind her eyelids. There was no light showing at the window of Gordon’s study.
‘Let’s walk down the garden,’ Jimmy proposed, breaking the silence. He offered her his arm in an old-fashioned gesture.
The garden was dark and soothing beyond the glare of the terrace lights. The rank scent of earth and crushed grass grew stronger, released by their silent feet. It made Jimmy think of the last time he had seen Lucy, and the brambled clearing in the wood. He swallowed his anxiety slightly more easily. If Darcy knew anything, it would have come out tonight.
Jimmy and Marcelle sat down together on a wooden seat at the end of the garden, hidden from the house by the rounded bulwark of a silver-frosted ilex. Marcelle wrapped her arms around herself. She felt as if she were slipping out of sight, down some treacherous slope into a mire of isolation. She wondered, as she identified the sensation, if this were no more than weakness and whether some act of self-discipline might set her upright again in the landscape of ordinary life. Jimmy stuck up in the middle of the slope like a healthy tree that might break her sliding descent.
‘Do you think I’m a fool?’ she asked abruptly.
He answered at once, ‘No. Not any kind of fool. What makes you ask?’
Marcelle’s head fell back. Jimmy’s arm rested along the seat behind her; it was a luxury to lie against him. She had felt the same earlier, when she had touched his collar and noticed the prickle of reddish hair at the nape of his neck. The confirmation of touch, she thought absently. The comfort of it. There had been nothing with Michael, neither touch nor comfort, for a long time. Her loneliness focused sharply, burning like the pinpoint of sun through a magnifying glass. And then, with a sudden flare of anger she thought, Why should I be denied it, why only me? When everyone else takes what they want …
Without any warning, she was overtaken by a jolt of longing, a need for love that was stronger and seemed more affirmative than anything she had felt for a long time.
She had almost blurted out her fears about Michael and Hannah, but now her queasy anxiety contracted, diminished by the urgency of the new feeling. She remembered clearly what had happened on Christmas Eve, the secret she had shared with Jimmy and then wished she could take back into her own custody. Jimmy was not the right recipient for her confidences, if there were anything to confide. But Jimmy felt like her friend. More than a friend, as he had offered to be on dozens of occasions in the past. Jimmy was what she needed.
‘What makes you ask?’ Jimmy repeated softly. She could tell he was smiling.
Marcelle was thinking that they were like dominoes standing in a tidy row. Then Nina had been set down carelessly at the end of the line and she had toppled over, and the couples had begun falling on top of each other in obedient sequence all along the line, and now the momentum had reached her and it was her turn to fall too. The thought made her want to laugh, and then to her surprise she realized that she was laughing, out loud, resting her head against Jimmy’s arm and looking up at the stars in the dark sky.
‘Nothing. Nothing,’ she managed to say.
‘I’m glad it’s funny, whatever it is,’ Jimmy said.
Marcelle stretched her arms and legs, cat-like, recognizing the cords of tension that had kept her hunched into herself for weeks.
The need for love and attention had not evaporated with her laughter. It had become a quite specific itch.
Slowly she turned her head to him. There was the outline of his small-nosed, tidy profile. Like a pleased dog, she thought. Or some nocturnal animal, tilt-eared and poised. When she lifted her hand to the nape of his neck the hairs felt very soft under her fingers. She stroked, tiny encouraging movements in the reddish fur. There was a thick, viscid heat between her thighs.
Jimmy’s top lip lifted, showing his teeth. He looked full at her. Marcelle was singingly glad of the darkness. She felt beautiful and queenly in it.
Then Jimmy leaned forward an inch and kissed her. It was a light, brotherly little kiss that fell at the corner of her dry mouth. Marcelle waited, imagining that she could trace the course of her blood through the cells and ventricles of her body. Then, in the flush of warmth, she tilted her head so that their lips touched again, and opened her mouth and kissed Jimmy in return. She had kissed him before, in the hazy glow of evenings when the couples drank and laughed and danced in each other’s houses, but there had never been an invitation in it until now. Tonight she made the invitation explicit with her tongue and her fingers knotting in his hair, drawing him towards her.
Jimmy’s arm was awkwardly trapped behind Marcelle’s shoulders. He noticed that her skin was hot; there was a faint, scorched scent coming off it as if she had a fever.
Jimmy liked Marcelle, because she was part of the spread of other men’s wives that was there for him to admire, but also because she was herself. He had imagined, quite pleasurably and not infrequently, what kind of lover she might be. Nor had he ever dismissed, in their amiable skirmishes, the interesting possibility that one day one of them might lead to his discovering whether or not his predictions were accur-ate. But now, with Marcelle’s tongue in his mouth and the pulse in her cheek ticking wildly against his, his only feeling was of dismay. He shifted on the bench, resisting the need to clear
