grabbed hold of it and used the business of kissing her knuckles as an excuse to detach his mouth from hers.
He could only think of Lucy, Lucy white-limbed in the clearing in the wood and all the other times they had been together, but without any flicker of retrospective passion that might have come to his rescue now. He could only think of her as pregnant, a confusing double identification of her as both his innocent victim and the malevolent repository of a brood of accusations that might swarm out of her at any time, to home in on himself. He was smitten simultaneously with longing for her, and with the desire to escape from Grafton as quickly as possible before Darcy came for him. The relief he had felt at dinner was eaten up by certainty that it was only a matter of time before he was found out. Darcy had acted freakishly enough tonight to make Jimmy afraid of what there might be to come.
And now there was the painful irrelevance of Marcelle.
Jimmy wondered, with a tangential flicker of curiosity, if had it not been for Lucy he might have taken up Marcelle’s offer. A brief image entered his head of the two of them on this bench, with Marcelle straddled barelegged across him, her face tipped back in a spasm of pleasure. He dismissed the thought, with the possibility that he might return to it later, as he kissed the knuckle of Marcelle’s little finger again.
‘You don’t really want this, do you?’ he chuckled.
Marcelle hesitated. He felt the shiver of confusion in her.
‘This? Oh yes, I do.’
Who was he to tell her what she might or might not want?
There had been perhaps a minute for Marcelle when everything had seemed sweet and intense and also perfectly simple. She was desirable and desired and Jimmy would love her out here in the rustling garden and later, without knowing exactly how, she was sure she would close up this secret and carry it safely back into the couples’ evening and all the other evenings like an amulet.
Only now, she understood too late, she had opened herself up, like some saleswoman opening a case, and Jimmy had declined her.
‘Mar’ – his voice was cajoling, cracked with their mutual embarrassment – ‘you know I love you, but –’
Marcelle coldly interrupted him. ‘But you don’t want to fuck me. Have I got that right?’
Anger foamed up inside her. She would not try to laugh, to make it easy for him, so they could dismiss this as another episode in the saga of Jimmy’s flirtations. He had asked her often enough. What did he say, with his foxy little grin?
When? When Mike’s at the hospital?
He had allowed her – no, made her – think of him as her resort, for when she needed him. But it had been only to flatter himself, and nothing to do with her or her feelings and least of all to do with the unsavoury package of her needs and desires.
Marcelle had never felt such anger.
Mercifully the anger burned up her humiliation. She drew away her hand and wondered whether she should slap him with it. Her fingers itched, and she could already hear the way the sharp, satisfying crack would be taken up and amplified by the black air.
‘Of course I do,’ he mumbled. ‘Only here, in the garden, with Star and Mike in the house …’
‘Don’t lie about it,’ Marcelle said. ‘Don’t you know how disgusting it makes you seem?’
The desire to hit out left her. She stood up instead, and then ran back over the grass to the house.
‘Marcelle, wait a minute,’ Jimmy called after her.
Marcelle could see Michael. He was standing in the kitchen, his back to the window, talking to Gordon and Andrew. She put her fingertips up to her face and pushed the folds of burning skin back, taut, to open her eyes and drag her mouth into a smile. She stepped on to the terrace, into the glare of the lights. She was afraid of the feelings that would come later, but for the moment she had the armour of her clean, bright anger. She opened the door and walked into the kitchen, where all of them could see her.
Jimmy sat on the bench. He took out a cigarette and lit it, but he smoked only half before he threw it away from him with a quick gesture of distaste. Then he stood up and followed Marcelle to the house, stepping in his turn into the lights.
Vicky’s bedroom was the same, but Darcy’s memories of it seemed to belong to a much more distant past than the reality of a few months. He sat tentatively on the end of the bed in a ruck of cushions and what looked like a crocheted shawl with long, tangled fringes.
He was thinking back to the other times when he had come here, of Vicky standing in the thin, chilly sunshine of wintry mornings to unbutton the loose layers of her maternal clothes. He had entirely submerged himself, forgetting everything, in the blue-veined folds of her exposed body. He could recall the precise choreography of their passion as clearly as he could see the lace-bordered cushions, the intimate terrain of the white bedcover, but it was like studying a series of photographs of their encounters. He was cut off from that sweet series of mornings by the intervention of chaotic time as effectively as if by a steel door. He was possessed by the knowledge that he could not go back, or obliterate what had intervened, or even hope to make a partial repair. An overwhelming sense of loss weighed him down, and a nostalgia for his life as it had been then. His heart contracted and expanded in his chest, forcing a muddy and sluggish current around his body.
It was only when he was drunk that a proper perspective opened to him. Sober, Darcy knew, it was possible to feign a kind of busy blindness, to deceive himself as well as he deceived the others. But the day’s drinking had cleared his sight and he wondered if he should make some move before it was too late.
Still he went on sitting at the end of Vicky’s bed. He was tired, and he had no idea where to run to.
Vicky put a slopped cup of black coffee into his hand. ‘There. Drink it.’
He bent his head. As the warmth fogged his face some other recollection stirred, the pale eye of a cup held for him, the elusive warmth of his mother.
Vicky sat down beside him. ‘How do you feel?’
Darcy considered the possible responses. ‘Drunk,’ he offered. ‘Sorry about the evening.’
‘The evening doesn’t matter in the least. But you shouldn’t drink so much.’
Simple, he thought. Good, wholesome advice. Too late.
‘Hannah …’
‘No.’ Very gently. ‘It’s Vicky.’
‘I know that. I’m not so far gone. Vicky, Vicky. I remember. I was going to say, Hannah tells me the same thing. And the doctors. Ha. Bad for the heart. Only I keep thinking it might have been easier to go the first time. Saved a … saved what? I don’t know.’ Darcy shrugged. ‘Saved a lot of formalities.’
Vicky took the empty cup away from him. He felt the mattress absorbing the shift of her weight and he was reminded again, with the same detachment, of the far-off mornings they had spent on this bed. Vicky put her arms around him. She was murmuring to him, cajoling.
‘You mustn’t say that. You mustn’t even think it. You’ve been ill, but you’re getting better. You have to let yourself get better, wait for it to
