and he put his arms gratefully around her, stroking her hair as she leaned her head against him.
‘That’s my girl,’ he said.
Lucy and Barney followed her lead. They wrapped their arms around their father, and their combined strength made his discovered frailty more apparent to each of them.
‘Don’t worry,’ Lucy told him.
‘I’m not worried. Only for what it might mean for the three of you, and Hannah, and Laura and Freddie. If I hadn’t been ill, I could have put everything back in order. No trouble. A matter of days, that was all it was.’
They did not want to ask him any more. Their conjectures were enough.
‘There we are then,’ Darcy said, with his terrible, hollow, confident bluster. ‘Now you know everything there is to know. Thanks for being such good kids. I’d better go back downstairs to your mother.’
This vagueness was telling. ‘To Hannah, that is,’ Darcy corrected himself.
Hannah was in the drawing room. The space filled with warm, diffused light and the planes and angles of polished surfaces and billows of soft fabrics seemed newly precious to him, and also troubling because of his fear.
‘Did you tell them? Did they understand?’ Hannah asked.
‘Yes, of course they did. Why not?’ Darcy responded in the cheerful, positive manner that it seemed important for him to adopt. He went to the silver tray and picked up a bottle from the shining rank of them. Alcohol would blunt the sharp edge of his anxiety, he knew that, although it would not dispel the dark mass itself. ‘Let’s have a drink, shall we? Celebrate getting to the end of today?’
Upstairs Lucy had begun to cry. She cried in thick sobs that bubbled out of her slackened mouth. Barney looked at her, his good-humoured face creased in concern.
‘He’ll put it right. It doesn’t sound too healthy now, but I’m sure he will.’
‘It isn’t only that.’ She took a ragged breath, staring at him with streaming eyes. Lucy was ugly when she cried. She shouted at him, ‘I’m pregnant. I don’t know what to do. I want to tell Dad about it.’
Barney turned to Cathy, who nodded sombrely.
‘Who?’ Barney asked.
Lucy told him brutally, ‘Jimmy Rose.’
While his sisters watched him, Barney assimilated this.
‘Then you can’t tell him.’ Barney was rarely angry, but they saw his anger kindling now. ‘You can’t bloody well dump that on him as well. You can see how he is, can’t you?’
Lucy’s cheeks wobbled with her sobbing. Her outrage at this turn that her life was taking emerged in her cry, ‘What about me?’
‘I’m sorry about you.’
‘You sound it.’
‘Barney,’ Cathy warned him. ‘Look at her.’
Barney sighed. His big hands floundered in the air around his sisters’ shoulders.
‘I am sorry, Luce. I am. Only you can’t run down to Dad, at this minute of all times, and tell him his best friend’s got you pregnant. What were you doing with Jimmy Rose anyway? He’s old enough to be your father himself. How can you have let it happen?’
‘The pill. I forget it sometimes. And I thought I loved him.’
‘Jimmy Rose?’ Barney let out a long, derisive breath. And then he nodded, understanding her even though it was unwillingly. ‘Yeah. Okay. I can imagine how. Poor Lucy, but you can’t tell Dad about it. What you have done is tell me instead. And what I ought to do right now is go round to see Jimmy Rose and kick his arse up his windpipe.’
‘Put his balls in the Magimix?’ Cathy murmured.
‘Yeah. And his dick on a skewer. The little rat.’
There was a small sound from Lucy that wasn’t a sob or a sniff. She had let out an unexpected squirt of laughter.
‘That’s better,’ Barney said. He sat down next to her, holding her and cradling her head against him. He murmured with his mouth close to her ear, persuading her that there was a chink in her misery, ‘So we can sort this out ourselves?’
Lucy slowly nodded her head. ‘I want to have an abortion. And get away from Grafton.’
‘Sure thing.’ Barney promised her.
Nina opened her front door and saw Barney standing on the step.
‘Are you working?’ he asked her.
‘Yes.’
‘Can I come in anyway?’
She held open the door. Nina was not surprised to see him; Barney had taken to calling on her without telephoning first, as if he felt that it might be too easy for her to turn him down on the telephone. What was surprising to her was that she was not displeased by his arrival in the middle of her working day.
Barney followed her down to the kitchen. He gestured for her permission, then went to the refrigerator and took out a can of the beer she had begun to keep there for him. Nina also liked this familiarity and freedom he took with her tidy arrangements. It made her empty house seem populated. Barney pulled at the metal ring and over the hiss of gas before he drank asked her his invariable question.
‘How’s it going?’
Instead of irritating her this made her feel much younger, as if she were part of some conspiracy in which work and responsibility were inconveniences to be negotiated before the real business of pleasure could continue.
Nina laughed as she told him, ‘Well, thank you. I’ve done lots of work. Been to London about a new commission. And you?’
Barney drank some more of his beer. ‘Not so good.’
Nina recomposed her face, ready for a recital of catastrophes that might have befallen Barney’s car or his studies.
‘Tell me.’
He stood up from the corner of the table where he had been leaning and came across the kitchen to her. He was awkward with surplus energy and also graceful, and she knew before he reached her that she wanted to touch him. When he took hold of her she let herself fit neatly against him.
‘Come upstairs?’ he asked, when he had kissed her.
‘We can’t always go up to bed.’
‘Why not?’
‘Um. I can’t think of any specific reason, now you ask me. Just that one shouldn’t always give way to one’s urges. As a matter of principle. Self-discipline.’
‘Crap,’ Barney said.
In the end, she led him upstairs to her room.
In
