and occasional clumsiness and when he smiled at himself, with their faces close together, his eyes seemed to flatten and slide apart so she imagined that she was looking into the mask of some friendly, healthy, silent animal. Then if she tried to guide him with a small movement of her thighs or wrists, his face would sharpen with the intensity of his concentration, like an animal again, and she would be quick to reassure him with another movement in order that he should not misunderstand her intention and be hurt.
The second or third time he came into her bed Nina asked him, ‘How many girls have you made love to?’
‘Half a dozen. Six,’ he corrected himself in case this should sound dismissive. ‘Including you.’
‘The same as me. Lovers, that is,’ Nina said.
This limited history of hers diminished the distance between them. But unlike Gordon, Barney did not ask her to talk about Richard or any of the other features of her invisible and therefore irrelevant past. Barney’s appetites were for the present. After Gordon, and the rawness from him that was left under her skin, Barney’s puppyish immediacy seemed natural, and inevitable, and welcome to her.
With the palms of her hands Nina traced the solid muscles of his back while Barney made love to her. She began by dreamily staring up at the ceiling, beyond him, but his insistence drew her in and made her an equal participant as it had done each of the times before. This, as well as other things about him, surprised and pleased her.
‘You said before that something was the matter,’ Nina said afterwards. ‘Was that why you came to see me?’
‘Nope.’ He moved his finger along the prominent ridge of her collar bone and grinned at her, flat-eyed, like the satisfied animal. ‘But there is something. Can I tell you?’
‘Of course you can.’
He told her first about Lucy and Jimmy Rose. Nina listened, and although Barney’s account of Lucy’s difficulty was brief and bloodless it propelled her back fifteen years into her own late teens.
In her first year away from home Nina had fallen in love for the first time, with a painter of difficult and uncommercial abstracts who also taught at her art school. Within three months she was pregnant, and within as many weeks the painter had faded out of her orbit and resubmerged himself in his life with a wife and two small children.
After she had listened to what Barney had to tell her, Nina offered her own story in response.
‘His name was Dennis O’Malley,’ she confessed. ‘He was not that unlike Jimmy. I haven’t thought about him for years.’
‘What did you do?’
‘Had an abortion.’
The thought of Lucy Clegg sharpened the memories of it for her. Nina found that she could recall exactly the metal-framed furniture in the office where an unsympathetic doctor had interviewed her, the street in a London suburb where she had walked up and down under the plane trees for an hour before deciding finally to enter the clinic, and the nauseous complex of feelings, fear and loneliness and anger, with the alarming longing for the baby itself that was all the more disturbing because it must be pinched down and denied. When it was over she had felt empty and stricken.
Those brief weeks carrying the flutter of fear had been the only pregnancy Nina had achieved. When Gordon Ransome had admired her flat and unmarked belly, she had not told him quite the whole truth. Nor had she kept the promise to herself, made when she re-emerged into the suburban street, that she would never again entangle herself with a married man.
She thought of Star, and the cool and dignified way she moved through the Grafton parties with her face turned away from Jimmy’s antics, and the offer of friendship she had extended to Nina. Nina wondered how many other Lucys there were, and whether Star knew about them, and, with a kind of internal shrinking as if to deflect a blow, she also thought of Vicky Ransome. Nina shifted, turning away from Barney on to her back, so she could look up again at the impassive ceiling.
‘Lucy is going to have an abortion too,’ Barney said.
‘As long as that is what she wants. And Jimmy?’
‘Jimmy nothing.’
‘Yes, I see.’
Barney moved closer to her. She could feel the tiny currents of displaced air between them in the places where their naked skin did not quite touch.
Barney said, ‘There is an added complication. To do with Darcy. Maybe I shouldn’t tell you this, but I can’t ask for your help without letting you know why. Can I?’
Nina sighed. ‘I don’t know. I think you imagine I’m much wiser than I really am. The truth is that I’m full of confusion and misgiving.’
‘Please. I need to tell you.’
‘Then do.’
She listened again, this time to Barney’s much longer account of the police arriving at Wilton, and the suppressed concern in the house, and Darcy’s blustering, clay-footed explanation of the events to his children. Nina was filled with sympathy for Hannah, and for Darcy, because she liked him, although she did not believe that he would be entirely incapable of a criminal act.
And then an image came into Nina’s head, as pin-sharp as if it were projected on to the blank plaster above her. She saw the Grafton couples dancing, two by two, as she had first seen them at the Frosts’ Hallowe’en, only the smiles they wore were the Hallowe’en masks, and behind the masks there were the hollowed faces made unfamiliar by the shadows of secrets and fallibility. She saw herself amongst them, first with Gordon and then, in response to some unseen dance-master, changing her partner for Barney. Around her the couples changed their partners too, and danced on in their broken gavotte with their faces hidden behind the grinning masks.
‘Are you asleep?’ Barney whispered.
She had kept very still, but she had heard every word he said. He had not asked her what she thought, nor even suggested that his father was anything but innocent. Nina liked him the more for it. She thought that Darcy would be generously supported by his family.
Nina turned her head. ‘No, I’m not asleep. Poor Darcy. I’m sorry.’
She kissed the corners of the boy’s mouth, and held him. Now she did feel the span of the years separating them.
‘Do you see what it means?’ Barney was intent on his explanation. ‘Lucy wants to tell Darcy what’s happened to her, so he can make it better. That’s what he does, always has done for her. Only she mustn’t, now. He shouldn’t have to worry about anything else.’
‘I think your instinct is right,’ Nina said.
‘It’s just that Lucy isn’t particularly … stable, or reliable. She needs someone who knows what to do, to help her get through it. So I’m asking you. Is that trespassing too much, on this?’
The small movement he made took in their proximity, and the tiny world they made together between the curled ends of Nina’s bed.
‘No. It isn’t trespassing. I could give Lucy the number of my gynaecologist. He’s in Harley Street, although there are plenty of other places and different agencies that Lucy could go to. But I know that Mr Walsh will understand what she needs and how it
