much will it cost?’
The memories of that distant, suburban clinic and the doctors behind their metal desks and her own long-ago desolation gathered around Nina again. She was not sure whether to interfere in Lucy Clegg’s life would be damaging, but since she had come this far she resolved that she might as well go on.
She said very carefully, ‘You can tell Lucy that I can easily afford to help with that too. Perhaps she can pay me back one day.’
Barney touched her cheek, and then her mouth, with the tips of his fingers. She could see the relief in his eyes. Nina was pleased to be able to offer him what he and Lucy needed, but she knew she was also doing it for Star’s sake. If Star could be shielded from at least this much, then it would be something.
‘And if Lucy would like somewhere in London to stay, before or afterwards, just for a day or so, we could always ask Patrick.’
‘Thank you,’ Barney said humbly.
‘Not at all,’ Nina murmured. He answered by kissing her, and she felt the neat contraction of her own pleasure in response to him.
*
It was raining. Thick ropes of rain twisted out of the grey layers of sky overhead, bouncing up and breaking into steely threads as they hit the streaming pavements. Hannah and Michael ran, hand in hand, with the wetness plastering their hair to their skulls and cheeks and soaking in black patches across their shoulders to glue their clothes to their skin. They ran and dodged the rain-stalled London traffic until Hannah was gasping for breath and stumbling in her ruined shoes.
‘I can’t run any more.’
‘It’s not far,’ Michael called to her.
There were lines of taxis in the streets but not one of them offered the comfort of a yellow light. He pulled her on behind him, across the murky rivers swirling in the gutters, until they turned a corner and saw the windows of their hotel. A minute later, with the doorman offering them the pointless protection of his umbrella, they reached the revolving door and were delivered by its rotation into the mirrored warmth of the hotel lobby.
‘Safe,’ Michael proclaimed. He was exhilarated by the dash through the rain. He took Hannah’s soaking arm and steered her into the lift, and they were swept upwards in the company of their own dripping but flatteringly tinted reflections. Down the corridor to the door of their room they left a trail of watery steps.
‘Let me dry you,’ Michael said. He came out of the bathroom with an armful of towels, and he unbuttoned Hannah’s clothes, bundled them away from her and knelt down to unstrap her shoes from her feet. He swathed the towels around her and patted her face dry, seeing how the black stuff with which she made up her eyes had touchingly blotted over the soft, pouchy skin beneath the lashes. The rain clattered against the windows, isolating them in the hotel bedroom with its glazed chintzes and empty cupboards. Michael thought the moment was both sexy and melancholy, but when he turned his mind to try to pin down either his excitement or sadness they both slid away from him, leaving him standing awkwardly in his wet clothes, with Hannah in her towels held against him.
‘I’m cold,’ she said.
‘Have a bath and get into bed. I’ll order us some tea.’
It was five in the afternoon. They had already spent one night together, under the grey eye of the television perched at the foot of the bed. Michael had tried to submerge himself in Hannah, until his insistence had made her ask him, only half-jokingly, ‘What are you trying to prove, Mister Wickham? This isn’t a competition.’
‘I just want you,’ he had answered. ‘I can’t help it. Do you want it to be different?’
Only he had not been able quite to submerge himself, however intimately he connected himself to the folds and fissures of Hannah’s body, and so he was troubled by a sense of separation from her. She was still herself, and desirable to him, but they were not quite easy with each other. Michael found that he was thinking about Marcelle and his children, that their faces and voices inserted themselves between Hannah and himself when he had wanted to dismiss them for these few hours.
Today Michael had followed Hannah to some designers’ showrooms. He had sat apart, uncomfortable in a visitor’s chair, while house models paraded clothes in front of Hannah. He had liked to see this other, businesslike side of her, but she shrugged at his questions.
‘It’s just a matter of picking what I like, what I think I can sell. I don’t even need to go to the showrooms, really. I made the appointments to give myself an alibi for being here with you.’
He had been flattered by that, but the sense of distance between them had not been dispelled. They ate an indifferent lunch in a restaurant he had chosen from The Good Food Guide, and afterwards, without admitting that they felt at a loss, they went into the National Gallery. They had wandered through the Sainsbury Wing with the tourists, exiled from their proper setting along with the Japanese groups and elderly American couples, and had emerged into the downpour.
Michael felt energized by the plunge through the streets, and the stinging rain, as if the woolly insulation between Hannah and himself had been washed away. When she emerged from her hot bath, pink and glowing, his desire for her recharged itself without any tinge of guilty melancholy. The tray of tea with silver teapot and thin china was brought by a white-coated waiter, but when he had withdrawn they left it to go cold on the side table. Michael knelt over Hannah’s rosy body so she could close her warm mouth around him.
He felt as he had done the first time, within the curtains of her shop, and afterwards clean, hollowed out, reconciled. He lay for a while, drifting in the trivial backwaters of his own imagination.
Then, when he looked at Hannah’s face on the pillow beside him, he was amazed to see that she was crying.
‘What is it? Hannah, what have I done?’
At first she wouldn’t say anything. She shook her head, and more tears squeezed out from beneath her eyelids.
‘You must tell me. I can’t put it right, unless you tell me.’ A flicker of irritation came with a sense of his own powerlessness.
‘It’s all right,’ she muttered, contradicting everything he could see. ‘It’s nothing to do with you. Or not really. I felt lonely, suddenly.’
‘Lonely, when we are this close?’ He smiled, with his mouth against her cheek, to comfort her. But his awareness of the distance between them returned, intensified by Hannah’s recognition of it too. Looking at the close tangle of her hair, robbed by the rain of its springy lift from her skull, he saw that the roots were darker than the honey-coloured strands. Her vulnerability oppressed him.
Hannah cried for a minute, snuffling damply against his shoulder. Then she lifted her head and stretched her round arm to the brocade-boxed bedside tissues.
‘Sorry.’
‘Don’t be silly. But I don’t like to see you cry.’ That was true. It was the courageous, chair-lift Hannah he valued, the foil to his own cowardice, and her erotic mutation into the woman he had discovered within the Ottoman tent of her shop. He did not care so much for this weepy, sniffing version of his love.
‘I’m worried about Darcy. I’m afraid of what will happen next, and he won’t tell me anything except that it’s going to be all right.’
