idea took hold. She could say hi to the team, most of whom she knew, and then perhaps Matt and she might even go for a coffee. Years ago, before the children, she sometimes used to look in on him at his lab in London. Through one of the portholes in the swing doors she would catch sight of the back of his head and his shoulders hunched over a rack of test-tubes or a set of DNA sequences. He would look up and see her and wave her over. Then they would walk downstairs to a canteen, and laugh and drink urn tea at a table decorated with chipped formica and a crinkled tin ashtray.
Outside, Dinah called across to the boys.
‘I’m going over to see Daddy for an hour. Don’t leave the street, will you?’
‘Yeah, Mom.’
They were old enough now. Jack was ten and Merlin nearly nine.
She drove her Jeep along Pleasant and turned across Main under the traffic lights, and from there swung into the central square. There was a wide green with handsome trees enclosed by solid, pinkish brick buildings. Franklin was proud of its history, and there were a number of tasteful shops on the green selling souvenirs and pamphlets about the original settlers and notable sons of the town. The campus of the University of Massachusetts at Franklin extended from the far side of the green, beyond a pair of tall stone pillars and a ponderous statue of the Founder. The buildings were dignified, with stone steps and massive doors and pediments with clocks that reflected the sun in discs of gold. There were libraries and chapels and memorial theatres facing each other across inevitable smooth lawns; this was the face of the university that was featured in prospectus photographs.
Matthew’s part of the foundation was housed in one of a series of big, glassy blocks discreetly separated from the photogenic old buildings by a belt of trees. These newer facilities were a world away from the mousy warren of stairs and ancient cubbyholes where he had worked in London, although Matthew seemed barely to notice the difference.
Defiantly she left the Cherokee in a convenient space labelled faculty members only, and strolled across the grass towards the science blocks. The steps and lawns and student parking lots were deserted and somnolent in the sun. It would be another week before the students came crowding back in time for Registration Day. The clock on the James Randall Hallett Library struck four behind her, triggering a series of associations. The church clock in the village, back at home. Vicarages and English tea. Gardens with roses and honeysuckle. Fields with gates, and white-laced hawthorn hedges.
Dinah walked faster, digging her hands deeper into the pockets of her skirt. Her hair was pulled into a thick plait that felt weighty and hot at the nape of her neck. No, not plait, braid. Bangs. She marshalled the different words, distracting herself by doing so.
The road curved through the shadow of the trees. There were huge, elegant conifers here with branches like trailing skirts that looked black in the bright light.
There was more grass in front of the new buildings, a curving bank of it, and across the grass a scatter of people. The senior members of the various faculties pursued their research throughout the year, so there were more parked cars here, and the doors of the dining commons were open.
Dinah headed diagonally across the lawns. In front of Matthew’s building a handful of people were playing frisbee. She watched a boy in a baggy white shirt leap up and twist in the air to make a catch. Several voices called out and then the disc floated on from his hand in a smooth arc. All the figures were leaping now, their hair and clothes rippling and Dinah imagined how a director might freeze the frame to capture a single image, a blurred smiling face in a swathe of hair and an outstretched hand to signify, what, youthful abandon, confidence, freedom?
For the life that you live.
Perfume, trainers – sneakers – or low-fat yoghurt?
She was smiling with pleasure at the sight of the frisbee players when she realised that one of them was Matthew.
He was wearing khakis and a blue shirt that had pulled loose, and a peaked baseball cap she had never seen before. It was jammed low over his forehead to keep the sun out of his eyes and his hand was reaching up in a salute as he called out.
‘Sean! Over here, look.’
Sean Rader had been part of Matthew’s old team in London. It was part of the agreement Matt had made that he should be able to bring two of his key people over to New England with him. Dinah had met Sean often, back in London. He was a small, tense man with a corrugated frown. And now he was out in the four o’clock sunshine playing frisbee and shouting. These were all people who worked with Matthew. The boy in the white shirt was a technician, and there was a little dark-haired woman PhD and Jon Liu, Matt’s deputy director, and half a dozen others.
The frisbee skimmed again on a long curving path towards Matt. He caught it two-handed and as he leapt in triumph he looked to Dinah so taut and springy, and so unquestionably comfortable within himself and in his place, that the coloured lenses of familiarity fell from her eyes.
The naked vision made her shiver in the afternoon’s heat.
How was it that she had driven across town needing to talk to this man rather than that one, or another altogether? She was gazing at a stranger, a man she didn’t know in any way, who lived a life with which she was unacquainted.
Disorientation rocked her. She put out a hand to steady herself in the rushing air.
Someone had sent the disc spinning away on the wrong trajectory. There was a chorus of jeers and the players ran after it in an eager pack. The woman PhD stumbled on the bank and landed on her outstretched hands, but she pushed herself up again and ran on, anxious not to be left out. The shadow of his cap’s peak cut sharply across Matt’s face.
Dinah did not want him to see her here. She could only think of getting away before anyone noticed her. She shrank backwards, two or three steps, then turned and fled for the shelter of the trees.
‘It was only a frisbee game,’ Nancy said. ‘Why are you so angry?’
They were in the Pinkhams’ yard, laying out cutlery and paper napkins. Nancy had had her hair cut in the summer and it stood out in a cottony floss around her face, making her look not many years older than her little girls. ‘Even Todd plays it.’
‘It wasn’t the game. I’m not angry.’ Dinah couldn’t express to Nancy the failure of recognition and the confusion that had come with it, or the sense of loss at being excluded from a closed circle of shared interest and common purpose that mocked what her marriage had become.
Matt was happy here.
How had that obvious fact somehow escaped her? She was lonely; Matthew was considerate and careful of her, almost as if she were an invalid, but on his own account he was happy.
‘Damn it. Nancy, I sound a miserable shrew, don’t I?’
‘Uh-huh. You don’t deserve him. And oh boy, are you a misery. You never come over here and make me laugh when I’m ready to scream, do you? You aren’t funny or cute or a great mom or anything?’
‘Aren’t I?’
‘Shit, Dinah, what’s wrong? You know you are.’
Simple. On the face of it.
Dinah shook out a gingham cloth and twirled it like a matador cape. The boys were up in the trees hanging candle lanterns from the branches.
