Rosie Thomas 4-Book Collection: Other People’s Marriages, Every Woman Knows a Secret, If My Father Loved Me, A Simple Life

Upstairs there was a heavy double thump on the door knocker. The men had arrived with the van.

*

Patrick directed the unloading. The job took less time than he had expected, because Nina had brought so little with her. There were a few pieces that he remembered from the London house, a Queen Anne chest on chest, some Beidermeier that would look well in the plain, square rooms, sofas and chairs, and a French bateau lit. Within two hours the van was emptied and the men were on their way home again.

After they had gone Nina and Patrick had a drink in the drawing room. It was furnished so sparsely that their voices faintly echoed. The illuminated cathedral front swam in the darkness beyond the windows.

‘Will you be comfortable enough?’ Patrick asked at length.

‘I wanted to bring as little as possible.’ She was not sure, now. She remembered how the storage people had come to wrap the pictures and modern pieces in burlap and polythene before carrying them away.

‘This will be fine for the time being. I can always add more things.’

Different things, she meant, not the old ones.

‘Would you like me to stay? I could take you out to dinner somewhere.’

‘Thank you, that’s nice of you. But it’s a long drive back. And I should unpack a bit, I suppose.’

Patrick understood that she wanted him to go, to leave her alone to confront whatever it was she intended. He drank a second glass of wine, reluctant to leave her, and then stood up. Nina went down the stairs with him, and out to the green where his car was parked. They made arrangements for a weekend and promised to telephone one another. Then Patrick kissed her on both cheeks, climbed into his car and drove away.

Nina went back into the house and shut the door. She walked slowly up the stairs to her bedroom and stood at the foot of the bed, her fingertips resting on the high, smooth scroll of polished wood. Richard had bought the French bed for her as a wedding present.

On their wedding night he had held her in his arms, rocked her and told her to imagine that they were in a real boat adrift on a benign ocean. She had smiled at him, drowsy with happiness and sex, and the sea of contentment had seemed boundless.

Nina wrapped her arms around herself now, digging her nails into the flesh of her shoulders to feel the confirmation of pain.

‘Why did you leave me?’ she asked the empty air. ‘I can’t bear it without you.’

To have come home to Grafton seemed a pointless gesture. Even if she sold everything she and Richard had jointly owned, shedding the possessions of a shared life, his absence would still come at her out of the mundane actions of each successive day.

Nina began to cry, noisily, into the silence of her new house.

Two (#u4867d205-638d-5ca6-a40a-66ec0e70e161)

Janice Frost and Marcelle Wickham were the first to notice Nina. They were in the big supermarket and in the distance, as if the perspective lines of the shelves held her vividly spotlit just before the vanishing point, they saw a tall, thin woman in a long black skirt. Her red hair was pinned up in an untidy nest on the top of her head and her mouth was painted the same colour, over-bright in her white face.

‘Who is that?’ Janice wondered. Janice knew everybody interesting in town, at least by sight.

Marcelle looked. As they watched, the woman moved away with her empty wire basket and disappeared.

Marcelle lifted a giant box of detergent into her trolley and squared it up alongside the cereals and tetrapacks of apple juice.

‘Haven’t a clue. Some visitor, I suppose. Crazy hair.’

They worked their way methodically up one side of the aisle and down the other, and then up and down the succeeding avenues as they always did, but they didn’t catch sight of the red-haired woman again.

Nina paid for her purchases, sandwiching them precisely on the conveyor belt between two metal bars labelled ‘Next Customer Please’, all the time disliking the frugal appearance of the single portions of meat, vegetables and fish. She loved to cook, but could find no pleasure in it as a solitary pursuit.

She had no car in Grafton. She had sold the Alfa Romeo that Richard had bought her, along with his Bentley coupé, in the grief-fuelled rejection of their possessions immediately after his death. To take her back into the centre of town there was a round-nosed shuttle bus that reminded her of a child’s toy. She squeezed inside it with the pensioners and young mothers with their folding pushchairs, and balanced her light load of shopping against her hip. The bus swung out of the car park immediately in front of Janice and Marcelle in Janice’s Volvo.

The next person to see Nina was Andrew Frost, Janice’s husband. Andrew did recognize her.

Nina had been working. She was painting the face of a tiger peering out of the leaves of a jungle, part of an alphabet book. For a long morning she had been able to lose herself behind the creature’s striped mask and in the green depths of the foliage. She worked steadily, loading the tip of her tiny brush with points of gold and emerald and jade, but then she looked up and saw blue sky over her head.

It was time to eat lunch, but she could find no enthusiasm for preparing even the simplest meal. Instead she took a bright red jacket off a peg and went out to walk on the green.

Andrew had left his offices intending to go to an organ recital in the cathedral. He was walking over the grass towards the west porch, pleased with the prospect of an hour’s music and freedom from meetings and telephones. He saw a red-haired woman in a crimson jacket crossing diagonally in front of him, and knew at once who she was. She had worn a costume in the same shade of red to play Beatrice.

He quickened his pace to intercept her.

‘It’s Nina Strange, isn’t it?’

Nina stopped. She turned to see a square man with thinning fair hair, a man in a suit who carried a raincoat even though the sky was blue.

‘You don’t remember me,’ the man said equably.

A thread of recollection snagged in her head.

‘Yes, yes I do. Wait a minute …’

‘“When I said I would die a bachelor, I did not think I should live till I were married.”’

‘Oh, God, I do remember! It’s Andrew, isn’t it?’

‘Andrew Frost. Benedick to your elegant Beatrice.’

‘Don’t try to remind me of how long ago.’ Nina held out her hand and shook his. She was laughing and her face was suddenly bright. She remembered the plump teenaged boy who had played opposite her in the joint Shakespeare production of their respective grammar schools.

‘You were very good. I was dreadful,’ he said.

‘No, you weren’t. And your calves were excellent in Elizabethan stockings.’

Andrew beamed at her. ‘I was going to hear some music, but why don’t we go across to the Eagle instead? Have you had lunch?’

Nina hesitated.

Small fragments of memory were rapidly coalescing and strengthening, swimming into focus in front of her like the images in a developing Polaroid snapshot. She could see the boy now, inside this grown man, and as she looked harder at him the boy’s features grew more pronounced until it seemed that it was the man who was the memory. The sight of the young face brought back to her the long hours of rehearsal in the school hall smelling of floor polish and musty costumes, the miniature and tearful dramas of adolescence, the voices of teachers and friends. It was disorientating to find herself standing on the green again, almost within the shade of the mulberry tree, but clothed in the body of a middle-aged woman instead of a schoolgirl’s.

‘I can’t. I really shouldn’t today. I’m working. I’ve only come out for five minutes’ fresh air.’

It was three days since she had spoken more than half a dozen words to anyone. She didn’t want the questions to start in the saloon bar of the Eagle. She was afraid that if she was given a chance she would let too many words come pouring out, and she didn’t want Andrew Frost to hear them.

‘Working? Are you staying in Grafton?’ He was standing with one hand in his pocket, the other hitching his raincoat over his shoulder. He was friendly and relaxed, no more than naturally curious.

‘I … I’ve come back to live. I bought a house, in Dean’s Row.’

Andrew pursed his mouth in a soundless whistle, ‘Did you, now?’