Dimly, I become aware of his voice outside on the balcony, seeping in through the tiny gap where the door has not quite closed. He’s saying that there is nothing to worry about, that he has everything under control and that he will be back in the office on Monday. He sounds deferential, stumbling over his words in a way I have never heard before. After a minute’s taut silence, he says, ‘Yes – yes, she is.’ Another silence, and then a short, relieved laugh.
‘OK,’ he says, and as he does so he pushes the door open again and steps back inside the room. ‘I will. Lunchtime tomorrow at the club? Got it. I’ll see you then.’ He disconnects the call and tosses the phone on to the bed, breathing deeply. He glances at me and I am surprised and relieved to see a flirtatious spark in his eyes. ‘That was my father,’ he says. ‘Wondering why I’ve been playing hooky from the office. He’s a clever old devil, I’ll give him that – he worked out that you must be with me, and he’s intrigued. He wants to meet you—us—for lunch tomorrow with him and my mother. Fancy it?’
I blink, unsure of what has just happened. The thought of lunch with Jonathan’s parents both exhilarates and terrifies me. I stare at him, running the tip of my tongue nervously along my bottom lip. ‘Yes,’ I say, because there seems to be nothing else to say, nothing else that will keep us on this course.
He comes to sit beside me on the bed and puts his arm around me, and with that one gesture my doubts dissolve and I want to weep with relief. ‘I’m sorry this is all so fast,’ he whispers into my neck. ‘But I don’t want to lose you. I know that already.’ He kisses my collarbone, a soft, long kiss that makes me close my eyes. ‘You’d better go home later,’ he says. ‘Explain things to those parents of yours. Maybe leave out the part about them being dead.’ A low snort of amusement against my neck lets me know that he’s teasing me, repainting what initially seemed bizarre and disturbing in a kinder, more indulgent light.
‘We’re not close,’ I say. I’m trying to justify myself to him, but he doesn’t seem interested in hearing me. He’s running his hands slowly over me from top to toe, as if he has just noticed that I am naked. He mutters something that I can’t catch, and soon enough I don’t want to talk any more. He attacks my body with a passion that half frightens me, so roughly at times that I can feel the pain stabbing at me through the haze of pleasure, and more than once I almost scream at him to stop, but he seems to read my thoughts and softens his touch at the crucial moment every time. Soon enough I will reflect that things are much the same out of bed as they are in it. Some people have a knack for bringing you to the brink again and again, pushing you right to the limit of your endurance until you think you cannot take any more, but never quite tipping you over the edge and out of love.
Laura was in the garden when I returned from the shop, tying lengths of pale green and lilac crêpe paper in bows around the back of each chair in turn. I stood and watched her from the kitchen window. When she had tied each bow, she stepped back, shaded her eyes against the sun and tipped her head a little to one side, as if expecting the chair to speak to her. Several times she came forward again and readjusted the crêpe paper, fluffing it primly and precisely into place until she was satisfied. There must have been fifty or sixty chairs in total, huddled in groups around spindly metal tables dotted across the sweep of lawn. A pile of bunting was stacked up by one of the tables – multicoloured flags strung together on a pale yellow cord, stirring slightly with the summer wind. As I leaned out of the window, peering closer, I could see tiny sparkling dots nestling in the grass, winking and glimmering like jewels. Rose petals perhaps, or some kind of confetti. As I stared at them, Laura looked up and saw me, gave me a little wave. I came out into the garden to join her.
‘How was the shop?’ she asked when I was close enough to pick up the soft, low register of her voice.
Briefly, I considered telling her the truth. I told Catherine about Jonathan today. She treated me differently all afternoon, and before I left she asked me whether I wanted to talk any more about it. I said no, but now I’m not so sure. I think I might, and soon. ‘This all looks great,’ I said instead, gesticulating to take in the whole lawn. ‘Better hope it doesn’t rain overnight.’
‘Oh, it won’t rain.’ A hint of Laura’s old imperiousness surfaced. ‘I wanted to get everything ready today, so that I could concentrate on the food tomorrow. We’ve got almost sixty coming, you know.’
There was pride in her words. I stared out across the lawn, shading my eyes against the evening sun, trying to imagine it filled with people intent on celebrating Harvey’s sixty-fourth birthday. It was an arbitrary number to be making such a fuss over, but I suspected that the birthday itself was little but a device to kick-start Harvey’s return to society. Last year, visitors had come and gone with a monotonous regularity that had rapidly thinned into nothingness when it became clear that none of us was inclined to put on a brave face and entertain company. I could tell that through his grief Harvey was still capable of being disappointed by the shoddy pretence of respect with which his erstwhile friends and colleagues had retreated – and contemptuous of it, too. All the same, the garden party had been his idea, perhaps to test the permanence of the situation. As the RSVPs had trickled back I had sensed a kind of cold satisfaction emanating from him, a growing confirmation that he had not been erased as swiftly as it had appeared. He had always known, as well as they did, that he was not the sort of person who was easily forgotten.
‘It’ll be strange,’ I heard Laura say, as if half to herself. ‘Seeing everyone again. It feels like such a long time since we’ve had this sort of gathering.’ Her fingers plucked disconsolately at a thread of lilac crêpe, teasing it apart into long filmy strands. ‘I hope Dad enjoys it.’
‘I hope we all do,’ I said, ‘but there’s no reason why we wouldn’t.’ Empty though the words were, they seemed to reassure her, and she nodded. I hesitated, and then put my hand over hers. Despite the heat of the day, her skin felt cold and faintly damp, as if she had just come in out of the rain.
‘I think this will be good for you, Violet,’ she said unexpectedly. ‘You’re too young to…’ She trailed off and, not wanting her to go on, I gripped her hand more tightly. The sudden smart of tears behind my eyes surprised me. Affection, even love, for Laura tended to strike me like that; randomly, as if unthought of ever before.
‘I’m looking forward to it,’ I said, as brightly as I could muster, and as I smiled at her I felt my spirits lift with the knowledge that I wasn’t lying. The closest I had got to a party in the past nine months was a strained, abortive gathering with a few of Jonathan’s old university friends – women ten years older than myself who wanted to drink cocktails, talk loudly about their own lives and subtly compete to give the impression that they themselves had been far more deeply touched and bruised by my husband’s death than I could ever imagine. It was a mistake that I had never made again. There was something unsettling about the distance I felt from them, a sharp contrast to the easy friendliness with which they had seemed to welcome me when Jonathan and I were first married. Perhaps they had