Marcelle saw Nina’s hands still braced on the wheel, two small white patches. She also saw that the two heads were slowly drawing apart, and she knew for certain, as surely as she also knew who the two people were, that they had kissed while they were waiting for the train to pass by.
The red lights at the side of the barrier stopped flashing. In a moment the gates would automatically swing upwards once again. But while the two cars waited, separated by the rails and the red and white bars, Gordon and Nina saw Marcelle watching them.
In her turn, Marcelle saw how their faces turned into stiff ovals pocked with the dark holes of shock.
The rear of the train had disappeared. The gates silently lifted, moving through an invisible arc until the twin arms pointed upwards and the way was left clear.
Both drivers eased their cars into gear and they crept towards each other over the wooden ramp. Marcelle lifted her hand in a wave and Gordon and Nina both smiled back at her. Even as they passed each other Marcelle recognized what it took for them to overlay their expressions of alarm with smiles of conventional greeting.
Then the Mercedes was gone, dwindling in her rear view mirror and vanishing around the bend in the road.
Marcelle drove on towards the Pond School, trying to lay straight in her mind the implications of what she had seen. Two miles further on, while she was still thinking of Vicky with Helen strapped to her front in a baby sling, she caught a glimpse of Gordon’s grey Peugeot. He had left it in a corner of the car park belonging to a roadside restaurant.
‘Did she see you?’ Nina gasped. ‘Did she recognize you?’
‘Of course she did.’
Pale-faced, Gordon stared ahead at the road as he tried to work out the significance of what had happened.
‘She couldn’t have seen us kiss. The train was in the way,’ Nina said.
‘I think she must have seen enough.’
How could they, he wondered, have imagined that they were invisible and impregnable, just because they were so happy to be together?
They were both shaking. Their instinct was to pull off the road and find comfort and reassurance in touching each other, but to do so where they could be seen would be to compound their absurd mistake. Gordon was asking himself, even now, Where can we go in future? Where will we be safe?
‘There could be a perfectly ordinary explanation. Your car could have broken down. I was giving you a lift. I just passed by. Gordon?’
She was seeking his reassurance, and he tried to give it.
‘Yes. Maybe.’
‘What shall we do, then?’
He couldn’t think of anything in particular. It seemed now inevitable that someone would have seen them, and he was amazed by his preceding carelessness. ‘Nothing. I don’t believe there is anything we can do, except brazen it out if we have to with a breakdown story.’
‘Do you think Marcelle will say anything to Vicky?’
He thought about it. ‘No, I don’t suppose so. Not directly. Perhaps she’ll try to warn her in some more oblique way. I don’t know. What do women say to each other in these circumstances?’
‘I have never been in these circumstances before.’
The edginess came back again as they veered from complicity to opposition.
They drove for a little way in silence. Gordon was trying to work out what would happen if he told Nina now that it must end, before anything else happened. But it was only a distant speculation. They had already come too far to imagine retracing their steps.
They came to a crossroads, and a sign indicating that they were only a few miles from the motorway. Nina lifted her hands from the wheel for an instant.
‘What do you want to do? Shall we go on?’
He answered at once, ‘Yes. Let’s get as far away from here as we can, if only for a few hours.’
His certainty won her back again, and her spirits lifted. Their story would be believed, there was no reason why it should not be. It had been a warning; they would be more careful in the future.
She put her foot down and the Mercedes shot forward.
In the demonstration kitchen Marcelle went through the motions of mixing and kneading her bread dough while a dozen students lounging on the benches in front of her yawned and whispered and made notes. Cathy Clegg sat at the front, with her long legs in thick black tights negligently propped up on the dais. She twined an escaped strand of streaky blonde hair through her fingers as she gazed out of the window.
Marcelle had given the lesson often enough to be able to do it on auto-pilot. As she worked and talked a segment of her mind slid over the morning’s conundrum and then away from it, to wonder about the other Grafton couples.
What she had seen made her feel precarious. She had not confessed even to Janice that she was afraid her own marriage was faltering; her communications even with her closest friend about this were always on the level of wry jokes, jokes that turned on the helplessness and childishness of their men. They were never to do with their own loneliness, or disappointment, and even so Janice sometimes shrank from this comic half-truth-telling to reaffirm her own contentment.
‘But they aren’t so bad, the two of them, are they, Mar? They could be much worse, after all.’
She would wrinkle her nose in the pretty way she had, and smooth the loose folds of her skirt over her hips.
Their men could be drunks, or womanizers, Marcelle supplied for her. Or violent, or cruel or criminal – but those were the traits of men in other places, weren’t they? Husbands in television documentaries, newspaper articles. They were nothing to do with the steady couples and the security of Grafton, with its golf club and good schools and with the golden cathedral at its heart.
Marcelle had assumed it was only her own marriage that was dying away into silence, and that it must be doing so through some fault of her own. If she could be better in some way, she reasoned, then Michael would warm to her again. In the meantime she would not admit that she was afraid, even to Janice. She didn’t want to betray too much, to admit that there was so much darkness beneath the smooth, shining surface of their lives.
This morning’s glimpse of Gordon with Nina had not troubled her merely for Vicky’s sake, although that did concern her also. It was more as if in the moment at the level crossing some stretched-taut piece of insulating fabric had been pierced, and now the pinprick was tearing apart to become a gaping hole. Through the hole came a cold and threatening draught of suspicion that blew all around her. It was not just her own life that was in difficulties. The placid and normal world that she struggled to maintain had become as precarious as a conjuring trick. What was the reality in Grafton, Marcelle wondered, and what was the illusion?
The oven pinger interrupted her thoughts.
‘Mrs Wickham? The bread?’ a student helpfully reminded her.
‘Thank you, Emma.’
There had been a time when Marcelle had found it definitely uplifting to cook good food for lovers and friends, although for some reason it had seemed not quite acceptable to admit as much. The young were less worried about such things now. But in the last years – for how long had she felt it? – cooking had become a matter of work, and of repetitive family duty.
Art and nature, Marcelle thought, remembering one of her oblique conversations with Janice. Gardening, and cooking, and sex. Where had the subtle and diverse pleasures gone to?
It was four o’clock. She could hear the clatter of other students in the corridor outside.
‘That’s all for today,’ she told her students.
She left the class and went quickly to the staff room to collect