No one said as much, but they knew that what had happened to Vicky and Gordon and Nina had unexpectedly shaken up the pieces of some tidy, established pattern. It had caused them to look differently at one another, speculatively, as if after so long they knew each other much less well than they had always imagined.
After Christmas Gordon had bleakly camped out in his office, and then he moved into the modern hotel on the fringe of the business park. Then, some time later, the others heard that he was at home once more. Evidently Vicky had taken her husband back.
In the weeks since Christmas no one had seen very much of the Ransomes, either together or separately. Andrew told Janice that Gordon was working very hard. ‘And a good thing too,’ he had muttered in conclusion. Janice told the other women what she had also heard from Andrew, that Nina had gone back to London for a while, but none of them had anything else to report.
Each of the women, in turn, had taken care to let Vicky know that she was there for her, if there was any need. Vicky had thanked them, but in the end she hadn’t talked much to any of them. It seemed that she was busy with her children.
But some of this new awareness of a break in the old pattern had accompanied the Frosts and the Wickhams and the Cleggs to Méribel.
Hannah stretched out in front of the fire. She had left her hair loose and a thick, shiny cascade of it half-covered her face and hid the hand propping up her head. Her jeans accentuated the hollow of her waist and the rounded swell of her hips. Andrew and Michael were both looking at her, and Hannah knew that they were looking. There was a triumphant curve to her lips that went with all the other curves of her, still just confined on the right side of the dividing line between voluptuous and fat.
Darcy was the only one who seemed unaware of the effect Hannah was having. He had been drinking steadily since before dinner, and his attention was fixed on the window where the snowflakes were visible in the last instant before they melted against the glass.
‘Well,’ Janice said softly, breaking a little silence, ‘Are we all glad to be here?’
She glanced round at them, waiting for an answer.
Janice was wearing a loose, silky kaftan because she was at the upper limit of her weight range, the phase she described as Fat Jan. Soon a savage bout of dieting would reduce her to Plump Jan once more, and then the cycle would begin again.
‘Of course we’re glad,’ Michael murmured. Away from the hospital and his bleeper and the considerations of tomorrow’s list he was cheerful, almost light-hearted. The wine at dinner and the whisky seemed to have unpinned him. His legs splayed out in front of him and his long arms and surgeon’s fingers dangled over the arms of his chair.
Andrew sleepily laced his hands over the small mound that his stomach made under his sweater.
‘I need a holiday,’ he said.
It had been a difficult couple of months. The recession was affecting business, and until recently Gordon hadn’t been pulling his weight. Andrew told himself with satisfied conviction that he deserved a break, if anyone did.
Marcelle said nothing. She was wearing jeans and a sweat-shirt, an ordinary, workaday translation of Hannah’s velvet and cashmere, and she knew that she looked old and faded. It had seemed a bigger struggle than usual, this year, to find everyone’s ski belongings and to wash them and pack them, and to close up the house and to arrange a week’s cover at work, and she had not found time to buy anything new for herself. She was worried that there were no other girls in the party to keep Daisy company. She was irritated that the dinner cooked by the sulky chalet girl had been less good than anything any one of her students could have produced, with the possible exception of Cathy Clegg. She felt tired, and anxious, and sad, and she would have liked to tell Michael so, and have him comfort and reassure her. But she knew that she could not tell him, indeed that she would have to pretend to be cheerful and to enjoy herself, so as not to increase either his irritation with her or her own sense of disappointment in him. They had existed since their last big argument in a state of careful politeness.
‘Mar?’ Janice was looking at her, her smooth forehead puckered with concern.
‘Oh, yes.’ Marcelle summoned a smile, only just able to remember what the question had been. ‘So long as the ski-ing’s good.’ She had been a keen skier from childhood, and was probably the strongest in the group, better even than Darcy. Until this year, perhaps even this month, the promise of a week in the snow would have raised her spirits from any depths. That it failed to do so now only increased her fear and sadness.
‘So, what shall we do with the rest of this evening?’ Hannah asked. ‘It’s late, but it’s too early for bed.’
She shook her hair back from her face, revealing her white throat. Behind her head a log fell in the hearth, sending up a tiny shower of sparks.
There was another small silence.
In the quiet room, hemmed in together by the snow while their children slept, they were reminded of Nina and Gordon. Even Marcelle, through the isolation of her sadness, sensed the possibility of something new and dangerous happening; even unimaginative Andrew sensed it.
‘Play a game?’ he suggested, not meaning quite that, but wanting to deflect this moment and steer the evening back to normality. There had been a period when the Grafton couples had been enthusiastic about after-dinner games, in the time when they had felt they knew everything there was to know about each other and needed new diversions.
‘For Christ’s sake, no. Not some fucking game.’
Darcy looked away from the window at last. The strength of his objection made the others realize that he was drunker than they were. But the tradition of deference to Darcy meant that no one tried to argue in favour of starting up a game.
Hannah looked at him, her smile disappearing for a second. Then she stood up, lazily reaching out her arms and flexing her fingers. She had taken off her suede boots, and her toenails were painted with the same bronze varnish as her long fingernails.
‘I know.’
She went across to the cassette player provided as part of the chalet’s equipment. There was a neat stack of cassettes beside it and she flipped through them until she found one that suited her. Michael and Andrew watched her as she bent down to fit the tape into the player. Janice lay back in her place with her head resting on one arm, waiting to see what would happen.
‘I think we should dance,’ Hannah said.
The tape she had chosen was Tina Turner’s Private Dancer, no longer particularly new, more or less familiar to each of them. She began to hum, low down in her throat, while she searched for the place she wanted in the tape. Then, when she had found it, she stretched her arms wide, threw back her head and began to dance.
They had seen Hannah dance before, all of them, dozens of times, but not quite like this. Her eyes were half-closed but she was still smiling, moving her hips rhythmically to the music, slow gyrations that seemed to ripple up the length of her spine and down her arms to her fingertips. She was absorbed in herself but sang as she danced, ‘I’m your private dancer, a dancer for money, I’ll do what you want me to do …’
Nobody else moved.
As a performance it was overdone, veering close to parody, and there was a second when someone might have laughed and then the laughter would have spread and Hannah’s solo would have lost its power to transfix any of them. But there wasn’t a sound except for the music and Hannah’s singing, and there was a crackle of tension in the room.
Janice lifted her head from her arm and watched, her mouth slightly open. Andrew was fully awake, and Michael put a finger up to rub a bead of moisture away from his top lip. Each of them thought, in their different ways, of the change that Gordon and Nina had begun. The imminent unravelling