The bedroom door opened and then closed again. The floor creaked as he passed the end of the bed and Marcelle was gripped by the fear that it was not Michael, but an intruder.
‘I am awake,’ she said in a clear voice edged with alarm.
‘Are you? It’s very late.’
It was him, of course, but she did not feel any sense of relief. She clicked on her bedside light.
‘How is he?’
Michael was standing with his shoes in one hand and his jacket in the other, the picture of stealth.
‘Oh. Probably all right, in the short term.’
Marcelle listened as he told her about Darcy and the hospital. He undressed as he talked, putting his cufflinks in the carved wooden dish that stood on the chest of drawers, dropping his shirt and underclothes into the wicker laundry basket. Marcelle thought of the thousands of other nights that had slipped by and now stretched behind them, their joint history.
‘And Hannah?’
Michael lay down on his side of the bed.
‘Worried, naturally. But coping with it well enough.’
Marcelle wanted him to put his arms round her, making some gesture of reassurance, but she knew that he would not.
‘So what was going on tonight?’ she asked.
There was a small silence, and then he said, ‘I’m sorry, I know how it must have looked. We’d both had a few drinks, we’d agreed that we were sick of the election. So we went outside, that’s all. There was a bit of fooling around. You know what Hannah’s like.’
‘Not really, evidently,’ Marcelle said.
Within her head gnawed the conviction that Michael was lying to her. She turned his words over and over, trying to prise the truth out of them, but they stayed defiantly flat, refusing to admit her.
‘What does “fooling around” mean?’ she persisted. The expression was not quite right. She had never heard him use it before. Was that the false note?
‘I kissed her. A friendly, flirtatious kiss. These things happen between people.’
‘Do they?’
Michael moved his arm awkwardly, and then found her hand. He squeezed it.
‘Yes, they do. I’m sorry if you were hurt.’
She knew that she would get no more out of him, and in a way she was relieved. There was nothing for her to do but accept what he told her, and it was easier to do so than otherwise because it allowed her to step aside from her anxieties. These things did happen, she told herself. Between people of their age, with their histories behind them. She knew as much, from Jimmy.
Michael withdrew his hand, settling himself for sleep.
‘I’m tired,’ he said. ‘And I’ve got a busy day tomorrow. How about you?’
‘The same.’
Marcelle closed her eyes experimentally, and they lay next to each other with their separate thoughts.
Nina lay on her side and looked at Barney’s naked back. His spine was a strong groove like a thumb-line pressed in soft clay.
Barney was sitting on the edge of her bed, talking on the telephone to the hospital. She closed her eyes, and then opened them again. There was still the narrow space of crumpled sheet and then the startling, solid shape of him. She stared at the lines of his neck, and imagined the hard outline of his skull under the scrolls of hair. His face was hidden from her but his questioning voice sounded like an anxious boy’s, contradicting what she saw.
Barney replaced the receiver and turned back to Nina.
‘He’s stable, and his heart is being monitored. He’s asleep at the moment.’
‘Good. That’s good news.’
‘May I call Hannah now?’
‘Of course. Don’t tell her where you are, will you?’
‘Not if you don’t want me to.’
He dialled again, and almost at once began talking to Hannah. Nina knew that she must have been sitting at Wilton waiting beside the telephone. She turned over on to her back and thought about the morning in order to disconnect herself from Barney’s conversation with his stepmother.
They had come upstairs together, and in the shuttered silence of her bedroom Barney had seemed neither a tired boy nor a predatory man, but simply himself. He kissed her and undid her dressing gown, and she stood quietly while he looked at her. Then he touched her arm.
‘Don’t get cold,’ he said.
He lifted the quilt and she slid into the warmth underneath it. He took off the clothes that he had put on for the Frosts’ party, ages of time ago, and gratefully lay down beside her. She held out her arms to him.
‘May I?’ he had asked, and he had sounded so much like a polite boy at a birthday party that it made Nina laugh.
‘Well, yes, since we’ve come this far.’
Barney laughed too, with relief, leaning over her and kissing the corner of her mouth.
‘Thank you. It would be quite difficult to go to sleep right now.’
Nina had not wanted to compare him with Gordon, but she could not help it. Barney would not make her forget herself, and the time and the place and everything else except what he did, as Gordon had been able to do, nor did she want that from him. She could feel his eagerness, and his clumsiness, and she wanted to reassure him.
‘It’s all right. I want you to be here. I’m glad you are.’ Barney closed his eyes and sighed, and then murmured, ‘I wanted to be. I have for ages. I thought you knew.’
‘I did.’
They both laughed again, acknowledging that the gap between them was temporarily diminished.
It was easier, after that. She had given him confidence, and he was as warm and natural as she had imagined he would be.
Afterwards Barney said with his mouth against her cheek, ‘Thank you. Did I tell you that you are beautiful?’
‘I think you did, more or less.’
‘Less isn’t enough. You are.’
Nina smiled. ‘Thank you,’ she said in her turn.
She was pleased that they had safely negotiated their way to this comfortable moment. She dismissed the hovering spectres of common sense and responsibility, and concentrated instead on the joint pattern her breathing made with Barney’s. After a moment she realized that he had drifted into sleep and saw from the looseness of his mouth and the circles under his eyes that he was exhausted.
Barney slept for an hour, while she lay quietly beside him. Then he opened his eyes again, at once wide awake and seeming completely rested. It made her realize again how young and healthy he was.
‘I should telephone,’ he said.
After he had spoken to the hospital and to Hannah his anxiety visibly lifted.
‘I told her she should go to bed and try to sleep,’ he said to Nina, adding, ‘She thinks I’m at Tom’s.’
He lay down beside her again. They contemplated each other openly for a moment, squinting a little because of the closeness of their faces, each of them evaluating this new stage of their intimacy and trying to work out what should happen next. Nina put her fingers up to his mouth, approving of the shape of it, and the other remembered details of