LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

fine wool and chiffon and slippery satin. Dinah had often wondered, as she flicked through the fashion magazines, what colour greige might be. It came to her now that this was it. It was so subtle and refined that it made her cheery yellow linen look by contrast like the flowering of some tenacious garden weed.

      ‘It’s never worth disagreeing with Ed,’ his wife murmured. ‘He believes that he’s right and he almost invariably is. I think it’s the act of believing itself that does it.’

      Dinah smiled. Surprisingly, but distinctly, she felt herself warming with interest in Sandra Parkes. It was not her clothes, or the way she looked, or even what she said. It was the sound of her faint English voice and the half-swallowed, descending semitones of irony and deprecation.

      Ed Parkes might look like a bull elephant and sound like a hick, but he was as quick as a whip. The stirring of empathy was not a matter of sharing a common language with Sandra, nothing as obvious as that. By the bare movements of her lips and the darting little gestures of her fingers, Dinah knew where Sandra came from. She could read the text of Sandra’s background just as surely as Sandra could read hers.

      Within a few moments the women were perched side by side on the scrubbed pine of Nancy’s kitchen table, exchanging the common currency of their histories in a way they would never have done at home in England, or even in New York or Los Angeles. Whereas the links would have been taken for granted there, here they seemed surprising, remarkable. They had both grown up in the Home Counties, the only children of career servicemen. Sandra’s father had been in the Navy, Dinah’s in the Army. There had been overseas postings, and then from the age of eleven, good safe girls’ boarding schools within a sensible radius of London. After boarding school there had been long interludes of rebellion. And then for both of them, marriage to men from backgrounds entirely different from their own.

      The Parkeses lived for part of the year in London, Sandra explained. Ed liked to be there when he was writing. Zermatt was for a month or six weeks at Christmas and Franklin was where he claimed to feel most at home.

      ‘But Ed gets bored quickly. In a month he’ll be fidgeting, working out a trip to somewhere.’

      ‘And you?’ Dinah asked.

      Sandra sighed, looking sideways at Dinah through the pale and silky bell of her hair. ‘I would like to feel …’ her elegant fingers shaped a box in the air ‘… located.’

      Like me, Dinah thought. Correctly located. It must be this need in both of them that Ed Parkes had recognised. Talking to Sandra had stirred a hundred associations within her. Her Englishness called up the inessential details of home and history, but it was not those details Dinah felt severed from only what they contained. A secret, embedded in England like a fly in amber. She couldn’t explain the severance to Nancy or Dee or George Kuznik or anyone else, nor could she talk about it even to Matthew.

      Most of all, not to Matthew.

      She couldn’t even think about this. She had to keep them sealed away, all the connected threads, or they would snake loose and whip and whistle around her.

      ‘Do you have children?’ Sandra was asking.

      Yes.

      ‘Yes, two boys. They’re here somewhere.’

      ‘Of course. I met them earlier. One of them said to me “You see, dinosaurs had tiny brains relative to their bulk.”’

      ‘Jack. The younger one is Merlin. And you?’

      Sandra plucked at the filmy top layer of her draperies. An odd wary note sounded in their talk. Each of them heard it and interpreted it for herself, without wondering if the other did the same.

      Sandra said, ‘One. A girl. She’s fourteen now.’

      Fourteen.

      Dinah felt a jolt, and the tidy focus of her attention scattered like beads in a kaleidoscope. She made herself say smoothly, ‘You must bring her over, the boys would like it.’

      Sandra’s narrow shoulders lifted. ‘I don’t know. Perhaps. She’s quite difficult …’

      Impulsively Dinah put her hand on Sandra’s arm. ‘Aren’t they all? Listen, why don’t you come and see me? One day next week. We’ll have lunch, just the two of us. Will you?’

      There was some connection between them, not yet identifiable, beyond the mere similarity of their histories.

      ‘Yes. All right, I’d like that. I’ll come while Milly’s with her tutor. She doesn’t go to school just at the moment. Ed travels so much, and I like us both to go with him …’

      For a second, Sandra’s pale eyes held Dinah’s imploringly.

      From across the room, Matthew was watching them. He saw Dinah touch Sandra’s arm. It was okay, he thought. Good. Dinah needed a friend over here and the writer’s nervy wife might be the one. He had liked the writer himself, for all his bullshit. But there was a shiver of impatience with Dinah. She was needy, and once she had been strong. He had drawn on her strength, of course. Made himself with her help.

      The equation was different now. He was concerned for her, for Dinah separately and the two of them together. But still there was the chafe of exasperation, the raw edge of worn-out patience rubbing the smoothness between them.

      The boys were in bed and asleep at last. Even Ape had given up his clicking and thumping and settled in his basket in the laundry room. In her bathrobe, Dinah sat in front of her bedroom mirror brushing her hair. When she was a little girl her nanny had taught her to brush her hair every night, just so, counting the strokes. Not that she did it, then or now. Why tonight? Because of the associations crowding in on her? Dinah remembered her parents coming into her bedroom while she sat at her dressing table, her mother in a cocktail dress with a stole round her bare shoulders, her father resplendent in his uniform. A kiss on the top of her brushed head. A cloud of Arpège and her mother’s hands resting on her pyjama shoulders. Their two faces reflected one above the other, a blurred half-formed version under the poised lipsticked one. Eleanor always so perfect. Yet they were alike, hair and eyes and colouring.

      That mother-daughter link broken. Eleanor, long widowed, in England, in a bungalow on the south coast. Elegant, bridge-playing, lonely probably. Herself with her two boys. Tufty hair, their father’s, an odd whorl at the back of three heads.

      ‘Are you coming to bed?’

      Matthew was already there, propped up with the inevitable scientific journal.

      Dinah untied her robe, and slipped under the covers. Matthew put his reading aside and turned out the light.

      In the darkness he asked, ‘Are you all right?’

      ‘Yes. Of course.’

      She had not mentioned the frisbee game. Scientists’ wives often feel excluded. Someone had warned her, at the very beginning. The Prof’s wife, back at UCL, that was it. It’s like a very exclusive club. The exchange of ideas, the stimulus, the sheer thrill of it all. Most of them enjoy it more than sex, dear.

      It wasn’t the obviousness of her own exclusion from the club that had hurt her, though. It was the sight of Matthew’s unclouded happiness. And as she thought this Dinah felt a stab of self-disgust like a spike driven into her neck.

      He reached out for her now. She knew that they would make love and they did, in their tender and considerate way that masked other feelings nothing to do with tenderness or concern.

      Afterwards Matthew mumbled sleepily, ‘I love you, you know.’

      ‘I love you too,’ she answered. And thought that the divide between love and hatred was a very fine and fragile one.

      Dinah dreamed of England. It had become a place of steep hills, each hill revealing another beyond it, all of them with pale roads winding to their rounded summits like illustrations in a child’s picture book.

      

Скачать книгу