Rosie Thomas - A Simple Life

It was a good party. The moon hung above the trees, heavy and orange-tinged, and the children’s candle lanterns glowed amongst the dry leaves. The Kendrick Street neighbours were pleased to see each other after the long vacation and there was plenty of news to exchange.

Jack and Merlin went off with Tim Kerrigan. Dinah caught a glimpse of them in one of the bedrooms, sitting in a line with legs stuck out in front of them and chins sunk on their chests, watching a video. Just lately, her children had stopped making unfavourable comparisons between Franklin and home. They seemed to have stopped thinking about England altogether.

Dinah flitted from group to group, laughing and talking. She had drunk two quick glasses of wine in the kitchen with Nancy. Two or three people told her she was looking well, that her summer tan suited her. She listened to Max Berkmann describing the idyllic year in France.

‘I tell you, we would have stayed right there in Mâcon if there was any way I could have fixed it.’

‘Here, Dinah.’ George Kuznik was partial to Dinah, and he shifted to make a place beside him on the garden seat. The darkness was warm and scented and within it the lanterns made oval patches of fuzzy golden light.

George’s voice rumbled in her ear. ‘A cold beer and you. What more could a guy ask for? You know, I always think this is the best time of year. After the heat, waiting for the fall, before the cold comes.’

Talking without listening to herself, Dinah said something about not much looking forward to another New England winter. She was overtaken by a sense that this place was still utterly strange to her, and by the mysteriousness of the people around her, even her husband. The landmarks of habit and logic and certainty were dissolving. She was on the outside of all this talk, detached from the physical world even with George Kuznik’s bulk pressing against her thigh, and she was losing her ability to decode the messages that were flashed to her.

She was afraid they would notice; everyone would notice her singularity.

With a beat of panic Dinah wondered if she might be going mad.

She turned to George suddenly and took hold of his hand. Anchoring herself. His palm was moist, surprisingly soft. George’s domed forehead reflected the lantern overhead. He leaned forward and for a moment she thought he was going to kiss her. A bubble of laughter forced itself upwards but George only asked solemnly, blinking a little.

‘You all right, Dinah?’

The garden began to coalesce again around her. The fearful dislocation was passing. Dinah did laugh now, and the laughter eased her throat and slackened her face. She released George’s hand and set it back in his lap, registering the flicker of his disappointment. Beyond him she saw a big man emerge from the house and stand on the porch steps, hands on hips, his gaze panning across the garden.

‘How much have I had to drink?’ she smiled.

‘Aw, and I thought it was my charm that was intoxicating.’

Dinah kissed George’s cheek then leaned back, separating herself from him. ‘You’re a good neighbour,’ she said truthfully. They both drank, allowing the tiny awkwardness to pass.

‘Who’s that?’ She indicated the big man who was now strolling between the groups of people. His height and commanding manner gave him a seigneurial air.

‘A friend of Max’s, Todd must have asked him over. Name’s Ed Parkes. Have you heard of him? He writes thrillers. Pleased with himself, but a decent sort of guy. His wife’s British, now I come to think of it.’

Later in the evening when the party shifted indoors and the children began to reappear and rummage for leftover food, Dinah met the Parkeses. Ed had a huge handshake, and his face creased into affable crinkles while his shrewd, light-blue eyes examined her. He told her that he came originally from Detroit but he and his wife had a house in the woods outside Franklin, and one in London where they spent part of the year, and a chalet in Zermatt. He talked easily, amusingly, but in the slightly overbearing way of a man accustomed to being the focus of attention. At last, but with a suggestion that it was out of good manners rather than real interest, he turned the conversation to Dinah.

‘I don’t have a job here,’ she told him. ‘I used to be in advertising, in London.’

‘Doing hearth and home for a while?’ He was appraising her.

‘That’s right.’ She was grateful for his way of putting it.

Your husband’s the scientist, isn’t he? I must have a talk with him. I can always use special expertise.’

Dinah was amused at the idea of Matt’s work being good for nothing more than extra colour in one of Ed Parkes’s airport blockbusters. She bit the corner of her lip, and then realised that Ed had followed her thoughts as plainly as if she had spoken them aloud. He was grinning down at her.

‘You think I’m full of shit?’

‘Not at all.’

‘Not much. Hey, I want you to meet Sandra. Here she is. Sandy, this is Dinah Steward. You’ll like each other, and not just because you talk the same language.’

Sandra Parkes was in her mid to late forties, tall and pale and thin, and very beautiful. She had the kind of flawless finely featured face that make-up artists and cameras fall in love with. Dinah didn’t dare to squeeze her hand when she took it in case the pale skin bruised.

‘What’s he said?’ Sandra asked.

‘Nothing you can’t contradict if you wish, honey.’ Ed sauntered away. His made-to-measure shirt sat comfortably across his massive shoulders.

‘Nothing worth contradicting,’ Dinah told the woman coolly. Sandra was wearing a complicated outfit of layers of gossamer 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.