Rosie Thomas - A Simple Life

‘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.

The road climbed as it led deeper into the woods. There were no more houses to be glimpsed between the trees, nor were there any mailboxes at the roadside.

‘Have we missed it?’ Dinah wondered as she drove, peering ahead to where oblique shafts of sun filtered through the branches. The leaves were showing the first margins of butter-yellow and crimson. In another two weeks the fall would be in full blaze.

In the back seat Merlin looked up from his GameBoy.

‘101 was miles back.’

They were looking for 102, the Parkeses’ house.

‘How do I get to the next level of this? Jack?’

‘Give it here. You’re so dumb, I’ve shown you this already. Look, there’s another sign.’

A yellow arrow stencilled 102 pointed onwards.

‘I wouldn’t want to live out here,’ Jack said.

‘Aw, too creepy for you? The deep dark woods are full of monsters?’

‘Too boring, in fact, Merlin. Like you.’

‘Stop bickering,’ Dinah snapped.

‘Mum, we aren’t bickering. Can’t you tell the difference between argument and conversation?’

Opposition to her was the only factor that united them, Dinah thought. Nothing was new.

‘Sandra Parkes complains that Camilla is difficult. She can’t be as bad as you two.’

‘ Camilla , what a totally sad name.’

‘Sort of like some disgusting pudding, Camilla-and-custard.’

‘Pink and wobbly. I bet she’s really fat.’

The boys snorted and retched, united also by their unwillingness to make the visit to the Parkeses.

Matthew seemed to hear none of this. He had been silent most of the way, sitting with his eyes turned to the woodland flickering past.

He was thinking about his work; ever since the summer, when the present avenue of speculation had properly opened up to him, the thought of it had never been far from his mind. Even when he surfaced from sleep he was aware of it rising again through the membranes of semiconsciousness.

He was thinking about his engineered molecule now, his inner eye turning it so that it twisted elegantly, three-dimensional, a dense cluster of atoms floating free in black computer space. Which group should he change, to make the molecule more active?