Rosie Thomas - Rosie Thomas 4-Book Collection - Other People’s Marriages, Every Woman Knows a Secret, If My Father Loved Me, A Simple Life

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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Publishers 2015

Copyright © Rosie Thomas 1994, 1996, 2004, 1995

Cover layout design © HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 2015

Rosie Thomas asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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Source ISBN: 9780007560653, 9780007560523, 9780007560554, 9780007560516

Ebook Edition © January 2015 ISBN: 9780008115364

Version: 2014-10-15

Contents

Cover

Title Page ROSIE THOMAS 4-BOOK COLLECTION Other People’s Marriages Every Woman Knows A Secret If My Father Loved Me A Simple Life Rosie Thomas

Copyright

Other People’s Marriages

Every Woman Knows a Secret

If My Father Loved Me

A Simple Life

Keep Reading – THE ILLUSIONISTS

Keep Reading – THE KASHMIR SHAWL

About the Author

Also by Rosie Thomas

About the Publisher

Cover

Title Page Other People’s Marriages BY ROSIE THOMAS

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

It was the end of October. As London receded and the motorway bisected open country they saw the flamboyant colours of the trees. Autumn in the city was a decorous affair of fading plane trees and horse chestnuts, just one more seasonal window display, but here the leaves made fires against the brown fields and silvery sky.

‘Look at it,’ Nina said. ‘There’s no elegant restraint out here, is there? That’s real countryside. Where I belong now. How does the poem go?’

She knew it perfectly well, but she shifted cautiously through the layers of her memory that contained it. Memory could still play tricks on her, bringing her up against some scene or a view or simply some remembered words that would make her cry. She had cried more than enough for now.

‘“Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,”’ Patrick supplied for her.

‘Yes, that’s it.’

The poem brought to mind completion, or rather the conclusion of some important cycle, and the slow but inev-itable stilling of the blood and consequent decay that must come after it.

Nina turned her head and stared out of the rear window as if she hoped to catch a last glimpse of London. There was nothing to be seen except the road, and the traffic, and the unreticent scenery. She had left London, and had not yet arrived anywhere else. It was as if the expansive world she had unthinkingly occupied had shrunk until it was contained within Patrick’s car. ‘It’s how I feel, rather.’

‘You are not particularly mellow.’

She laughed, then. ‘Nor fruitful.’

‘You have your work, that’s fruit. And you are only thirty-five.’

And so even though she was a widow there was still time for her to meet and marry another man, and to mother a brood of children if she should wish to do so. Not much time, but enough. In his kindly way Patrick did not want her to lose sight of this, although he was too tactful to say it aloud. She was grateful for his consideration, but with another part of herself Nina also wished that her loving friends would stop being so careful now. She thought that she needed someone to shout at her:

Your husband is dead but YOU are ALIVE and you must bloody GET ON with it .

It was what she was trying to shout at herself. Going to Grafton, coming to Grafton, rather, now that they were on the road and more than halfway there, was part of getting on with it.

Nina reached out one hand and put it on Patrick’s leg, above the knee, and felt the solid warmth of him caught in the thickness of his clothes. He didn’t shrink, didn’t even move, but Nina quickly lifted her hand and settled it back with the rest of herself, where it belonged. She felt, as she quite often did nowadays, that Richard’s death had removed her from the corporeal world just as conclusively as it had removed him. Widows didn’t touch. They accepted unspeaking hugs and silent pats on the shoulder and strokings of their cold hands, but they didn’t reach out themselves for the reassurances of the flesh.

‘Thank you for driving me all this way.’

He took his eyes off the road for a single second to look at her. Patrick was a careful driver, as his car proclaimed. It was a sensible estate model, armoured with heavy bumpers and crumple zones. Today the rear seats were folded down and the most precious and valuable of Nina’s belongings were packed inside. The rest of her things were in the removal van, somewhere on the same road.

‘I wanted to drive you. I want to see you properly settled in the house.’

He returned his eyes to the road. A German tour bus swelled in the rear window, and he moved aside at once to let it pass. Richard would have stamped down hard on the accelerator and sent his frivolous car swirling ahead. Nina peered up at the faces behind the skin of glass. They were elderly couples, on a good holiday, intent on enjoyment together. She pinched on the blister of her own sadness before it could pointlessly inflate.

‘Do you want to stop off somewhere for a cup of tea?’ Patrick asked her.

‘No, not unless you do. Let’s just get there.’