The following Thursday was her birthday. I gave her my present – a chunky red perspex bracelet and the new Gorillaz album – in the morning and Michael, Greg and I planned to take her for cocktails down by the river after work. Greg and I had arranged to meet her at home at seven-thirty but when we got there there was no sign of her. Her birthday cards were lined up on the mantelpiece though, and there were empty envelopes on the coffee table, so she must have been home to open her post.
‘Martha?’ I called but there was no response.
‘Her bedroom door is closed,’ said Greg.
Unless she was changing, Martha very rarely closed her door during the day. I went downstairs and knocked on it gently. ‘Martha?’ There was no response but I thought I heard a movement within so I said her name again. Again there was no answer so I opened the door a few inches and looked in.
She was sitting on the edge of her bed with her head bowed, her hair falling forward over her face. Her hands were in her lap. She looked up as I came in. ‘I’m being ridiculous,’ she said, sniffing and taking a tissue from the box on her bedside table to wipe her eyes. ‘I’ll be all right in a minute, honestly.’
Martha never cried. ‘Don’t be silly,’ I said, going to sit next to her. ‘What’s the matter? You’re not allowed to cry today.’
‘No, it’s really stupid,’ she said. ‘I can’t believe I’m letting myself get upset about it. My mother forgot my birthday, that’s all.’
I thought about the empty envelopes in the sitting room. ‘Oh Marth, you know what the post is like. You’ll probably get her card or parcel tomorrow. They can never get anything here on time.’
She shook her head. ‘No, I called her. She forgot. She didn’t even realise when I dropped hints. I told her in the end and she got defensive and said that she couldn’t be expected to remember all these dates. I’m an only child, for God’s sake – that’s one date a year.’
I had heard of Martha’s mother even before I met Martha. Patricia was one of the figureheads of seventies feminism, mentioned in the same breath as Germaine Greer, Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem. I’d envied Martha as soon as I’d found out the connection. I’d thought it must be great to have such a firebrand as a mother, an intellectual powerhouse and someone who had played a major part in effecting a sea-change in attitudes to women. I soon realised that, though the idea of her was good, the reality was somewhat more difficult to live with.
I’d met her only once, at the end of the summer term in our first year at Oxford, when she was over from America paying her annual visit to her ex-husband, Martha’s father, with whom she remained on friendly terms. I’d been so nervous beforehand and her appearance had done nothing to reassure me. She’d been wearing boot-cut black jeans with a tight white T-shirt under which there was clearly no bra. Her hair was coloured tomato red and she was accompanied by a miasma of spicy scent. Although she was in her late fifties, she was still somehow of the moment. The conversation that day had revolved around her and I’d felt sorry for Martha, who had been looking forward to her visit so much. She was preparing to give a paper in London on the changing role of the mother in contemporary society and she’d talked about how women had had to smother their own ambitions when they had children. ‘I hope I didn’t smother yours too much,’ Martha had said, heavy on the irony.
‘What?’ Patricia had said, as if remembering with surprise that Martha was in fact her daughter. ‘Well, no. Your father looked after you a lot. It wasn’t too bad.’
Mostly Martha made light of it but at times like this I knew she found it hard that her mother seemed to regard motherhood as an insidious form of bondage. ‘You know,’ she said, ‘I don’t mind at all about cards or presents. It’s just, when she forgets, it makes me feel like she doesn’t care.’
Greg had come in and was leaning against the windowsill, his long legs extending across the room towards us. ‘Marth, you can’t think like that,’ he said. ‘How could she not love you to bits?’
She smiled at him gratefully. ‘Thanks. You know, I don’t know what I’d do without my friends. Danny called earlier. Lucas is doing a dinner on Saturday night, a combined birthday supper for me with a welcome back to Diana. You two are coming, aren’t you?’
With some anxiety, I waited for Greg to reply, not wanting to force his hand.
‘Of course. Your birthday supper – wouldn’t miss it for the world,’ he said.
‘And I’m not working at The Times.’
‘Cool.’ She smiled again. ‘By the way, Danny says Diana has been round two or three times swimming and Lucas is writing again. Apparently he’s been locked in the study for hours.’
‘Sounds like she might be good for him,’ I said, with a slight pang.
We didn’t arrive at the house until lunchtime. On the drive was Michael’s new car, a silver Audi TT. We’d heard all about it at Martha’s birthday drinks; he was endearingly proud and had taken the previous day off work to collect it from the garage. Martha rang on the doorbell but there was no answer. We rang again and although we could hear the chiming inside no one came.
‘They’ll be outside on an afternoon like this, probably on the terrace.’ Greg set off round to the side of the house.
There was no one there either but the door to the flower lobby was wide open. We went in and checked the kitchen and the drawing room. The house was quieter than I could ever remember it. I stood at the bottom of the stairs and tipped my head backwards. The painted ceiling came into view. In the heat, the man on the chaise looked particularly languid. ‘Hello?’ I shouted up through the centre of the place. A few seconds passed and the last reverberations of my voice echoed off the walls.
‘Hello?’ Danny appeared at the mouth of the passageway. ‘Oh, it’s you.’
‘Were you expecting someone else?’
‘We’re in the kitchen garden.’ He turned and walked off. Greg rolled his eyes.
By the time we got out there, Danny had resumed what was obviously his former position on a pretty white-painted garden bench he had dragged alongside the raised bed in which Lucas and Michael were crouched. Lucas stood to greet me. ‘Strawberries,’ he said. ‘We’re going to have them for supper.’ His knackered Radiohead T-shirt had two circles of sweat under the arms.
‘Hey,’ called out a female voice from inside the French windows.
‘Diana, hello,’ I said, surprised.
‘I think I need a glass of water,’ said Michael. He stood up and stretched, his hands in the small of his back. ‘It’s nearly unbearable. Look, the air’s actually shimmering.’
‘It’s supposed to break today, they said on the radio. We’ll eat inside this evening, just in case,’ said Lucas.
Diana wandered out to us. She was wearing a white T-shirt and a skirt the colour of a piece of green glass washed up on the beach. The outfit gave her the appearance of a landlocked mermaid. ‘Hi and goodbye,’ she said. ‘I’m going to go home now. I’ve got some pictures to develop and I want a shower before dinner.’
‘Do you need a lift?’ he asked. ‘I’ll take you down in the Jaguar.’
‘No. I like to walk.’ She leant over and gave him a kiss on the cheek. She had the kind of easy familiarity with him that I used to have. The thought made me sad. ‘See you later.’ She raised her hand in a goodbye to the rest of us and there was the light jangle of silver bracelets.
We waited until she’d gone. ‘It must be good to see her again,’ Martha said.
‘Yes,’ said Lucas. ‘It is.’
‘She’s hot,’ Danny said. ‘Simple as that.’
Martha had cut two bowls of buttermilk roses for the table and their scent was heavy as incense. As Diana and Elizabeth arrived for dinner, Michael had been showing us his car and its thermometer had read eighty-nine degrees. If the humidity increased any further, breathing would be like inhaling soup. We had pushed up the sash windows as far as they would go but the air was dead. I felt sick with it. It was too early for the sky to be darkening, but from my seat at the table I could see a roll of black cloud mounting over the wood, like a breaker waiting to crest, the body of it becoming darker and darker as the minutes passed. The house was full of an uneasy penumbrous light, as if a giant stood over the place casting it in shadow.
Tonight Elizabeth was wearing a cream linen shift dress with a simple bronze cuff on one wrist. Despite the heat, she looked crisp enough to step on to a yacht in St Tropez at a moment’s notice. ‘I remember we had an incredible storm here that first summer,’ she said now. ‘It was almost biblical – lightning non-stop for what seemed like hours, sheets of rain. We joked about what we’d all done – whether it was divine retribution. We had visions of being swept from the house by floodwater, drowned for the sinners we no doubt were.’ She laughed. ‘The power was out for a couple of days. It’s so far off the beaten track here that it was last to get reconnected. Patrick took charge, though, as he always did. It was actually rather fun. We were like scouts, heating up soup on a primus stove, swimming in the river instead of bathing. It was the same the time we got snowed in. He was like that, as you know, Lucas.’ She smiled at him. ‘He took charge and made sure everything was all right. I think that’s why people were drawn to him, especially women. He made people feel safe.’ I watched her happy animation as she remembered. I realised that, as she was getting to know us better, her froideur was disappearing and the real Elizabeth emerging from behind the façade. I wondered whether it was possible that she might have been shy.
‘Did you ever feel jealous of the other women?’ asked Danny.
Martha’s eyes flicked on to him again, as they had been doing all evening.
‘Danny,’ I said, ‘perhaps Elizabeth would prefer not to talk about it.’
He looked at me as though I were a housemaid who had spoken out of turn.
‘Oh, I don’t mind. It’s lovely to have the opportunity to remember. I’ve really enjoyed talking to Danny about him over our lunches. The years I spent with Patrick were some of the happiest of my life. Of course, eventually we drifted apart; there were pressures of work and then I met Diana’s father but we stayed close. I wonder, if he hadn’t died …’
Lucas stood abruptly to clear the table. I got up to help but Diana waved me back into my seat. ‘Don’t worry, Jo, I’ve got this.’ Without stacking the bowls, she took four, arranging them up her arm. ‘Years of waitressing experience.’ She turned lightly towards the kitchen, the material of her dress swinging around her brown calves. Whether it was consciously a dress for seduction I didn’t know, but even I was finding it difficult not to look at her. Cut on the bias, it was the colour of fine dark chocolate and the fall of it around her breasts and hips was such that she looked as if she’d been dipped in it. Her hair was shining and fell over her shoulders around its narrow tied straps. It was a dress to make a man yearn to unwrap her and swallow her up. I had seen Danny watching her and Greg, too, although when he noticed that I’d seen he looked quickly away.
There was the rattle of plates from the kitchen and the sound of another bottle of wine being opened.
‘Danny,’ said Elizabeth confidentially, ‘how is Lucas? I’ve been so worried.’
‘He’s making progress,’ he said. ‘I’m doing my best to look after him.’
She smiled at him gratefully, as if he were doing her a favour. There was something very old-fashioned about the way in which she made herself his subordinate. ‘You know,’ she said, ‘sometimes you remind me of a young Patrick. You have that same sort of strength. And the way you are with Lucas is a little like the way things were between him and Justin, at least to start with. Patrick looked out for him. I suppose it was a brotherly thing but it was particularly strong between them.’
An expression of surprised pleasure passed across his face. ‘It’s interesting you should say that,’ he said, lowering his voice. ‘It’s something I think about, too, sometimes. I’ve always tried to look out for Lucas. He’s less worldly than me, less robust …’
I wondered whether Elizabeth would have the same opinion of him if she knew how he had fallen apart when he found Lucas that night. Now, though, she settled her eyes back on his as watchfully as a cat, and stretched her arm towards him, exposing the smooth white skin on the inside of her wrist.
‘What changed?’ said Michael. ‘You said “at least to start with”.’
‘Oh well, when Justin got his role in that television series, he had his own money for the first time. Patrick didn’t have to keep bailing him out any more. It changed things between them a bit, evened them up.’
Diana came through the swing door with a bowl of new potatoes and Danny quickly moved his hand away from Elizabeth’s. ‘Is there anything we can do, darling?’ she asked.
‘No, Mum, everything’s fine.’ She returned to the kitchen. A moment or two later there was a loud ‘Christ’ and the cymbal crash of a saucepan lid on the stone floor. Diana’s laugh was loud and genuine and Lucas’s joined it, bass to her alto.
‘It’s wonderful that they get on so well,’ said Elizabeth, taking a cigarette from her silver case.
‘Yes, absolutely.’ Danny lit it for her. ‘And she’s so attractive. Very much her mother’s daughter.’
I saw Martha look into her lap and I nudged her foot under the table so that she glanced up at me. It’ll be OK, I tried to say wordlessly. But I didn’t believe it. I only hoped that, if Danny did make a move on Diana, it wouldn’t be in front of her.
The kitchen door swung open and Lucas brought in a huge serving plate bearing two chickens dressed with watercress. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I have no idea what possessed me to do a roast on a day like this.’ He rolled the sleeves of his grey cotton shirt to the elbow. As he leant forward to start carving, a dark curl fell into his eyes. His hair was getting very long. I couldn’t think that he’d had it cut since he’d moved to the house.
‘Look at the colour of that cloud,’ said Greg. ‘Surely it has to break soon.’ I turned to the window. The sky over the wood was now the shade of Lucas’s bruise and just as angry.
‘I want the storm so much,’ said Martha, ‘just to be cool again.’
As we drank our coffee I watched the cloud move inexorably up from the wood and merge itself with the growing darkness that rose from behind the house to meet it. The light went quickly and Lucas switched on the table lamps on the sideboard and lit the candles. As he sat down again, there was a clap of thunder so loud I thought at first that the roof had fallen in. We all jumped.
‘Jesus Christ,’ said Martha, knocking her coffee over the white linen cloth. The stain soaked in and left a residue of grounds like silt.
There was a tremendous crack. A bolt of forked lightning tore the sky like a piece of sugar paper. The flash was so bright that for a split second the room was lighter than day. The faces round the table were illuminated, blanched, by it. Diana started counting quietly and only reached four before the thunder came again, just as loud. ‘It’s close,’ she said. ‘But it’s not raining. Everything’s so dry. I hope it doesn’t start a fire.’ We got up and stood at the open windows to watch. Greg was behind me and put his arms round my shoulders. There was another bolt of lightning and, as it jagged down, the whole front lawn and the drive were revealed in an eerie electric light. The thunder followed almost at once, as loud as the sound of a steel-hulled liner running aground.
‘Who pissed off Zeus?’ said Martha.
Into the silence that followed came a quiet pattering outside on the path, like the slow introduction to a song, the beat growing more persistent. Spots the size of two-pence pieces started to freckle the flagstones. ‘At last,’ said Diana. She turned round excitedly, her eyes full of a new idea. ‘I’m going outside to get cool – who’s coming?’
Before anyone could say anything, she was gone and we heard the front door opening. There were quick, light footsteps on the stones and she appeared in front of the window, lit only by the glow from the lamps inside. ‘The rain’s warm,’ she said. She threw her arms up as if waiting for something to come out of the sky and embrace her. Her dress was already soaked through and it clung to her gleaming skin.
‘Diana, be careful. It’s dangerous. You’ll get struck,’ shouted Elizabeth.
‘No, I won’t. It’ll get the house first.’ She pushed her hair off her face. ‘Put some music on, Lucas.’
Danny was already by the stereo. He checked the CD and slid the drawer back into the machine. After a second or two the air was filled with the sound of his friend’s track with its sample of the keening, sensual Spanish lament.
‘Louder,’ Diana called to him.
From the window we watched her as she started to move. If it had been anyone else, it would have looked ridiculous. Her dress, now black with water, stuck to the curves of her waist and hips, and her long hair snaked down her back. She closed her eyes against the rain and turned her face up towards it. She seemed natural in an elemental sense. Another flash of lightning lit up the sky. She looked, I thought, like a maenad, transported by something powerful and invisible. There was nothing virginal about the way she moved: the sensuality of it was darker and more knowing, a homage not to her namesake, the maiden goddess, but amoral Dionysus. We stood motionless, watching.
‘This is ridiculous,’ said Elizabeth. ‘She’ll be killed.’ She turned away from the window and went to the table for her wine glass.
It wasn’t until he appeared in the garden that I realised that Lucas had gone. Laughing, he slid his hand around Diana’s waist and picked up her rhythm, moving his body with hers. Soon his shirt was soaking, too, the fabric darkening in patches until all of it was gunmetal. His hair formed dark ringlets.
‘Come on, then.’ Greg took Martha and me by the hand and pulled us outside.
‘I don’t want to,’ I shouted but he didn’t listen, choosing not to or unable to hear me over the pounding of the rain and the thunder and the beat of the music. Michael came to the front doorstep and kicked off his shoes. We joined Diana and Lucas and we danced as a group. I was self-conscious at first but with each crack and roar from the sky I felt less and less myself, more a tiny piece of something bigger than me and out of my control and understanding.
Lucas danced closer and said something that I couldn’t hear.
‘What?’ The sky was electrified by another bolt of lightning.
He was forced to move away as Greg danced over and wrapped his arms aggressively around me. He kissed me hard, the rain channelling over the contours of our one joined face.
‘Where’s Danny?’ said Martha, turning round. There was an explosion of simultaneous lightning and thunder and she stopped dancing and stood perfectly still. We followed her gaze.
Inside the house, framed in silhouette by the light in the room behind them, Danny and Elizabeth were kissing, their bodies tight together and oblivious to the storm.
We had stood in the rain staring until eventually Greg spoke and we followed him inside. In the hallway we looked at each other blankly. The dining-room door was open and we kept away from it as if it harboured contagion. The storm was still overhead and the lightning played through the ring of small windows below the dome like a strobe or the lights of an ambulance, illuminating the painting with electric blue. The flickering effect brought the tableau alive: the characters seemed to be moving, each flash catching them differently, showing now the man on the couch, now the dark-haired woman at his feet, now the golden Ganymede proffering his krater with terrible animation.
Water dripped off us and pooled around our feet. I looked at Martha. She was trembling, subtly enough for it to be the start of a chill from her wet clothes but recognisable to me as the first sign of distress. She was biting her lower lip and her eyes were wide, as if she feared that closing them would encourage the tears she knew were on their way.
‘Let’s not get cold,’ said Greg. ‘Let’s get upstairs and get changed.’
‘If Lucas can lend you a T-shirt, I’ve got a spare pair of jeans you can have, Diana,’ I said. ‘They’ll do for now, until you get back to the village.’
She came up to our room and I found them for her. I realised that, of all of us, she was the least shocked. In fact, she seemed hardly even surprised. The wild self-abandonment of her dancing had been replaced by a strange resignation. ‘Are you OK?’ I asked her.
‘Yes, I’m used to it. She’s been doing this since I was a child.’ She hesitated, uncertain, it seemed, whether or not she should say more. ‘It’s because she’s the last of the great romantics. She’s like a teenager – she thinks that finding someone who loves her will answer every question and solve every problem. She thinks every new affair is “the one” and she’s heartbroken every time it goes wrong.’
When I’d got dry, I went to Martha’s room. She hadn’t showered or changed out of her wet things but was lying face down on the bed. The sheets around her were damp with rainwater. I said her name quietly but she didn’t respond so I put my hand on the back of her head and smoothed the tangle of her sodden hair.
‘I’m an idiot,’ she said, her voice muffled by the pillow. ‘Go on, tell me you told me so.’
‘I wouldn’t.’
On the bedside table I saw the birthday present he had given her, an old leather-bound copy of Middlemarch, which he knew was her favourite. I had been impressed by that.
‘I believed him,’ she said. ‘And I fell for the oldest line of all, that we only had to be quiet about it in the beginning, until we were sure. But I was sure straightaway. I let myself really care about him. I’m so fucking dumb.’
‘It isn’t your fault,’ I said. ‘He isn’t like normal people. He doesn’t have a conscience. He really doesn’t care how his behaviour affects others. Oh Martha, it’s hard now but you’ll be glad in the long run, I promise. I want you to fall in love with someone who deserves you. He’s not good enough to polish your shoes. Imagine if he did this later, if you’d got married and had children.’ I thought how unlikely it was that he would ever do those things. ‘He’d give you the biggest run-around. He’d make you so unhappy.’
‘I’ve never felt like that about anyone. He made me feel as if the risks were worth taking. He makes everything feel … exciting. Jo, I can’t bear the thought that I won’t ever wake up with him again.’
I thought of telling her about Michael. I wanted her to know that she wasn’t the only person to have fallen for Danny’s peacock-tail seduction. I also wanted to shock her, to decimate her image of him so that she could never be persuaded of his goodness again, even if he used the full extent of his charm on her. It was the thought of the impact the news might have on her friendship with Michael that stopped me; of us all, she was probably closest to him and I was loath to let Danny ruin that, too.
She turned over at last and looked at me. Her eyes were swollen and her cheeks as flushed as though she had just stepped out of a scalding bath. ‘You haven’t told anyone about this, have you?’ She pulled her knees up and hugged them to her chest. ‘I couldn’t stand it if everyone knew how stupid I’d been.’
The atmosphere among us was subdued for the rest of that evening. Martha stayed upstairs and Greg, Michael and I helped Lucas and Diana wash up. Then we poured large brandies and sat in the kitchen. The centre of the storm had moved off a little and was now rumbling in the distance, over the Chilterns. It was still raining, though, and we left the French windows open and listened to the strangely soothing sound of it, like blank radio interference after a disturbing broadcast. Danny and Elizabeth had gone. We didn’t need to check to know it: the air in the house was different, as if its particles had changed their charge.
Later, when we were in bed, I turned over in my head the question of whether I should tell Greg about Martha. I felt as though I was boiling with secrets and I wanted to discuss them with him, partly to ease the pressure but also to rid myself of the feeling that I was being dishonest with him. If our relationship was going to work, I couldn’t keep things from him. But I didn’t know whether it was more disloyal to Martha to discuss it with him or to Greg not to. Then I thought about how he had been the night Lucas was taken to hospital: I was sure I could trust him. ‘Can I tell you something?’ I said, making the decision.
‘Of course. What is it?’ He sat up and puffed up his pillow.
‘Martha’s been having a fling with Danny.’
He stopped. ‘My God. What, you mean tonight, when … ?’ He shook his head, disbelieving. ‘Shit. Poor Marth.’
‘I know.’
‘But I thought she knew better about him. Surely she wouldn’t touch him?’
‘Apparently she’s liked him for years. It speaks volumes that she never told me.’
‘God, he’s a bastard. How could he do that to her? She’s such a sweetheart.’
It was a relief to talk to him about it and to have someone to share my indignation that I decided to tell him everything. His expression when I told him about Michael as well was sheer incredulity. ‘So he’s been sleeping with both of them and no one knows? Shit. And neither of them knows about the other?’
‘No. And now it looks like he’s starting something with Elizabeth.’
By morning the weather system had shifted to the east and we turned on the news and watched pictures of it wreaking havoc in East Anglia, causing rivers to break their banks and sweeping cars into ditches.
‘Our beautiful British summer,’ said Lucas, getting up to switch off the set.
Danny wasn’t anywhere to be seen and so we assumed that he’d spent the night at Elizabeth’s house in the village. It struck me as important that we took Martha back to London before he reappeared. I wanted to remove her from a situation where she might have to face him and be hurt further, either by his blithe indifference or by some turkey-cock display of his new conquest. I spun a flimsy line about having a lot of stuff to do for the Gazette – an excuse utterly transparent to anyone who had ever heard me talk about the place – and we left.