were whispering about Mrs Robinson. A woman laughed shrilly, kicking her shoes across the parquet.
Sue wasn’t smiling any more. The face that looked up at him through the gloom was hard and accusing. Lines that weren’t laughter-lines had developed round the eyes: lines of tension and probably fury, Gavin reckoned. He could see her thinking: he had led her on, he had kissed the top of her head. Now he was suggesting lunch some time, dealing out the future to her when the present was what mattered. He felt he’d been rude.
‘I’m sorry, Sue.’
They were standing in the other dancers’ way. He wanted to dance again himself, to feel the warmth of her small body, to feel her hands, and to smell her hair, and to bend down and touch it again with his lips. He turned away and extricated Polly from the grasp of the drunk who had claimed to love her. ‘It’s time to go home,’ he said angrily.
‘You’re never going, old Gavin,’ Malcolm protested in the hall. ‘I’ll run Poll home, you know.’
‘I’ll run her home myself.’
In the car Polly asked what had happened, but he didn’t tell her the truth. He said he’d been rude to Sue because Sue had said something appalling about one of her guests and that for some silly reason he’d taken exception to it.
Polly did not believe him. He was making an excuse, but it didn’t matter. He had rejected the game the Ryders had wanted to play and he had rejected it for her sake. He had stood by her and shown his respect for her, even though he had wanted to play the game himself. In the car she laid her head against the side of his shoulder. She thanked him, without specifying what she was grateful for.
‘I feel terrible about being rude to Sue,’ he said.
He stopped the car outside their house. The light was burning in the sitting-room window. The babysitter would be half asleep. Everything was as it should be.
‘I’d no right to be rude,’ Gavin said, still in the car.
‘Sue’ll understand.’
‘I don’t know that she will.’
She let the silence gather, hoping he’d break it by sighing or saying he’d telephone and apologize tomorrow, or simply saying he’d wait in the car for the babysitter. But he didn’t sigh and he didn’t speak.
‘You could go back,’ she said calmly, in the end, ‘and say you’re sorry. When you’ve driven the babysitter home.’
He didn’t reply. He sat gloomily staring at the steering-wheel. She thought he began to shake his head, but she wasn’t sure. Then he said:
‘Yes, perhaps I should.’
They left the car and walked together on the short paved path that led to their hall door. She said that what she felt like was a cup of tea, and then thought how dull that sounded.
‘Am I dull, Gavin?’ she asked, whispering in case the words somehow carried in to the babysitter. Her calmness deserted her for a moment. ‘Am I?’ she repeated, not whispering any more, not caring about the babysitter.
‘Of course you’re not dull. Darling, of course you aren’t.’
‘Not to want to stay? Not to want to go darting into beds with people?’
‘Oh, don’t be silly, Polly. They’re all dull except you, darling. Every single one of them.’
He put his arms around her and kissed her, and she knew that he believed what he was saying. He believed she hadn’t fallen as he and the Ryders had, that middle age had dealt no awful blows. In a way that seemed true to Polly, for it had often occurred to her that she, more than the other three, had survived the outer suburb. She was aware of pretences but could not pretend herself. She knew every time they walked into the local Tonino’s that the local Tonino’s was just an Italian joke, a sham compared with the reality of the original in Greek Street. She knew the party they’d just been to was a squalid little mess. She knew that when Gavin enthused about a fifteen-second commercial for soap his enthusiasm was no cause for celebration. She knew the suburb for what it was, its Volvos and Vauxhalls, its paved paths in unfenced front gardens, its crescents and avenues and immature trees, and the games its people played.
‘All right, Polly?’ he said, his arms still about her, with tenderness in his voice.
‘Yes, of course.’ She wanted to thank him again, and to explain that she was thanking him because he had respected her feelings and stood by her. She wanted to ask him not to go back and apologize, but she couldn’t bring herself to do that because the request seemed fussy. ‘Yes, of course I’m all right,’ she said.
In the sitting-room the babysitter woke up and reported that the children had been as good as gold. ‘Not a blink out of either of them, Mrs Dillard.’
‘I’ll run you home,’ Gavin said.
‘Oh, it’s miles and miles.’
‘It’s our fault for living in such a godforsaken suburb.’
‘Well, it’s terribly nice of you, sir.’
Polly paid her and asked her again what her name was because she’d forgotten. The girl repeated that it was Hannah McCarthy. She gave Polly her telephone number in case Estrella shouldn’t be available on another occasion. She didn’t at all mind coming out so far, she said.
When they’d gone Polly made tea in the kitchen. She placed the teapot and a cup and saucer on a tray and carried the tray upstairs to their bedroom. She was still the same as she’d always been, they would say to one another, lying there, her husband and her friend. They’d admire her for that, they’d share their guilt and their remorse. But they’d be wrong to say she was the same.
She took her clothes off and got into bed. The outer suburb was what it was, so was the shell of middle age:
