The Potter’s House. Rosie Thomas

hostess’s protection. My hands were cold, so I went closer to the fire and warmed them.

      The evening took off. Clive told a funny story I had never heard before about his days as a houseman under an autocratic consultant who thought his inveterate stutter was an affectation. ‘D-d-d-iverticulitis, Dr Marr?’ he mimicked, embedding his own impediment within the fearsome doctor’s voice with surgical precision.

      Everyone laughed including Lisa, and Clive looked boyish with pleasure.

      Dan Cruickshank the portrait painter gossiped indiscreetly about the royal princess who was currently sitting for him, and Mark and Gerard leaned forward greedily to catch the details. From across the room Peter smiled at me, his eyes creasing behind his glasses. I smiled back, buckling my mouth into a curve against a sense of alarm that I didn’t yet recognise.

      We went into the next room to eat. The candles reflected tapering ovals of light off glass and polished wood. Lisa studied Peter’s pictures, a pair of splashy Hodgkins and a small Bacon. She had taken off her little pink cardigan and her shoulders were bare except for thin straps. Her skin was pale and the candlelight seemed to strike off it, breaking and intensifying into painterly slashes of green and peach and yellow so that I narrowed my eyes to make it recombine, wondering if I had already had too much to drink.

      ‘Lisa, would you like to sit here?’

      Peter drew out the chair next to his. I took the other end of the table, between Gerard and Dan. The talk and laughter swelled and I sliced and spooned food on to plates and watched it disappear. After long years of conditioning myself, I didn’t any longer care much about eating. But I had plenty of time at my disposal to prepare meals like this one and cooking was still one of my pleasures.

      At my end of the table Dan and Sally and Jessy were talking about portraiture. Peter had wanted Dan to paint me and we had met originally to talk about the project. I had hedged and demurred, because I didn’t want to sit and be scrutinised so closely, and in the end the idea had come to nothing. But we had remained friends with Dan and therefore also the current one of his series of girlfriends.

      ‘I would still like her to sit for me, but I don’t think I can persuade her,’ Dan was saying.

      ‘You should keep trying,’ Gerard advised.

      Lisa had been deep in conversation with Peter. Her attentiveness to him made her seem taut as a stretched bow with the arrow in the notch and ready to fly. But now she turned her head. Our eyes met and locked.

      ‘It would be a wonderful picture. When I first saw Cary I was almost too afraid to speak to her.’

      ‘Why is that?’ I asked, in spite of myself.

      ‘Because of the way you look.’

      There seemed to be a shift in air pressure, as in the seconds before the sound of an approaching tube train becomes audible. The way you look. When I was much younger I possessed an outlandish kind of beauty. I was six feet tall, with a smooth face that make-up artists could paint over with a hundred other faces. I used my appearance to earn money as a photographic model. But I was past forty now and what was left of my extreme looks had been for a long time more an affliction than a blessing because they were at odds with what I felt inside. It was like having always to wear a mask, only it was also a mask that age kept on distorting.

      ‘I remember that you talked quite a lot, in fact,’ I said, recalling the confidences about Baz and his new girlfriend and the pregnancy.

      There was that change in air pressure again, a movement of the atmosphere that made you suck in a breath to reinflate your lungs. In the sudden silence that was broken only by the clink of cutlery I realised that the new atmospheric component was hostility. It had replaced the oxygen.

      Lisa and I were still looking at each other, the glance twisting between us like razor wire. Peter sat in his place at the head of our table, his eyes still mild behind his glasses, maybe unaware of the arrow pointed at him. But I think he did feel the tension of the bowstring. This was about him. Lisa Kirk believed that she had spotted Baz’s replacement.

      ‘Oh yes, once I knew you,’ Lisa said softly.

      My body went stiff. That this child should think she knew me on the basis of a couple of encounters, when I had devoted so much and so many years of effort to concealing everything. Everyone in the room, it seemed, immediately began talking very loudly about the first thing that came into their heads.

      Mark adjusted the already perfect folds of his turned-back shirt cuffs. He had smooth wrists, lightly tanned from the latest trip to Kerala. And then he reached out to touch Lisa’s handbag that was lying next to her plate.

      ‘I read somewhere that women’s bags actually represent an intimate portion of their anatomy. Do you think there’s any truth in that, Lisa?’

      Dear Mark, kind and vicious in the same breath. Tonight’s little bag was in the shape of a pink satin heart, sequinned and beaded, and certainly quite anatomical if you chose to look at it that way.

      ‘If it is true, I’m in the right business, aren’t I?’ She smiled. ‘Even if it is only a representation. Dealing in a commodity that is so constant and yet so sought after.’

      Lisa was utterly self-possessed. I had the sudden certainty that nothing would deflect her and nothing would disconcert her. She wore her youth and sureness and desirability like armour plating.

      Peter’s American associate was giggling at this risqué turn in the conversation, and Lisa lifted up the bag and gave it to her to examine.

      ‘What do you think, Jessy?’

      ‘It’s certainly pretty enough.’

      ‘Thank you.’

      I slid out of my chair and began to collect up the plates from my end of the table, moving very deliberately and with a smile nailed to my face.

      The evening came to an end eventually. Lisa rested her fingers gently and briefly on my forearm as she kissed me goodnight and then gave exactly the same attention to Peter.

      When Peter and I were left on our own we stacked the plates in the kitchen, blew out the candles, retreated to our bedroom as we had done so many times before. I lay very still in our bed and he put his arms round me, which made me conscious of how brittle I felt.

      I wasn’t ageing well, I thought. Now that I no longer had it, I wanted my weird beauty back again. I wasn’t a model, I had failed to become an actress – which had been my subsequent intention. Another strange choice for a woman who doesn’t like to be looked at. Much uneventful time had elapsed and I didn’t know what I was any longer. Except that I was Peter Stafford’s wife and a resident of Dunollie Mansions, for now.

      ‘Catherine, what’s wrong?’

      He doesn’t often call me by my full name.

      ‘Nothing. Did you enjoy the evening?’

      He shifted a little on his hip, considering, and I felt the warmth of his breath on my face.

      ‘Yes. I think it went quite well. Clive was in good form.’

      Tenderness towards him spread beneath my breast-bone like heartburn. Peter always considered his judgements, and tried to be fair and objective. How had we lived together for so long and been so different, in our chalk and cheese way?

      Lying in the dark I found myself thinking of the night we met and fell in love, standing under the ribs of a spiral staircase while a procession of models went up and down past our heads. Lisa Kirk told me about watching her Baz falling in love at a party in just the same way and I was sure I had witnessed the same flash of lightning tonight, between Lisa and my husband, even though I didn’t think they had exchanged a word in private or even an unwitnessed glance. The three scenes made a bright little triptych in my mind’s eye.

      I moved an inch closer to Peter and kissed his closed mouth. At the same time I lifted and crooked my upper knee. One of those signals that long-time couples read so well.