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Rosie Thomas 4-Book Collection: Other People’s Marriages, Every Woman Knows a Secret, If My Father Loved Me, A Simple Life
Rosie Thomas
A collection of four stunning ebooks from the author of the runaway bestseller, THE KASHMIR SHAWL.OTHER PEOPLE’S MARRIAGES: They were 'the five families' – the pleasant hospitable Frosts, the brash and sexy Cleggs, flirtatious Jimmy Rose and aloof Star, maternal Vicky and reliable Gordon Ransome, Michael Wickham and his perfect wife Marcelle. Old friends, their lives are interwoven in a comfortable pattern, until rich, sophisticated and newly widowed Nina Cort returns. In the course of a year from which none will emerge unscathed, they discover that you can never truly know the fabric of other people's marriages. Perhaps not even of your own…EVERY WOMAN KNOWS A SECRET: What happens when you fall in love with the one person you shouldn't? In the aftermath of a family tragedy, Jess Arrowsmith is powerless to resist her attraction to Rob, twenty years her junior, and the person she has reason to hate most in the world. As their love affair threatens to blow her family apart, Jess finds herself in a desperate struggle to defuse a crisis that puts at risk all she holds dear…IF MY FATHER LOVED ME: Sadie's life is calm and complete. She is a mother, a good friend, and the robust survivor of a marriage she deliberately left behind. But now her father is dying. As Sadie confronts the truth about this family history, her relationship with her son Jack appears to be breaking down and she is intent on saving it. Then the arrival of a fleeting women from her father's past starts a train of events that even Sadie cannot control…A SIMPLE LIFE: Dinah Steward has a secret. Hidden beneath the comfortable family life she shares with her successful husband Matthew and their two sons lies a shameful secret that has haunted her for fifteen years. But when a chance encounter brings the past into sharp focus once more, Dinah realises she can no longer deny the truth. She decides to risk everything – her husband, her sons, her perfect lifestyle – in order to claim what was always hers.
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 (#u5ed7527f-5d56-5514-8b9b-40ca269c2743)
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2015
Copyright © Rosie Thomas 1994, 1996, 2004, 1995
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers 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.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007560653, 9780007560523, 9780007560554, 9780007560516
Ebook Edition © January 2015 ISBN: 9780008115364
Version: 2014-10-15
Contents
Cover (#u09933530-6095-5816-b2ef-0bff5a826c61)
Title Page (#u3841377f-036c-5cdf-b41f-ccde6237ff2c)
Copyright
Other People’s Marriages (#u55580a9c-2f96-5745-92ab-025d1da8a63b)
Every Woman Knows a Secret (#u80051257-c673-572b-95b6-d7dc84560011)
If My Father Loved Me (#u80589ea5-2499-5805-9b80-ac8f875ff9a6)
A Simple Life (#ua60ede5a-b20e-5d73-a40b-0757e1a1ebf8)
Keep Reading – THE ILLUSIONISTS (#ue36b80a5-bedf-5102-a1a4-0f7ad8ecfed0)
Keep Reading – THE KASHMIR SHAWL (#u2b5f87a3-eeae-5459-ab81-77e72fc3dc84)
About the Author
Also by Rosie Thomas
About the Publisher
Other People’s Marriages
BY ROSIE THOMAS
Contents
Cover (#u55580a9c-2f96-5745-92ab-025d1da8a63b)
Title Page (#u8d2d602b-d253-5ef6-a30f-f44c09ef9e7a)
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
One (#u4867d205-638d-5ca6-a40a-66ec0e70e161)
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.’
There was a basket in the back of the car in which she had packed the kettle, cups and tea for themselves and the removal crew, as an article on moving house in a homemaking magazine had advised her to do. In the days before the move Nina had become a paragon of organization. She had made dozens of lists, adding and crossing off, defining and redefining her intentions. She would not be caught out in the small issues, at least. Every box and carton and piece of furniture was labelled with its eventual destination in the new house, she had measured and checked every dimension twice, she knew the whereabouts of every necessary key and switch and security code.
It was the large issues that were more problematic, like whether she was right to be moving, or whether she was insane to do it, as most of her loving friends certainly suspected.
‘Are you okay?’ Patrick asked.
She smiled sideways at him. ‘Fine.’
The countryside unscrolled alongside them. In an hour, more or less, they would be in Grafton.
The great twin towers of the cathedral were visible first. They stood with the town drawn around them in the quiet and fertile fields enclosed by a rim of little grey hills. It was a perfectly English prospect. The pilgrims who came to Grafton five hundred years before would have had the same view as they wound their way down from the chalk uplands.
The town had grown some ugly outskirts since Nina’s childhood. Coming from the London road they did not go by the new business park set in its landscaped gardens. Instead, on this eastern side, there was a huge red-brick supermarket, an estate of miniature red-brick houses shuffled close together, a pair of petrol stations confronting one another across a stream of cars, and a Little Chef. The road became a maze of roundabouts and traffic lights, and litter whirled up in the wind.
‘Drive straight through,’ Nina said, wanting to apologize for this modern mess. Patrick pointed the car towards the cathedral towers.
Once they had crossed the river by the Old Bridge, they were in the old town where the medieval streets curled in their protective pattern towards the cathedral and the close. It was four o’clock in the afternoon, the traffic was curdled and there were crowds of shoppers on the pavements, mothers with buggies and schoolchildren and pensioners outside Boots, but the sight of the place made Nina happy. The superficial look of it had changed, but the bones of it were the same as they had been when she was growing up, the same as they had been for hundreds of years, and the bones were beautiful.
The pale limestone of the buildings was butter-soft in the late sun. The curves of the streets, Southgate and Coign Street and Drovers, were graceful, and the proportions of the houses and the lines of their roofs were intimate and pleasing. There was a glimpse of a cobbled square through an archway, and the grey front of a Norman church.
‘Where now?’ Patrick asked.
‘That way.’
Nina pointed. There was a narrow entry, just wide enough for the car, where the stone of the old walls was pocked and darkened with the rubbing of countless shoulders.
They passed through the entry and came out into the glory at the heart of Grafton, the cathedral green with the close to one side behind high walls and the great west front of the cathedral itself.
Patrick looked up at the wide tiers of golden stone, the carved companies of faceless saints and archangels in their niches, ranked upwards and rising between the exuberance of columns and piers, to the vast darkened eye of the west window and the height of the Gothic pinnacles towering above.
‘I had forgotten how very grand it is,’ he murmured at last.
Nina was pleased, possessive.
‘I forget, too. Every time it amazes me. There’s my house.’
