The Hive A Novel (Gill Hornby)

Author:Gill Hornby
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780316234795
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2013-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

Dancing

Georgie and Will had taken to the dance floor for “Walking on Sunshine.” Rachel watched them dreamily, and she wasn’t the only one. Their performance was attracting quite a bit of attention. It wasn’t just that they were both such good dancers. It was that together they looked really, well, hot. In fact, they were practically shagging.

There were quite a lot of people dancing now. Even the grumpy secretary, with Wayne-with-the-disco gyrating behind her, doing a slightly unsavory charade of grinding his pelvis into her bottom. They too were practically shagging, but Rachel’s mind did not want to go there.

She returned her focus to the Martins. They were such an advert for the state of marriage, those two; they should be put on a billboard to promote it to a disenchanted nation. Even before her own ugly dramas—when Rachel had thought herself to be loved, in love, generally content—she had not always liked to look upon the spectacle of most other marriages in the raw: couples sitting in restaurants in a cloud of silence, or dragging around the shops with tetchy boredom. All those people might think themselves to be perfectly happy, yet their marriages never looked so great, it seemed to her, in the beholding eye.

“Dancing in the Moonlight” was on now, which Rachel knew to be a favorite over at Martin’s Farm. Georgie was spinning around Will, and he was gazing at her with a mixture of adoration and open lust. How do they work, these relationships that go on and on for year upon year without any fatigue or dissatisfaction? Perhaps they never quite move on, or never notice that they have moved on. Looking at Will, looking at Georgie, Rachel could see that he was seeing the girl he had first fallen in love with. The eyes of someone who met her tonight for the first time would take in a great long list of marks and stains upon her appearance, from age and childbirth, hard bloody work and sheer neglect. They would look and see a woman bedding down into middle age. But his eyes weren’t seeing that. His eyes were clearly seeing all the way back to how she was before.

It had been the same thing with Rachel’s old family home, the one she had grown up in. They had all loved it for years—it was still her ideal house—and when the children had left home and her parents had decided to sell it, they sort of presumed it would go for a fortune; that someone else would love it as they had done. So they were shocked when the estate agent billed it as “in need of modernization” and listed all the cracks and droops and failings and general out-of-dateness of it. The decline had happened so gradually that none of them had even noticed. They had fallen in love with the place when they moved in and they had never had cause to revisit their original opinion. That’s how Will and Georgie were with each other.

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