Читать книгу Rosie Thomas 4-Book Collection: Other People’s Marriages, Every Woman Knows a Secret, If My Father Loved Me, A Simple Life - Rosie Thomas - Страница 10

Vicky stooped down, lowering herself from the knees because it was weeks since she had been able to bend from the waist. She held on to the banisters with one hand and with the other gathered up the trail of Lego blocks that Alice had left scattered along the landing. The effort made her breathless and she had to wait for a few seconds before making the journey into the bedroom to put the blocks away.

The girls’ room was messy, heaped with discarded clothes and a jumble of toys, and Vicky wearily pushed her hair back from her face as she surveyed it. She had no strength left to do anything more than sleepwalk through these last days, and she turned away and closed the door, feeling guilty as she did so. She was not particularly houseproud, but she did not like the threads of her domestic organization to unravel completely because she was too exhausted to hold them firm.

Across the landing was the room prepared for the baby, and on her slow way downstairs again she stopped for a moment on the threshold. The cot had done duty for Mary and Alice and the white paint was chipped, but there were new curtains and a new cover on the daybed and the drawers of the chest were layered with tiny clothes. The Moses basket with its folded white blankets lay ready for Gordon to bring to the hospital so they could carry the baby home in it together.

Vicky thought about how in a few days’ time she would be here again with her new child. She would sit in this room in the silence of the night to feed it, watching the play of muscles in its face as it blindly sucked, feeling the steady flow of her milk. Her breasts ached now, and there was a pain low in her back that made her lean awkwardly backwards to try to ease it.

Downstairs, Alice was sitting on the sofa watching afternoon television. She had her bed blanket with her, and her thumb and one corner of the blanket were poked into her mouth. Alice was at nursery school only in the mornings. Vicky plodded across to her and the child made room without taking her eyes off the screen.

‘Tired Mummy,’ Alice remarked automatically.

‘That’s right.’

Vicky lowered herself, letting out a gasp of breath, and Alice snuggled up against her. Vicky put an arm around her shoulders and they settled down to watch together.

The child’s bare arm was round and smooth, still with a babyish ring in the flesh around her wrist. There was plasticine under the sticky fingernails and a faint smell of damp hay emanated from her hair.

‘That man is silly,’ Alice said, pointing to the television screen.

‘Is he?’

Vicky was thinking vaguely of the business of her children growing, the invisible multiplication of their busy cells, and the branching of veins and laying down of bone to support more growth, upwards and away from Gordon and herself, so that one day their present adult functions would become Mary and Alice’s own. She imagined under her daughter’s fine hair and the armour of her skull the eye of her brain restlessly moving, photographing the infinitesimal details of her world and storing them, creating a miraculous index that would enable her to occupy the enlarging shell of her body with ease and confidence.

The small shape resting against her seemed charged with an almost unbearable perfection.

Vicky had always felt an intense physical pleasure in her children’s bodies, a pleasure that was almost but not quite erotic, from the moment after Mary’s birth when the midwife had hoisted the baby into her arms and her womb had contracted with an amazed spasm of love and tenderness. She remembered how when Mary was tiny, six years ago, Gordon used to carry her into their bed in the early mornings and they would lean over her naked folded limbs and serrated face to feast on this embodiment and extension of their love.

Six years ago, not now: Vicky smiled at the contrast. Gordon’s practice was much busier these days and his hours were longer, and the mornings were a scramble to dispatch him and the girls to their separate destinations. There was too little time to spare, but she knew that all parents of young children suffered from that. There would be time again, she was sure of it. She shifted her position, her thoughts sliding away in another direction, to the pain in her back.

Then she said suddenly, ‘Alice, will you run into the kitchen and fetch me a towel from the big cupboard?’

Alice ran, unquestioning for once, because of the sharp note in her mother’s voice. Vicky’s waters had broken.

Gordon drove home from the office. He had telephoned Vicky’s mother and she was already on her way to collect the girls, and Marcelle Wickham would pick Mary up from school and stay at home with the two of them until their grandmother arrived. He concentrated on the road and the swirl of the traffic, frowning, trying to channel his attention down a single avenue directed towards reaching the house and conveying Vicky to hospital. He had been called out of a meeting and fragments of the discussion and the points he had been intending to make collided in his head.

There was a long queue of cars snaking up to the round-about at the city bypass, but he calculated rapidly that it would be quicker to wait in the line than to turn back and take a less direct route. As the car inched forward his thoughts ran on the hours ahead in the labour room, and then jumped backwards to the births of Mary and Alice. He could remember the contractions reflected in Vicky’s face, the way her mouth pinched in at the corners as she struggled to ride them, her cries and wails, and her final triumph and the emergence of the wet, black heads, like a conjuring trick. Each time, he recalled, he had been amazed by the appearance of a baby at the climax of it. It was as if the months of preparations and anticipation and ante-natal classes had been academic for him, or theoretical, with no particular end in view. And then there had been the extraordinary emergence of a third and completely other individual from what had once been only himself and Vicky. Now it was about to happen yet again, and there would be a new person around whom they would rearrange the formulae of their lives. Gordon wished that it might be a boy. He had begun to feel, lately, that he might be overpowered by the collusion of women in his house.

The car had almost reached the roundabout. In the middle of a November afternoon the fading light drew a greenish halo around the buildings and bridges, but some of the autumn trees were still bright. The burning colours made him think of the new woman, the one who had come to Andrew’s party, and the splashes of coloured light roving over her hair. Gordon circled the roundabout and saw the dual carriageway ahead of him. He accelerated hard towards home.

Janice had arrived to wait with Vicky while Marcelle had taken Alice with her on the school run. The two women were sitting on upright chairs in the kitchen. Vicky’s chin was tucked into her chest as she concentrated on her breathing, but she looked up as soon as she heard Gordon come in. He saw her relief at the sight of him and the way her hair fell childishly straight on either side of her cheeks. He wanted to lift her up, as he might lift Alice, and at the same time to shake her back into herself, to remake the Vicky she had once been out of the Vicky and mother she had become. He took hold of her hand and smiled at her.

‘It’s all right, I’m here now.’ He spoke to her, too, as he might have done to the children. ‘Are you having con- tractions?’

‘Not very big ones yet. But they’re coming quite often. The hospital says to go in now.’

He could see that it was an effort for her to talk. ‘Come on, then,’ he said calmly.

‘Her bag is in the hall,’ Janice told him. ‘Everything’s in it. Here’s her coat.’ They draped it around her shoulders and helped her to her feet.

‘Don’t worry about the girls,’ Janice said to Vicky when they had shuffled to the car. ‘Away you go, both of you.’

She stood in the driveway and waved them off, as if they were departing on holiday.

It was only fifteen minutes’ drive to the hospital, but by the time they reached it Vicky felt afraid. A porter and a nurse saw them arriving and came out with a wheelchair. Vicky saw their faces through a fog of pain and confusion.

*

As the days passed, Nina began to establish a pattern by which to live. She went upstairs to her studio early in the mornings and worked, and by the middle of the day she had completed enough of a painting to satisfy herself. Then, in the hollow afternoons, she went for long walks. It soothed her to have a routine with which to parcel out her time; she found that by observing it she could still some of her restlessness. Sometimes her walks took her through the town, and she observed the new façades of shops and restaurants pasted on to the old buildings, and the faces of the people as they criss-crossed the liver-coloured paving blocks of the pedestrian shopping precinct. At other times she headed in the opposite direction, through one of the new estates at the city margin and out through a no-man’s land of half-made rutted tracks that led to windy fields marked out for development, and on into the open country. She walked quickly, with her hands in the pockets of her coat, observing the dips and folds of the mild landscape and the pencil lines of plough furrows and now leafless trees. Back at home in the evenings she read, and telephoned her friends in London, assuring Patrick and the others that she was neither lonely nor going mad.

She did not, either, spend quite all of her time alone. She found herself beginning to be included in the circle of women that quietly revolved within the group of smiling couples.

It was Janice Frost who made the first overture. She telephoned Nina one morning and invited her to lunch, and Nina had accepted before she could think of any particular reason to refuse. She walked out to the Frosts’ this time, and when she reached their neighbourhood she looked with interest at the big houses set back in their gardens. She had once had a schoolfriend who lived in one of these turnings, and it seemed that nothing much had changed since those days. There were perhaps more cars, wives’ runabouts, parked in the sloping driveways. The roads were quiet, and a stillness hung over the roofs and tree tops, but it seemed to Nina that she could actually hear the sonorous bass note of prosperity humming away. If she had stayed in Grafton, she wondered, would she have married and come to rest in one of these solid houses?

She had already turned in at the Frosts’ gateway when a car braked and stopped on the gravel behind her. Nina turned and saw a BMW driven by Darcy Clegg’s wife. The two women reached Janice’s front door together.

‘Hi,’ Hannah said breathlessly. ‘Jan just called me and asked me to come on over for lunch with the two of you. I left Mandy in charge of the shop.’

Nina wondered if she was supposed to know anything about the shop or Mandy. Janice opened the door to them. She was wearing jeans and a loose shirt, but her eyes were made up and she appeared younger than she had done on the night of her party. She kissed Hannah and waved her inside, and drew Nina after her. The kitchen was warm and scented with food, and the table was properly laid for three with linen napkins and wine glasses. Nina had been feeling a prickle of impatience, but it subsided now. She accepted a glass of white wine and leant against one of Janice’s worktops. Janice began to chop herbs beside her. There was a view of garden and fruit trees and a football goal from the window.

Janice said, ‘I’m glad you could come. I didn’t have a chance to speak to you the other night, it was such a scramble. I realized afterwards how unfriendly it must have seemed.’

‘No. I remember what it’s like, giving a party.’

‘The Frosts are wildly hospitable. Without them none of us in Grafton would ever see each other.’

Hannah had perched on a stool with her legs crossed. She was wearing suede trousers and a light cashmere sweater, and her pale blonde hair was half pinned up to show her soft neck. Quite soon she would have crossed the dividing line between voluptuous and fat, but for now she was luscious with her pearly skin and plump mouth. Nina thought that she looked cream-fed, sated. Darcy must be attentive in bed. Her own singleness made her feel dry and angular by comparison, with creases in her skin and a sour ache between her shoulder blades from the effort of keeping her head held up.

‘I like it. I need to have people around. I’m the only one of us who doesn’t have a proper job,’ Janice explained to Nina. ‘I wanted Marcelle to come to lunch too but she’s demonstrating today. She teaches cookery at the Pond School, you know.’

Hannah laughed. ‘Nina, Janice may not have a job, but she does everything else. She sits on every committee in Grafton, Friends of the Cathedral, PTA, you name it. She works for at least three different charities, and if anyone wants something done they invariably ask Mrs Frost first. Her energy exhausts us all.’

Nina smiled too. She began to see a more rounded version of this hospitable Janice, with her neat dark hair and faintly domineering manner, and she liked what she saw.

‘Let’s eat while we’re talking,’ Janice said briskly, and moved them to the table.

There was a warm salad with wild mushrooms, and a vegetable pie. Hannah drank steadily and Janice kept their glasses filled. Nina had been intending to work that afternoon but she drank more wine and ate hungrily, out of the pleasure of having good food cooked and laid in front of her. She abandoned the idea of work, without regret. It was pleasant to sit here in the kitchen glow talking to the women.

It came to Nina suddenly that she had been stiff, lately, with the effort of containing herself within the bounds of polite behaviour. She could feel the petrifaction in her face and along the rigid links of her spine.

Then there was a surprising blurred moment when the wine and the women’s unforced friendliness seemed to dissolve the bounds, and she felt that she could be as she really was instead of pretending otherwise. Hannah said something, although Nina immediately forgot what it was. Something about how the house in Dean’s Row must seem big and quiet.

Nina began to cry.

She cried when she was alone, too often, but she had not broken down in front of other people, strangers, since the first weeks after Richard’s death. It was both a shock and a relief to find the tears running down her face.

The two women came round the table to her. They stooped on either side of Nina’s chair. Hannah touched her shoulder.

‘Is it what I said about your house? I’m so sorry if it is. I didn’t think.’

Nina took a tissue that Janice held out to her and blew her nose.

‘It’s all right. It’s not you. It just happens. I’ll stop in a minute.’

They knew, both of them. She had told Darcy Clegg at the party that Richard was dead. It had been absurd of her to imagine that she could come here and recreate herself as a different person. There was always and for ever the same old self to live with, with the same dull catalogue of griefs and anxieties. The thought made her mouth twist in resignation. Now she must explain some part of what she felt to these friendly women with their unvoiced curiosity.

Nina took a breath. ‘My husband died, earlier this year. I came back to live here because I thought it would be easier than staying in London where there were so many more things to remind me of him. Sometimes it is easier. Then I remember all over again that he’s gone, and I think for a minute that I can’t bear it. But I can, of course. That’s all it is. I’m sorry to be embarrassing when I hardly know you.’

‘You aren’t embarrassing.’ Hannah was indignant. ‘I am, if anyone is.’

Janice nodded. ‘And you do know us. You can talk to us, if you want to. Or forget about it, if you’d rather.’

The moment was over. Nina was grateful to the two of them, but more grateful still to have regained her own self-control.

‘I would rather,’ she said softly.

The women went back to their places. Janice took another bottle of wine out of the rack opposite Nina and raked at the capsule with a corkscrew. More wine glinted into their glasses.

Nina turned to Hannah.

‘Tell me about your shop.’

It seemed important to go on talking about something else, anything else. She was touched by their concern, but she felt too raw to accept it. She wanted to show them that she was not receding, only that she couldn’t advance any further towards them.

Hannah was anxious to make amends for her own apparent clumsiness.

‘It’s a dress shop. La Couture. Darcy bought it for me not long after we were married because he thought I needed something to keep me amused. I surprised him, rather, by making a bit of a success of it.’

Janice chipped in, pleased that Nina was recovering herself, ‘You should go in and have a look. It’s in Southgate, opposite the bookshop. I don’t go because I can’t afford it. Can I, Hannah? There isn’t a thing in there under ninety quid.’

Hannah ignored her.

‘It became a success because there’s plenty of money in Grafton.’ She rubbed her thumb and forefinger together. ‘And people like to dress up and show it off once in a while. At Jan’s parties, for instance. Or at least they did. They’re not so sure, now there’s this recession. I think they’ve still got the money, most of them, but they’re not convinced they should wave it around for all to see.’

You and Darcy wouldn’t worry, Nina thought. And she also thought of Richard’s money, wedged behind her like some invisible wall. She saw that Janice’s dark eyebrows had risen a fraction. There was some puritan disapproval of Hannah in her, and of Hannah’s cheerful vulgarity. Nina wondered how these two women and their partners properly fitted together. Did they like one another, in truth? The friendliness that had warmed her earlier presented itself with chillier undertones.

Nina finished her wine, and held her hand over her glass when Janice inquiringly lifted the second bottle. They began a laughing exchange of Grafton gossip, the three of them relieved that they had safely negotiated the moment of Nina’s tears.

‘I’ll give you a lift back,’ Hannah said, when it was time to leave. ‘I’m probably over the limit, but I’m going to risk it. I usually do, don’t I, Jan?’ There was something about Hannah’s gurgling laugh and the confiding lift of her shoulders that made Nina wonder what other risks Hannah habitually took, and whether Hannah had intended to arouse the speculation. Janice made no comment. She came out to the car with them, and put her hand lightly on Nina’s arm.

‘You know where we are,’ she said, without emphasis.

‘Yes,’ Nina answered, liking her again.

Hannah drove fast and carelessly, and deposited Nina at the entry to the cathedral green.

‘Come and see me in the shop?’ she asked.

‘Yes, of course I will.’

‘I’m sorry I’m stupid. Darcy’s the only person who doesn’t really bother about it.’ Hannah drove away, revving the engine too hard, leaving Nina on the kerb.

Vicky Ransome’s baby was delivered by Caesarean section six hours after she had been admitted to the labour ward. Her obstetrician had been inclined to let her labour on for a while, as he explained to Gordon, because she had already achieved two normal deliveries. But then the monitors had indicated that the baby was becoming distressed and an examination revealed that it had turned in the birth canal and was now presenting the left shoulder instead of the head. Vicky herself was exhausted and growing panicky.

‘I won’t try to turn it again. I think we’ll just whip her in next door,’ the doctor said. Gordon was given a mask and a green gown to cover his business suit, and followed the trolley carrying his wife into the theatre. There was a calm flurry of surgical procedures. He watched, aware of his own helpless detachment even though he held Vicky’s hand and whispered encouragement to her. He waited, and then beyond the screen that protected Vicky he saw the baby lifted out from her sliced belly like a marine creature being wrested from a viscous crimson sea.

‘A beautiful little girl,’ the medical team told him.

‘A girl?’ Vicky repeated.

The baby cried, and after they had handled its tiny body and wrapped it for him Gordon was given it to hold. Then they were busy with Vicky, with the white and crimson folds of flesh and fat and muscle, stitching the flopping bag of her body back into place. Gordon was cold and shivers of nausea fluttered under his breastbone, but he made himself breathe in and exhale steady gulps of medicated air. He bent his stiff neck and looked down into the baby’s opaque black eyes.

‘I’m sorry,’ Vicky said later. They had sponged her face and put her into bed in the ward, and the flowery curtains had been closed around them. The baby was with the paediatricians, but they had been assured that everything was quite normal.

‘Why sorry?’ Gordon felt jerky with tiredness. He had been briefly hungry but his appetite had left him even though he had eaten nothing. His mouth was slimed with hospital tea, and he could smell his wife’s blood thickly in the back of his nose.

‘Not to do it properly. Was it horrible? It’s just a blur, to me.’

‘No, it wasn’t horrible. How could it be? It was beautiful.’ He lied half-heartedly, wishing that he could command sincerity. He was sure that there must be some formula of words that would reassure her, and would light her face from beneath the skin in the way that it had been lit after the births of the other two babies, but the formula evaded him and he heard himself disappointing her.

‘I know you wanted a boy.’

They were whispering. The ward lights had been turned off for the night, and they were artificially held together in a small circle of light directed downwards from over Vicky’s head. Vicky had gone past tiredness, and she looked bright, with the skin stretched taut over her cheekbones. He knew that she needed to talk, although the ward sister had warned him he must only stay to see her settled. He thought of their bed at home, and the silence of the empty house. The girls were safely with their grandparents.

‘I don’t mind what it is, so long as it has everything intact and you are safe. You know that.’ He bent his head and kissed her folded hands.

‘She. She has everything intact. She’s a girl.’

Vicky was becoming querulous. He knew she was near to tears and he wanted to leave so she could close her eyes on the tears and drift away into sleep.

‘A beautiful girl. A little sister,’ he reassured her.

‘Helen. We are going to call her Helen, aren’t we?’

It was one of the names they had discussed. Gordon preferred Olivia, and for a boy he had wanted Oliver. But he whispered, ‘If that’s what you would like. Yes, of course.’

It was like soothing the children at bedtime, so they could turn inwards to sleep with the day’s wrinkles straightened behind them. Vicky and he had lovingly argued the merits of Mary against Alice when the first one was born, and it was Vicky who had capitulated then.

‘Mr Ransome?’

The white paper turret of a nurse’s cap appeared around the curtain. Gordon stood up at once, and pressed his mouth against his wife’s forehead.

‘Sleep,’ he said. ‘I’ll come in as soon as I can tomorrow.’

He left her and the leather soles of his shoes squeaking on the linoleum floor faded into the night-time murmurs of the ward.

The cathedral was almost empty. The last of the thin trickle of tourists brought out by a winter’s day had drifted away to the coach and car parks, and the medieval quire stalls with their famous carvings were not yet occupied by choristers fidgeting before evening choir practice. There were circles of light at the chancel steps and over the pulpit, but the nave and the side chapels were almost in darkness. A verger passed down the central aisle with a pile of hymn books in his hands. Someone began softly to play the organ, and the quiet mass of the great building took up the notes and dispersed them, letting them filter down again seemingly charged with the whispers and echoes of its own voice.

Gordon sat at the back of the nave, with his briefcase and a file of papers relating to the cathedral works on the wooden seat beside him. His head was tilted back as he tried to discern the familiar outlines of the Gothic vaulting above him, and at the same time he reflected on the slow weathering and decay of the limestone that was the concern of the Conservation Committee. It seemed that the organ notes as they seeped through the arches and between the huge pillars, fading and falling away into silence, eloquently expressed the crumbling of the stone through the silences of seven hundred years.

When the twelfth-century stonemasons had completed their work on the cathedral, the artists followed them to glorify their creation with the brilliance of gilding and the exuberance of primitive colours. Every wall and screen was painted, pattern on vibrant colour, and the paint and gilt lay over the stone like a skin, protecting it from the air’s abrasion. Only then, over the centuries, the custodians of the cathedral lived and died and changed, and the raucous hues of the original decorations were slowly stripped away. They were replaced by pale classical colours, or by nothing at all, leaving the grey-gold limestone naked and exposed to the onslaught of sulphur dioxide.

Gordon had worked with the rest of the Grafton Cathedral Conservation Advisory Committee for more than two years in preparation for this week. Over the next few days the scaffolders would arrive with their poles and planks to erect a membrane around the cathedral within which the restoration of the sickened stone could begin. He had just come from another meeting of the committee, at which the conservationist dean had announced that the Preservation Trust, with the Prince of Wales as its Patron, had raised a further million pounds which would enable a second stage of res-toration to follow on from the first. The work would take years, but the contemplation of its beginning gave Gordon a firm sense of professional achievement. This solid spur stuck up from the sea of his personal confusion like the ridged back of an island.

He stood up and gathered his belongings. He was not quite sure where he was going. The house was empty and he was disinclined to go back to it. Vicky would be in hospital for several more days, and his daughters were still with his parents-in-law. He had no obligations, except for his work and the daily visits to Vicky and the baby. This brief interval of freedom was liberating, but it was also disconcerting. He found himself moving cautiously, as if testing for invisible barriers. He received the telephone calls and the invitations of the Grafton couples one by one, and politely refused them.

Gordon went out of the side door, closing it behind him on the organ music and the echoes. It was not yet dark, but the green was rainy and windswept, an expanse of wet grass and fugitive leaves. He hesitated, with the massed ranks of saints and prophets soaring in their blackened niches behind him. Then he began to walk. He was halfway down the length of Dean’s Row when he met the woman. At first she was just a face, possessing the kind of unknown familiarity that might have sprung out of a dream. Then she took on a more solid shape. She was wearing a waxed jacket, boots and an emerald green scarf, and her red hair was pulled haphazardly back and tied at the nape of her neck. Her face was shiny, as if she had walked a long way in the open air. They were almost past each other, but they stopped and then looked back, momentarily unsure of the social ground between them.

‘I’m Gordon Ransome,’ he reminded her. ‘We met at the Frosts’. We danced together.’

‘I remember.’ Nina had reached the steps that led to her front door. She stood one step up, and with this advantage she could look down at him. He was pale, and the rims of his eyes were reddened and sore. ‘I heard about the baby. Congratulations.’

‘Thank you.’

Gordon wanted to keep her where she was, to hold her shining face in front of him, and he wondered clumsily what he might say next. But it was Nina who asked him, ‘Are you busy? Would you like to come in and have a cup of tea?’

They sat in the kitchen together. They made the conventional exchanges about the house and its position and Nina’s removal to Grafton, and all the time Gordon watched her as she opened cupboard doors, reached up to take cups from a shelf, placed the filled teapot on a tray. She was tall, with long bones and faintly awkward limbs. He could imagine her white feet, the spaces between her toes, and the curved chain of her spine, nape to coccyx, as clearly as if they were exposed to his eyes. She was smooth and clean, like her surroundings. The kitchen was very tidy, the surfaces bare and gleaming, and this orderly place contrasted sharply with Vicky’s arrangements. Vicky believed that the children’s happiness and creativity counted for more than clean tiles, and so the floors silted up with toys and the walls sprouted drawings and crayoned messages.

‘How is Vicky?’ Nina was asking.

‘Not as fit as after the other two. It takes longer to recover from a Caesarean, obviously. She might be there for a week. But she will be fine, and there are no problems with the baby. She’s feeding well, doing the right things. Vicky’s a natural mother.’

‘Is she?’

‘She always has been, even before we had our own. She has an extraordinary affinity with children. Partly to do with her work. She’s a psychotherapist, working with children in difficulties, at a special unit we have here. She has only been able to do it part-time, recently, of course. But I’m told she is very, very good.’

Gordon heard himself heaping up this praise of his wife as if he was pushing sand into a channel against the incoming tide.

Nina paused, holding the tray of tea things. ‘We could take this upstairs, and sit more comfortably. Only the fire isn’t lit, I’m afraid.’

‘I could do that.’

He took the tray from her and followed her up the stairs from the basement. In the room overlooking the green the shutters were open on to the oblique view of the cathedral front.

‘What will Vicky do?’

The question startled him at first, but then he realized that Nina meant her career, now that they had Helen also.

‘She will be able to work in the mornings once she’s back on her feet, I should think. There’s a woman who lives locally, her own children are grown up and she comes in sometimes to take over when Vicky’s at the unit. She’s very reliable, completely trustworthy.’

‘That’s good,’ Nina answered, conscious of the surface neutrality of this exchange. Her ears strained to hear some barely audible subtext. It was there, but she could not yet decipher it.

There was a basket of kindling and logs next to the hearth. Gordon knelt down and made a thick twist of newspaper, then flicked a match to it. He made a pyramid of kindling over the flames in the grate, deftly supplementing it with thicker pieces of wood as the fire crackled and caught. He rested on his heels for a moment, watching its progress with his back to Nina. The yellow light changed the bare room, softening and warming it.

For Nina it was like being given a present, to have the luxury of company, to have Gordon kneeling in front of the hearth making a fire for her with casual masculine efficiency. Her own efforts more often led to a blackened mound of fuel and nothing more than a wisp of acrid smoke, so quite often she did not even bother to try. Nina half smiled at the blatancy of this stereotyping. She would have liked to imagine that she could light a fire as well as any boy scout, but the truth was that she could not. She had made many such discoveries since Richard’s death.

Gordon turned round. He saw the glimmer of her amusement, and wondered at it. He thought perhaps she was laughing at his firelighting.

‘Don’t you have any bigger logs than these?’

‘Come and have your tea,’ Nina said. ‘I haven’t found out where to get logs, not yet. I don’t suppose it’s too difficult.’

‘I can arrange a delivery for you, if that would help.’

As he moved, leaving the fire and coming to sit down opposite her, Nina became aware that she was attracted to him. The realization delivered itself to her fully formed, with all the physical manifestations. A thick heat spread like a slow current pumping through her veins. She shifted in her place, glancing behind her as if her burning skin might mark the cushions where she sat. Gordon’s cup rattled in its saucer as she passed it across to him.

‘Perhaps,’ she said. ‘Yes, that would be kind.’

The man wasn’t looking at her. She was grateful and also disappointed. There was a confused image of his wife behind him in the full sail of pregnancy and the faces of his children like cherubs that might have floated out of the stained glass in the cathedral. Gordon’s head was turned away to the windows.

‘You have a wonderful view from here.’

The sun had set, and the lights illuminating the west front had come on while they were watching the fire.

‘It makes me and my belongings seem rather dim by comparison.’

‘I don’t think so,’ he said quietly. And then, ‘Do you know what’s about to happen?’

She put her cup down, slowly. Gordon stared at her hands, with the wedding ring and a diamond on her left one. She pushed her fingers through her hair, and he remembered the revolving lights settling on her head and changing its colour and then circling on.

‘What is about to happen?’

‘A huge conservation programme. To restore the exterior first and then, eventually, the interior. Do you see how the statues are eroded?’

He beckoned to her, and they went and stood at the window. In the floodlights the stone figures shone out in their ascending tiers.

‘Look at the faces, and the hands.’

They were worn, chewed away almost to featurelessness. Noses and fingers and in places feet and whole heads had been lost. The stone was blackened and pitted.

‘They are very old,’ Nina said softly, to defend them.

‘They are so old and fragile that if we don’t do something to preserve them they will crumble away altogether. Luckily something can be done. Tomorrow the first scaffolding crews arrive. That portion of the front will be covered’ – he gestured with his hand, close to her shoulder – ‘so the work can begin.’

‘Is it your work?’ she asked.

‘I’m an engineer, not a conservationist. But we are part of the restoration team, yes.’

Nina gazed at the inscrutable faces. ‘How can they be repaired?’

‘The damage has been done by sulphate crystals building up on the stone. The rain dissolves the salts and washes them into the tiny cracks, and then the wind and sun dry them and harden them into crusts that split and flake the stone away. The treatment is to apply a coat of lime, like a poultice.’

Gordon wanted to talk about this. The prospect of the ancient fabric being regenerated was an affirmation of some greater good that he was anxious to acknowledge, and he was also fascinated by the mechanical and chemical techniques commanded by the conservationists. But he did not want to bore the woman by ploughing unstoppably on about stone and scaffolding.

‘That won’t bring the faces back, will it?’ Nina asked.

He said, ‘There is a way of rebuilding them.’

‘How?’

She was interested. He could tell by her voice and her expression. He felt a charge of pleasure.

‘They soak lengths of hessian in baths of the lime wash, and then they wrap the statues in the hessian. The wash sucks out the dirt, the blackness that you can see, and at the same time feeds natural lime into the stone.’

‘Giving it back its strength.’

‘Exactly. And the missing features, noses or fingers or even whole heads, can be rebuilt with mortar.’

Nina imagined the companies of prophets and angels reawakening, intact again, and shining out once their shrouds of limed cloth had fallen away.

‘It will be like a little Judgement Day,’ she said, more to herself than to Gordon.

‘Yes. I thought that, too.’

‘Only that would be to deify the Conservation Committee, wouldn’t it?’ She smiled sidelong at him.

‘No, we are only the instrument of a higher authority, of course,’ Gordon answered.

They stood in silence for a moment, contemplating the scale of the work that was about to begin. There was perhaps a foot of empty air between them, but it was as if their skins touched.

‘How many statues are there?’

‘Three hundred and twelve, from the Madonna and Child to the martyrs in the topmost row.’

‘I shall enjoy watching the work,’ Nina said at length.

‘There won’t be a great deal to see. You will lose your splendid view to an expanse of tarpaulin, I’m afraid.’

‘I shan’t mind,’ Nina told him.

Gordon looked at his watch. It took him a moment to register what time it was. He had been in Nina’s house much longer than he would have guessed, and it was time he went to the hospital to see Vicky and the baby. He found himself gazing at Nina’s hair and wondering what would happen if he picked up a strand to wind between his fingers. He cleared his throat, sounding in his own ears like an over-eager schoolboy.

‘If you are interested, I could take you around the interior of the cathedral to show you what the long-term conservation plans are.’

‘Yes, I would like that. Very much.’

She was facing him now. They would be silhouetted in the uncurtained window, for the invisible passers-by on the green.

Gordon moved away towards the door, saying quickly, ‘I’ll call tomorrow afternoon, at about the same time, and we can go across there together.’

Nina agreed. She would wait for him, and then they would go out to the cathedral and look at Gothic arches and fan vaulting.

When he was gone, and she was alone again, she missed him in the spaces of the house.