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 11

Through the glass partition at the end of his office Gordon could see his partner at his desk.

Andrew was working with his head bent over a sheaf of estimates and a calculator. He had been sitting in the same position for perhaps an hour, during which time Gordon shifted the papers on his own desk into revised heaps.

Andrew’s calm absorption irritated him; he felt the irritation as sandpaper patches caught between the hard plates and the tender lining of his skull. He had plenty of his own work to do. He had spent the first hour of his day out on a site on the other side of the county, and had gone from there to a meeting with the county planners who were proposing to build a sports complex on the site. He was supposed to be writing a report that would accompany the Frost Ransome tender for the structural engineering works, but he had not yet even looked at his notes. He had thought of nothing but the day’s progress towards four o’clock, and his visit with Nina to the cathedral.

The private line rang on his desk. He picked it up, wondering if she could somehow have discovered this number, and found that it was Vicky.

‘Yes. Yes, love, of course I am. Just busy. How are you?’

‘Stitches are a bit sore, and I’m quite tired. The ward was very noisy last night, two new arrivals. One woman with twins.’

He heard the quiver in her voice. She wanted his sympathy, but did not want to admit to it. This tremulous mixture of vulnerability and stoicism worked again at the sandpaper patches within his head.

‘Poor Vicky. And poor woman. How’s Helen today?’

‘Much more wide awake. I’ve just fed her, and she’s lying here with her eyes open, staring at me.’

He felt a jolt of protective love for both of them that went awkwardly but inevitably in tandem with his irritation. ‘Take care of yourselves until I come in this evening.’

‘Talk to me for five minutes. Tell me some news. It’s so boring and lonely in here.’

She was about to cry. It was the complicated measure of postnatal hormones, Gordon reasoned for her. Was the rush of anxious sadness the same after a Caesarean birth as after a normal one? It must be. Perhaps even more intense. He must try to have a word with the ward sister while he was at the hospital this evening.

‘Gordon?’

He told her about the morning’s work, about the site visit and the report waiting to be written, parcelling up and delivering the small subjects and avoiding the big one that he felt like a thick layer of felted wool between them.

‘Darling, I have to get on with some work now,’ he said at the end. ‘I’ll see you later.’

‘Love you,’ Vicky said in a small voice.

‘Love you too.’

He picked up his pen and made himself pitch into the dreary depths of his morning’s notes as if they were a cold sea. At the end of twenty minutes he had written an acceptable draft report. He looked at his watch and saw that it was three forty.

In the corridor, as he struggled into his coat in his hurry to leave the building, he met Andrew. Andrew’s blue shirt was as crisp as it had been at the beginning of the day, but the knot of his blue and lilac paisley tie was loosened to indicate that he was in full-tilt mode.

‘Are you going to the hospital?’ Andrew asked mildly. He was interested, properly concerned, without giving out even a breath of criticism of his partner’s unscheduled early departure.

‘Yes. Dropping in at the cathedral for something first, actually.’

Andrew was less interested in the restoration project than Gordon was.

‘Ah. See you in the morning, then, about the supermarket drawings?’

‘Yes. Yes, I’ll be in by half eight,’ Gordon called over his shoulder. His car was parked in its initialled slot at the back of the building. Behind the wheel, on the short drive into town, he felt as if he had made some thrilling and ingenious escape.

He found that he was laughing with pleasure and exhilaration, at his freedom and at the prospect of seeing Nina.

Nina was already in the cathedral. In the last days she had begun to feel comfortable in Grafton, as if she was settled in her own place rather than crouching in hiding, and this new feeling of being at ease had grown with the welcome that the women had given her.

But since yesterday afternoon, since watching Gordon lighting the fire in her drawing room, her perspectives had shifted again. She had been excited and fearful, and so she had left her house early and walked the short way over the green, certain that Gordon would find her. She sat at the back of the nave, at the end of the last row of wooden chairs, staring at the darkening glory of the east window.

Gordon had to cross the green from the opposite side, and so when he passed the west door he made the small detour under the bare ribs of the newly erected scaffolding and in through the inner door, as if to check that the interior was all that it should be before he brought her here. He saw her at once, sitting with her back to him, with her long limbs folded and seeming more elegant in repose. He was overtaken by gratitude and happiness that she should be here, in the great dim space, quietly waiting for him. He went to her and put his hand on her shoulder, not lifting it when she turned her face up to look at him.

‘I’m glad to see you,’ he told her, offering her the truth without any varnish of social nicety.

‘And I you.’

The quiet solemnity of her response pleased him too.

She stood, and her height and the heels of her shoes put her eyes on a level with his.

‘Show me,’ Nina said.

He said, trying to sound light, ‘Now you have asked for it.’

He took her on a slow tour of the aisles and side chapels. She listened gravely as he explained the projected works, asking an occasional question but mostly remaining silent as he talked.

‘It takes a long time to assess the effects of stone conservation work,’ Gordon said. ‘Perhaps a hundred years, or even more. The Victorians saw what was happening here, and tried to reverse it by painting over the stone with a kind of impervious varnish. It was the favoured technique of the time, the best available to them. But the outer coat hardened further with years of exposure to the air, and underneath it the stone softened and crumbled away. Do you see this?’

They had passed through a Gothic doorway on the south side of the chancel into a pillared hallway. Ahead of them an exuberant flight of stone steps curved upwards under an intricately vaulted ceiling. Nina paused at the bottom step. It was hollowed and worn shiny, but as the springing geometry of the stairs drew her eyes upwards she also saw the black flakes of stone that were breaking away to reveal the paler crust beneath. The thirteenth-century magnificence had come to look sickly, diseased. Gordon stooped beside her, with one hand splayed over the base of a pillar. He rubbed with the tips of his fingers into a stone hollow the size of his fist, and then withdrew his hand to show her that it was gritty with dust.

‘Can it be put right?’ Nina asked.

‘We can try. Using the best methods at our disposal, and hoping to be more successful than the Victorians. Some of these pillars will have to be replaced.’

Nina put her head back, following the jets of stone with her eyes, imagining the scale of the work.

‘The rest will be treated in the same way as the exterior, with lime wash coloured with stone dust and skimmed milk to match the old stone as closely as possible. The coating protects the stone, but lets it breathe at the same time. In a hundred years or so, the cathedral’s conservators will know whether we have been successful or not.’

Nina liked the absence from his meticulous explanation of both arrogance and the assumption of omnipotence, but she was also warmed by the underlying optimism of what he described. It was satisfying to contemplate the endurance of the cathedral, this medieval glory of branching pillars and mouldings decorated with ball flowers, solid and cared for and beloved, at the heart of the other careless Grafton with its car parks and chain stores and shopping precinct. She thought of the perpetual counterpoise that underlay this urban contrast, between spiritual endurance and material desire, and was pleased to find it so neatly summarized around her.

Somewhere out of sight beyond the curve of the stairs a door opened, and the dim air was filled with chattering voices. Around the corner appeared a stream of boy choristers dressed in ruffs and white surplices over plum-coloured robes. They swept past Nina and Gordon, jostling amongst themselves and covertly laughing, and descended into the cathed-ral. Behind them came the choirmaster and a line of senior choristers, and then a chaplain with a heavy bunch of keys. Gordon nodded to most of the men as they passed and held up his hand in greeting to the priest. It was time for Evensong.

Nina and Gordon followed behind them, and then turned down the length of the nave to the west door again.

‘Thank you,’ Nina said when they reached the door. Inside her head there was a rich collage of decorated stone and candlelight and fluttering surplices.

‘I hope I didn’t bore you,’ Gordon said stiffly. He was suddenly aware that he had talked, and she had barely spoken.

‘No.’ Nina smiled at him. The choir had begun to rehearse a Te Deum. The boys’ voices climbed up, and higher, as invincible in their harmony as the soaring steps they had just come scuffling down.

Outside it was dark. Gordon wondered disconnectedly where he should offer to take her, trying to calculate how much time was left to him. Could they go to the Eagle? Across to the Dean’s Row house again? He couldn’t bear the idea that he must lose sight of her, but he knew he would soon have to go to the hospital and somewhere within himself find the buoyancy to lift Vicky out of her depression.

Nina was still smiling. The splendour of the cathedral, and the singing, and the startling pleasure she felt in Gordon’s company had lapped together with the images of regeneration in the conservation work to produce a high, curling wave of happiness. She knew that since Richard’s death she had been walking inside a blank-walled box and had been unable to raise her head to look beyond it. She understood in the same moment that she was afraid of what Gordon Ransome threatened, of the edge they were balanced upon, but at the same time she longed to pitch herself over it, for the affirmation of physical response, as a release from the steady and monotonous solitary confinement of her days. The directions forward seemed to multiply entrancingly ahead of her.

She thought that Gordon was going to reach out and touch her. She stepped away, containing herself.

‘I should get back now. I have some work to finish,’ she muttered.

Her immediate need was for solitude. She had no doubt that there would be tomorrow for Gordon and herself, tomorrow and other days. This confidence surprised her, but she did not question it.

Gordon found that he almost ran after her, like a boy. He dodged to stand in front of her, cutting off her line of retreat.

‘Shall we meet again? Perhaps I could buy you lunch tomorrow?’

No, not lunch, he remembered. He was committed to lunch with Andrew and a pair of retailing entrepreneurs for whom they did a great deal of work.

‘Or dinner, rather? Could you manage that? It would have to be late, perhaps, after the hospital …’

He heard her cutting short his bluster.

‘Dinner would be fine. Thank you.’

‘I’ll pick you up at about half past eight.’ He had to call after her. Her heels clicked musically on the cobbles as she swung away from him. Gordon was happy as he went to retrieve his car from the malodorous recesses of the multistorey park.

*

He was early for visiting. Vicky looked up in pleased surprise as he edged around the floral curtain protecting her bed. Helen was in her arms, a white bundle of hospital cellular blanket, and Marcelle Wickham was sitting in the single armchair next to her.

‘Hello, darling, is everything all right?’ Vicky asked him. He acknowledged silently that it was a matter for concern nowadays if he arrived anywhere before the last minute.

‘Of course it is. I wanted to see you both, that’s all.’ He kissed her overheated forehead and laid one finger against the baby’s cheek. He kissed Marcelle, too, noticing her perfume, reminded by it of dancing with her at parties. Then he glanced around for somewhere to sit. The curtained space was full of bunches of flowers, fading fast in the heat. The flowers pushed into inappropriate vases that were mostly too small looked as uncomfortable as he felt. There was a faint but distinct smell of vomit in the ward, underlying the perfume and flower scents. Gordon put his coat down on the end of Vicky’s bed and loosened the knot of his tie.

‘Sit here, Gordon. I’m on my way back to pick up the kids from nativity play rehearsal.’ Marcelle stood.

‘No, Marcelle, you don’t have to rush away because Gordon’s arrived.’

‘Stay a bit longer. I haven’t seen you for weeks.’ They spoke in unison, unwilling to have the buffer removed from between them.

‘This baby is gorgeous.’ Marcelle bent over to admire her once more. ‘You are so lucky.’

Her face was drawn with sadness. Gordon wondered if she wanted another baby herself, and if dour Michael Wickham wouldn’t agree to it. He remembered how one summer barbecue afternoon, with his tongue loosened by beer, Michael had complained to him, ‘Bloody kids. They’re like vampires, aren’t they? They take every hour of the day and every ounce of your energy, and your wife’s and they still want more. Why do we do it?’

They had been surrounded by the children of the various families, by the noise of a rounders game, and the cries of ‘It’s not fair’ and ‘He hurt me’. Gordon couldn’t remember what he had said in response.

Marcelle had gone. Gordon sat down in the chair and Vicky gave the baby to him. He gazed down at the little face, seeing Mary and Alice in the compressed features. The same, each time, but different. He held this tenacious fragment of optimistically combined genes for a moment, and then laid her in the crib beside the bed.

‘Marcelle brought me a picnic from the school. I was hungry,’ Vicky explained. There was a white box on the bed table, and when he looked into it he saw the remnants of some savoury pie and two brandy snaps. Vicky had a sweet tooth. He felt criticized, because he had not thought to bring her anything to eat himself, although he knew the hospital food was poor. He took her hand and wound his fingers through hers. Her fingers had swollen up at the end of the pregnancy, and she had had to take off her rings.

‘Are you still feeling blue?’

‘Not too bad.’ Vicky hoisted herself up against the pillows, making a face at the discomfort as she did so. ‘It’s only the stitches, really.’

Gordon had not seen the wound since he had watched the delivery itself. He imagined the line of stitching above the curling hair where he had liked to kiss her. It would be like a closed mouth, he thought. The scar would fade to a faint white line. The doctors had told them that.

‘You’ll be better soon.’

‘I know. It’s okay. Have you had a busy day?’

Very clearly, he heard the tonelessness of their questions and the other, unspoken dialogue concerning their separate and irreconcilable needs.

‘Not particularly. I came here straight from the cathedral. The scaffolding is going up.’

Vicky was even less interested in the conservation work than Andrew was. ‘It’ll be up for ever, I suppose. What a shame it has to be done now.’

Now or in a hundred years, Gordon mused. I might have missed seeing it. He felt privileged to be part of this regeneration, and the thought of seeing it with Nina made him falter, on a dancing beat of pleasure, so that he had to lean sideways, twitching at a parched flower that hung out of a vase to hide his joy from Vicky.

Visiting time was in full flood. The ward hummed with camcorders, and with the noise of older siblings who slid on the polished floor and swung on the high ends of the beds.

‘I called the girls this afternoon after I spoke to you,’ Vicky said, with her eyes on the other mothers’ children.

‘Is everything okay?’

‘Mum says they’re both a bit weepy and anxious. Alice wet her bed last night.’ She hesitated, and then said without looking at him, ‘I wondered if it might be a good idea for you to bring them back early? They could have the weekend at home with you, and come in to see the baby before we bring her back.’

It was a challenge to him, like an unorthodox move in a chess game. Vicky was giving him an opening to show his concern for his children’s well-being by removing them from their grandparents and attending to them himself through a winter weekend. Like a drowning man, Gordon glimpsed a series of flickering images of two days of freedom. He saw Nina in her green scarf, and the squared lights and shadows that divided the ceiling of her cool, bare drawing room.

‘I have a mound of paperwork to do, love. If I clear it while you are in here I’ll have more time once you do get home. And I think it’ll be more unsettling for the girls to whisk them back again when they are expecting to stay longer with Marjorie and Alec. They’ll think something is wrong.’

Vicky pleated the white sheet between her fingers. Her stomach still made a noticeable mound under the covers.

‘It was just a thought.’

He put his hand over hers. ‘Mary and Alice are fine. How could they not be, with a mother like you?’

‘And a father like you.’ There were a dozen edges to her words.

Gordon felt the stubborn base rock of his resistance when he smiled back at her. ‘We’ll be okay. You rest and get your strength back.’

It was almost the end of visiting time. He leant over Vicky and kissed her as he had done when he arrived, but she would not look at him. Gordon’s queasy swell of tenderness and rancour was spiked with premonitory guilt.

‘See you tomorrow.’

‘Yes. Gordon?’

‘What is it?’

‘Is everything all right?’ The bland formula of a searching question, repeated. It delivered her fears up to him, a package that he should unwrap.

‘Of course it is. I want you to come home, that’s all.’ Bland and tidy lies, also, putting aside the parcel.

‘Only two or three more days.’ She leaned back against the pillows, relinquishing him.

On his way out Gordon found the ward sister in her office. He mentioned Vicky’s depression as if she might offer some potion to dispel it.

‘Nothing to worry about,’ she reassured him. ‘Mums with two or three children already at home often worry if they will be able to cope with the new one, you know. It can seem a daunting prospect, especially after the physical stress of a Caesar.’

The sister seemed young for a position of responsibility. She had a round face and short hair under her cap. Gordon noted her attractiveness, automatically, without further speculation.

‘Vicky will cope,’ he said. It was the rampart of maternal competence that she had erected that made him feel excluded, or at best edged out on to the margins of their female-strong family. The petulant thought eased his guilt a little.

‘With the right back-up,’ the sister said. Gordon caught the suggestion of a rebuke, but now that he was almost free he was ready to ignore it.

‘Naturally.’ He smiled at her.

He made his way down the corridors with the stream of departing visitors and out to his car.

The quiet house soothed him. Gordon walked through the rooms with a tumbler of whisky in his hand. He didn’t want anything to eat and in any case the spirit tasted much better than food, good and fiery in the back of his throat.

He went upstairs and into the children’s bedroom, and knelt beside Alice’s bed to bury his face in her pillow. He smelt the ghost of her in the sheets, and in her nightgown pushed under the quilt. The absence of his daughters’ antiphonal breathing, of the hot exhalations of childish dreams, made him long for them to be home again. But at the same time he savoured this brief isolation in his own house. He listened to the sounds of it, to the boiler firing and the swill of water in the pipes, with a freshly attuned ear.

Gordon stood up again and smoothed Alice’s pillow to remove the imprint of his face. He went through into the big bedroom and made a slow circuit of the bed. He had made it this morning but he could never make the white cover lie in the right folds, as Vicky did. The bed seemed lumpy, dishevelled, as if it was concealing something. Gordon picked up an ornate perfume bottle from the dressing table, and put it down again without sniffing at it. He moved the boxes and photographs, seeing the prints of them left in a faint film of dust. One of the top drawers was slightly open. He drew it out further, and looked in at the satiny straps and bones and folds of Vicky’s underwear.

He turned away and sat down heavily on his side of the bed. He picked up the bedside telephone and sat with it on his lap while he groped on a lower shelf for the directory. When he found it he flipped impatiently through the pages, searching for the name of the couple who had owned the Dean’s Row house before Nina. He found it quickly, and then dialled the number beside it without waiting to think.

She answered after two rings, saying her name rather than hello. Her voice sounded amused, as if she was smiling into the mouthpiece.

‘Nina, it’s Gordon. Gordon Ransome.’

‘Yes.’

It was a statement, not a question, making him think that she had even been expecting his call.

‘I wanted to talk to you.’

It was much easier to say it over the telephone. He felt suddenly that he might confess anything, and that she would listen with sympathy. ‘I couldn’t wait until tomorrow evening.’

He had crossed a divide. He couldn’t go back and pretend just to be a friendly conservationist. There was a new pressure within himself, like an inflating balloon, and he realized that it was happiness.

‘I’m glad you called. I wanted to talk, too. I thought you might be a friend of mine, Patrick, from London.’

Gordon was fired with jealousy of this unknown man.

‘Are you disappointed that it isn’t?’

Nina laughed then. ‘No. Not disappointed at all.’

Gordon felt this first avowal like a thread between them, stretching through the air from the well-worn territory of his house away into the darkness to some new terrain that was lying in wait for him to discover.

‘What are you doing?’ he asked.

‘Sitting in my kitchen. Looking at all these doors and cupboards with nothing much behind them.’

She had not wanted to sit in the upstairs drawing room because the view, and the ashes of the fire he had lit lying in the grate seemed too closely connected with him. She was as eager as a girl, and also fearful of whatever manoeuvres tomorrow evening would bring.

Gordon recalled the bareness of her house. ‘You are travelling light.’

‘It seemed the easiest way.’

He knew this was an acknowledgement of her reason for coming to Grafton and of the attendant truths that she would reveal to him in time, in their own shared time. He imagined these truths peeling away, like layers of fine tissue, each layer matched by a discarded layer of his own, until they knew each other entirely.

The vision made him confident and he asked, ‘Would you like me to come over now?’

After a fractional pause she answered, ‘No. Let’s meet tomorrow, as we arranged.’

It was illogical, but she felt the need to preserve some propriety, in case it became necessary to defend herself against him. She also wanted to give herself the pleasure of anticipation. It seemed a long time since she had looked forward to anything. She tried to imagine Gordon at the other end of the line, in some orderly domestic setting like Janice Frost’s, amidst children’s toys and family-dented furniture. A black wing shadowed her for an instant and then flew on.

‘Gordon?’

‘I’m still here.’

‘Is everything all right?’

The same question that Vicky had asked, meriting an altogether different answer.

‘Yes,’ he said simply, knowing that it was, and that if it was not they would make it so between them.

‘Good night, then,’ Nina whispered.

‘Good night. I will be there tomorrow.’

The dinner was not a success. Gordon chose the restaurant because it was some miles away from Grafton and not much frequented by anyone he knew. When he arrived with Nina they found they were almost the only people in the over-frilled dining room. They sat facing each other across a daunting table, feeling themselves under the scrutiny of the tiptoeing waitresses. The food was pretentious and poor, and soupy music washed over them as they ate.

Gordon was angry with himself for his bad choice, and as embarrassed as an adolescent on a disastrous first date. He dissected the food on his plate, chewing and tasting nothing, while Nina barely touched hers. Gordon was made more uncomfortable by his conviction that Nina and her husband would have been familiars in whichever London restaurants were the fashion of the week, and that she must be judging this provincial disaster with a cold eye. Gordon did not know London well, and he was mistrustful of city gloss. He understood himself well enough to be aware that he was a success in a small place, and to have been satisfied with that, until he contemplated his distance from Nina.

Their talk was stilted. They made openings and waited for one another to respond, but the beginnings were not bold enough to overcome the music and the eavesdroppers, and they faltered and dried up one by one. In the end they discussed their work and the cathedral project and Grafton, and the achievements of Gordon’s daughters, like the strangers they were. Nina was wearing a scarlet jacket braided and frogged with black silk, and with her pale face Gordon thought she looked like some androgynous, doomed hussar. He wanted to hold her, shielding her from the cavalry, instead of sitting over tepid food and talking about education provisions. Gordon wondered if yesterday’s intimacy had been a hallucination.

At last the meal was over. He paid for it without totalling the bill and they went out into the cold air. He held open the door of his car for her and she sat in the passenger seat, composedly arranging her limbs and her large hands and feet and then keeping still in the way that he now recognized, with a helpless wash of admiration.

They drove in silence for a while. Then Gordon said, because he thought that he must say something or they would drive all the way to Grafton without speaking, ‘Sorry. That was bloody awful.’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

She said it as a statement of fact. He realized that she was telling him the truth. She was not judging him or the restaur-ant, or adopting a faint air of martyrdom over a disappointing evening as Vicky would have done. The meal had not been important, whether it was magnificent or mediocre; it was simply a rite that they were enacting together.

‘I wanted to take you somewhere special, that you would remember,’ he explained. The intimacy had not disappeared. He felt the softness of it between them, in this leathery space dimly illuminated by the dashboard lights.

‘I will remember.’

To his amazement she reached out and took his hand, lifting it off the wheel so that he drove one-handed, and then she linked her fingers through his. She held both their hands tight against her warm thigh. In his happiness and gratitude Gordon wanted to close his eyes and rest his head in her lap.

‘Let’s go home,’ Nina said.

They reached Grafton and Gordon parked his inconspicuous car in an inconspicuous corner a short distance from the cathedral. They walked quickly through the narrow entry that gave access to the green where a street lamp shone on them and made them hurry, not looking at one another, on and out to the relative darkness of the green itself. The cathedral was a black perpendicular to their left. They turned right down Dean’s Row, passing the secure doors and curtained windows of Nina’s neighbours. Gordon thought fleetingly of the families behind them, within their domestic defences. He knew that he was about to leave his own married castle with its moat and battlements behind him, and that he was doing it gladly.

They reached Nina’s front door. She unlocked it and turned off the alarm and let him into her house.

They stood in the hallway, with the street door secured behind them. There was a light burning over their heads in a plain glass lantern, too bright for their eyes. Gordon watched her as she unbuttoned her coat and put her bag aside.

It was such a pleasure to be here in this safe place after the prissy constraints of the restaurant. They were both smiling, sidelong, not yet confronting one another.

Then she turned to him and he caught her by the elbows and held her against him. She turned her face up and he kissed her. Her mouth opened at once and he tasted her tongue, and suddenly both of them were full of hot confusion, rubbing their faces together and panting a little. He pushed her backwards so that she was caught against the wall. His fingers fumbled with the frogging of her jacket until somehow it opened and he found a silky layer underneath it with lace and straps, and into his head swam the memory of Vicky’s drawer filled with the same female things. Only they were not the same, and his surprise and pleasure at the difference shot through him like a scalding wire, burning him, so that he closed his eyes and knotted his fingers in her hair while their mouths sucked greedily together.

The light was very bright. When he looked again he saw Nina’s eyes staring into his, with the reflections in the black pupils receding to a point beyond his reach. She wriggled sideways and slipped out of his grasp. With the same movement she shrugged off her coat and left it hanging over the banister rail. The open front of her jacket showed a black slip and some black lace over white skin faintly marked with tea-coloured freckles.

‘Come upstairs,’ she said in her clear voice.

She held her hand out to lead him but he followed at once, watching the swing of her hips and the tightening of her calf muscles as she climbed the stairs.

Her bedroom was on the second floor, above the drawing room, with the same view of the cathedral front. Nina released the shutters from their wooden recesses and folded them across the windows, securing them neatly with the old catches. Gordon waited at the foot of the bed, watching her. She switched on a lamp on a low table and he saw a scrolled wooden headboard and a plain white cover. There were none of the lace-edged pillows or ancestral teddy bears favoured by Vicky.

Nina took off her red jacket and put it aside. She stepped out of her skirt and he saw that she was wearing stockings with lace tops, and ribbon suspenders. Vicky always wore tights, and he recalled how the mesh paled over the half-moons of her buttocks when she bent down in the closed space of their bedroom.

He stumbled to Nina, reaching for her, his mouth dry. But she evaded him, smiling a little, and he was left standing while she bent and stretched to pull her short slip over her head by the lacy hem. Then she raised first one foot and then the other on to a chair to unhook her stockings from the ribbon tongues. He saw the bunching of the gluteal muscles as she peeled the nylon skin down the freckled whiteness of her thighs.

Nina watched him watching her, evidently gauging the impact of this half-ironic sketch of a striptease.

She shook out the wisps of stocking and laid them tidily across her folded skirt and slip. Then she stood upright, in her black knickers and brassiere, with one arm folded across her chest and the other over her belly.

‘It’s a long time since I undressed in front of a man.’

A man not her husband, Gordon translated, a man not connected to her by the daily familiarity of body textures and scents, sweet or stale, in the uncritical and mundane condition of marriage.

‘You are lovely,’ he said, although he had not yet arranged his impressions into an opinion. ‘Let me look at you.’

Wanting to match her, he unbuckled his belt and undid the trousers of his second-best suit, navy blue with a faint pinstripe. Vicky called it his Tory suit because she thought it made him look like the Home Secretary. He put the trousers over the back of another chair and faced her in his socks and shirt-tails, with his erection tenting the white cotton in front of him. Nina unwound her arms and slid against him, quickly, so he only glimpsed her white belly and the blue shadow between the lace cups of her bra. She unbuttoned his shirt and slid her hands inside it, over the lateral muscles and the collar of flesh around his midriff.

‘Getting fat,’ he whispered with his mouth against her hair.

‘Merely acquiring some solidity.’

Her head was bent. She seemed smaller without her high heels, and more fine-boned. Her shoulders were narrow and marked by bigger freckles, almost blotches. She was looking down, sliding her hand under the elastic waistband of his shorts. Her fingers grasped him. Gordon lifted his hands over his head, like a boxer in victory, to give her the freedom to do what she wanted. He tore open his cuffs and dropped his shirt on the floor. She stretched the elastic ribbing and pulled it down over his hips, to expose him. Her mouth was slightly open, her lower lip protruding. It made her appear solemn, judicious. She moved her fist up and down, so that the head of his penis was shrouded and then revealed again. While they looked at it a tear of moisture bled from the open eye.

It was odd, this slow motion, Gordon thought. He could not remember when he had last felt so avid, but at the same time he was held aside from the burning in his balls and the threatened kick at the base of his spine by the woman’s dreamy detachment.

‘You make my dick stand up and touch my chin,’ he said.

That was better. He saw the fastidious twist at the corner of her mouth, but at the same time there was a drooping and thickening of her eyelids, as if a surge of blood had puffed them out, that made him think she liked to hear him say it.

Nina held him in her hand, weighing his balls. She put her thumb under his shaft and ran it upwards, to the tip, feeling the shiver it drew out of him.

The man rocked on his feet, spreading his toes on her polished floorboards, leaving faint, moist prints. Richard had never used words like ‘dick’. His lovemaking had been tender, affectionate rather than headlong. But this man was not Richard, nor was he anything like Richard. That was a good thing.

She knelt down, gazing at him for a moment, at the thick mat of hair that tapered upwards to the umbilicus, the solid thighs and broad slab of belly. Then, using her fingers to guide it to the right place, she took his penis in her mouth. She ran her tongue around the constricted neck, tasting the salt and iron. Gordon cupped his hands at the back of her skull, bracing his legs apart and arching his back so she could attend to him.

He let himself think of staying like that, swelling into her mouth until he came, but it was no more than an idea, an acknowledgement.

‘Let me look at you,’ he repeated.

He tilted her head back so that he saw her foggy eyes, and then lifted her up. He unhooked her bra and drew the straps off her shoulders, then put his mouth against the red chafe line that changed the colour of the freckles from tea to rust. Her breasts were small with bumpy brown nipples, and they pointed downwards and outwards like unripe fruit. He rubbed the nipples in turn between his fingers as she wound her arm around his neck. She drew him backwards, in an awkward dance step, until the side of the bed caught her behind the knees and they fell on to the white cover. Nina bumped her hips up against him, pushing and trying to guide him with her hands, greedy now. Her eyes were closed, turned inwards into her head. Her breasts fell aside, no longer elastic, and revealed the tender knobs of her breastbone.

Gordon held himself over her for an instant, enjoying this moment of dominance. He splayed his hands over her belly, and then crooked his arm under her hips so he could lift her. He took off her pants and knelt with his knees beneath her buttocks. She had a sparse lick of sandy hair, and a surprisingly tight, flat stomach like a boy’s. Her hip bones jutted prominently on either side. Vicky’s belly was rounded and generous, like the pillows on her bed, even between her pregnancies.

He bent his head over Nina, kneading her skin with the heels of his hands.

‘Not a single stretch mark,’ he marvelled, meaning only to convey his admiration. Vicky’s skin between her navel and the points of her hips was marked with two fans of fine, silvery lines.

‘Not a single pregnancy either.’

‘I’m sorry. That was clumsy of me.’

‘It’s all right. We were happy as we were.’

He did not want to think of her husband at this minute, or of Nina’s past life that he had no knowledge of, nor did he want to remember Vicky and everything else he knew too well. He lowered Nina’s hips and slid away, over the side of the bed, to kneel in front of her. He put his tongue to the wet gingery hair and parted the lips and worked at her until he heard her sigh.

Gordon lifted his head. Her hair was wound across her face like a veil. He moved again to lean over her, big and dark, and she opened her eyes to contemplate his face.

‘I want to fuck you now,’ Gordon said.

Richard had not used words like ‘fuck’ in bed.

‘Yes,’ Nina said.

He pushed her legs wider, excited and made rough by her apparent submission, but she put her hands in the way to stop him.

‘Shouldn’t you use something?’

‘I’ve got some in my jacket pocket.’

After his lunch with Andrew and the retailers he had made an excuse before going back to the office and had hurried into the big Boots in the precinct. He made sure he didn’t know the girl at the checkout, and he had bundled his purchase through with some toothpaste and dental floss. In spite of his forethought, now that the time had come he didn’t want to use one of the things.

‘But I had a medical check-up a month ago, for insurance. A full blood test, everything negative.’

Her eyes were very close to his. The proximity made her appear cross-eyed, greedy.

‘I trust you, then. And I haven’t been with anyone since Richard died. I was always faithful to him before that.’

He didn’t want to hear about this fidelity, a tribute paid to love that was locked and sealed away from him. For answer he moved her hand out of the way and spread her open with his fingers. As he came into her she asked,

‘Are you faithful to Vicky?’

He made the first thrust. ‘Not as of this minute.’

She was hot, and pleasingly tight around him. His entering her seemed to have released some catch. Her face changed and softened. She wound her legs around him and as he found his rhythm her fingers raked over his back and worked his buttocks, pulling him into her. They rolled over, and over again, with their mouths covering each other’s eyes and cheeks and throats.

She was good, Gordon thought. She was responsive and he liked that and he liked the whistle of her breath and the way she came on top of him and worked up and down so her bumpy little breasts hung over his chest with a sheen of sweat gleaming between them. They fitted together, hand in glove.

‘Turn over,’ he whispered. ‘I want to see your backside.’ He saw the concupiscent thickening of her eyelids again. Perhaps her husband hadn’t talked to her in bed.

She did as she was told, turning her head to one side with her mouth open so that a wet patch of saliva formed on the pillow.

He came into her from behind and she stretched out her arms over the coiled sheets, clenching and opening her fists in alternating submission and aggression. Gordon licked her shoulders and rubbed them until the white skin flushed a dull pink, and then they rolled again and she twisted her legs around his waist, trapping him.

‘Now you are mine,’ she said fiercely. She held his wrists too.

‘Is that what you want?’ he whispered. Her hair had fallen back and he could see her face. The skin was loosening over her cheekbones and under her eyes and the recognition of her imperfections, and of his own, filled him with sympathy and compassion for them both.

‘I do now,’ Nina said.

‘I am here now.’

Her mouth looked sore. She bit her lower lip and he kissed it where the teeth marks showed for an instant in the chafed skin. He freed his hands and stroked her face as she tilted her hips upwards, to reach for him. Carnality seemed interleaved with tenderness and he knew that she felt this too because her face had changed again. It had become clear and he could see directly into it, as if the cross-hatched skin had become transparent.

She said ‘Oh,’ seemingly surprised.

He knew she would come soon and he worked at her, both of them panting. When she did come it was with a series of small inhuman yelps that made him think of a nocturnal animal caught in the undergrowth. Her fingers dug into the thick muscles of his back, and her head fell blindly back to offer him the taut white cords of her throat.

Afterwards she was breathless and she laughed, as if still surprised, and held herself against him, rocking them both.

After a while she said, ‘You now. Do you know what I would like?’

‘What would you like?’

She had grown more confident, he noticed, made secure by their success so far and by her own satisfaction. Her eyes were bright and her tongue showed between her teeth.

‘I’d like to drink you.’

Gordon’s breath caught. It had been his first thought when she knelt in front of him, and the suggestion offered so coolly made him stiffen as he had done at the very beginning.

‘Do, then.’

She knelt between his legs and tucked her hair behind her ears with a prim gesture before lowering her mouth to him.

‘Vicky doesn’t like it. She says it makes her feel she is going to choke,’ he betrayed her.

Nina lifted her head for a second. ‘Braggart.’ Her coolness struck him with a jolt of lust.

He came quickly, feeling her mouth hard and soft, with a spasm that seemed to wring his heart.

She moved to lie beside him, her lips shiny, and he tasted the juice of himself when he kissed her.

‘Thank you,’ he offered bathetically, but she moved to stop him. She put her arms around him, motherly now, and rearranged the crumpled coil of the quilt around their shoulders.

Nina lay quietly, looking up at the contours of the shuttered windows and the ceiling over her head. The room seemed to have changed its dimensions. It was enlarged, made to seem a light space full of humming air by her unexpected happiness. She wanted to lock her arms more tightly around the man, holding him to her so as to preserve this minute, but she made herself stay still. She would not think of what would happen next, only of what had just happened.

‘It seems very simple, doesn’t it?’

Gordon had drifted almost into sleep. He had slept badly the night before, in intermittent snatches disturbed by dreams. For a second he was surprised by where he was, and by Nina’s voice. He roused himself with an effort.

‘Sex? Or else as complicated as … molecular biology. Or astrophysics.’

‘It starts off simple.’ She meant between the two of them, new as they were now, before they had to make further reckonings. She wanted to have that acknowledged, to exonerate themselves for the time being.

‘I know what you mean,’ he helped her, ‘But I don’t agree. Every time you take someone new to bed, after the first person, it is a process of re-creating yourself through a new pair of eyes, a different set of sensors. Each attempt at re-creation has to refer to all the successes and failures that have gone before.’

His hand had rested in the hollow of her waist. He lifted it and settled it higher, over the convex span of her ribs, and she felt the two hand-shaped patches of skin cooling and warming by exchange.

‘It becomes more complicated with each renewal, because each of you brings to bed more history under the skin and behind the eyes.’

He had been thinking of Vicky, and home, and superimposing this woman and her bedroom over the other, noting where the images overlapped and where the differences lay, shadowy outlines like an improperly registered colour print.

Nina said, ‘That sounds … intensely narcissistic.’

Gordon laughed. ‘I am sure you are right. But not simple.’

He intended it as an oblique tribute, wanting her not to think that he had just fucked her out of blind lust. But he was also wary as he lay with her arms round him and her bedcovers heaped over them. He was not sure what expectations she might have. He thought of their separate histories, skipping connections in his head that led him to ask, more abruptly than he might otherwise have done,

‘What was your husband like?’

‘In bed?’

‘I didn’t mean particularly in bed.’

‘He was very gentle.’

Nina turned away a little, stretching out on her back. The happiness was still with her. It did not threaten to become dislodged and float away.

‘Can you stay? Stay the night, I mean?’

Gordon thought. The idea was tempting, and the alternative was not. If he got up early enough in the morning, he could drive quietly home to feed the cats and change his shirt and be in the office by eight-thirty.

‘If I may.’

He saw that she was pleased. She turned back again, cuddling up to him as Vicky did. He was more awake now. The images of there and here did not overlap or blur together any longer. They stood apart, sharp in their differences. He let himself savour them.

‘We had a very nice life,’ Nina said slowly. ‘We had a lot of friends, we did all kinds of things, but really we were doing them just the two of us, on our own together.’ She wanted to tell Gordon about what it had been like, but she chose deliberately colourless words, thinking to spare them both.

‘Go on,’ he said. He settled her head against his shoulder to encourage her.

‘We had a house in London, and a house in Norfolk not far from the sea. Richard was a weekend painter, and he liked the sky. We used to walk on the beach, and bring back driftwood. There was an open fire, and there was always a debate about which pieces to burn and which to put on the shelf to admire.’

Gordon relaxed. His body weight seemed to increase, sinking downwards into a comfortable place.

‘Go on,’ he said again.

‘When he died, at first I only felt angry. For a long time, it felt like a terribly long time, I was so angry with him for breaking our contract.’

‘What happened?’

‘He was in Norfolk, on his own. It was midweek and I was in London because my agent and I were meeting an American publisher. Richard sometimes went there alone to work, using the fax and the telephone. He liked the peace and the isolation. On the morning he died he had been working in the garden. The wheelbarrow was on the path, and there was a rake and a spade beside it. He had a severe asthma attack. A neighbour found him, lying between the wheelbarrow and the kitchen door.’

Gordon said nothing, but he held her and stroked her hair.

‘I should have been there. He shouldn’t have been doing anything strenuous without his inhaler. He needn’t have died.’

When Nina had reached the house with Patrick Richard had already been taken away, but she could see him lying on the path under the crab apple tree, twisted over his defeated lungs. Dry-eyed and with a stiff face she had made the neighbour describe exactly what she had seen.

‘Are you still angry?’

Nina told him, ‘No. It’s six months ago, now.’

But he could feel her loneliness. The hunger it generated in her was magnetic, and also faintly repellent. He felt a weight of sympathy coupling with his liking for her, and a tinge of alarm. The alarm concentrated under his diaphragm like the onset of indigestion.

‘Go on talking,’ he said. Nina settled more comfortably against him. As he listened to her Gordon was conscious of the planes and angles of her house around them, an unknown place with the potential to become familiar. He felt already that he knew this room, and would remember the details of it if he never saw it again.

Nina told him about Richard and their life before his death. She told him small things that made pictures of ordinary days and he liked the way she did this for him, filling in a domestic background as a painter at a canvas. She described the house in London, and he remembered reading about the conversion in an architecture magazine and was impressed. He felt his perceptions of her changing all the time. He was sleepy again, and although he struggled against it he dropped into a doze for a few seconds. When he woke up again it was with the momentary impression that he knew her very well, better than he knew Vicky.

Nina realized that he was almost asleep. She watched him as she talked, and saw the involuntary flickers of his facial muscles, and the relaxation of his jaw that left his mouth a little open as his breathing steadied and deepened. She switched off the light and turned in the darkness to curl herself against him. In his sleep he put his heavy arm over her hip, and she knew this was how he must lie with Vicky.

When Nina woke up in the morning the feeling of lightness was still with her. It was dark in the room behind the heavy shutters, but she could make out the shape of Gordon’s features as he slept. She remembered the night and the happiness from it was secure, even though she knew they must now face the day. She lay, memorizing the outlines of his mouth and eyes so she would be able to recall them when he had gone. At last, her stare penetrated his sleep and he stirred and opened his eyes to see her. Almost at once he was looking for his watch.

‘Twenty past seven,’ Nina told him. It was early to her.

He sat up. ‘Is it? As late as that? I must go.’

‘Do you have to?’

She had imagined they would have breakfast together. She had even planned how she would lay a tray and bring it up.

‘Yes. I have to be in by eight-thirty.’ He was thinking of the way home, a hot shower and turning the car round again for the office. He put his hand out to touch her cheek. ‘I’m sorry. Perhaps I should have gone home last night.’

‘I’m glad you didn’t.’ She knew that he was about to get out of bed and leave her. ‘I’m glad you were here. I was happy when I woke up. I lay and looked at your face. You made me feel happy.’ She knew it was too much to tell him but she smiled anyway.

‘That’s good. I’m just sorry I have to go,’ he repeated.

He leaned across to kiss her and then moved quickly out of the bed. He went across the landing to the bathroom and lifted the wooden seat of the lavatory. There were jars of cosmetics and coloured bottles on the glass shelves, and he looked at them as he emptied his bladder. He avoided even a glance at himself in the mirror.

Nina had propped herself against the pillows. He retrieved his clothes and dressed himself. He felt clumsy in his socks and underclothes with her watching him. When he was ready to leave he went to the end of the bed, feeling scratchy and constricted in his creased Tory suit. She swung her legs out from under the quilt. When she stood up he saw her body and remembered it, and at once he wanted to push her back into the nest of heat and strawy scents they had made. Nina wrapped herself in a striped bathrobe and tied the belt. She came and stood close to him and he put his arms round her, letting her warmth seep into him.

‘Thank you,’ he said.

There was a movement of her shoulders, not quite a shrug. She did not want thanks, but reassurance.

‘I’ll call you,’ Gordon said, evading her need.

Nina nodded. ‘Yes.’

He kissed her forehead, and then let her go. She watched him to the door of her bedroom and made no attempt to follow him down the stairs. Gordon descended through the dark house and let himself out into the street.

It was only just light, and Dean’s Row was deserted. Across the green he saw the scaffolders’ wagon arriving with a load of poles and planking. Quickly he turned the corner into the narrow alley. It was a relief to shut himself into the sanctuary of his car.

He drove around the perimeter road, through the first wave of commuter traffic, passing the turning that led to the hospital. He did not think he had been seen by anyone who knew him; he was safe if he could reach home. He listened to the weather and traffic reports without taking any note of them. Memories and impressions of the night were beginning to sort themselves inside his head. When the traffic summary was replaced by rock music he found that he was smiling, and drumming his fingers on the wheel.

There was one more risky point. When he turned into his road he craned down the length of it, but there was no one about. His neighbours’ new Mercedes was parked in their driveway where it could be properly admired, and the upstairs and downstairs curtains were closed. No one else was likely to have noticed that he had been out all night. Gordon swung into the drive of his solid, Victorian house. Everything was secure. He locked the car and went quietly round the side of the house, past the conservatory, to let himself in through the back door.

The kitchen was warm and silent. He heard a rattle and a bang beside him as Alice’s cat slid in through its flap. The animal came to rub itself against his legs, purring mechan-ically. Gordon rubbed his chin with the tips of his fingers. He had fifteen minutes: time for a shave and a shower, and even a cup of coffee. He was whistling softly as he put the kettle on.

Gordon was glad to find his home quiet and safe, as if the night had never happened.

But for all his sense of relief and reprieve, he knew already that he could not bear the thought of not taking Nina to bed again.