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 14

It was a cold December, and the fields and hills beyond the city were stilled and drained of their colours by night after night of hard frost. A Christmas tree was put up on the cathedral green, exactly as Nina remembered from her childhood. Looking out at it from her windows she thought that even the strings of coloured bulbs that twisted through the branches were the same.

Darcy and Hannah Clegg sent out elaborate printed invitations for their Christmas Eve party. It was to be the fifth successive year that they had held the party, and it had long been established as the social centrepiece of the couples’ year.

Nina put the Cleggs’ invitation on the mantelpiece in her drawing room, from where Gordon picked it out from amongst the Christmas cards. He had called to see her after a visit to the cathedral. The whole of the west front was now masked with scaffolding and protective sheeting.

‘Are you going to this?’

‘Yes, I am. Why not, really?’

They were edgy with each other today, although she had run downstairs at the sound of his knock and when the door was closed they had fallen back against it in a rush of eagerness for one another.

‘I can only stay for a few minutes,’ he had whispered, while his fingers were already busy with the buttons of her shirt.

Afterwards they had pulled their clothes together again, and stood uneasily in the drawing room in front of the cold afternoon hearth. Gordon had refused her offer of tea, explaining that Andrew was waiting for him at the office.

Nina was galled by what she interpreted as a suggestion that she should stay away from the party. It would be the first time Gordon would have to face her with Vicky beside him.

‘I didn’t mean that you shouldn’t come,’ he said at once, taking her hands. ‘I want to see you, every possible time, wherever it is. I’m only afraid that I won’t be able to hide how much I do want it.’

‘You will be able to. It will be like at the Frosts’. Easier than that, because Vicky will be there.’

‘It isn’t easy.’

His answer was so simple, so heartfelt, that Nina saw she was unreasonable. It was no more than the unpalatable truth that she would be jealous of Vicky, and it was also true that she would have to learn to swallow her jealousy and digest it, because there was nothing else to be done.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said at once.

They held on to each other as if they could keep everything else at bay with the tenderness between them. Their separate identities miraculously melted together, and they were convinced that they understood each other entirely. So it was that they swung in a moment from distance to delight.

To Gordon, the spare Georgian house across from the cathedral was both a sanctuary and a snare. When he was away from it he thought of it constantly, yet when he came into it he moved cautiously, always reckoning the time he could spare in minutes and replaying in his head the evasions he had made in order to reach it.

Today Andrew had been clearly impatient when he had announced that he must make another visit to the cathedral. Had he only imagined it was the dawn of suspicion? There had been several half-explained absences lately. Yet Gordon could not bear to think of staying away from Dean’s Row. Nina filled his head and his imaginings. He believed that he now knew how a compulsive gambler or an addict felt, and at the same time was repelled by his connection of Nina with such things.

He asked her, with his mouth moving against her forehead, ‘When can we meet again?’

He felt the small movement of her shoulders, a gesture of impotence rather than carelessness.

‘When you next can spare an hour.’

That was how it had been since the day of buying Nina’s car. They had met four or five times, always hurriedly, always with a sense of the rest of the world lying in wait for them.

The minutes of an hour added up for Gordon now. He could almost hear them ticking, like a bomb. It was a long time; it was hardly time to draw breath.

‘I’m sorry,’ he offered in his turn. ‘That is just how it is. I’d spend every hour with you, if I could.’

Nina nodded, and then lifted her head. He could see the tiny whorls and knots of colour in her irises, and the black pupils fractionally dilating. He imagined the pull of the ciliary muscles on the tiny lens within her eyes, and the twin inverted images of himself laid on the retina only to be righted again by the brain’s conviction.

That was the brain’s power, he thought, to make logic out of what it saw clearly to be the wrong way up.

‘I’m going to drive to Bristol tomorrow. I want to give the car a proper trial,’ Nina said.

Since she had taken delivery of the red Mercedes it had spent almost all its time in the garage of the cobbled mews behind Dean’s Row.

She added, ‘I need to buy some materials for Marcelle’s nativity costumes.’

‘I’ll come with you,’ Gordon said, obliterating with a grandiose stroke the next day’s obligations. Her pleasure immediately rewarded him.

‘Will you?’

‘Somehow,’ he promised, already ambushed by his own anxiety.

Marcelle was driving to work at the Pond School. She was currently teaching on one of the college’s best money-spinners, a twelve-week intensive course designed to bring novices up to the standard where they might look for work as ski-chalet cooks. Her current set included Cathy Clegg, one of Darcy’s nineteen-year-old twins, who was a perfect example of the Pond’s introductory cooking student. Cathy’s only real interest in food was in how much or how little of it she could consume before a millimetre of surplus flesh appeared on her miniskirted hips.

As she drove Marcelle was reflecting on the lack of enthusiasm from her class, and in another compartment of her mind she was running through the afternoon’s demonstration. She would be showing the students how to make ciabatta bread, and enlarging on some techniques associated with bread and dough preparation before the next morning’s practical session.

Her attention was fully engaged and she drove the familiar route automatically, almost unseeingly.

Marcelle had taken a roundabout way via the outer bypass instead of facing the morning’s traffic through the middle of the town. By this route she would cross a branch of the main railway line that ran out to the west of Grafton. The fading echo of mainline expresses heard from the cathedral green was supposed to mean that rain was coming.

The branch line was not much used, but today, as she looked ahead over the flat crowns of the hawthorn hedges, Marcelle saw the red and white arms of the level-crossing barrier begin to descend. When she rounded a bend and could see the crossing itself, the gates were already down and the red warning lights were flashing to indicate that a train was coming. Marcelle muttered, ‘Damn’ and slowed to a stop in front of the gate.

On her own side of the line hers was the only waiting car. At first, because she was busy with her thoughts, she registered only that there was another vehicle drawing up on the far side beyond the tracks.

Then, after two or three seconds, some recollection of shine and redness made her look again.

Immediately she recognized Nina’s new Mercedes. The flashness of the car had given rise to some wry remarks amongst the Grafton wives. Marcelle saw that it was Nina at the wheel of the red car, and that there was a passenger with her.

The train was approaching. She could hear the rumble of it, and out of the corner of her eye she saw a blur of movement as the dark shape rolled around a bend towards the crossing.

In that moment Marcelle realized that Nina and her passenger were laughing together, and that there was a shiver of intimacy between them that she couldn’t have described, or accounted for by their expressions or postures. She was only certain that it was there, and that the couple had not seen her, and that the man was Gordon Ransome.

A second later the engine of the train hid them from her sight. It was a heavy diesel pulling a line of clanking goods wagons. Marcelle counted them as they went by, sixteen in all, and then the swaying brown box of the guard’s van at the end. In the minute that it took the train to pass she collected her thoughts, and began to compose the simple explanations that would account for Gordon and Nina laughing together, alone in her car on a weekday morning, enjoying a closeness that seemed to exclude the rest of the world.

The guard’s van swept by, reopening her view like a curtain being drawn back.

Marcelle saw Nina’s hands still braced on the wheel, two small white patches. She also saw that the two heads were slowly drawing apart, and she knew for certain, as surely as she also knew who the two people were, that they had kissed while they were waiting for the train to pass by.

The red lights at the side of the barrier stopped flashing. In a moment the gates would automatically swing upwards once again. But while the two cars waited, separated by the rails and the red and white bars, Gordon and Nina saw Marcelle watching them.

In her turn, Marcelle saw how their faces turned into stiff ovals pocked with the dark holes of shock.

The rear of the train had disappeared. The gates silently lifted, moving through an invisible arc until the twin arms pointed upwards and the way was left clear.

Both drivers eased their cars into gear and they crept towards each other over the wooden ramp. Marcelle lifted her hand in a wave and Gordon and Nina both smiled back at her. Even as they passed each other Marcelle recognized what it took for them to overlay their expressions of alarm with smiles of conventional greeting.

Then the Mercedes was gone, dwindling in her rear view mirror and vanishing around the bend in the road.

Marcelle drove on towards the Pond School, trying to lay straight in her mind the implications of what she had seen. Two miles further on, while she was still thinking of Vicky with Helen strapped to her front in a baby sling, she caught a glimpse of Gordon’s grey Peugeot. He had left it in a corner of the car park belonging to a roadside restaurant.

‘Did she see you?’ Nina gasped. ‘Did she recognize you?’

‘Of course she did.’

Pale-faced, Gordon stared ahead at the road as he tried to work out the significance of what had happened.

‘She couldn’t have seen us kiss. The train was in the way,’ Nina said.

‘I think she must have seen enough.’

How could they, he wondered, have imagined that they were invisible and impregnable, just because they were so happy to be together?

They were both shaking. Their instinct was to pull off the road and find comfort and reassurance in touching each other, but to do so where they could be seen would be to compound their absurd mistake. Gordon was asking himself, even now, Where can we go in future? Where will we be safe?

‘There could be a perfectly ordinary explanation. Your car could have broken down. I was giving you a lift. I just passed by. Gordon?’

She was seeking his reassurance, and he tried to give it.

‘Yes. Maybe.’

‘What shall we do, then?’

He couldn’t think of anything in particular. It seemed now inevitable that someone would have seen them, and he was amazed by his preceding carelessness. ‘Nothing. I don’t believe there is anything we can do, except brazen it out if we have to with a breakdown story.’

‘Do you think Marcelle will say anything to Vicky?’

He thought about it. ‘No, I don’t suppose so. Not directly. Perhaps she’ll try to warn her in some more oblique way. I don’t know. What do women say to each other in these circumstances?’

‘I have never been in these circumstances before.’

The edginess came back again as they veered from complicity to opposition.

They drove for a little way in silence. Gordon was trying to work out what would happen if he told Nina now that it must end, before anything else happened. But it was only a distant speculation. They had already come too far to imagine retracing their steps.

They came to a crossroads, and a sign indicating that they were only a few miles from the motorway. Nina lifted her hands from the wheel for an instant.

‘What do you want to do? Shall we go on?’

He answered at once, ‘Yes. Let’s get as far away from here as we can, if only for a few hours.’

His certainty won her back again, and her spirits lifted. Their story would be believed, there was no reason why it should not be. It had been a warning; they would be more careful in the future.

She put her foot down and the Mercedes shot forward.

In the demonstration kitchen Marcelle went through the motions of mixing and kneading her bread dough while a dozen students lounging on the benches in front of her yawned and whispered and made notes. Cathy Clegg sat at the front, with her long legs in thick black tights negligently propped up on the dais. She twined an escaped strand of streaky blonde hair through her fingers as she gazed out of the window.

Marcelle had given the lesson often enough to be able to do it on auto-pilot. As she worked and talked a segment of her mind slid over the morning’s conundrum and then away from it, to wonder about the other Grafton couples.

What she had seen made her feel precarious. She had not confessed even to Janice that she was afraid her own marriage was faltering; her communications even with her closest friend about this were always on the level of wry jokes, jokes that turned on the helplessness and childishness of their men. They were never to do with their own loneliness, or disappointment, and even so Janice sometimes shrank from this comic half-truth-telling to reaffirm her own contentment.

‘But they aren’t so bad, the two of them, are they, Mar? They could be much worse, after all.’

She would wrinkle her nose in the pretty way she had, and smooth the loose folds of her skirt over her hips.

Their men could be drunks, or womanizers, Marcelle supplied for her. Or violent, or cruel or criminal – but those were the traits of men in other places, weren’t they? Husbands in television documentaries, newspaper articles. They were nothing to do with the steady couples and the security of Grafton, with its golf club and good schools and with the golden cathedral at its heart.

Marcelle had assumed it was only her own marriage that was dying away into silence, and that it must be doing so through some fault of her own. If she could be better in some way, she reasoned, then Michael would warm to her again. In the meantime she would not admit that she was afraid, even to Janice. She didn’t want to betray too much, to admit that there was so much darkness beneath the smooth, shining surface of their lives.

This morning’s glimpse of Gordon with Nina had not troubled her merely for Vicky’s sake, although that did concern her also. It was more as if in the moment at the level crossing some stretched-taut piece of insulating fabric had been pierced, and now the pinprick was tearing apart to become a gaping hole. Through the hole came a cold and threatening draught of suspicion that blew all around her. It was not just her own life that was in difficulties. The placid and normal world that she struggled to maintain had become as precarious as a conjuring trick. What was the reality in Grafton, Marcelle wondered, and what was the illusion?

The oven pinger interrupted her thoughts.

‘Mrs Wickham? The bread?’ a student helpfully reminded her.

‘Thank you, Emma.’

There had been a time when Marcelle had found it definitely uplifting to cook good food for lovers and friends, although for some reason it had seemed not quite acceptable to admit as much. The young were less worried about such things now. But in the last years – for how long had she felt it? – cooking had become a matter of work, and of repetitive family duty.

Art and nature, Marcelle thought, remembering one of her oblique conversations with Janice. Gardening, and cooking, and sex. Where had the subtle and diverse pleasures gone to?

It was four o’clock. She could hear the clatter of other students in the corridor outside.

‘That’s all for today,’ she told her students.

She left the class and went quickly to the staff room to collect her coat, avoiding the tea-drinking gaggle of other teachers, and emerged from the front door. Immediately she caught sight of Cathy ahead of her, who must have skipped out without doing her share of the clearing. Cathy ran down the steps towards a young man who had just clambered out of an illegally parked Golf. Loud music issued from the wound-down window.

Cathy shouted, ‘Barney!’

Marcelle paused at the top of the steps, wrapping her arms around her chest to keep out the cold. Her breath clouded in front of her.

Barney Clegg greeted his sister with a double feint to her head, and then a bear-hug.

‘Hey, I’m home, are you pleased? Good day’s cooking?’

‘Great. The cooking was okay. Here, have some bread, you’re always hungry.’

He took the chunk that she produced for him and gnawed enthusiastically at it.

‘This is great. Did you make it?’

‘Don’t be a dope. Marcelle did. She’d be thrilled if I had. Wouldn’t you, Marcelle?’

She had come quietly down the steps behind Cathy. The two Cleggs turned their smiles on her. They both had long upper lips, and very white, perfectly even teeth that proclaimed expensive orthodontistry. Marcelle could see their joint resemblance, presumably to their mother, whom she had never met.

‘You could, Cathy, if you felt like it.’ She knew she sounded like a schoolmistress, not the bestower of culinary inspiration to last a lifetime. The realization depressed her. ‘Hello, Barney. Are you home for Christmas?’

Darcy’s eldest child was away studying at agricultural college.

‘Yup. Come to liven the old place up a bit.’ He grinned engagingly at her, displaying his father’s charm and what would turn into the same creases at the corners of his eyes. Barney was over six feet tall, broad-shouldered and blond-haired, with a healthy aura that suggested he spent much of his time in the fresh air. In his trainers and American baseball jacket with white leather sleeves he seemed huge, towering over Marcelle like some benevolent if not very intelligent giant.

‘So, how’re you, Marcelle? Apart from having to teach Cathy, that is? And the family?’

Cathy swiped at him with her black leather rucksack. They were like healthy animal cubs, Marcelle thought, playing outside the nest. She smiled up at Barney.

‘Very well, thank you. But I must go and pick them up from Janice’s, or they’ll be wondering where I am. Have a happy holiday, won’t you?’

As Marcelle crossed the road to the car park the two Cleggs piled into the Golf and slammed the doors, calling their goodbyes to her. The car accelerated away in a diminishing blast of noise and music.

It was Janice’s day for the school run. When Marcelle reached the Frosts’ house the winter daylight had all but gone and the street lights made the sky look thick and black. Janice’s car was already in the driveway. The children were in the kitchen, and so was Vicky Ransome with her baby and the two little girls.

Marcelle took the mug of tea that Janice handed her and gave her children the attention they needed. Jonathan had scored a goal in a football game, and Daisy was anxious about the evening’s singing rehearsal.

‘Well done, Jon. There’s plenty of time, Daisy. We’ll have supper and then go to the cathedral. Look, William isn’t worried, is he?’

William didn’t take his eyes from the television screen.

Marcelle sat down at the table with her mug of tea, facing Vicky.

Vicky’s open blouse showed the strong stalk of her neck, and her head nodded tenderly over the contented baby. While she watched Vicky Marcelle became sure that she could not possibly say anything about what she had seen. Her anxiety about what it meant together with the responsibility for keeping silent pressed heavily on her. She wondered if there were other secrets, secrets that she could not guess at, inhabiting the room and separating the three of them.

‘How are you?’ she heard herself asking Vicky.

Vicky looked up. Her wings of hair swung back to expose her cheeks and the collar of flesh, not yet dissolved, that pregnancy had laid down around her jawline.

‘It’s tiring, with three of them. Alice wakes up often at night, always when this one has just gone off. I spend a lot of time creaking across the landing from one bedroom to the other, hurrying to stifle the cries. And then sitting in the baby’s room, feeding her, imagining we are the only people in the world who are awake. There is that particular silence in the small hours that seems unbreakable.’

‘I remember.’

‘But Gordon is being very good. Better by far than he was with the other two.’

Marcelle could well imagine that Gordon would come home and guiltily try to compensate for what he did elsewhere. She felt hot shivers of indignation directed at him, and at Nina.

‘That’s nice,’ she said pointlessly, seeing the red car again and the two bewitched profiles sliding apart from each other.

Later the same evening Vicky was watching television. She was sitting in her usual chair with her feet curled up beneath her and her hands wrapped around a mug of hot milk. It was only the reminder that the milk must not be spilt that kept her from dozing off. She was tired, but there was no point in going to bed to sleep before Helen had woken for her last feed. The baby lay in her basket on the sofa. Vicky drank some of her milk, and the skin that had formed on the surface of it caught on her top lip. The act of rubbing it away reminded her strongly of being a little girl, sitting in her dressing gown ready for bed while her mother listened to The Archers. The comforting childhood feeling of being secure and in the right place pervaded the present, too, falling around her and enclosing the children and Gordon in its warmth.

In the kitchen Gordon tidied up after their dinner, a Marks & Spencer curried chicken dish that he was not particularly fond of. There was a milk-rimed saucepan filled with tepid water on the draining board, and Vicky had stood a bunch of dirty cutlery in it to soak. Yellow-crusted eggshells and toast fragments left from the children’s tea had fallen out of a bent tinfoil dish on the worktop, and there was a high water mark of tea leaves and whitish scum clinging to the sides of the sink. Next to the tinfoil dish was the clear polycarbonate sterilizing drum for Helen’s feeding equipment. The bottles and teats floated murkily inside it.

Gordon set about tidying up. Vicky was not a fastidious housekeeper, and he preferred domestic order and cleanliness. For a long time, they had tried not to let this difference be a source of irritation between them.

As he worked, Gordon thought deliberately about Nina. He set himself the test of recalling the shape of her hands and fingernails, the way her hair grew back from her forehead, the exact timbre of her voice. The details came to him without effort, but invested with clear importance that was separate from the jumble of everything else that made up his life. He knew that he was in love with her.

When he was satisfied with the order of the kitchen he went through to the living room to find Vicky. When she saw him she pushed out her jaw in a yawn that turned into a lazy smile, and stretched her arms with the fingers bent inwards at the knuckles in a way that made him think of a cat.

‘Vicky?’

He was exhausted with the weight of having to keep the truth from her, and by the opposing need to tell her, to blurt out what was happening and share the bewilderment of it with her.

‘Mmm?’

I’ve fallen in love with Nina. I want to live with her. I don’t know how not to be with her all the time. How can I explain that to you?

‘Did you see Marcelle today?’

She saw us at the level crossing. I know what she saw, and therefore what she knows.

‘Yes. She came to pick the kids up from Janice’s while I was over there this afternoon. Why?’

Marcelle had said nothing, then. Not yet.

‘No reason, really. It seems a while since we saw the Wickhams. I passed her in the car this morning, which made me think of it.’

The room seemed to shiver around him, with all its accumulated weight of familiarity, curtains and covers chosen, books collected, photographs and mementoes and worn patches accumulated over the years lived through together. It shivered with the precarious balance of the necessary truth against his merciful deception.

Vicky sighed. ‘We should have an evening, I know. But, to be honest, I don’t think I’ve got the energy to do it. Perhaps we could have some people in over Christmas?’

He put his hand on her shoulder. There was a pad of flesh there, and he felt the dent where the broad strap of her nursing bra bit into it. He knew her so well; he saw her set in her separate place like a fly in amber, or a fish held fast in the winter ice, and himself beside her, a way apart. The two of them no longer flowed together, they didn’t blur and coalesce and give off energy by their combination as they once had done.

‘You don’t have to bother about anything like that. We’ll only do it if you want to.’

Vicky stretched herself again, luxuriating in his concern for her.

‘All right. Only if we both feel like it. Is that Helen waking up? Have a look for me.’

He leaned over the basket. The baby’s eyes were open. They were very deep and dark in her tiny red face, and they stared straight up into his.

‘Yes, she is awake. Do you want her?’

Vicky undid her front buttons in answer to him. He saw the armoury of her underclothes, and then the veined blue-whiteness of the overfull breast when she released it. The loose flesh of her belly swelled up in another curve below it. There was a tissue pad in her bra cup that gave off a stale-milk smell. He thought of Nina’s spare, freckled body and its touching knobs of bone.

Gordon lifted the baby carefully out of the basket. Her heavy head wobbled against him and he cupped it in his hand, noticing how the silky skin wrinkled over the hard, fragile skull. As he held her with her tiny face against his cheek he felt a rising up of pain inside him that made him want to cry out. He breathed in the scent from the downy head and the pain grew so acute that he did not know how he could contain it.

Then Vicky held her empty arms out for the baby, and he handed his daughter over to her.

The evening before the dress rehearsal for the nativity play Marcelle and Nina met at the Wickhams’ house. The two women had not seen each other since the morning of the level crossing. Nina brought with her the animal masks that she had made in her studio over the last few days. She had taken a lot of trouble with them, as if doing so would somehow atone for everything else.

In Marcelle’s dining room Nina took the masks one by one out of their wrappings and laid them out for her approval. They were very light and simple, stylized suggestions of animal faces rather than attempts at realism, but Marcelle could see at once how effective they would be.

‘They are good,’ she said, picking up one of the lambs to examine it more closely. She held it to her face, and regarded Nina through the oval, slanting eye holes. Then she lowered the mask again and the two women looked straight at each other.

‘Are you sure they are what you wanted?’ Nina asked.

‘Yes. Really, they’re perfect. I could never have made anything half so good.’

Marcelle wrapped them carefully and put them aside. There were play costumes all round the room, arranged on hangers hooked to the picture rail, everything labelled and pressed ready for the dress rehearsal.

There was a moment’s silence.

Marcelle wondered what she should say, whether there was some word of caution or advice or admonition for Vicky’s sake that she might offer. Nothing came into her head, and she saw Nina twisting her wedding ring round and round her finger. The ring appeared too loose for her. She felt sad, and sorry for Nina as well as Vicky.

Nina also waited. She didn’t know Marcelle well enough, but she wished she could confide in her. Could she plead with her now, Don’t judge us too harshly. Don’t assume it is only what you think, a bald and commonplace act of adultery.

But then, how else could she explain what it was to Vicky’s friend? By emphasizing her own need, or Gordon’s, or the happiness that they generated for each other when they were together?

There was nothing, she realized, that she could say to excuse herself or Gordon. The weight of dislike and mistrust coming from Marcelle was no more than she should expect.

Neither of them spoke, and the silence lengthened into awkwardness. It was Marcelle who broke it, at last.

‘Thank you for helping me out. It must have taken hours of your time.’

Now they could not mention what they both knew because the moment for it had slipped past. Marcelle was angry with herself, and at the two of them for placing her in this dilemma.

‘It didn’t take that long,’ Nina lied. ‘I’m glad there was something useful I could do.’

Marcelle would not tell anyone, Nina was finally sure of that. We must be careful from now on, she thought, experi-encing a surprising surge of relief and gratitude that made her almost lightheaded.

Michael Wickham looked in to the dining room. It was after eight, but he was formally dressed as if he had only just come in from the hospital. Nina had the impression that he was irritated by the sight of them hovering with their masks and by the clutter of costumes, but he made the offer of a drink politely enough.

‘Yes, do stay and have a drink,’ Marcelle echoed. ‘A drink, at least. I feel that I ought to be offering you dinner, after all you have done.’

‘Is there any dinner?’ Michael dryly interrupted.

‘Yes. In half an hour.’

Gordon had promised Nina that he would telephone this evening. Vicky would be out of the house for two hours, after the children were asleep. She said quickly, ‘I can’t stay even for a drink, but thank you anyway. If there’s anything else last-minute I can do …’

Marcelle did not suggest anything. Nina said good night to the Wickhams and drove back to Dean’s Row.

*

‘Did Marcelle say anything?’ Gordon asked. He was sitting on the edge of the double bed, looking out beyond the undrawn bedroom curtains to the grape-black sky. There were toys and baby clothes on the floor by his feet.

‘No.’

It was one of their flat, melancholy telephone conversations. Sometimes they could forget the distance and talk as if they were touching each other, but tonight everything they said seemed to convey less than they meant. They both wondered what they were doing, begging questions, making these banal offerings of words into thin, humming space.

‘When can I see you again?’ Nina asked. She twisted the spiral cord of the telephone around her little finger.

‘I don’t know. I’m not sure, it’s not a good week. And Andrew made some crack this evening about my disappearing acts.’

Nina wondered why he should have to account for himself to Andrew, but she only said, ‘Does that make it difficult? I’m sorry.’

‘There’s no reason for you to be sorry.’ With an effort, wanting to change the direction, he said, ‘I love you.’

‘I know,’ Nina answered soberly.

It was plain that the mood would not change, and neither could offer the other any comfort. Gordon tried to imagine how it would be if he left the house and the children and drove straight to her.

‘I’ll call you soon,’ he promised.

‘Yes. Please call.’

She hung up, wanting to sever the connection for herself.

The night of the nativity play came.

Nina had imagined that she would not go, but when it was time she found herself drawn across the cathedral green to join the people who gathered together in convivial groups at the west door. After all, she told herself, she could not hide in her house for ever.

The chapter house was packed. Nina slipped quietly around the octagonal margin, looking for an empty place on one of the benches. She nodded to the handful of familiar faces in the crowd as she passed by. At length she found a single seat, removed from anyone she knew, and sat down with her hands folded in her lap. Marcelle and Michael sat near the front, with Jonathan fidgeting in between them. Marcelle felt a flutter of nerves for Daisy’s sake. Stella Rose sat on the other side of Marcelle. Her face was calm as she gazed intently upwards at the geometrical tracery of the windows. Jimmy Rose was a Catholic. He very rarely chose to accompany his wife to the great barn, as he called the cathedral.

The Frosts and Toby, nagged into a dark blazer for the occasion, sat two rows behind them. By tradition, they would join the Wickhams later for a drink. Andrew always jovially referred to this occasion as the Christmas kick-off. Janice knew and greeted almost everybody in the Grafton audience.

Nina saw the Cleggs come in. Hannah was wearing ankle-length dark mink, her blonde hair in striking contrast to the smooth fur. Hannah held Laura’s hand and Darcy guided Freddie. The two small children were dressed in double-breasted dark blue coats with velvet collars. Behind their father came Cathy and Lucy, attracting their due of covertly or openly admiring glances. Following the twins was a big, blond young man Nina had never seen before. When he turned sideways to ease between the benches she saw his profile, and recognized the family resemblance.

She had been looking at the Clegg boy, and then her glance travelled away, drawn along a valley between the row of heads. With the shock that was now becoming familiar, she saw Gordon. His two little girls sat between him and Vicky. Vicky was on the end of a row, with a white bundle in her arms. Her hair had been cut into a neat, shiny bob. All four of them were staring straight ahead, a model family, quietly waiting for the play to begin.

There was a movement to Nina’s right, at the great double doors of the chapter house. Then there was an organ chord and the cathedral choristers came slowly forward, two by two, in their cassocks and snow-white surplices.

They were singing, and the chapter house fell silent.

Once in Royal David’s city, the choir sang.

William Frost sang a solo verse. His voice was perfect, rounded and strong and pure, and it rose as effortlessly as a hawk riding an air thermal. Under the square-cut fringe of fair hair the boy’s mouth made an innocent secondary oval within the choirboy oval of his face.

Through the doors of the chapter house came two children dressed as Joseph and Mary. There was the Mary-blue robe that Nina had last seen hanging from the picture rail in Marcelle’s dining room. Mary, awed and solemn-faced, was leaning on a third child who paced between them. This boy was wearing a plain grey leotard with a dark cross etched on the back from shoulder to hip, and his face was covered by Nina’s donkey mask.

Nina and Star Rose and the Grafton couples and their children sat with the other people under the great fan vaults of the chapter house roof and watched the unfolding of the nativity play.

The shepherds in their rough coats and the kings in their magnificent robes came to offer their gifts to the Christ child, the lessons from the Gospels were read and the carefully memorized lines were clearly spoken. The Holy Family and the white-robed angels and the animals in their masks gathered around the crib. Daisy Wickham and the schools choir and William and the other choristers sang their carols, and the children’s solemn faces reflected the renewed wonder of the Christmas message.

The play was both simple and grand.

Nina was moved, and she felt the collective emotion of the people around her, the rows of heads with their hidden thoughts made momentarily clear. She felt that she was gathered in with the rest, and made safe, as she had not done in the cathedral since she was a young girl.

Almost at the end, Helen began to cry. Vicky tried to quiet her, and through the valley of seats Nina saw Gordon’s face as he inclined his head towards his wife. He looked different, like someone else, like any one of these other husbands and fathers, not like a man who was her lover.

Vicky slipped out with Helen in her arms. She drew a soft wake of smiles after her as the double doors opened to let her out. Her cheeks were pink, and she held her head up.

For the last carol the audience stood up to sing with the choirs. The familiar words and music drew Nina backwards into herself as a child, standing between her parents in the same place to sing the same carol. And as if she was contemplating it with the imperfect, simplified judgement of a child it seemed sad that there was no continuity beyond her, that she had no child of her own to bring in her turn.

When the play was over Nina sat amongst the flurry of leavings until almost everyone else had filed away. Gordon went by without seeing her, with Andrew and Janice. The Cleggs waved as they passed, and the tall boy who must be Darcy’s son nodded as if he believed he should know her. When she was sure that everyone must have gone far enough ahead she followed them through the double doors and down the steps into the nave. She gazed upwards, to the compound shafts of the pillars and the Gothic arches that sprang from them. It was here that Gordon’s tour of the restoration work had begun for her benefit.

She did not want to leave by the west door, because she was sure that the Grafton couples would be gathering on the green beside the Christmas tree, ready to begin their season’s celebrations. If anyone looked for her, they would assume that she had slipped out by the north side.

Nina sat down in the shadows of the nave. The organist was playing a Handel voluntary. She could see the shaft of light behind the curtain up in the loft.

She wondered if she should pray, but she could not think how she might expiate herself.

At last, after a long time, one of the vergers came to stand beside her. He was a very tall young man in a black cassock that was too short for him.

‘I’m afraid the Cathedral is closing now.’

There was no one left in the aisles or in the rows of wooden seats.

Nina smiled. ‘I’m going home,’ she told him.