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 19

Barney Clegg stood back to admire his work, brushing the earth off his large hands on to the legs of his jeans.

‘There. What do you think?’

Nina stood in the doorway to survey her tiny square of back yard. The early March sunshine felt warm on the top of her head, and Barney’s opulent clumps of daffodils and grape hyacinths added to the brightness.

‘I think it’s the best instant garden I have ever seen.’

He had arrived in a van loaded with sacks of compost and pots and tubs of plants, and in the course of the morning had dug over and fed her patch of starved earth and filled it with splashy green shrubs and spring bulbs in full flower.

‘I feel fraudulent, though.’

Barney raised his eyebrows at her. ‘Why’s that?’

‘I haven’t sprinkled the seed or hoed or watered.’

‘Well, neither have I, exactly.’

‘Where did the plants come from?’

He grinned. ‘Don’t ask. But it looks good, doesn’t it?’

‘It does. I shall come and sit out here and admire it, all summer long.’

‘And think of me.’

Nina laughed. ‘Of course. I’m very grateful, Barney. I’m not quite sure why you’ve gone to so much trouble.’

She was not sure, but she was glad to have her garden so deftly transformed. Nor would she have denied to herself that it had been a pleasure to sit on a kitchen stool pretending to be busy, and covertly watching him humming and digging out in the sunshine. Barney was comfortable in the open air.

‘I promised I’d do it for you.’

‘I didn’t really expect you to keep such a rash promise.’

‘I always keep my promises, actually.’

They were standing by the French doors into the kitchen. Barney was leaning on a spade, with his shirt sleeves rolled up. There was a rim of fresh earth around his wrists.

‘Now I’ve offended you.’

‘Not seriously. You could make amends with a cup of tea.’

She had offered one earlier, but Barney had told her he wanted to get the job finished first.

‘Do you really want tea? Wouldn’t you rather have a drink?’ It was the middle of the afternoon, an indeterminate and featureless hour. The idea of a drink seemed appealingly decadent.

‘Yes, I would rather, since you mention it.’

Barney followed her into the kitchen. He stood at the sink washing his hands while Nina foraged in cupboards. She put bread and cheese and fruit on the table, and poured two glasses of wine. The lush greenery outside kept catching her eye. The afternoon had mysteriously become an impromptu celebration.

‘You’ll have to teach me what these plants are, you realize. I only know the Christmas rose.’

The hellebore he had brought her on Boxing Day had been joined by two more. Their new leaves stood up from the earth like eagerly raised hands.

‘Easy. There’s Choisya ternata, Fatsia japonica, Hedera Goldheart and Ravensholst –’

‘Stop. I’m lost already. My husband was the gardener.’

He hesitated. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t be. It’s all right.’

It was, she thought. A year, almost, since Richard’s death. Now she was drinking wine in the middle of the afternoon in her house in Dean’s Row with an amiable blond giant of a boy, and she had been pierced by a sudden arrow of happiness.

Barney was thinking that when Nina smiled, when she was caught unawares, she reminded him of a picture. Cathy had had a print of it pinned on her bedroom wall. Botticelli, was it?

‘Go on,’ Nina told him. ‘Have something to eat.’

He began with a fist-sized chunk of bread and cheese.

‘You’ll have to water out there a lot to start with. Even if the weather’s wet. The beds won’t catch much rain, being overhung by the walls.’

‘What do I use? A watering can?’

‘If you’ve got all day. Or I could come back and rig up a hose and a sprinkler for you.’

‘I can’t ask you to do anything more.’

‘I’d like to do it. And we Cleggs always do what we like.’

Barney had reached across and refilled Nina’s glass for her. She could see his father in him, only Barney was so likeable.

‘Do you? All right, then,’ she agreed, knowing that it had not taken much to persuade her and resolving that she would not worry about it. ‘If you can. Come back and fix up some water for me.’

‘I’ll come on Wednesday, then.’

He finished his chunk of bread and began on another.

‘Wednesday?’

‘There’s a lot of college that’s worth bunking on Wednesday.’

‘Am I supposed to agree to you missing college in order to come and fiddle with hosepipes for me?’

He put his head on one side and examined her face. In the strong spring light Nina knew that the fine lines around her eyes and the furrows at the corners of her mouth would be clearly visible, and at the same time she could see the boy’s ruddy open-air skin and the unclouded whites of his eyes. Untroubled healthiness and good humour beamed out of him.

‘You needn’t agree to anything, Nina. Only I know that practical experience, actually doing the job, beats any amount of classroom theory. I’ve never been any good on paper.’

Belatedly Nina understood that there was a whole subtext to this talk of hosepipes and practical experience, that the boy was flirting with her, and that she was not displeased by the discovery. She began to laugh, and Barney laughed with her, and their amusement sealed the impromptu celebration between them.

At last Nina took a deep breath. ‘Yes. Well. You’re old enough to know your own mind. But if you’ve finished your wine and had enough to eat, Barney, I should think about doing some work now.’

‘I’ll see you on Wednesday,’ he said, as she opened the front door for him. ‘I’ll bring along everything to finish the job.’

‘I’m sure you will,’ Nina said crisply.

She glanced across the green to the tarpaulins masking the west front. In the spring sunshine, the world looked newly bright and clean. The statues would surely re-emerge from their lime poultices as crisp as unfurling leaves.

‘Where are you going?’ Cathy asked her sister.

Lucy was examining her face in the magnifying mirror that extended on a bracket from the wall of their shared bathroom. She had been plucking her eyebrows and now she turned her head from side to side with a sharply critical expression.

‘Just out, okay?’

‘I’m sorry. I only asked.’

‘You’re in my light, actually.’

‘You’re always going just out. Who is it?’

‘Shut up, Cathy, will you? And move, so I can see what I’m doing.’

‘You look divine, darling. But that’s my shirt.’

Lucy snapped the cap on to her lipstick. She gave her reflection a last narrow-eyed appraisal, then she turned her back on the glass and faced her sister. The mirrored walls doubled and redoubled their twin likenesses, but the effect was too familiar for them to notice it.

‘You don’t mind, Cath, do you? And can I take the car?’

Cathy sighed. ‘I hope it isn’t who I think it is.’

Lucy crammed her Chanel purse into her handbag. ‘Don’t say anything. Just don’t. I’ve got to go now.’

Cathy followed her, frowning with concern. They met Barney coming up the stairs. He was whistling, but he stopped and took his hands out of his pockets when he saw Lucy.

‘Hey. You look real.’

‘Don’t try to be hip, Barn. You’re too old.’

Lucy framed a kiss in the air. On her way out she looked into the kitchen. Hannah was standing in front of the Aga in her dressing gown, heating up bedtime milk for Freddie with a fretful Laura balanced on one hip. Hannah had a cold, and so did the two children. Her eyes were puffy and her nose was red.

‘See you,’ Lucy called to her.

‘Your father telephoned.’

Hannah yanked the milk pan off the heat.

‘Is he okay?’

‘Mmm. I think. He won’t be back for a few days, he said. He’s still got some things to sort out.’

Darcy had gone to London and then, saying he had some business to do, had told Hannah he had to go to Germany. He had never been away from Wilton for so long before.

At least Vicky Ransome was at home, where she should be. Hannah had seen her, from a distance, in town. Hannah tilted the pan, staring at the flat moon of milk without seeing it, but Lucy was too busy to interpret her anxiety.

‘Bye, Hannah. Don’t worry if I’m late.’

Lucy ran out to the car she shared with Cathy. It was dark, but there was a faint luminosity in the sky that promised lighter evenings. She backed the car hastily and made a turn that sent an arc of gravel pattering over the grass beyond the driveway. Hannah, carrying Laura and the hot milk, saw her tail lights through the glass of the front door as a pair of red eyes in the darkness.

Jimmy Rose waited in his car.

They had arranged to meet at a place they had used before, in a quiet lane between Grafton and Wilton. It was the same field gateway where Gordon had sat on Boxing Day after making his last visit to Nina, and Jimmy also could see the distant lights of Darcy’s house on its hill. After a few moments he was able to distinguish the lights of a car coming towards him. The glow brightened and switched direction with the sharp bends in the lane, and he knew that she was driving much too fast.

The dazzle of lights approached him, separated abruptly into twin beams as Lucy braked her Renault, and raked over his face as she swung into the gateway beside him. In the darkness that followed the door of her car opened and slammed shut, and he saw the pale blur of her face and hands as she ran to the passenger door of his car. A second later she was inside in the warmth beside him.

They kissed without speaking, her fingers splayed on the back of his neck as she pulled him closer to her.

‘You were driving too fast,’ he said at last, when he lifted his head.

Lucy’s smile showed her white teeth and the glint of her tongue in the dim light.

‘I always drive too fast.’

‘You’re a silly girl. I don’t want you to smash yourself up.’

She answered him by winding her arm around his neck again, searching for his mouth with her tongue, an eager girl. Jimmy’s hand found her knee, then her long thigh in some thick, dark stocking material and the stretchy hem of her tiny skirt.

‘Ah, God, Lucy, I’ve missed you. A week’s too long.’

‘It isn’t my fault that we haven’t seen each other for a week.’ Her voice was soft, teasing him, but Jimmy had sharp enough ears to hear the scratch of complaint in it.

‘Of course it isn’t. If I could do anything more I would, you know that. Only the truth is that you shouldn’t be wasting your time with an old married man like me.’

He felt the muscles of her smooth cheek move against his. Her hand touched his leg and then insinuated itself between his inner thigh and his groin. Jimmy winced pleasurably at the effect of it and shifted his position a little.

‘It isn’t a waste of time,’ Lucy whispered.

Jimmy knew that. It wasn’t difficult to respond to Lucy Clegg, but she took her own pleasure in him in turn as eagerly and directly as anyone he had ever known. He shifted his hand under her jacket to the front of her blouse, sliding his fingers inside it to find warm silky skin as his mouth searched for hers again.

But Lucy sat up abruptly and flicked her hair back from her face.

‘Where are we going tonight?’ she asked.

‘Ah, to heaven and back, I hope.’

‘Where are we going first? I want to go somewhere, Jimmy, not just to sit in the car. I’ve got all dressed up for you.’

There was a distinctly plaintive note now. Jimmy sighed inaudibly.

‘I can see. You look, and smell, fantastic.’

In fact he did not much mind what Lucy wore, so long as it came off easily. But she rewarded him for the compliment by sliding closer again, warming his face with her breath.

‘I want to go somewhere with you, for once, the two of us as if you were really mine.’

For once? Jimmy thought. He had only been seeing Lucy Clegg for two months, but perhaps that brief interval felt like a much longer time to a nineteen-year-old.

‘I am yours,’ he soothed. ‘Look, here I am. It’s these precious hours that count, not the ordinary ones in between.’ He was thinking rapidly as he spoke. ‘Come on, I’ll take you for a drink.’

There was a pub about ten miles the other side of Wilton that should be safe enough, and there would still be time afterwards. Star would be back from the Williamford parent-teacher evening, but that couldn’t be helped. He would think of something. It was Darcy finding out that he really wanted to avoid; it was comfortable knowing he was away.

Jimmy switched on the ignition, and Lucy’s triumphant smile was illuminated for him in the glow from the dashboard. She put her hand back on his thigh, her fingers grazing against him so that his dwindling erection immediately recharged itself.

*

Star came home and found the house in darkness, although Jimmy had not mentioned that he was going out. She went into the kitchen and made herself a cheese sandwich and a cup of tea, listening to the mixer tap dripping into the sink without bothering to turn it off or to switch on the radio to drown it out. She carried her supper into the dining room and sat down at the table with a pile of exercise books that were waiting to be marked.

Star picked up her red pen, but the silence of the house pressed into her. She could feel it like a weight on her head and on her hands.

When she looked at the walls she saw that the striped wallpaper was beginning to peel at the joins, and there was a film of dust on the shallow skirting. The vertical blinds at the windows were of a design she no longer liked; everywhere her eyes turned there seemed to be evidence of neglect. Jimmy and she lived in this house, but it was a long time since they had done anything to improve or cherish it. Star tried to offer herself the excuse that they lacked the money; it was true that they had her income, but Jimmy’s conference- organizing business had recently almost collapsed. He had never been as successful as the other Grafton men, but until quite lately they had been able to make wry jokes about that to one another. Now there were no jokes, but she knew quite well that there was enough money to look after the house, if either of them had cared sufficiently about it.

The truth was, Star thought, that it was good enough as it stood to enclose what existed within it.

She twisted the top off her pen and drew the pile of books closer to hand. Even in here she could hear the drumbeat of the dripping tap.

It was five minutes to midnight, and she was on the second-to-last book, when she heard Jimmy’s car pull into the space in front of the house.

‘Hello there,’ he called out as the front door rattled shut behind him. ‘Shall I lock up?’

Star waited until his sandy face appeared round the door, his pointy eyebrows raised.

‘Unless you’re planning to go out again,’ she said.

‘Would I be, at this time of night?’

‘How would I know that?’

‘Oh, dear God, what’s the matter now? How was the school evening?’

Star gazed down at the work in front of her. Gary Burdett’s translation, covered to a point halfway down the page with little red hieroglyphics.

She wondered if somewhere in some defiant corner of herself she loved Jimmy still, or if she hated him, or if she was simply tired and ashamed of them both, and finally indifferent. She wondered who he had been with, and if she knew her, or whether she was some mysterious and therefore incalculably alluring stranger.

‘It was exactly the same as usual. Where have you been?’

‘I went over to the golf club for a quick drink. Do you want a nightcap?’

He had opened the sideboard and found a bottle of Johnny Walker about one third full.

‘No, thank you. Who was there?’

‘Where? Oh, nobody much.’

‘Have you eaten?’

‘Yes, I had something at the bar.’

Looking at her, at her angular face, Jimmy thought, She knows, but the realization did not dismay him particularly. She only knew in the way that wives always knew, with a mixture of suspicion and intuition that shied away from wanting to find out the real truth. He wondered how he would feel if she was unfaithful to him, and decided as he always did that he would not care for it at all.

He leaned down to her, intending to kiss the top of her head, to make an offering of affection.

‘You look tired.’

Star jerked away from him, out of his reach, letting her anger show.

‘It’s late,’ she said coldly.

Her arm struck against his as she stood up, making him spill some of his drink. Jimmy felt an answering kick of anger within himself, fuelled by whisky.

He wondered if Lucy’s scent clung to him. He felt immersed in her. After their drinks, in the confined space of the car, she had wound her long legs around him in the gymnastic enthusiasm of their lovemaking. Now he was home and the bloom of guilt he had felt when he arrived was burned off by a jet of resentment. He did not want to come in and see Star with her face made stiff with accusation; there was a way a man’s home should be and Star did not make it so. He hated her when she did this. She could have made things easy and pleasant for both of them, for herself as well as for him, but there was some rigid determination in her that would not adopt the comfortable way.

His free hand grasped her shoulder, his finger and thumb pinching her flesh.

‘What’s the matter with you? I’ve only been out for a couple of drinks.’

Star looked at his face.

His eyes were reddened and there was a flush across his cheekbones that made the fair hairs above the shaving line stand out, but he was a long way from being drunk. A sequence of images passed, dreamlike, through her head. They were violent images, in which she struck out and Jimmy hit back at her, blow for blow. Star shrank. She was bigger, but he was stronger. The scenes in her mind were not all imaginary. Some of them were simply recollected.

Carefully, almost gently, she removed his hand from her shoulder. She walked past him, without saying anything.

Upstairs in their bedroom Star took off her clothes very carefully, and hung them in the old painted wardrobe that they had never quite got around to replacing with fitted alcove models like those in the bedrooms of the other Grafton couples. In bed she turned on her side and waited.

Jimmy followed her up after a few minutes. She heard him in the bathroom, and then he came in and undressed. There was the clink of loose change as he emptied his pockets on to the dressing table. As she lay there Star remembered other evenings that had followed this pattern. She thought, if he tries to touch me, wanting to show what he can do, then he hasn’t been with anyone else. If he doesn’t try, then I’ll know he has.

There was a draught of cold air on her skin as he lifted the covers. Jimmy lay down, turning his back as he composed himself for sleep.

The next day Star telephoned Nina. She felt like some labor-atory animal that had explored all the avenues leading out of a cage and found them blind, except for one that she could not remember encountering before. As she listened to the ringing she imagined Nina in her studio, although she had never seen it. It would be tidy and full of white light.

‘Nina, this is Star. Can we meet? I’d like to talk. I thought I’d forgotten how to, and then I half remembered on our walk. I enjoyed our walk.’

There was a brief silence and then Nina’s warm response. ‘So did I. I’m glad you called. Come round and see me. When? Are you busy this evening? I could make us some supper.’

‘Thank you. I’d like that.’

Star was surprised by the house. Nina showed her over it, right up to the studio at the top. There were pale walls, a very few pieces of furniture, most of them antiques that looked impressive even with Star’s limited knowledge of such things. She liked the feeling of space and air, the sense that fine things had been confidently acquired and then placed exactly where they belonged, without the necessity for compromise. There was nothing makeshift or mass-produced; it was a spare, metropolitan look that made the tastes and styles of Grafton, even Wilton Manor, seem effortful and hopelessly provincial.

They went back to the drawing room on the first floor. Nina poured wine and gave Star hers in a thin glass with a knobbed stem.

‘Are you rich?’ Star asked her. ‘You must be, to have a house like this, with these things in it. That’s an impertinent question, isn’t it? You see, I have forgotten how to talk.’

‘My husband was rich. I didn’t really know, until he died.’

Star felt something that it took her a moment to recognize as envy.

Nina was free, she possessed the luxury of wealth and independence. It would be easy for Nina to go where she wanted, to make herself whatever she wished. It was no wonder, she thought, that Gordon had been attracted to her. Gordon was as defined by the limits of Grafton as she was herself.

‘I know what you’re thinking,’ Nina said.

‘I rather hope you don’t. I’m not proud of it.’

‘I found it harder, rather than easier, to have so much, and still to be alone. To have it because I didn’t have him. In the beginning, just after he died, I wished that my external circumstances matched the way that I felt inside. I sold the houses in London and the country, the cars, put his art collection in storage. I wanted to dispense with what he had left me, as brutally as I could, because he had left me so brutally.

‘I came here because he had never been here. It was my past, not our joint history. And I was so jealous of you, when I first arrived. All you couples.’

‘Ah. Us couples. But you are right, that’s what I was thinking without thinking about it carefully enough. Are you still very sad?’

Nina rested her head against the high back of her chair. It was her instinct to deflect the question, but Star herself made her want to answer it.

‘Sometimes. At other times not. And sometimes when the grief does fade I feel guilty, as if I ought to keep it fresh. Then occasionally I feel sharply happy, as if I’ve never really noticed what it was like to be happy before. Gordon made me feel like that. And so did you, when we had our walk the other day. And Barney Clegg, who came to do my garden for me.’

‘Barney Clegg?’

‘Why not?’ Nina protested, but they were both laughing. It seemed that they had passed over some interim stage of acquaintanceship and had become allies.

‘And you?’ Nina asked.

Star gave her shrug.

‘You said you wanted to talk,’ Nina prompted. ‘You haven’t forgotten how to. It happens like this, like we are doing now. Was it about Gordon?’

‘No, not about Gordon.’

‘About Jimmy, then?’

Star examined the rim of her glass, and then tapped it very lightly with her fingernail. It gave a tiny, clear ring.

‘Are you still envious of us? Now that you have seen us more closely?’

Nina said, ‘Now that I know about Vicky and Darcy, do you mean, as well as what happened between me and Gordon?’

She did not try to speculate beyond that, not out loud, but she had the sense that the couples were held in some precarious suspension, as if another breath of passion might overbalance the prosperous order and send them toppling.

She added, very softly, ‘It was you who said that none of us can look in on other people’s marriages. I don’t know what Vicky and Gordon are like, or Darcy and Hannah, or you and Jimmy. I can only see the surface. It seemed smooth and shining when I first came here.’

Star lifted her hands and chopped a box shape in the air.

‘Did you ever feel that there was nowhere to go?’

‘Yes, I did. But there always is. There is somewhere to go, if you look hard enough for it.’

Star drank her wine, admiring the glass again, and the carved wooden arms of her chair, and the pretty room that contained them.

‘Could we be friends, do you think?’ she asked at length.

Nina nodded her head. ‘Yes. I think perhaps we could.’

On Wednesday, Barney came as he had promised with two lengths of different piping, an armful of garden hose and a toolbag. He whistled as he carried the load through the kitchen into the garden.

‘Have this fixed for you in a trice, lady,’ he called. ‘Nice place you got here.’

Nina watched him roll up the sleeves of his overalls and set to work. She had not realized that he planned to install an outside tap for her.

‘I’ll have to turn the water off at the mains for half an hour, is that OK? I like plumbing,’ Barney said confidently. ‘I can always be a plumber, if all else fails, can’t I?’

‘I don’t think all else will fail, somehow.’

She had begun to believe that Barney possessed the necessary talents to make a success of whatever he chose.

He quickly became engrossed in the job. Nina put her red jacket on, and went to where he was laying plastic piping under the sill of the door.

‘I’m going out for half an hour, Barney, to buy us some food for lunch.’

He sat back on his heels, rubbing a grease mark on his cheek.

‘I was hoping you might let me take you out for lunch. Only to the pub, or somewhere, if you wouldn’t mind that?’

She looked down at him. ‘I would like to. But I still need to do some shopping. I’ll be back soon.’

Nina pulled the front door to behind her, but she lingered for a moment on the top step. It was a pleasure to feel the spring sun on her face, and the warmth trapped in the black paint of the iron handrail under her fingers. The green was dotted with people, the first of the new season’s tourists, and the benches on the opposite side where she had met Star eating her lunch were occupied.

Gordon saw her before she saw him. His first thought was that she had changed, and then he realized that she seemed different because the lines in her face had somehow altered.

‘You look beautiful,’ he said, when he reached her. ‘You look happy.’

‘Do I?’ She was startled by his sudden materializing in front of her, when she had almost stopped wishing for him.

‘I wanted to see you.’

‘Did you? Why, after all these weeks?’

‘You had every right to be angry,’ he said humbly. ‘You still have. Nothing has changed. I can’t offer you anything, any more than I could at Christmas. I wanted to see you, to see –’

‘To see how I am surviving without you? Well enough, thank you. Did you think I wouldn’t be?’

Even as she spoke she was disappointed with herself, for making a pointless charade of anger that she no longer felt.

‘Please, Nina, couldn’t we go inside and talk?’

‘No. Barney Clegg is here, doing some work in the garden for me.’

‘Barney Clegg?’

He said it in exactly the same tone of disbelief as Star had done.

Nina smiled, and he noticed the difference in her face again. Nina said, ‘Let’s walk, instead.’

She took his arm, folding her own comfortably within it, and they crossed the cathedral green between the knots of tourists to the west door.

Inside there were scaffolding towers around the pillars on the left side of the nave. They were screened with polythene sheeting but the screens did not cut off the clamour of high-speed drilling and workmen calling to each other. There was a group of Japanese listening intently to a guide in the middle of the central aisle.

Gordon and Nina passed on the opposite side. They walked over stone tablets with their worn inscriptions and the brass memorials to armoured knights and mitred bishops.

‘Do you remember when we first came? When I showed you around?’

‘I remember.’

They came behind the quire stalls and the high altar, to the Lady Chapel in the apse. The glass in the windows here had been destroyed and then pieced together after the Reformation in a fractured pattern of crimson and cobalt. They stood side by side, looking up at the brilliance of the mosaic.

Nina felt the fragility and the importance of the threads that briefly held them here, tenuously woven together in their joint and separate places, the Grafton couples and their families, and herself in her own place, and the filaments that stretched beyond them into infinity.

She was convinced for a moment that they were in a pattern with its own brightness and darkness, a pattern that was not always legible or comprehensible but was nevertheless there, and the notion comforted her. She thought of Vicky and Darcy, and whatever it happened to be that they needed from each other, and how Gordon did not or would not know about it, and of Star and Jimmy, and the other precarious links of marriages and the desires and disappointments surrounding them.

The frailty of the connections saddened her, and she felt the loss of Richard as a blank within her, but at the same time she felt her own single strength, and she knew that she would survive.

Gordon turned away from the dislocated beauty of the stained glass.

‘Are you ready to go on?’ he asked.

‘Yes, I’m ready.’

They moved on, down the opposite side of the nave, so that they made a complete circuit of the cathedral under the great vaults of the roof.

Outside the light seemed even brighter. Gordon walked her back across the green to the steps of the Dean’s Row house.

‘Is the restoration work going well?’

‘Slowly, always slower than anyone expects, but yes. Behind those screens there is a logical, expensive miracle happening. It’s a perfectly explicable miracle but it’s still wonderful to watch it.’

He was suddenly animated, full of pleasure in the work. She loved him for his enthusiasm.

‘Are you all right?’ he asked her.

‘Yes, I am.’ Nina released his arm. ‘I hope you will be too.’

They didn’t touch each other again. Gordon smiled at her, and nodded his head, and then turned to walk away.

In the enclosed green space of the garden, Barney had almost finished work. The coil of hose was lying beside the new tap.

‘Can I help you carry the shopping in?’

‘I didn’t get it in the end. Never mind.’

‘Watch this.’

He turned on the tap and water splashed over the paving stones. Nina clapped her hands and Barney bowed to her in his overalls. For an encore he coupled the length of hose and from a spray nozzle at the other end a jet of water arced upwards, catching the light to make a brief rainbow. Droplets pattered on the leaves and released the scent of wet earth from the ground beneath.

‘Barney, thank you.’

‘My pleasure entirely. Shall we go across to the Eagle to celebrate?’

‘I should be buying lunch for you.’

He came closer to her, so that his shadow fell over her face. He was very large, and young. But he leaned down, serious-faced, and kissed her on the mouth and Nina thought, whatever next?

‘Barney …’

‘You didn’t mind that, did you?’

‘No. No, it was nice. Surprising, but nice.’

‘There can be other lunches, then, can’t there? If you want there to be?’

Why not, Nina thought. Why not, after all?