Vicky when they had shuffled to the car. ‘Away you go, both of you.’
She stood in the driveway and waved them off, as if they were departing on holiday.
It was only fifteen minutes’ drive to the hospital, but by the time they reached it Vicky felt afraid. A porter and a nurse saw them arriving and came out with a wheelchair. Vicky saw their faces through a fog of pain and confusion.
*
As the days passed, Nina began to establish a pattern by which to live. She went upstairs to her studio early in the mornings and worked, and by the middle of the day she had completed enough of a painting to satisfy herself. Then, in the hollow afternoons, she went for long walks. It soothed her to have a routine with which to parcel out her time; she found that by observing it she could still some of her restlessness. Sometimes her walks took her through the town, and she observed the new façades of shops and restaurants pasted on to the old buildings, and the faces of the people as they criss-crossed the liver-coloured paving blocks of the pedestrian shopping precinct. At other times she headed in the opposite direction, through one of the new estates at the city margin and out through a no-man’s land of half-made rutted tracks that led to windy fields marked out for development, and on into the open country. She walked quickly, with her hands in the pockets of her coat, observing the dips and folds of the mild landscape and the pencil lines of plough furrows and now leafless trees. Back at home in the evenings she read, and telephoned her friends in London, assuring Patrick and the others that she was neither lonely nor going mad.
She did not, either, spend quite all of her time alone. She found herself beginning to be included in the circle of women that quietly revolved within the group of smiling couples.
It was Janice Frost who made the first overture. She telephoned Nina one morning and invited her to lunch, and Nina had accepted before she could think of any particular reason to refuse. She walked out to the Frosts’ this time, and when she reached their neighbourhood she looked with interest at the big houses set back in their gardens. She had once had a schoolfriend who lived in one of these turnings, and it seemed that nothing much had changed since those days. There were perhaps more cars, wives’ runabouts, parked in the sloping driveways. The roads were quiet, and a stillness hung over the roofs and tree tops, but it seemed to Nina that she could actually hear the sonorous bass note of prosperity humming away. If she had stayed in Grafton, she wondered, would she have married and come to rest in one of these solid houses?
She had already turned in at the Frosts’ gateway when a car braked and stopped on the gravel behind her. Nina turned and saw a BMW driven by Darcy Clegg’s wife. The two women reached Janice’s front door together.
‘Hi,’ Hannah said breathlessly. ‘Jan just called me and asked me to come on over for lunch with the two of you. I left Mandy in charge of the shop.’
Nina wondered if she was supposed to know anything about the shop or Mandy. Janice opened the door to them. She was wearing jeans and a loose shirt, but her eyes were made up and she appeared younger than she had done on the night of her party. She kissed Hannah and waved her inside, and drew Nina after her. The kitchen was warm and scented with food, and the table was properly laid for three with linen napkins and wine glasses. Nina had been feeling a prickle of impatience, but it subsided now. She accepted a glass of white wine and leant against one of Janice’s worktops. Janice began to chop herbs beside her. There was a view of garden and fruit trees and a football goal from the window.
Janice said, ‘I’m glad you could come. I didn’t have a chance to speak to you the other night, it was such a scramble. I realized afterwards how unfriendly it must have seemed.’
‘No. I remember what it’s like, giving a party.’
‘The Frosts are wildly hospitable. Without them none of us in Grafton would ever see each other.’
Hannah had perched on a stool with her legs crossed. She was wearing suede trousers and a light cashmere sweater, and her pale blonde hair was half pinned up to show her soft neck. Quite soon she would have crossed the dividing line between voluptuous and fat, but for now she was luscious with her pearly skin and plump mouth. Nina thought that she looked cream-fed, sated. Darcy must be attentive in bed. Her own singleness made her feel dry and angular by comparison, with creases in her skin and a sour ache between her shoulder blades from the effort of keeping her head held up.
‘I like it. I need to have people around. I’m the only one of us who doesn’t have a proper job,’ Janice explained to Nina. ‘I wanted Marcelle to come to lunch too but she’s demonstrating today. She teaches cookery at the Pond School, you know.’
Hannah laughed. ‘Nina, Janice may not have a job, but she does everything else. She sits on every committee in Grafton, Friends of the Cathedral, PTA, you name it. She works for at least three different charities, and if anyone wants something done they invariably ask Mrs Frost first. Her energy exhausts us all.’
Nina smiled too. She began to see a more rounded version of this hospitable Janice, with her neat dark hair and faintly domineering manner, and she liked what she saw.
‘Let’s eat while we’re talking,’ Janice said briskly, and moved them to the table.
There was a warm salad with wild mushrooms, and a vegetable pie. Hannah drank steadily and Janice kept their glasses filled. Nina had been intending to work that afternoon but she drank more wine and ate hungrily, out of the pleasure of having good food cooked and laid in front of her. She abandoned the idea of work, without regret. It was pleasant to sit here in the kitchen glow talking to the women.
It came to Nina suddenly that she had been stiff, lately, with the effort of containing herself within the bounds of polite behaviour. She could feel the petrifaction in her face and along the rigid links of her spine.
Then there was a surprising blurred moment when the wine and the women’s unforced friendliness seemed to dissolve the bounds, and she felt that she could be as she really was instead of pretending otherwise. Hannah said something, although Nina immediately forgot what it was. Something about how the house in Dean’s Row must seem big and quiet.
Nina began to cry.
She cried when she was alone, too often, but she had not broken down in front of other people, strangers, since the first weeks after Richard’s death. It was both a shock and a relief to find the tears running down her face.
The two women came round the table to her. They stooped on either side of Nina’s chair. Hannah touched her shoulder.
‘Is it what I said about your house? I’m so sorry if it is. I didn’t think.’
Nina took a tissue that Janice held out to her and blew her nose.
‘It’s all right. It’s not you. It just happens. I’ll stop in a minute.’
They knew, both of them. She had told Darcy Clegg at the party that Richard was dead. It had been absurd of her to imagine that she could come here and recreate herself as a different person. There was always and for ever the same old self to live with, with the same dull catalogue of griefs and anxieties. The thought made her mouth twist in resignation. Now she must explain some part of what she felt to these friendly women with their unvoiced curiosity.
Nina took a breath. ‘My husband died, earlier this year. I came back to live here because I thought it would be easier than staying in London where there were so many more things to remind me of him. Sometimes it is easier. Then I remember all over again that he’s gone, and I think for a minute that I can’t bear it. But I can, of course.
