ears strained to hear some barely audible subtext. It was there, but she could not yet decipher it.
There was a basket of kindling and logs next to the hearth. Gordon knelt down and made a thick twist of newspaper, then flicked a match to it. He made a pyramid of kindling over the flames in the grate, deftly supplementing it with thicker pieces of wood as the fire crackled and caught. He rested on his heels for a moment, watching its progress with his back to Nina. The yellow light changed the bare room, softening and warming it.
For Nina it was like being given a present, to have the luxury of company, to have Gordon kneeling in front of the hearth making a fire for her with casual masculine efficiency. Her own efforts more often led to a blackened mound of fuel and nothing more than a wisp of acrid smoke, so quite often she did not even bother to try. Nina half smiled at the blatancy of this stereotyping. She would have liked to imagine that she could light a fire as well as any boy scout, but the truth was that she could not. She had made many such discoveries since Richard’s death.
Gordon turned round. He saw the glimmer of her amusement, and wondered at it. He thought perhaps she was laughing at his firelighting.
‘Don’t you have any bigger logs than these?’
‘Come and have your tea,’ Nina said. ‘I haven’t found out where to get logs, not yet. I don’t suppose it’s too difficult.’
‘I can arrange a delivery for you, if that would help.’
As he moved, leaving the fire and coming to sit down opposite her, Nina became aware that she was attracted to him. The realization delivered itself to her fully formed, with all the physical manifestations. A thick heat spread like a slow current pumping through her veins. She shifted in her place, glancing behind her as if her burning skin might mark the cushions where she sat. Gordon’s cup rattled in its saucer as she passed it across to him.
‘Perhaps,’ she said. ‘Yes, that would be kind.’
The man wasn’t looking at her. She was grateful and also disappointed. There was a confused image of his wife behind him in the full sail of pregnancy and the faces of his children like cherubs that might have floated out of the stained glass in the cathedral. Gordon’s head was turned away to the windows.
‘You have a wonderful view from here.’
The sun had set, and the lights illuminating the west front had come on while they were watching the fire.
‘It makes me and my belongings seem rather dim by comparison.’
‘I don’t think so,’ he said quietly. And then, ‘Do you know what’s about to happen?’
She put her cup down, slowly. Gordon stared at her hands, with the wedding ring and a diamond on her left one. She pushed her fingers through her hair, and he remembered the revolving lights settling on her head and changing its colour and then circling on.
‘What is about to happen?’
‘A huge conservation programme. To restore the exterior first and then, eventually, the interior. Do you see how the statues are eroded?’
He beckoned to her, and they went and stood at the window. In the floodlights the stone figures shone out in their ascending tiers.
‘Look at the faces, and the hands.’
They were worn, chewed away almost to featurelessness. Noses and fingers and in places feet and whole heads had been lost. The stone was blackened and pitted.
‘They are very old,’ Nina said softly, to defend them.
‘They are so old and fragile that if we don’t do something to preserve them they will crumble away altogether. Luckily something can be done. Tomorrow the first scaffolding crews arrive. That portion of the front will be covered’ – he gestured with his hand, close to her shoulder – ‘so the work can begin.’
‘Is it your work?’ she asked.
‘I’m an engineer, not a conservationist. But we are part of the restoration team, yes.’
Nina gazed at the inscrutable faces. ‘How can they be repaired?’
‘The damage has been done by sulphate crystals building up on the stone. The rain dissolves the salts and washes them into the tiny cracks, and then the wind and sun dry them and harden them into crusts that split and flake the stone away. The treatment is to apply a coat of lime, like a poultice.’
Gordon wanted to talk about this. The prospect of the ancient fabric being regenerated was an affirmation of some greater good that he was anxious to acknowledge, and he was also fascinated by the mechanical and chemical techniques commanded by the conservationists. But he did not want to bore the woman by ploughing unstoppably on about stone and scaffolding.
‘That won’t bring the faces back, will it?’ Nina asked.
He said, ‘There is a way of rebuilding them.’
‘How?’
She was interested. He could tell by her voice and her expression. He felt a charge of pleasure.
‘They soak lengths of hessian in baths of the lime wash, and then they wrap the statues in the hessian. The wash sucks out the dirt, the blackness that you can see, and at the same time feeds natural lime into the stone.’
‘Giving it back its strength.’
‘Exactly. And the missing features, noses or fingers or even whole heads, can be rebuilt with mortar.’
Nina imagined the companies of prophets and angels reawakening, intact again, and shining out once their shrouds of limed cloth had fallen away.
‘It will be like a little Judgement Day,’ she said, more to herself than to Gordon.
‘Yes. I thought that, too.’
‘Only that would be to deify the Conservation Committee, wouldn’t it?’ She smiled sidelong at him.
‘No, we are only the instrument of a higher authority, of course,’ Gordon answered.
They stood in silence for a moment, contemplating the scale of the work that was about to begin. There was perhaps a foot of empty air between them, but it was as if their skins touched.
‘How many statues are there?’
‘Three hundred and twelve, from the Madonna and Child to the martyrs in the topmost row.’
‘I shall enjoy watching the work,’ Nina said at length.
‘There won’t be a great deal to see. You will lose your splendid view to an expanse of tarpaulin, I’m afraid.’
‘I shan’t mind,’ Nina told him.
Gordon looked at his watch. It took him a moment to register what time it was. He had been in Nina’s house much longer than he would have guessed, and it was time he went to the hospital to see Vicky and the baby. He found himself gazing at Nina’s hair and wondering what would happen if he picked up a strand to wind between his fingers. He cleared his throat, sounding in his own ears like an over-eager
