around the interior of the cathedral to show you what the long-term conservation plans are.’
‘Yes, I would like that. Very much.’
She was facing him now. They would be silhouetted in the uncurtained window, for the invisible passers-by on the green.
Gordon moved away towards the door, saying quickly, ‘I’ll call tomorrow afternoon, at about the same time, and we can go across there together.’
Nina agreed. She would wait for him, and then they would go out to the cathedral and look at Gothic arches and fan vaulting.
When he was gone, and she was alone again, she missed him in the spaces of the house.
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
