underwear.
He turned away and sat down heavily on his side of the bed. He picked up the bedside telephone and sat with it on his lap while he groped on a lower shelf for the directory. When he found it he flipped impatiently through the pages, searching for the name of the couple who had owned the Dean’s Row house before Nina. He found it quickly, and then dialled the number beside it without waiting to think.
She answered after two rings, saying her name rather than hello. Her voice sounded amused, as if she was smiling into the mouthpiece.
‘Nina, it’s Gordon. Gordon Ransome.’
‘Yes.’
It was a statement, not a question, making him think that she had even been expecting his call.
‘I wanted to talk to you.’
It was much easier to say it over the telephone. He felt suddenly that he might confess anything, and that she would listen with sympathy. ‘I couldn’t wait until tomorrow evening.’
He had crossed a divide. He couldn’t go back and pretend just to be a friendly conservationist. There was a new pressure within himself, like an inflating balloon, and he realized that it was happiness.
‘I’m glad you called. I wanted to talk, too. I thought you might be a friend of mine, Patrick, from London.’
Gordon was fired with jealousy of this unknown man.
‘Are you disappointed that it isn’t?’
Nina laughed then. ‘No. Not disappointed at all.’
Gordon felt this first avowal like a thread between them, stretching through the air from the well-worn territory of his house away into the darkness to some new terrain that was lying in wait for him to discover.
‘What are you doing?’ he asked.
‘Sitting in my kitchen. Looking at all these doors and cupboards with nothing much behind them.’
She had not wanted to sit in the upstairs drawing room because the view, and the ashes of the fire he had lit lying in the grate seemed too closely connected with him. She was as eager as a girl, and also fearful of whatever manoeuvres tomorrow evening would bring.
Gordon recalled the bareness of her house. ‘You are travelling light.’
‘It seemed the easiest way.’
He knew this was an acknowledgement of her reason for coming to Grafton and of the attendant truths that she would reveal to him in time, in their own shared time. He imagined these truths peeling away, like layers of fine tissue, each layer matched by a discarded layer of his own, until they knew each other entirely.
The vision made him confident and he asked, ‘Would you like me to come over now?’
After a fractional pause she answered, ‘No. Let’s meet tomorrow, as we arranged.’
It was illogical, but she felt the need to preserve some propriety, in case it became necessary to defend herself against him. She also wanted to give herself the pleasure of anticipation. It seemed a long time since she had looked forward to anything. She tried to imagine Gordon at the other end of the line, in some orderly domestic setting like Janice Frost’s, amidst children’s toys and family-dented furniture. A black wing shadowed her for an instant and then flew on.
‘Gordon?’
‘I’m still here.’
‘Is everything all right?’
The same question that Vicky had asked, meriting an altogether different answer.
‘Yes,’ he said simply, knowing that it was, and that if it was not they would make it so between them.
‘Good night, then,’ Nina whispered.
‘Good night. I will be there tomorrow.’
The dinner was not a success. Gordon chose the restaurant because it was some miles away from Grafton and not much frequented by anyone he knew. When he arrived with Nina they found they were almost the only people in the over-frilled dining room. They sat facing each other across a daunting table, feeling themselves under the scrutiny of the tiptoeing waitresses. The food was pretentious and poor, and soupy music washed over them as they ate.
Gordon was angry with himself for his bad choice, and as embarrassed as an adolescent on a disastrous first date. He dissected the food on his plate, chewing and tasting nothing, while Nina barely touched hers. Gordon was made more uncomfortable by his conviction that Nina and her husband would have been familiars in whichever London restaurants were the fashion of the week, and that she must be judging this provincial disaster with a cold eye. Gordon did not know London well, and he was mistrustful of city gloss. He understood himself well enough to be aware that he was a success in a small place, and to have been satisfied with that, until he contemplated his distance from Nina.
Their talk was stilted. They made openings and waited for one another to respond, but the beginnings were not bold enough to overcome the music and the eavesdroppers, and they faltered and dried up one by one. In the end they discussed their work and the cathedral project and Grafton, and the achievements of Gordon’s daughters, like the strangers they were. Nina was wearing a scarlet jacket braided and frogged with black silk, and with her pale face Gordon thought she looked like some androgynous, doomed hussar. He wanted to hold her, shielding her from the cavalry, instead of sitting over tepid food and talking about education provisions. Gordon wondered if yesterday’s intimacy had been a hallucination.
At last the meal was over. He paid for it without totalling the bill and they went out into the cold air. He held open the door of his car for her and she sat in the passenger seat, composedly arranging her limbs and her large hands and feet and then keeping still in the way that he now recognized, with a helpless wash of admiration.
They drove in silence for a while. Then Gordon said, because he thought that he must say something or they would drive all the way to Grafton without speaking, ‘Sorry. That was bloody awful.’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
She said it as a statement of fact. He realized that she was telling him the truth. She was not judging him or the restaur-ant, or adopting a faint air of martyrdom over a disappointing evening as Vicky would have done. The meal had not been important, whether it was magnificent or mediocre; it was simply a rite that they were enacting together.
‘I wanted to take you somewhere special, that you would remember,’ he explained. The intimacy had not disappeared. He felt the softness of it between them, in this leathery space dimly illuminated by the dashboard lights.
‘I will remember.’
To his amazement she reached out and took his hand, lifting it off the wheel so that he drove one-handed, and then she linked her fingers through his. She held both their hands tight against her warm thigh. In his happiness and gratitude Gordon wanted to close his eyes and rest his head in her lap.
‘Let’s go home,’ Nina said.
They reached Grafton and Gordon parked his inconspicuous car in an inconspicuous corner a short distance from the cathedral. They walked quickly through the narrow entry that gave
