the crumpled coil of the quilt around their shoulders.
Nina lay quietly, looking up at the contours of the shuttered windows and the ceiling over her head. The room seemed to have changed its dimensions. It was enlarged, made to seem a light space full of humming air by her unexpected happiness. She wanted to lock her arms more tightly around the man, holding him to her so as to preserve this minute, but she made herself stay still. She would not think of what would happen next, only of what had just happened.
‘It seems very simple, doesn’t it?’
Gordon had drifted almost into sleep. He had slept badly the night before, in intermittent snatches disturbed by dreams. For a second he was surprised by where he was, and by Nina’s voice. He roused himself with an effort.
‘Sex? Or else as complicated as … molecular biology. Or astrophysics.’
‘It starts off simple.’ She meant between the two of them, new as they were now, before they had to make further reckonings. She wanted to have that acknowledged, to exonerate themselves for the time being.
‘I know what you mean,’ he helped her, ‘But I don’t agree. Every time you take someone new to bed, after the first person, it is a process of re-creating yourself through a new pair of eyes, a different set of sensors. Each attempt at re-creation has to refer to all the successes and failures that have gone before.’
His hand had rested in the hollow of her waist. He lifted it and settled it higher, over the convex span of her ribs, and she felt the two hand-shaped patches of skin cooling and warming by exchange.
‘It becomes more complicated with each renewal, because each of you brings to bed more history under the skin and behind the eyes.’
He had been thinking of Vicky, and home, and superimposing this woman and her bedroom over the other, noting where the images overlapped and where the differences lay, shadowy outlines like an improperly registered colour print.
Nina said, ‘That sounds … intensely narcissistic.’
Gordon laughed. ‘I am sure you are right. But not simple.’
He intended it as an oblique tribute, wanting her not to think that he had just fucked her out of blind lust. But he was also wary as he lay with her arms round him and her bedcovers heaped over them. He was not sure what expectations she might have. He thought of their separate histories, skipping connections in his head that led him to ask, more abruptly than he might otherwise have done,
‘What was your husband like?’
‘In bed?’
‘I didn’t mean particularly in bed.’
‘He was very gentle.’
Nina turned away a little, stretching out on her back. The happiness was still with her. It did not threaten to become dislodged and float away.
‘Can you stay? Stay the night, I mean?’
Gordon thought. The idea was tempting, and the alternative was not. If he got up early enough in the morning, he could drive quietly home to feed the cats and change his shirt and be in the office by eight-thirty.
‘If I may.’
He saw that she was pleased. She turned back again, cuddling up to him as Vicky did. He was more awake now. The images of there and here did not overlap or blur together any longer. They stood apart, sharp in their differences. He let himself savour them.
‘We had a very nice life,’ Nina said slowly. ‘We had a lot of friends, we did all kinds of things, but really we were doing them just the two of us, on our own together.’ She wanted to tell Gordon about what it had been like, but she chose deliberately colourless words, thinking to spare them both.
‘Go on,’ he said. He settled her head against his shoulder to encourage her.
‘We had a house in London, and a house in Norfolk not far from the sea. Richard was a weekend painter, and he liked the sky. We used to walk on the beach, and bring back driftwood. There was an open fire, and there was always a debate about which pieces to burn and which to put on the shelf to admire.’
Gordon relaxed. His body weight seemed to increase, sinking downwards into a comfortable place.
‘Go on,’ he said again.
‘When he died, at first I only felt angry. For a long time, it felt like a terribly long time, I was so angry with him for breaking our contract.’
‘What happened?’
‘He was in Norfolk, on his own. It was midweek and I was in London because my agent and I were meeting an American publisher. Richard sometimes went there alone to work, using the fax and the telephone. He liked the peace and the isolation. On the morning he died he had been working in the garden. The wheelbarrow was on the path, and there was a rake and a spade beside it. He had a severe asthma attack. A neighbour found him, lying between the wheelbarrow and the kitchen door.’
Gordon said nothing, but he held her and stroked her hair.
‘I should have been there. He shouldn’t have been doing anything strenuous without his inhaler. He needn’t have died.’
When Nina had reached the house with Patrick Richard had already been taken away, but she could see him lying on the path under the crab apple tree, twisted over his defeated lungs. Dry-eyed and with a stiff face she had made the neighbour describe exactly what she had seen.
‘Are you still angry?’
Nina told him, ‘No. It’s six months ago, now.’
But he could feel her loneliness. The hunger it generated in her was magnetic, and also faintly repellent. He felt a weight of sympathy coupling with his liking for her, and a tinge of alarm. The alarm concentrated under his diaphragm like the onset of indigestion.
‘Go on talking,’ he said. Nina settled more comfortably against him. As he listened to her Gordon was conscious of the planes and angles of her house around them, an unknown place with the potential to become familiar. He felt already that he knew this room, and would remember the details of it if he never saw it again.
Nina told him about Richard and their life before his death. She told him small things that made pictures of ordinary days and he liked the way she did this for him, filling in a domestic background as a painter at a canvas. She described the house in London, and he remembered reading about the conversion in an architecture magazine and was impressed. He felt his perceptions of her changing all the time. He was sleepy again, and although he struggled against it he dropped into a doze for a few seconds. When he woke up again it was with the momentary impression that he knew her very well, better than he knew Vicky.
Nina realized that he was almost asleep. She watched him as she talked, and saw the involuntary flickers of his facial muscles, and the relaxation of his jaw that left his mouth a little open as his breathing steadied and deepened. She switched off the light and turned in the darkness to curl herself against him. In his sleep he put his heavy arm over her hip, and she knew this was how he must lie with Vicky.
When Nina woke up in the morning the feeling of lightness was still with her. It was dark in the room behind the heavy shutters, but she could make out the shape of Gordon’s
