face the day. She lay, memorizing the outlines of his mouth and eyes so she would be able to recall them when he had gone. At last, her stare penetrated his sleep and he stirred and opened his eyes to see her. Almost at once he was looking for his watch.
‘Twenty past seven,’ Nina told him. It was early to her.
He sat up. ‘Is it? As late as that? I must go.’
‘Do you have to?’
She had imagined they would have breakfast together. She had even planned how she would lay a tray and bring it up.
‘Yes. I have to be in by eight-thirty.’ He was thinking of the way home, a hot shower and turning the car round again for the office. He put his hand out to touch her cheek. ‘I’m sorry. Perhaps I should have gone home last night.’
‘I’m glad you didn’t.’ She knew that he was about to get out of bed and leave her. ‘I’m glad you were here. I was happy when I woke up. I lay and looked at your face. You made me feel happy.’ She knew it was too much to tell him but she smiled anyway.
‘That’s good. I’m just sorry I have to go,’ he repeated.
He leaned across to kiss her and then moved quickly out of the bed. He went across the landing to the bathroom and lifted the wooden seat of the lavatory. There were jars of cosmetics and coloured bottles on the glass shelves, and he looked at them as he emptied his bladder. He avoided even a glance at himself in the mirror.
Nina had propped herself against the pillows. He retrieved his clothes and dressed himself. He felt clumsy in his socks and underclothes with her watching him. When he was ready to leave he went to the end of the bed, feeling scratchy and constricted in his creased Tory suit. She swung her legs out from under the quilt. When she stood up he saw her body and remembered it, and at once he wanted to push her back into the nest of heat and strawy scents they had made. Nina wrapped herself in a striped bathrobe and tied the belt. She came and stood close to him and he put his arms round her, letting her warmth seep into him.
‘Thank you,’ he said.
There was a movement of her shoulders, not quite a shrug. She did not want thanks, but reassurance.
‘I’ll call you,’ Gordon said, evading her need.
Nina nodded. ‘Yes.’
He kissed her forehead, and then let her go. She watched him to the door of her bedroom and made no attempt to follow him down the stairs. Gordon descended through the dark house and let himself out into the street.
It was only just light, and Dean’s Row was deserted. Across the green he saw the scaffolders’ wagon arriving with a load of poles and planking. Quickly he turned the corner into the narrow alley. It was a relief to shut himself into the sanctuary of his car.
He drove around the perimeter road, through the first wave of commuter traffic, passing the turning that led to the hospital. He did not think he had been seen by anyone who knew him; he was safe if he could reach home. He listened to the weather and traffic reports without taking any note of them. Memories and impressions of the night were beginning to sort themselves inside his head. When the traffic summary was replaced by rock music he found that he was smiling, and drumming his fingers on the wheel.
There was one more risky point. When he turned into his road he craned down the length of it, but there was no one about. His neighbours’ new Mercedes was parked in their driveway where it could be properly admired, and the upstairs and downstairs curtains were closed. No one else was likely to have noticed that he had been out all night. Gordon swung into the drive of his solid, Victorian house. Everything was secure. He locked the car and went quietly round the side of the house, past the conservatory, to let himself in through the back door.
The kitchen was warm and silent. He heard a rattle and a bang beside him as Alice’s cat slid in through its flap. The animal came to rub itself against his legs, purring mechan-ically. Gordon rubbed his chin with the tips of his fingers. He had fifteen minutes: time for a shave and a shower, and even a cup of coffee. He was whistling softly as he put the kettle on.
Gordon was glad to find his home quiet and safe, as if the night had never happened.
But for all his sense of relief and reprieve, he knew already that he could not bear the thought of not taking Nina to bed again.
Nina waited all of that same day for Gordon Ransome to telephone her. She went up to her studio and sat at her drawing board, automatically dipping the tip of the fine brush into her paints, but she was only pretending to work.
She felt loose in her joints, and as languid and sleepy as if she had eaten a heavy meal. Sometimes she found herself smiling when she remembered some detail of the night’s intimacy. She tried to manufacture irritation with this new hypnotized condition, but there was only a stubborn satisfaction. She began to imagine what certain of her women friends would say if she told them, and their various shades of scepticism or envy.
At first she was happy, with an edge of anticipation warmed by certainty when she looked at the telephone beside her. But then, as the hours crept by, she grew colder and less confident. She thought more often of Vicky full-blown in her pregnancy, and the new baby, and of her own thoughtless capitulation to a man she hardly knew. The night they had shared seemed to change its significance, losing its recollected warmth and becoming merely sordid, shameful. From longing to hear his voice she swung to embarrassment at the thought of ever having to encounter him again.
The telephone rang only once, at five o’clock, and she snatched it up immediately, betraying herself. It was Janice Frost.
‘Nina? Andrew and I wondered if you’d like to come over and have supper on Sunday. Nothing elaborate, just the Cleggs and the Roses after golf, and probably Gordon Ransome before Vicky comes home on Monday. Not the Wickhams, because they’re busy.’
Nina said at once, ‘That sounds nice.’
Then she became flustered at the thought of facing Gordon under the scrutiny of the smiling couples and lied hastily, ‘But … I had thought of going to London for the weekend. I don’t know if I’d be back in time …’
‘Don’t worry,’ Janice said easily. ‘It’s only a kitchen supper. Come along by eight if you’re back, and if you feel like it. Have a good weekend. Bye.’
At last, at seven o’clock, Nina could bear the silence no longer. She had made no plans for the weekend, but she ran down to her bedroom and crammed some clothes into a bag and then telephoned Patrick. It would be better to leave Grafton, to make herself unavailable. That would be the right statement to make. As she walked through the wintry rain to the station, Nina wished for the first time since leaving London for the freedom of a car.
Patrick’s panelled rooms in the Spitalfields house were reassuringly the same as always. He had lit candles in the old black iron sconces, and there was a smell of melted wax and wood smoke.
‘What has happened?’ he asked Nina.
Nina tilted her wine, looking at the pinhead bubbles faintly distorted and rainbowed by Patrick’s handblown Venetian glass. Small details of the physical world seemed suddenly to have become very clear; there were the tiny stitches in a tapestry cushion beneath her elbow, a faint smear of wood ash
