‘Yes. Is it a man?’
There was a different look to her. He had noticed it as soon as she arrived.
Nina laughed. ‘Clever you.’
‘Not especially. It’s plain to see.’
Patrick stood up and put another log on the fire. The half-burned ones were mantled in white ash seamed with glowing scarlet threads. Watching him, and seeing his economical, faintly old-maidish movements as he tidied the stone hearth, Nina thought how much she loved him, and also loved this room where everything had been chosen for its beauty and placed with care and attention. It drew her back to Richard’s world and made a contrast with the Grafton houses that she had visited, bursting with children and haphazard furniture and colour supplement chintzes. This small piece of superiority distanced her from Gordon who had filled her mind through the train journey. The recognition of their differences reassured her.
‘It’s nothing. One night, that’s all. He’s married, with about a dozen children. But it was very nice, just for the one night.’
Patrick did not give any sign of approval. He was wary and tentative in his own relationships, and celibate now. He had shared the months of Nina’s grieving for her husband and he was glad to see her sudden brightness, but the circumstances were not what he would have wished for her.
‘Be careful,’ he said, knowing that he sounded joyless.
She nodded her head to acknowledge the warning, moral and emotional and physical.
‘I was. I shall be.’
But she felt wonderful, sitting and drinking her wine and watching the fire in Patrick’s company. It was wonderful to have given and received love again, however briefly. The shame had faded away, leaving her with clear eyes to admire the miniature perfections of the ordinary world. Her head teemed with ideas, silently drifting like thick snowflakes. She began to think of her alphabet paintings, and it came to her that she might paint a rainbow in the bowl of a glass, like Patrick’s, with a medieval room reflected in it like a jewel.
‘Nina? What would you like to do? We could go to a late film, if there is anything you want to see.’
Patrick watched her.
‘I don’t want to go out. Unless you do.’
He could remember the precise mixture of dreaminess and sharp awareness, although he had not felt it himself for a long time. The contemplation of it made him both envious and sad.
‘Are you hungry? Shall I cook something?’
Nina uncrossed her legs and stood up, going to Patrick and putting her arms around him. There was a tiny hole at the shoulder seam of his vicuna sweater, and the fairish hair at the neat shaved line beside his ear glittered with silver. When they hugged each other she felt that he stood solid and there was no longer an involuntary recoil from the old crudity of her grief. She patted his shoulder gently, like a mother, and released him.
‘Let’s cook something together. It’s ages since I made a proper meal.’
She was hungry, she realized.
Nina followed Patrick into his austere kitchen. She opened the door of his refrigerator and looked in at the neat single portions of food. She had not been expected, of course.
They were both lonely. The various modes and varieties of loneliness confronted her like the meat and vegetables on the white racks. She remembered the Grafton couples with their big warm kitchens and pine tables and easy hospitality, and the façades of smiles.
Her first judgement of them had been a simplification. It had been born out of envy, and the over-awareness of her own solitude. Last night with Gordon Ransome she had glimpsed confusion behind the smooth faces, and now she felt a beat of gratitude for the past happiness of her own marriage.
She held the refrigerator door open wider.
‘What shall we make?’ she asked Patrick.
At seven-thirty, after a day of meetings and a distant site visit, and after he had been to the hospital and come home at last, Gordon dialled Nina’s number. There was no answer, not even the bland invitation of an answering machine. He held the receiver for a long time, listening to the hollow ringing tone.
He tried again and again, through the slow weekend until the digits were imprinted in his head like a mantra, but there was never any reply.
For Nina it was a London weekend like many others she had known. The form of it was both familiar and already consigned to history. She went with Patrick to the theatre to see a play by a new feminist writer, and to Blooms for dinner with Patrick’s friends. On Sunday morning they went to Brick Lane market to rummage for treasures amongst the faded bric-à-brac, and then to Hampstead for a lengthy lunch with more old friends who only noted with pleasure that Nina looked well, almost herself again.
At the lunch there was an architect, recently divorced, whom she had not met before, although he claimed to have known Richard. After they had eaten they went out to walk on the heath amongst the Sunday crowds of dog-exercisers and kite-flyers and children on tricycles. The architect walked beside Nina, and after a little way he asked her if she would like to have dinner with him one evening.
Nina’s hands were in the pockets of her coat. She rubbed the residue of crumbs and fluff between her fingers, and looked ahead at the silhouettes of walkers against the greenish sky on the crest of Parliament Hill. This afternoon was perfectly familiar to her, like the wider axis that contained it, and she had felt herself growing impatient with it as the hours passed. She was thinking about Grafton, and wanting to hurry back there.
She smiled at the architect. ‘I can’t, but thank you. I don’t live in London any longer. I moved away to the country and I have to go back this evening.’
‘Next time you are in town then, perhaps,’ the man said, observing the conventions.
It was getting dark, with the rapid sinking into gloom of a December afternoon. The party broke up as one couple with their children turned at an angle across the heath towards their own house.
‘I should get back to Grafton,’ Nina said to Patrick. She calculated that if she caught the six o’clock train she could be at the Frosts’ house by not long after eight. She did not let herself reckon beyond that. Patrick heard the note of urgency in her voice.
‘I’ll drive you to Paddington,’ he offered.
At the station Nina hugged him again. He made a surprised face, to indicate that he was unused to such an abundance of affection.
‘Next time, will you come down to stay with me?’ she asked. Her face was bright. She had discovered something, some seam of happiness, and she wanted to share it with him or to have him admire it. ‘There are nice people. I’d like you to meet them.’
He accepted that she was being generous. ‘Of course I will come.’
‘Good. Maybe I’ll give a party.’ There had been lots of parties before Richard died.
‘Be careful, won’t you?’ Patrick repeated.
‘Certainly.’ She
