he felt unexpected happiness lifting and ballooning within him. There was this house and its gardens, and the solid, inarticulate love he had for his sons, and there was Janice. He remembered her blurred glance at him this evening when she brought up Jimmy’s behaviour, and her need for love and reassurance, and the kitchen smell in her hair.
The happiness was as taut as a drum beneath his rib-cage.
As he got up and walked back towards the house he was thinking that it was not an audacious life, but it was round, sufficient. It was what he had. Upstairs in the silence of the house Janice was already asleep. Andrew undressed and got into bed beside her, warming himself against the generous curve of her back.
Forty excited children seethed under the magnificent fan-vaulted roof of the cathedral’s chapter house and leapt on and off the ancient stone seats that lined the walls, unawed by their surroundings. It was the first full rehearsal for the annual Grafton nativity play.
Marcelle Wickham sat on a folding chair with a list and a clipboard, and a wicker hamper beside her. Daisy Wickham had been chosen to be one of the angel chorus. It was an honour but it was a double-edged one, because with the invitation had come a suggestion that Daisy’s mother might like to help with the costumes. Marcelle had sighed, and then for Daisy’s sake agreed that she would be glad to do it. Now, with three weeks before the first performance, sixteen of the children were still uncostumed, including the ox and the ass.
Marcelle looked up from her list to see Nina standing beside her.
Nina was wearing her bright red jacket and her hair frizzed out over her shoulders, reminding Marcelle of her first glimpse of her in the supermarket. She shone like a beacon against the austere stone backdrop of the chapter house.
‘Thanks for coming,’ Marcelle said.
The director was calling his cast to order. Marcelle and Nina lowered their voices.
‘The ones I’ve finished are in here.’ Marcelle lifted the lid of her wicker hamper.
Nina unfolded an angel’s robe. The fabric was the cheapest plain white cotton but the garment was beautifully cut, with a yoke and falling folds of sleeve.
‘No tinsel haloes?’ she asked.
‘No tinsel haloes. To Daisy’s great disappointment.’
‘So what would you like me to do?’
She had heard Marcelle talking about the cathedral play, and about the sewing that remained to be done, and had diffidently offered to help her. In the last weeks Nina had felt the cathedral beckoning her, so that her steps continually returned to it. The creamy stone of the great pillars and arches and the pieced-together miracle of the medieval glass thrilled her as they had always done, but now she was as much affected by its place at the heart of Grafton. The towers and pinnacles seemed to gather the streets inwards, anchoring and interpreting them, and connecting the lives beyond them.
Once she would have dismissed the idea as fanciful, but she was convinced that the cathedral and its works were the secular as well as the spiritual heart of Grafton. The business park and the shopping precinct and the closes and avenues of new houses were only peripheral, the bright green leaves, whereas the cathedral was the roots and more than the roots, the black earth itself. Nina had never experienced any religious feeling and she did not know if what she was experiencing was religious, but she loved the sense of continuity, of the daily services that were offered up whether the people came or not, and the rhythms of the chapter and the close beyond her windows.
Marcelle said, apologetically, ‘It’s the animals, really. The ox and the ass, and the lambs. I know it’s a cheek, asking a professional artist like you, but I thought perhaps some painted masks …’
Nina cut her short. ‘I can do masks, if that’s what you would like. Or I can do more representational heads, if you would rather. Not fibreglass or anything too ambitious but papier-mâché needn’t be as tacky as it sounds.’
‘Could you?’
‘Easily.’
‘I think masks. The children are quite small, especially the lambs. Those are the two, at the front.’
A pair of six-year-olds, one with a head of tight brassy curls, squirmed at the front of the group of children.
The angel choir had shuffled to its feet, Daisy Wickham amongst them. They were joined by the twelve boy choristers from the Cathedral School and their musical director raised his hand.
The children began to sing the Coventry Carol.
Nina’s eyes and throat were stung by the sweetness of it. Her parents had brought her to the cathedral every Christmas to see the nativity play and to hear the carols. She was swept back to childhood and the memories of hard wooden seats and the faint smell of cough sweets and fir boughs.
Daisy Wickham peered sideways to make sure her mother was watching, and then made an embarrassed face at her.
From the four rows of children Nina picked out another face she knew, or thought she recognized. He was amongst the choristers, a boy of about nine. He had a cap of fair hair cut in a square fringe above his eyebrows, and a round, sweet, rather stolid face.
‘That must be a little Frost, surely, the one at the front on the left?’
‘Yes. It’s William, the younger one.’
He was like his brother, but his features were still girlish and pretty. Nina watched the boy as the carol ended, and reflected on the slow changes that would transmute him into the glowering adolescent and then, at last, into a version of Andrew Frost.
For the first time in many months she wished for a child of her own, to see her growing and unfolding in the way that William Frost would do.
The rehearsal ended at eight. By the time it was over Marcelle and Nina had divided the outstanding cutting and sewing between them, and Nina had promised to bring roughs of her masks to the next rehearsal.
‘I’m so grateful,’ Marcelle said. She was, in truth, because she was sure that whatever Nina undertook to do would be done well.
They said their good nights and separated. Nina walked away across the green, thinking of Vicky at home with her husband and her new baby, and of the choir of angels, other women’s children, rehearsing their carols.
Marcelle drove across town with Daisy in the back. She was a good driver and she felt comfortable, in this brief interlude, within the insulated box of her car. She liked the soft greenish glow of the instrument panel and the slow burr of the heater, and the way the lights outside licked over her face and then receded behind her. She would have been happy if home had been much further away; if she could have driven on, suspended like this, with the traffic blinking past on the opposite side of the road.
When she reached the house, Marcelle noted that a light was on behind the drawn curtains in Michael’s upstairs study. The tranquillity induced by the night drive was slipping away from her. Her mouth tightened, she felt it, and felt the vertical lines marking her cheeks.
‘Here we are, home again,’ she said brightly to Daisy. Michael’s
