new sister, and Gordon was being assiduous in his efforts to help. Helen slept, and fed, and slept again. The house enclosed them all, like a warm cocoon.
When she was quite sure that the baby was asleep, Vicky lifted her up and walked softly into the next room. She wrapped her in her white blanket and laid her down in the Moses basket.
It was the middle of the morning. This was the time that always seemed to Vicky to be the brightest and safest of the whole day. It was an optimistic interim of radio music and kettles and vacuum cleaners, before the day tipped over into the more ambivalent stretches of the afternoon. When she was at work, at the clinic, she liked to see child patients at this innocent time.
There was no need to think about work yet, she reflected. The remaining weeks of her maternity leave stretched ahead of her.
Vicky went into the kitchen and leaned against the sink, looking out into the wintry garden. There was an inverted pyramid of baby clothes hanging on the tree of the rotary clothesline. It was a day of thin sunshine and the shafts of light struck horizontally through the windows. Dust motes swirled like light particles in the solid-seeming bars of brightness. She felt dreamy, almost dazed by the colourless sunlight falling on her face.
When the telephone rang on the wall beside her she lifted it absently and murmured, ‘Hello?’
There was the momentary weightless silence that signalled Gordon on his car telephone.
‘Darling? Is that you? You sound funny. Are you all right?’
‘Yes, I’m fine. Helen has just gone to sleep. Isn’t it a lovely day?’
‘What? Yes, beautiful. I wanted to make sure you were okay. I’m going to be on site for most of the rest of the day, and it’ll be difficult to reach me.’
‘Don’t worry. We’re perfect here, Helen and me.’
‘I’ll ring you later, then. You’ll call Janice or someone, if you need anything?’
‘Of course I will. I don’t need anything. Thanks, anyway. Gordon?’
‘Yes?’
‘I love you.’ She cradled the receiver against her shoulder, still looking out at the garden and the clothes gently rotating on the line.
‘Love you too. I won’t be late,’ Gordon said.
Vicky hung up. Moving slowly, luxuriating in the light, she filled the kettle and admired the diamond flashes in the water as it splashed in the sink.
Gordon drove back the way he had just come, this time with Nina beside him. The interior of the car seemed full of the scent of her, and the ends of her hair and the soft points of wool that stood up from her clothes gave off a crackle of static electricity. He wanted to touch her, rubbing her to discharge the sparks and then to press his mouth against her and drink her in.
‘Where are we going?’
He was watching the road, but he was pricklingly aware of the pull of the muscles around her mouth, the sheen of her skin and the bloom of tiny hairs revealed by the oblique sunlight. It was no less than miraculous that he had achieved this expedition with her, at the cost of nothing more than a small lie to Vicky and a penetrating glance from Andrew as he had eased himself out of the office.
‘You know where we are going,’ he answered. ‘To buy you a car.’
Teasingly, Nina had repeated Hannah’s suggestion to him, and he had responded to it in full seriousness. She had been touched.
‘Yes, I know that, and it’s very kind of you to take me.’
‘Kind?’
‘Certainly. But where are we going to buy me a car?’
‘To a Mercedes dealership I know. Near Bristol.’
‘Ah. Do I definitely need a Mercedes? Wouldn’t it be more sensible to settle for something utilitarian and Japanese?’
‘There is a Nissan place right opposite the Merc showroom, if you need to make a comparison. But it was you who mentioned a Mercedes in the first place.’
‘I know. I have always rather liked the idea.’
His hand left the wheel and reached for hers. Their hands locked together but they looked ahead, at the road signs that loomed and then whirled past rather than venture a glance at each other.
‘A Mercedes is a sensible car. Solid, reliable, immaculately engineered.’
Nina laughed at his earnestness. ‘If you say so.’
‘And sexy. If you choose the right model.’
‘Sexier than …’ Nina pursed her lips. ‘Hannah’s BMW, say?’
‘Much.’ He did look at her then, and she was surprised and then caught undefended by the heat in him. Their linked hands rested against her thigh. Nina heard the rasp of her own breathing.
‘Just as you are sexier than Hannah herself.’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Oh, but you are. Hannah is obvious, whereas you are subtle. Hannah is a hot day at the beach and you, you are … a forest path in the moonlight. A matter of shadows and suggestions, and sudden clear patches of pure silver.’
This poetic flight from a man so unpoetical touched her again. She felt a kindling of affection that was separate from the welter of her other confused sensations.
Nina stared ahead of her again. A sign swept towards them. Bristol, 20m. Gordon disengaged his hand from hers as he overtook a Volvo the same colour as Janice’s. Lightheartedly, but also out of a secret kind of retrospective jealousy, she asked him, ‘Which of the other wives do you like? If not Hannah?’
Gordon shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Star, perhaps.’
Nina remembered the impression of her weeping at the Frosts’ on Sunday evening.
‘Is she unhappy?’
‘Who knows? No unhappier than anyone else would be, I imagine, married to Jimmy Rose.’
It was a deliberate deflection and Nina silently accepted it.
The Mercedes showroom was a sleek affair of plate-glass windows and shining bodywork by the side of a busy road amongst a network of more busy roads. There was indeed a Nissan garage directly opposite to it, a much brasher looking place with a border of snapping flags flying from tall white poles.
Nina and Gordon stepped out from Gordon’s car into a world of steel-blue reflections in glass and long, polished bonnets and cold sun striking darts from mirrors and chrome. Even the specks of mica underfoot twinkled up at them. They walked shyly to the doors of the showroom, half-dazzled by the light and pleased to find themselves as a couple in this adventure, as if they had emerged into a surprise holiday.
Once they were inside a salesman in a blue suit came briskly to meet them.
‘Good
