thought of the money that Richard had left her, dead weights of it invisibly stored up in banks and securities, and of Richard himself, as she had never seen him, lying on the path under the branches of the trees. He was gone, and he would never come back.
‘Yes, I can pay cash.’
His eyes widened a fraction, and the palm of his hand grazed her nipple under the layers of clothes.
Speed, and money, and sex, Nina thought giddily. The old cliché. But it was none the less exciting for that.
‘Then let me do the deal for you,’ Gordon said.
They went back to the showroom together, and he began to negotiate.
From the salesman’s face, Nina knew that he was jealous of them both. He was jealous of her for her car and her money, and of Gordon for his possession of her. The atmosphere in the mock-plush side office was as tense as a drawn wire.
‘I can’t go any lower than that. That’s shaved our profit right down to a couple of points,’ the man complained.
‘Then we’ll go along to Forshaw’s and see what they can offer us,’ Gordon said simply. Nina was awed.
After half an hour, she had her red car for exactly fifty-five thousand pounds, and the salesman was wiping his forehead with a folded handkerchief.
‘I’ll come in with a banker’s draft the day after tomorrow,’ Nina said and smiled.
They shook hands, at last.
Outside again, Nina put her arm through Gordon’s.
‘You were terrible. The poor little man.’
‘Poor nothing. He doesn’t sell many of those in a week.’
‘My beautiful new car. Thank you.’
On the forecourt, faced off by the lines of Nissans, they kissed again. Nina shivered with his arms around her.
‘Get in,’ Gordon said, and held the door for her. They drove away in silence, aware of their own breathing and the fog of one another’s breath on the cold air. When they reached the motorway Nina slyly put her hand out, reaching for him with the images of smooth red wings and the glitter of chrome in her mind.
‘It’s a long way home,’ she whispered.
He knew that she had been turned on by the car, and by the whole secret, frivolous expedition they had made together, and that seemed to him delightful and also erotic.
‘I can’t wait that long,’ Gordon said roughly.
Ahead of them was a sign for a motorway rest area, and amongst the blue and white symbols innocently offering themselves there was a bed. It had a head and foot and a neatly turned-down white sheet.
Nina heard the tick-tick of the indicator, and they swung left in a line of drivers leaving the motorway. The Travelodge at the far side of the enclave was deserted at this time of day, the double row of windows masked by net curtains. There were no other cars in the motel’s parking area.
‘Wait here for me,’ Gordon said.
After he had gone through a door at the end of the block marked ‘Reception’, Nina felt suddenly conspicuous sitting alone in his car. She sank lower into her seat, drawing the collar of her coat up around her neck, and then dismissed her fears as absurd and sat upright again. A moment later Gordon came back and took his place behind the wheel once more. Then he opened his hand to show her a key with a plastic number tag. They both stared at it.
‘Do you want to do this?’ he asked her. ‘In a motel room, with me?’
She gazed out at the windswept tarmac and the tossing branches of trees that had been planted to break the noise of the road.
Gordon said, ‘The other night was happenstance. We can dismiss that, if you like. You were lonely, I stepped out of line, Vicky was in hospital.’
The second time, she supplied for him, was different. It was a matter of volition, and if the act was repeated they would have to make the necessary reckonings afterwards. Her own husband was dead; this man, with his direct language and appetite, was another woman’s husband. She knew the weight of her own loneliness, and remembered how Gordon had lightened it, and understood equally well that he would not and could not entirely dissolve it for her.
But even as Nina pondered the equation, with her eyes fixed on the trees, she was forced to acknowledge that she did want him again. More than that, it was inconceivable that she would find the strength of will to deny that she did. This mundane place, the breeze-block outline of the motel, and the key in his hand, were invested with significance because of their association with him. She did not understand how this had happened, only that it had happened and she could not now escape whatever was to follow.
She took the key from his hand, and metal and plastic jingled together.
‘I do want to,’ she told him.
He kissed her, forcing her head back against the headrest, and his mouth grazed her skin. They left the car, and walked unsteadily towards the motel room.
It was a small rectangular box, with a hollowed bed flanked by cheap drawers faced in brown plastic veneer. A bathroom walled into one corner revealed pink tiles and a floral curtain.
Gordon tossed the key on to the bedcover.
‘I’m sorry. This is horrible.’
He was thinking of the pale, dignified spaces of her house in Dean’s Row. He remembered her bedroom as clearly as if he was looking at a photograph of it. But he had wanted this second time, if it was to happen, to be in a neutral place that was neither hers nor his.
‘It isn’t horrible or beautiful. It’s nowhere,’ Nina said gently.
He was grateful to her for this reading of his needs. But now they faced each other in the perfunctory approximation of a bedroom, a place that was occupied without affection by hurried businessmen and travellers and illicit lovers like themselves, he saw their condition more clearly, stripped of its romantic glow. He saw a middle-aged man, made weary of his good wife by the repetition of too many days. He had brought Nina here – and in this clear light he knew that she was not the wild girl he had conjured up the other night but a sad widow, also no longer young, with fine lines in her face – to commit an act of adultery.
A memory of the cathedral on the night he had shown it to her came back to him. He had been intent on Nina, but he also remembered the organ music and the singing of the choir at practice. He was not a conventionally religious man, and he had married Vicky in a register office, but he had a confused sense of a simple and faithful life, established and approved by a higher authority, that might have been lived along lines that were parallel to but infinitely distant from the tangle and heat and disillusion of his real existence.
‘What is it?’ Nina asked him.
He tried to say ‘nothing’ but at the same time he half turned away from her, looking through the net curtains to where his car was parked between oblique white lines.
‘Guilt. And fear, and a belated desire not to hurt anyone.’
