she was not sure she would be able to keep it. It was hard enough to accept that she must relinquish him in an hour, as she would have to.
‘I know that. Thank you.’
He felt a separate, invincible tenderness now for his wife and daughters. It was important that they should not be hurt, whatever came.
Gordon was full of optimism. He kissed the top of Nina’s head. ‘Come and get into the bath with me.’
They went into the windowless pink cell and ran the water, and Nina emptied the contents of all the complimentary sachets into it so that bubbles mounted to engulf the taps, and steam obliterated the mirrors. They lay down in the foam, folding their limbs to accommodate themselves, and sickly scented water slopped over the edge of the bath and puddled the tiles.
They talked through the steam, exchanging simple details about their lives. It seemed important that they should know if the other had sisters or not, had travelled and how far, could speak French if not German, had read Updike, disliked John Major.
When the water was cold, Gordon said, ‘I must go back now.’
They dried each other, gently like children, and disen-tangled their clothes.
When they were ready to leave they stood in the doorway, gazing back at the bed and the tea tray and the surfaces of plastic veneer. Then Gordon closed the door, with affection, as if he was sealing into the room a portion of their history.
They drove quietly back to Grafton. The weather was changing; the sky was clouded and a bruised light looked as if it might be the herald of snow.
It was a cold December, and the fields and hills beyond the city were stilled and drained of their colours by night after night of hard frost. A Christmas tree was put up on the cathedral green, exactly as Nina remembered from her childhood. Looking out at it from her windows she thought that even the strings of coloured bulbs that twisted through the branches were the same.
Darcy and Hannah Clegg sent out elaborate printed invitations for their Christmas Eve party. It was to be the fifth successive year that they had held the party, and it had long been established as the social centrepiece of the couples’ year.
Nina put the Cleggs’ invitation on the mantelpiece in her drawing room, from where Gordon picked it out from amongst the Christmas cards. He had called to see her after a visit to the cathedral. The whole of the west front was now masked with scaffolding and protective sheeting.
‘Are you going to this?’
‘Yes, I am. Why not, really?’
They were edgy with each other today, although she had run downstairs at the sound of his knock and when the door was closed they had fallen back against it in a rush of eagerness for one another.
‘I can only stay for a few minutes,’ he had whispered, while his fingers were already busy with the buttons of her shirt.
Afterwards they had pulled their clothes together again, and stood uneasily in the drawing room in front of the cold afternoon hearth. Gordon had refused her offer of tea, explaining that Andrew was waiting for him at the office.
Nina was galled by what she interpreted as a suggestion that she should stay away from the party. It would be the first time Gordon would have to face her with Vicky beside him.
‘I didn’t mean that you shouldn’t come,’ he said at once, taking her hands. ‘I want to see you, every possible time, wherever it is. I’m only afraid that I won’t be able to hide how much I do want it.’
‘You will be able to. It will be like at the Frosts’. Easier than that, because Vicky will be there.’
‘It isn’t easy.’
His answer was so simple, so heartfelt, that Nina saw she was unreasonable. It was no more than the unpalatable truth that she would be jealous of Vicky, and it was also true that she would have to learn to swallow her jealousy and digest it, because there was nothing else to be done.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said at once.
They held on to each other as if they could keep everything else at bay with the tenderness between them. Their separate identities miraculously melted together, and they were convinced that they understood each other entirely. So it was that they swung in a moment from distance to delight.
To Gordon, the spare Georgian house across from the cathedral was both a sanctuary and a snare. When he was away from it he thought of it constantly, yet when he came into it he moved cautiously, always reckoning the time he could spare in minutes and replaying in his head the evasions he had made in order to reach it.
Today Andrew had been clearly impatient when he had announced that he must make another visit to the cathedral. Had he only imagined it was the dawn of suspicion? There had been several half-explained absences lately. Yet Gordon could not bear to think of staying away from Dean’s Row. Nina filled his head and his imaginings. He believed that he now knew how a compulsive gambler or an addict felt, and at the same time was repelled by his connection of Nina with such things.
He asked her, with his mouth moving against her forehead, ‘When can we meet again?’
He felt the small movement of her shoulders, a gesture of impotence rather than carelessness.
‘When you next can spare an hour.’
That was how it had been since the day of buying Nina’s car. They had met four or five times, always hurriedly, always with a sense of the rest of the world lying in wait for them.
The minutes of an hour added up for Gordon now. He could almost hear them ticking, like a bomb. It was a long time; it was hardly time to draw breath.
‘I’m sorry,’ he offered in his turn. ‘That is just how it is. I’d spend every hour with you, if I could.’
Nina nodded, and then lifted her head. He could see the tiny whorls and knots of colour in her irises, and the black pupils fractionally dilating. He imagined the pull of the ciliary muscles on the tiny lens within her eyes, and the twin inverted images of himself laid on the retina only to be righted again by the brain’s conviction.
That was the brain’s power, he thought, to make logic out of what it saw clearly to be the wrong way up.
‘I’m going to drive to Bristol tomorrow. I want to give the car a proper trial,’ Nina said.
Since she had taken delivery of the red Mercedes it had spent almost all its time in the garage of the cobbled mews behind Dean’s Row.
She added, ‘I need to buy some materials for Marcelle’s nativity costumes.’
‘I’ll come with you,’ Gordon said, obliterating with a grandiose stroke the next day’s obligations. Her pleasure immediately rewarded him.
‘Will you?’
‘Somehow,’ he promised, already ambushed by his own anxiety.
Marcelle was driving to work at the Pond School. She was currently
