two by two, in their cassocks and snow-white surplices.
They were singing, and the chapter house fell silent.
Once in Royal David’s city, the choir sang.
William Frost sang a solo verse. His voice was perfect, rounded and strong and pure, and it rose as effortlessly as a hawk riding an air thermal. Under the square-cut fringe of fair hair the boy’s mouth made an innocent secondary oval within the choirboy oval of his face.
Through the doors of the chapter house came two children dressed as Joseph and Mary. There was the Mary-blue robe that Nina had last seen hanging from the picture rail in Marcelle’s dining room. Mary, awed and solemn-faced, was leaning on a third child who paced between them. This boy was wearing a plain grey leotard with a dark cross etched on the back from shoulder to hip, and his face was covered by Nina’s donkey mask.
Nina and Star Rose and the Grafton couples and their children sat with the other people under the great fan vaults of the chapter house roof and watched the unfolding of the nativity play.
The shepherds in their rough coats and the kings in their magnificent robes came to offer their gifts to the Christ child, the lessons from the Gospels were read and the carefully memorized lines were clearly spoken. The Holy Family and the white-robed angels and the animals in their masks gathered around the crib. Daisy Wickham and the schools choir and William and the other choristers sang their carols, and the children’s solemn faces reflected the renewed wonder of the Christmas message.
The play was both simple and grand.
Nina was moved, and she felt the collective emotion of the people around her, the rows of heads with their hidden thoughts made momentarily clear. She felt that she was gathered in with the rest, and made safe, as she had not done in the cathedral since she was a young girl.
Almost at the end, Helen began to cry. Vicky tried to quiet her, and through the valley of seats Nina saw Gordon’s face as he inclined his head towards his wife. He looked different, like someone else, like any one of these other husbands and fathers, not like a man who was her lover.
Vicky slipped out with Helen in her arms. She drew a soft wake of smiles after her as the double doors opened to let her out. Her cheeks were pink, and she held her head up.
For the last carol the audience stood up to sing with the choirs. The familiar words and music drew Nina backwards into herself as a child, standing between her parents in the same place to sing the same carol. And as if she was contemplating it with the imperfect, simplified judgement of a child it seemed sad that there was no continuity beyond her, that she had no child of her own to bring in her turn.
When the play was over Nina sat amongst the flurry of leavings until almost everyone else had filed away. Gordon went by without seeing her, with Andrew and Janice. The Cleggs waved as they passed, and the tall boy who must be Darcy’s son nodded as if he believed he should know her. When she was sure that everyone must have gone far enough ahead she followed them through the double doors and down the steps into the nave. She gazed upwards, to the compound shafts of the pillars and the Gothic arches that sprang from them. It was here that Gordon’s tour of the restoration work had begun for her benefit.
She did not want to leave by the west door, because she was sure that the Grafton couples would be gathering on the green beside the Christmas tree, ready to begin their season’s celebrations. If anyone looked for her, they would assume that she had slipped out by the north side.
Nina sat down in the shadows of the nave. The organist was playing a Handel voluntary. She could see the shaft of light behind the curtain up in the loft.
She wondered if she should pray, but she could not think how she might expiate herself.
At last, after a long time, one of the vergers came to stand beside her. He was a very tall young man in a black cassock that was too short for him.
‘I’m afraid the Cathedral is closing now.’
There was no one left in the aisles or in the rows of wooden seats.
Nina smiled. ‘I’m going home,’ she told him.
On Christmas Eve Wilton Manor was lit up like a cruise ship at anchor in a sea of parked cars.
Michael and Marcelle Wickham walked the short distance to the house in silence, but as soon as the door opened to them they found their smiles and went into the party together.
Marcelle glimpsed Jimmy’s crest of sandy hair, and the Clegg twins, one in ankle-length and the other in thigh-high black Lycra, and Gordon Ransome’s narrow, handsome head politely inclined as he listened to something Hannah was whispering to him. Hannah was wearing a tight sheath of gold that seemed barely to contain her.
Marcelle took a glass of champagne from the tray someone held out and drank half of it. Now that she had escaped her own house she was eager for company and conversation and the comfort of a drink. As if the pressure in her ears was suddenly equalized the hubbub of the party broke in on her. She heard music, and raised voices, and the chorus of greetings. Her spirits lifted in response.
‘Marcelle, Michael, at last!’
Darcy’s cowboy-fringed arm descended around her shoulders.
‘Merry Christmas, Darcy.’
‘Have you got a drink? Hey, that’s only half a drink. Let me fill it up for you.’
More champagne foamed into her glass. She was aware that Michael had moved away from her side. She could see Janice, and the Kellys, and a dozen other familiar faces in the hallway under the Christmas tree and amongst the crowd of people in the drawing room. She let herself be carried forward to meet them, to the kisses and the greetings and the gossip, her fingers curled firmly around the glass in her hand.
Gordon watched her go. Then, involuntarily, he searched out Nina. She looked pale, thinner than usual, in a simple black dress that revealed the bony wings beneath her throat. Their eyes met, and then jerked away again.
The manor house was polished and scented, elaborately decorated with great silvered garlands of pine and holly, and warmed with log fires in all the wide grates. Hannah and her stepchildren had overseen the preparations, because Darcy was unusually preoccupied with his work. The little Clegg children had stayed up to greet the first guests and were now asleep upstairs, with their name-appliqued stockings hung over the ends of their beds, but Darcy’s three grown-up children were a noticeable presence at this year’s party.
Lucy, Cathy and Barney had invited a contingent of their own friends, and these younger people with their different haircuts and impromptu clothes wove a contrasting thread through the fabric of the party. They asked the disc jockey behind his turntables in the conservatory to play unfamiliar music in place of the sixties and seventies hits, and they danced differently, waving their arms in loose groups instead of two by two.
The Grafton parents, whose own visiting mothers and fathers were mostly at home watching over their grandchildren, were made suddenly aware that there was another generation crowding up behind them.
Michael and Darcy stood shoulder to shoulder in their dinner jackets, watching the young. Michael had refused champagne and was drinking whisky from a tumbler.
He
