a greeting to some of the other worshippers, although he knew none of them well. This was a matter of choice; he preferred to slip out of the currents of the day and come to mass alone.
The Catholic church was a modern brick building in a quiet road. Jimmy walked a little way away from it, down the street, to get away from the people and their cars. It was a cold, clear night. The street lights spread a murky orange canopy overhead, but he could see through it to the sharp brilliance of the stars. When he was alone he stopped, and heard the tiny echo of his own footsteps.
He tilted his head back to look at the stars.
It was Christmas morning, and Jimmy felt entirely at peace.
The door of the house in Dean’s Row was opened by a man Gordon had never seen before. His pale, indoor clothes looked incongruous in the metallic winter light and his feet were bare. It was the afternoon of Boxing Day.
‘Is Nina here?’
Patrick said, ‘Yes, she is.’ He knew at once that this was the man. Reluctantly he held the door open wider. ‘Come in. She’s upstairs.’
Nina and Patrick had been watching a film, the Branagh Henry V. They had spent many afternoons like this together, immersed in a movie, barricaded by sofa cushions. There was a box of Belgian chocolates on the floor, and a comfortable litter of empty coffee cups and wine glasses. The King’s dirty, weary army limped across the television screen in the corner.
‘I much prefer the Olivier version,’ Patrick had sighed, before the knock at the door. ‘Such romantic Plantagenet splendour.’
‘You would.’ Nina laughed at him through a mouthful of chocolate. ‘Don’t you think mud and dead horses are more realistic?’
‘And is realism a real benefit?’
Now Gordon stood in the doorway. Nina was startled, still warm with laughter, sitting in her corner of the sofa with her knees drawn up against the cushions. Gordon saw the evidence of an indulgent, adult afternoon of a kind that he had almost forgotten. His own house today was a dense, humid mass of children and grandparents and festive detritus. Nina’s bare, elegant drawing room and even the unknown languid man formed a tableau that entirely excluded him.
‘I’m sorry. I’m disturbing you.’
Nina jumped to her feet. She was wearing leggings and a loose cashmere tunic that he remembered seeing before. It had felt soft enough to melt under his hands.
‘No, you’re not. Of course you’re not.’
He clearly saw the pleasure and anticipation in her face, and wished that he had come to tell her something different.
‘Only I thought, today …’
She gestured with her long fingers that he wanted to take hold of. She meant that it was Boxing Day, a time of new dolls’ houses and noisy parlour games and family attachments.
‘I said I had a headache and needed some fresh air. The truth, as it happens.’
For a moment he had forgotten the pale-coloured man behind him, but Nina had not.
‘Gordon, this is Patrick Forbes, an old friend of mine. Patrick, this is Gordon Ransome.’
Gordon said stiffly, ‘How do you do?’
Patrick shrugged, smiling a little. ‘Hi.’
They shook hands, conscious of immediate mutual dislike. Gordon saw, now that they faced each other, that Patrick must be queer. He was always uncomfortable with homosexuals, and Patrick’s defensiveness of Nina made him prickly.
Gordon was also disconcerted to realize that he had never considered that Nina might not be alone, even on the day after Christmas. They hadn’t discussed their separate holiday plans. Patrick’s presence, among the cushions and pairs of wine glasses, conjured up another world of Nina’s friends and diversions and allegiances in which he played no part. He felt a desolate, paradoxical jealousy.
He said, with his eyes fixed on her face, ‘I hoped we might be able to talk for a few minutes.’
Patrick’s eyebrows lifted. ‘I’ll go and make some tea, shall I?’
Nina smiled at him. ‘Could you?’
Gordon felt as if he had blundered into a game in which the unwritten rules were too subtle for him to comprehend. But as soon as Patrick had gone Nina came to him, putting her hands on his arms and reaching up to kiss him. He held her, longingly and unwillingly.
‘He knows about us, doesn’t he?’ Gordon asked.
‘I had to talk to somebody. I couldn’t keep so much so secret. Do you mind very much?’
She was bright-faced with happiness. He considered, briefly, whether he might not be able to conceal the real reason for his visit. Then they could sit down together in comfort amongst the discarded television pages and hollowed cushions. He hesitated, but her face was already changing, the happiness fading out of it.
‘What is it?’ she asked.
He noticed that in the time he had been in the room the light outside had faded from midwinter afternoon to premature dusk. In a moment the street lamps would come on at the margins of the green. When he didn’t answer at once she repeated,
‘What is it? Tell me.’
He sat down on the edge of the warm sofa. He remembered that he had lit the fire for her, on the first afternoon, and they had admired the view of the west front before it was obscured by scaffolding. Not many weeks ago. He could number them exactly, and the days, counted out in intervals by the number of times they had managed to see each other. In retrospect they seemed very few, for the weight of what he was having to do now.
‘Marcelle told Jimmy Rose that she saw us together.’
Nina gazed at him. The firelight polished her cheeks and the golden shields of her earrings.
‘Well. That is a pity.’
He waited, but she had nothing else to say. Her passivity irritated him until he remembered that she was an outsider and did not understand the shorthand of the Grafton couples.
‘If Jimmy knows it means everyone knows. Jimmy has never been one for keeping a titbit of gossip to himself.’
‘Vicky?’
‘Vicky will know soon enough, obviously. Someone will tell her.’
Nina was silent again.
Gordon had not thought directly of Vicky since he came into the room, but now he saw her as she had been when he left home with his headache to drive to the cathedral. Her mother and father had been with her, and he had noticed the way their features foretold her progress into old age just as Vicky’s predicted her own daughters’ maturity.
He had been quick with his gabbled excuses, and his wife had sighed, not
