him hurry away to do what had to be done.
Nina raised her eyes to meet Gordon’s. In his head the features of the two women were briefly superimposed, as he had once envisaged their bodies at the start of the affair.
She said very quietly, ‘I see. What does this mean?’
‘It means that I must tell her the truth, before somebody else gives her a distorted version of it. And it also means that I can’t go on seeing you. I’m sorry. I wish I didn’t have to be so clumsy. I feel as if I have broken something that is irreplaceable.’
Nina sat still. Her eyes slid away from his, to the fire. When she spoke it was in the same quiet voice.
‘Don’t worry. Nothing’s broken.’
Whatever it was that Gordon had been afraid of, tears or protests or blame, did not come. Her face was immobile, and her silence meant that he had to talk, continuing to offer her some other currency now that the old, thrilling one had become invalid.
‘This is very painful, Nina. You made me so happy. Guilty, but happy as well. I went through our tapes, in the racks at home, and dug out the old rock numbers and fed them into the deck in the car. I used to drive along, going to work or some bloody site meeting, with the volume turned up, music blasting out. Singing along, grinning and drumming my fingers on the wheel. I felt like a boy.’
He spread his hands out, offering her this.
‘A middle-aged engineer, burdened with debt and children and responsibilities. I couldn’t believe that it was happening.’
Nina said nothing.
‘I loved you. I love you now.’
She looked at him at last.
‘And so what happens to it, this love?’
He considered it, knowing that he owed her as much.
To feel love had been seductive and intriguing and flattering, and it had lent him an animation that he had not felt for years. This woman, whom he had believed he understood and now suspected that he did not, had accepted and reciprocated his love, and all of this had been enclosed within a frame of secrecy that had been part of its delight. Gordon had enjoyed having a secret, after so many years when his interior life had been as clean and plain and colourless as the external world. The possession of it had added an extra erotic charge to everything that he and Nina did together.
But once the secrecy was gone, he did not see how the rest could remain. Whatever different gloss he wished to give it, it had been a private affair that was now public property.
‘I love you still,’ he said helplessly.
That was the truth. Greedy and possessive as he knew it was, he wanted to keep her. Even now it would have been easy, delightful, to reach out, to undo buttons and expose the white, tea-freckled skin.
Gordon touched the tip of his tongue to his lips.
‘But I am married, and therefore responsible to people other than myself. I thought you understood that. Nina?’
‘Understood that wives must be protected at all costs?’
Her eyes were as flat as the discs of her earrings.
‘Wives, and children …’ Gordon said.
As he spoke the words he gained another surprising perspective. This loss of love and Nina hurt him, and would continue to hurt him, but he also wanted to be saved. Salvation was in sight, and this glimpse of it filled him with relief.
‘What about me?’ Nina asked. Her voice was dry, toneless.
He shook his head slowly, from side to side, accepting the darts of pain inside his skull as his due. He was eager for the pain of losing her to begin, too, as the penance he must undergo.
‘I don’t want to hurt you. I want to wrap you up and make it better for you, but I can’t. I can’t bear the thought of hurting you.’
‘But, clearly, you can bear it.’
It was fully dark outside. The street lamps made an ugly, amber haze in drifted snow-shapes of condensation at the corners of the window panes.
In the silence that followed Nina went to the nearest of the tall windows and unfolded the shutters from their panelled niches, carefully fitting the old iron catch with its curled tail into the slot to hold them securely closed. She did the same with the other two windows, moving carefully behind the Christmas tree to reach them. Nina’s tree was hung with silver trinkets and illuminated with pure white light. Gordon made an automatic comparison with Vicky’s, which was loaded with crayoned ornaments made by the girls and lit with multi-coloured lanterns.
Nina finished the task of closing out the darkness, and came back to her place.
‘Thank you for coming to tell me first,’ she said. ‘Before Vicky.’
He had never seen this coldness, this composure, in her before. After the very beginning she had always been warm and eager, generous with herself in a way that had been enticingly at odds with her physical slightness. He wanted to defend Vicky, who had done nothing, but he restrained himself.
‘I’m truly sorry,’ was all he could think of to say.
‘Yes. However, nothing is broken,’ Nina repeated.
But she is strong, Gordon thought. Much stronger than I am.
Her strength unbalanced him, and revealed his own weakness.
Now that the business was done he felt a terrible, humble urge to throw himself at her, to hide his face and to cry and wail in her arms and have her comfort him, the way Vicky soothed Alice with inarticulate murmurings after a bad dream. The smell of her and the texture of her skin and hair returned sharply in his imagination. He propped his elbow on his knee, and rested his head in his hand. She did not reach out to soothe or console him, as he wanted her to do. Instead she looked at her watch, and the loose cuff of her tunic fell back to expose her thin wrist and the freckles on her arm.
She said in her cool, unemphatic voice, ‘I wonder where Patrick is with the tea.’
Gordon lifted his head again.
‘I don’t want any tea.’
‘Yours will be waiting for you at home, of course.’
The glimpse of her bitterness stirred him. She was not unaffected, after all, and he felt himself melting. He made a tiny move towards her, but she held up her hands, fending him off.
The conversation was over. He could not put any other interpretation on it. She would not look at him now.
There was nothing for him to do but stand up and take the coat that he had put aside when Patrick led him into the room.
He blurted foolishly, ‘Will I … will we see each other again?’
Nina sat amongst the cushions, one side of her face gilded by the firelight.
‘At the
