you be soft, then.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he attempted for the last time.
‘Yes,’ Nina said. He was dismissed.
Gordon nodded. Then he went down the stairs and let himself out into the Row. His Peugeot was parked beyond the archway that led on to the green. He drove out of the city in the opposite direction from home, and stopped in a field gateway off a lane that led in the direction of Wilton. In the distance he could see the lights of Darcy’s house on its little hill.
He sat for a long time with the car heater making a small burr of warmth around him. The hedge trees loomed in the darkness, and no other car passed. Once he reached out to the tongue of the cassette tape protruding from the player, but he stopped before pushing it in to play. He thought about all the households between here and the city, imagining the rooms and the decorations that had been put up for the holiday and the complicated arrangements of families gathered for Christmas. He felt omniscient, elevated by his sadness, as if he could look into each of the houses and interpret its secrets.
Then he thought about his own fireside, with a sudden affection coloured by relief. It only remained for him to make his confession to Vicky, and then he would be safe.
At length, when he began to feel stiff and cold even with the heater running, he restarted the engine and turned the car back in the direction he had come.
In the empty room Nina leant forward and picked up a shred of gold wrapping paper from the rug. She folded it and buffed it with her fingernail to make it shine, and then twisted it around her ring finger to make a wedding band, as she had done as a child in games of getting married.
My husband will be handsome and rich, and we’ll have eight children, four of each.
My husband will buy us a big house in London and another by the sea, and we’ll have eight children as well.
The paper made a gaudy triplet with Richard’s rings.
She asked him, Why aren’t you here? Why did you go and leave me, when I needed you? We had our houses and your money and our happiness.
No children. I’m sorry for that, my love.
And then you had to go and die, and leave me here.
Nina stared at the blank wooden shutters that closed out the cathedral and the restoration works. A month ago, even a week ago, she would have cried and battered herself against the wall of her own grief. Nothing had changed, only herself, but this time she did not cry.
Now that he had stumbled away with his needs and his confusion, Nina knew that she had only tried to make herself a shadow husband out of Gordon Ransome. She had imagined his strength and protection, and her instincts had been hardly more developed than those of the little girl playing weddings.
It was harsh to be angry with Gordon because his strength had turned out to be an illusion, and because his protective instincts were all for himself and his wife and his children and not for her.
She took off the paper ring and screwed it into a ball before throwing it at the fire. The only strength that was valuable to her was her own, and for the protection of friendship there was always Patrick.
She found him sitting in the kitchen, the room she still disliked with its faux-rustic cupboards and tiles. The tea tray was immaculately laid and waiting on the table beside him. He was smoking a coloured Balkan Sobranie with gold filter, a Christmas indulgence.
‘I heard him leaving,’ Patrick said.
‘The final exit.’
He raised his eyebrows at her, squinting through the smoke, making his Noel Coward face. Nina began to laugh.
‘Funny?’ Patrick enquired.
‘Not really. No.’
‘Tell me, then.’ He lifted the teapot and poured for her, passed her the cup.
‘It’s just how you would have predicted. You warned me at the beginning, didn’t you?’
He made a gesture modestly dismissive of his own prescience, and now they both laughed.
‘One of the wives, one half of one of the couples, happened to see us together. She told someone else, one of the husbands, who will in his turn tell the others. And so Gordon’s wife will get to hear of it. And so it has to end, so that he can confess to her and ask for forgiveness.’
Patrick demanded, ‘How can you bear it? This provincial world of couples pecking away at each other, at each other’s secrets?’
Nina drank some of her tea. ‘It isn’t quite like that. This isn’t a metropolitan world, there isn’t the same luxurious privacy that cities give. But there is a feeling of us all being here together. Of having committed ourselves to the same life. It was a mistake to have an affair. I suppose I had overlooked the fact that it would be more … significant here.’
She was thinking of the different faces of the Grafton couples and the ways that their friendships and allegiances seemed to knit them together, and remembering her reluctance to join Darcy Clegg in his mild mockery of them.
Patrick was watching her face. ‘So it is over, your love affair?’
‘Oh, yes.’
There was a moment’s silence. ‘He was wearing those shoes. The ones that look like pork pies that have been left out in the rain.’
‘Don’t laugh at him, Patrick. I liked him very much.’
‘And now he’s made you sad.’
‘Yes.’
Patrick took hold of her hand and then he put his arms around her. She rested her forehead against his shoulder.
‘Why don’t you come back to London instead of staying out here in bandit country, with bandits in pork pie shoes?’
Nina shook her head. ‘I like it here,’ she said. She was thinking of the statues in their cathedral niches, and their faces re-emerging from the lime bandages, images of regeneration.
Patrick let her go. ‘Well. I suppose that’s that, then. Do you want to watch the end of the film?’
‘Why not? We could have a glass of champagne at the same time. It is Christmas.’
‘That’s my girl.’
They finished their tea, and then drank champagne in front of the television. Later there was another knock at the door, and Nina went downstairs to answer it. A car was parked with two wheels on the pavement, and Barney Clegg and his friend with the bandaged arm stood on the step. Barney held up two bottles and Tom carried an ivory-flowered plant wrapped in green tissue paper in the crook of his good arm. They both beamed at her.
‘You did live, then,’ Nina said to Tom.
‘I did. We’ve called to say thank you. And to give you this. Whatever it is.’
‘It’s a Christmas rose,’
