yes I do. Wait a minute …’
‘“When I said I would die a bachelor, I did not think I should live till I were married.”’
‘Oh, God, I do remember! It’s Andrew, isn’t it?’
‘Andrew Frost. Benedick to your elegant Beatrice.’
‘Don’t try to remind me of how long ago.’ Nina held out her hand and shook his. She was laughing and her face was suddenly bright. She remembered the plump teenaged boy who had played opposite her in the joint Shakespeare production of their respective grammar schools.
‘You were very good. I was dreadful,’ he said.
‘No, you weren’t. And your calves were excellent in Elizabethan stockings.’
Andrew beamed at her. ‘I was going to hear some music, but why don’t we go across to the Eagle instead? Have you had lunch?’
Nina hesitated.
Small fragments of memory were rapidly coalescing and strengthening, swimming into focus in front of her like the images in a developing Polaroid snapshot. She could see the boy now, inside this grown man, and as she looked harder at him the boy’s features grew more pronounced until it seemed that it was the man who was the memory. The sight of the young face brought back to her the long hours of rehearsal in the school hall smelling of floor polish and musty costumes, the miniature and tearful dramas of adolescence, the voices of teachers and friends. It was disorientating to find herself standing on the green again, almost within the shade of the mulberry tree, but clothed in the body of a middle-aged woman instead of a schoolgirl’s.
‘I can’t. I really shouldn’t today. I’m working. I’ve only come out for five minutes’ fresh air.’
It was three days since she had spoken more than half a dozen words to anyone. She didn’t want the questions to start in the saloon bar of the Eagle. She was afraid that if she was given a chance she would let too many words come pouring out, and she didn’t want Andrew Frost to hear them.
‘Working? Are you staying in Grafton?’ He was standing with one hand in his pocket, the other hitching his raincoat over his shoulder. He was friendly and relaxed, no more than naturally curious.
‘I … I’ve come back to live. I bought a house, in Dean’s Row.’
Andrew pursed his mouth in a soundless whistle, ‘Did you, now?’
Nina asked quickly, ‘What about you? Did you follow on from Benedick and find your Beatrice?’ There was a gold wedding ring on his finger.
‘I married Janice Bell. Do you remember her?’ Nina shook her head.
‘Perhaps she came after your time.’
Nina wanted to move on. It was reassuring to have made this small contact, but she needed a space to adjust Andrew Frost in her mind. She pointed to the cathedral porch.
‘You can still get into the recital. Perhaps we can have lunch together another day?’
Andrew took a business card out of his wallet and wrote on the reverse. When he handed it to her she read the inscription ‘Frost Ransome, Consulting Engineers’, with Andrew’s name beneath followed by a string of letters. Nina pursed her lips to whistle too, mimicking his gesture.
The boy’s face was swallowed up again now by the fleshier man’s.
‘We’re having a party, at home, on Thursday evening. That’s the address. It’s Hallowe’en,’ he added, as if some explanation was necessary.
‘So it is.’
‘Spook costumes are not obligatory. But come, won’t you? Janice’ll like to meet you.’
‘Thank you. I’m not sure … I’ll try.’
‘Who do you know in Grafton these days?’ He was looking at her with his head on one side.
‘Not a soul.’
‘Then you must come. No argument.’ He reached out and shook her hand, concluding a deal. ‘Thursday.’
Nina would have prevaricated, but he was already walking away towards the cathedral. She went back to her desk and bent over her tiger painting with renewed attention.
She had not intended to go. She had thought that when Thursday came she would telephone Andrew’s office and leave an apology with his secretary. But when the morning and half the afternoon passed and she had still not made the call, she recognized with surprise that her real intention must be the opposite.
Nina finished her painting and carefully masked it with an overlay before placing it with the others in a drawer of the plan chest. She was pleased with the work she had done so far. The new studio suited her, and she was making faster progress than she and the publishers had estimated. She would go to the Frosts’ party, because there was no reason for not doing so. Quickly, as if to forestall her own second thoughts, she looked in the telephone directory for the number of a minicab company and ordered a car to collect her at eight-thirty.
*
Marcelle Wickham was a professional cook, and she was spending the afternoon at Janice’s to help her to make the food for the party. The two of them worked comfortably, to a background murmur of radio music.
Janice admired the rows of tiny golden croustades as they came out of the oven, taking one hot and popping it into her mouth.
‘Delicious. You are a doll to do this, Mar, do you know that?’
‘Pass me the piping bag.’ Marcelle wiped her hands on her apron. The logo of the cookery school at which she worked as a demonstrator was printed on the bib.
‘I like doing it. I like the’ – she gestured in the air with her fingers – ‘the pinching and the peeling, all the textures, mixing them together.’ Her face relaxed into a smile, elastic, like dough. ‘I love it, really. I always have, from when I was a little girl. And I love seeing the finished thing, and the pleasure it gives.’
Janice sighed. ‘You’re lucky.’
Marcelle filled the piping bag with aubergine purée and began to squeeze immaculate rosettes into pastry shells.
‘I read somewhere that cooking is one of the three human activities that occupy the exact middle ground between nature and art.’
‘What are the others?’
‘Gardening.’
‘Ha.’ Janice glanced out of her kitchen window. Her large, unkempt garden functioned mainly as a football ground for her two boys.
‘And sex.’
‘Ha, ha!’
They glanced at one another over the baking sheets. There was the wry, unspoken acknowledgement, of the kind familiar to long-married women who know each other well, of the humdrum realities of tired husbands, demanding children and sex that becomes a matter of domestic habit rather than passion. They also silently affirmed that within their own bodies,
