took the offering. The fragile cup-shaped flowers were tinged with green, with a central boss of golden anthers. ‘How beautiful. My garden isn’t worthy of it. Would you like to come in and have a drink? Provided you don’t bleed on anything.’
The boys trampled in, seeming huge in her hallway.
‘Eleven stitches,’ Tom said proudly, holding out his arm.
‘After eleven hours sitting in casualty, or thereabouts,’ Barney cheerfully complained.
They followed Nina up the stairs, filling the quiet house with noise.
‘We’ve been round to Mike Wickham’s, to thank him as well.’
‘And how were they?’
The boys snorted with laughter. ‘Pretty dire. Howling kids everywhere.’
‘Like Barney’s place, in fact.’
Nina opened the drawing room door for them.
‘Well, there are no kids here, howling or otherwise. Only Patrick and me.’
Patrick uncoiled himself from the sofa.
‘This is Barney and his friend Tom. They’ve come to thank me for doing not very much when Tom cut his arm on Christmas Eve.’
After the handshakes Barney offered his bottles of wine.
‘I don’t know what these are. Is it drinkable? I lifted them from Dad’s cellar.’
Patrick examined the labels. ‘Better than drinkable. A rather good Pomerol.’
‘Shall we open them? Let them breathe, and the rest?’
More glasses were brought, logs were put on the fire and the humming television was switched off. The boys made themselves comfortable, arms and long legs folded somehow into Nina’s cushions. Patrick and Nina refilled glasses and passed plates, and learned among other things that Barney was a student of landscape design and horticulture at agricultural college, and Tom was at the nearby poly. They had been friends since their not-very-distant schooldays. They had been vaguely planning to move on to Grafton’s one disco later in the evening, but Barney complained that it was full of kids, ‘Lucy and Cathy’s crowd’. Soon it became clear that Barney and Tom were staying to dinner.
When Patrick and Nina found themselves alone for a moment in the kitchen, Patrick said, ‘I thought you said you knew no one in Grafton except middle-aged married couples.’
‘Surprise, surprise.’
It was a convivial supper. Patrick was never predatory or even openly camp, but the wine melted his reserve and made him funny and loquacious. It was clear that he liked the company of the two large boys. He seemed too often to be an observer nowadays. For herself, she was amused by Barney and Tom’s good humour and their enthusiasm for everything from her food to Patrick’s wry jokes.
When she remembered Gordon and experienced the twist of angry sadness that came with the thought of him, she made herself close him off and concentrated instead on the friendly faces around her kitchen table. It was odd to hear the laughter and clatter of plates in this room, when she had so deliberately determined that it would always be empty and silent.
The Christmas rose stood stripped of its paper on the draining board. There were crumbs of earth around the lip of the clay pot, and more mud rimming the bottom of it. Nina brushed some of it away with her fingertips. Barney came with a neat pile of dirty plates to stand beside her at the sink.
‘I lifted it from the nursery bed especially for you,’ he told her. He was a head taller than Nina, and she had to look up at him.
‘Did you lift one for Mike Wickham too?’
‘No, of course not.’
They both gazed at the ivory petals with their faint suffusion of green. Nina was disconcerted to find that she was blushing. Behind them she heard Tom explaining to Patrick the rules of some complicated word game that he had suddenly decided they must play.
‘Shall I plant it for you?’ Barney asked her. ‘It’s too hot for it to be happy in here.’
Nina turned on the outside light and led Barney to the doors that looked out on to her tiny courtyard garden. It was a dismal prospect of bare earth drifted over with dead leaves and windblown litter.
‘I did say that my garden wasn’t worthy of it.’
Barney unlocked the door and carried the plant outside. Nina watched him as he found a sheltered corner and tenderly heaped up dead leaves around the pot to protect it from the frost. He rubbed his large hands on his jeans and ducked back into the kitchen.
‘I’ll come in the daylight to plant it properly for you. I could tidy up the rest and plant some other stuff as well, if you like.’
He waited.
Nina said gently, ‘That’s very kind of you. But I don’t think you should spend your time doing my neglected garden for me.’
Richard had always been the gardener. He had loved his garden in Norfolk, the garden where he had died. Carefully Nina picked up the last specks of earth from the stainless steel ribs of the sink drainer.
Barney shrugged. ‘That’s okay. It’s my job; or it will be if I ever get qualified.’
Tom called to them, ‘Are we going to play this game, then?’
They had had a good deal to drink, Nina realized. But she took another bottle of wine from the rack and opened it, and sat down at the table again.
The game was a rambling, open-ended affair of inventing words and then supplying meanings for them. Patrick was the best at devising words and definitions; he had always been good at crosswords and riddles and charades, but Barney came in a surprisingly sharp second. Nina was hopeless, her wits were too scattered, but it was a pleasure to see Patrick enjoying himself so much.
At length, long after midnight, the boys decided that they must after all make a late raid on the disco. They tried to persuade Nina and Patrick to accompany them, without success, and finally, with promises to come back another day, they left in search of new diversions.
Patrick leaned against the duck-egg blue cupboards and drank the last of a glass of wine.
‘Do you think I’m a silly old queen?’ he asked, ‘Enjoying a pair of nice, straight boys like those?’
‘No more than I’m a silly old woman,’ Nina answered. She was smiling, but Patrick was not deceived.
‘Are you thinking about pork-piefoot?’
‘Yes.’ And about Richard, too, only she would not burden him with that.
‘Then don’t,’ Patrick ordered her.
Vicky’s parents went home on the day after Boxing Day. Gordon carried their tartan suitcases out to the front of the house and stowed them side by side in the boot of Alec’s Vauxhall. The old people moved slowly in his wake, arranging their car rug and Marjorie’s handbag on the back seat, arguing
