out at the skiers, coloured matchstick people zigzagging in the sunshine. Everyone was out in the snow, except for him.
‘I wanted to talk.’
‘Oh. Well, do you know what’s happened? I’m going back to work part-time. I had a call yesterday from the director of therapy at the centre, and they need someone to take on a limited caseload, just two or three days a week, and I talked it over with Gordon last night and we agreed that I should do it. I’ve got to find someone to come in and take care of Helen …’
Darcy listened to her plans, leaning against the window glass with the telephone crooked under his chin. There was snow on the balcony floor, and a white rim in the rustic cut-outs and on the curved rail of the wooden balustrade. The light danced and sparkled, hurting his eyes.
‘That’s good, I’m glad,’ he heard himself say. He felt dirty and creased in the sunshine, full of a weariness that seemed to spread all through him, and weak as a child in comparison with Vicky’s procreative strength.
‘Why did you call?’ she asked him at last.
It was too much of an effort to dissemble.
‘I talked to Hannah last night. Or, rather, she talked to me. Someone called Linda Todd, who lives opposite you, has been monitoring my movements. Does that sound likely?’
‘Yes. Shit. Yes, it does. What exactly did Hannah say?’
‘Not much. It was more what she did. A bit of a dance, not quite a striptease, for the benefit of Michael and Andrew, and a warning shot for me at the same time. It stirred up the passions a bit.’
‘I can imagine.’
Vicky knew how it would have been. Hannah dancing, lit up with pleasure at herself. She had been friends with Hannah for a long time, and she wondered if she liked her at all. She said quietly, so quietly that he had to think for a moment before he was sure that he had heard her correctly,
‘I think you and I have come to the end of the road, Darcy.’
‘This particular road, perhaps. For now,’ he said, wishing that he could contradict her.
A moment later they had said goodbye, and he replaced the receiver in its cradle.
Darcy slid open the glass door and stepped out on to the balcony. The cold air caught in his throat. He leaned on the balcony rail, and looked across at the nearest slope. Suddenly he saw Hannah in her silvery ski suit with its fur-trimmed hood, and Michael Wickham in navy-blue that appeared black at this distance. Their ski teacher made a series of fluent turns, and Hannah and Michael obediently followed him.
Hannah had improved, Darcy noticed.
She lifted her arms in triumph and waved her poles as she completed the last turn. Michael punched the air in front of him in laughing acknowledgement of their achievement.
All through this time, the work on the west front of the cathedral went on behind the contractors’ screens of scaffolding and tarpaulins.
One afternoon in February Nina stood at a corner of the green, where a gap in the coverings offered a narrow view of one column of saints and archangels. The stone figures in their niches were enveloped in dust or swathed in dingy protective coverings, and workmen passed in front of them with plaster-coated tools and buckets. Watching them, Nina could not imagine how the details of folded hands and serene stone faces could ever be recovered from this desecration.
The wind was cold. At length, wrapping her arms around herself, Nina turned away from the cathedral front and began slowly to cross the green. She would have liked to go on in through the west door, to look at the columns and arches of the interior, but she did not. Ever since Christmas she had avoided the cathedral, because it was associated with Gordon. She had been afraid to begin with that she might meet him there, and so be thought guilty of pursuing him. Lately she had simply preferred to keep away from the places that were most closely connected with him in her mind, because she missed him and it was easier to spare herself this much.
When she reached the opposite, sheltered side of the green she saw a woman sitting on one of the benches that bordered it. The woman was wearing a flamboyant long mackintosh made of some light, banana-coloured material. She was watching Nina coming towards her, and eating a sandwich. Nina recognized Star Rose.
‘Hello,’ Star said, in her cool voice. ‘I heard on the bush telegraph that you’d left and gone back to London.’
Nina hesitated. Of the Grafton couples, she had seen only Janice and Hannah since Christmas and those meetings had been accidental. The women had not been unfriendly, but just as it had been easier for Nina to avoid the places that were connected in her mind with Gordon, so it had also been her choice not to meet his friends, and Vicky’s.
‘I did go back for a time. But I’m here again now. This is where I live.’
She had spent almost three weeks staying in the Spitalfields house with Patrick, but it had become increasingly hard to ignore the truth that she had left London for Grafton to escape the memories of one man, and had then fled back to London for the same reason and a different man. Patrick had not tried to hide his concern.
‘You can’t flit to and fro for ever, you know, running away from yourself and imagining you can leave your losses behind you like last year’s overcoat.’
‘I know that,’ Nina said humbly. ‘I’ll go back to Grafton to confront myself, shall I, and wear the coat until the better weather comes?’
He took her hand, and she rested her head against his shoulder for a minute.
‘You know you can stay here as long as you like,’ Patrick said.
But in the end Nina had come home. In any case she had work to do, and needed her studio.
Star screwed up her sandwich paper. ‘I’d offer to share my lunch with you, but that was it. We could go and have a cup of coffee in the cloister, if you like. I am as free as air, it being half term.’
Surprised, and pleased by the suggestion, Nina said, ‘Yes. All right. Let’s do that.’
Star stood up, brushing the sandwich crumbs from her raincoat. A pair of pigeons swooped down on them. The two women began to walk towards the cathedral.
‘Where do you teach?’ Nina asked. She had met Star a number of times, but it had always been at dinners or at parties or with permutations of the Grafton couples.
‘Williamford. Modern languages.’
Williamford was the big mixed comprehensive that had been created after Nina’s time by an amalgamation of her girls’ grammar with the boys’ school where Andrew Frost had gone.
‘I went to the Dean’s School.’
‘Did you? Oh yes, Andrew said something about it. We still use the same buildings, you know. Very inconvenient they are, too.’
There had been red-brick classrooms with tall Victorian windows that let in thin coils of fog in the winters, and concentrated the sun’s heat
