her hand again. ‘It’s like really being seventeen for ever.’
The tearoom, the table and cups and everything else slowly resumed their normal density. Nina said, ‘I regret it more for Vicky’s sake.’
‘Do you? Do you think Vicky is blameless?’
Star did not wait for Nina’s answer. She gazed round at the almost deserted tearoom and impatiently pulled the folds of her mackintosh closer as if to insulate herself from it.
‘Shall we have a walk somewhere?’
Nina had planned to spend the afternoon working, but even as she began her refusal she changed her mind. Since coming back to Grafton she had resumed her solitary country walks, but now she discovered that she minded her solitude more. Sometimes she felt almost disabled by it as she followed the paths and lanes that wound around Grafton. But this afternoon Star had unexpectedly arrived in the middle of the empty landscape.
Nina wanted their talk to continue, because she wanted to see where it would lead. An intimacy had sprung up between them so quickly that it made her aware of how much she needed a woman friend in Grafton. She suspected Star needed a friend also.
They went out on to the green and walked away in the opposite direction from Dean’s Row. Star walked briskly, with her head up and her hands in her pockets.
Their route took them along Southgate, the best street in Grafton. It was lined with the bow-fronted façades of eighteenth-century shops, Hannah Clegg’s La Couture amongst them. There were no cars in Southgate. Shiny, black-painted bollards closed off either end of the street, and the city council in its civic pride had placed dark green and gold litter bins along the pavements and hung flower baskets from the arms of the Victorian lamp posts. The baskets had been planted for the winter with universal pansies and variegated ivies, and the trailing leaves were browned by the wind and lack of water.
Nina and Star walked down the middle of the cobbled street. Pedestrians with plastic shopping bags crossed between the bollards and fanned out towards the shops, and Nina scanned the people as they passed her. Every one of them looked respectable, even the youngest ones. They were dressed in muted colours and serviceable shapes as if they had been outfitted by the same civic department that was responsible for the tasteful liveries of the Southgate shopfronts. Not one of them looked as if a deviation from the routine path would be welcomed.
There was a prosperous, provincial solidity in Grafton that sometimes reassured her, and at other times did not.
Star was laughing.
‘What’s funny?’ Nina asked.
‘The tidiness of it. Tidy lives. That’s what you were thinking, wasn’t it?’
They came out into Bridge Street, where traffic flattened the polystyrene litter blown outside McDonald’s.
‘Something like that.’
‘Grafton is tidy. Socially and emotionally tidy. Pain and passion are mostly kept well out of sight, especially by people like us. It’s easy to sneer at it, but I rather like it. It’s dignified.’
Darcy had tried to recruit her into a conspiracy of urban superiority against Grafton, Nina remembered.
‘Why should you think that I would sneer at it? I came back to live here, so I must like it too.’
She was thinking about the handsome couples, who had at first seemed so smilingly enviable and secure in their comfortable houses, and the contradictions that wove around them now. Into her head at the same time came an image of the stone figures of the west front, blackened and pitted by the centuries, but still enduring.
‘Not you, I didn’t mean you,’ Star said.
They were walking towards the river. Ahead of them, as they rounded a curve in the street, they could see the old bridge and a pewter-coloured expanse of water. On the far bank were the playing fields and dim red-brick blocks of the Dean’s School, now part of Williamford.
‘What did you mean when you asked me if I thought Vicky was blameless?’
Star flicked a glance at her, a look that was speculative and amused and faintly malicious.
‘Just that.’
‘Oh. So, do I think that Vicky is to blame because I blithely started a hot affair with her husband while she was in hospital delivering their third baby by an emergency Caesarean?’
Nina saw the tiny contraction of the muscles around Star’s mouth that gave away her hurt, and wondered for how long she had loved Gordon. No wonder Star liked Grafton for its bloodless dignity. She possessed exactly the same quality herself. Star would be good at suppressing her own pain and passion.
Nina said more sharply than she had intended, ‘No, I don’t think Vicky is to blame.’
‘That’s not what I asked you.’
Nina followed the thread of Star’s insinuation.
‘I see,’ she said at last, unwillingly. And afterwards, ‘Who is he, then?’
Star nodded, as if Nina were a slow pupil who had at last grasped something.
‘Darcy.’
They had reached the point where the road turned parallel with the river. Iron railings separated the road from a path that ran beside the water under the naked branches of willow trees. The river was swollen and little crusts of yellowish foam eddied in the current and were caught in the twiggy debris beside the bank.
‘How do you know?’ Nina asked automatically.
‘I know because I’ve heard. Small towns don’t keep secrets for long. As you discovered.’
‘Yes. I did, didn’t I?’
They had crossed the bridge, and as if they were acknowledging that they had left Grafton behind they stopped to stand shoulder to shoulder, looking back at it. The cathed-ral’s twin towers rose over the steps of rooftops, sombre against the graphite sky.
‘Does Hannah know?’
‘Oh, I should think so. I’m sure she’s reeling in his line. Hannah may never have read a book in her life and she may also think Wittgenstein’s a ski resort, but she’s not a fool. She has Darcy placed exactly where she wants him, whatever the old poseur may imagine to the contrary.’
‘And Gordon?’
‘I don’t think Gordon knows.’
To assimilate this information Nina leaned against the limestone pillar that marked the end of the bridge.
As her cold fingers rubbed the gritty stone she remembered that it was exactly here that she had been kissed for the first time. There was a triple-globed ornamental lamp mounted on the pillar, one of four put up by the people of Grafton to commemorate the Coronation, and when the boy had put his arms around her and begun to rub his mouth against hers she had been afraid that they were too clearly visible in the pallid circle of light. She had also been afraid that he would rub away the coat of white lipstick she had applied in the school cloakroom and expose the babyish rosebud of her real mouth. They had been
