amalgamated taste and smell of Clearasil.
The realization that more than twenty years had elapsed since that night, the conviction that nothing in Grafton had changed, and the news that Star had just given her, combined as a tremor in the back of Nina’s throat that forced its way forward and emerged between her teeth as a spurt of laughter.
She saw Star’s expression, the mixture of amusement and malice and cleverness in it, and then Star began to laugh too.
‘It’s funny,’ Nina explained.
‘You’re right. It’s so funny that it hurts.’
They leant against the limestone pillar, oblivious to the passing traffic, until they stopped laughing. And then they turned their backs to Grafton and walked on, newly comfortable with one another.
‘I don’t know why I’ve marched us out here,’ Star remarked. ‘Force of habit, I suppose.’
They had come to the school gates. They were locked, but there was an old man in an overall beyond them, dispiritedly brushing long-dead leaves from the tarmac drive.
‘Hello, Ted,’ Star called to him.
‘Afternoon, Mrs Rose. Can’t you keep away from the bloody place, then?’
Nina stood with her fists locked on the railings, like a convict, gazing into the grounds. The line of trees that had marked the far boundary were gone; she supposed that they must have been elms. There was a new housing estate on the slope beyond where there had once been farmland. Threads and snippets of unimportant memories swam and merged in her head.
‘Mrs Cort’s an old girl of the school, Ted. Can we slip inside so she can have a look around?’
This was so much what Nina wanted without even having expressed it to herself that she stared at Star in surprise.
‘Can’t let you in the building, Mrs Rose, it’d be more than my job’s worth. But I’ll open these gates for you, if your friend wants a stroll round.’
Star and Nina walked up the driveway to the Victorian red-brick slabs of the building. At the nearest window Nina leaned on the sill, shading her eyes to look in at the rows of desks. As soon as she saw the shape of the room she immediately became the fomenting schoolgirl she had once been, full of dreams and illusions, unwillingly hunched over her work. The exercise books they used had had stiff grey covers and Nina had drawn all over them, obsessively creating derivative op-art designs and then filling in the divisions and subdivisions with her black pen, as if she could reduce the confusions of adolescence to mosaic patterns.
‘It’s all different, furniture, colours, everything, but it’s still exactly the same. This was the geography room.’
It had smelt of hot dust from the radiators, and chalk, like the other classrooms, but also of the sticky, oiled canvas of the big old-fashioned maps that hung on the walls. The room had had a soporific hum that made it difficult to stay awake in there on warm afternoons.
These shreds of recollection knitted together. Their coalescence was painful because the life that had contained them was gone, but the revival of so many tiny memories made Nina feel suddenly that she had her place here in Grafton more securely than anywhere else she had ever lived, even with Richard. She knew that her instinct to return had been the right one, even to this mutating city of car parks and micro-industries and modern couples.
‘My theory is that the essence of a place never changes,’ Star said. ‘Because it is to do with the layers of time and experience variously contained within it, not the colour of the walls or the style of the furnishings.’
‘I don’t know if your theory would stand much analysis. But I know exactly what you mean. It’s rather comforting, isn’t it?’
They began to walk around the outside of the building, stopping to look in through the tall windows.
Now Nina could recall the shiny tiles of the corridors and the submerged green of the cloakrooms and the beams and arches and echoes of voices as vividly as if she had left them behind only yesterday. She felt that she was linked to Star by their separate paths through the same high classrooms, and as they reached their starting point again she put her arm through Star’s so that they walked in step.
‘Enough?’ Star asked.
‘Yes. I liked seeing the place again. Thanks.’
‘It wasn’t difficult to arrange.’
Ted let them out into the road again, and morosely locked the gates behind them. Nina and Star turned back towards the bridge. The sky was already darkening, leaving a faint outline of phosphorescent green around the roofs and chimneys and the cathedral towers.
Nina gazed ahead of her, measuring the familiarity of what she saw, the unfamiliar comfort of Star’s arm linked through hers, and noticing how the thin, cold wind made her eyes smart. It came to her in that moment that she was content, not happy but content, as she had not been since the day of Richard’s death.
As if their thoughts were common to each other, perhaps because as they came back into Grafton they remembered the couples, Star abruptly asked,
‘Were you and your husband happy?’
‘Yes, we were very happy.’
‘Tell me what it was like.’
Just as she had asked about Gordon. Nina suddenly felt such a plaintive, bewildered need in Star Rose that she wanted to stop and hold her, to comfort her. She held her arm closer, as if that would do.
‘What can I tell you? It was a marriage. A friendship, a contract, good and bad, like any other.’
They were on the bridge now, midway between the two pairs of commemorative lamps.
Star nodded, staring away over the parapet at the water.
‘None of us can look into other people’s marriages, can we? There is only our own, and the continual mystery of the rest.’
‘Yes,’ Nina said, knowing that was the truth. They walked on quietly together.
When they reached the Dean’s Row house Nina asked Star if she would like to come in, but Star shook her head.
‘I have to go. But can I see you again?’
The form of the question did not strike Nina as odd.
‘Of course.’
‘I’ll call you, then.’
Star stepped forward, and they put their arms around each other and hugged. Then Star turned away and recrossed the green, walking briskly so that her long yellow coat flared out behind her.
In Méribel, as soon as it stopped snowing, the families zipped up their padded suits and clumped out into the white world to ski.
The children went to ski school, while the Frosts with Darcy and Marcelle set out every morning to conquer new and more distant peaks and steeper gullies. They came back each evening with pale circles printed by their sunglasses across their reddened faces, to sit around the dinner table and talk about how high and how far
