Clegg?’
‘Why not?’ Nina protested, but they were both laughing. It seemed that they had passed over some interim stage of acquaintanceship and had become allies.
‘And you?’ Nina asked.
Star gave her shrug.
‘You said you wanted to talk,’ Nina prompted. ‘You haven’t forgotten how to. It happens like this, like we are doing now. Was it about Gordon?’
‘No, not about Gordon.’
‘About Jimmy, then?’
Star examined the rim of her glass, and then tapped it very lightly with her fingernail. It gave a tiny, clear ring.
‘Are you still envious of us? Now that you have seen us more closely?’
Nina said, ‘Now that I know about Vicky and Darcy, do you mean, as well as what happened between me and Gordon?’
She did not try to speculate beyond that, not out loud, but she had the sense that the couples were held in some precarious suspension, as if another breath of passion might overbalance the prosperous order and send them toppling.
She added, very softly, ‘It was you who said that none of us can look in on other people’s marriages. I don’t know what Vicky and Gordon are like, or Darcy and Hannah, or you and Jimmy. I can only see the surface. It seemed smooth and shining when I first came here.’
Star lifted her hands and chopped a box shape in the air.
‘Did you ever feel that there was nowhere to go?’
‘Yes, I did. But there always is. There is somewhere to go, if you look hard enough for it.’
Star drank her wine, admiring the glass again, and the carved wooden arms of her chair, and the pretty room that contained them.
‘Could we be friends, do you think?’ she asked at length.
Nina nodded her head. ‘Yes. I think perhaps we could.’
On Wednesday, Barney came as he had promised with two lengths of different piping, an armful of garden hose and a toolbag. He whistled as he carried the load through the kitchen into the garden.
‘Have this fixed for you in a trice, lady,’ he called. ‘Nice place you got here.’
Nina watched him roll up the sleeves of his overalls and set to work. She had not realized that he planned to install an outside tap for her.
‘I’ll have to turn the water off at the mains for half an hour, is that OK? I like plumbing,’ Barney said confidently. ‘I can always be a plumber, if all else fails, can’t I?’
‘I don’t think all else will fail, somehow.’
She had begun to believe that Barney possessed the necessary talents to make a success of whatever he chose.
He quickly became engrossed in the job. Nina put her red jacket on, and went to where he was laying plastic piping under the sill of the door.
‘I’m going out for half an hour, Barney, to buy us some food for lunch.’
He sat back on his heels, rubbing a grease mark on his cheek.
‘I was hoping you might let me take you out for lunch. Only to the pub, or somewhere, if you wouldn’t mind that?’
She looked down at him. ‘I would like to. But I still need to do some shopping. I’ll be back soon.’
Nina pulled the front door to behind her, but she lingered for a moment on the top step. It was a pleasure to feel the spring sun on her face, and the warmth trapped in the black paint of the iron handrail under her fingers. The green was dotted with people, the first of the new season’s tourists, and the benches on the opposite side where she had met Star eating her lunch were occupied.
Gordon saw her before she saw him. His first thought was that she had changed, and then he realized that she seemed different because the lines in her face had somehow altered.
‘You look beautiful,’ he said, when he reached her. ‘You look happy.’
‘Do I?’ She was startled by his sudden materializing in front of her, when she had almost stopped wishing for him.
‘I wanted to see you.’
‘Did you? Why, after all these weeks?’
‘You had every right to be angry,’ he said humbly. ‘You still have. Nothing has changed. I can’t offer you anything, any more than I could at Christmas. I wanted to see you, to see –’
‘To see how I am surviving without you? Well enough, thank you. Did you think I wouldn’t be?’
Even as she spoke she was disappointed with herself, for making a pointless charade of anger that she no longer felt.
‘Please, Nina, couldn’t we go inside and talk?’
‘No. Barney Clegg is here, doing some work in the garden for me.’
‘Barney Clegg?’
He said it in exactly the same tone of disbelief as Star had done.
Nina smiled, and he noticed the difference in her face again. Nina said, ‘Let’s walk, instead.’
She took his arm, folding her own comfortably within it, and they crossed the cathedral green between the knots of tourists to the west door.
Inside there were scaffolding towers around the pillars on the left side of the nave. They were screened with polythene sheeting but the screens did not cut off the clamour of high-speed drilling and workmen calling to each other. There was a group of Japanese listening intently to a guide in the middle of the central aisle.
Gordon and Nina passed on the opposite side. They walked over stone tablets with their worn inscriptions and the brass memorials to armoured knights and mitred bishops.
‘Do you remember when we first came? When I showed you around?’
‘I remember.’
They came behind the quire stalls and the high altar, to the Lady Chapel in the apse. The glass in the windows here had been destroyed and then pieced together after the Reformation in a fractured pattern of crimson and cobalt. They stood side by side, looking up at the brilliance of the mosaic.
Nina felt the fragility and the importance of the threads that briefly held them here, tenuously woven together in their joint and separate places, the Grafton couples and their families, and herself in her own place, and the filaments that stretched beyond them into infinity.
She was convinced for a moment that they were in a pattern with its own brightness and darkness, a pattern that was not always legible or comprehensible but was nevertheless there, and the notion comforted her. She thought of Vicky and Darcy, and whatever it happened to be that they needed from each other, and how Gordon did not or would not know about it, and of Star and Jimmy, and the other precarious links
