frailty of the connections saddened her, and she felt the loss of Richard as a blank within her, but at the same time she felt her own single strength, and she knew that she would survive.
Gordon turned away from the dislocated beauty of the stained glass.
‘Are you ready to go on?’ he asked.
‘Yes, I’m ready.’
They moved on, down the opposite side of the nave, so that they made a complete circuit of the cathedral under the great vaults of the roof.
Outside the light seemed even brighter. Gordon walked her back across the green to the steps of the Dean’s Row house.
‘Is the restoration work going well?’
‘Slowly, always slower than anyone expects, but yes. Behind those screens there is a logical, expensive miracle happening. It’s a perfectly explicable miracle but it’s still wonderful to watch it.’
He was suddenly animated, full of pleasure in the work. She loved him for his enthusiasm.
‘Are you all right?’ he asked her.
‘Yes, I am.’ Nina released his arm. ‘I hope you will be too.’
They didn’t touch each other again. Gordon smiled at her, and nodded his head, and then turned to walk away.
In the enclosed green space of the garden, Barney had almost finished work. The coil of hose was lying beside the new tap.
‘Can I help you carry the shopping in?’
‘I didn’t get it in the end. Never mind.’
‘Watch this.’
He turned on the tap and water splashed over the paving stones. Nina clapped her hands and Barney bowed to her in his overalls. For an encore he coupled the length of hose and from a spray nozzle at the other end a jet of water arced upwards, catching the light to make a brief rainbow. Droplets pattered on the leaves and released the scent of wet earth from the ground beneath.
‘Barney, thank you.’
‘My pleasure entirely. Shall we go across to the Eagle to celebrate?’
‘I should be buying lunch for you.’
He came closer to her, so that his shadow fell over her face. He was very large, and young. But he leaned down, serious-faced, and kissed her on the mouth and Nina thought, whatever next?
‘Barney …’
‘You didn’t mind that, did you?’
‘No. No, it was nice. Surprising, but nice.’
‘There can be other lunches, then, can’t there? If you want there to be?’
Why not, Nina thought. Why not, after all?
Vicky was giving Mary and Alice their breakfasts. She was dressed for work, in a cream blouse and a pleated skirt, so she moved carefully to avoid splashes of milk. The little girls sat at the kitchen table eating Rice Krispies out of blue bowls with their names spelt out in white lettering around the rims. Helen was strapped in her bouncing chair with a string of coloured plastic balls suspended in front of her. Gordon came downstairs in his shirtsleeves, collecting the morning’s post from where it lay scattered on the hall floor.
Vicky put his breakfast in front of him as he slit open envelopes and frowned and placed the bills in a pile beside his plate. The radio was tuned to the Today programme, because that was what Gordon preferred. The two girls chattered through the election news; Alice had turned five now and joined her sister at proper school. The kettle boiled, and Vicky caught it before the whistling properly started. She spooned tea into the pot from a blue tin caddy.
Gordon glanced up at her as she put the teapot on the table. She saw anxiety contract to a dark pinpoint in his eyes, but Vicky only smiled and turned tranquilly back to spread honey on Alice’s toast.
It gave her a twist of satisfaction, after the months of confusion that had followed Helen’s birth, to look at the domestic order that contained them. Gordon was back in his place at the table and Nina’s name was no longer mentioned between them. Even Mary had stopped asking, in fearful moments, if Daddy would have to go away again. Vicky had heard him reassuring her once,
‘No, darling, I’m not going away anywhere any more.’
She had not tried to meet his eyes because she had felt no need of it, any more than she did now.
Vicky was not sure how she had done it, when she had imagined that she was weak and defenceless, but by some instinct she had won a victory in the campaign between them.
As soon as she had shut Gordon out of the house, and the fearful days immediately afterwards had passed, she felt strength coming back to her. She had cooked for the children, and put them to sleep and wakened them again with a kind of robotic determination that was centred in herself and not in her dependence on anyone else.
It had made her feel stronger to take Darcy in, and then to discover that it was her motherliness he craved, the very part of herself that had seemed so undesirable in comparison with Nina Cort.
Darcy had sat where Gordon was sitting now, and she had made tea for him too, and listened to his talk and then calmly taken him into herself. She did not trouble herself with feeling guilty about her affair, as she would once have done. What had happened was past, as she believed that Gordon’s love affair was also past. Instead she looked back with interest, even curiosity, as if it had happened to someone else.
Vicky understood that she had taken pleasure in going to bed with Darcy because it had been a retaliation, and an unexpected tribute, and a comfort in her solitude. She had felt greedy, and the greediness itself had reassured her that she was still alive, better than alive, a functioning woman as well as a mother and a wife. But it had also left a part of her untouched.
The truth was that Darcy’s attentions had sharpened her appreciation of Gordon. She had no wish to be Darcy Clegg’s mother. In fact the exposure of his secret infantile interior within the familiar, assertive shell had been surprising, and faintly repulsive.
The end of their affair had come as a relief.
Vicky knew all through the weeks that Gordon was away from them that she would eventually let him come back. She counted off his begging telephone calls like beads on a rosary, and finally, almost languidly, she judged that he had paid enough.
When he was home, and had fallen with wary gratitude into the old pattern of their life, Vicky made another discovery. Although the acknowledged transactions between them indicated that Gordon looked after her, the underlying reality was the opposite. It was she who did the caring, mothering again.
Perhaps, she thought, Gordon had discovered this too. Now he knew that he could not survive without her and his children, whereas they could survive without him, and had done. Vicky thought that it must be this awareness that made the pinpricks of anxiety show in her husband’s eyes.
But
