‘Sleep,’ he said. ‘I’ll come in as soon as I can tomorrow.’
He left her and the leather soles of his shoes squeaking on the linoleum floor faded into the night-time murmurs of the ward.
The cathedral was almost empty. The last of the thin trickle of tourists brought out by a winter’s day had drifted away to the coach and car parks, and the medieval quire stalls with their famous carvings were not yet occupied by choristers fidgeting before evening choir practice. There were circles of light at the chancel steps and over the pulpit, but the nave and the side chapels were almost in darkness. A verger passed down the central aisle with a pile of hymn books in his hands. Someone began softly to play the organ, and the quiet mass of the great building took up the notes and dispersed them, letting them filter down again seemingly charged with the whispers and echoes of its own voice.
Gordon sat at the back of the nave, with his briefcase and a file of papers relating to the cathedral works on the wooden seat beside him. His head was tilted back as he tried to discern the familiar outlines of the Gothic vaulting above him, and at the same time he reflected on the slow weathering and decay of the limestone that was the concern of the Conservation Committee. It seemed that the organ notes as they seeped through the arches and between the huge pillars, fading and falling away into silence, eloquently expressed the crumbling of the stone through the silences of seven hundred years.
When the twelfth-century stonemasons had completed their work on the cathedral, the artists followed them to glorify their creation with the brilliance of gilding and the exuberance of primitive colours. Every wall and screen was painted, pattern on vibrant colour, and the paint and gilt lay over the stone like a skin, protecting it from the air’s abrasion. Only then, over the centuries, the custodians of the cathedral lived and died and changed, and the raucous hues of the original decorations were slowly stripped away. They were replaced by pale classical colours, or by nothing at all, leaving the grey-gold limestone naked and exposed to the onslaught of sulphur dioxide.
Gordon had worked with the rest of the Grafton Cathedral Conservation Advisory Committee for more than two years in preparation for this week. Over the next few days the scaffolders would arrive with their poles and planks to erect a membrane around the cathedral within which the restoration of the sickened stone could begin. He had just come from another meeting of the committee, at which the conservationist dean had announced that the Preservation Trust, with the Prince of Wales as its Patron, had raised a further million pounds which would enable a second stage of res-toration to follow on from the first. The work would take years, but the contemplation of its beginning gave Gordon a firm sense of professional achievement. This solid spur stuck up from the sea of his personal confusion like the ridged back of an island.
He stood up and gathered his belongings. He was not quite sure where he was going. The house was empty and he was disinclined to go back to it. Vicky would be in hospital for several more days, and his daughters were still with his parents-in-law. He had no obligations, except for his work and the daily visits to Vicky and the baby. This brief interval of freedom was liberating, but it was also disconcerting. He found himself moving cautiously, as if testing for invisible barriers. He received the telephone calls and the invitations of the Grafton couples one by one, and politely refused them.
Gordon went out of the side door, closing it behind him on the organ music and the echoes. It was not yet dark, but the green was rainy and windswept, an expanse of wet grass and fugitive leaves. He hesitated, with the massed ranks of saints and prophets soaring in their blackened niches behind him. Then he began to walk. He was halfway down the length of Dean’s Row when he met the woman. At first she was just a face, possessing the kind of unknown familiarity that might have sprung out of a dream. Then she took on a more solid shape. She was wearing a waxed jacket, boots and an emerald green scarf, and her red hair was pulled haphazardly back and tied at the nape of her neck. Her face was shiny, as if she had walked a long way in the open air. They were almost past each other, but they stopped and then looked back, momentarily unsure of the social ground between them.
‘I’m Gordon Ransome,’ he reminded her. ‘We met at the Frosts’. We danced together.’
‘I remember.’ Nina had reached the steps that led to her front door. She stood one step up, and with this advantage she could look down at him. He was pale, and the rims of his eyes were reddened and sore. ‘I heard about the baby. Congratulations.’
‘Thank you.’
Gordon wanted to keep her where she was, to hold her shining face in front of him, and he wondered clumsily what he might say next. But it was Nina who asked him, ‘Are you busy? Would you like to come in and have a cup of tea?’
They sat in the kitchen together. They made the conventional exchanges about the house and its position and Nina’s removal to Grafton, and all the time Gordon watched her as she opened cupboard doors, reached up to take cups from a shelf, placed the filled teapot on a tray. She was tall, with long bones and faintly awkward limbs. He could imagine her white feet, the spaces between her toes, and the curved chain of her spine, nape to coccyx, as clearly as if they were exposed to his eyes. She was smooth and clean, like her surroundings. The kitchen was very tidy, the surfaces bare and gleaming, and this orderly place contrasted sharply with Vicky’s arrangements. Vicky believed that the children’s happiness and creativity counted for more than clean tiles, and so the floors silted up with toys and the walls sprouted drawings and crayoned messages.
‘How is Vicky?’ Nina was asking.
‘Not as fit as after the other two. It takes longer to recover from a Caesarean, obviously. She might be there for a week. But she will be fine, and there are no problems with the baby. She’s feeding well, doing the right things. Vicky’s a natural mother.’
‘Is she?’
‘She always has been, even before we had our own. She has an extraordinary affinity with children. Partly to do with her work. She’s a psychotherapist, working with children in difficulties, at a special unit we have here. She has only been able to do it part-time, recently, of course. But I’m told she is very, very good.’
Gordon heard himself heaping up this praise of his wife as if he was pushing sand into a channel against the incoming tide.
Nina paused, holding the tray of tea things. ‘We could take this upstairs, and sit more comfortably. Only the fire isn’t lit, I’m afraid.’
‘I could do that.’
He took the tray from her and followed her up the stairs from the basement. In the room overlooking the green the shutters were open on to the oblique view of the cathedral front.
‘What will Vicky do?’
The question startled him at first, but then he realized that Nina meant her career, now that they had Helen also.
‘She will be able to work in the mornings once she’s back on her feet, I should think. There’s a woman who lives locally, her own children are grown up and she comes in sometimes to take over when Vicky’s at the unit. She’s very reliable, completely trustworthy.’
‘That’s good,’ Nina answered, conscious of the surface neutrality of this exchange. Her ears strained to hear some barely audible subtext. It was there, but she could not yet decipher it.
There was a basket of kindling and logs next to the hearth. Gordon knelt down and made a thick twist of newspaper, then flicked a match to it. He made a pyramid of kindling over the flames in the grate, deftly supplementing it with thicker pieces of wood as the fire crackled and caught. He rested on his heels for a moment, watching its progress with his back to Nina. The yellow light changed the bare room, softening and warming it.
For Nina it was like being given a present, to have the luxury of company, to have Gordon kneeling in front of the hearth making a fire for her with casual masculine efficiency. Her own efforts more often led to a blackened mound of fuel and nothing more than a wisp of acrid smoke, so quite