Nina finished the task of closing out the darkness, and came back to her place.
‘Thank you for coming to tell me first,’ she said. ‘Before Vicky.’
He had never seen this coldness, this composure, in her before. After the very beginning she had always been warm and eager, generous with herself in a way that had been enticingly at odds with her physical slightness. He wanted to defend Vicky, who had done nothing, but he restrained himself.
‘I’m truly sorry,’ was all he could think of to say.
‘Yes. However, nothing is broken,’ Nina repeated.
But she is strong, Gordon thought. Much stronger than I am.
Her strength unbalanced him, and revealed his own weakness.
Now that the business was done he felt a terrible, humble urge to throw himself at her, to hide his face and to cry and wail in her arms and have her comfort him, the way Vicky soothed Alice with inarticulate murmurings after a bad dream. The smell of her and the texture of her skin and hair returned sharply in his imagination. He propped his elbow on his knee, and rested his head in his hand. She did not reach out to soothe or console him, as he wanted her to do. Instead she looked at her watch, and the loose cuff of her tunic fell back to expose her thin wrist and the freckles on her arm.
She said in her cool, unemphatic voice, ‘I wonder where Patrick is with the tea.’
Gordon lifted his head again.
‘I don’t want any tea.’
‘Yours will be waiting for you at home, of course.’
The glimpse of her bitterness stirred him. She was not unaffected, after all, and he felt himself melting. He made a tiny move towards her, but she held up her hands, fending him off.
The conversation was over. He could not put any other interpretation on it. She would not look at him now.
There was nothing for him to do but stand up and take the coat that he had put aside when Patrick led him into the room.
He blurted foolishly, ‘Will I … will we see each other again?’
Nina sat amongst the cushions, one side of her face gilded by the firelight.
‘At the Frosts, or the Cleggs, I imagine.’
‘Don’t be hard.’
‘Don’t you be soft, then.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he attempted for the last time.
‘Yes,’ Nina said. He was dismissed.
Gordon nodded. Then he went down the stairs and let himself out into the Row. His Peugeot was parked beyond the archway that led on to the green. He drove out of the city in the opposite direction from home, and stopped in a field gateway off a lane that led in the direction of Wilton. In the distance he could see the lights of Darcy’s house on its little hill.
He sat for a long time with the car heater making a small burr of warmth around him. The hedge trees loomed in the darkness, and no other car passed. Once he reached out to the tongue of the cassette tape protruding from the player, but he stopped before pushing it in to play. He thought about all the households between here and the city, imagining the rooms and the decorations that had been put up for the holiday and the complicated arrangements of families gathered for Christmas. He felt omniscient, elevated by his sadness, as if he could look into each of the houses and interpret its secrets.
Then he thought about his own fireside, with a sudden affection coloured by relief. It only remained for him to make his confession to Vicky, and then he would be safe.
At length, when he began to feel stiff and cold even with the heater running, he restarted the engine and turned the car back in the direction he had come.
In the empty room Nina leant forward and picked up a shred of gold wrapping paper from the rug. She folded it and buffed it with her fingernail to make it shine, and then twisted it around her ring finger to make a wedding band, as she had done as a child in games of getting married.
My husband will be handsome and rich, and we’ll have eight children, four of each.
My husband will buy us a big house in London and another by the sea, and we’ll have eight children as well.
The paper made a gaudy triplet with Richard’s rings.
She asked him, Why aren’t you here? Why did you go and leave me, when I needed you? We had our houses and your money and our happiness.
No children. I’m sorry for that, my love.
And then you had to go and die, and leave me here.
Nina stared at the blank wooden shutters that closed out the cathedral and the restoration works. A month ago, even a week ago, she would have cried and battered herself against the wall of her own grief. Nothing had changed, only herself, but this time she did not cry.
Now that he had stumbled away with his needs and his confusion, Nina knew that she had only tried to make herself a shadow husband out of Gordon Ransome. She had imagined his strength and protection, and her instincts had been hardly more developed than those of the little girl playing weddings.
It was harsh to be angry with Gordon because his strength had turned out to be an illusion, and because his protective instincts were all for himself and his wife and his children and not for her.
She took off the paper ring and screwed it into a ball before throwing it at the fire. The only strength that was valuable to her was her own, and for the protection of friendship there was always Patrick.
She found him sitting in the kitchen, the room she still disliked with its faux-rustic cupboards and tiles. The tea tray was immaculately laid and waiting on the table beside him. He was smoking a coloured Balkan Sobranie with gold filter, a Christmas indulgence.
‘I heard him leaving,’ Patrick said.
‘The final exit.’
He raised his eyebrows at her, squinting through the smoke, making his Noel Coward face. Nina began to laugh.
‘Funny?’ Patrick enquired.
‘Not really. No.’
‘Tell me, then.’ He lifted the teapot and poured for her, passed her the cup.
‘It’s just how you would have predicted. You warned me at the beginning, didn’t you?’
He made a gesture modestly dismissive of his own prescience, and now they both laughed.
‘One of the wives, one half of one of the couples, happened to see us together. She told someone else, one of the husbands, who will in his turn tell the others. And so Gordon’s wife will get to hear of it. And so it has to end, so that he can confess to her and ask for forgiveness.’
Patrick demanded, ‘How can you bear it? This provincial world of couples pecking away at each other, at each other’s secrets?’
Nina drank some of her tea. ‘It isn’t quite like that. This isn’t a metropolitan world, there isn’t the same luxurious privacy that cities give. But there is a feeling of us all being here together. Of having committed ourselves to the same life. It was a mistake to have an affair. I suppose I had overlooked the fact that it would be more … significant here.’
She was thinking of the different faces of the Grafton couples and the ways that their friendships and allegiances seemed to knit them together, and remembering her reluctance to join Darcy Clegg in his mild mockery of them.
Patrick was watching her face. ‘So it is over, your love affair?’
‘Oh, yes.’
There was a moment’s silence. ‘He was wearing those shoes.