Rosie Thomas 4-Book Collection: Other People’s Marriages, Every Woman Knows a Secret, If My Father Loved Me, A Simple Life. Rosie Thomas
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private line rang on his desk. He picked it up, wondering if she could somehow have discovered this number, and found that it was Vicky.
‘Yes. Yes, love, of course I am. Just busy. How are you?’
‘Stitches are a bit sore, and I’m quite tired. The ward was very noisy last night, two new arrivals. One woman with twins.’
He heard the quiver in her voice. She wanted his sympathy, but did not want to admit to it. This tremulous mixture of vulnerability and stoicism worked again at the sandpaper patches within his head.
‘Poor Vicky. And poor woman. How’s Helen today?’
‘Much more wide awake. I’ve just fed her, and she’s lying here with her eyes open, staring at me.’
He felt a jolt of protective love for both of them that went awkwardly but inevitably in tandem with his irritation. ‘Take care of yourselves until I come in this evening.’
‘Talk to me for five minutes. Tell me some news. It’s so boring and lonely in here.’
She was about to cry. It was the complicated measure of postnatal hormones, Gordon reasoned for her. Was the rush of anxious sadness the same after a Caesarean birth as after a normal one? It must be. Perhaps even more intense. He must try to have a word with the ward sister while he was at the hospital this evening.
‘Gordon?’
He told her about the morning’s work, about the site visit and the report waiting to be written, parcelling up and delivering the small subjects and avoiding the big one that he felt like a thick layer of felted wool between them.
‘Darling, I have to get on with some work now,’ he said at the end. ‘I’ll see you later.’
‘Love you,’ Vicky said in a small voice.
‘Love you too.’
He picked up his pen and made himself pitch into the dreary depths of his morning’s notes as if they were a cold sea. At the end of twenty minutes he had written an acceptable draft report. He looked at his watch and saw that it was three forty.
In the corridor, as he struggled into his coat in his hurry to leave the building, he met Andrew. Andrew’s blue shirt was as crisp as it had been at the beginning of the day, but the knot of his blue and lilac paisley tie was loosened to indicate that he was in full-tilt mode.
‘Are you going to the hospital?’ Andrew asked mildly. He was interested, properly concerned, without giving out even a breath of criticism of his partner’s unscheduled early departure.
‘Yes. Dropping in at the cathedral for something first, actually.’
Andrew was less interested in the restoration project than Gordon was.
‘Ah. See you in the morning, then, about the supermarket drawings?’
‘Yes. Yes, I’ll be in by half eight,’ Gordon called over his shoulder. His car was parked in its initialled slot at the back of the building. Behind the wheel, on the short drive into town, he felt as if he had made some thrilling and ingenious escape.
He found that he was laughing with pleasure and exhilaration, at his freedom and at the prospect of seeing Nina.
Nina was already in the cathedral. In the last days she had begun to feel comfortable in Grafton, as if she was settled in her own place rather than crouching in hiding, and this new feeling of being at ease had grown with the welcome that the women had given her.
But since yesterday afternoon, since watching Gordon lighting the fire in her drawing room, her perspectives had shifted again. She had been excited and fearful, and so she had left her house early and walked the short way over the green, certain that Gordon would find her. She sat at the back of the nave, at the end of the last row of wooden chairs, staring at the darkening glory of the east window.
Gordon had to cross the green from the opposite side, and so when he passed the west door he made the small detour under the bare ribs of the newly erected scaffolding and in through the inner door, as if to check that the interior was all that it should be before he brought her here. He saw her at once, sitting with her back to him, with her long limbs folded and seeming more elegant in repose. He was overtaken by gratitude and happiness that she should be here, in the great dim space, quietly waiting for him. He went to her and put his hand on her shoulder, not lifting it when she turned her face up to look at him.
‘I’m glad to see you,’ he told her, offering her the truth without any varnish of social nicety.
‘And I you.’
The quiet solemnity of her response pleased him too.
She stood, and her height and the heels of her shoes put her eyes on a level with his.
‘Show me,’ Nina said.
He said, trying to sound light, ‘Now you have asked for it.’
He took her on a slow tour of the aisles and side chapels. She listened gravely as he explained the projected works, asking an occasional question but mostly remaining silent as he talked.
‘It takes a long time to assess the effects of stone conservation work,’ Gordon said. ‘Perhaps a hundred years, or even more. The Victorians saw what was happening here, and tried to reverse it by painting over the stone with a kind of impervious varnish. It was the favoured technique of the time, the best available to them. But the outer coat hardened further with years of exposure to the air, and underneath it the stone softened and crumbled away. Do you see this?’
They had passed through a Gothic doorway on the south side of the chancel into a pillared hallway. Ahead of them an exuberant flight of stone steps curved upwards under an intricately vaulted ceiling. Nina paused at the bottom step. It was hollowed and worn shiny, but as the springing geometry of the stairs drew her eyes upwards she also saw the black flakes of stone that were breaking away to reveal the paler crust beneath. The thirteenth-century magnificence had come to look sickly, diseased. Gordon stooped beside her, with one hand splayed over the base of a pillar. He rubbed with the tips of his fingers into a stone hollow the size of his fist, and then withdrew his hand to show her that it was gritty with dust.
‘Can it be put right?’ Nina asked.
‘We can try. Using the best methods at our disposal, and hoping to be more successful than the Victorians. Some of these pillars will have to be replaced.’
Nina put her head back, following the jets of stone with her eyes, imagining the scale of the work.
‘The rest will be treated in the same way as the exterior, with lime wash coloured with stone dust and skimmed milk to match the old stone as closely as possible. The coating protects the stone, but lets it breathe at the same time. In a hundred years or so, the cathedral’s conservators will know whether we have been successful or not.’
Nina liked the absence from his meticulous explanation of both arrogance and the assumption of omnipotence, but she was also warmed by the underlying optimism of what he described. It was satisfying to contemplate the endurance of the cathedral, this medieval glory of branching pillars and mouldings decorated with ball flowers, solid and cared for and beloved, at the heart of the other careless Grafton with its car parks and chain stores and shopping precinct. She thought of the perpetual counterpoise that underlay this urban contrast, between spiritual endurance and material desire, and was pleased to find it so neatly summarized around her.
Somewhere out of sight beyond the curve of the stairs a door opened, and the dim air was filled with chattering voices. Around the corner appeared a stream of boy choristers dressed in ruffs and white surplices over plum-coloured robes. They swept past Nina and Gordon, jostling amongst themselves and covertly laughing, and descended into the cathed-ral. Behind them came the choirmaster and a line of senior choristers, and then a chaplain with a heavy bunch of keys. Gordon nodded to most of the men as they passed and held up his hand in greeting to the priest. It was time for Evensong.
Nina and Gordon followed behind them,