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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them on these evenings that Janice prepared and he cleared away.
‘I love you too.’ The formal exchange. It was not an untruth, not exactly, rather a truth that had changed its colouring. Andrew closed off the thought. He did not want to pursue it.
‘Jimmy was very lively tonight,’ Janice began. She wanted to make amends in case her flirtatiousness had disturbed him.
‘Jimmy is Jimmy.’
‘I know that,’ she sighed. Andrew heard a whisper of regret in her admission, but he let this second thought follow the first into limbo.
‘I’ll help you finish here,’ Janice said after a moment. ‘It won’t take a minute.’ She had regained some of her briskness.
They worked side by side, stepping around each other in the familiar space. Janice imagined the pattern of their footsteps on the tiled floor, like the intricate movements of some domestic dance.
The unaccustomed whimsy of the idea made her smile.
Sometimes Andrew’s footsteps would diverge, leaping to work and away from them all, whilst hers would lay down more regular loops, to school and to other houses. But still the centre of the pattern would be printed here on the kitchen tiles. It was a comforting notion.
The kitchen was tidy enough to satisfy them both. Andrew wiped the top of the units with a cloth, sweeping the crumbs and remnants carefully into the cup of his hand. He had always been neater around the house than Janice.
‘I’m going to bed,’ Janice said, giving a little yawn like a cat’s.
‘I’ll be with you in a minute. Five minutes’ fresh air, and then I’ll lock up.’
It had been raining, but now the sky was partially clear. There was a ribbon of thick cloud overhead, marked by a paler rim, and beyond it in the west a few stars were visible.
Andrew made a slow circuit of the garden. It was too dark to see much and he made each step carefully, testing his familiarity with the ground against the confusion of darkness. He ducked his head under the branches of a cherry tree that overhung the path, and then found a bench set back between the bare twigs of dogwoods. He sat down, feeling the damp grainy wood under his fingers. The small noises of the garden were magnified, much greater in importance than the low note of distant traffic on the bypass.
Andrew let his head fall back against the seat. His eyes closed and the damp air sealed them like a compress. He had also drunk a good deal. The voices of the evening sounded briefly within his skull, and then he dismissed them. The silence was sweet.
When he looked again with dark-adjusted eyes he saw the irregular bulk of the house and the loose composition of trees that framed it. One corner of the trellis that supported a wisteria against a wall had come loose, he recalled. He would have to fix it on Saturday, bringing out his toolbox and a ladder from the garage.
With the domestic certainty of the intention he felt unexpected happiness lifting and ballooning within him. There was this house and its gardens, and the solid, inarticulate love he had for his sons, and there was Janice. He remembered her blurred glance at him this evening when she brought up Jimmy’s behaviour, and her need for love and reassurance, and the kitchen smell in her hair.
The happiness was as taut as a drum beneath his rib-cage.
As he got up and walked back towards the house he was thinking that it was not an audacious life, but it was round, sufficient. It was what he had. Upstairs in the silence of the house Janice was already asleep. Andrew undressed and got into bed beside her, warming himself against the generous curve of her back.
Forty excited children seethed under the magnificent fan-vaulted roof of the cathedral’s chapter house and leapt on and off the ancient stone seats that lined the walls, unawed by their surroundings. It was the first full rehearsal for the annual Grafton nativity play.
Marcelle Wickham sat on a folding chair with a list and a clipboard, and a wicker hamper beside her. Daisy Wickham had been chosen to be one of the angel chorus. It was an honour but it was a double-edged one, because with the invitation had come a suggestion that Daisy’s mother might like to help with the costumes. Marcelle had sighed, and then for Daisy’s sake agreed that she would be glad to do it. Now, with three weeks before the first performance, sixteen of the children were still uncostumed, including the ox and the ass.
Marcelle looked up from her list to see Nina standing beside her.
Nina was wearing her bright red jacket and her hair frizzed out over her shoulders, reminding Marcelle of her first glimpse of her in the supermarket. She shone like a beacon against the austere stone backdrop of the chapter house.
‘Thanks for coming,’ Marcelle said.
The director was calling his cast to order. Marcelle and Nina lowered their voices.
‘The ones I’ve finished are in here.’ Marcelle lifted the lid of her wicker hamper.
Nina unfolded an angel’s robe. The fabric was the cheapest plain white cotton but the garment was beautifully cut, with a yoke and falling folds of sleeve.
‘No tinsel haloes?’ she asked.
‘No tinsel haloes. To Daisy’s great disappointment.’
‘So what would you like me to do?’
She had heard Marcelle talking about the cathedral play, and about the sewing that remained to be done, and had diffidently offered to help her. In the last weeks Nina had felt the cathedral beckoning her, so that her steps continually returned to it. The creamy stone of the great pillars and arches and the pieced-together miracle of the medieval glass thrilled her as they had always done, but now she was as much affected by its place at the heart of Grafton. The towers and pinnacles seemed to gather the streets inwards, anchoring and interpreting them, and connecting the lives beyond them.
Once she would have dismissed the idea as fanciful, but she was convinced that the cathedral and its works were the secular as well as the spiritual heart of Grafton. The business park and the shopping precinct and the closes and avenues of new houses were only peripheral, the bright green leaves, whereas the cathedral was the roots and more than the roots, the black earth itself. Nina had never experienced any religious feeling and she did not know if what she was experiencing was religious, but she loved the sense of continuity, of the daily services that were offered up whether the people came or not, and the rhythms of the chapter and the close beyond her windows.
Marcelle said, apologetically, ‘It’s the animals, really. The ox and the ass, and the lambs. I know it’s a cheek, asking a professional artist like you, but I thought perhaps some painted masks …’
Nina cut her short. ‘I can do masks, if that’s what you would like. Or I can do more representational heads, if you would rather. Not fibreglass or anything too ambitious but papier-mâché needn’t be as tacky as it sounds.’
‘Could you?’
‘Easily.’
‘I think masks. The children are quite small, especially the lambs. Those are the two, at the front.’
A pair of six-year-olds, one with a head of tight brassy curls, squirmed at the front of the group of children.
The angel choir had shuffled to its feet, Daisy Wickham amongst them. They were joined by the twelve boy choristers from the Cathedral School and their musical director raised his hand.
The children began to sing the Coventry Carol.
Nina’s eyes and throat were stung by the sweetness of it. Her parents had brought her to the cathedral every Christmas to see the nativity play and to hear the carols. She was swept back to childhood and the memories of hard wooden seats and the faint smell of cough sweets and fir boughs.
Daisy Wickham peered sideways