Rosie Thomas 4-Book Collection: Other People’s Marriages, Every Woman Knows a Secret, If My Father Loved Me, A Simple Life

To one side of the green, forming its northern border, there was a terrace of fine Georgian houses. There were four wide steps with iron railings leading up to each front door, and the balconies to the tall first-floor windows were an intricate tracery of wrought-iron leaves. Nina’s new house was in the middle of the row, looking directly out over the mulberry tree in the centre of the green.

As she climbed out of Patrick’s car, stretching her legs and easing her shoulders after the confinement of the long drive, she stopped for a moment to gaze up at her own blank windows.

‘When I was a little girl I always said that I wanted to live in Dean’s Row. My mother used to laugh. “Why settle for that?” she used to say. “Why not the Bishop’s Palace itself?” The answer was always that I didn’t want to marry the Bishop because he had funny teeth.’

Patrick came to stand beside her.

‘And now here you are.’

She heard the silent rider, Maybe it isn’t such a half-arsed scheme to come and live down here, as clearly as if he had enunciated it.

‘Have you got the keys?’

Nina took the heavy bunch out of her bag and held it up. ‘Yale, Chubb and burglar alarm.’

Patrick waited beside his car and let her go alone up the four steps to unlock the door.

She liked the house empty, like this. She could see and admire the ribs and joints of it. In the drawing room the oak floorboards were two handspans broad, smooth and glowing with age. The window shutters folded into their own recesses in the panelling with seductive precision, and the thin glazing bars divided the glass and the late afternoon light into eighths, sixteenths, tidy fractions. Over her head in the hallway the curving wrought-ironwork of the stair rails sprang up from each stone tread and drew her upwards through the centre of the house. The bedrooms were square, well-proportioned, each with its iron grate and painted overmantel. The house was much too big for her, but that did not matter particularly. Richard had left her wealthy. The memory of that, the surprising figures contained in his will, could still catch her off-balance.

At the top of the house the previous owners had created a studio. The slope of the pitched roof, concealed by a low parapet from the green and the cathedral’s west porch, was a sheet of glass. There were the Gothic pinnacles, seeming to float above Nina’s head in the breadth of the sky.

It was here that she would work. Her plan chests and her drawing board and her desk would be installed, neat and complete, with her boxes of paints and coloured ranks of inks and pencils. Nina was an illustrator of children’s books, her work much admired.

‘Nina?’

Patrick’s voice rose from a long way beneath her.

‘I’m coming.’

He was standing outside the drawing room. The door stood ajar behind him, to admit a view of the mulberry tree and of the saints and archangels in their stone niches.

‘What do you think?’

‘It’s wonderful. A beautiful house.’

She put her arms around him and hugged him. Again she felt the resistance – not rejection, but containment – that told her he didn’t know what to do with her. It wasn’t that she expected anything. Patrick was gay. She had known that for all the ten years they had been friends. But his awkwardness emphasized that her bereavement and the sympathy which followed it had set her apart. She was separate. She was to be treated with care, when in reality her grief and her needs made her long to be pulled in, peremptorily handled, to be loved so roughly that the memories were obliterated. Nina longed for it, bled for it.

‘Shall we go down to the kitchen and have some tea?’

Patrick patted her shoulder. ‘Excellent.’

He had unloaded the boxes from the back of his estate car and stacked them inside the front door.

‘You should have waited for me to help you carry that in.’

‘Nina, darling, if I can’t manhandle a few packing cases, who can?’

Patrick dealt in antiques, singlehandedly and rather discriminatingly, from his house in Spitalfields. His speciality was early English oak.

Nina said quickly, ‘I’m grateful for everything you’ve done. Not just today, but ever since Richard died.’

Patrick had come to her directly, on that first afternoon, after the telephone call from the house in Norfolk.

‘It’s okay,’ Patrick said. ‘You know where I am if you need me.’

She did know, but she was also convinced, with a sudden lift of her spirits, that she had done the right thing to sell the houses and the cars, to put Richard’s modern art collection in store, and come to Grafton. She couldn’t remake herself in London except as Richard Cort’s widow. Here, she was free to make herself what she would.

‘Tea.’

The kitchen was in the basement. There were Smallbone cupboards, painted teal blue, expanses of brick and slate. French windows looked out on a small paved yard at the back of the house. Nina took the kettle out of the basket, filled it, plugged it in and set out the cups and saucers. Patrick prowled behind her, opening the doors into the larder and the utility room, inspecting empty cupboards and wine bins and sliding drawers in and out on their smooth runners.

Nina did not much care for this kitchen. The opulent rusticity of it was not to her taste. In London, with Richard and for their friends, she had cooked in a functional space of stainless steel and black granite. But she did not plan to change this place, because it would not be the centre of this house as her old kitchen had been in the last one. She would cook for herself, as quickly as possible, and that would be all.

She poured out the tea and handed Patrick his cup. For the lack of anywhere else to sit they hoisted themselves up and perched side by side on one of the worktops. Patrick gave his characteristic short snuffle of amusement.

‘Look at these dinky cut-outs and finials. I’m surprised there are no stencilled flowers.’

‘I could paint some in. You’re right, though. Richard wouldn’t have liked it, would he?’

In London they had also lived in a Georgian house. But Richard’s architect had gutted the interior. He had made it a series of huge, light spaces and they had furnished it sparsely. Richard had also owned a modern apartment, where he set out the growing collection of paintings and sculpture and where they sometimes gave parties, and then there had been the house near the sea in Norfolk, stone-floored and thick-walled. These solid, geometric places had contained their life together, and after his death Nina had been unable to contemplate their emptiness. She had sold them, and added even more money to his startling legacy. Richard had been a lawyer, who had also bought and converted and sold property. The mid-eighties had made him rich, although it was not until after he died that Nina realized exactly how rich.

Patrick drank his tea and regarded her. Nina sat with her shoulders hunched forward, her fingers laced around her cup. She looked composed, quite well able to make her own decisions and order her life, as she had always done. He admired her, and her strength. He had witnessed other deaths recently and observed their effects on those who were left behind, and Nina’s levelness impressed him.

He asked, ‘Is that why you’ve come here?’

‘Because a cathedral close, a little place like Grafton, and this house are so much not Richard’s kind of thing?’

‘Yes.’

‘Partly so. Also I like the feeling that I belong here. There is a sense of being rooted. That’s important, isn’t it?’

Patrick, who had grown up in Ilford, let it pass.

‘Don’t you know anyone here any more?’

‘Not a soul.’

Nina was an only child. She had spent her childhood and youth in Grafton, but she had left to go to art school when she was eighteen. Her parents had moved away less than a year later, and both of them were dead now. Her remaining links with the town had long ago broken. She laughed suddenly.

‘I’ll be able to recreate myself entirely, with no one looking over my shoulder. Don’t you envy me the chance to get rid of those tiresome labels that people attach to one over the years? Nina doesn’t like curry, knows nothing about music, always cries in those sentimental French films.’

He nodded, agreeing with her. ‘Patrick drives like an old lady, is such a coffee snob, will never learn to ski.’

They were both laughing now, with affection.

‘Don’t make yourself too different. All your friends who love you like you are will miss you.’

‘I won’t.’ Nina was thinking, If I start again, away from the places we knew together, I won’t feel left behind. Is that a naive expectation?