Lucas stood looking down at her.
‘Amy, you’re my fiancée. We’re going to get married. You are legally going to be part of my family. I think of you as part of it now and so does my father. You belong.’
Amy gripped the duvet.
‘Try telling that to Dale,’ she said, and shut her eyes.
On Christmas Eve, Tom Carver said he would like to go to midnight mass in the Abbey.
‘Why?’ Dale said.
‘I feel that I’d like to.’
‘But you never go to church. You don’t believe in all that stuff. I bet the last time you went to church was when you married Josie and you only did that to please her because she was so insistent.’
Tom picked Basil up from where he lay on the kitchen table waiting for someone to forget to put the lid on the butter dish, and carried him over to the garden window at the end of the kitchen. He hadn’t been in the garden for weeks and it had a wet, dark, flattened look, a winter sulkiness about it. Even the sweet stone statue of a girl holding a dove which he so loved looked as if she’d had enough. He and Josie had found her in an architectural reclamation yard just before their marriage and had pounced on her with relief, as if she was a symbol for them both, a symbol of hope and harmony. It was something of the same hope that had carried Tom into church on his second wedding day, an anticipation that by marrying Josie in such a place – whatever it did or didn’t mean to him – would somehow open up the possibility of making his relationship with Josie as profound as his relationship with Pauline had been. Or, at least, as he earnestly believed it had been. Josie had challenged him about that. She told him he had romanticized his first marriage, that he’d made it – by idealizing it so much – impossible for any real woman even to begin to replace a dead saint. He bent and rubbed his chin slowly across Basil’s obliging broad head. He hadn’t thought Pauline was perfect but he had preferred being married to her to being married to Josie. Except for Rufus. Whatever the lost perfections of Pauline, it was Josie who had given him Rufus. And it was something, however obscure, to do with Rufus that made the idea of an hour in Bath Abbey at midnight suddenly strongly alluring. He turned round.
‘Dale.’
‘Yes?’
‘You’ve got your Christmas tree?’
‘Yes.’
‘And Christmas stocking?’
‘Yes.’
‘And a turkey even though Lucas and I would have liked to experiment with a goose?’
‘Yes.’
‘So I am going to midnight mass. You needn’t come with me. I shall be quite happy to go alone. But I’m going.’
Dale came down the kitchen towards him. She was wearing black jeans and a tight pale-grey polo-necked jersey, and she was holding a mixing bowl of brandy butter. She held out a wooden spoon.
‘Taste that.’
Tom took a small lick. Basil craned interestedly upwards, purring like a traction engine.
‘Excellent.’
‘More sugar?’
‘No. Definitely not. I think you should stop playing the perfect housewife and go out and see a friend or go for a walk or something.’
Dale looked at him, her head slightly on one side.
‘I’ll probably come to the Abbey. I don’t want to make a thing—’
‘Good.’
‘I just do wonder why you’ve suddenly got the urge to go.’
Tom shrugged. He bent down and let Basil roll heavily out of his arms onto the floor. He waited, with resignation and a degree of dread, for Dale to continue, ‘I suppose it’s because you hope you’ll see her at the Abbey,’ but she didn’t. He heard the click of her boot heels go sharply back up the length of the kitchen, and then he straightened up.
‘I’m going down to the basement.’
‘Lunch?’ Dale said. ‘Soup? A filled croissant?’
He shook his head.
‘No, thank you. Sweet of you, but no.’
She smiled at him.
‘No trouble,’ she said. She began to scrape the brandy butter briskly out of the mixing bowl into a green glass dish. ‘It’s just when I’m here, I like to look after you. That’s all.’
Elizabeth couldn’t see Tom in the Abbey. It was packed, of course, hundreds of people, and he had never indicated that he would be there, but something in his faint unspoken envy of her own projected Christmas had made her feel there was the slightest possibility she might see him. She had a new haircut – much shorter – and a new overcoat, with a fake-fur collar and cuffs, and she had achieved both these startling changes on an impulse, just a few days before Christmas, amazing herself. Her father had admired both.
‘Very becoming,’ he’d said of her hair. ‘Very. You look much younger and far less responsible. And a red coat. Red! I thought you were colour blind to every colour on earth but navy-blue.’
He stood beside her now in the voluminous old tweed coat he’d had all her life with, on the pew beside him, a tweed hat in which a few fishing flies of long ago still clung, peering at his hymn book through reading glasses she had mended that afternoon with fuse wire. He’d been very proud of the flat.
‘I hope you notice the diamond-like glitter of the windows.’
‘I do.’
‘And the brilliant purity of the lavatory.’
‘Dazzling.’
‘He wanted four pounds an hour. That’s twenty pence more an hour than they pay him at The Fox and Grapes.’
‘You must have felt like Lady Bountiful.’
‘I’ve never employed anyone for their hands before, rather than their wits.’
‘Then you have lived in a very secluded world.’
‘I know,’ he said. His voice had an edge of regret to it. ‘I know I have.’
Elizabeth felt very fond of him, standing there beside him in the Abbey. She felt, if she thought about it, oddly fond of everyone round her, too, and of this church with its profusion of eighteenth-century monuments, and of her new haircut, and the glossy black cuffs of her new coat, and of Christmas and of England, and life. She felt she wanted to sing lustily and in a heartfelt way, pleased to be part of such a congregation, such an occasion, with Christmas about to break upon them all, intimate and immense all at once. She turned to Duncan and smiled at him. He winked. Then he leaned sideways until the corner of his spectacles brushed her hair.
‘What vandals the Victorians were. Even with carols.’
‘If,’ she whispered back, ‘you’d been yonder peasant, what would you have said to Good King Wenceslas?’
Duncan winked again and returned to his singing. From some distance away, Tom Carver, with Dale beside him, realized that it was indeed Elizabeth Brown over there, in a red coat with much shorter hair. He glanced at Dale. She had her hymn book held up, almost ostentatiously, in front of her face and was singing with apparently solemn concentration. Tom pushed his reading glasses down his nose so that he could see comfortably at long-distance over the top of them and, singing still, fixed his gaze upon Elizabeth.
‘Hello,’ Elizabeth said.
Rufus regarded her. He had Basil in his arms and the possession of this huge fur pillow seemed excuse enough not to say anything.
Elizabeth smiled.
‘I’m a friend of your father’s. He’s helping me with my new house.’
Rufus rubbed his face against Basil. This friend of his father’s looked nice, normal and nice, unalarming. She had on the kind of skirt that the teachers in his old school in Bath used to wear, with pleats, very tidy-looking. The teachers in Sedgebury didn’t have pleats, and they didn’t have cosy voices either. They sounded tired, mostly, and when there was too much noise in the classroom, which was often, they sent a child out to find another teacher to help them make everyone shut up.