She looked down at her left hand. Her engagement ring, a square-cut citrine in a modern setting of white gold, seemed to sit on her finger as if it wasn’t entirely comfortable to find itself there. Maybe it had always looked like that; maybe she had always known, at an unacknowledged level, that it didn’t suit her. Lucas had chosen it. The girls at work had been vociferously divided between those who thought this a truly romantic gesture and those who felt it was, in terms of a modern relationship, completely out of order. Amy herself had felt it to be a bit of both and in her confusion had allowed good manners and a desire to please Lucas to prevail. She slid the ring off now, and held it in her palm. It looked, as it always had, classy and impersonal. She put it on the table, beside her mug, and then spread her naked hand out, holding it in the air. It seemed fine – too fine, perhaps, to belong to someone who had just taken a unilateral decision to break off an engagement to marry.
She stood up and stretched. Lucas would be back around midnight, weary but in the slightly wired condition he was always in after three hours of hosting a radio show. She had, perhaps, three hours until his return, three hours in which to decide what to say to him and how to say it; or three hours in which to pack her clothes and most intimate possessions and take herself off to her friend Carole, leaving the citrine ring and a letter on the coffee table, for Lucas to find.
Dale was singing. Elizabeth could hear her clearly from the kitchen three floors below. She had a good voice, light but true and sweet. She was singing along to a CD of the score of Evita, and the sound came spiraling down the house, rippling through open doors, flowing everywhere. As a sound it was quite different, the complete opposite, in fact, of the sound that Dale had made the night before when she discovered the havoc Elizabeth had wreaked on the top floor. That had been terrible; screams and howls of rage and outrage, thundering feet down the stairs, cascades of furious tears. Elizabeth had sat in her place at the table, and refused to react, declined, mutely and stubbornly, to have anything to do with what was going on. It was Tom who had reacted, Tom who had attempted to soothe Dale, Tom who had gone back upstairs with her to help her sort out the muddle, to reassert her rights. Elizabeth wondered if Tom could hear the singing now in the basement. He had been down there for hours now, since four or five that morning, when he had given up all attempts at trying to sleep and had slid out of bed, trying not to wake Elizabeth who was awake already and pretending not to be in order not to have to say anything.
She had taken coffee down to him about eight. He had been sitting, wrapped in a bathrobe, in front of his drawing board, looking at drawings for the chapel. He took the coffee and put his other arm around her, still looking at the drawings.
‘Would you still like to see this?’
‘Of course,’ she said.
He took a swallow of coffee.
‘I’m afraid of you,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid of what you’re thinking.’
She moved herself gently out of his embrace.
‘I’m afraid, too.’
‘Shall we – shall we go and look at this, this morning?’
‘Yes,’ Elizabeth said.
He took her hand for a second.
‘Good.’
Half an hour later, he had come into the kitchen to leave his empty mug on his way upstairs to shave and dress. Elizabeth was sitting at the table, already dressed, reading an arts supplement from the previous weekend’s newspaper. Tom bent, as he passed her, and kissed her hair.
She said, ‘Breakfast?’
‘No thanks. I’ve got about another half-hour to do downstairs before we go. Can you wait?’
‘Yes.’
‘You don’t mind waiting?’
‘No,’ Elizabeth said.
She had tidied up the kitchen, watered the parsley and the lemon verbena in their pots on the windowsill, swept the floor and fed Basil one of his tiny gourmet tins. He had eaten it seemingly in a single swallow and had then heaved himself on to a kitchen chair so that he could gaze steadily and pointedly at the milk jug and the butter dish. It was then that the singing began. Elizabeth was just stooping to tell Basil, in a voice of profound indulgence, that he was the greediest person she had ever met, when the first wave of sound came rolling lightly down the stairwell. She straightened.
‘It’s Dale—’
Basil seemed entirely indifferent. He leaned his chins on the table edge and purred sonorously at the butter.
‘She’s singing,’ Elizabeth said out loud in amazement. ‘She’s woken up and found herself to be exactly where she intended to be and she’s singing. In triumph.’
Basil put a huge paw on the table, next to his face. Elizabeth knelt beside him. She put her forehead against his densely furry reverberating side.
‘I can’t bear it. I can’t.’ She closed her eyes. ‘I think I’m going mad—’
With surprising supple agility, Basil leapt from the chair to the table. Elizabeth sprang up and seized him.
‘No—’
He made no struggle. He lay upside down in her arms and regarded her with his big yellow eyes and continued to purr. She put her face down into him, into the soft spotted expanse of his stomach.
‘What,’ she whispered into it, ‘am I going to do?’
‘Dearest,’ Tom said from the doorway.
She looked up. Basil turned himself easily in her arms and slithered back on to the chair.
‘Are you ready?’ Tom said. ‘Shall we go now?’
The chapel stood in a side street in the north of the city, balanced precariously on a hill, between a short row of shops and a terrace of neglected houses, mostly divided into flats. In front of it, separated from the street by iron railings and a locked iron gate, was a rectangle of unkempt grass. Behind it and beside it, Tom said – and this was what had so attracted the purchasers – were spaces of land which the original sect had intended for their own private cemetery, the graves to be arranged like the spokes of a wheel around a neoclassical monument to the founding father. These plans had never come to anything. The aristocratic lady benefactress had been milked of all her money and no other obliging source could be found to replace her. The sect had gradually disbanded and the founding father had disappeared to France taking the two prettiest acolytes with him, and all remaining funds, and the spaces around the chapel were abandoned with the building, and were gradually taken over by alder and cats and willow herb.
The chapel had handsome double doors under a nobly pedimented porch. Tom put a key into the lock and turned it.
‘There.’
Elizabeth peered in. There were windows down both sides, a second tier of them running above a graceful grey-painted gallery. The nave space was empty, except for debris, and a little huddle of pitch-pine pews below a magnificent panelled pulpit, waiting numbly, as it were, for the next soul-saving utterance.
Elizabeth walked forward, her feet grinding on the dust and fallen plaster.
‘It’s lovely.’
‘I thought you’d think that.’
‘Won’t it make rather a funny house?’
He drew level with her.
‘That’s what they want.’
She leaned on the back of one of the pitch-pine pews.