Winter Garden Read Free Page A

over her knees and stuffed her fingers in her ears.
    Nonplussed, Ashburner craned forward to look at Nina. The man in spectacles gave him a second, conspiratorial smile. Nina was talking to Bernard; sensing she was being watched she glanced over her shoulder. Ashburner was struck by the anxiety in her eyes. This woman loves me, he told himself, though many wouldn’t realise it.
    Nina fluttered her fingers at him, a gesture so reminiscent of his wife’s dismissive wave of farewell that he was further cast down. Hurtling along the runway at a hundred and twenty miles an hour, he considered the probability that at this very moment his wife was unbolting the back door of their house to let the dog out to do its business. The sickening wrench he experienced when the plane left the ground and climbed into the sky made his heart pound in his breast. It wasn’t only the ground he was leaving. It came to him in one of those flashes so often described by Nina, that his wife saw him in much the same light as the dog, a creature so dependable and infirm as to be thought incapable of straying beyond the confines of the winter garden.
    Ashburner ached to confide in someone and had to wait fifteen minutes before Enid removed her fingers from her ears.
    ‘Are we up?’ she asked. She refused to look out of the porthole.
    ‘Well up,’ said Ashburner. He ferreted in his mind for the right words. ‘I haven’t known Nina very long,’ he began. ‘I expect you know her better than I.’
    ‘Hardly,’ said Enid. ‘We’re not intimate.’ Now that Ashburner had taken off his fur hat she thought he looked like a troubled baby. It had something to do with the firmness of his pink cheeks, and his round, puzzled eyes.
    ‘But you’re in the same line . . . art and that sort of thing.’
    ‘Nina’s gone into lumps of metal,’ Enid said. ‘I work mainly in oils.’
    ‘But’, persisted Ashburner, ‘you do know her.’
    Enid was often underestimated. Her pleasant smile and unremarkable features made her appear neutral. She had been made a prefect at school, and the subsequent discovery that she had cheated in the maths exam had caused astonishment. ‘I’ve never been to Nina’s house for dinner,’ she said, ‘if that’s what you mean. Or to her cottage in the country, or to her studio in Holland Park. But once I had a long chat with her husband about India. He’s keen on rugs.’
    ‘Ah,’ said Ashburner and fell uncomfortably silent.
    He too had never been to Nina’s house for dinner. He had, however, visited it in his lunch hour without being offered a morsel of food. Instead, Nina had encouraged him to make love to her standing up in the kitchen. ‘Just get on tip-toe,’ she had urged, ‘and lean against the door.’ It was in case her husband the brain specialist came home unexpectedly. Buttocks perilously close to the brass knob of the door, his transports of love had been tinged with theatricality. It wasn’t quite the real thing. He found it terribly difficult to keep his balance, and his knees trembled violently. He wasn’t a fit man, being overweight, and the muscles in his calves seemed to have wasted away; if he had fallen on top of her the consequences could have been fatal. Nina was quite right of course, it would have been in bad taste to cavort in the marriage bed, and it was bad luck that the sofa in her living room was upholstered in velvet. There was a leather couch in one of the consulting rooms on the ground floor, but mostly the door was kept locked. Ashburner had suggested they line the sofa with a protective layer of newspapers, but the idea – and who could blame her? – hadn’t appealed to Nina. He was fearful, to the point of paralysis, of discovery. Nina usually stripped below the waist but insisted he retain his trousers. Such a welter of cloth and dangling braces rendered him helpless. Had Nina’s husband returned – apparently he was in the habit of rushing home quite gratuitously for a