Читать книгу Rosie Thomas 4-Book Collection: The White Dove, The Potter’s House, Celebration, White - Rosie Thomas - Страница 15

It was raining again, a cold, thin rain that fell straight down from a blank, grey sky.

Amy turned away from the window and went to her wardrobe. She was supposed to be shopping and having tea with her old schoolfriend Violet Trent, and Bethan had pressed her pale grey suit for her and put out her high-heeled grey suède shoes. But Amy had telephoned Violet to say that she couldn’t manage tea today, and she put the suit back in her wardrobe. She wasn’t sure of the appropriate costume for this afternoon, but it certainly wasn’t a Charles Creed suit and a shirt with a pie-frill collar and two dozen tiny tucks in the front.

Amy frowned at the outfits hanging on the rail, each one shrouded in its linen bag and with the matching shoes polished and wrapped in the racks below. The right sort of clothes that she owned were mostly at Chance, and this array only underlined the frivolity of her London existence for her. In the end she put on a pair of dark trousers with the stoutest shoes she could find, and the plain coat she had worn to Appleyard Street. A beret hid her hair, and at the last moment she snapped off her pearl ear-studs and dropped them back into the red morocco box that stood on her dressing table.

Amy slipped downstairs and out of the house without anyone seeing her. The rain dripped monotonously from the trees in Berkeley Square, and the pavements were crowded with bobbing black umbrellas. She set off down Hill Street, certain of where she was going, and emerged a few minutes later into Park Lane.

Amongst the red buses and taxis sending up plumes of spray she saw a handful of police on horseback plodding towards Marble Arch, their waterproof capes spread out over the big brown rumps of the horses. On the opposite side, beyond the traffic, was a thin but continuous stream of people heading in the same direction. There were more policemen amongst them. Amy crossed the road and with her hands deep in her coat pockets she began to walk too.

At Speaker’s Corner the crowd was already a thousand strong and it was swelling steadily as people trickled to join it from all directions. A brass band was playing cheerful music under the trees at the edge of the Park, but the musicians’ faces were solemn and no one seemed to be listening to them. Amy edged close to the makeshift platform of piled-up boxes. Most of the people she passed were simply waiting quietly in the downpour, their collars turned up and dark, damp patches showing on their shoulders. There were policemen everywhere, ringing the growing crowd and filtering through it in pairs. Amy wondered why there were so many of them to control this dejected, almost silent gathering of people. The banners and placards held up were smudged and limp, at odds with their defiant messages.

Amy read them as she waited, wishing that Tony had let her accompany him so that he could explain.

‘Bermondsey for Workers Control.’

‘London Workers Support the Miners.’

‘A Job for Every Man.’

Suddenly, in the middle of a knot of people beside the platform, she saw Jake Silverman. His dark head and black beard stuck up above the rest. He was bareheaded, coatless and soaking wet, but Amy could sense the crackle of his liveliness even from where she stood. She was about to run towards him, unthinking, when a motorcyclist came nosing slowly through the crowds. A red armband was fastened around the sleeve of his jacket. Jake’s head jerked up at the throb of the engine, and he beckoned the rider forward. Reaching the foot of the platform steps, the man pushed up his goggles and said something to Jake. At once Jake seized his hand and shook it, pumping the man’s arm up and down in his pleasure.

Then Jake vaulted up on to the platform. Amy saw Kay there at the front in a bright green waterproof with her hair wrapped in a scarf. She immediately began to look from head to head, searching for Tony, but there was no sign of him.

‘Comrades and friends!’

Jake was up at the edge of the platform, beckoning them all forward. The crowd surged forward immediately, pressing closer around Amy. She let herself be carried forward too. Out of the corner of her eye she saw the head of one of the police mounts rear upwards, its harness jingling.

‘Friends, we have just had word from the courier here that the marchers will reach us in fifteen minutes.’

Jake’s voice carried easily over the cheering that broke out, raggedly at first and then growing in conviction.

‘You all know that they have been on the road for twelve days. That on every one of those days comrades and workers have come out to support them. And that their support was often in direct defiance of the Labour Right who have done their best to sabotage this march. Let’s give our marchers a welcome now to beat anything they’ve seen yet. Let’s every one of us be proud that we are here to march with them on the last lap to Trafalgar Square. And let’s go on from there to Downing Street!’

The cheering was a roar now. Somehow Jake Silverman had drawn the soaking, silent crowd forward and set it alight.

‘Today we’ll show Ramsay MacDonald that a capitalist Labour government is no bloody good to us. Let’s show him that we want work. That we want to control that work ourselves. And that we mean to do it. Let him be warned!’

Jake’s clenched fists came up over his head and he shook them, and the cheering rose to meet him as if he was conducting his own powerful orchestra. The forest of placards and banners rose in a wave and the clenched fists defiantly answered Jake Silverman’s defiance.

‘Be warned! Be warned!’

It was a chant now. Under the trees the band began to play again. Dimly Amy recognized The Red Flag, and at the same time, quite close to her, she heard another shout.

‘Commie saboteur!’

‘Kike! Kike! Fuck off to Russia if that’s what you want!’

The surge of the crowd towards it half-turned her around. She saw a big man with a red face ducking away, and the smooth flanks of a police horse as it wheeled sharply in front of her. The horse blocked her view for an instant, and when she looked again a space had opened in the crowd. The margins of it were held back by lines of police with their arms linked tight.

Amy was suddenly cold. Something ugly was flickering here, behind the police helmets and in the London faces milling around her. It might not be safe, for one thing, Tony had said when he had refused to let her come with him. What was it that wasn’t safe, amongst these people and the half-understood rhetoric of their slogans?

Part of her was detachedly aware that the rain had stopped, and that towards the west beyond the ragged edges of the clouds there was a faint, pale blue line. But with the rest of herself she was listening to the crowd noise, and waiting fearfully for that flicker of ugliness again.

There was more shouting from the roadside now.

‘They’re here!’

The police, with their arms still linked, were easing the crowds further apart so that a wide aisle opened between them. The cheering and shouting died into an expectant silence and the band sounded much louder.

Amy stood on tiptoe, craning to see. A fat man in a coat much too small for him grinned at her, showing black teeth. ‘‘Ere y’are, my love. Get in ‘ere in front.’

In the sudden breathless silence, between the square shoulders of the policemen, Amy saw them coming.

It was a long, black column, with lights bobbing on either side of it. The miners were in ranks of four, swinging smartly along as if they had only set out that morning.

As they came closer, the leaders turning in between the held-back crowds, she saw that the impression of blackness came from their dark, sodden clothes and from their physical likeness. They were small, hunched men with dark faces under their caps. And the lights were miners’ lamps. Each man carried his lamp, lit up and swinging to his step.

She was struck by something incongruous about the column as it drew closer. The men were marching like an army, and the band was playing them on. But there was no triumphant ring of well-drilled boots on the metalled road. Amy listened, and the sound she heard caught at her throat and sent a shiver deep inside her.

There was only the muffled flap, flap of hundreds of pairs of broken boots, boots tied up with rag and shored uselessly against the rain with newspaper.

It was the flap, flap that cleared Amy’s head and drove her forward against the wall of policemen. She found her voice and she was shouting, shouting the same welcome and greeting that rose in a deafening crescendo around her. She stretched her hand out past the uniform shoulders and waved and shouted as she had never done before.

If men could walk so far in boots like those to ask for help, how badly must they be in need of it? And in her own cupboards at home, polished for her and brushed and carefully stored in bags, there were dozens of pairs of shoes in crocodile skin, soft suède and supple pastel leather.

In that instant Amy knew, with as much certainty as she had ever known anything, which side she was on. She was with these men, with their proud lights and their thin, drawn faces and their terrible boots, and she was with Jake Silverman and his friends. With Tony Hardy, wherever he was. Amy felt as if she had just come home, and yet as if she had cut herself off from everything she loved and understood. Gerald Lovell and Peter Jaspert, Adeline, and even Isabel, didn’t belong in this new home because they couldn’t or wouldn’t see what was happening here today.

Amy was gulping for air that tasted of wet wool, sweating people and horses. Were these people her friends and family, she thought wildly, looking at the strangers surging and shouting around her?

The column of marchers was still passing.

Amy saw a green banner with a red and gold dragon. Nantlas, Rhondda it proclaimed. Bethan’s home village. Bethan was having a rare day off today. Was she here in the crowd too? Why hadn’t the two of them come together? Amy felt dizzy, as if her world had suddenly tilted to one side and changed all her perspectives. Under the Nantlas banner she saw a man much taller than his companions, bareheaded like Jake Silverman and with his black hair flattened to his head by the rain. He was looking over the heads of the crowd and smiling, pleased with what he saw. Amy had time to think, There, there’s someone who knows he’s right, before the man had passed and was swallowed up into the black ranks beneath the platform.

The tail of the march arrived and the aisle held open in the waiting crowd was filled with miners.

There was one brief speech from the platform and then Jake was speaking again, not shouting yet his voice carried to the back of the huge crowd.

‘The last lap now. We’ll march together to Trafalgar Square. Let’s tell our friends from South Wales that we’re proud to march behind them.’

There was a great burst of cheering, but there were other shouts too and Amy struggled to hear what the raw voices were threatening. The police horses wheeled round again and the miners raised their banners once more. The dark-faced men in their black clothes turned and led the way along Oxford Street with their lamps swinging and the band, playing behind them. Amy let herself be carried forward in the press as the police chain broke to let them through and then she was walking too, past the familiar shopfronts and the curious, staring faces of shoppers on the city pavements. For one odd, hallucinatory moment she thought she saw herself and Violet Trent among them, faces blank under their smart little hats. The gutters were huge puddles after the heavy rain, and Amy’s shoes were unsuitable for walking any distance. Her feet and trouser legs were soon soaked, but she was oblivious. She felt as proud as Jake Silverman could have hoped, and she cheered and sang at the top of her voice with everyone else. The fat man with the tight coat was still at her side, and he winked at her. ‘We’ll show ‘em, eh?’ He was holding one side of a placard that read National Unemployed Workers Movement.

I am unemployed, that’s true enough, Amy thought wryly.

They passed Oxford Circus. The police were holding up the traffic and she glimpsed Regent Street choked with stationary buses. At the far end of Oxford Street they turned and streamed down Charing Cross Road. Amy’s right shoe had rubbed her heel into a blister, and she thought again of the hundreds of miles from South Wales in boots tied up with rags.

At last they reached Trafalgar Square. There was another, bigger platform here, draped with banners that read ‘London Workers Welcome the SWMF Marchers’. The square filled up behind her and Amy found herself pushed closer to the front. Just ahead of her and to the right, on the steps between Landseer’s lions, she saw Jake and Kay again. There were still more policemen here, on foot and on horseback, and another brass band playing outside the National Gallery. The cheering and shouting was deafening, and the crowd surged and swayed in pulsating waves, suddenly much bigger. More people must have been waiting for the marchers to arrive in the square.

It was difficult to hear the speakers and Amy strained to catch the words of one after another of the march leaders and organizers. ‘This government … be made to see that the failure of private enterprise in our industries … chronic poverty and destitution among unemployed men … persistent pit closures … repeal of the Eight-Hour Day Act … iniquity of the not seeking work clause …’

Then, as she struggled to hear through the din, she caught the sound of different chanting.

‘Commie scum! Commie scum!’

The crowd bulged around her and swayed towards the sound with a sudden, ominous life of its own.

‘Dirty reds! Dirty reds!’

Amy glimpsed Jake Silverman hoisting Kay out of the way on to the steps and then plunging forward. The chanting broke up into urgent shouting. Four police horses and a dozen bobbing helmets converged on the spot where Jake had disappeared. From somewhere ahead of her Amy heard a woman’s scream, and then as if at a signal the boiling crowd erupted into violence. Right beside her a man’s fist came up and smashed into another’s face, and a spurt of blood sprang from his nose before he fell backwards under the trampling feet. Amy heard her own scream rising with the others, and then she was propelled violently forward by the fighting breaking out behind her. She stumbled forward, catching at clothes and arms to stop herself being pushed over, and almost fell over another man lying on the ground with his arms up to protect his head and face. Then the high brown flanks of a police horse loomed over her and she saw the great polished hooves only a foot or so from the man’s head. She ducked down to try to help him but be was already being hauled to his feet by his friends.

The crowd from the back of the square was still pushing forward to the steps, and Amy felt an instant of pure, panicky certainty that she would be crushed to death or suffocated in this dense, heaving mass of bodies.

The steps, she told herself. Try to reach the steps where she had seen Jake lift Kay up. The next blind surge carried her forward, and she saw that she had come up against the solid phalanx of miners in front of the platform. A lamp was still swinging in someone’s hand. The steps were only a few yards away.

Then, right beside her, Jake Silverman was fighting to pull away from two men who held his arms pinned savagely behind his back. A mounted policeman was just behind them with his stick raised. Amy saw the leather thong wrapped around his gloved fist. Then there was a third man right beside Jake with something short and heavy in his hand.

A lead bar. A length of piping. Whatever, it was for Jake.

Amy opened her mouth to scream but he would never have heard the warning. As she watched, frozen, the bar came up and then down. The dull crack of metal against bone and skin made her feel sick to the pit of her stomach. Jake’s head flopped forward and he fell like an empty sack.

Horror gave Amy strength. She thrust past the men blocking her way and knelt beside Jake. His face was as white as candle wax and his eyes were closed. When Amy looked up again to scream for help the three men had vanished and there was nothing in the world except trampling feet and swaying bodies that threatened to topple over them. In feeble desperation she tried to pull at Jake’s coat and realized that she would never be able to drag his weight to safety. Then someone else was pulling her aside and stooping beside Jake. She saw the blue scars on the hand turning Jake’s unconscious face, and the lamp hooked to his belt.

‘Murdering bastards,’ the miner said.

Then he bent and scooped Jake up. He hoisted the dead weight over his shoulder as if it was nothing, and began to strike through the tangle of people. Amy looked wildly around for Kay or another familiar face, but there was no one. The police were moving through the crowd in blue lines now, and the violence was ebbing away. Most people were standing still, bewildered, with their arms hanging at their sides. A little path opened in front of the miner with his burden and Amy ran after him, almost sobbing with relief.

He didn’t stop or look round until they were clear of the mass in the square. In front of St Martin-in-the-Fields he glanced back over his shoulder and then very gently swung Jake down and put him on the pavement. His face was so white that Amy was afraid he was already dead. There was a tiny trickle of dark blood at the corner of his mouth.

‘Are you his friend?’ the miner asked abruptly.

Amy nodded.

‘See to him, then. I’ll run for the ambulance. Bloody First Aid Post’s the other side of the square.’

He was gone immediately.

Amy knelt down beside Jake. He must still be alive if that man’s gone for help, she thought stupidly. She undid her coat and took it off, wrapping the soft folds over the crumpled body as best she could. Then she untied her silk scarf and put it under his head. He was so heavy, and there wasn’t a flicker of movement.

‘Jake,’ she whispered. ‘What can I do to help you?’

She had no idea. She took his cold hand and held it, bitterly thinking that she was completely useless. She had marched along Oxford Street, singing and shouting and feeling proud of herself, yet now she was needed for something real and she was failing them. Jake was going to die here on the pavement outside St Martin-in-the-Fields because she didn’t know how to save him.

A knot of people had gathered round them, and she looked up at the faces. ‘Does anyone know any first aid?’

They shook their heads, sympathetic but unhelpful.

‘Nah. Ambulance’ll be along just now.’

The seconds ticked by and Jake didn’t move. Amy went on holding his hand and found herself praying. Please God, let him be all right. Please God, let him …

The miner came back again.

He knelt down on the other side of Jake and felt his wrist, then turned his head to one side. Amy was surprised by the gentleness of his scarred hands.

‘I didn’t know what to do,’ she said, ‘I’m sorry …’

‘Nothing you could do,’ he answered without looking at her. ‘He needs hospital.’

Almost at once they heard the siren. The ambulance was ploughing up through the crowds on the east side of the square. Amy looked up and saw the high white side of it with the reassuring red cross.

‘Thank God,’ she said, and the miner looked up and smiled in relief for the first time. I know you, Amy thought.

The ambulance-men came running with their rolled-up green canvas stretcher. They spread it out beside Jake and lifted him on to it, then hoisted his weight up into the dark mouth of the ambulance.

From the folding metal steps the miner jerked his head at Amy. ‘You’d better come too.’

She scrambled in and the doors slammed behind them. They sped away in the direction the ambulance had come.

The miner leaned back against the hard wooden bench opposite the stretcher. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘Your man will be all right.’

‘He isn’t my man,’ Amy said. ‘I just know him.’

The man was still smiling, and she knew why she recognized him. He was the tall miner who had marched under the Nantlas banner, and had smiled out over the crowds in his enviable certainty.

‘How do you know he’ll be all right?’

‘I’ve seen enough head injuries,’ he answered abruptly.

The ambulance was slowing again. Charing Cross Hospital, Amy thought, and again: Thank God.

Light flooded in at them as the doors swung open. The stretcher was lifted and carried out and they followed behind it into the hospital. Another ambulance had arrived immediately behind them, and the hallway was full of hurrying people in white uniforms. Two nurses came forward to meet Jake’s stretcher as it was lifted on to a trolley. His hand hung limply at one side. One of the nurses peeled back the ambulance blanket and Amy’s coat. She held it out briskly to Amy. ‘Do you know this patient?’

Amy opened her mouth, but the miner forestalled her. ‘His name is Jacob Silverman. I am a relative. I will look after his things for him.’

Smoothly he removed a worn leather wallet and a little book from Jake’s pocket, and smiled at the nurse.

‘I’m afraid you can’t do that …’ she began, and then shrugged.

‘We’ll wait out here until the doctor has seen him,’ the miner said. The nurses wheeled Jake away, and Amy watched them until they disappeared around a maroon-tiled corner.

‘Shall we sit down?’

There was a double row of hard wooden chairs down the length of the hall, and they found two empty ones side by side.

A man passed them, supported by two others, his nose streaming blood.

‘Quite a fight,’ Amy’s companion said. He was flicking quickly through Jake’s little book, and then through the few papers and notes in the old wallet. He frowned at one piece of folded paper and slipped it into his own pocket, then closed the things up again.

‘Did you see what happened?’ he asked.

‘Two men were holding him. Another man hit him with something that looked like a metal bar. There was a policeman on a horse right beside them. Who’d want to do that to Jake?’

The man was looking at her. Amy saw him looking at her face and hair, and then at her hands. She was surprised to find that she was still clutching her handbag.

‘How well do you know Jake?’

‘I met him once at Appleyard Street.’

‘And what were you doing at Appleyard Street?’

Amy felt a prickle of resentment. Why, after what had just happened, was this man questioning her?

‘Just visiting,’ she said coolly.

‘I see. Just a tourist?’ His voice was equally cool.

‘I suppose so.’ His suspicion aroused her own and she looked squarely at him.

‘What did you take from Jake’s pocket?’

The miner grinned. ‘Can’t you work that out? If you know who Jake is, and what he does?’

They sat in silence after that. Amy watched the nurses coming and going, moving quickly but unhurriedly. It seemed a very long time.

At last a doctor came round the corner. A nurse beside him pointed to them.

‘Are you Mr Silverman’s friends?’

They nodded.

‘There’s nothing to worry about. He has some concussion, but there is no skull fracture and he should regain consciousness before too long. We will have to keep him here for a few days, of course. I understand you are a relative?’

‘That’s right.’

The doctor’s eyes flicked over the dark clothes and the lamp at the man’s belt, but he said nothing. ‘In that case, perhaps you would inform his next of kin. You may say that the sister in ward two may be telephoned for news of him in the morning.’

‘Thank you.’ The man held out Jake’s wallet and book. ‘I said that I would take care of these for him, but if he’s going to be conscious soon he might worry about where they have gone. Will you take them for him?’

The nurse held out her hand and Amy and the miner turned away. Still in silence they went out and stood in the hospital courtyard. The clouds of the afternoon had all drifted away and the sky was the colour of pearl, pink-tinged in the west.

‘What time is it?’ he asked.

Amy glanced at her watch. ‘Half past six.’

‘Everything will be all over, then,’ the man said. His voice sounded flat and, for the first time, uncertain. They began to walk together, still in silence, heading automatically for Trafalgar Square. When they reached it the crowds had evaporated. There were just the ordinary passers-by, a pair of patrolling policemen and a handful of men dismantling the makeshift platform.

‘Which way is Downing Street?’

Amy pointed. There was no sign of the long column of miners, or any of the crowds and placards that had filled the afternoon.

The man turned in a circle, looking all round him. ‘Well,’ he said, and Amy suddenly saw how tired he was. ‘That’s that, then. I wonder where they’ve gone?’

‘I read in one of the papers,’ Amy said carefully, ‘that the marchers were to be put up while they were in London in Bethnal Green Town Hall.’

‘Ah.’ The man’s smile was wry. ‘And which way is that?’

Amy pointed eastwards down the Strand. He hitched his jacket around him, still smiling. ‘I’d better start off that way, then.’

‘Wait.’ Amy was thinking quickly. I’m on your side, she wanted to say, remembering Hyde Park and the flapping of the boots as the men marched past her. I always will be, however uselessly. But there was something about this man that disconcerted her. There were two pound notes in her bag, but he wasn’t the kind of man to have money pressed into his hand.

What kind of man was he, then?

‘Why did you steal that paper from Jake’s wallet?’

The man was much taller than Amy. He looked down at her and she saw that he had unusual grey-green eyes, and that he was amused.

‘Steal it? To eat, perhaps? Or to start a fire to keep warm by? Listen, whoever you are. Written on that piece of paper were addresses that are important to us. Addresses of Communist Party organizers, sympathizers, the whole network. Better that the police shouldn’t see it if they come to see him and happen to search him.’

‘The police?’ Amy was going to protest They wouldn’t, and then she remembered the big horses with their shiny hooves.

The man gestured his impatience with her. ‘Of course. Jake Silverman is a dangerous Communist agitator.’ Amy bent her head to escape his grey, distant stare.

As she looked down at the paving stones she saw her own polished shoes with their elegant toes pointing at the miner’s worn, gaping boots.

Amy forgot his hostility. There was something she could do to help him, she thought. There was no need for him to trudge the last miles to Bethnal Green in those boots, and there was no need either to risk his scorn by trying to give him money. Bruton Street was a big house full of bedrooms that no one would occupy tonight. It was her home, and she could invite this man to stay the night there as her guest. As soon as the thought came to her she looked up and met his eyes again.

‘If you haven’t got anywhere to stay tonight,’ she said at last, ‘you could have a bed at my home.’

His eyebrows went up into black peaks.

‘Your home? And where’s that?’

His coldness angered her. She had made her impulsive offer in a spirit of straightforward friendliness, and she wanted him to accept it in the same way.

‘Does it matter where it is?’ she snapped.

The miner shrugged. ‘Not really. I’m sure it will be better than the Spike. Shall we go, then?’

There was a taxi passing them. Amy flung up her arm and it rumbled to the kerb. The cabbie scowled at the miner, but Amy wrenched open the door and scrambled inside and the man followed her.

‘Bruton Street,’ she called sharply through the partition, and the driver muttered something about it being fine for some people, as they trundled grudgingly away. The man leaned back and closed his eyes, and she saw the exhaustion in his face. Her anger evaporated, bafflingly.

‘My name’s Amy,’ she said.

‘Nick Penry,’ he answered without opening his eyes. After a moment he added, ‘Thank you. I don’t know where Bethnal Green is, but I don’t want to walk there tonight.’

‘You come from Nantlas, don’t you?’

She was aware of his quick sidelong glance at her now but she kept her face turned away, pretending to be watching the streets sliding past.

‘How do you know that?’

‘I saw you under the banner. At Hyde Park. I … know someone else from there.’

‘Do you, indeed? That surprises me a little.’ Nick Penry’s eyes were closed again and Amy continued to stare out of the window, her cheeks reddened. Neither of them spoke again until they rolled into Bruton Street.

Damn you, Amy thought.

She had been wondering what to do with the man once they were home. Where would she put him? What was he expecting? It was not a situation that Miss Abbott’s social deportment lessons had prepared her for.

Now she decided. This sharp, unsettling man would be treated just like any other guest in their house. Gerald was at Chance and Adeline was occupied with a new friend. That would make it easier, she thought, and at once felt that she was compromising her new allegiances by being grateful for that.

On the steps in front of the tall doors Amy ceremonially rang the bell instead of using her key. One of the footmen opened the door.

‘Good afternoon, Miss Amy.’

Inside, she said crisply, ‘This is Mr Penry. He will be staying the night. Perhaps it would be easiest if one of the maids made up Mr Richard’s room for him. And Mr Penry has been separated from his luggage. Would you see that some things are laid out for him? We’ll be ready for dinner at … oh, eight, I should think.’

‘Very good, Miss Amy.’

Nick Penry looked up from the marble floor to the high curve of the stairs and the crystal waterfall of the huge chandelier spilling light over them. There was an inlaid table encrusted with gilt with a silver tray on it and the afternoon’s post laid neatly out. Amy had automatically picked up her letters. It was very quiet; the muffled, dignified silence of money and privilege. Under the curve of the stairway with a scroll-backed sofa covered in pale green silk beneath it, there was a huge, dim oil painting of a big house. Row upon row of windows looked out expressionlessly over drowsy parkland.

Nick pointed to it. ‘That’s the country place, is it?’

‘Yes, as a matter of fact.’ He was grinning at her, and there was a taunt in it that made her angry again.

‘Jesus Christ. Who are you?’

‘Amy Lovell.’

‘Should I be any the wiser?’

‘If you aren’t,’ Amy said, surprised at the tartness in her voice, ‘I’ll elaborate. My father is Lord Lovell. The Lords Lovell have been the King’s Defenders since the fourteenth century.’

‘How nice. Does that make you Lady Lovell?’

‘Of course not. That’s my mother. My title, by courtesy only, is the Honourable Amalia Lovell. My friends call me Amy.’

‘I see,’ Nick Penry said, pointedly not calling her anything. They stood underneath the chandelier, staring at each other.

The footman came back again.

‘John will show you upstairs, Mr Penry. Dinner will be at eight, if that suits you.’

Still the taunting grin and the odd, clear stare. ‘Oh, delightful.’

‘This way, sir.’ The footman was carefully not looking at the visitor’s gaping boots and the lamp clipped to his belt like a proclamation.

Amy went upstairs to her room. She ripped open the sheaf of envelopes she had picked up downstairs and stared unseeingly at the invitations. Then she remembered that she was supposed to be dining at Ebury Street. She telephoned Isabel and told her that there was an unexpected guest at Bruton Street.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Isabel said. ‘There would only have been us, anyway.’

‘Bel, are you all right?’

Concern cut through Amy’s preoccupation. Isabel’s voice sounded as if she had been crying.

‘Of course. Call me tomorrow if you like. I’m not doing anything much.’

Amy hung up, frowning, and automatically set about changing for dinner.

In Richard’s bedroom Nick Penry prowled to and fro between the cupboards and the bookshelves. He picked one of the leather-bound stamp albums out of the row and looked through the carefully set-out lines of tiny, vivid paper squares. There were dozens of books neatly shelved, most of them on art and architecture, but there were volumes of poetry too. The copy of Paradise Lost looked identical to the one that Nick had lost with his pack. The old rucksack had been pulled off his shoulders as he fought to Jake Silverman’s side in Trafalgar Square.

The Welfare library would expect him to pay for a lost book, Nick remembered.

Nick had asked the superior footman if he could make a telephone call, and he had been shown into a vast room lined with books. There were little tables with the newspapers and boxes of crested paper laid out, and a wide, polished desk with a silver inkstand and a green-shaded lamp. He had sat at the desk in a green leather chair to telephone Appleyard Street.

He told the girl at the other end what had happened to Jake, and gave her the doctor’s message. The sob of relief in her voice as she thanked him suddenly made Nick think of Mari and Dickon, alone in the damp, cheerless little house in Nantlas. He was struck with a sudden, sharp physical longing to hold them both in his arms.

Nick resumed his pacing. There were silver-backed brushes on the tallboy, and in the heavy, mirrored wardrobe there were what seemed like dozens of suits and coats and polished shoes. If Mr Richard was the frowning boy beside Amy Lovell in the silver-framed photograph on the tallboy, he was hardly more than a child. How could a child need so many clothes; own so many possessions? With a sharp clatter, Nick replaced another photograph, this one of a beautiful woman lounging in a basket chair with a spaniel on her lap.

As he stood there, Nick felt the ugly swell of anger within himself. It was a familiar feeling. He had known it since early boyhood when he had caught it from his father. Nick thought of the anger as an infection because it made him helpless while it lasted, and it clouded his thinking. It made him vicious, as he had felt on the night of the explosion long ago at Nantlas No. 1 pit, and that was of no benefit to anyone. It was better by far to be clear-headed. That was a better weapon in the battle that he had inherited from his father and mother. They had died early, of deprivation and exhaustion, but Nick knew that he had enough strength himself to last a long time yet. Nick’s father had lived by the Fed, and his son had adopted his faith. As soon as he was old enough to think for himself, Nick had gone further still. He had become a Communist because the steely principles of Marxism seemed to offer an intellectual solution beyond the capitalist tangle that bled dry the pits and the men who worked them.

But yet sometimes Nick couldn’t suppress the anger. It came when he looked at Dickon, and when he watched Mari working in the comfortless back kitchen at home. And it came to smother him now in the rich, padded opulence of Amy Lovell’s home.

Nick slowly clenched and unclenched his fists, and then shook his head from side to side as if to clear it.

First thing tomorrow, he promised himself, he would be off.

The swell of anger began to subside again, as he had learned it always did. Deliberately he began to peel off his grimy clothes.

He was here, now. There was nothing he could do here, tonight, in this particular house. He didn’t know why the girl had brought him here, but something in her ardent, sensitive face worked on his anger too, diminishing it.

He would make use of the house, Nick thought, by taking whatever was offered to him. He found a plaid robe behind the door and wrapped himself in it. He stood his lamp on the tallboy next to the silver brushes and went across to the bathroom that the footman had pointed out to him.

A deep, hot bath had already been drawn. There were piles of thick, warm towels and new cakes of green marbled soap. The brass taps gleamed and the mirrors over the mahogany panels were misted with steam. As he sank into the water and gratefully felt the heat drawing the aches out of his body, Nick was thinking about Nantlas again. In Nantlas, baths were made of tin and they were hauled in from the wash house and set in front of the fire in the back kitchen. Then a few inches of hot water were poured in from jugs. He sat up abruptly, splashing the mirrors.

How much longer could they last, these gulfs? Between the people who had things and the people who didn’t?

Not for ever, Nick promised himself. Not for ever, by any means.

When he put the plaid robe on again and padded back to the bedroom he found that his clothes had been removed. In their place was a dinner suit with a boiled shirt and a stiff collar, a butterfly tie, even a pair of patent shoes that shone like mirrors. Black silk socks. Underwear with the creases still sharp which looked as if it had just been unfolded from tissue.

‘For God’s sake,’ Nick Penry murmured.

It was exactly five minutes to eight. Someone tapped discreetly at the door. He flung it open to confront Amy.

‘Um. I thought you might be ready,’ she said. Her cheeks went faintly pink. ‘I’ll come back later.’

Nick jabbed his finger at the clothes on the bed. ‘I won’t wear this get-up. Where have my clothes gone?’

‘I expect they’ve taken them away to dry them properly for you. What’s wrong with the ones they’ve given you?’

‘Everything. D’you really think I’d put all that lot on?’

Amy’s face went a deeper pink. She pushed past him into the room. ‘I don’t give a damn what you wear. Come down to dinner in my little brother’s dressing-gown, if that’s what you feel like.’

Nick suddenly wanted to laugh. Instead he leant against the door frame and folded his arms. ‘A shirt and jersey and an ordinary pair of trousers will do nicely, thank you.’ He watched her flinging open drawers and rummaging through cupboards, suddenly noticing how pretty she was without the disfiguring beret that she had worn all afternoon. She had thick, shiny hair that was an unusual dark red, and warm, clear skin that coloured easily. Her eyes were the bluey-green colour that often went with red hair. She was wearing a creamy-coloured dress of some soft material that was slightly too fussy for her, Nick thought, but she had exceptionally pretty calves and ankles that her high-heeled, pointy-toed shoes with ankle-straps displayed to perfection.

‘Very nice,’ Nick said smoothly. She was holding out a navy-blue jersey that Richard had put away because it was too big for him. There was a plain white shirt too.

‘Leave the shirt unbuttoned if it’s much too tight,’ she said sharply. ‘I shall have to go and look for some trousers belonging to my father. Richard’s will be far too small.’

‘You’re very kind,’ Nick called after her, laughing when she could no longer see him.

A moment or two later she came back with an unexceptional pair of grey flannel trousers. Nick took them.

‘His lordship’s very own?’ he asked, grinning, and Amy snatched her hand away in case their fingers touched. Why did he find her so amusing? It annoyed her. ‘Give me two minutes to change. Unless you’d rather stay?’

‘No, thank you.’

Amy shut the door behind her a little too firmly, and stood in the corridor wondering how Nick Penry had driven her so quickly into prissy defensiveness. He came out very quickly, a tall man with his black hair smoothed down and Richard’s blue jersey tight across his shoulders. Amy had taken the time to collect herself. She was on her own ground, after all. She wouldn’t let this man make her feel like a curiosity in her own home. ‘Let’s go down to dinner,’ she said evenly. ‘You must be hungry.’

‘A little,’ he agreed. ‘It’s so hard to get a decent luncheon on the road. Today’s was bread and margarine.’

Amy stared straight ahead of her. ‘I think you’ll find that dinner will be an improvement on that.’

They went down the stairs in silence. Nick looked up at the portraits as they passed them.

The footman was waiting at the dining-room doors. He held them open as Nick and Amy passed through, and Mr Glass stood waiting behind Amy’s chair. The velvet curtains had been drawn against the cold spring evening, and in the warm glow of shaded lamps Nick saw the elaborate plaster cornice picked out in cream and gold, the cream and gold upholstered chair seats, the smooth curves of the marble fireplace and the delicate colours of Adeline’s collection of early English porcelain shelved on either side of it. A pair of branched silver-gilt candelabra stood on the table, with tall new candles all alight, and an array of silver cutlery, crystal glasses and starched napery.

Nick and Amy sat down, facing each other across the polished gulf of the table. From a white china tureen with curved handles and tiny garlands of gold-painted flowers soup was ladled into bowls so thin that they were almost transparent. On the bowls, and the handles of the cutlery, and worked into the heavy linen napkins, was the same crest, a crowned lion in a wreath of laurel leaves. The footman offered bread wrapped in a napkin folded into intricate peaks, and the butler poured pale gold wine into the glasses. Reflections wavered back at once from the polished wood.

They sat waiting. The servants moved discreetly, making sure that everything was in place. Then the doors closed silently behind them.

Nick looked at Amy. He had been about to say something sharp, mocking, but then he saw how young she was, not more than twenty, and how anxious. It occurred to him that it had been brave of her to bring him here, and sit him down in the face of all this silk and gold. He swallowed the abrasive words and said, ‘May I eat this now?’

The anxiety vanished and at once her face was alive with sympathy and humour. ‘Of course.’

The soup was thin and clear, yet mysteriously rich with game and brandy. Nick’s disappeared in two spoonfuls, and the crusty bread with curls of yellow butter along with it.

Amy was smiling with pleasure. ‘Would you like some more?’

‘I think I could manage some.’

She reached for the bell-pull, a thick cream silk tassel, and then changed her mind. Instead she ladled the soup herself into Nick’s bowl. When all the soup and all the bread was gone, Amy touched the bell-rope. Nick raised his glass of wine to her.

‘What shall we drink to? To the revolution?’

Amy glanced up at the gold-traced ceiling and the heavy curtains with their tassels and drapes. ‘Not the revolution. Not here and now. I don’t think it would be … fitting.’ She was smiling, but Nick saw that she meant what she said and he felt the first flicker of liking for her. Amy Lovell’s loyalty would be worth winning. ‘I think we should drink to Jake. To his recovery, and his success.’

‘That’s more or less the same as drinking to the revolution. But here’s to him.’

They drank, looking at each other.

The butler came and took their plates away, and the footman’s eyebrows went up a hairsbreadth at the sight of the empty soup tureen. After the soup came fish, as light as foam with a shrimp-pink sauce.

When they were alone again, Amy asked tentatively, as if she was expecting a rebuff, ‘What was it like, marching to London?’

Instead of dismissing the question with a shrug, as he might easily have done, Nick said, ‘It was a long way. But not as hard as I’d expected. Most days we ate better than we would have done at home, and there are worse things than just being wet and cold and tired. And then there were times when it was all worthwhile. More than worthwhile. Like when the local trades council people came out to meet us even when their executives had directed them not to. We didn’t have official backing for the march, you see. It was all supposed to be a Communist manoeuvre. Yet the people came anyway. And other times, like when we made the Spike managers give us special status.’ Seeing Amy’s puzzled face, Nick put down his silver fork and grinned in the candlelight. He was struck by the incongruity of talking about these things to this girl in her pearls and her elaborate dress. ‘The Spike. The workhouse, you see. When there was nowhere else for us to sleep we’d go there. They’d try to put us up in the Casual. The Casual ward, for vagrants. One blanket, usually lousy. Two slices of bread and one mug of tea for breakfast. And in return you surrender everything at the door. No money, tobacco, matches, anything, allowed in the Casual.’ Nick laughed at Amy’s expression. ‘You didn’t know? Why should you? It’s a fine, proud system. If a man hasn’t got anything else, why should he need dignity? But we wouldn’t accept Casual status and we took over the wards anyway. And we had fried bacon for breakfast. Then when we marched up Park Lane and saw the crowds and heard the cheering, I’d have done it all over again for that.’

‘I saw you, under the banner. Looking out over the crowds as if you were saying I’m right.’ Amy stopped, feeling her cheeks redden with the sense of having said too much.

But Nick only said softly, ‘Oh, we’re right. I’m certain of that.’

The plates were replaced again. Now there was breast of duck, thinly sliced in a mysterious peppery sauce, and early vegetables from the walled gardens and greenhouses at Chance. In fresh glasses the wine was garnet red and when Nick drank some it reminded him of the scent of violets.

Amy saw with relief that the tense, aggressive set of his shoulders had relaxed a little, and that some of the exhausted lines were smoothed out of his face.

‘You said in the taxi that you knew someone from Nantlas.’

‘Bethan Jones. She’s been my friend since I was a baby, almost.’

‘Your friend?’

‘Why not? She’s looked after my sister and me as if we were her own children. Is there any reason why I shouldn’t think of her as a friend?’

‘No reason at all.’

In the silence that followed, as Nick watched her over the rim of his glass, Amy wondered what they were both defending so fervently against each other. And if they were in opposition, so naturally and immediately, why were they sitting here facing each other between the brilliant points of the candles?

‘Do you know her?’ she asked lamely at last. ‘Her mother is the local midwife.’

‘Yes, I remember Bethan Jones. And I know Myfanwy well.’ Nick thought of Dickon, and the night he was born, and the way he said ‘Da? Dada?’ over and over again, insistent and uncomprehending, in the cold little house.

Nick’s face darkened as he saw himself sitting in this opulent room, enjoying the scent of violets opening up as the wineglass warmed in his fingers. Da? Dada?

Seeing his face, Amy could think of nothing to say. The silence spread and seeped coldly between them, and the chance of breaking it receded.

Glass and the footman came in again with pudding in a cut-glass bowl, fruit and cheese and port in a decanter for Miss Amy’s strange guest if he should want it. They felt the silence and glanced at each other as they moved between the table and the long sideboard.

‘Will there be anything else, Miss Amy?’

‘I don’t think so, Glass, thank you. I’ll ring for coffee if we need it later.’

It was a mistake.

It had been a mistake to bring the man home and imagine that she could do anything to help. It was an interference, no more than that. This painful silence was proof of it. Amy stared dully at the fruit knife placed beside her plate and unexpectedly the tears pricked in her eyes like a reminder of her weakness. She felt her powerlessness, and her isolation, and the little certainty that she had possessed this afternoon ebbed away. She didn’t understand what she wanted to do, nor did she understand why this dark, frightening man was suddenly a symbol of it. She only knew that she had wanted to reach out, and that the simple gesture was suddenly threateningly complex and utterly beyond her.

‘I’m sorry.’

The words startled her so much that she jumped. There were tears on her eyelashes and the realization made her redden with humiliation.

‘I’m sorry,’ he repeated. He stood up and walked all the way round the great table to Amy’s chair, and then he put his hand on her shoulder. She felt his fingers resting in the hollow of her collarbone. ‘I’m not schooled, like your friends probably are, in masking feelings with manners. Talking about Myfanwy Jones made me think of my son. She delivered him, one night when the doctor wouldn’t come out to my wife because we couldn’t pay him. Myfanwy saved his life, and probably my wife’s too. She did all she could. But the baby was damaged. He’ll never be able to do anything much. Nothing, without Mari and me to help him. Thinking about him in the middle of all this …’ the sudden sweep of Nick’s other hand took in the table, the glinting silver and the polished hothouse fruit, the white and gold china and the port waiting in the decanter on the sideboard. ‘It made me angry, for a moment. I’m sorry if I upset you. You’ve been kind, and you were brave in that crowd this afternoon and when you didn’t know what to do to help Jake. I would have expected a woman of your class to run away, if she had been there in the first place.’

Amy shook her head to clear the tears. She didn’t know why, but it was important that Nick Penry shouldn’t see that she was crying.

No wonder his face had frozen her. No wonder she had been unable to think of a light, casual word to break the ice of silence.

The tip of his finger touched her shoulder and then he was strolling away again, back to his place at the table.

‘Shall we talk about something else?’ Nick asked. ‘You could tell me why you were in Trafalgar Square this afternoon.’

Amy looked up. What else was there to say? That she was sorry about his son? That she couldn’t help it if she was rich and Nick Penry was poor? That she had wanted to help, and had just seen, humiliatingly, that she couldn’t?

She shook her head slowly. ‘I was at Appleyard Street when they were planning the march. By accident, really. A friend of mine took me because he thought it might amuse me, more or less. But I was interested. I liked the people there because they seemed to believe so strongly in what they were doing. And they were much livelier than a lot of the people I know. What I heard there made me start thinking a little about differences. And asking myself whether it was fair, I suppose. It’s partly to do with feeling rather … pointless myself lately.’ Amy felt that her face was red again. She was making herself sound like a pampered society girl in search of fresh diversions. She didn’t think that was the real truth, but what else would Nick Penry think? ‘I can’t dress it up in the right comradely words, like Jake Silverman would. I just felt that there was more I should know. That I should try to find out for myself, because nobody else was going to show me. I went this afternoon just to see. For a moment while I was there I was sure I knew. I knew what was right, and what I must do, and whose side I was on. It seemed perfectly simple.’ Determined to be as truthful as she could, Amy added defiantly, ‘It was the boots. The sound they made as you marched. You can laugh if you like.’

Across the table Nick was watching her intently without even a flicker of a smile. ‘Go on, Amy.’

My friends call me Amy, she remembered telling him.

‘Not ringing out like you’d expect, like soldiers’ boots, but flapping and shuffling. I thought, if men can walk so far in those boots to ask for help then they must need it badly.’

Nick said crisply, ‘The boots aren’t important. Nor were we marching to beg for help. What we want, you know, is what is ours by rights. To work under fair conditions for fair wages. Oh, I know that Jake Silverman and his friends put a different colouring on it for political purposes. But that was what the march was really for. Not begging, but demanding. But for Jake, I would have been in the deputation of men meeting the government committee on the mines this afternoon. Who knows, they might have achieved something by now.’

Amy nodded, realizing again how little she knew and how little she understood. ‘I thought I could help in some way. I felt full of glory, marching along Oxford Street. I suppose this evening has demonstrated that I can’t. We seem to be in opposition, don’t we?’

Nick did smile now. ‘You helped. You got to Jake Silverman before I did. And you’ve given me the best meal I’ve ever eaten, sorry though I am that the rest of them at Bethnal Green haven’t shared it. Can I finish it now on temporarily neutral ground?’

Amy was touched and pleased that he should let the Lovells’ formal dining room be neutral ground.

‘Please do. Will you have lemon pudding or cheese?’

‘Both.’

They smiled at each other. Amy was discovering that under the complicated layers that she had glimpsed this evening, she liked Nick Penry.

‘Tell me about something else while I eat this. You said you had a sister. And the room I’m sleeping in belongs to your brother?’

Hesitantly at first, and then more fluently as he prompted her with questions, Amy began to talk about her family. She told Nick about Isabel’s marriage, and how lost she felt without her.

‘Jaspert the Tory MP?’ Nick asked, and she nodded. She told Nick about the way Richard and their father stalked painfully around each other, and about Airlie’s death in the War. She talked about Richard’s friendship with Tony Hardy, and her own growing one. Nick smiled sardonically. He leaned back in his fragile chair and hooked one arm over the back, biting into a russet apple from Chance while Amy described her mother’s confusing appearances and disappearances, and how important Bethan’s constancy had been to them as children. She was surprised by how easy it was to talk to Nick.

She told him about the lunches, and the parties and dances that filled her time, and her descriptions of the people she met made him laugh. When he laughed naturally, and the coldness of his stare disappeared, Amy thought how different he looked.

Then, when they had drunk the last of the wine between them and her guest seemed to have finished eating at last, Amy said, ‘Well. That’s all I’ve done, up until now. It isn’t very much is it? But today did help me to decide something.’ As she spoke she felt a bubble of optimism rising inside her. She would tell Nick Penry about the germ of an idea that had been growing since this afternoon, and telling him would help to fix her intentions.

‘I’ve never felt so useless, or so helpless, as I did this afternoon. Just sitting on that pavement outside St Martin’s with Jake, and not knowing what to do. He might have died there beside me, and all I could think of was wrapping him in my coat. I don’t want to feel like that ever again.’ Amy took a deep breath and then said, ‘I’m going to train to be a nurse.’

As soon as the words were out, she was quite certain that she had found the answer she was looking for.

Nick said calmly, ‘And do you think you’ll make a good nurse?’

Amy was laughing in the candlelight. ‘I’ll be a better nurse than a debutante. Do you think it’s a good idea?’

Suddenly, it seemed very important that he should think it was.

‘I think it’s a fine idea.’

‘Good. Then I’ll do it.’

After that Amy had rung for coffee and they had taken the port decanter up to Adeline’s white drawing room. In the doorway, seeing Nick’s raised eyebrows, Amy had said hastily, ‘No, not in here. Come up to the old schoolroom.’

Nick carried up the tray and Amy brought in an electric fire and stood it in the hearth where she and Isabel had so often sat over the fire on wet London afternoons. A big, sagging sofa with a chintz cover was drawn up in front of it, and behind that was the double desk where they had sat to do their French translations before going to Miss Abbott’s.

‘Didn’t you go to school?’ Nick asked from the depths of the sofa. Amy spun the old wooden globe on its stand.

‘Not until I was fourteen. We had governesses until then. And the school we went to in the end concentrated on teaching us Court curtseys and where to place duchesses at dinner. I’ve always felt rather uneducated, and jealous of Richard at Eton.’

Leaving the globe still spinning, she crossed to the tray and filled the two port glasses. She had drunk more wine than usual this evening, but it had made her feel warm and comfortable, rather than dizzy and remote as it often did. She gave Nick his glass and curled up in the sofa corner opposite him, kicking off her shoes as she settled back. The schoolroom felt safe, and homely.

‘It’s your turn now,’ she said. ‘Tell me about Nantlas.’

Nick was looking at her. She saw the colour of his eyes again and thought that sometimes they looked almost transparent. He lifted his hand as if he was going to reach out and touch her, then let it fall again.

‘Do you know,’ he said quietly, ‘that you have very pretty feet? No, don’t hide them under your dress. I wasn’t going to touch them.’

You can, if you want to, Amy said silently. The lurching awkwardness of the evening, the painful gaps that it had revealed between them and the flimsy structures that they had bridged them with were forgotten for the moment. To Amy, in that instant in the schoolroom, they were equal, and close enough to each other to reach out and touch.

Then Nick was talking again, faster than usual. ‘Nantlas. It was a fine place until ten years ago. It worked, as a community. There was a school, and the master was good enough to make us want to go on learning after we all left for the pit at fourteen. There was a choir, and a pit band, and sports on Saturday afternoons. There were two chapels and enough money to support a minister for both of them. They’re gone, now.’

‘I know.’ Amy was looking away at the hard red bars of the fire. ‘Bethan told me. Her sister had to go to Ferndale to get married in the registry office.’

‘I was at the wedding party,’ Nick said. ‘There was food, and singing and dancing. Almost like the old days.’

Amy sat beside him in her corner of the sofa, following the outlines of the flowers in the chintz with her fingertip and listening, only half-comprehending. The moment of closeness had crept up on her and then receded, so quickly that it was hard to believe it had happened. Nick was talking almost to himself, about the pits that closed one after another, about the system that forced out-of-work miners to walk from pithead to pithead, often covering scores of miles in a week, to get the pit managers’ signatures on a piece of paper. The signatures were proof that they had genuinely been seeking work, so that they could claim the dole money. He talked about the soft company unions that threatened the strength of the miners’ lodges, the only hope that remained of defending their livelihoods.

‘That’s why we march,’ Nick said bitterly. ‘That’s why I believe we can do something if we fight them instead of taking what the companies and the government hand out. It’s less every time; less even than it was in 1918.’

Nick had been talking for a long time. Abruptly he sat upright, frowning. ‘I’m sure all that has bored you to death.’

‘It wasn’t boring,’ Amy said gently. ‘Tell me something. You say that you have to prove that you’ve been looking for work, and that if you can’t you lose your benefit. Won’t you lose yours now?’

‘It’s possible.’

‘What will you do?’

Nick’s frown was black, but he shrugged the question away. ‘I don’t know. Try to find some work. It hasn’t happened yet.’

Amy looked at the fire and then at the familiar chintz flowers, the faded blues and pinks reminding her of summer gardens and the long borders at Chance.

‘If …’ she began slowly, ‘if you needed work badly, there would be something at Chance. I could ask my father, and the estate manager. It’s a big estate. I don’t know exactly what the men do there, but …’

As she saw Nick’s face her voice died in her throat. His eyes had gone completely cold.

‘You’re very gracious,’ he said.

Amy could have bitten out her tongue. Without warning the gulf had opened up again, deeper than ever.

‘Thank you, but no. I’m a miner. I don’t want to join the creeping army of Lovell retainers. And even if I’m out of work I’ve got other things to do in South Wales. As well as a wife and child.’

‘I was thinking of them …’

‘Let me do that. I’m grateful for the dinner and the bed. Even for the kind offer of someone’s penguin suit to dress up in like a gentleman. But it doesn’t give you the right to patronize me. I don’t want charity from you, or people like you.’

His words stung Amy. Half-sensing the painful, damaged pride and the humiliations that lay behind them, she hesitated. Her rational self told her that she should keep quiet, but anger at his harshness overtook her.

‘You’re a fool, then,’ she said hotly. ‘It was an honest offer to help. Why should I want to patronize you? Why should you think I’d care enough?’

Nick looked at her, and she felt the full insulting weight of his appraisal. And then he laughed at her.

‘As you correctly remarked earlier, you can’t help. People like you can’t do anything for us. You are the enemy. Go and learn how to wind bandages to fill up your time between parties, if it makes you feel better. But don’t imagine that by trotting along to Appleyard Street or marching under a banner with the working classes you’re going to change anything. Least of all your spoilt self.’

He stood up, and then yawned ostentatiously. ‘I will make use of your brother’s comfortable bed, since you offered it. Goodbye, Miss Lovell.’

Amy was shaking with shock and anger. She stood up to face Nick, clenching her fists at her side. ‘Have you finished now?’

Nick had half-turned away, but he swung back and stood as if considering something. ‘Not quite,’ he said.

His fingers closed around her wrist. Slowly he lifted it so that their forearms touched. And then he bent and kissed her. Amy felt the hardness of his mouth against hers and the brush of his tongue. The breath caught sharply in her chest. Savagely she jerked her arm up, bringing Nick’s with it, and she bit into his imprisoning hand with all her strength.

‘Bitch.’ She heard the word under his breath. Nick let go of her at once. He stepped back, rubbing the round red mark among the blue scars.

‘Don’t ever touch me,’ Amy said. Anger was almost choking her, but it was anger with herself as much as Nick. The violence of her own reaction baffled her. It had only been a kiss, and an hour ago she had felt close enough to Nick to want him to touch her.

Nick was looking at her glittering eyes and flushed cheeks with amusement tinged with admiration.

‘So they taught you biting at school as well as curtseying. Hasn’t anyone ever kissed you before?’

‘Of course they have.’

But not like that, Amy thought, remembering the hot, half-drunk boys in taxis. And Tony’s distant gentleness. ‘I’m sorry I bit you.’

‘Oh, not at all.’

This is ridiculous. Amy stood up straight, trying to muster the remains of her dignity. She felt a sudden fatal desire to laugh. ‘I don’t think there’s much point in prolonging this evening.’

‘There doesn’t appear to be,’ Nick said equably.

‘Can you find your way to your room, or shall I ring for somebody?’

‘Oh, I think I can manage.’

He was perfectly cool now, the amenable guest determined not to let his hostess’s outburst mar the end of the evening. The irrational laughter died in Amy as she recognized something. Nick Penry was clever, and formidably quick. With all her advantages, she was nowhere near a match for him. How many masks have you put on tonight? Amy wondered. Which is your real face?

In his turn he was looking through her, as if her own amateurish disguises were transparent.

‘Good night, then,’ she said abruptly and turned to the door.

Nick watched her go, his hand with the red weal resting on the old chintz sofa back.

In her room Amy found that she was shaking. She dropped her pearl necklace on the dressing-table top with a clatter, stripped off her dress and underclothes and left them where they fell, and slid under the bedclothes to curl up in the safe darkness like a child.

But even there she felt that the man was still staring through her.

‘Go away,’ she said aloud to the muffled stillness. ‘Leave me alone.’

*

In the morning Amy changed her clothes twice before finding an outfit that pleased her, and then she frowned at herself in the mirror at the thought that she might be dressing to please anyone except herself. She pinned her hair up carefully and made up her face before marching briskly down to Richard’s room. She had rehearsed what she was going to say this morning. She would apologize, lightly and humorously, for her double gaucheness of last night, and Nick would apologize in his turn. Then they would go down to the dining room and she would make sure that Nick had an enormous breakfast before he set out for Bethnal Green. She hadn’t yet worked out how she could tactfully pay for him to get there, but she would think of something when the time came.

There was no answer to her knock on Richard’s door. The bathroom door opposite it stood wide open.

‘Mr Penry? Nick?’ There was still no answer. Amy pushed open the bedroom door and looked inside. The bed was as smooth as if it had never been slept in, but on the chair beside it, neatly folded, was the navy sweater, the white shirt and the grey flannel trousers.

‘Nick?’

Amy looked again, but she knew that he was gone.

Without faltering, and with her chin firmly up, Amy went down to breakfast on her own.

There was a single place laid at the table. If Adeline was at home she would be having breakfast on a tray in her room. Adeline never appeared before midday.

Mr Glass was standing at the sideboard in front of the silver-domed hot dishes.

‘Good morning, Miss Amy.’

‘Good morning. My guest, Mr Penry, did he have breakfast?’

‘Mr … ah, Penry left the house two hours ago. He said that he wouldn’t be requiring breakfast. He left this for you, Miss Amy.’

It was an envelope with the Lovell crest, with a single sheet of crested writing paper inside it. Amy looked at the few words. Nick’s handwriting was firm, black and confident. Educated writing, she thought, and knew that she should have expected it.

Thank you for everything last night. Even for the job offer. I’m not a fool, you know. Neither are you. Learn to be a nurse, but try to be a real one like Myfanwy Jones and not a society girl filling in time. Then when the day comes you may really be able to help. Good luck. Nick Penry.

PS. Do some more kissing. You might get to like it. The bite is healing quite nicely.

With a smile lifting the corners of her mouth, Amy refolded the paper along its crease and put the envelope safely in her pocket.

Mr Glass lifted the silver cover off one of the dishes.

‘Eggs and bacon, Miss Amy?’

She sat down in her place, with her own pink and white china breakfast cup laid in front of her, just as always, and her napkin in one of her silver christening rings. Just as always.

Well then, Nick Penry had disappeared as quickly as he had materialized. But Amy felt that he had lifted the pall of the last weeks for her.

She knew what she was going to do.