Читать книгу Rosie Thomas 4-Book Collection: The White Dove, The Potter’s House, Celebration, White - Rosie Thomas - Страница 18

In the warm, pin-neat Ebury Street basement kitchen, Bethan looked at the tray and sighed.

There was clear soup in a gold-rimmed bowl and bread cut transparently thin. A little dish of green-gold grapes was set beside a wedge of creamy cheese. As she watched, Cook smoothed the starched cloth and carefully positioned a long-stemmed wineglass, then brought a decanter and filled the glass with red wine.

‘That will put some heart into her,’ Cook said with conviction. ‘When I was with Lady Kiftsgate and she was in the same condition, I always made sure she drank wine.’

Bethan had heard enough about Lady Kiftsgate, and she was afraid that all the wine in France wouldn’t change Isabel’s heart now. But she said, ‘Thank you, Cook. I’ll take it up now, and we’ll just hope she eats some of it.’

At Isabel’s bedroom door Bethan knocked, and when there was no response she knocked louder and pushed the door open. Isabel was lying on the day bed in the window, exactly as Bethan had left her an hour before. Her eyes were closed and her hands were hanging awkwardly at her sides as if she didn’t want to clasp them over her mounded stomach.

Bethan put the tray down on the table beside the day bed. ‘Mrs Jaspert? Isabel, love, are you asleep?’

Isabel’s eyes opened and stared, wildly, before they focused at last.

‘Not sleeping. Trying … trying to think.’

‘What have you got to be thinking about?’ Bethan tried to soothe her. ‘All you’ve got to do is rest, and not let yourself get worked up again. Here, now. Cook’s made some special soup for you. Try and eat it for me, will you?’

She put her arm behind Isabel’s shoulders and eased her upright.

‘Please eat some,’ Bethan whispered, trying to reach out to the Isabel she had always known, to the gentle child within the correct little girl, and the vulnerable adolescent who had sheltered in the self-possessed young woman. But all the familiar faces of Isabel had vanished in the last weeks, shrivelling away into this wild-faced stranger who seemed to have lost all touch with her own world. Bethan felt that there was a household conspiracy – Peter Jaspert, Lord and Lady Jaspert, the staff of Ebury Street, all of them seemed wilfully set on ignoring Isabel’s distress. Yet she ate almost nothing now, and sat all day in her room staring as if she was looking in fear into her own head. And yesterday, Bethan had found her crying. The tears came silently, unstoppably, and they had gone on for hours. Bethan had been on the point of telephoning Mr Hardwicke when Isabel fell into an exhausted sleep.

With an effort now, Isabel leaned forward and tasted the spoonful of soup that Bethan held out for her. It felt thick on her lips, like blood. She shivered and swallowed against the nausea. The thin triangle of bread was as dry as ash and her throat closed up against it.

Instead she made herself concentrate on Bethan’s arms around her and the soft, Welsh voice begging her just to talk a little.

Hopelessly Isabel shook her head. The warmth of Bethan’s shoulder, her innocent scent of soap and toilet water, brought back the very first time that Bethan had comforted her. A long, long way off, like a tableau spotlit at the end of a dark tunnel, Isabel saw the nursery at Chance and the bars of sunlight sloping over Airlie’s rugs. A weight was crushing her, squeezing the breath and life out of her.

‘I’m afraid,’ she said. ‘I’m so afraid.’

‘Oh, there.’ Bethan’s arms tightened. ‘There’s no need to be afraid. The doctors all say so. They won’t let you have a bad time. It isn’t like that nowadays, all the wonderful things they can do.’

But Isabel only shook her head again.

How could she explain to anyone that it wasn’t the birth that was frightening her? She wasn’t frightened for herself, for the physical pain or the risks that women whispered about and Mr Hardwicke soothingly never mentioned. She wasn’t afraid for the baby, either. The weight of it sat broodingly within her, sometimes like a cold, heavy stone that had nothing to do with her own flesh and blood. At other times it was turbulent, writhing inside her as though it had taken over her system and reduced her to a dry husk.

Just by looking at herself in the mirror, Isabel could see that was what really was happening. With her arms as thin as sticks and the bones knobbed at the base of her neck, and the huge, swollen pod in front of her, she knew that she was grotesque. The baby possessed her, branding her and reminding her of how it had come there.

She wasn’t afraid for herself, nor for the baby because it was a hundred times stronger, and a Jaspert.

It was everything else that frightened her. The bright, busy jigsaw of the world had shaken and the neat, familiar components of it had clicked out of place one by one and spiralled away. Isabel frowned, trying to recall what the pieces of it had been. She only dreamed about them nowadays, long vivid dreams of parties where she laughed as she danced and the men’s whitegloved hands correctly holding her never wandered or turned hot, pink and fleshy. She dreamed of walking with Amy at Chance, hiding in the hollow heart of the great box hedge in the formal gardens, and then of riding her mare at a canter up and over the long ridge that sheltered the estate.

The dreams were more vivid than life, now. Life had become fear, and watching, and waiting.

Am I ill? Isabel wondered.

There were nightmares, too. Peter came to her in them, and she felt the hot, stifling weight of the bedclothes, and the guilt of terrible secrets. There were other men in the nightmares, too. There was Mr Glass. Even, once, her own father. I must be ill.

‘Isabel, dear, couldn’t you talk to me? Or Amy? I’ll tell you what, I’ll ring Amy at her hospital and ask her to come to see you.’

‘No,’ Isabel said sharply. ‘Don’t do that.’ Amy shouldn’t be here in this place. Amy shouldn’t be contaminated by it. She was trapped herself, but it must never happen to Amy.

‘Or Lady Lovell, then.’

‘She’s abroad.’ The baby wasn’t due for another three weeks. Lady Lovell would fly back from Morocco in good time for the birth, of course. Isabel was wondering vaguely at the note of triumph in her voice. Did she want to be so isolated, then? How much of all this weight of despair was her own doing?

‘Where’s my husband?’ she asked, feeling briefly pleased with the normality of the question until she saw Bethan looking at her.

‘It’s Election Day. The twenty-seventh of October. Don’t you remember? Mr Jaspert’ll be in his constituency.’

‘Of course he will.’

She had forgotten. Peter’s was a solidly safe Conservative seat, but he had campaigned vigorously in the three weeks since the last Parliament had been dissolved. Isabel had been excused by her condition from sitting beside him on platforms, applauding his speeches and smiling, smiling. But she would be expected to do it next time. Peter had married a politician’s perfect wife, and he would see to it that she functioned as one. At the thought of it, at the very idea of after the birth and the demands that would be placed on her again, Isabel’s skin crawled. She turned and smiled a bright, tight, skeletal smile at Bethan’s worried face. ‘Leave the tray, Bethan. I feel quite hungry now. I won’t need anything else tonight, thank you.’ She felt suddenly cunning. Of course she could hide the disgusting food somewhere, and pretend that she had eaten it.

Reluctantly Bethan stood up. ‘Well, if you’re quite sure … you will ring for me, if you need me, won’t you?’

At last, Isabel thought, she was alone again. She was levering herself upright, intending to slop the soup and wine into her hand basin, when something that had been obscenely stretched inside her burst wide open. Water seeped and then splashed. Her dress was soaked, and the pale green watered-silk of the day bed showed a dark, spreading stain.

‘No,’ Isabel whispered. But even as she said it she felt the first low pull of pain, as definite and undeniable as gravity itself.

Peter Jaspert was comfortably pleased with the day. It had been a long, arduous one during which he had been driven from one makeshift street-corner hustings to the next to rally the last of the undecided into voting. It had hardly been a fight even from the beginning. There was no Liberal candidate, and the Labour man, a muddled MacDonaldite, had never stood the ghost of a chance in a squarely middle-class constituency. But Peter had spared no effort in making his victory as emphatic as it could possibly be. All day he had been shaking hands, and smiling confidently, and exhorting voters to choose the man who was so incontrovertibly right for the job.

When the polls closed he had had an excellent dinner with his constituency agent and the committee at a rather good local hotel, and then they had driven to the Town Hall where the count was taking place to await the result.

They had had to wait until one a.m., but the result when it came was well worth it. Peter had increased his majority by six thousand votes.

In a mood of mellow elation he decided that he would drive back to town at once instead of putting up for the night at the hotel. That way, he could be certain of seeing Archer Cole first thing tomorrow morning.

As Peter came up the stairs at Ebury Street he saw that Isabel’s light was still burning. The habits of the last months dictated that he should ignore it and go on to his own room. But tonight he felt so pleased and happy that he decided that he would go in and share the good news with Isabel at once. The door swung open and he marched inside.

His wife was lying on her day bed in the window, and her face was as white as the pillow.

Peter saw that she had bitten her lips so hard that there were bloody punctures in them. He saw the tray beside her, where spilled wine mingled disgustingly with bread and congealed soup, and then the other spilt wetness on the silk underneath her.

‘What’s happening? Why haven’t you called anyone?’ His voice was harsh with fear and accusation. He knelt beside the day bed and touched the stain, and then looked at his fingertips. Not blood, then. Some water was normal, wasn’t it? ‘Why haven’t you?’ Isabel’s head rolled just a little to one side, and Peter noticed how brittle and thin her white neck looked. His fingers stretched and clenched, and then he stumbled to her bell and rang and rang. Bethan came flying, with her hair wound up in curl papers.

‘I’ve just come in,’ Peter blustered. ‘And look at her.’

Bethan was kneeling beside her now, one hand feeling for Isabel’s pulse and the other resting over the bulge of the baby.

‘Ring for Mr Hardwicke,’ she said. ‘And the other man, the obstetrician. Sir.’

She pushed aside the mess of the tray, and folded her hand over Isabel’s damp forehead. ‘Why didn’t you call anyone, love?’

‘It isn’t time for it to come yet,’ Isabel said clearly. ‘I don’t want it to come yet.’

The doctors arrived with surprising speed. They brought leather bags, nurses in white aprons, and an atmosphere of steady reassurance.

Mr Hardwicke ushered Peter and Bethan out of the room. ‘Nothing to worry about. Not a bit. She’s just got a bit of a head start on us, that’s all. If I were you, Mr Jaspert, I’d go downstairs and have myself a large whisky.’

Peter went, and Bethan slipped down to the telephone in the butler’s room. She fumbled inexpertly through the directory pages until she found ‘Royal Lambeth Hospital. Nurses’ Hostel’. Then she dialled the number and waited. The ringing went on for what seemed an eternity, and then someone answered. ‘Lambeth. Nurses’ Hostel porter.’ The voice was thickened with sleep, but there was no mistaking the fury in it.

‘I want to speak to student nurse Lovell. Please.’

There was a brief, incredulous silence. Then the voice said acidly, ‘This is not a message service for nurses. It is an emergency number, for use in the case of fire, or war. I suggest you contact your friend through the normal channels.’ There was a click, and then the dialling tone again. Bethan could have cried. She had no idea what the normal channels might be. All she knew was that Amy would have the strength and determination to stick by Isabel as long as she was needed. She would know how to cut through Mr Jaspert’s bluster, and the doctors’ smokescreens.

But Bethan didn’t know how to reach her. She reached out to the telephone again, but her courage failed her. Instead she turned around and tiptoed back up to her room, to wait.

Mr Hardwicke’s colleague, gloved to the elbows, leaned over and looked into Isabel’s face. ‘You’ve got to help us, my dear. You’ve got to push the baby out. You’re both ready now, and then it will be all over.’

Isabel was shaking, and her teeth were chattering, but she was buoyed up by the sudden, intoxicating feeling of power. The pain had been like torture, but now she felt that she was floating somewhere above it, beyond the reach of the tearing fingers. She smiled through the terrible shivering, and could almost have laughed. She was in control of herself after all. The baby wouldn’t be born, because she didn’t want it to be. Even as the thought came, she seemed to float higher and away from herself, as if it was someone else’s body submitting to the agony on the bed beneath her.

Isabel saw the nurse’s face swim closer to her, and had time to wonder ‘Is she up here with me too?’ The muslin masking the lower half of the nurse’s face looked just like a shroud.

‘Come on, dear. Be a brave girl and push for us.’

Isabel did laugh now, although it came out sounding cracked.

The doctors exchanged glances across the bed.

‘She isn’t co-operating,’ the specialist said. Mr Hardwicke was frowning, trying to put the docile, responsive girl he had known together with this mute, staring woman. Something had happened to Isabel Lovell.

‘If she won’t, she won’t,’ the other doctor said irritably. ‘We’ll have to take her in. Can’t risk the baby any longer. Nurse? Ring through to the hospital, will you? Perhaps you’d speak to the father, Hardwicke.’

After that it was all noise and jarring movement for Isabel. Her room was suddenly and inexplicably full of people, and they were pulling her off the bed where she was floating so comfortably and dragging her on to a narrow canvas stretcher where the fingers of pain dug themselves into her all over again. She was swaying down the familiar stairs feet first and the thought came to her that she was dead. She wanted to laugh again, but found that she couldn’t now. At the door she saw Peter and she knew from the mixture of fear and rage in his face that she wasn’t dead at all. It was fear for the baby, and anger with herself. There was only noise and pain after that, a bell shrilling somewhere and agonizing bumping, then bright lights overhead and pink face-blobs that kept coming and going. A vile-smelling rubber flap came down over her face and she knew that she was going to be sick, and then there was only delicious, peaceful dark.

‘A fine chap,’ someone was saying over and over again. ‘Yes, a fine little chap. Look at his face, he’s got Jaspert written all over him.’

Isabel opened her eyes. She remembered that she had been awake before, but there had only been nurses and white sheets and welcome silence. Now the first thing she saw was a hazy blur of colour with a dark column towering beside it. When her eyes focused the colour turned into flowers, banks of them all around, with Peter in a City suit standing in front of them. He was leaning over a white crib, smiling with satisfaction. Isabel felt the skin at the back of her neck prickle, then down the length of her spine. She wanted to shut her eyes again and plunge back into the safe darkness. Then she saw another face, closer to her. It was Amy, sitting beside the bed.

Isabel tried to turn to see her better, and then she felt the burning slice across the middle of her. At once, she understood what they had done. She had refused to have his baby for him, and so they had sliced her open and pulled it out of her anyway.

A fine little chap.

Inside Isabel’s head someone who wasn’t herself at all began helplessly screaming.

‘Bel, darling? Are you awake now?’ Amy was leaning forward. Her hand touching Isabel’s felt solid and warm.

‘Am I awake?’

Peter swung round at her. ‘You are, aren’t you? Look, he’s all right. It was touch and go, but you needn’t worry now. You mustn’t blame yourself. Come on, look at him.’ He was lifting a white bundle, pushing it towards her.

‘No.’

Amy moved protectively in front of her. ‘She’s barely out of the anaesthetic. She should rest, Peter. Perhaps if you come back this evening, she’ll be more alert to the baby.’

Reluctantly he lowered the white shape back into the crib. ‘Peter George Jaspert,’ he murmured. ‘Peter George Lovell Jaspert, if Isabel insists. Well then, I’ll look in later if I can. I have to see Archer Cole again. It’s an important time for me now. There are all sorts of things in the wind.’

Covertly Isabel watched him go. When the door closed the scream in her head faded a little.

Amy didn’t try to talk. She sat beside Isabel holding her hand and concentrating on keeping the anxiety out of her face. Her sister had lost a good deal of blood and had taken an unusually long time to rally from the anaesthetic. It was only because she was a nurse herself that they were allowed to be alone together, and still one of the hospital staff came in every five minutes to check on her. The baby, almost nine pounds of him, big-boned and lusty, was in perfect health. Amy had never seen Peter Jaspert look so pleased with himself. It was as if he had produced the big pink baby alone and unaided, seeing it spring direct and untainted from healthy Jaspert stock.

She looked back at Isabel and saw that she had drifted into sleep again. Amy had gathered from the doctors’ euphemisms and from the half-heard professional murmuring that Isabel had fought against the birth up to the point when they had taken the choice away from her. She could only guess at why, but from Isabel’s face when she looked at him she knew that Peter was at the hidden root of it all. Somehow, Amy resolved, Isabel would have to be kept away from him until she had recovered herself. Somehow it would have to be done. Adeline would have to know, and perhaps together they could find a way of rescuing Isabel.

It took Adeline twenty-four hours to reach London after receiving the cable in Morocco. She came to the hospital the next morning, tapping into Isabel’s room on high, tapering heels. She was wrapped in silvery furs and there was a little round fur hat perched on her beautiful hair. Her eyes were very blue and wide, and Amy thought as she hugged her that her mother looked no older than she did herself.

‘Mummy, thank God you’re here.’

‘Thank God I’m here,’ Adeline echoed in her famous drawl, and Amy smiled at her.

Amy had spent the night with Isabel, dozing in the chair beside her bed, and now she was due back on duty at noon. She felt exhausted, but her mother’s determined sparkle was as much of a tonic as always.

‘The poor invalid.’ Lightly Adeline stroked Isabel’s forehead. ‘She’s terribly white and thin. How do they say she is? Have we got the best man?’

‘Yes. She’ll be all right, with rest and proper treatment.’

‘And my grandson?’ Adeline moved gracefully to the crib. ‘Mmm. He’s enormous.’

‘There isn’t any problem with the baby,’ Amy said quietly.

They looked at each other, and Amy saw that her mother understood and was thinking quickly. Under all the frivolity and fashionable detachment she knew that Adeline loved the three of them dearly, and would defend them fiercely against the world. And she was as shrewd as anyone Amy had ever met.

‘And so what shall we do?’ Adeline murmured.

Isabel had retreated into the safety of sleep yet again. Amy took her mother’s arm, smelling how the perfume that clung to her furs overpowered even the massed blooms around the bed.

‘I think we should talk. There’s a little private sitting room across the hall.’

And there, with Adeline wrinkling her nose over the hospital’s attempt at China tea with lemon, Amy told her why she was so frightened for Isabel’s sake. She told her about the strange lunch at the Ritz, about Isabel’s growing remoteness and the tautness that had replaced her old even composure. She described Isabel’s extraordinary physical denial of giving birth, and the expression in her eyes when Peter held the child out to her. She remembered everything, even the colourless letters from the Italian honeymoon, and as she recited it the evidence seemed to mount damningly. Isabel was unhappy with Peter. By her very nature, because she was loyal and steadfast and proud, she wouldn’t be able to leave him, or even admit it to anyone. And the lonely pressure of it, together with the stress of her pregnancy, had made her ill. Had unbalanced her, somehow.

There, it was said. The worst of Amy’s fears was that her sister wasn’t normal any more.

Adeline was looking at her exquisitely manicured oval fingernails. Her rings flashed blue sapphire light.

‘Do you know they aren’t happy?’

‘Not for certain. I only imagine it, from the man he is and the way Bel has changed.’

‘And do you know that all marriages are not automatically happy? That peaceful and equable solutions can be found to the problem that don’t involve hasty, dramatic gestures or public scandal or stories in the newspapers?’

Adeline was still studying her fingers. In all the years she had never, never, even obliquely, referred to the meaningless façade of her own marriage. Amy thought briefly of Gerald immured in solitude at Chance, and wondered if the solution was peaceful and equable for him too.

‘Yes,’ Amy said softly. ‘I know that.’

‘Do you also know that in a marriage it is the two married people who matter, and interference from outsiders, however well they mean, can be an impertinence?’

Tony Hardy’s words, almost exactly. ‘I know that, too.’

‘So what are you suggesting, Amy darling?’ From the look in her eyes, and Adeline’s half-smile, Amy knew that her mother was with her.

‘Just that we rescue her from him, somehow or other. So that she can recover from all this and then decide in peace whether or not she wants to go back.’

‘Ah. Well, that seems quite rational, except that the idea of rescuing her is just a little extreme. Isabel is twenty-one years old, you know.’

Amy nodded meekly, and said nothing about the strong sense she had had of Isabel being trapped among the Jasperts at West Talbot.

Adeline sighed, and then said, ‘You know that I was never exactly ecstatic about the match. Would you know what I meant if I said that Peter Jaspert is a perfect example of one of those blunt, jabbing Englishmen who can’t stay up and don’t care that they can’t?’ Adeline’s smile broadened enchantingly, and Amy blinked at her. ‘Perhaps not. Just say that they’re not ideal husband material. But she would have him, you know.’

Amy remembered Isabel’s calm certainty before the marriage that she was doing the right thing. Surely that must make the shock of what was happening now even more profound?

‘He’s just the sort of man that Isabel would choose. She’s …’ Amy faltered tellingly ‘… such a rational person. If you wrote a list on paper, Peter would have all the right qualifications.’

‘I’m guessing wildly, of course, but if the trouble between them is what I suspect it is, it’s the very thing that none of us can work out on paper. How easy life would be if only one could.’ Adeline smoothed the silver-white points of her fur, first against the lie of the pelt and then flat again so that it gleamed like silk. ‘So, what shall we do for Isabel?’

Amy took a deep breath. ‘I think you should say, insist, that Isabel must come away on a long holiday with you. And then take her off somewhere safe and just see how she is.’

‘Safe? Jaspert may be an oaf, but I don’t think he’s dangerous.’

I do, Amy suddenly thought. Oh, I think he’s dangerous.

‘But, as you say, Isabel will need a long holiday. Where shall I take her? Do you know, it might be the very best of fun. Couldn’t you come too, dear heart?’

Amy made a wry face. ‘I can’t even find six spare hours, let alone six weeks or six months, or however long you can spare for Isabel.’

Adeline stood up and smoothed her tight skirt over her hips. She was still as slim as a girl.

‘And what about my huge grandson?’

‘There will be a nurse, and Bethan, and from the look of it Peter will be a besotted father.’

‘Yes,’ Adeline said meditatively. ‘And I’m sure that Joan Jaspert will do everything possible to help, if only to demonstrate to me how maternally remiss I am. Very well. We’ll do it. As soon as Isabel is well enough to leave here I’ll sweep her off to the sunshine somewhere. If she’ll come, that is. Does that make you happy?’

‘I think she’ll come,’ Amy said. ‘Yes. Just a little bit happier.’

They crossed the hallway again and looked in at Isabel. She was still lying with her eyes shut, apparently asleep.

She was safe. She could hide. Hide from Peter and the baby in its crib. And from the concerned faces that were a reproach rather than a comfort.

It was easy to retreat into the darkness at first, but as the hours passed and then the days began to crawl by Isabel found that the precious oblivion was harder and harder to achieve.

Sleep wouldn’t come and she lay with her eyes shut, hunched over her aching breasts, and listened to the screaming in her head. Her body felt as if it was being stretched tighter and tighter until she was certain that the livid pucker of the red and purple scar would split open again and she would fall in half.

The tears, when they came, were a relief and then they wouldn’t stop. They soaked her chic hair so that it lay lank and flat against her head, and the pillows, and the ruffles of her crêpe-de-chine nightdresses.

The nurses were soothing at first, then baffled, and then, helplessly, Isabel sensed their impatience. She was healing physically, but with every day she felt herself slipping further out of control of herself.

Peter came and sat by her bed, talking significantly and at length about how the Prime Minister had made Archer Cole his Home Secretary. Isabel lay completely still, feeling the skin prickle along her arm again at his proximity. One morning he strode in and announced that his own appointment had been confirmed. He was to be a junior minister in the Home Office.

‘I knew Archer had something for me. It was a question of how far up he could bring me in. I’m still a new boy to most of them, of course. There’s a lot to be done, Isabel, but with a minister like Archer there’s no telling how far we might go.’ He went on, talking and talking, and looking out of the hospital window towards Westminster.

The tears ran down Isabel’s cheeks and Peter’s face tightened with anger.

Mr Hardwicke came, and said, ‘A little depression is very common after the birth of a child. You’ll be as right as rain as soon as you are back in your own home with your beautiful baby.’

All of them tried to thrust the baby on her. The nurses asked, ‘Will you try to feed him yourself for a week or so?’

‘No,’ Isabel said, and they shrugged and gave him a bottle. She saw the bony little gums clamp round the teat, and shivered.

When they made her hold him she looked into the tiny face, closed-up and calm, and sensed all the reserves of power and strength in it. She knew that she had none. Yet she was getting better. It was as if her own body was defying her, gathering its own strength out of the hospital air. They made her get up, dressed her in one of her pretty robes, and sat her in a chair in the window. She could see the tower of Big Ben, so she drew the curtains on it and sat in the dimness until the nurses came and pulled them back again.

Adeline came to see her every day, always exquisitely dressed and always just on her way somewhere, or else hurrying home to change to go somewhere else. She was talking gaily about travel plans and Isabel stared uncomprehendingly at her. Even Gerald came. He looked like an old man now, and walked arthritically with a stick. He approved of the baby’s big, healthy pinkness. ‘He’s a fine boy,’ he said to Peter. ‘The first grandchild should be called Airlie.’

‘Airlie? Don’t be ridiculous. His name is Peter George. We’ve already announced it. Archer Cole has agreed to be a godfather.’

Amy was the only visitor Isabel didn’t shrink from. Amy didn’t say much, nor did she coo and cluck falsely over the baby. She simply sat, sometimes holding her sister’s hand, and tried to will some of her own strength into her.

Once, just once, Isabel felt a flicker of the old life.

Richard came and found the two of them sitting together.

‘Darling sisters,’ he said, and raised an eyebrow at the room filled with flowers and presents and messages. ‘I knew, Bel, that you would be showered with tributes and I had no idea what offering to bring. And then I was passing through Covent Garden … don’t ask me what I was doing there because I won’t tell you … and I saw this.’ From a pocket Richard produced a tomato. ‘It is the most perfect tomato in London. Don’t you think? It’s very important that whatever you bring should be the best,’ he said seriously.

The tomato was large, and evenly and floridly red. He put it reverently on the bedside locker and kissed Isabel. Richard was wearing a tight-waisted pale jacket and a Windsor-knotted emerald silk tie. His hair was slicked back and he looked taller, and more elegant than the schoolboy they had last seen. But the defensive humorousness marked his face as strongly as ever.

‘Well. Where is the infant?’

Amy pointed and he peered into the crib. There was a moment’s silence.

‘Oh dear,’ he said at last. ‘Do you know, I always thought that all the stuff about the child being father of the man was romantic piffle. Now here is the living proof that old Wordsworth was perfectly right. This child is Lord Jaspert down to the very last wrinkle. How does it feel, Isabel, to have given birth to your own father-in-law?’

‘Richard.’

It was Amy’s exclamation, but Isabel felt a ripple of laughter spreading inside her. For the briefest of instants they were together again, Amy and Richard and herself, sparring and giggling around the fire. The ripple spread and lapped outwards and more followed it. She was laughing aloud but suddenly it wasn’t the right sort of laughter any more, and the happy moment had gone. Amy was staring at her as she laughed louder and then abruptly the sobs came to choke her and she was blind to her brother and sister and she knew that she was lost to the old safe world for ever.

Over Isabel’s cropped head Amy and Richard looked at each other. The white knobs at the nape of her neck stood sharply out.

‘I’m sorry,’ Richard said awkwardly. ‘I’m very, very sorry.’

The terrible crying was unstoppable. At last Amy called a nurse who brought Isabel a sedative and sent the two of them out.

‘I could cut out my tongue,’ Richard said as they walked slowly away together. ‘An all-too-familiar feeling.’

‘It wasn’t your fault. Isabel’s ill.’

Richard looked sideways at Amy. ‘Head ill?’

‘I think so. Mummy’s going to take her away for a while.’

She sensed his shrewd glance again. ‘Away from Jaspert?’

‘Yes.’

‘What a very good idea.’ They stopped at the corner of the street. ‘I have to go back now.’ Richard made a quick, disgusted face. ‘I’m in bad enough trouble as it is. And don’t ask me about that, either. But you’ll stay with her as much as you can, won’t you? I love you both.’ He touched her wrist quickly and then walked away, leaving Amy to watch until he was out of sight and wish that she knew her brother better. For all his whimsy Richard was tough, and it would have helped to have him with her now.

After three weeks the doctors judged that Isabel was strong enough to be allowed home. After another two weeks, they said, she might travel in easy stages with her mother and a nurse to Spain and then, perhaps, to the sun in North Africa. The flowers in Isabel’s room had withered and the presents had been taken home with the folded-up greetings and telegrams.

The tomato had stayed on the bedside locker until the bracts curled and blackened like a spider, and the red skin puckered. Then a nurse threw it away.

Isabel was taken home in the Daimler, tucked up in a fur rug. Bethan took the baby separately in his voluminous white wrappings.

The Ebury Street bedroom was bright and warm. The day bed was drawn up beside a low table where a cloisonné bowl filled with pot-pourri gave out a cloud of spicy perfume. The flowers had been carefully arranged, shaggy bronze and white and gold chrysanthemums and heady forsythia from the hothouses at Chance. There were new books and magazines on the table too, and Isabel’s embroidery laid out neatly in its frame.

Adeline and Amy had been carefully preparing for her return, Isabel thought, but instead of welcoming her the warmth and bright colours and scents made her feel her own chill brittleness more intensely. She moved slowly around the room, touching the green silk coverings and the stiff curve of a chrysanthemum petal, then with horrified fascination the handle of the door leading into Peter’s dressing-room. Isabel was shivering, and the high, thin screaming that plagued her constantly was much louder here. Ebury Street didn’t feel like home. Everything was too light and bright and shiny. It attacked her senses, making her feel even thinner and colder and more isolated than she had done in hospital. Isabel made another circuit of the room. It occurred to her that she was looking for somewhere to crawl into and find shelter in, and her own bedroom offered nowhere.

I don’t live here. I can’t stay here. Where can I go?

She couldn’t think of anywhere, and she felt like a small animal caught in a box. Adeline had talked about travel, of going south in search of the sun, and she shrank from that idea too. The sun would probe her and shine through her raw skin when she longed for darkness and silence.

From the other end of the house, where Bethan and the trap-mouthed night nurse appointed by Lady Jaspert shared the nursery suite, Isabel heard the baby Peter crying.

The two screams, internal and external, merged and became one.

Please stop. I want to be quiet. Please stop.

When Peter came home he was exhilarated by the first of a series of committee meetings under his own chairmanship. Archer Cole had appointed him to head a vital and timely investigation of public order and the processes of police control. Peter was in complete agreement with the Home Secretary that street political demonstrations and mass displays posed a threat to public safety, and he was looking forward to drafting legislation that would forbid them, and to increasing police powers to deal with them when they did erupt. Peter believed that politics were the rightful and hereditary affair of his own class, and that any attempt by the remaining masses to involve themselves was an intrusion.

He found Isabel’s room in semi-darkness, and his wife in the farthest corner of it. Her white face half-turned towards him, and Peter thought impatiently that she looked like a cringing animal. After the committee he had stopped in for a drink with Sylvia Cole, who had poured out whisky and flattered him with political gossip and assurance of how very highly Archer valued him. Sylvia was electrically charged by her husband’s new power and prominence. She was wearing red lipstick with her fingernails varnished the same colour, and her bright scarlet cocktail frock showed off the tops of her full breasts. As he watched her striding up and down her drawing room talking and laughing and waving her cigarette holder, Peter was reminded of an exotic tropical bird. When she drank, Sylvia’s mouth left a red print on her glass and Peter could hardly take his eyes off it when she put it down on the tray again.

When he stood up he had to control an urge to pick the glass up and press his own mouth to it.

Compared with Sylvia’s brilliance his white, trembling wife seemed hardly alive at all. Her helplessness suddenly made Peter angry, and when he was angry he was brutal.

‘Welcome home,’ Peter said. ‘It will be nice to have a wife again. Now that we’ve got the boy safely.’ He caught Isabel’s wrist, and it felt like a stick. He pulled her towards him so that her head jerked back, and looked down into her face. Isabel’s skin was drawn and there were dark, unhealthy circles under her eyes. He thought with impatience that his wife was losing her looks faster than he could have believed possible, and her eye-catching, windflower beauty was one of the main reasons why he had married her. Angrily his fingers tightened on her arm and he kissed her, his mouth open over her compressed lips. She was shaking so much now that her head wobbled, and Peter thought it was like kissing one of the wax-faced clockwork dolls in his sister’s collection at West Talbot. The idea disgusted him, and he pushed her away so that she half-stumbled against the bed. As if the touch and sight of it galvanized her Isabel backed away from it, her hands to her mouth.

‘What’s the matter with you?’ Peter hissed at her. ‘What? What? Look at it all.’ He gestured wildly at the pretty room. ‘You’ve got everything, every damned thing, and you look like a scared nanny goat. What do you want, Isabel? I know what I want. I need a wife. I need a wife like other men have, like Sylvia Cole. You can’t even smile at my table and open your legs in bed at night. Look at you.’ Isabel saw the spray from his mouth as Peter swung round and swept the cloisonné bowl and the books and papers and sewing off the table. The pot-pourri scattered in dry, aromatic dust and the bowl, unbroken on the rug, rang with a single resonant note.

The hum of it and Peter’s shouting pierced Isabel’s skull and even cut through the screaming. Her hands moved from her dry mouth to her ears as she tried vainly to block out the din. She shook her head in bewilderment.

‘I can’t … be … like … Sylvia Cole. Never.’ Was that her own voice? Isabel wondered within a corner of herself. Were the words really coming out of her mouth, or was she just imagining herself saying them? ‘And you ask me what I want. I want you not to touch me. You make my skin crawl. The things you … the things you do to me are disgusting. I hate them. I hate you.’

She really was saying the words. Isabel knew it from the disbelief and then the blind anger mounting in her husband’s face.

‘You’re mad,’ he told her. ‘I’ve wondered, and now I know. You’re insane.’

Isabel pressed her hands flatter to her head.

‘Don’t say that.’ Her voice was rising. ‘Don’t say that. Don’t tell me I’m mad. It’s your fault. You did it …’

‘Stop screaming.’ Peter’s hand flashed up and down and the blow caught the side of her head and rattled the bones of her jaw. ‘Do you want all the bloody servants to hear you?’

Isabel fell against the bed and then lay huddled half on the smooth green cover and half on the floor. She heard the door close and the sound of Peter walking away towards the nursery. He was going to see the baby, of course. Their two strengths, the one male and blunt and brutal, and the other primeval, mysterious, but none the less male, would meet and reinforce each other. Meanwhile her own strength had bled away into nowhere.

Oh, please, just let there be quiet. Where can I go?

Isabel lay for a while listening, unable to distinguish whether the scream was really the baby’s or her own, internal one. Then, when she felt strong enough, she stumbled to the door and locked it. She locked the dressing-room door too, and with her breath coming a little more easily she went and lay down on the bed again. She stayed wide-eyed in the darkness listening to the domestic sounds of the house, and when they subsided at last into the silence of night she was still lying, waiting and listening.

When she judged that everyone must be asleep she levered herself upright. She was stiff and cramped from lying so long in one position, but she knew exactly what she must do and she moved quickly.

The key turned noiselessly back in the lock, and she slipped out into the darkness beyond her room.

The noise. The screaming. If only I can just stop it, everything will be all right. There must be something the matter with the baby for it to scream like this. It would want me to stop it, wouldn’t it?

The door of the nursery suite was closed, and she turned the knob breathlessly and inched it open. There was a little lobby linking the three rooms, and one of the doors stood ajar. A dim light filtered through, and Isabel blinked at it after the total darkness.

Wait until you can see properly. That’s better. Oh, the terrible noise. Put it right.

Stealthily, with her hand out in front of her to guide her, Isabel crept forward. Inside the nursery the nightlight was lit. In the middle of the room was the white crib under its white canopy hung with ribbon and lace. She moved towards it, one tiny step at a time. The room was all white, fresh and pure. It’s nice here, except for the noise. Why doesn’t anyone else hear it, Bethan or the nurse? I’ll stop it myself now. Then everyone will be happy.

Isabel reached the foot of the white crib. Taking a deep breath, she leaned over and looked inside. To her surprise, the baby didn’t look as if it was crying at all, although the sound of it was deafening. The eyes were shut in the autocratic little face, and it was motionless.

Frowning a little, Isabel looked around her. There was a folded blanket on the nursing chair beside the crib. She picked it up and folded it again into a neat square and then she pressed it over the baby’s face.

Is it so strong then? The scream hardly faltering. As strong as Peter himself. Of course.

Isabel leant on the blanket with all her strength and at last, after so long, the screaming dropped in pitch and suddenly choked on itself.

The blessed silence.

‘Madam? What are you doing?’

Isabel let go of her blanket and turned round. It was the nurse, the one with the mouth like a steel trap. She was staring at Isabel in shocked disbelief.

‘The baby was crying,’ Isabel said calmly. ‘Couldn’t you hear it? I was quietening it. We can’t let it scream like that all night, can we?’

The nurse ran forward and leaned over the crib. She gasped and snatched up the white bundle and held it against her shoulder. There was a choking sound and then a thin, shuddering wail.

Isabel saw the woman’s face sag with relief, and wondered vaguely why. The nurse wrapped her arms around the baby and after an instant’s hesitation she ran, carrying it with her.

Isabel stood listening gratefully to the silence.

It didn’t last long. Within seconds a door slammed, and there were raised, urgent voices and hurrying feet coming towards her. She looked around and half-retreated behind the white-draped crib. Peter burst into the room. His face was red and seamed with sleep, and he looked even bulkier in his striped dressing-gown. At the sight of him Isabel shrank and tried to slip behind the crib hangings. But he was coming for her, and his arm reached out and gripped her like a vice. Over his shoulder Isabel saw the nurse still staring at her in horror. Standing a little to one side was Bethan, and she was crying, tears pouring silently down her cheeks. Only then did Isabel understand that something terrible had happened.

Peter could hardly speak. Something was strangling his voice in his throat. ‘You. My son. A baby. Helpless. You are mad, Isabel. You should be locked up.’

Isabel raised her free hand to try to ward him off but he was too close. She tried to twist sideways, meaning to run to Bethan as she had done as a child. Bethan’s arms opened to her, but Peter held her tight. There was no escape, and Isabel’s arm crooked to protect her head.

‘Not mad,’ she whispered. ‘Not. Just couldn’t bear the noise, any more.’

‘Is the baby all right?’ Peter asked harshly and the nurse nodded.

‘I reached him almost at once.’ She wouldn’t look at Isabel now.

‘We’ll wait until morning to speak to the doctors, then. Come with me.’ He pulled Isabel across the room so roughly that her foot caught in the hem of her robe and she almost stumbled. He jerked her upright again.

‘Let me stay with her until the morning,’ Bethan pleaded. ‘She’ll be all right with me. Won’t you, love?’ Peter wouldn’t hear her. He propelled Isabel back to her own room and pushed her inside. She fell forwards and lay with her cheek against the rug, wide-eyed in the pitch blackness. There was a moment of relief as she heard Peter slam the door between them, and then she heard the click of the lock.

Her door wasn’t locked against the world any longer.

It was locked on the outside, and she was behind it.

She was imprisoned with herself, and the memory of the nurse’s horror beside Bethan’s helpless tears and outstretched, empty arms.

Isabel lurched forward and rattled the unyielding door. At the same moment she heard the bolt on Peter’s side of the dressing-room door slide home. Her hand came up to her mouth and she bit into the heel of it until the pain made her feel dizzy and she tasted the warm, salty blood.

Then she knelt down and leaned her forehead against the door. The draught through the crack sliced down the side of her face like a knifeblade.

Amy sat bolt upright in bed. She was shivering and sweating, but the black fingers of the nightmare were already losing their grip. Isabel had been running towards her, shouting something, and there was a chasm between them that zigzagged wider and wider as Amy tried to warn her. But she was fully awake now, and she couldn’t remember what Isabel had been shouting, nor what she herself had been trying so desperately to warn her against.

Amy reached out for her alarm clock, breathing deeply to try to stop her teeth from chattering. A quarter to five in the morning, and she was due on day duty again at six. It was almost time to wake up in any case. She turned on the overhead light and looked around the little room. Her uniform dress was ready on its hanger behind the door, and her textbooks were piled up on the shelf exactly as she had left them the night before. It had only been a bad dream and she couldn’t even remember exactly what had been happening, but still the atmosphere of it clung round her. She was still afraid, with a dull knot of anxiety that sat in the pit of her stomach. Isabel was slowly recovering, she was safely back home at Ebury Street, but Amy was frightened for her. Why, so vividly, now? Was it just the effect of the nightmare?

Amy pushed back the covers and gathered up her things for the bath. There were only two bathrooms in this part of the hostel, and there were always queues to use them. She would go early and relax for a few minutes in the hot water, if there was any, and then she would make a cup of tea and perhaps take one along to Moira … But the routine plans failed to calm her nerves. Amy was still shaking, and the thought of Isabel running desperately stayed obstinately with her. Instead of heading for the bathroom Amy went quickly to Moira O’Hara’s door and tapped urgently.

‘Dear Lord,’ she heard Moira murmuring. ‘Is that you, Lovell? Do you have any idea what the time is?’

Her friend came shuffling to the door and opened it, blinking.

‘Moira, will you do something for me? Will you tell Blaine that I’m sick and can’t come on this morning?’

‘Are you ill? You look white enough.’

‘No. I’m worried about my sister. I want to go home and see her. Will you tell Blaine?’

Moira looked doubtful. ‘Sure I will, but they’ll come down here and check on you, you know. If they find you out it’ll be big trouble.’

‘I’ll risk it. I might be back before they notice I’m gone.’

Amy ran back to her room and pulled on her clothes. To fool the porter in his cubicle by the front door into thinking she was simply going on duty early, she wrapped her nurse’s cape around her and slipped out of the hostel. The street was dark and deserted, with the few lit-up hospital windows reflected icily in the puddles. The air tasted raw and cold, with a sour lacing of smoke and the dustbins in the yard at the side of the hospital. Amy glanced up and down. There was no hope of a taxi, of course, and she thought that it was probably much too early for a bus. Grateful for the heavy warmth of her cape, she pulled it around her and began to walk north towards the river.

By the time she reached Lambeth Bridge her feet were soaked and she was chilled through by the raw November air. But on the corner of Marsham Street a cab stopped right beside her and disgorged two couples in evening clothes. One of the women, in a silver lamé dress with a little fur shoulder cape, stumbled and the two men caught her, laughing. Amy ran past them, waving to the driver. He stared doubtfully at her nurse’s cape and her damp hair loose and clinging to her face.

‘I said Ebury Street. At once,’ Army repeated sharply. Hearing the authority in her voice, the driver jerked his head to motion her into the cigar-reeking interior.

The house in Ebury Street seemed to be in forbidding, total darkness but as Amy came up to the area railings she saw a light in the basement kitchen window. She ran down the area steps and, through the half-drawn curtains, she saw that it was Bethan inside, sitting alone at the square scrubbed table. Her face was buried in her hands. Bethan’s head jerked up in fright and Amy saw the tears.

The anxiety tightened its grip within her.

‘Bethan. It’s me. Let me in, will you?’

A second later the area door swung open and the two women stood facing each other in the tradesmen’s lobby.

‘Oh, Miss Amy, thank God.’

‘What’s happened?’

‘He’s locked her in. Why should she try to hurt him? The little mite was asleep. But her poor, white face, Amy. She didn’t know what she was doing …’

Bethan’s incoherence was enough to tell Amy that something was terribly wrong. She fought against the infectious panic and gripped Bethan’s arm firmly to steer her back into the kitchen. She made her sit down and drew her own chair up so that they sat knee to knee.

‘Now. Tell me slowly.’

‘I didn’t hear anything. The nurse woke me, with the baby in her arms. She said … she said that Isabel had tried to kill him. By smothering him with a blanket. She said that she heard her, and saw her.’

‘That can’t be true.’ But even as she said it, Amy knew that it could be. Isabel.

‘I saw her too. She didn’t look like our Isabel at all. She was as white as death, and her eyes stared like stones. She said something like she wanted to stop the noise. But he was asleep, Amy. There wasn’t a whisper of noise.’

Amy stood up. Somehow, she discovered, the months of training on the wards had given her a kind of quick-thinking calm. It helped her to suppress the pity and horror welling inside her and ask levelly, ‘Where’s Isabel now?’

‘In her room. Mr Jaspert locked her in, he wouldn’t let me be with her. He said that she should be locked up. He’s going to bring the doctors in in the morning.’

They both looked up at the white-faced kitchen clock. Not quite six a.m. ‘He said that she was mad, Amy …’

‘She’s ill, that’s all, and she needs help. We’ll get it for her.’ Amy was already at the door, wrapping the anonymity of her dark cape around her.

‘Where are you going?’

‘To Bruton Street, to get my mother. We’ll come back and take Isabel away with us.’

Outside it had begun to rain, and it was at least another hour before the beginning of the winter dawn. Incredibly, or so it seemed to Amy, another taxi was unloading a party of late revellers. One of them looked a little like Johnny Guild, and she smiled bitterly at the remoteness of that other world now. The taxi swept her on through the streets that were already beginning to come alive with delivery boys and shop workers, and deposited her on the steps of Bruton Street. Amy hadn’t thought of bringing her own key and it took prolonged ringing to summon a faintly dishevelled footman to open the huge door.

‘Good morning, Miss Amy, ah, Miss Lovell.’

Amy brushed past him and into the hallway. ‘Is Lady Lovell at home?’

‘Yes, I believe so, miss. Ah, Parker usually takes up her tray at nine-thirty.’

Amy was taking the steps of the great curving stairway two at a time. She ran under the glass dome and past the ranks of portraits to her mother’s suite. Her private sitting-room was empty, but there were two glasses on a little tray beside the dead fire. In her dressing-room one of the mirrored doors along its length had swung open to reveal the skeletal shoulders of dresses on their padded hangers. The bedroom door was closed. There wasn’t a thought in Amy’s head except Isabel, and taking Adeline to her as quickly as possible. Amy knocked lightly on the door and pushed it open at once, intending to tiptoe in and wake her mother gently. Her first confused sight was of a man’s forearm forcibly pinning Adeline against the pale peach bedcovers. She saw black hair on the pillow, and the glowing red-brown of her mother’s tangled with it.

As Amy realized that her mother was asleep in a man’s arms, Adeline woke up and stared at her. Her blue eyes were clouded with sleep at first, and then they snapped open wide. For the first time in Amy’s life, she saw her mother at a loss. The man beside her stirred and murmured something, and then he was looking at Amy too, frozen into immobility.

If it hadn’t been for her anxiety for Isabel, Amy might almost have laughed. It was an absurd role to find herself in, to be the innocent daughter discovering her mother in bed with a lover. And yet. Although she had known for years that Adeline had lovers, to be so brutally confronted with it shocked her. Amy took a faltering step backwards, pulling her cape up around her throat as if she was the naked one. It didn’t take long for Adeline to collect herself.

‘You know, darling,’ she drawled, ‘it’s never advisable to burst into people’s bedrooms unannounced. Or is the house on fire?’

‘It’s Isabel,’ Amy blurted. ‘She’s ill. I came to get you.’

‘I see.’ Adeline was sitting up, drawing the covers around her smooth, creamy-pale shoulders. ‘If you’ll go back to your room, darling, and ring for some tea, I’ll join you in a tiny tick.’

She came almost immediately, wrapped in a slither of pale peach silk that fell around her like sculpted marble. She had tied back her hair with a peach satin ribbon, and her skin glowed.

Does sex make you feel wonderful as well as looking it? Amy wondered, with an odd, wild tinge of bitterness.

‘Tell me,’ Adeline commanded. She listened intently as Amy told, her head bent, letting the folds of silk fall in ripples through her fingers.

At last she nodded. ‘Yes. I’m not altogether amazed. Clearly she is ill, and we must go and fetch her. We’ll take her to Chance, to begin with, while I make arrangements. Then to Switzerland, perhaps. There’s a clinic outside Lausanne.’

‘Peter won’t like it.’

Adeline sighed. ‘Quite probably not. He is her husband, and therefore her next of kin. I suspect that that might be crucial. We shall have to deal with that when we get there.’

‘Quickly, then,’ Amy begged her and Adeline smiled.

‘I’m not going to run wildly out into the night half-dressed and looking more than a little crazy myself. I’m not like you, Amy. I’m going to drink my tea and then have my bath. Then I shall dress, and say goodbye politely to poor, embarrassed Bobbie, and then I shall ring for the car and we will drive calmly round to Ebury Street. From what you say, I don’t think Isabel will be going far this morning.’

Amy was half-wild with impatience, and with a certain conviction that they should race back to Isabel at once, but she knew better than to argue with Adeline. She passed the interminable waiting time in pacing up and down her room, up and back again.

Incredibly, it was ten o’clock before Adeline sailed in. She was wearing a dark grey tailored costume with a black Persian lamb collar and her maid had coiled her hair up under a Cossack hat of the same fur. She was pulling on her gloves and smoothing the black suède over each fingertip.

‘And now, let’s go to Ebury Street,’ she ordered regally.

Her chauffeur, in lavender-grey breeches and tunic with a double row of silver-gilt buttons, was waiting with the car at the steps. He took his peaked cap from under his arm with a flourish and pulled it low over his eyes, then handed them inside. Adeline’s car was a rakish cream Bentley, and every inch of chrome on it, from the radiator grille to the wheel spokes, was polished to a sparkle. As the long cream bonnet nosed out into the street the traffic seemed to hold respectfully back for it.

Amy glanced at the thick glass partition behind the chauffeur’s head.

‘I’m sorry I rushed in this morning.’

Adeline was still smoothing the niches of suède at her wrists. ‘Yes. You know, I wouldn’t dream of bursting into your bedroom, whatever the circumstances.’

The idea made Amy smile, but it was an uneven, bitter smile. ‘You wouldn’t see anything unexpected, even if you did.’ A thought struck her. Was she jealous of her mother, then? Jealous of her free spirit and her prime concern for her own pleasures? Or simply of her good time?

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Adeline murmured. ‘What with bringing home coal miners, and going to strange meetings and dinners with Mr Hardy.’

‘How do you know about the meetings?’ Amy was surprised, and curious.

‘I know all kinds of things,’ Adeline answered. ‘But you shouldn’t worry about whether I do or not, my darling. You have your own life to lead – and only one life, after all.’

They were in Ebury Street, and the long cream car was stopping at Peter Jaspert’s door. Standing at the kerb ahead of them was another car, a discreet black one. Adeline frowned at the sight of it.

A scared-looking maid ushered Amy and Adeline into the upstairs drawing room, and after a long moment Peter came in. He was freshly shaven and immaculate in morning dress with a gold chain looped across his waistcoat. Amy thought he looked as if he was about to preside over a wedding rather than his wife’s collapse. Adeline kissed him elaborately on either cheek.

‘Peter, my dear, I’m so sad and worried about Isabel and the baby. I think she should have a long, complete rest. And, if this terrible story of Amy’s is true, some proper medical attention. I’ll take her home to Chance with me now, and then we can talk about sending her to Dr Ahrend’s clinic in Lausanne. Will you ring for her maid to begin packing for her? Just a few things. The trunks can follow later, of course.’

Peter was standing stiffly, like a wax model of himself. ‘The terrible story, as you call it, is perfectly true. Isabel tried to smother the baby. I appreciate your concern, of course, Lady Lovell, but it won’t be necessary for you to make any arrangements. I have already done so. The doctors are examining her now, and the car is here to take her to an excellent rest home. In Chertsey, as it happens.’

‘Chertsey?’ Adeline was incredulous. ‘If it has to be in England, surely somewhere nearer home? There is someone in Harley Street who specializes …’

Peter cut her short. ‘I’m afraid I have already made the arrangements for my wife. She is going to Chertsey this morning.’

‘Peter,’ Adeline said in her soft, dangerous drawl. ‘What are you doing? Are you planning to certify my daughter?’

Amy thought that Peter might waver, but he stood his ground.

‘The papers have to be prepared. Nothing can and nothing will be done in haste. But in the meantime, it will be best for her to be somewhere secure. For her own good, as well as the child’s.’

Adeline stood facing him. To Amy it was clear that she was already being forced to fall back on her second line of attack.

‘The baby will stay here with his nurse and Bethan, of course. We’ll just take Isabel, and as soon as she is well again, she can come home to you both.’

My daughter for your son, in other words. The bargain was clear to all three of them.

‘Isabel is going to Chertsey this morning,’ Peter repeated.

‘You can’t do it.’

‘I’m afraid,’ he said evenly, ‘that it is already as good as done. I cannot risk my son.’

Amy had jumped to her feet ready to launch herself into a protest, but then she saw Adeline’s shoulders drop and knew that if her mother was giving up the fight so quickly, then they didn’t stand a chance at all. Peter was Isabel’s husband and her lawful guardian now if she had lost the precious responsibility for herself, and he held all the cards against them.

‘I want to see her,’ Amy demanded. As she spoke, they heard dragging footsteps come slowly down the stairs. Adeline wrenched open the door and Isabel confronted them. She was wrapped in a blanket and there was a nurse on either side of her, holding her arms. A doctor was coming down the stairs in the wake of the procession.

‘Isabel,’ Amy said, but her sister barely looked at her. Her hair was matted around her face and one cheek was swollen and puffy, the eye above it watery and blank. ‘I just wanted to be quiet,’ she explained to them all in a thin, childish voice.

Adeline made as if to go to her, but Peter caught her arm and the nurses gestured her back.

‘I’m afraid it isn’t advisable,’ the doctor said. ‘Any excitement, or sudden movement. In any case, we’re not sure that she knows who anyone is. We’ve given her a sedative, and she will be quite calm shortly. If you will let us through?’

They stood in a huddle in the drawing-room doorway, watching in silence as Isabel was led shuffling away, her head hanging like a convict’s. Peter shook himself and followed the little group down to the street. The door of the black car opened and swallowed Isabel, and then it drove away from them and disappeared.

Amy heard her mother utter a single, black obscenity. Peter came slowly back into the house and Adeline raised her chin and swept past him without a glance. Shaking, with her legs almost giving way underneath her, Amy followed her. She was aware of Peter closing the door on them and on his wife being sped away somewhere to a discreet, distant and unmentionable locked room.

Amy sank into the car beside her mother and the Bentley purred off in the opposite direction.

All Amy’s calm was gone and she turned to Adeline and begged her, like a child, ‘Mummy, what can we do? If we had been earlier …’

Adeline’s face was turned away, out to the busy, everyday streets.

‘It wouldn’t have made any difference. He owns her, don’t you see? He is her husband, and her keeper. Oh, we’ll get her back in the end, but it will take time.’

There was a long silence, and then she said fiercely, ‘Don’t marry, Amy, will you? Do anything else you like, but don’t marry anyone.’