Читать книгу Rosie Thomas 4-Book Collection: The White Dove, The Potter’s House, Celebration, White - Rosie Thomas - Страница 19

‘And how long will they make her stay there?’ Helen asked.

‘I’ve no idea,’ Amy said. ‘I don’t think anyone has.’

They were sitting together in Helen’s clean, bare room. In the corner beside the grate was a fire bucket filled with sand and swathed with red paper, with a fir branch stuck firmly into it. The spiky green arm was liberally hung with paper decorations, cut out and coloured by Jim.

It was the week before Christmas and in pride of place on the mantelpiece next to the photographs were the presents that Amy had just bought for Helen and Freda and Jim. The glossy wrappings and the determined effort at a tree made an almost festive glow in the colourless room.

Amy tried to smile over the rim of the best teacup, but the smile failed and Helen looked sharply at her.

‘It’s me sitting here, you know. Helen. I thought we were friends. You don’t have to be cheerful if you don’t feel like it. Have a bloody cry, if you feel like that. I probably would, if it was my sister in the loony-bin.’

The smile did come now, even if it was a slightly twisted one. ‘Sanatorium and Rest Home, Helen. They would shudder to hear it called anything as honest as loony-bin. And I’ve done enough crying. It won’t help Isabel, will it?’

The room was warm, with a small fire lit in honour of her visit, but the chilly fingers of Thorogood House, Chertsey, seemed to reach out and touch Amy even here and she shivered involuntarily.

The secure rest home that Peter Jaspert had chosen precipitately for Isabel was in a quiet road lined with similar gloomy Victorian houses standing in huge, dripping gardens. There was a cramped attempt at a carriage drive leading from the locked iron gates to the locked front door, and the raked gravel was overhung with laurels and rhododendrons. While visitors waited for someone to peer through a slot in the door before undoing the locks, they stood on the stone steps listening to the rain drumming in the evergreens and breathing in the scents of sour earth and prowling cats. When the door was finally inched open, visitors were ushered into a little green-painted room off the dark panelled hallway. From there they were summoned either to the communal sitting room or to the discreet suites on the upper floors, depending on the patient’s health. Isabel’s doctors were advising complete rest and calm. On the few visits Amy had been allowed to make, Thorogood House had struck her as the most depressing place on earth. How could anyone get well, surrounded by so much ugliness and gloom?

Isabel seemed to have retreated so far into herself as to be almost unreachable. She was quiet and docile, and so the staff let her sit for hour after hour beside the window in the day room, staring out at the dank, mottled leaves. She hardly ever spoke, and when she did it was with faint, puzzled politeness.

‘There’s no need for her to be in that place,’ Amy said now, with sudden violence, ‘if Peter hadn’t gone so wild. He signed everything there was to sign, just to keep her away from the baby and out of the papers. He wanted her taken away, there and then. If he could only have been patient and calm, she could have been in Lausanne now, where Adeline could go and stay with her. But he was so afraid that he couldn’t think. I despise him for that more than for anything else.’

Helen reached over and peered into the teapot. The sudden movement made her cough, and she sat still to let it subside. ‘Here,’ she said. ‘Have a fill-up before it gets stewed. So what happens? Can’t your ma do anything?’

‘Eventually. She’s got plenty of influence, but she wants things done discreetly as much as Peter does. Madness isn’t chic, is it? Isabel will be moved somewhere, probably to the Lausanne clinic. But without Peter’s help it will take time. And I’d have gone mad already myself, locked up in that place for so long.’

Helen shook her head sympathetically. ‘I’m sorry. But she will get better, won’t she? In the end?’

‘Oh God, I hope so.’

They were silent for a second or two. Then Amy shook herself deliberately. ‘I shouldn’t be unloading my problems on to you. I will have some more tea, please. And if you’re not going to have any cake I’ll eat it myself.’

Amy had brought a dark, rich fruit cake glistening with cherries and peel, and a big bowl of oranges that made another splash of colour in the dimming firelight. Helen sliced the cake and put one piece on a plate.

‘Aren’t you going to eat anything?’ Amy persisted.

‘Nah. I’ll save the rest for Freda and Jim.’

‘There’s plenty.’

‘I don’t want anything,’ Helen said, with the stubborn air that Amy now knew better than to argue against. She drank her tea and ate her own cake, and noticed that Helen’s hands were thin and veined under the rough skin.

‘Let’s talk about something cheerful,’ Amy said to break the silence. ‘What about Christmas? What do you do?’

‘On Christmas Eve, after the carol singers have been along the street, we all go down to the boozer. Only the one on the corner, you know? Kids and babies and all. There’s an old joanna in there and someone thumps on that and we sing all the old songs. I had rum toddy last year. Got quite tiddly. On Christmas Day we go to Aunt Mag’s for our dinner, we’ve always done that even before Ma went. Mag makes plum pudding you’d die for. There’s presents and a tree and all that. But we’ll open yours before we go.’

Amy had bought a soft, jade green cashmere jacket for Helen. It was feather-light and folded up almost into nothing, but it was as warm as a heavy coat. For Freda there was a bright red knitted skirt with matching mittens and cap, and a perfect scale model of a Hispano Suiza for Jim that ran jerkily on a wind-up clockwork motor.

Helen stood up and went behind the screen that hid the sink. She came out with two packages wrapped in holly-sprigged paper and laid them awkwardly beside Amy’s plate.

‘These are for you. This one’s from me.’ A soft parcel, carefully sealed. ‘And this is from Freda and Jim.’ A small, bundled-up package that rattled. ‘It isn’t very much, but make sure you think of us on Christmas morning.’

‘I will,’ Amy said softly.

‘So what do you do?’

‘Almost exactly the same thing every year, ever since I can remember.’ Although that wasn’t quite true. Amy could just remember Airlie’s last Christmas, and that had been magical and glittering in a way that none of the others had ever matched. But Adeline loved Christmas as much as any child, and she threw herself into the preparations and the celebration itself with infectious excitement. But what celebration could there possibly be this year, without Isabel? Amy had half-expected, even half-hoped, that she would be on Christmas duty. But when the duty rota had been pinned up and the students crowded round it, she saw that she was one of the half-dozen lucky ones who had been given leave. She was free for five whole days, from Christmas Eve.

‘Lovell’s got the time off, of course,’ Mary Morrow had said sourly. ‘Wouldn’t you know it?’

And so she would be going to Chance, to join her family, and Adeline’s traditional house party.

‘On Christmas Eve,’ she told Helen, ‘there is the servants’ dance. It’s a big party for everyone who works in the house and on the estate. There’s a tree, specially chosen from the fir copse and brought up to the house on one of the wagons. Isabel and I and our governess used to decorate it. There’s a present underneath for everyone. My mother does that. She’s very clever at knowing who enjoys a drink and who would rather have silk stockings than linen handkerchiefs. For the dinner, long trestle tables are laid up in the servants’ hall, covered with white cloths and decorated with wreaths of holly and ivy, and my father sits at the head of one and my mother at the other. It’s a proper Christmas dinner, with turkey and bread sauce and plum pudding to follow.’

Adeline thought that the traditional meal was hideously vulgar, and at her own Christmas table family and guests were served game, and the finest beef that the estate could offer, and her own favourite pudding, syllabub in crystal cups.

‘After the dinner the tables are cleared away and everyone dances. My father leads off with the housekeeper, and my mother with Glass, the butler. Isabel and I take our chances with the footmen, who are always so rigid with embarrassment that they can’t dance at all.’ Amy paused, smiling at the thought. ‘They can’t wait for us to go, and leave them with the maids. My brother Richard dances with the old woman who does the plain sewing and makes her roar with laughter. Then my father makes a little speech thanking everyone for a wonderful evening, and wishes them all a merry Christmas and we tiptoe away. The party goes on for hours after that. Isabel and I …’

Amy broke off and looked across the table at Helen. Her friend was listening, open-mouthed with fascination. There was no trace of envy or rancour in her face. ‘Go on,’ she ordered. ‘It’s just like in a film.’

‘Isabel and I walk across the park to the church. The gravel and the grass is always crackling with frost, but the church is warm. The verger has banked up the coke stove ready for early service. There are white and gold flowers on the altar, and around the pulpit and the font, and there’s always a nativity scene made by the estate children with a doll in the crib and a woollen donkey. It’s so quiet, utterly silent, and there’s that religious smell of candles and flowers and cold stone. Last year it was just before Isabel’s marriage. I remember praying for her to be happy. Oh damn.’ Amy’s hand came up to shade her eyes, but not before Helen had seen the tears. She heaved herself out of her chair and came to put her arm round Amy. ‘Tough, isn’t it?’ was all she said, but Amy felt the depth of her unspoken sympathy. It comforted her at once, but at the same time shamed her. The physical touch made Helen’s emaciated fragility so obvious, and yet the strength was all flowing the wrong way.

‘Oh, bugger it,’ Amy said, sniffing.

Helen laughed at once and let her go. ‘And you supposed to be a real lady. I wish I had something stronger in the house than bloody tea. Look, it’s nearly half past. Shall I yell for Jimmy to go round to the Jug for sixpenn’orth and we’ll have a Christmas toast?’

Regretfully, Amy shook her head. ‘I can’t. I’ve got to be on at six. Blaine’ll flay me if I get there late and reeking of drink as well, Christmas or not.’

They stood up and Helen turned on the single overhead bulb as Amy groped for her coat. The fire had burned low and they had been sitting in semi-darkness. They both winced now at the harshness of the light.

‘It’ll be a week, then?’ Helen asked casually.

‘Five days. I’ll be back to see in the New Year with you.’ Amy kept her voice equally casual, but a new anxiety was stabbing at her. In the bright light she saw that Helen looked ill. There were red patches on her cheekbones, and grey hollows under her eyes.

Amy suddenly thought of the fresh, sharp air at Chance and the soft beds in firelit rooms, and the tables abundantly heaped with the best of everything. How good a few days of that would be for Helen. It wouldn’t be enough, but it would be something. She reached out and grabbed Helen’s thin, hot hand.

‘Listen. I should have thought of it before. Why don’t you come with me? You, and Jim and Freda. I’ve taken guests for Christmas before. It won’t be …’

‘Not like us, you haven’t.’ Helen was laughing again. ‘Are you soft? How could you turn up there with us lot? Thanks, but no. We wouldn’t know where to stand or sit, and I’d be ill with the fright of it. Take me to your London house one day when there’s no one about and let me have a good stare. But not to stay, love.’ Seeing Amy’s face she added, ‘Look. You can’t change anything. I’m me and you’re you, and we’re friends. That’s enough. Don’t try and pretend we’re the same. We both know the difference. Just count yourself lucky you’re on the right side of it.’

There was no bitterness in her words. Helen was simply matter of fact. Amy started to say something fierce, but Helen was quicker. ‘Aw, I know you think you can do something, with all your meetings and leaflets.’ Amy had told her about Appleyard Street, and had shown her the pamphlets until Helen had dismissed it with ‘Your Commie tendencies are all guilt, y’know.’ Helen went on now. ‘But you can’t. The gap’s getting wider, not narrower, didn’t you know? I appreciate the gesture. But I can’t come home to the manor with you for Christmas.’

‘I didn’t ask you as a political gesture,’ Amy said stiffly. ‘I asked because you are my friend.’

‘Nor did I refuse as a political gesture. I don’t believe in politics. But it’s there, isn’t it? And you’re my friend, as well.’

‘I’d better go.’ Amy pulled her cape around her.

‘Here.’ Helen held out the holly-wrapped packages. ‘Don’t go without your presents.’

In the doorway, suddenly, they hugged each other.

‘Happy Christmas.’

‘Happy Christmas.’

As she fled down the street towards the hospital Amy heard Helen coughing, as if she had managed to contain the spasm all the time she had been with her.

The Christmas rituals at Chance were all performed with a kind of mechanical cheerfulness that depressed Amy deeply.

The house was full of the usual shifting crowd of guests who came and went over the holiday. Gerald had mustered a quartet of friends for shooting and cards, three of them equipped with fading, powdered wives who sat in the drawing room after dinner and listened with fascinated disapproval to the fast, cliquey gossip of Adeline’s women friends. Adeline’s set smoked and left the ashtrays full of lipsticked butts and drank complicated cocktails. They talked a great deal about people called Bunny and Buffy and Tiger, and laughed in flurries that baffled their powdered rural counterparts. Watching them, in her depressed mood, as they turned their long necks to listen to a new story or to sip at a champagne glass and their diamonds flashed, Amy was reminded of so many hooded cobras.

It seemed inevitable and yet sharply painful that her parents should pretend that everything was normal and as it should be. Adeline sparkled and clapped her hands to demand charades, or Clumps, or forfeits, and Gerald drank and gambled and went out all through the frosty days with the guns. She reflected that they were adept at it, after all. The keeping up of carefully controlled appearances must be more than second nature after so many years. Isabel’s absence, glaring at Amy through every minute of the day, was neither spoken of nor questioned. Peter Jaspert was never mentioned either. The acceptable match and the glittering marriage might never have been made.

The cobras knew, of course, all of them. But not a word was spoken.

It was almost worse, Amy thought, the way that Isabel had just been allowed to fade away, than if they had all been talking about her. For her sister she was there in every stone of the great house and every white-rimmed blade of grass across the park.

‘I miss Isabel. Don’t you?’ she answered sharply, when Adeline complained of her long face. Surprisingly, they found themselves alone in the drawing room in the mysterious hour between tea and the appearance of the first Lanvin sheath and white waistcoat before dinner. Amy was sunk into the depths of one of the sofas with an unopened book beside her, and Adeline was writing a letter, covering sheet after sheet of crisp blue paper with her leggy, energetic scrawl.

‘Of course I miss her. So what shall we do, sit in darkness and silence until she’s well again?’

‘No. Just not be quite so determinedly gay, perhaps.’

With an exasperated shrug Adeline screwed the cap on her gold pen and folded up her letter.

‘Gaiety is all there is. Without it, you might as well be in the grave, my darling one. Stop looking as if you’re carrying the cares of all the world on your shoulders and who knows? You might even find that you’re enjoying yourself. Not doing so won’t help Isabel, in any case, will it?’ When Amy didn’t answer, Adeline said more patiently, ‘Why don’t you go and find the boys? They were making you laugh last night. I saw them. At least twice.’

By ‘the boys’ Adeline meant Richard and Tony Hardy. To Amy’s surprise, Richard had turned up on Christmas Eve with Tony. Clearly Adeline had been expecting them both. Amy found herself placed next to Tony at dinner. They had seen each other two or three times since the night in Soho Square, but the old easiness between them had faltered a little. Yet on Christmas Eve in the ambiguous atmosphere of the servants’-hall party, Amy found herself liking him as much as ever.

The boys had indeed made her laugh. After the family and houseguests had left the dancing the three of them had gone upstairs and drunk quantities of brandy together. Richard was a natural mimic, and he had honed to perfection the set piece of Gerald thanking the staff for another year: ‘Ah … the family here at Chance … and we are a family you know, all of us, working together. Except for me, that is …’

Tony was the perfect, dry foil for Richard. Watching them over the rim of her glass, and all through the hours of Christmas Day with the dry headache that the brandy had given her, Amy understood why Richard’s antics seemed more frenzied than ever. He didn’t talk about her, but Amy knew that he was trying to fill the void that Isabel had left.

He could make everyone laugh, the cobras and their husbands and the powdered wives. Everyone except Gerald.

Now, on Boxing Night, Amy decided that Adeline was right. She would go and find the boys, and they would have a stiff drink together before the ritual of dinner. She kissed her mother, who nodded absently and went on with her animated scribbling.

Amy left the drawing room where the footman had just stirred the fire to a fresh, scented crackle and crossed the panelled height of the hallway. The family Christmas tree stood here, a blaze of white and silver light in the dimness, tipped with a diamanté star.

A handful of unopened presents remained from the great heap that had circled it yesterday, and at the sight of them Amy put her fingers up and touched her necklace. She had unwrapped her holly-sprigged packages alone in her bedroom. Helen had hoarded discarded woollens and had painstakingly unpicked them, choosing the gentlest blues and greens that blurred together, and had knitted them up into a soft scarf. Amy wore it to church on Christmas morning. Her present from Freda and Jim was a string of blue and green glass beads to match the scarf, carefully threaded by Jim and fastened with a pretty clasp that Freda had found and saved.

Amy was thinking of the three of them now as she hesitated by the Christmas tree, and wondered if their Christmas at Auntie Mag’s had been a happy one. Happier than her own at Chance, despite all the music and the exquisite food under the silver-domed dishes and the warmth of the crimson-throated log fires? Amy shivered a little. To find Richard and Tony, that was the thing, and share a large drink with them.

Instinctively she left the hall by the south door and walked quickly down a long, carpeted corridor where a colonnade of arched doors opened in summer on to the terrace. The arches were shrouded with heavy drawn curtains now and the corridor was filled with a muffled, undisturbed silence that seemed to cut it off from the rest of the great house. At the end of the corridor was a pair of intricately carved double doors that led into the orangery on the south side of the house. Amy paused, frowning slightly as she found herself in front of them and wondering why she had come here instead of any of the more obvious places.

But in the silence she pushed one of the carved doors and it swung smoothly open. At once the scent flooded out to her, a sharp reminder. Isabel and she had played for hours in the orangery as children. Breathing in the memories, Amy slipped inside.

The Chance orangery had been built in the eighteenth century in a severely classical style, with a long span of white-arched columns echoing the corridor that led to it. The house wall was lined with niches for prim classical statuary, and the floor was tiled with severe black and white marble blocks. But overhead the arches soared into a magnificent ogee-shaped glass roof, and in summer the sun poured into the orangery with almost tropical splendour. The Lovells who had built it had intended a fashionable adjunct where the ladies could parade gently in inclement weather, the trains of their dresses swishing gently on the marble floor, and it had stayed that way for almost a hundred and fifty years. But Gerald’s Victorian grandfather had been a traveller and a plantsman, and he had made the orangery his own. Over a long lifetime he had filled it with his botanical trophies until the arching fronds of palm trees brushed the glass roof, and the strange tendrils of sub-tropical creepers snaked treacherously across the floor. The old man had designed the ingenious stovehouse that heated his domain, and in the warmth the orchids with strange, sticky, pungent blooms flourished alongside weird growths that oozed with resinous gum. A family of greenfinches twittered and swooped in the thickening jungle.

Amy prowled down the central avenue, absorbing the scents of rich, dark earth and dripping leaves. The thick foliage swallowed the sound of her footsteps and the glass space around her was alive with other noises, the rustle of unfurling leaves and peeling bark, and the flutter of the finches. Like all the rest of the festive house the orangery was brightly lit, electric lamps flaring in sconces on the house wall. But the greenness dimmed it, and outside the pitch darkness pressed against the glass, misted and dribbled with condensation. Amy was about to turn away again, out of the oppressive air, when -somebody spoke.

She looked, and saw them in the little bay at the end of the orangery. There was a white-painted scrolled iron seat under a tree that hung green fingers down to hide it. Beside the seat was a stone statue of Pan, holding the pipes to his lips, with green moss clinging to the stone furrows of his beard.

Tony and Richard were facing each other, as if they had just stood up to continue their stroll and had paused to exchange a last remark. Amy opened her mouth to call out to them, and then she felt the hair lift at the nape of her neck and in the heat a cold, slow trickle run down her spine.

‘I don’t give a damn where we are,’ Richard said clearly. ‘Or a bugger, for that matter.’

‘I know that,’ Tony said. His voice was low, but something in it reminded her of Soho Square and the plane trees black against the indigo sky. By contrast the orangery felt clammy and the reek of it suffocated her.

‘Well, then,’ Richard said, and Amy heard Tony’s answer, ‘Not here.’

But they were still standing facing each other, and Tony reached out for Richard’s wrist and held it, and then he pressed the inner side against his cheek. Then, with a small movement as if his head and neck hurt him intolerably, Tony turned his face so that his mouth was pressed against the veins of Richard’s wrist. Richard was looking at Tony as she had never seen him look at anyone before, with all the posturing animation drained away, as vulnerable as a child and yet not a child at all any longer. With his free hand he touched Tony’s bent head, and then Tony looked up and their eyes met.

Amy stood rigid, listening to the whispering leaves and the insistent drip of condensation. She was aching to move, to be anywhere else in the world, but she was transfixed. She was longing to be blind and deaf, but every movement and sound was painfully magnified.

The chink of green air between the two familiar profiles had closed. She saw Richard’s hand again, with the crested gold ring he wore on his little finger, moving to touch Tony’s cheek in a gesture of almost unbearable tenderness. It was the most fleeting of kisses, but it was the longest second Amy had ever known. When it was gone, everything had changed. It was as if the orangery with its snaking tendrils and weird blossoms had shaken, and all the world beyond it, to jolt the pieces of a puzzle she had only been able to glance at. The shudder had slid the pieces into place, and Amy saw the picture now with all its depths of shade and rolling contours. What had been flat and coarsely black and white before was suddenly grained with infinite subtlety. In all the surge of feelings that followed, she tasted humiliation at her own hopeless, naïve yearnings for Tony Hardy, and the opposite relief of understanding at last why he had seemed to reject her.

But Richard? What did it mean for Richard? The new landscape lurched, threateningly steep, as Amy thought of her father, and then without warning of Airlie, proud in his Sam Browne belt.

Amy looked past the vivid picture and realized that Richard and Tony were watching her. Richard was angry and in Tony’s face she read sympathy and an echo of her own relief. She lifted her chin and squared her shoulders deliberately. ‘Don’t think I was spying on you. I wasn’t. I’m going now. I didn’t see anything. I don’t know anything about it.’

She turned and walked back up the green-arched aisle to the carved doors, and she closed them firmly behind her. Her hands and legs were trembling as she walked on. Was that the right thing to have done? Was that what they would have wanted?

As she retraced her steps down the silent corridor and past the glittering tree Amy felt the layers of security and comfortable childhood assumptions drop painfully away. She was afraid suddenly that she didn’t know anything, or anybody. Not her own sister and brother, certainly not her mother and father, or any of the truths that mattered about Tony Hardy, or Moira O’Hara, or any of the people who filled her days. All she knew were little, trivial things, and attitudes solidified in her through privilege and habit. Helen Pearce in her dim basement room, existing on her terrible diet of penny buns and tea, knew a thousand times more than she did.

Amy went slowly up the grand staircase, feeling the smooth-rubbed wood of the banister curve and twist upwards under her hand. She opened the door of her room and saw the folds of her evening dress laid out ready by the maid. Her evening slippers stood side by side, ready for her to step into them. Amy wanted to laugh, but she wanted to cry even more. She knew, as she stood there staring at her satin shoes, that she was experiencing her first moment of adult loneliness. There was nowhere to hide, or anyone to run to so that her hurt could be rubbed better. She had only herself, and here and now.

Amy wasn’t going to let herself cry.

Instead she went to her jewel case and took out a pair of diamanté pendant earrings that she had dismissed as too flamboyant. She clipped them on to her ears and then she wound her hair up to leave her long neck bare. She put the pretty pastel-coloured dress back in her wardrobe and took out a slim black one that flared around her calves. Sitting in front of her mirror, she painted her mouth and rubbed colour on to her cheeks with the little pink puff from its gilt case. Then she looked at herself once more in the mirror, seeing a red-lipped stranger with very bright eyes, and went down to the drawing room for cocktails before dinner.

Later, fortified by gin and wedged in her place at the dinner table, she looked down the polished length of it and saw Richard, relentlessly amusing his neighbours. Tony was opposite her, turning his glass round in his fingers. She smiled at him, a smile of perfectly normal friendliness, and gave her attention back to her neighbour on the left-hand side. From her place at the foot of her table, Adeline nodded her approval of her daughter’s bright new demeanour.

Gaiety is all there is. Well, Amy thought. She would give it a try.

She had understood something tonight, and understood it with startling clarity. She couldn’t live Isabel’s life for her, or Richard’s for him. She had only her own. And with the knowledge of that, to compensate her for the new, chilly loneliness, Amy thought that she had gained the first, durable shell of maturity.

In the morning she went into the billiards room where Richard and Tony were lounging against the big green table, and kissed them both goodbye. Then Adeline’s chauffeur drove her to the local station in the Bentley and Amy caught the London train. From Euston she plunged into the grimy clatter of the Underground with her thoughts already fixed on the Royal Lambeth.

There was always work, Amy told herself.

For the next weeks, with the rest of her set, Amy worked an eighteen-hour day. The crucial first batch of examinations was looming ahead of them.

‘I’ll never make it,’ Moira groaned. ‘I might just as well head back to Mother Ireland now. Perhaps I could get myself a little job in the draper’s in Portair.’

‘Don’t be so spineless,’ Amy retorted. ‘And if you’re not going to do your own work, at least shut up and let me get on with mine.’

‘I don’t know what’s come over you, Lovell. You used to be such a normal person. Got to come top, have you?’

‘I just want to pass these exams,’ Amy told her with an attempt at patience. ‘I need something to go right, just now.’

Moira looked shrewdly at her. ‘How’s your sister?’

‘The same.’

Isabel didn’t want to leave Thorogood House. Adeline showed signs of winning her battle with Peter Jaspert for Isabel’s guardianship, but when she had mentioned Lausanne and Dr Ahrends, Isabel had said in her quiet, firm way, ‘I want to stay here.’ She had made a friend of one of the other patients, and they sat in the day room together and walked in the grounds under the dripping rhododendron trees.

Amy and Richard went to see her, and came away silenced by Isabel’s remoteness. They travelled back to London and had dinner together at Bruton Street, but they never mentioned the orangery. Yet Amy felt that Richard held her less firmly at arm’s length than before. As their concern for Isabel drew them closer Richard tried less hard to be witty and surprising and let her occasionally glimpse his inner, reflective self. Amy loved her brother very much. Resolutely she had convinced herself that it wasn’t abnormal for boys to have love affairs with other boys. The judgement made her feel sage and mature. It was a phase that Richard would surely grow out of, and then he would marry and have children like everyone else. More than like everyone else, because Richard’s children would be Lovells. And Tony Hardy wasn’t difficult to love. She knew that, painfully well, herself. If Tony was truly homosexual – well, he had his own life too. Even with her new maturity Amy couldn’t bring herself to speculate beyond that. After Christmas at Chance Tony didn’t write to her or telephone again, and she accepted it sadly as she had accepted her loneliness.

The weeks dragged and then accelerated past towards the examinations. Amy had worked to the point where she felt nauseated by the sight of her file of lecture notes and dreamed at night of burns that she had forgotten how to dress and boils that swelled under her fingers.

There was little time for anything, even visiting Helen. In the few, snatched times that they spent together Amy was distressed by Helen’s listlessness and by the cough that had taken hold of her yet again.

Once, not expected, she came plodding down the street through drifting snow that piled against the steps and capped the black area railings. The door to Helen’s basement room was ajar and she was pushing it open as she heard Helen shout, ‘Look at it. Get out, will you? Go away. Don’t come back. I hate you. All of it.’ Thoroughly alarmed, Amy went in. To her astonishment there were only Freda and Jim, white-faced, and Helen at the table with her head in her hands. On the rubbed, faded linoleum were the tracks of dirty, melting snow that the excited children had tramped in with them. Hand in hand they pushed past her and escaped into the harsh white light again. The door slammed dully.

Amy went behind the screen at the sink and brought out a bucket and a floorcloth. Carefully she dried and polished the floor, and when she had finished she went and put her arm around Helen.

‘I don’t hate them,’ Helen said, her voice muffled by her hair and hands. ‘They’re everything in the world, and I bloody yell at them every hour of the day. They’d be better off on the parish, anyway.’

Amy stroked her hair back, feeling how hot she was. ‘Hush. You’re tired. And ill, you know that. I think you should be in hospital again.’

‘No.’

‘Please, Helen.’

‘It’s winter, or haven’t you noticed? Who’s going to find the money to feed them and keep them warm while I lie in bed?’

‘I will,’ Amy said quietly.

‘No, thanks.’

Helen hadn’t even paused to think and the abruptness of her rejection stung Amy.

‘Why not? Don’t be so selfish. Why kill yourself out of pride?’

There was a long, quiet moment. Then Helen said, ‘You don’t know everything, do you? If pride was all you had, you’d know better than to say that. People like you make me laugh.’

Then Amy understood how close to the edge Helen had come. She bit back the sudden fear and said gently, ‘Don’t argue with me as well. Shall I put the kettle on?’

Helen shrugged with exhaustion. ‘There isn’t any milk.’

Amy went out to the dark, cramped and pungent-smelling shop at the corner and bought a basket of supplies. When she came back she made Helen a cup of tea sweetened with condensed milk, just as she liked it, and a piece of bread and butter that her friend didn’t even touch. Amy said nothing, but, remembering what Helen had done once before when she was there, put a hambone with some chopped carrots and onions in a pan and left it on the ring to simmer for soup. There would be something for Freda and Jim when they came in again, and perhaps the savoury smell would tempt Helen.

‘Where have they gone?’ Amy asked, and Helen smiled lopsidedly.

‘Mag’s, I should think. Oh, they won’t be huddled in a doorway somewhere, if that’s what you’re thinking. They can take care of themselves, if they have to. Don’t worry.’

‘It isn’t Jim and Freda I’m worrying about.’

‘Thanks.’ Helen didn’t even have the energy to smile.

When the time came Amy had to force herself to leave and make her way up the deserted street once more. It was snowing again, wet flakes driven cruelly by the wind. She would have to come much more often, every day if possible, and at least she could bring food. Helen had accepted the first basket, that was something.

If pride was all you had, you’d know better than to say that.

The words dinned in Amy’s head as she put on her starched uniform again.

The exams came, almost an anticlimax after the build-up that the students had given them. Amy wrote her papers, ruthlessly clearing her head of everything else before each one. She went through her practical tests under the granite stares of Blaine and the sister tutor, never confusing a pressure dressing with a burn dressing and bandaging crooked legs in perfect overlapping layers.

The results appeared with surprising speed. The sister pinned up a typewritten list on the faded green baize-covered board in the study hall ante-room. Dorothy Hewitt’s name headed it, to nobody’s surprise, but Amy’s was immediately beneath.

‘Well done, Lovell,’ breathed Moira O’Hara in awed admiration.

Mary Morrow was standing nearby, looking at her own name halfway down the list. She turned sharply towards them. ‘Are congratulations really in order? If they’ve got themselves a precious candidate like Lovell, they’re not going to let her come bottom, are they now?’

‘I would have thought so, just to prove their egalitarian principles,’ Moira retorted. ‘Lovell doesn’t get any privileges. She’s scrubbed as many sluice-rooms as you.’

Amy put her hand on Moira’s arm and dragged her away still protesting over her shoulder at Morrow.

‘Why didn’t you speak up for yourself?’ Moira demanded indignantly. ‘I’ve never heard anything like the old cow.’

Amy shrugged, pretending indifference. ‘Why bother?’ But she had seen the naked resentment in Mary Morrow’s face and it had shocked her. It was hard, Amy thought, to be hated just for being in the place you had been born in, and not for anything to do with yourself at all.

Amy was given a silver pin for her apron, and Dorothy Hewitt received the gold one from Sister Tutor herself. New student intakes were already coming up behind their set, and the drudgery of hours spent carbolizing bedsteads and brushing mattresses passed to them. There was more proper nursing, and less numbing exhaustion from sheer physical overwork. Even Moira O’Hara could begin to believe that she might, after all, reach the dizzy grandeur of State Registered Nurse.

Not very many nights after receiving her silver pin, Amy woke up to someone knocking on the door of her room. It was an insistent tapping, not loud enough to wake anyone else, and although she ached to plunge her head back under the pillows, Amy was already awake enough to know that it wouldn’t stop or go away until she answered it.

‘Moira?’ she mumbled. ‘Sa’matter?’

The tapping went on. She would have to get out of bed and open the door. Amy stumbled to it and jerked it open, ready to hiss a protest at whoever it was. Standing outside was a girl from her set, fully dressed in uniform and with her cape wrapped around her. She glanced up and down the corridor as if she was afraid that she might have been followed and then gasped, breathless with running, ‘I’m on nights on Talbot. I’ve come over in my break. There’s a friend of yours been brought in and she’s calling for you.’

The corridor went cold, and the blackness seemed to thicken around them.

‘Helen,’ Amy said mechanically. ‘Is it Helen?’ In her head she was already planning what she would have to do. Dress in her uniform, pull her cap on. Duck across and into the hospital as if she was on duty, and up to Talbot on the sixth floor. Talbot was the isolation and fever ward. Why was Helen there, instead of down on the chest ward?

‘Pearce, her name is,’ the other nurse told her. ‘She’s bad. I thought I’d better come. Lovell, I’ve got to get back now I’ve told you …’

‘Wait. Who’s the staff on Talbot tonight?’

‘Corcoran.’

That wasn’t so bad. Corcoran was slow-moving, and kind-hearted. Amy had worked with her and earned her approval.

‘Tell Helen I’m coming.’ The other nurse was already running, skidding out of sight around the angle of the corridor. ‘Thanks,’ Amy whispered after her. Her heart was thudding as she pulled on her uniform and her breath was tangling in her chest as she wrestled with the ridiculous buttons. She’s bad. She’s bad.

The hostel night porter was asleep in his cubicle. Amy ran through the icy wind and reached the hospital nurses’ entrance, and then made herself slow down as she reached the second porter in his box. She put her fingers up to the starched wings of her cap and then breathed in to steady her voice. The porter glanced up at her curiously, knowing that no one came on or off duty at two in the morning.

‘Two short on Talbot tonight,’ Amy said. ‘So they’ve pulled me in. And I’ve already done eight today.’ The man nodded, commiserating, and turned back to his folded newspaper. Amy walked briskly past him, and once out of sight she ran at the stairs counting the steps blankly in her head. Sixth floor. Which way? Her friend was hovering at the double doors, a box of fresh dressings in her hand.

‘Isolation four,’ she directed her. ‘Corcoran’s down the main ward. I’m supposed to be watching your friend.’

Amy glided past the grim isolation cubicles until she came to number four. Inside the bare box Helen was lying on her side, her thin hand hooked like a claw over the white sheet. She didn’t speak or move her head. Amy knelt at the side of the bed so that their eyes were level and they looked at each other. Helen’s eyes were like dark holes and the blood had sunk out of her face to leave her lips as white as the sheets. Gently Amy touched her hand. She realized at the touch that Helen was going to die, here in this bare cream room, without even the photograph of Freda and Jim beside her.

Impotent fury flared in Amy as she looked wildly around. There was nothing on the locker except a covered sputum bowl. She snatched up the chart from the foot of the bed and read off the height of Helen’s fever. Dr Davis had been in at eleven-thirty and had gone away again, almost certainly to bed. There was nothing they could do for Helen, and so they had left her out of the way here, alone. But for a junior nurse who had broken the rules to run for Amy, Helen would have died as isolated as she had lived. Amy knelt again and looked into the white face. Helen’s eyes were filmed, and she couldn’t be sure that she even knew Amy had come at last.

‘Helen,’ she whispered, ‘it’s Amy. Don’t go.’ The eyes didn’t even flicker.

Cold anger made Amy feel stiff and dry. She knelt in silence, her back rigid, listening to the night noises of the hospital and thinking it was like a great unsensing machine. She hated the hospital, and everything outside it as well for the waste of Helen Pearce.

Footsteps squeaked up to the door of the room, but Amy didn’t turn her head and they retreated again after a moment’s pause. Gently Amy slid her arm under Helen’s shoulders so that her head was cradled, and laid her own head close to it. Helen seemed to be looking nowhere, staring at blankness. The minutes passed slowly, and Amy felt the anger solidifying inside her like a rock. There would be no starting again for Helen, no hope that tomorrow would be happier, or different, or fairer. No anything.

Her head lay heavily on Amy’s arms, and the circulation tingled and shot tiny points of pain into Amy’s fingers, reminding her bitterly of her own vitality.

Amy felt the spasm as it first stirred in Helen’s chest. It gathered force terrifyingly, shaking her as if the bed, the whole room was moving instead of just the emaciated body lying in it. The cough never broke free of the tattered lungs. Instead the blood came, first a black gob of it that slid between Helen’s lips before her mouth opened and the red bubbled out, flecked with foam and spreading over the pillow and into her black hair.

Amy never moved.

The pool of bright blood engulfed them both, soaking the starched cuffs of Amy’s uniform and trickling warm and sticky under her cheek as she held Helen in her arms. Outside the room the night noises of the hospital went on without faltering until at last the blood stopped rushing. Amy felt the last, shallow flutter of breath.

She looked into the dark eyes again and saw that Helen was still staring into blankness. Slowly, with infinite gentleness, Amy slid her arm from under the head that had suddenly grown unbearably heavy. Blood had soaked her sleeve and glued her fingers, and her hand felt bloated and heavy with cramp. Carefully Amy wiped her hand clean on her crackling apron and then with white, creased fingertips she closed Helen’s eyes. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, and her own voice shook her in the infinite silence contained inside the shabby cream walls.

Behind her the cubicle door opened. As if from a long way off, Amy heard the crisp rustle of uniforms. ‘Who’s this? Nurse? Lovell, what are you doing on the ward?’

It was Staff Nurse Corcoran, followed by a sister, a nurse Amy didn’t know. Behind them Amy glimpsed Mary Morrow, shocked fascination and righteous expectation mingled in equal parts in her expression. Morrow must be the other junior on duty tonight. It was Morrow who had brought the staff and sister, of course.

‘Lovell?’ It was the sister. Hospital discipline was affronted. Amy would have to explain herself. The inappropriateness of it, with Helen’s closed face still warm under her hands, made the core of anger set still harder.

‘She’s my friend,’ Amy said. ‘She’s dead.’

The staff nurse was already moving, lifting Helen and turning her in the soaked scarlet mess of sheets. The sister stared at Amy as if she was struck dumb by the towering height of her misconduct.

‘She’s dead,’ Amy shouted. ‘What do your bloody petty rules matter?’

‘Lovell,’ the woman repeated sharply, ‘before you leave this room you will tell me exactly what happened with this patient.’

They were laying Helen flat. Mary Morrow was bending over her, putting her arms straight and then covering her poor face with the sheet. Amy wanted to drag them away from her bedside, to wash the blood herself and then to sit with Helen in the silent room. But they wouldn’t let her do even that. Of course they wouldn’t let her.

In a hard, unwavering voice Amy told them what they wanted to know. The sister nodded, her little mouth pursed even tighter.

‘Very well. You will come with me to my office while I put this in the night book. You will sign the report, and so will I and Staff Nurse Corcoran. Then the front hall porter will escort you back to the hostel, and you will stay there until you have seen Matron …’

The little recital went on. Amy closed her ears and found she could just control the anger. The black rock was swelling inside her and threatening to burst out. She’s dead, her own voice echoed in her head, silently answering the sister. She’s dead, curse you all …

Amy carried the rock with her to the sister’s office, and then back through the freezing darkness to the hostel. Once she was alone in her room she sat down on the upright chair, her head bent. She was staring down at her sleeves and apron where the blood was drying, brown and stiff.

‘Helen,’ Amy whispered again, ‘I’m sorry.’

She was apologizing for the indignity of death in the Royal Lambeth Hospital, and for her own part in that. Much more, she was apologizing from her heart for the unfairness that had left Amy sitting warm and alive while Helen’s face was covered by a hospital sheet. The great, unfair gulf had always been there. Helen had seen it and she had never resented it, while Amy had naïvely tried to pretend that it didn’t exist. They would never bridge it now. Amy remembered that she had never even taken Helen to Bruton Street as she had promised. She had, after all, allowed their friendship to lie in its watertight hole as if she was ashamed of it.

‘No,’ Amy said angrily. ‘Never.’ The first tears fell on her apron, and darkened the brown blood all over again.

*

Amy had fallen asleep at last in her soiled uniform. When the terrified new student came in the morning to summon her to the matron, Amy had to change her clothes. Instead of hurrying she moved deliberately, as if each familiar action was of vital, separate importance. She stood in the matron’s office for half an hour. All she could remember afterwards was her feeling of incredulity that this catalogue of her professional shortcomings was being delivered in the face of Helen’s death.

Amy was warned that her failure to report Helen’s haemorrhage to the senior nurse was gravely negligent. Her very presence on the ward, unsupervised, was an act of sabotage.

‘Do you have anything to say?’ the matron asked.

Amy checked the thousand things that might have spilled out. ‘She was my friend,’ she said. The matron’s expression didn’t flicker. So friendship didn’t count then. At length Amy heard that the Royal Lambeth Hospital was not proposing to deprive her of her studentship. She was to hand back her silver pin, and she was to forfeit so many days’ leave. That was all.

A student nurse had broken all the rules and had been reprimanded and punished. The great machine that was the Royal Lambeth sailed majestically on.

And Helen was dead.

Helen was buried in the churchyard of St Saviour’s Church, Lambeth. Amy couldn’t attend the funeral. It took place at three in the afternoon, when she was on the afternoon shift.

At six o’clock, when her duty ended, she put on her cape and left the hospital, walking rapidly through the freezing slush. The church stood in an unlit cul-de-sac off a much smaller side street, the bulk of its tower black against the livid city sky. The graveyard gate was open. It was a small enclosure, surrounded on three sides by crowded terraces and separated from a bare playground on the third by a rusting wire fence.

The graveyard was almost full. Amy walked past the headstones to the last row, where there was a mound of raw earth and ice. There were two or three bunches of flowers on the earth. One was a little posy, its label already sodden with damp: ‘To our dear Helen, ever your loveing Freda and Jim.’

Amy stood with her head bent. She had brought no flowers.

Somewhere close at hand a train rattled by. It would be full of office workers on their way home, looking forward to food and their firesides after another day.

No more days for Helen.

Amy bent down to feel the earth. It was heavy and sticky, and the cold seemed to touch through to her bones. For a moment she crouched there, frozen herself, and then another train passed. This time Amy glimpsed the chain of yellow lights between the houses. Stiffly she stood up again. It was still anger rather than grief that weighed her down. But there was nothing to keep her in the sooty graveyard. Helen had gone. Amy turned away from the icy earth and the chilled flowers and walked back between the headstones to the gate and the roadway.

The old street where Helen had lived was close at hand. Amy came down the area steps and saw that there was a light in the window. She tapped on the door and it was opened a crack by a small, wiry woman who stared defensively out at her.

‘I’m Helen’s friend, Amy Lovell. I couldn’t come to the church this afternoon.’

The crack widened a little, but not enough to let her in.

‘Are you Aunt Mag? I came to see if I could do anything. Are Freda and Jim there?’

At last Mag opened the door and Amy followed her into the room. Freda and Jim were sitting side by side on the truckle-bed. The blankets had been removed and were folded in a neat, threadbare pile. Glancing into the cupboard room beyond, Amy saw that the big bed Helen and Freda had shared was similarly stripped. The mantelpiece was bare of its plush cover and the precious photographs. Even the glass shade had been removed from the single light.

‘What’s going to happen?’ Amy asked.

Mag stuck her hands in the pockets of her print apron. ‘I won’t let them go on the parish,’ she said. ‘Not in that orphanage. They’ll come ‘ome with me for as long as I can manage. Freda’ll be old enough to bring in a bit herself, soon.’ Mag saw Amy’s troubled glance at their dismantled home. ‘They can’t stay ‘ere, can they?’

Amy tried to look at the children. They shrank closer together, not wanting to meet her eyes. Jim’s face was grimy and reddened where he had rubbed at the tears with his knuckles.

Amy had been Helen’s friend, not theirs. To them, in spite of the presents, the glass beads and the clockwork car and the red cap and skirt, she belonged to the other side. She represented power and authority just because of the way she looked and spoke, and all three of them were wary of her. It was hard, Amy thought, with sudden bitterness. She remembered Mary Morrow and then with vivid clarity she saw Nick Penry, with his black hair and blue-scarred hands, in the nursery at Bruton Street.

‘I’d like to help,’ she said abruptly. None of them looked at her. ‘If money would help…’ The clumsiness of it stirred her anger again.

‘Nah,’ Mag said quickly. ‘We’ll manage, won’t we? Freda? Jim?’

It was exactly the same rapid rejection that Helen herself had dealt her. People like you make me laugh, Helen had said. And: If all you’ve got is your pride …

Amy opened her handbag and took out a piece of paper. She wrote on it her name and the hostel address, and the address of the Bruton Street house as well, and then she folded it up and gave it to Mag. Mag put the paper in her apron pocket.

‘If you change your mind,’ Amy said into the silence.

She turned to go, looking around the room for the last time. The screen that Helen had used to hide the sink was folded up, exposing the buckets and a little zinc bath. On the floor in the middle of the room was a cardboard suitcase, open, with Helen’s few clothes folded in it. On the top was the green cashmere jacket.

‘You gave her that, didn’t you?’ Mag said. ‘Do you want to take it?’

Amy stood stock-still. The anger that she had carried with her since Helen’s death was suddenly gone. It was futile to be angry, with the hospital or the world outside it or with Helen herself for leaving so abruptly. And in place of the anger came grief, swooping and choking.

She shook her head blindly. ‘No. You wear it. Helen would want that.’ Somehow she crossed the room, passing the truckle-bed. She wanted to hug Freda and Jim but their hunched shoulders and averted faces rejected her still. Instead she reached and just touched Freda’s tangled hair with her fingertips. ‘Goodbye Jim, Freda. If you need me …’

Amy knew that she wouldn’t see them again. She reached the door, opened it and closed it again, and climbed the steps into the streaming street.

In the darkness she cried. The wind whipped the tears and stung her face as the grief took hold of her and she cried for the pity of everything. It seemed to Amy then that the quicksands were engulfing Helen and swallowing her up as if her years had never been. In a single day the home and everything she had fought and scrubbed for had been folded into a suitcase and carried away.

Nor was it just Helen that Amy cried for. It was for Isabel and the baby Peter, for Richard and Tony, her mother and father, and for Nick Penry and his wife and child.

And then she heard Helen’s voice, as clearly as if she was walking beside her huddled against the wind.

‘Tough, isn’t it? At least you’re on the right side of it.’

That’s what she would have said. They were still there, Freda and Jim and Mag and Amy herself, and so they were on the right side of it. Nor had the quicksands swallowed Helen. They would remember her. Amy could only grope at the idea through her sorrow, but she already understood that for the rest of her life at times that truly mattered she would act or think in a particular way because that was what Helen Pearce would have done.

Amy reached the hostel door. The porter peered at her and then reached for his book for her to initial. Amy was not allowed to be out after eight o’clock without the matron’s specific permission. Tonight she signed herself in without having to swallow her usual anger at such pettiness. She was still shackled by the fact that Helen was dead.

In her pigeonhole a batch of envelopes was waiting for her from the afternoon’s post. They were thick, cream or white envelopes addressed to the Hon’ble Amy Lovell in confident black handwriting and mostly forwarded from Bruton Street. She knew that they all contained invitations, engraved and gilt-edged, for dances and dinners. Usually Amy wrote her well-schooled formal refusal. Tonight she picked up the sheaf of them and dropped them into the waste-bin unopened. Then she went on up the dingy stairs to her room.