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Nantlas 1933

Mari climbed the steep stairs, lifting each foot as if it hurt her, and ducked under the low lintel into Dickon’s tiny room. He hadn’t moved since she had left him to go down and warm his food. Mari sat down in her place beside the bed and stirred the contents of the bowl, then held a spoonful out to him.

‘Come on now, Dickon bach,’ she coaxed. ‘Eat this for your mam, will you?’

The little boy’s head seemed too heavy on his thin neck for him to lift it off the pillow, but when the smell of the potatoes reached him he pushed the spoon away. Mari stared at him, dry-eyed with desperation.

‘You must eat something, lovely. You won’t get better if you don’t eat.’

Dickon made no response, but he kept his eyes fixed on his mother. Even before his illness he had been small for his eight years, and now his body was shrivelled and brittle. His eyes seemed to have shrunk into a bony helmet.

‘Dickon?’ She held the spoon again, invitingly.

Mari knew from the long years of caring for him that Dickon understood what she was saying. His way of answering had always been by look and touch, even though he had proudly mastered a dozen or so important words as well as ‘Mam’ and ‘Daa-ad’ and ‘More’.

In the last years, under her patient, repetitive tuition, Dickon had learned to feed himself and even to keep himself clean and dry. Mari had begun to hope that against all the odds he might go on improving, might even one day be capable of living a sheltered life of his own. But with the illness he had slipped back into helpless infancy. Mari had to boil the old copper every day for the heavy washing, and she fed him in slow spoonfuls like a baby.

Dickon was looking at her now, and telling her explicitly that he couldn’t eat the food. She glanced down at the waxy chunks of potato in the thin, greyish liquid and felt a surge of exhausted anger. She didn’t want to eat it herself, and she was fit and well. She put the bowl down, out of sight beside the bed, and straightened the pillows behind Dickon’s head.

‘All right then.’ She smiled at him brightly. ‘I’ll make us both a cup of tea. With conny milk, just like you like it best. There’s a tin that your nan brought.’

‘Yes,’ Dickon said in his slurred voice. Mari knew that he wanted to agree, to please her. She turned away abruptly so that he wouldn’t see the tears. Fear of losing him had begun to possess every hour that Mari was conscious, the fear even stronger than her impotent anger and bitterness.

‘Here’s your dad,’ she called from the top of the stairs, hearing Nick’s boots in the entry.

‘Daa-ad.’ There was pleasure in the child’s voice. When Nick went up to him, he would hold out his arms for his father’s hug. Mari was Dickon’s limbs and tongue, but Nick was the sun in his sky. Mari would once have smiled at the thought, but now her face was stiff and cold.

‘How is he?’

Nick was standing aside from the foot of the stairs to let Mari come down, because there was no room for them to pass in the steep space.

‘The same. He’s eaten nothing.’

They passed without looking at each other, and Nick went up the stairs. Mari made tea, spooning condensed milk recklessly into Dickon’s special cup. When she took the cups upstairs she found Nick sitting with his arm around Dickon while with his free hand he drew charcoal pictures on the backs of old handbills. Dickon’s face was faintly flushed with pink and he was laughing his funny, braying laugh. Mari silently gave them their tea and drank her own downstairs while she was waiting for the washing water to boil on the reluctant fire.

When Nick reappeared she was in the tiny scullery, feeding wet sheets from a tin bucket through the wooden mangle.

‘He’s asleep. He seems better today,’ Nick said carefully. When Mari didn’t answer he went on, ‘I think he’s on the mend. Perhaps that doctor didn’t know what he was on about.’

‘He knew what he knew,’ Mari said. ‘And that was that he couldn’t do anything for him. And that he won’t get better without the specialist.’

It was old, painful ground. They had covered and recovered it a hundred times. Mari had wrapped Dickon in an old shawl, Nick had lifted him, too easily, and they had carried him to the Ferndale bus. At the end of the journey, after gritting their teeth at every jolt, they had seen an old doctor, a friend of Myfanwy Jones, the midwife. Nick and Mari had watched anxiously as the doctor examined Dickon, running his square hands over his tiny body and peering into his mouth and eyes with a small light.

After the examination, the old man had frowned and eased himself upright, pulling the points of his waistcoat down over his stomach.

‘I’m a country quack, that’s all,’ he told them. ‘I’d say it’s a kind of progressive blood deficiency, some form of pernicious anaemia perhaps.’ He had explained again quickly, using simple words in case they hadn’t understood him, and Nick had frowned at the assumption. Mari had touched his arm warningly.

‘But you shouldn’t take my word for it,’ the doctor rumbled on. ‘Anyway, I couldn’t treat him properly. With children like this, any diagnosis and treatment is complicated. There’s a big man in Cardiff now, a blood specialist. I could write him a letter for you. I don’t know how you’re placed …’

And the kindly doctor had broken off and looked at the shawl Dickon had been wrapped in, at Mari’s tight dress that was faded under the arms and at the seams, and at Nick’s decaying boots.

‘Thank you,’ Nick had said stiffly. ‘We’ll manage. If you would write the letter for us. And your own bill, if you would …’

The doctor had turned away to wash his hands. ‘There’s no charge. I’m glad to do it, for Myfanwy Jones.’

So Nick and Mari had wrapped Dickon up again and carried the uncomplaining bundle back on the bus to Nantlas.

The doctor’s letter in its stiff, white envelope still stood on the mantelpiece, tucked safely behind the Barry Island china mug. They had as much hope of finding the money to see the big man in Cardiff as they had of retiring in comfort to the Gower peninsula.

‘He seems better today,’ Nick repeated. He was struggling to convince himself, Mari knew that. She had tried the same thing herself, and she had failed. The truth was that Dickon wouldn’t get better, not without the help that they couldn’t afford. She didn’t answer, and went on turning the handle of the mangle so that the wooden rollers clamped on the sheets and sent the water dripping and splashing into the enamel bowl set underneath.

Nick stood awkwardly for a moment with his arms dangling at his sides, and then took a single step so that he was beside her. He put his arms around her waist and rested his cheek against her hair, pulling her towards him.

‘Mari,’ he murmured. ‘It will be all right. Dickon will be all right.’

His wilful blindness pierced Mari’s shell of control. She let go of the handle of the mangle and it swung backwards, clanking. The sheets fell and dragged on the gritty floor, and she just let them lie. Her resentment of him, her bitterness and her despondency boiled up inside her and it seemed for an instant that she hated Nick Penry and all their life together. She snatched at his sleeve, her white face frightening him.

‘Come here,’ she hissed at him. ‘With me.’ Still gripping his sleeve, Mari dragged Nick through the back kitchen to the foot of the stairs. Half-pulling and half-dragging, she made him follow her up to Dickon’s room. Only when she had knelt down beside the low bed did she let him go, because she was turning back the sheet and worn blankets that covered the sleeping child.

‘Look,’ she whispered to Nick. ‘Just look at him. You think he’s getting better?’

Her hands were shaking as she undid the buttons of the child’s pyjamas. They were Nick’s last pair, cut down, and they flapped pathetically as the boy stirred in his sleep. Mari pulled the folds of them away from Dickon’s chest. The ribs stood out under the white skin as sharp as knife handles.

Mari did up the buttons one by one, and covered him up again. Then she stooped and picked up the bowl of cold potatoes.

‘See this? See? He hasn’t eaten anything for two days. Two days, Nick. And are you surprised, when this muck is all I have to give him? He should be having eggs, and fruit, and little bits of chicken and rich gravy to tempt him, and proper soups full of goodness, not this old dishwater …’

Watching her, Nick thought with shocked detachment that the old, sensual vitality he had loved in his wife had drained down into this one lascivious recital of all the good things that they couldn’t give to their sick son.

‘We’re lucky to have what we’ve got,’ he said quietly. ‘Some don’t have even that much.’

‘I don’t care about some. I care about us. No, not us. Not you, Nick. I care about Dickon. I don’t want him to die just because of you.’ Mari was almost screaming, the high, hysterical note in her voice cutting through Nick like a wire. Behind her, he saw Dickon’s wide-open terrified eyes.

‘Don’t frighten the boy,’ he said.

Mari broke off at once and knelt down to soothe Dickon. ‘There, lamb,’ she murmured. ‘Your dad’s set me off again. You go back to sleep and take no notice.’

Dickon’s eyelids fluttered as he drifted into sleep again. Silently they crept down to the kitchen and Mari closed the door on the stairs.

‘What do you want me to do?’ Nick asked.

Mari smiled, a thin, down-turning smile that aged her already lined face. ‘Where have you been?’ she demanded.

Nick sighed, knowing what was coming. ‘Mari …’ he began, but she cut him short.

‘Where?’

‘I’ve been to a meeting. The Associated Collieries rate per ton is being cut again. For God’s sake, they’ll be asking the lads to pay for the privilege, next, of dragging the bloody coal out of the ground for them. Half of the lads want to sit down and take it because any rate is better than nothing, and they’re drifting away into the pit unions faster and faster because they think they’ll hold on to their few shillings that way. Christ, Mari, the Fed’s all we’ve got and we’ve got to make them see that nothing will ever get better for us unless they stick to it. It matters more than ever now.’

The fervour for workers’ solidarity that had always galvanized Nick still reverberated in his voice, but Mari read the bleakness in his face. Even Nick was beginning to lose heart. He was seeing the decay spreading across the coalfields as clearly as anyone as the world markets for coal contracted, as the pit owners cut more corners, and as thousands of men struggled humiliatingly for jobs and were paid less and less for the back-breaking hours underground.

Nick had seen his share of it. He had queued hungrily in the dark of winter mornings with dozens of others hoping for a day’s casual pit work, only to be turned away when he reached the lighted pit-top and the managers saw who he was. Once or twice he had even been taken on, and had deliberately been given the most menial of tasks, a bitter insult for a skilled worker like Nick. More recently there hadn’t even been the hope of casual work. For two years, since the hunger march, Nick hadn’t worked in the pits at all. His meagre unemployed benefit had been stopped because, as the official put it, he ‘wasn’t looking hard enough for work if he could spare the time to wander off to London’. The Penrys existed on the few hours of odd jobs that Nick managed to find for himself, on tiny and irregular hand-outs from depleted union funds, on whatever their relatives could spare, and on Co-op credit.

All through it, until Dickon’s illness, Nick had never flagged. He devoted the hours of unwelcome freedom to the Miners’ Federation, and to the individual causes of his members. He was a popular labour organizer and a charismatic speaker, liked and respected all through the valleys. He would walk miles and then spend hours with a single miner, trying to persuade him not to leave the Federation for a toothless, powerless company union. Even the dwindling numbers of his own men, the bleeding away of the strength which he believed was their only hope, had not weakened Nick’s convictions.

Until Dickon’s illness.

Seeing the boy’s new helplessness as the illness sapped his meagre strength, and left the ribs showing through his thin skin, Nick asked himself if it was worth hanging on. If anything in the world was worth seeing Dickon suffer any more than he did already. He heard the answer clearly, his first renegade thought. No, nothing was worth that.

Mari wouldn’t look at him. The down-turning smile was bitter.

‘So, what do you want? Another strike?’

‘If needs be,’ Nick said quietly.

The lines around Mari’s mouth deepened. She stared past Nick, and back down the years stretching behind them. The strike of 1921, when her family had got by on what she and her mother could earn. 1926, the year of Dickon’s babyhood when they were discovering that he would never be like other children, the General Strike and the long, bitter summer that followed it with the miners straggling back to work when the winter cold began to bite. 1928, 1931, the dreary repetition of hardship, and all for nothing. People like Nick and herself had nothing, and they never would.

Angry resentment was alive inside her, and it focused suddenly on Nick.

‘Another strike, is it?’ she murmured. ‘You think you’re such a big man, Nick Penry, don’t you? You with your meetings, up on the platform telling the men with their wives and children back home to lay off work and fight the bosses. Telling them to go another week without money coming in, all for the cause. Well, I’ll tell you something. You’re not a big man. You’re not a man at all. What kind of man is it who can’t bring home food for his child who’s dying? Dickon can’t eat pamphlets, can he? We can’t pay the doctor in Cardiff with workers’ solidarity, can we?’ Mari’s mouth was working although the words had stopped coming. There was a white fleck on her lower lip, and the cords in her neck stood prominent.

‘I hate you,’ she whispered. ‘I hate you, and everything you’ve done to bring us to this.’

‘I haven’t done it,’ Nick said softly. ‘Capitalism has done it.’

Mari moved so quickly that the stinging slap almost caught his face, but Nick was quicker. He held her wrist as she tried to twist sideways to escape him.

‘So what do you want me to do?’ His voice turned hard and cold.

‘I want you to get a job. Leave here, go wherever it is that there’s work.’

Leave the valleys, leave the struggle that’s taken everything since you’ve been old enough to think. Leave what you believe in and the people you care about and go anywhere you can to earn the shillings that will save Dickon.

The unspoken words were tangible between them, sharp and pointed like little flint arrows.

Nick let go of Mari’s wrist and turned away. He took his coat and cap off the peg behind the back door.

‘I’m going for a walk,’ he said. ‘Don’t wait the tea for me, will you?’ That was an ironic shot. For months there had been only one meal a day for the Penrys, and they had already eaten it.

Mari waited, motionless, until the door had banged shut before she let the hot tears spill over.

It was the middle of June. At the end of the covered backs, daylight shone in an oval of blue and gold. Nick left the passage, with its smell of damp brick that never evaporated even in the driest weather, and walked out into the sunshine. The terrace was noisy with the shouts of children who were running after a ball as it rolled away over the steep cobbles. A miner was coming up towards Nick with two whippets straining on the leash. He nodded calmly and strolled on. With so little work to be done, the pace of Nantlas seemed to have slowed to a dawdle. Only the children bothered to run, or to shout to one another.

Nick turned his back on the motionless winding-gear at the valley bottom and climbed upwards. Beyond the last row of houses and the ugly hem of brick-and-slate privies, makeshift sheds and rusting corrugated-iron shelters, was a line of allotments. Half a dozen men were working there, moving to and fro between the tangle of greenery and orange-scarlet flowers that scrambled over the beanpoles. The men straightened up from their hoeing and nodded to Nick as he passed. No one spoke. ‘Going for a walk’ was a recognized way of filling time in a workless day, although until today Nick himself had almost always been too busy to need to contemplate it. Beyond the allotments was bare, open hillside. Nick scrambled upwards, leaving the sprawling black gash of the tips away on his right.

He didn’t stop until he reached the hill crest, panting slightly from the steepness of the climb. A little way below the ridge was an outcrop of rock that made a rough shelter. Nick and his friends had smoked their first cigarettes here when they were boys. As he sat down with his back against the sun-warmed rock Nick smiled a little at the memory of the coughing that had followed. He would have given anything for a cigarette now, but he couldn’t remember when he had last had the money for tobacco.

The sun was almost too hot. Nick took off his jacket and eased his shoulders under the thin shirt that had belonged to his father. It had been a little too small when he had inherited it from the old man, but since he had been out of work the hard muscles of his shoulders and upper arms had softened down and the old shirt, carefully patched by Mari, fitted perfectly now.

Nick had climbed the hill to think. He stared down at the familiar view. Along the valley, at the pit that was still working, he saw a full truck heave into sight and disgorge itself at the pithead. The rumble and clatter reached him a full two seconds later on the heavy, still air. Further away he saw a tiny white signal arm quiver and drop beside the railway line and a train of trucks began to inch forward behind the busy engine. He heard a shrill whistle and the clash of couplings with perfect clarity.

Work.

He had come up here to think but now, with the hopelessness spread neatly out in front of him and the blue-purple roof of his own house in the centre, he knew that there was nothing to think about.

If there was work anywhere, he would have to take it. It went against the grain of everything he believed in and hoped for. It was giving up, and running away when he knew he was needed, but he would do it because it was for Dickon. Nick thought of the rough crest of hair at the crown of the boy’s head that wouldn’t lie down however hard Mari brushed it, and the square shape that his mouth took on with his strange laughter, and his body ached with the pity of it.

Work. Nick knew where he would try first.

He had often thought of Amy Lovell and the great, quiet house in Bruton Street where the servants padded to and fro and where there was not a wrinkle or stain in the soft, shining expanse of luxury.

He would write to the Honourable Amalia Lovell, and ask her politely if there might still be some work for him on her family estate. Nick bent his head at the thought of sitting down to the letter, but the pang passed quickly enough. Swallowed pride wasn’t all that palatable, he thought, but he was getting more than used to the taste.

There was a chance, of course, that Amy Lovell would have forgotten all about him. But somehow, recalling her still face and the hurt in her eyes when he had refused her help, Nick didn’t think she would have forgotten. And if Amy Lovell couldn’t, or wouldn’t help him — well, then, he would try the Midlands, where light industries were burgeoning, or he would try the car manufacturers. He would go anywhere, except to London. There were enough men from the valleys in London already, walking the streets in search of something they could do.

So the decision that wasn’t really a decision at all was made, but Nick went on sitting with his back against the outcrop of rock. As the light changed the blue sky faded to pearl grey with a rim of pink softening the hills to the west. Nick kept his eyes on the horizon, never glancing at the black smudges of houses and workings in the darkening valley.

It was completely dark when he stood up stiffly and began the scramble down to Nantlas. As he passed along the terraces most of the lights were already out, and his own house was black and silent when he reached it. The thin curtains were drawn tight across the upstairs window.

Nick let himself in and crossed the back kitchen, sniffing the familiar scent of carbolic soap and brass polish with the knowledge that he would have to leave this and everything he cared about. The realization gave him a moment of sharp physical pain.

He trod softly up the stairs and pushed open the bedroom door.

In the dimness he saw that Mari had taken Dickon into bed with her. Her arms were wrapped protectively round the boy, who was restless in his sleep. His bottle of medicine, a patent tonic, stood with its spoon on the table by the alarm clock. Slowly, Nick turned away.

He stopped at Dickon’s doorway and lay down on the child’s bed, too frozen even to take off his clothes. This is how a marriage ends, then, Nick thought. In the dark, cold and silent.

In the morning, as soon as it was light and before Mari and Dickon were awake, he sat down at the kitchen table and wrote to Amy Lovell.

*

Amy found the letter in her pigeonhole at the hostel, forwarded with the rest of her mail from Bruton Street. It was the end of a night shift and she was yawning and looking forward to tea and toast in the nurses’ canteen before going upstairs to sleep.

She recognized the strong black handwriting at once.

Nick’s request was straightforward. If there was still a job on her family estate, as she had once mentioned, he would be grateful for it now. Yours, Nick Penry. Amy folded up the single sheet of paper, wondering. The hauteur with which Nick had rejected her offer in the first place still stung. It must have been hard for him to come back and ask, after that. But Amy had heard enough from Bethan about the way things were in Nantlas to be able to guess why he had had to do it.

Instead of going up to her room Amy went to the telephone in the common room and, after a short delay, she was put through to Chance. She could see her father’s irritable frown as he answered her.

‘The labourers on the estate are Mackintosh’s business. I won’t interfere with that.’ Mackintosh was the estate manager.

‘This man saved the life of a friend of mine, once,’ Amy said. ‘He’s my friend too, in a way. Could you make an exception with Mr Mackintosh, just once?’

‘It sounds very unsuitable.’ Gerald was stiff. ‘And we have enough trouble finding work for our own people nowadays.’

‘Please.’

Her father loved her, awkwardly and mutely, Amy knew that. At length, shaming her a little and masking his capitulation with gruffness, Gerald said, ‘All right. I’ll speak to Mackintosh. If he has anything, your friend will be offered it. Don’t ask me to do anything of the kind ever again, because I won’t.’

‘No, I won’t ask again.’

A week later, a letter in a crested envelope arrived for Nick. The brief, uncordial missive under the heading ‘The Estates Office, Chance’ stated that at his lordship’s direction, and subject to a satisfactory trial, the post of under gardener on the estate would be offered to N. Penry at a wage of twenty-eight shillings a week. If Penry would present himself to Mr Mackintosh at the above address as soon as possible he would receive his directions. Accommodation would be provided on the estate.

Nick looked down at the thick paper, the neatly typed words. He was thinking about Amy Lovell and the smooth machinery she must have set in motion. So much for a naïve, impulsive, pretty girl to be able to do so easily.

Without speaking, Nick gave the letter to Mari. She was sitting in the chair by the range with Dickon on her lap. His head was resting on her shoulder, and Nick saw the sharp chain of bones running from the nape of his neck.

Mari read the letter and stared at Nick over Dickon’s crest of hair.

‘At his lordship’s direction? How?’

Nick had never told her about Bruton Street, or the girl. The gulf between that polished place, he had reasoned, and the things that Mari had to make do with was cruelly wide enough without pointing it up further.

‘Does it matter? The job’s on offer. It’s the wages that count. Not over-generous, but there you are.’

‘It’s twenty-eight shillings more than we’re getting now.’

‘Exactly. I’ll be able to send you almost all of it.’

Mari’s eyes were fixed on him. Instead of the relief she had expected to feel she was cold, and suddenly vulnerable.

‘You’re going to go, then?’ she whispered.

Nick was cold, too. Leaving Nantlas. Leaving the Fed. He could do that, even though it would hurt. But to leave Dickon. And to leave Mari. Even though the love had gone, and all the warmth and softness and the sweet smell of her with it, Nick didn’t know how he would live without her.

‘Of course I’m going. Isn’t that what you wanted?’ He was adding up swiftly in his head. ‘Ask the doctor in Cardiff if you can pay him weekly. With not having me to feed, and even with the extra bits of good food for Dickon, you should be able to manage.’

‘You’ll need to eat.’

‘I expect there’ll be plenty of rabbits on his lordship’s acres.’ Nick smiled slightly. Rabbits were as scarce as tigers in the valleys nowadays.

‘It says here as soon as possible.’

‘It won’t take me long to get myself ready.’

There was a moment when either of them might have said something else. Might have changed everything. Dickon rolled his head against his mother’s shoulder and moaned fretfully. The silence spread between the three of them, unbroken.

‘I’ll go down and see the Committee,’ Nick said at last. ‘I’ll need to do a bit of explaining about resigning the secretaryship.’ He had done the voluntary and important job for years, and it was hard not to feel like a renegade now.

‘Yes. You should do that,’ was all Mari said.

They hardly spoke again for the single day that it took Nick to prepare himself. He knew that the other stalwarts he had worked with thought he was deserting them. They accepted his resignation stiffly, and there were none of the votes of thanks and congratulations due to outgoing officers.

At seven the next morning Nick was ready to go. The cardboard suitcase that had belonged to his father was packed. He had arranged a ride in a delivery van as far as Newport. After that he would walk, hitching lifts where he could, eastwards to Chance.

He put his empty cup down on the kitchen table and Mari snatched it up at once and took it to the sink. Her hands were shaking and the cup rattled as she rinsed it. Nick knelt down by Dickon in his seat by the range. He ruffled the crest of hair and then lifted the boy in his arms. He smelled unhealthy, faintly of soured milk, and his limbs were like knobby sticks. Nick kissed him, closing his eyes for a moment to seal the memory within himself, and hugged the frail weight against him. Then he folded Dickon back into his blankets.

‘Be a good boy for your mam until I get back.’

Mari followed him to the back door. She was still in her nightdress, with her hair hanging loose over her shoulders. She looked like a young girl until she stopped and he saw the deep lines around her eyes.

‘Good luck,’ Mari said simply.

Nick nodded. She didn’t turn her face up to be kissed, and he didn’t try to put his arms around her. He touched her hand instead, but their fingers didn’t grasp at each other.

‘I’ll write,’ he promised. ‘When I send the money. Take care of you both.’

Nick almost ran down the passage, out into the street and down the hill to where he had arranged to meet his friend in the van.

He didn’t reach Chance until the middle of the next day. Rides were hard to come by, and after he had slept the night burrowed into the prickly warmth of a haystack he knew that he looked rumpled and disreputable. At last, a baker’s van set him down at a crossroads.

‘Down that road,’ the driver directed him. ‘A mile or so, you’ll come to the gates. You can’t miss it.’ He was chuckling as he drove off.

Nick trudged the distance down the quiet green road and understood why. The high stone wall that the road had clung to gave way to tall iron gates topped with the increasingly familiar crest. He stopped and peered through them, and then whistled. It was so big. The great house stood on rising ground in a wide space of shimmering parkland. A long driveway, swept and raked, curved away towards it from the gates. A little stone lodge stood beside the driveway with lavender and hollyhocks in the trim garden.

Nick put his suitcase down to push at the gates, and they creaked reluctantly open.

A man came out of the lodge at once and hurried towards him.

‘That’ll do. You’ve no business here.’ He looked more closely at Nick’s case and added, ‘No work either, if that’s what you’re after.’

‘I have a job here,’ Nick said coldly. ‘I am to see Mr Mackintosh.’

The lodge keeper frowned at his Welsh voice, unmollified. ‘Mr Mackintosh? Then what are you doing here? This is the carriage drive. For the family.’

Nick was amused to hear the man uttering the word with the same reverence as for God, or the King.

The keeper pointed to the road curving onwards with the wall. ‘Follow this into the village. There are tradesmen’s gates there, and the estate buildings. I’ll telephone to Mr Mackintosh …’

… to check up on me, Nick thought, as he plodded away.

It was hardly a welcome to the vast acres of Chance, but he hadn’t expected one in any case. He was thinking of Amy as he walked on, and the way that she had taken him home without ceremony. She had been welcoming, he thought, and generous as well.

But then, she could afford to be.

Two weeks, Amy told herself cheerfully. Two glorious, sybaritic weeks off. Fourteen mornings to lie in bed until she felt like getting out of it, with the prospect of nothing to do that wasn’t thoroughly enticing for the rest of the day. She rolled up her discarded apron and stuffed it into the laundry chute and sent her cap and cuffs rustling after it.

For the next two weeks there would be lipstick instead of starch, champagne instead of lysol. ‘Thank God,’ Amy murmured. She glanced at her watch. Adeline was sending her car to the hostel for her. It was time to go down and see if the chauffeur was standing in his lavender-grey breeches at the porter’s cubicle. Amy had stopped worrying about whether the other girls might judge her for her rank and money. She knew that Moira O’Hara didn’t, and nor did the others of her circle of nursing friends. And if Mary Morrow chose to hate her, well, then that was Mary’s privilege.

Amy picked up her belongings and ran down the stairs. The chauffeur was waiting. He bowed slightly before taking her bag, ushered her out to the Bentley and handed her in. The car’s patrician nose slid out between the buses and tradesmen’s vans and then they were bowling north towards the river and freedom. Amy sighed with pleasure. She didn’t even glance backwards as the Lambeth vanished behind her.

Her love affair with nursing had died with Helen Pearce.

The old, urgent longing to be of help, and the pleasure in it that soothed all the other anxieties, had vanished with her. Amy had never regained the silver pin. She knew that she was a competent nurse, and she did her job as well as she could. But the tedious formality of hospital procedure irked her, and she still felt the callousness at the heart of the machine that healed or failed to heal in about equal proportions. A little of that callousness, she thought sometimes, had rubbed off on her. Either that or she had adopted it for her own protection. Probably, she decided coolly, she was a better nurse for it. Whatever the truth was, there never would be another Helen Pearce.

After her precious leave, Amy would return as a third-year student, with only a year separating her from the examinations of State Registry. And after she was registered, near-freedom beckoned seductively. She could live outside the hostel, even have some say in regulating her hours of duty. There were only twelve more months of slavery. And in the meantime, there was her annual fourteen days in the old world.

Adeline was waiting for her in the white drawing room. There were lilies everywhere in tall white porcelain vases. The white blinds were lowered against the midday sun, so that the light in the long room was pearly-soft.

‘Darling.’ They hugged each other. As their cheeks brushed Amy felt her mother’s taut shoulders and with a little shock she saw the fan of tiny wrinkles at the corner of her eye. ‘Darling, you do smell of hospitals. I’ve got some perfectly delicious new bath scent. Want to try? Be quick if you can, there’s a dear old friend of mine for luncheon. And Richard has promised to come, so we’ll be four …’

Adeline was anxious, and that was unusual. Mildly, Amy said that she was sorry about the hospital smell and of course she would change because she hadn’t expected there would be guests. Adeline was wearing a Schiaparelli dress and jacket in black and fuchsia pink, as sharp as a gleaming blade in the pale room. As Amy left the room a maid brought in a tray with the cocktail shaker and chill-frosted glasses. Perfect, she thought, as she went up to Adeline’s bathroom. A dry martini, talk, a long luncheon with more talk and nowhere to hurry away to, and afterwards … perhaps a nap on her own wide bed without having to shake herself awake too soon to go on duty all over again. She was smiling as she drew the fragrant bath, and still smiling when she wrapped herself afterwards in one of her mother’s thick white robes and sat down in front of her dressing-table mirror to look at herself.

Amy felt that she had grown into her own appearance lately, as if her features had knitted together into a coherent whole at last. She thought critically that her mouth didn’t look too large and wobbly any longer, nor did her eyes seem to be set too far apart. They stared back into the mirror, blue-green, direct. Amy reached for one of Adeline’s pots and deftly brushed gloss on to her eyelids. She chose one of the array of gilt-cased lipsticks and lightly painted in her mouth. Her hand hovered over the other brushes and jars, and then rejected them all. Her skin was pale from long hours in the wards, but it still had the faint apricot glow from which the freckles had faded at last. Her hair was cut short because that was the easiest way to wear it under a starched cap, but it also showed off her long neck to the fullest advantage.

Amy stood up and let the robe slip off her shoulders. The pale, glowing skin was flawless from shoulder to toe. She was slim and taut from two years of hard, physical work, that could equally have come with tennis and dieting. Only her hands, with rough skin around the short nails and reddened knuckles from disinfectant scrubbing, betrayed her as something other than the society girl.

She had brought a plain black linen dress with her, with deep Vs at the front and back that showed the smooth skin. Amy slipped it on and then frowned at herself. On impulse, she walked back to Adeline’s dressing table and opened her jewel case. Every night her maid locked the case in the safe, but during the day the nested velvet layers lay ready for Adeline to choose from their glittering contents. Amy lifted out a dark blue tray where pendant earrings sparkled, and peered into the recesses. There they were, the pieces she was looking for. She took out the two identical bracelets and slipped one on each wrist. They were bands of diamonds, as heavy and as wide as handcuffs.

It was too much for a family lunch party, but at the same time it looked exactly right. Just as Adeline herself, with her flair for unpredictable statements, would have looked. Amy picked up the hairbrush with AL in rhinestones on the silver back and smoothed her hair once more. And then, she judged, she was ready.

In the drawing room Adeline was pouring a martini for Richard. Her own glass was already refilled. Richard was lounging against the white marble mantelpiece. They both glanced up at her as she came in trailing her waft of Chanel, and then they stared. Richard’s perpetually half-closed eyelids blinked just once as he glided forward.

‘Is this how one looks when one comes of age?’ he demanded. ‘I can’t wait for it to be my turn, if it is.’

Amy had celebrated her twenty-first birthday four weeks earlier. Her party had consisted of bottles of wine and an iced cake from Bruton Street, shared between shifts with the other nurses. There had been no time for anything else.

She returned Richard’s kiss on both cheeks, and then held up her wrists like a pugilist.

‘Do you mind, Mummy? May I wear them? It struck me when I was dressing that it’s exactly what you would have chosen to wear with this nothing frock.’

Adeline wasn’t staring any longer. She was nursing her drink and smiling, but there was a small quiver of apprehension in it that hollowed her cheeks.

‘Of course you may, my love. They’ll be yours some day. I’m glad you’ve discarded the wholesome nurse look for a few hours. The … the old friend who’s joining us for lunch … it wouldn’t appeal to him at all. And I’m enough of a mama to want to be absurdly proud of you all to people who matter to me.’

‘Who is he?’

Behind her mother Amy saw Richard raise one eloquent eyebrow and blow a kiss into the empty air.

Adeline was touching her hair, an uncharacteristic gesture of anxiety. She didn’t answer Amy and an odd silence deepened between them, as if they were waiting anxiously for something.

They didn’t have to wait long.

A moment later the maid opened the door and announced ‘Mr Roper, my lady.’

‘Jack.’

Adeline stood up and held out both her hands but the tall, broad man who had swept in ignored them and wrapped his arms around her. He rocked her so that she swayed on her fuchsia suede heels and then turned her face up so that he could look squarely into it before he kissed her.

‘Beautiful Adeline,’ he said. ‘And not a day older.’

‘Several thousand days.’ There was a glow in her cheeks that had nothing to do with the martinis. ‘How many years is it? Too many, anyway.’ She shuddered a little theatrically. Jack, I want you to meet my two younger children. Amy, and Richard.’

The man turned to look at them. Amy saw close-cropped fair hair that was beginning to turn silver, a mouth marked by lines that might indicate either laughter or very strong will, and bright, clever blue eyes. She judged that Jack Roper was about fifty years old, and from the timbre of his voice rather than his accent she knew that he was American. His hand as it shook hers was warm and firm, and he held it for seconds longer than he need have done.

‘Amy?’ he said musingly. ‘When I last saw you, you were hardly more than a baby. It was your sister who promised to be the beauty then, I thought. I see I was wrong.’

Amy felt a faint, unmistakably pleasurable shiver. Whoever he was, Jack Roper was somebody special. Unplaceable, and so a little threatening, but special.

‘Isabel is very lovely…’

‘Isabel is married with a baby of her own, now …’ Amy and Adeline spoke together and then broke off, falling silent. Jack Roper was still holding Amy’s hand. He lifted it and touched the knuckles with his mouth. She saw his eyes flicker at the rough skin, and then narrow with calculation. It was a reaction as automatic as blinking. Mr Roper would miss nothing. Amy found herself wondering how much he had deduced from their quick, bright mentions of Isabel.

‘And Richard?’ He relinquished her hand at last, and she knew that he had registered that she wore no rings.

The men shook hands. Again there was the sharp, blue glance, and Richard countered it with his hooded stare. Adeline’s hand shook a little as she handed Jack Roper his glass, but her smile was under control again.

‘To old times?’ Adeline proposed, lifting her glass to him, and he echoed politely, ‘Old times.’ But Amy, as she watched him, knew that Jack Roper wasn’t a man who would care much for the past. The future might challenge him, but it was the present he lived for. She felt the little shiver again.

Adeline and her guest were talking about the years of their friendship. They had met almost twenty-five years ago, in London during the glittering Season before Adeline had married Gerald Lovell.

‘Your mother was like the fairy on top of the Christmas tree, then,’ Jack Roper said.

‘And still is,’ Richard murmured. He was reluctantly impressed by the stranger, and so unusually quiet.

Jack Roper bowed. His pale grey suit was perfectly cut, smooth as a second skin across his broad shoulders. ‘Of course. But in those days, every man who saw her fell in love with her. Including me, of course. I was crouching underneath the tree, hoping to catch a sequin falling off her skirt.’

Adeline was laughing. ‘You were too busy making money and making yourself known,’ she corrected him. He made his ironic bow again, smiling.

‘We were two Pittsburghers, both of us with our way to make in the world. By the time I had paved mine a little, you were Lady Lovell.’

‘Yes,’ Adeline said softly. From the brief glance that passed between them Amy guessed that, at some inevitable time during the years between, her mother and Jack Roper had been lovers.

‘Good to be back in London,’ he said after a pause. ‘I always feel at home here.’

‘And where’s home when you aren’t feeling at home in London?’ It was unlike Richard to sound waspish. Amy wondered a little at the complex currents eddying around her.

‘All over. New York mostly, for the last few years. Trying to put my business back on its feet after 1929.’

Somehow Jack Roper didn’t have the look of an unsuccessful man.

‘What is your business?’ Richard asked.

‘Construction. What’s yours?’ The blunt deflection made Richard laugh in spite of himself. He spread his arms out along the marble mantelpiece.

‘Eton, for far too long. I’m not going back for the next half, though. I’ve decided to launch myself as a man of letters. It sounds agreeable as well as impressive, don’t you think?’

‘I’ve no idea.’

They were all laughing when the maid came in again and whispered to Adeline. Adeline stood up and said gracefully, ‘Shall we go through?’

It was an agreeable lunch, to begin with. There was lightly poached salmon with a purée of sorrel and champagne sauce, and then wild strawberries in a silver dish. Amy ate with a small sigh of contentment that earned her another of Jack Roper’s blue glances, followed by a quizzical smile. She was sitting beside him and had to turn slightly to see his profile. His beaked nose gave him a forbidding air, until he too turned and looked at her again. Amy felt suddenly that her curled fingers were damp around the stem of her glass.

They had all been talking, Adeline leading them in her pretty drawl, her face alight with vivacity and her eyes brighter than usual. But when she saw the look, and Amy as lovely as a flower with the diamonds cuffing her wrists, the mask slipped and sagged.

She held out her glass to be refilled and then, when the servants had gone again, she motioned to Richard to do it once more.

One by one the three of them saw it and felt it, looking back at Adeline across her perfect table. In the course of a single meal Adeline had grown haggard.

The talk limped on. Amy and Richard had to lean heavily, for the moment, on Jack Roper’s urbanity. He had an admirable fund of London gossip and he gently pushed the tastiest titbits across the table, trying to tempt Adeline back into the circle. He had dined the night before with the Channons.

‘And do you know what Honor told me about Sylvia Ashley?’

Richard glanced sideways at his mother, and then his hand slid to cover hers on the polished table top.

At length, Adeline collected herself. There were sudden deep lines at the side of her mouth, showing under the peachy-pale make-up that had once hidden everything.

‘I think we’ve all had enough of this luncheon, darlings. Shall we go and have a little cup of coffee?’

Her voice was slurred, a drawl within a drawl. They walked slowly back to the white drawing room, with Richard and Jack supportively on either side of her as if she was an old woman.

Amy came behind them, caught short in miserable confusion.

Adeline sat in the corner of one of the sofas. She smoothed the black and fuchsia folds of her dress around her and then she lifted her hand to shade her eyes a little.

‘Sit here, beside me,’ she commanded and Jack Roper sat down. He went on talking smoothly about New York and London, and about old friends, as Richard poured coffee into little gilt-rimmed cups. Adeline drank two cups and then, seemingly as quickly as she had let the mask slip, she was herself again.

‘I’m sorry,’ she murmured to Jack Roper. In answer he took her hand and smiled at her, and the lines in Adeline’s face were invisible again. Watching the two of them, Amy understood that Adeline would always command devotion from the men who had loved her. Even from Gerald. Perhaps especially from Gerald, and that was part of his sadness.

Surprisingly, the lunch party ended as cheerfully as it had begun.

Richard went over to the liqueurs tray and raised his eyebrows at them. ‘I’m going to have some of this green chartreuse, for no better reason than that it matches my tie. Mama? There isn’t anything pink, I’m sorry to say. Amy? Mr Roper?’

Adeline fluttered her fingers. ‘Not a single drop more for me. It makes me feel so lugubrious today.’

Jack Roper had a brandy, and smoked a cigar. Amy leaned back against the cushions and sniffed appreciatively at the mingled scents of flowers, cigar smoke and Chanel.

‘I’m so pleased to be home,’ she said, and Adeline looked round meditatively at her.

‘I wish you were here more often. It wouldn’t come as such a shock, then, to see that you have grown up.’

At length, Jack Roper stood up to say goodbye. He kissed Adeline, turning her face so that his lips met the corner of her mouth. She bent her head, and touched one finger against the grey lapel of his suit.

‘Amy, perhaps you would see Mr Roper downstairs for me?’

Amy wasn’t sure that she wanted to be left alone with Jack Roper, but she nodded obediently as the men shook hands and then she walked with Jack beside her, under the well of light that splashed the line of Lovell portraits and to the head of the stairs. He was much taller than she was, and the bulk of him was a little intimidating.

As they paused before the long sweep downwards, he asked, ‘What do you do, Amy? Are you a nurse?’

His quickness unsettled her.

‘Yes. How do you know that?’

‘Ah.’ They began to descend, their muffled footfalls losing themselves in the still space. ‘I didn’t think, from your enjoyment of the little things, that today was quite ordinary for you. And your hands look as if you do more than go to parties. So does your hair. And nursing is the kind of thing a girl like you might do. Even though you like diamond bracelets as well. Or perhaps because of that?’

His finger on the truth reminded her of Helen. The memory pained her, as always.

Abruptly Amy said, ‘I work at the Royal Lambeth. I am home for my two weeks’ leave.’

They reached the foot of the stairs and crossed the marble floor to the front door. At once a footman materialized, holding the visitor’s hat. Jack took it, and waited until they were alone again.

‘Two weeks,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘That doesn’t give us very long, does it?’

Amy said nothing. She had the sudden feeling that she was holding a conch shell to her ear, listening to the sea surging within the pearly folds.

‘May I telephone you?’

Amy looked directly at him now. There were darker flecks in the bright blue irises. ‘I don’t think so.’

Jack Roper smiled. ‘Your mother and I understand each other. Ask her, if you don’t believe me.’ She opened her mouth to say something that would imply she didn’t understand, and then she thought better of it. She realized that Jack Roper habitually left out the intervening, polite sentences that ordinary people might have mouthed for form’s sake.

‘I don’t want to hurt her,’ Amy said clearly. ‘I don’t know quite what happened this afternoon …

He interrupted her. ‘Oh, I think you do. You should talk to Adeline about it. She has an unusual capacity for friendship. Particularly, I would think, with her own children.’ They stood for a moment looking at one another. Then, in quite a different voice, he said, ‘Diamonds suit you. With a neck as beautiful as yours you should be wearing diamond earrings. Long, extravagant ones that glitter as you dance. I know that it was your twenty-first birthday a month ago, because I remember the day you were born.’

Suddenly, the deep-sea roaring in Amy’s ears threatened to deafen her. The blood pounded like Atlantic surf in her head.

‘I shall buy you a birthday pair, and I will present them to you over dinner the day after tomorrow.’

‘No …’ Amy said weakly, and he raised one eyebrow as he laughed at her.

‘Amy, where do you imagine all your mother’s jewels in their chic Cartier settings came from? Those diamond handcuffs, for example? They’re not musty old Lovell heirlooms, are they, not like those monumental family rubies that look like drops of bullock’s blood?’

Amy was too afraid of the new, terrifying idea that had swept down on her even to speak. Jack Roper went on: ‘They were given to her. By men who loved and admired her. You should be prepared to accept tributes in the same way, Amy.’

He turned his hat in his fingers, preparing to put it on. ‘Until the day after tomorrow.’ Then Jack Roper opened the door and strode down the steps, settling his hat on his silver-fair hair. Amy had a last glimpse of him walking purposefully away towards Bond Street before she closed the door and leant briefly against the safe barrier of it.

It was a long moment before she walked back up the stairs to the drawing room. Adeline and Richard were sitting on the sofa. Richard’s arm was round his mother’s shoulders and their heads were close together. As soon as Amy came in they looked up, their expressions changing. Amy saw that her mother had been crying. One of Richard’s schoolboy handkerchiefs was crumpled in her fingers.

How close they are to each other, she thought, with a little shock. Much closer than I am to either of them. How alike, too. I’ve never noticed that before.

‘Thank you, darling,’ Adeline said. ‘That wasn’t such a brilliant luncheon, was it? I love Jack dearly. I always have. But seeing him after so long made me realize that I’m old. I’ve always hated old age. Ugliness. Being alone …’ She faltered, and then her face crumpled once more. Richard drew her close again and murmured against her hair as Amy stood helplessly by.

‘You are just forty-two years old. You will never be ugly. And people will always love you, because you are you.’

After a moment Adeline sniffed self-derisively. She blew her nose on Richard’s handkerchief and stood up, frowning at the creases in her silk dress. ‘I think I will go upstairs and have a tiny nap. Quite probably everything will look different afterwards. One shouldn’t drink immoderately, at my age.’

They watched her to the door, and then turned to each other. Richard pursed his lips in a long, slow whistle.

‘So what did you think of him?’

‘Mr Roper?’

‘Who else, darling?’

‘I thought he was … impressive. And attractive, I suppose.’

‘So did I.’ He smiled his wry smile as Amy tried to put aside the fear that had closed round her in the hallway.

‘Did you mean what you said, about not going back to Eton?’ she asked, to distract them both. ‘And being a man of letters?’

‘Yes,’ Richard said airily. ‘Eton and I hold nothing for each other now. I would prefer to leave before they ask me to. And I’ve written a novel that’s going to make me rich and infamous. Tony Hardy says it needs completely rewriting, and it will take me a year, but it will do in the end. Hasn’t he told you?’

‘I don’t see much of Tony nowadays.’

It was a mark of their closer relationship since the orangery that he acknowledged her friendship with Tony. But they had never spoken about what had happened there.

‘Too busy bandaging?’ he asked.

‘Something like that,’ Amy responded with equal lightness. ‘You know, I think I might follow Mama’s example and lie down this afternoon. I’m not very used to wine in the daytime.’

But although she lay on her bed and stared up at the ceiling, sleep didn’t come. She was thinking, instead, a knotted and insistent tangle of thoughts that coiled around the reality of Jack Roper.

Adeline was out to dinner that evening, and absent from the house all the following day. Amy found her at last at seven o’clock, in her room changing for another evening.

‘Come in, dear heart,’ Adeline called out in response to her knock. ‘See? Do you think this will make me look too much en fête? Too tinselly?’ She held up a short slip of pearly-grey dress and the straight, silver-sequinned jacket that went over it.

‘Like the fairy on the tree? Why not? No, I don’t think so, anyway.’ Amy put her head on one side to consider it, but Adeline had already hung the dress up.

‘Jack said that. Rather romantic, for someone who claims to be so hardboiled. D’you think he meant it?’ She laughed, not waiting for an answer. ‘Did you like him?’

‘Yes.’ Amy was hesitant, now that the moment had come. ‘I wanted to talk to you about him. He said I should. I thought…’

Adeline sat down in one of a pair of velvet-covered armchairs and pointed to the other. She was wearing a peach-coloured robe trimmed with ostrich feathers, and more feathers trimmed the toes of her high-heeled slippers. ‘Go on,’ she ordered.

‘I wanted to ask you if Jack Roper might be my father.’

For a brief, frozen moment Adeline stared at her. It’s true, Amy thought, and then Adeline threw her head back and laughed. In confusion Amy looked at her mother’s smooth white throat and the feathers drifting around it. She had expected anger, or shock, or an admission of the truth, but not so much obvious amusement. Adeline had a rich, musical laugh. At last it died away and she sat upright again.

‘I’m sorry to laugh. But it was rather funny. Amy, your father is your father. Isabel’s and Richard’s too. I loved him distractedly until the day Richard was born, and even for quite a long time after that. But when Airlie died all those years ago something died in Gerald too. It was the part of him I loved, surprising and secretive, and it left me with the dry, British shell that I didn’t. That’s all.’ Adeline shrugged to dismiss the pain. ‘I’m not very good at being brave, or soldiering on alone and all the things one is supposed to do. I found other people to love, and to love me. You know that, of course. Jack wasn’t the only one. But he was special, in a way. We shared the same roots, you see, even though they grew on different sides of the tracks. We were both adventurers, in our own ways. And we both needed to enjoy ourselves, because we couldn’t see the point in living otherwise. We don’t believe much in duty, and honour, and doing what is right, like you British.’

You British, Amy thought, and then: yes, that’s fair, I suppose.

‘That’s why I made such a damn fool of myself yesterday. The terrible mistake of one cocktail too many, like any old dowager trying to convince herself through a haze of gin that she’s still dynamite. It hurt, a little, to see Jack Roper look at you in that particular way, and not at me. I dare say it comes to every mother of daughters.’

Amy felt that she was smiling, just a little vacantly, still digesting her relief that after all Jack Roper was just a man like any other.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t be. I wouldn’t want you to look like the back of a cab, would I?’ Adeline changed her tack, suddenly brisk. ‘I want you to enjoy yourself too, darling. Not to spend all your best years up to your elbows in some dreadful old lady’s operation. This nursing game has gone on altogether too long.’

‘I am a nurse, it’s not a game,’ Amy said automatically. ‘And they’re not dreadful at all. But I feel, just a little, that the time might have come for some fun after all.’

‘Thank God. So. Did you like Jack Roper as much as he liked you?’

‘I liked him,’ Amy said quietly. She wouldn’t admit to Adeline how much, nor exactly what she had thought, even in the face of her lurid imaginings that he might be her father.

‘I imagine he might suit you better than, what’s-his-name, the stuffed shirt in the army?’

‘Johnny Guild.’

‘Or Mr Hardy.’

‘I don’t think Tony Hardy would do at all, actually.’

Adeline was dressing now. She slipped the grey dress over her head and stood up straight. It showed off her perfect legs, as smooth as a girl’s.

‘Mmm.’

‘Jack Roper asked if he might telephone me. He asked about dinner, tomorrow night.’

On went the silver-sequinned jacket. There was a white gardenia for the buttonhole.

‘So, will you go?’

Amy crossed the room in two steps and wrapped her arms around her mother. She smelt the familiar scent of her, that from her childhood had breathed glamour and the romance of adulthood.

‘May I?’ she said.

Adeline’s arms came round her in response and they stood, cheeks together, reflected almost like twins in the long mirrors.

‘Listen to me. I would rather see you with Jack Roper than almost anyone else in the world. And I would rather see you in love and free and true to yourself than married to a man like Peter Jaspert. Do what your heart tells you, Amy. It’s a sensible heart and not a poor romantic one like Isabel’s. I was beginning to worry that it was just a little too sensible.’

Amy stood still for a moment, letting her mother stroke her hair as if she was a girl, conscious of the unfamiliarity of being on the brink of happiness.

‘Thank you,’ she whispered.

Amy waited all through the next day, refusing to admit her anxiety, but refusing also to leave the house in case she missed him. The telephone rang incessantly, but always for Adeline or Richard.

At six o’clock she was sitting in the library leafing unseeingly through the Illustrated London News. She had stared irritably a dozen times at the silent telephone on the table beside her, but when it rang at last she jumped like a rabbit.

‘Amy Lovell speaking.’

‘Shall we say eight o’clock?’ he asked without preamble.

‘Eight-thirty,’ she said crisply, and hung up smiling.

She was ready for something to happen.

No matter what.