Читать книгу Rosie Thomas 4-Book Collection: The White Dove, The Potter’s House, Celebration, White - Rosie Thomas - Страница 22

Within five days, Amy was Jack Roper’s mistress.

From the first evening they spent together, a pattern was set for what Amy came to think of as Jack’s time. He lifted her out of the world of the Royal Lambeth and introduced her to another, so remote from it that it might have belonged to another universe.

On the first evening he came in his bright scarlet Lagonda and drove her to an impeccably proper dinner at the Savoy, just as Johnny Guild might have done. But when they had eaten and his cigar smoke was curling around them, he produced a midnight-blue velvet box from his pocket and slid it across the table towards her.

‘Happy birthday,’ he said.

Inside, nestled in the white satin folds, were the diamond earrings. Amy lifted one and cradled it in the palm of her hand. The stones shone back at her, a thousand facets of light in their white-gold settings. Then she looked up to see Jack watching her, with one slightly raised eyebrow. In the soft lighting he looked tough, and handsome. He was stroking the side of his jaw, meditatively, with his thumb. Amy realized that she wanted him to stroke her too, and she looked down again at the diamonds in her hand so that he wouldn’t read it too clearly in her eyes.

‘Do polite manners dictate that I should say Oh, Jack, I couldn’t possibly … I don’t want to. They’re so beautiful.’

She looked up again and they both laughed.

‘If you do, I’ll take them away again.’ He reached out for the earrings, handling them like trinkets. ‘May I?’ Gently, touching the softness of her ear lobes first, he fixed the earrings in place. Then he turned her chin with his forefinger so that he could look at her, and traced the line of her neck down into the hollow of her collarbone.

Clavicle, Amy recited to herself with blind irrelevance as all her bones, with all the names she had learned for them in another world, melted within her.

‘You are very beautiful,’ Jack said softly. ‘I was right about the diamonds. And now, do you think we should go on to Ondine’s? Would you like that?’

‘Yes,’ Amy said. ‘I’ve never been.’ But she had heard of it, and she was impressed, even though from what she already knew of Jack Roper it was inevitable that he would be a member. Ondine’s was the nightclub for the innermost of London’s circles, not just for the titled and the very rich, although many of its members were both. The clever and the famous, in almost any field, so long as they were fashionable, might also be invited to join. Ondine’s had the reputation of being both smart and raffish, lavish and louche at the same time as rigidly exclusive. And she knew too that the very grandest nightclub patron of all made regular appearances at Ondine’s.

Jack drove the Lagonda to Mayfair at breakneck speed.

‘Why so fast?’ Amy gasped, and he turned to grin at her, shouting over the engine’s roar.

‘Bad habits die hard. In my day I was an amateur racing driver. Not any more, sadly. Reactions too slow, now.’ The street lights streaked overhead and then they swerved and the big headlamps cut through the dimness of a deserted side street. ‘Didn’t you know? Hasn’t Adeline told you anything about me?’

A touch of vanity, there, Amy thought. ‘I’d never heard of you until the day before yesterday.’

‘I don’t know whether or not to be flattered by that.’

She was profoundly relieved when the Lagonda drew up at the bland façade that fronted Ondine’s. The little street was solidly lined with cars. Jack took her arm and led her in through the anonymous front door.

The dance floor and the packed tables that surrounded it were in the basement, and must have extended through the cellars of several houses on either side. As they came down the steps into the club, the talk, the music and the décor assailed Amy simultaneously. The room was solid with people and the décor was Egyptian as Egypt had never been. The doorways and panels around the walls were obelisk-shaped, and the negro band, in glittering priests’ robes, was playing on a dais surrounded by silver pyramids. On the wall opposite Amy was a huge, blindly staring reproduction of the mask of Tutankhamun.

‘It aims to be exotic but is in fact perfectly cosy,’ Jack murmured beside her.

The club’s owner saw Jack as soon as he reached the bottom step, and undulated forward to greet him. Ondine was wearing a sheath of glittering green, and her eyes were made up to echo the stare of Tutankhamun over her head. Even though her dress was only just held up over her breasts by a huge scarab pin, Ondine was rumoured to be a man.

Jack kissed her on both cheeks.

‘Zhack Ropaire, chéri. You are at ze table tonight?’

‘Madame Ondine. Yes, if you please.’

Ondine guided them to the booths against the wall away from the band, where round tables and red velvet chairs were separated by more pyramids. Jack held out one of four empty chairs in the most secluded of the booths, and Amy sat down. A moment or two later champagne in an ice-bucket materialized beside them. Jack’s head bent and almost touched hers as he gossiped amiably about the dancers revolving in front of them. Amy knew one or two of the faces from her mother’s drawing room, others from the newspapers, but most of them were strangers. As she watched she had the feeling that this was a stratum of society that would be as interesting as the debutante dances of Berkeley Square had been dull.

Amy was excited, alive with every fibre of herself, and more wide awake than she had felt for months.

‘Couldn’t we dance?’ she asked Jack. It would be an added pleasure to feel his arm around her, and the weight of his hand in the small of her back.

‘Would you mind if we go on sitting here for a moment?’ he answered. Jack was glancing at his watch with the first hint of anxiety she had glimpsed in him. He was waiting for something.

‘Of course not,’ Amy murmured. She drank her champagne, and watched the kaleidoscope turning in front of her.

A moment or two later Amy felt rather than heard the ripple that washed through the room. It was like a little wave that gathered its own momentum into a crest before breaking away into whispers of foam around the room. And when she did look to see where it had come from, it was the woman of the couple approaching their table that she noticed first. She was tall and stately, with dark hair drawn back in smooth waves from the centre. She had full, reddened lips and dark eyes, and she was wearing a perfectly simple dress of gleaming topaz satin. It was Thelma, Lady Furness, one of the celebrated Morgan twins. The man at her shoulder was the Prince of Wales.

Jack Roper stood up and bowed and Amy stumbled to her feet beside him.

‘Good evening, Sir. Thelma, how lovely you always are.’ Jack took Amy’s hand. His was firm and dry and perfectly cool, unlike her own.

‘Sir, may I introduce Amy Lovell?’

Memories of Miss Abbott’s school came flooding mercifully back to her. Not a formal Court curtsey on a private occasion. One foot gracefully behind the other, and dip into a small, controlled bob.

‘Good evening, Sir.’

‘Adeline’s daughter?’

‘Yes, Sir.’

They were sitting in their red velvet seats again around the intimate little table. Just wait, Amy thought irreverently, until I tell Moira O’Hara. And then she thought how much Helen Pearce would have enjoyed the reflected glory. She had sustained an odd, admiring awe of the Royal Family, and the Prince especially.

He drank whisky, and smoked incessantly, cocking an eyebrow through the wreaths of smoke. As soon as he had stubbed one out he lit another, tapping a staccato rhythm with the butt on his cigarette case. Amy found herself leaning forward, straining her ears. His light, clipped voice was difficult to hear and the Prince kept turning sideways to Lady Furness for confirmation of what he was saying. Only Jack seemed perfectly at ease now that the moment of waiting for the royal arrival was safely past.

After a few minutes’ conversation, the Prince turned to Amy. ‘Miss Lovell, would you like to dance?’

‘Thank you, Sir.’ They were on the dance floor, and Amy was conscious of the covert stares of every woman in the room. How odd it is, she thought. Her partner was just a small-framed, dandyish man with a sad, almost monkey-like face. He was exactly like everyone else, and yet could never be because people were never quite themselves with him. Amy felt that her own face was stiff, and a ripple of sympathy disconcerted her.

The Prince said very little, and then only pleasant trivialities, but he danced like a professional. Amy frowned, concentrating on keeping up with him. At last, her partner said, ‘Shall we rejoin our host?’ and she felt quite giddy with relief. The band finished the number with a triumphant flourish, and she was restored to Jack. He grinned at her over the rim of his glass. The Prince was leaning forward attentively to Lady Furness, his duty clearly done.

‘Would you like to dance again?’ Jack asked.

‘Yes, please.’

It was quite different. No one was looking at them and pretending not to. They were alone, with Jack’s height a bulwark between them and the world. All Amy’s physical being seemed focused in her fingers, laced with his. The rest of her felt as light as if she could float up off the sprung floor.

She looked up and saw the amusement in Jack’s blue eyes.

‘Silenced?’ he asked.

She laughed, and let her head rest against his shoulder. ‘Not quite. Deeply impressed. Are you a close friend of his?’

‘No. He doesn’t have many of those. We just like the same things. Adeline, for example. And Thelma and I have known each other for years. We Yankees have to stick together, after all. Tomorrow,’ he promised her, ‘we’ll do something quite different.’

Amy nodded, her head still against his shoulder, content with that.

His Royal Highness was disposed to enjoy himself. Amy’s impression of the evening began to run together into a blur of smoke and dimming lights, of the Prince’s monkey-sad face and the shimmer of Thelma Furness’s topaz dress. Jack’s arm around her and the insistent music seemed the only reality.

It was very late when the Prince stood up to leave. Madame Ondine came forward to escort the royal party to the entrance of the club. In the dark the Prince’s car slid up to the steps at once.

He bowed over Amy’s hand. ‘Perhaps Jack will bring you out to the Fort, one of these days.’

On my afternoon off from the Lambeth? she thought hilariously.

The Lagonda nosed forward and the leather seat swallowed her up. The street lights swung overhead again, and Amy saw as they reached Bruton Street that the sky was grey with dawn.

Jack leaned forward and just touched her mouth with his.

‘Is tomorrow evening much too soon for you to see me again?’

‘No. It seems a long time off.’

This time his mouth was harder. Amy reached up and touched his cheek.

‘Until tomorrow, then.’

He came at the stroke of eight, but Amy had been waiting for an hour. On her breakfast tray that morning she had found a little note from Adeline.

Darling, I do hope you will enjoy yourself. I know that Jack will take care of you. But, somehow, I don’t feel quite brave enough to stay and watch. Am I too silly? I have gone with Mickie Dunn to Venice for the d’Abres ball. To Paris first for a frock fitting.

I love you.

I love you too, she thought.

Amy had always considered Lord and Lady Carlisle to be her mother’s friends. When she had thought about them at all, it was to regard them as rather intimidating and exclusively fashionable. They were legendary party-givers and party-goers. But with Jack beside her, she discovered, it was different. There was a dinner for twenty-four people at the house in Green Street before the party began, where the talk licked wittily around the table. As Adeline’s daughter and Jack Roper’s partner a place seemed to open quite naturally for Amy. She had, she discovered to her pleasure, a talent for making her fellow guests laugh. It was nothing like Richard’s ability, but it made her feel happy and comfortable. She liked these clever, agreeable people who were devoted to nothing more complicated than enjoying themselves, Amy decided.

It was time she enjoyed herself, too.

Across the table she caught Jack’s blue gaze, and smiled at him so that the diamonds swung and sparkled in her ears.

She was also the focus of envy, she discovered.

The women withdrew briefly to Caroline Carlisle’s drawing room.

‘God, isn’t Jack Roper divine?’ breathed a girl of her own age with round, saucer eyes. ‘I’d give my best pearls for a single evening, truly I would. How d’you manage it?’

‘He’s a very old friend of my mother’s,’ Amy answered demurely.

The house was already flooding with people. The party began like any other, with a band playing and a river of guests flowing up the stairs to where the long windows of the first-floor drawing room stood open to the hot, velvety summer night. But at midnight, Caroline Carlisle came into the drawing room waving a thick sheaf of papers. She jumped on to a low table and clapped her hands.

‘Scavenger hunt! Scavenger hunt!’

At once there was a roar of approval and a forest of hands stretching for the pieces of paper.

‘Wait till I say. Cheats will be disqualified. Ready, steady, go.’ Lady Carlisle flung the papers up in a white whirl and at once the room was a boiling mass of people snatching and running. Amy felt one of her wrists clasped in Jack’s iron fingers. In his other hand he brandished the paper.

‘Run.’

They pounded down the stairs amongst the eddying crowd and out into the street where the Lagonda crouched at the kerb. As they vaulted over the gleaming red sides another couple pressed in with them.

‘Do be an angel, Jack. Let us come too.’

‘Hold tight, all of you. Amy, what’s top of the list?’

She read it breathlessly. At least a dozen items.

One diamond butterfly

One bicycle lamp

One evening slipper of Madame Ondine’s

One sandwich from the porters’ bar at Covent Garden …

‘Adeline’s got a diamond butterfly,’ she gasped. ‘She had it made up for a charity ball. And I think one of the footmen rides a bicycle.’

Jack was already racing, with their passengers clinging on behind and waving to the less fortunate running for cabs.

The bizarre items began to pile up safely in Amy’s lap.

‘On to Ondine’s!’ Jack shouted. He was possessed with the excitement of the hunt. Amy saw how much he needed and enjoyed the competition. Perhaps everything, even herself, was part of his need to win. She didn’t mind that. She was glad to be a prize for Jack Roper.

At Ondine’s he left them at the club door. A moment later he was back, bearing a sequinned slipper, surprisingly large.

‘We’re not leading yet,’ he shouted, as they swung away again. ‘She was only wearing this one. And God knows what sort of shape her dressing room’s in. There were about a dozen people scrimmaging at the door.’

At Covent Garden the tea stall was besieged by imploring people in evening clothes, to the astonishment of the handful of porters.

‘It doesn’t matter a damn what sort of sandwich,’ a man with a monocle was shouting.

At Marble Arch tube station more people were hunting through the litter for discarded tickets. One tube ticket, and the Underground was closed for the night. It was the maddest, funniest evening Amy had ever spent.

The chase took them down to the river, in search of a lifebuoy. From the river Jack drove like a demon to Soho where an ancient theatrical outfitter living over his shop came blinking to his door in answer to the fusillade of knocks. He took the crisp five-pound note that Jack held out and came shuffling back with a comic-opera policeman’s helmet.

‘It doesn’t say it has to be a real one,’ Jack beamed as they roared off into the night again. ‘Oh God, where can we get a cricket bat? Is Lord’s open after midnight?’

‘Chap who shares my digs plays cricket,’ said the man perched in the back of the car, and they were off again.

At last, bearing their trophies, they shot back into Green Street. Amy glanced up and saw Caroline Carlisle in her silver dress out on the balcony waving them on.

But from the opposite direction someone else was running, head down, like a rugger player. A policeman’s helmet was jammed on his head and the handle of a cricket bat protruded from under his arm. Jack saw him and vaulted over the side of the car. He was running too, with Amy and their friends of the evening at his heels, but not even Jack was fast enough. The boy streaked up the stairs and fell at Lady Carlisle’s feet, scattering his treasure all around her.

When Amy caught up with him Jack was leaning against the door jamb, gasping and smiling. ‘Beaten into second place by a damned sprinter,’ he complained. ‘But what a race.’

She put her arms around him and kissed him, laughing. ‘We should have won.’

From outside they heard someone shouting, ‘The Betts have been arrested for assaulting a police officer.’

‘What is a scavenger hunt if one or two of one’s guests aren’t clapped into the cells?’ said Lady Carlisle philosophically.

It was daylight when Jack walked Amy home again through the silent streets. The pavements were misted with the damp that clung in rainbow beads in their hair, and their breath clouded milkily ahead of them. Amy thought that she had never seen London look so polished clean, so perfect. It was the first moment, in all the hectic, sparkling hours since she had met him, that they had been alone and quiet together. She felt her happiness real enough to reach out and touch it.

At Bruton Street Jack kissed her fingers, one by one.

‘I have to do some business today. Shall I come for you at eight tonight?’

‘Another party?’

He smiled at her. ‘The very best kind of party.’

For the best kind of party Amy chose to wear her most elegant, plainest black evening dress, and extravagant long black gloves. The dress left her shoulders and throat exposed and creamy-pale, and from Adeline’s wardrobe she had borrowed a cape of floating white feathers to wrap herself in.

When Jack saw her standing like a black and white column under the huge chandelier he stopped for a moment. Then he reached almost awkwardly to touch her cheek.

The Lagonda was waiting outside. Jack drove them to Chelsea, to a neat white house in a pretty terrace.

‘Who lives here?’ Amy asked curiously.

‘I do,’ Jack answered.

Inside the quiet house he put his arms around her and turned her face up to his. Beside them a rococo gilt mirror reflected their stark black and white back at them, and Amy thought for a giddy instant as she saw it that they were already fused, already part of one another.

‘Are you hungry?’ he asked formally. ‘I could cook you some dinner, so long as it’s scrambled eggs.’

Amy smiled at the contrast with their other nights together. She felt privileged at last, to be here with him alone.

‘No,’ she said clearly. ‘I’m not hungry for food.’

The gentleness was suddenly gone. Jack took her hand and led her abruptly upstairs. In his bedroom there was a wide bed with a black silk cover. Roughly he kissed her throat and then lifted one of the damp white feathers where it clung to her skin. The feather cape dropped on to the black cover, and the drifting fronds settled lazily into stillness.

Jack peeled off the long black gloves, first one and then the other. He knelt to kiss the blue threads inside her wrists. Looking down, Amy saw the silver glitter in his fair hair and laced her fingers through it. His mouth moved upwards to the warmth in the crook of her arm, then to her shoulder and her lips again. His tongue moved against hers and for Amy the whole world slipped a little and then dissolved beyond them. There was only Jack now, only his hands and mouth and the expanse of rippling black silk. He undid the tiny buttons at the back of her dress and it fell in folds at their feet. Amy stepped out of it in her high-heeled slippers and he unhooked her stockings and touched the soft skin inside her thighs.

‘Jack,’ she whispered as her hands reached out for him. She saw his blue eyes half-close as the ribbon of his black tie unwound and dropped between them.

‘My love. My pretty, wicked love.’

They were both smiling as he kissed her again and her mouth opened wide to him. The last of their tangled clothes fell and he laid her back against the smooth silk. The kiss of his warm skin against hers was almost chaste in its sweetness, yet it excited her so that she moaned aloud and laced her fingers tighter, pulling him to her.

‘Jack,’ she whispered again, imploring now. His hand explored the heart of her so that she felt the petals already unfolding. He hung over her for a second, poised, and then with the arrogance of certainty he came inside her.

The pain and the pleasure were simultaneous, infinite, and then the pain was gone and there was only the pleasure as they moved together, opposite parts of the whole that had eluded her and now, at last, was here in all its simpleness for her to touch and taste.

The tide of sweetness overtook her and washed the breath and heat and anxiousness out of her, and then receded as mysteriously as it had come. It left her lying with Jack Roper in her arms, his eyes closed and his silver-fair hair darkened with sweat. The silence that wrapped around them was as warm and calm as the tropical sea. She smiled, crookedly, with her lips against his cheek, and stirred a little. He lifted his hand and found her fingers, and wrapped them in his own. Amy looked outwards, from the folds of black silk around them to the white walls, the curtained windows and the pattern of London beyond. The world knitted together and she felt whole and calm, as smooth and rounded as an egg and as powerful as a breaking wave. The world had let her into a secret at last and she was alive with it.

So that’s what happens, Amy thought. Her virginity was gone and she was glad, as if Jack had given her the answer to a question that had nagged at her for months. The intimacy of the moment seemed so natural and so tender that she felt she understood, at last, the mystery of love. It laced the world together, and illuminated it as well. Amy understood it for herself and Jack Roper, and it made her wonder why the same happiness had been denied to Isabel. Suddenly she knew that it was true that sex hadn’t completed any circle for Isabel. It had broken her down instead, and she been led away, helpless, between the nurses from Thorogood House.

It wasn’t fair, Amy thought. Why should there be the difference?

She opened her eyes and saw that Jack was watching her face. She was so close to him that all she could see was the net of tiny wrinkles at the corner of his eye and the little, tender fold of his eyelid. Jack was her friend, and he had shown her the secret with ease and grace and she loved him. That was all. The difference was between Jack Roper and poor Peter Jaspert.

Amy reached up to touch Jack’s cheek with her fingers.

‘Thank you,’ she said softly.

‘In the normal run of things,’ Jack told her, ‘I am supposed to thank you.’

Amy lay back so that her hair spread in red-brown feathers over his chest.

‘You know why,’ she murmured.

‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘Well? Did you like it?’

Amy rolled over so that she could see him, touching her finger to his mouth and then looking down at the curled, greying hair on his chest and the tanned, muscular belly, and his long legs still wound around hers. He made her own body look soft and glimmeringly pale by comparison against the rumpled silk cover. Amy bent her head so that her face was hidden.

‘I thought it was wonderful.’

She felt the rumble of laughter. ‘Oh, Amy, my darling. I’d sworn that I wouldn’t ever make the comparison, but you are so exactly like Adeline was.’

‘I don’t mind you comparing,’ Amy said honestly. She was thinking of her mother’s generosity and vitality and her determination to be happy. She knew that Jack was wrong, because she wasn’t the same as Adeline. ‘I’d be proud, if I thought that I really was like her.’

‘I don’t want to think of anyone at this minute but you,’ Jack said fiercely. ‘And anyway, one shouldn’t. It’s most discourteous.’

Passion veiled with flippancy, Amy thought, dreamily. Oh yes, I like that. I do like you, Jack.

He reached for her and kissed her so that she twined her legs more tightly in his and stroked his shoulders and the curve of his flank where it tapered into his hips. How wonderful it is, she thought, to be so hungry and to be fed exactly what you want. And how clever, and how beautiful, bodies are when they fit together.

‘Would you like to put on your exotic black dress again so that I can take you out to supper?’ he murmured.

Amy shook her head slowly. She forgot Isabel, and Adeline, and everything in the world except Jack. ‘I want you to make love to me again. Will you?’

He wound his fingers in her hair and pulled her down on top of him. ‘I’m forty-eight years old, my love. I should have known you when I was eighteen.’

Her hand moved, stroking, and then found him. ‘You can,’ she said simply and she heard the brief bubble of laughter again.

‘Yes. I can.’

Much later, they went out to supper together. Amy’s long black gloves were restored, and the floating white feathers enveloped her to the point of her chin. The diamonds shone in her ears again and her hair was as smooth as when she had left Bruton Street. But Amy was different. As the maître d’hôtel guided them through the packed tables to their shaded corner, the diners looked up at them. They saw the brilliance of Amy’s eyes and her pink cheeks, Jack Roper’s confident height and her fingers tucked under his arm, and they sighed enviously.

At their table the maitre d’ murmured, ‘And will the beautiful madame sit here?’

Amy had been told that she was beautiful before, and the idea had made her nervous. Tonight she knew that she was beautiful, and that she had achieved something that she would never forget.

Across the white tablecloth Jack raised his glass to her, with the bubbles rising and bursting in it like stars.

‘To you,’ he said.

There was no going back to Bruton Street. Amy fell asleep in the little Chelsea house with Jack’s arms around her, and he was still asleep beside her when she woke again in the morning.

She lay quietly, watching the bars of sunlight move infinitesimally slowly across the floor.

Jack stirred and opened his eyes. He was fully alert at once. He always crossed the barrier between oblivion and consciousness with perfect ease. His arms tightened around her now.

‘How long have we got?’ he asked.

Until she had to be a nurse again. ‘Only a week,’ Amy said sadly.

‘And how long will it take you to be packed and ready to go abroad?’

‘A couple of hours, I should think.’

‘Let’s do it, then. I want to see you in the sun.’

They flew from Croydon Airport to Nice. Amy had never travelled by air before and the ease of it enthralled her. Jack grinned at her indulgently, as if she was a child with a coveted new toy. By eleven o’clock they were dining overlooking the harbour at St Tropez, where the lights of the moored yachts reflected in skeins off the black water and the music drifted out over the ripples.

All through the hot, still days of their holiday Amy basked in the sun. Her skin turned gold, and her hair shone with copper lights. She swam with Jack in the warm sea, fighting to keep up with him as he forged ahead of her with powerful strokes sending up glittering plumes of spray. In the evenings they hopped from café to café with the surging crowds of friends, and danced on yacht decks under the strings of coloured lights. Then they went to bed, and reached out for one another all over again.

Amy had never felt so vibrantly happy, nor had she ever had the same sense that everything she looked at or touched was brighter than usual. The whole world seemed charged with a new electricity, from the crystalline sand under her feet to the feather of pink clouds against the evening skyline. The South of France was painted in its exotic colours by the physical pleasure that she shared with Jack. It wrapped around them so that their hands had only to touch to make them stop short and stare at one another, the dancing that drew them close and separated them was almost a torture, and the kisses lightly exchanged under the blue-black night sky grew deeper until they melted against one another and fled hand in hand from the noisy parties to be alone again.

The short summer nights seemed hardly long enough. But Amy felt stronger on the lack of sleep than she would ever have believed possible at the Royal Lambeth.

‘Do you think,’ she asked Jack once as they lay in bed in the ash-pale moonlight, ‘do you think it’s wrong to enjoy this so much? Isn’t there a word for it?’

The moonlight drained the colour from everything and his eyes were grey as he laughed at her.

‘The word you’re thinking of is quite inapplicable to you. You have a perfectly normal, natural appetite and I love it.’

He saw that Amy’s face was suddenly touched with sadness, and he reached out to hold her. ‘What is it?’

‘I was thinking about my sister.’

Isabel and her sadness had been often in her thoughts.

Jack was waiting. He knew about Isabel, as he seemed to know about most things. He even included Peter Jaspert among his huge circle of acquaintances. But he had almost never spoken of them.

‘Jack,’ Amy said abruptly, ‘when we get back home, will you come to Chertsey with me to see her?’

‘Of course.’

The last golden day came. Twenty-four hours before Amy was due to present herself to Sister Blaine once more they swam in the sea for the last time, and then drove back to Nice between the oleanders and the bougainvillaea.

Amy sighed. ‘I’ve never been so happy,’ she said softly. ‘Thank you.’ And then, in Jack’s tanned, familiar face, she saw anxiety briefly flickering. She put her finger on his wrist, knowing how the golden hairs on it thickened on his arm under the white shirtsleeve. ‘It’s all right,’ she told him. ‘I think I understand the rules.’

‘Not rules,’ he corrected her. ‘Except, perhaps, in the sense that a game has rules.’

It was a game. Amy had sensed from the beginning that what was happening with Jack Roper could hardly lead to their engagement, and her picture in the Tatler in a demure dance dress with a rope of pearls. It had been an invitation and a step into a new, exotic world for Amy, and she was grateful to Jack for the graceful way he had done it. It was as if he had given her a present of herself, rich and intact, and a million times more precious than the diamonds. But for Jack himself, she knew with perfect clarity, it was a diversion amongst many others. He would be her lover, she hoped, for a little while longer yet, and he would be her friend for ever.

They leaned back in their seats in the aeroplane, and tightened the seat buckles across their laps.

‘I wish,’ Jack said softly, ‘there were more girls in the world like you.’

The engines spluttered and roared, and then they were taxiing.

‘I loved it all,’ Amy said. ‘Being with you, and going to the parties, and the scavenger hunt, and the Prince of Wales, all of it. Who could ask for two happier weeks?’

She had intended to reassure him that she was safe, and playing the game with as much assurance as Jack Roper himself. But he was looking away from her, out of the tiny porthole window as the huddle of airport buildings vanished behind them. There was a folded copy of the London Times lying in his lap.

‘I’m glad, Amy. There may not be so very many more years of parties to come.’

Amy sat very still. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Chancellor Herr Hitler. German rearmament.’

Appleyard Street and its slogans, the threatening march of Capitalism and Comrades against Fascism, seemed to Amy at that moment to belong to another world. The plane was airborne now and climbing steeply. Far below her Amy glimpsed the curve of coast and the blue-green sea with its tiny white fringe as they banked in a slow curve and turned inexorably northwards. A slow, cold shiver touched her spine as the Mediterranean swung and vanished behind them.

The Lagonda was waiting for them at Croydon. Jack’s mood had changed again and he grinned at her as he slid behind the wheel.

‘Shall we drive straight to Chertsey? Why not?’

England seemed lushly green and shady, although the roads were white with dust in the mid-August sun. Even Thorogood House looked merely cool and solid amongst its shrouding evergreens that allowed shafts of sunlight to flicker over the lawns.

Isabel was sitting in a white wicker chair against a high rhododendron wall. Another chair was drawn up close to hers and she was reading aloud to a thin man in a grey woollen shirt. His long, thin grey-flannelled legs stretched out in front of him. Amy was unsurprised by the sight. Isabel and her friend were almost always together.

Isabel saw them coming towards her across the grass and stood up, blushing slightly. She looked pale beneath the pinkness after the tanned St Tropez faces, but she seemed composed enough.

‘Darling.’ The sisters hugged each other. Amy glanced down at the book that Isabel had hastily closed up. It was Kipling, she saw.

‘This is Jack Roper, Bel.’

As they shook hands Amy saw her sister look from Jack’s face to her own. There was a flicker, and the pink flush over Isabel’s cheekbones deepened a little. She saw at once, Amy knew that. Isabel’s vagueness had gone, and sometimes she seemed almost herself again. But she had withdrawn into the protection of Thorogood House, and the world beyond it was a threat that she had no wish to confront, as yet. After her brief home visits she went back to Thorogood House with a relief that was clear to them all.

At Chance, Isabel spent her days sitting quietly reading in her room or in the gardens. When she was at Bruton Street, Bethan brought the baby Peter to visit her. At Adeline’s insistence, Bethan was part of the rigid Ebury Street nursery hierarchy. Peter Jaspert and his mother tolerated her presence, and the visits to Bruton Street were permitted so long as Isabel was carefully watched at all times. They need not have worried. Isabel would play politely with the baby for an hour or so, as if he was the child of a rather distant cousin, and then Bethan would bear him away again, anxiety and incomprehension creasing her kindly face.

Amy herself could just understand that Isabel had cut his baby out of her consciousness in the same way as she had excised Peter Jaspert himself, because it was her only, distorted, hope of survival. But to Bethan it was a mystery. Loyalty to Isabel on the one hand, and on the other to the little boy under her care even though he was a living replica of all the other Jasperts, pulled Bethan painfully in two opposite directions.

Isabel would go happily back to Thorogood House after her visits so that her treatment could continue. For months Amy had known that the reason for her sister’s tranquil acceptance of the grim nursing home was the thin, grey man beside her.

‘How do you do, Mr Roper?’ Isabel said pleasantly. ‘May I introduce Captain William Parfitt?’ She glanced back at the red-brick house as confidently as if she was the mistress of her own house. ‘I’ll ask them to bring us some tea out here, shall I?’

They sat down in a circle in the rhododendron shade.

‘You look so well, Amy,’ Isabel said. ‘So pretty.’

‘Jack and I have been in St Tropez. It was so hot there.’

Isabel shivered a little. She glanced quickly away, her shadowed eyes flicking over the mown grass until they fixed on Captain Parfitt.

Amy bit her lip. It had been a mistake to come here with Jack. A reassurance, selfish, for herself and a cruel statement to make to Isabel. It was the insistent memory of Isabel as her best friend and her equal that made her want to share her happiness with her even now.

The tea tray arrived, white china arranged on a blue linen cloth.

‘It’s been so hot here, too. Hasn’t it, Bill?’

‘Oh, yes. So hot.’

They smiled at each other, and Isabel put a reassuring hand on his sleeve before she turned to pour the tea.

Captain William Parfitt had been so severely shell-shocked that he had been invalided out of his regiment in 1918. For most of the years since then he had been institutionalized. Until Isabel came to Thorogood House he had spent his days sitting alone, shaking, almost completely mute. Now, companionably, they spent their days together. Bill Parfitt followed Isabel everywhere.

He could talk again, but he turned to Isabel for confirmation of every word. And Isabel was proud and protective of him. Sometimes, even now, Bill’s eyes would fill with tears. Isabel would simply take his hand and wait until his face was in control again. They read aloud to one another and walked in slow circuits between the dank evergreens.

Now they sat side by side across the tea-table facing Amy and Jack. The talk moved on from the hot weather to cricket, and Larwood’s bodyline bowling that was causing a storm in Australia.

‘Damned un-un-un … unsporting,’ said Bill Parfitt and Isabel nodded her encouragement.

‘Oh, I don’t know.’ Jack was reasonable. ‘The man’s a fine cricketer.’

The two men plunged into discussion, and animation began to shine in Bill Parfitt’s thin face. Isabel watched him for a moment, and then turned a smile of gratitude on Amy that was startling in its warmth and naturalness.

‘Bill misses the chance to talk about cricket to someone who understands it. I don’t, although I try for Bill’s sake.’

So Jack was accepted, in spite of the threatening, unthinkable implications that surrounded him, because he could talk to Bill. Amy smiled back, but anxiety nagged at her.

They sat talking mildly for another hour. To an onlooker it might have been a tea party on the lawn of a big house anywhere in England. Madness seemed far removed from the sunny order of things, and so it was hard to believe that this Isabel wasn’t exactly the same sister that she had always known. The sense of loss and futility boiled up inside Amy while she talked neutrally of France and London.

When she stood up at last to leave with Jack, Isabel hugged her warmly. ‘I like your friend,’ she murmured. ‘And Bill does, too. Will you bring him down again?’

It was time to go. When she turned back for the last time to glance at them from the corner of the house, Amy saw that Isabel had already picked up the volume of Kipling and she was reading again. Bill Parfitt was listening, one hand held up to shade his face from the sun.

Amy was very quiet on the drive back to London.

At length she said abruptly, ‘Isabel really doesn’t need to be in that place any more. She’s well enough to be at home, or in Switzerland, or anywhere that would do her good. She only wants to stay there because of Bill Parfitt.’

Jack looked sideways at her, quizzical creases showing at the corners of his eyes. ‘Haven’t you considered that Bill Parfitt might do her more good than anything else?’

‘Why?’ Amy sensed her own anger.

‘Just because he needs her. Because she can feel stronger than he is. I’m not a brain doctor, but I’d guess that’s just what Isabel needs. Love the healer, and so on. Don’t you think so?’

‘Do they love each other?’ she snapped at him. ‘Surely, after Peter Jaspert, after what’s happened to her, Isabel wouldn’t want …’

Jack laughed at her. ‘Oh, Amy. Why shouldn’t they? You don’t imagine everyone loves in the same way as you, do you? White-hot and body and soul? Isabel could do worse than love poor Bill Parfitt.’

Amy’s knuckles went white as she gripped the leather seat. ‘That’s just it, Poor Bill Parfitt. Isabel is Isabel, and she’s lovely and clever and capable of all kinds of things. She’s just been ill, that’s all. There’s everything that she should do, if she’s well again. Not … not just sit there, vegetating, with him.’

Jack said nothing, and Amy glared at him. ‘How can you say that she ought to stay there?’

He was still silent, as if to let her listen to her own words, and then he said, ‘Nobody can say what Isabel ought to do, if she really is well again. That is for her to decide. If she’s happy, and she looked happy to me, shouldn’t you accept that? She isn’t you, my love, and nor are you Isabel. You’re different people.’

Amy wanted to shout at him for his arrogant reasonableness. Then she remembered how patiently he had talked to Bill Parfitt, waiting for him to form the stammering commonplaces, and Isabel’s radiant smile of gratitude.

Impulsively she reached and hugged him. The car swerved violently.

‘Don’t kill us both, Amy.’

‘I love you.’

He swung the long scarlet nose of the car straight again, and then drew up at the roadside so that he could put his arms around her.

‘I love you too.’

It wasn’t a pledge, or any kind of a promise. It was a simple, satisfying statement of a simple truth.

Eighteen tiny buttons on the uniform dress. Over it went the apron, starched so stiffly that it crackled. Then the frilled cap that hid the sun-bleached copper lights in her hair.

In ten minutes, she would be on duty. Amy smiled ruefully as she straightened the seams of her black stockings. She had already forgotten the smell of the sun on the sea and the blossoms that had overhung their balcony. The hospital smelt just as it always did, obliterating everything else. But yet, not quite. Jack had brought her back to the hostel, sliding right up to the door in the gleaming car and kissing the tip of her nose.

‘Telephone me,’ he had ordered imperiously, ‘as soon as you have your barbarous duty hours quite clear. Then I shall come and take you away from all this for a minute or two.’ Then he had waved and tooted the horn, and driven away in a blaze of scarlet.

The first person Amy saw was Moira O’Hara.

‘Holy Mother, Lovell. You look like a foreigner. Where’ve you been?’

‘I’ve been to the South of France. With a lover. Just wait till I tell all. It beats cups of cocoa and The Primer of Nursing, believe me. It’s vile to be back. Except for seeing you, of course.’ And in her exuberance Amy swung Moira around until they stumbled against each other, giggling.

‘God, I could do with a lover. Is he rich?’

‘And handsome. And a friend of the Prince of Wales.’

Moira asked in sudden alarm, ‘You’re not going to pack it in, then, are you? Be a lady, after all?’

Amy laughed. ‘No. I can’t marry Jack. I shall stick it out here with you, through thick and thin.’

‘Speaking of which, it’s thin for you all right. You’re under Blaine this week.’

‘Oh no.’

‘Oh yes.’

‘Oh damn and blast. I’d better go, I’m late …’

Jack Roper was true to his word. When Amy was off duty he would come purring up to bear her away to a party, or to a nightclub, or to a dinner à deux where he would fill her up with oysters and caviar and laugh through the smoke of his cigar at her groaning descriptions of hospital food.

Once there was a great fancy-dress ball in a country house where three marquees were decorated as circus rings, and the hostess presided as ring-master on a towering white stallion. Two plane-loads of flowers had been specially flown in from Paris for the ball, and the lake beyond the house was carpeted with floating petals.

Amy, in her tiny spangled trapeze-artist’s costume, was awed by the profligate splendour of it all.

‘It’s the beginning of the last fling,’ Jack said, with his touch of grimness. Fear flickered in Amy again, even more coldly because now she understood some of the reason. She had been back to Appleyard Street again, and found it seething with anti-Fascist feeling. Jake Silverman had been arrested and was still in gaol after leading some violent street battle against the Fascist sympathizers. Kay Cooper and Angel Mack were bitter and cold, with the old dilettantism bled out of them.

‘I wish I was a man,’ Angel declared. ‘I could fight then, instead of just waiting and stuffing pamphlets through letterboxes. Why is it that everything that happens is by and because of men?’

Amy began to see the parties and the nightclubbing against an increasingly sombre backdrop. She felt like a schizophrenic as she shuttled from Jack and Bruton Street and the noisy glamour of that world, and back to the wards again, and then on to the quiet tension of Appleyard Street.

Autumn turned slowly into winter, and the happiness that the summer had brought to Amy seemed to fade a little with the sunshine.

Christmas came, and this time Amy had only a short leave. Jack came with her to join the house party at Chance. Isabel was home too, for a whole week. She was as pleasant and withdrawn as always, nowadays. She seemed content to sit and read or to watch the boisterous party games that Adeline insisted on. There was never any question that Isabel might join in.

‘Bill’s gone to his sister at Broadstairs for a few days,’ she explained to Amy. ‘He’s really so much better. They think he might be able to live outside, soon.’

Remembering the day of her visit with Jack, and the way that he had reprimanded her for her judgements, Amy simply nodded. ‘I’m glad,’ she said.

The Christmas rituals were performed with the enthusiasm that Adeline insisted on. It should have been a happy time for Amy. Isabel was here, at least, and Richard was home too, in the highest possible spirits. She was with Jack, who prowled along the dark passage to her room as soon as the huge house had settled for the night. ‘Shh …’ he whispered, with his cheek against her hair so that she felt rather than saw his brilliant smile. ‘I can hear Gerald stalking with his twelve-bore …’

He could make her forget everything, as always, when he lay beside her. But afterwards, when he had padded back to his own room, Amy lay staring up into the darkness, feeling the melancholy gathering around her.

On Boxing Day, almost the whole of the party went off to the local meet. Jack had been mounted by Gerald on a big, nervy bay.

‘At least the fellow can handle a horse,’ Lord Lovell had muttered. ‘I’ve never seen that he’s good for anything much else except driving damned noisy cars.’

Jack had looked more handsome than ever under the black brim of his top hat. He bent down to kiss Amy on the cheek as the cavalcade moved away. She smelt the familiar scent of saddle soap and horses with a quick lift of excitement, but somehow she didn’t have the heart to ride out herself today.

Instead she put on her boots, and the scarf that Helen had knitted for her two years ago, and set off to walk across the park.

There had been a heavy frost, and the grass was crackling white as she walked away from the house and under the branches of the huge cedar tree. In the circle of its shelter the grass showed its thin winter colouring. Amy shivered, and her breath hung in front of her in a misty plume. The cold was biting and she began to walk faster in an effort to keep warm. She took the neat gravelled walk beside the wide curving herbaceous bed that was the glory of the gardens in summertime. The earth was bare now, spiked here and there with frost-blackened stalks. The gardeners had industriously cut everything back, and carried the debris away to bonfires and compost heaps. There was nothing here to remind her of the languid, scented warmth of summertime. Amy went on walking, head down against the cold, thinking. She followed the gravelled walk beyond the grey stone wall of the gardens and down the ridge towards the little huddle of houses at the village gates. The smoke from one of the chimneys made a blue-grey smudge against the colourless sky.

The high gates were locked, and the village street beyond them was deserted except for a tabby cat lifting its paws off the frosty stones. Amy turned around again and glanced at the little houses. Behind the trim curtains the men were at home with their families, enjoying their Christmas together. The estate office was locked too. Peering through the window she saw a calendar on the green wall and Mr Mackintosh’s bare wooden desk.

She was thinking about Nick Penry.

In the months since he had written to her, she realized, she had almost forgotten him. In her hours off the wards there had been Jack, and the parties and dancing and champagne bottles clinking in their silver buckets, and the nights when she had submerged herself in him and forgotten the whole world.

Now, suddenly, Nick Penry was as clear in her mind again as if he was standing beside her. Amy swung around, half-expecting to see him watching her. But there were only the blank eyes of the office windows, and she knew each of the families who lived behind the curtains of the others. She didn’t even know for sure whether Nick had come to work at Chance at all, and she had never bothered to find out.

Amy felt that the cold was cutting right through her and into her bones. As she stood hesitating, remembering Nick’s face and quiet voice and the well-shaped hands with the livid blue scars, one of the cottage doors opened. She started with pleasure, a smile of greeting already beginning, and then saw that of course it was only Mrs Wathen, the gamekeeper’s wife.

‘Good morning, Miss Amy. Merry Christmas to you. Would you like to come indoors now for a cup of something warm? You look half-starved out there.’

The smile was fading into disappointment, and Amy forced it politely back again. ‘Merry Christmas to you too, Mrs Wathen. I came out for a walk, but it’s much colder than I thought. I think I’ll just walk straight back up to the house, thank you very much.’

With the smile that she didn’t feel, Amy retraced her steps, following the marks that her feet had made in the frost. Sadness and a sense of emptiness that she couldn’t have explained folded around her. There was an image of Nantlas in her head, vivid from what Nick and Bethan had told her as if she had seen it all herself. It stayed with her all day, and it was still there when the riders came crowding back, exhilarated and red-cheeked from the gallop.

‘We killed over at Collyer’s Copse,’ Gerald announced.

‘You should have come,’ Jack smiled at her. His hands were wrapped gratefully around a brandy glass. ‘You look sad. Why’s that?’

Suddenly Amy wanted to tell him.

She wanted to talk about Helen Pearce in the desolate graveyard beside the railway line, and about Nick’s handicapped son in Nantlas, and the men she had seen swinging bravely up Park Lane with their lamps at their belts and their worn-out boots. And then she could have told him about the day she went back through the little Lambeth streets to Mag’s, looking for Freda and Jim, only to find that Mag had moved away and taken the children with her, leaving no address. People like Mag often moved away and were swallowed up, untraceable. Amy knew that. Then she could have described the Royal Lambeth to Jack and the people who came in and struggled and died in the high iron beds, night after night. But he had never asked her about that. Never, except to find out when she would be free again to come with him to yet another party. It was a part of her life, a half of her that was just as important, but it might never have existed.

Amy looked back into Jack’s level, bright blue eyes and knew that she would never talk to him about any of those things.

Jack believed in living and enjoyment and in finding happiness wherever possible, just as her mother did. And he was wrong about Amy herself, because half of her wasn’t like Adeline at all.

‘I do feel sad,’ she said. The hollowness around her was vast and frightening. She had lost her sense of happy unity with Jack. She liked him still, but she knew with sad clarity that she wasn’t in love with him any longer.

‘Don’t,’ he said cheerfully. ‘There isn’t any need. Listen, Adeline’s got a scheme for this evening …’

Stiffly, Amy turned away. ‘I don’t think I want to,’ she said.

She was remembering Nick Penry again, and wondering whether he was still here among the trees and meadows of Chance.

It was a month later that Jack told her he was going back to New York.

‘There are some things I have to see to there,’ he said, with an expression of faint distaste. Just as he never spoke of Amy’s work, he never mentioned his own business either. It was better, Amy had discovered, not to enquire too closely into how he had amassed his fortune.

There had been no change in their relationship, and Amy liked him just as much as she had always done. But on one or two of her free evenings lately Jack had not been there. Without having to ask she knew, as she had guessed would happen some day, that he had found someone who did not have to get up at dawn to be on duty at six a.m., and who didn’t yawn with tiredness just as an evening was fizzing to its high point. Amy didn’t know if the new somebody was American and so made New York important again, and she didn’t ask that either.

She simply said, with perfect truth, ‘I’ll miss you, Jack. Life will be very grey without you.’

‘I’ll miss you too,’ he said, and tilted her chin up so that he could kiss her.

Amy knew that even her mouth tasted sad, and she thought back regretfully to the summer when she had felt strong enough to take on the whole world.

Jack was to sail on the Mauritania at the end of February. On their last night together he took Amy to Ondine’s again. The decorations had grown endearingly familiar, and Madame Ondine greeted Amy as a favoured regular.

‘Such a crowd in tonight, darling. They haven’t had quite enough for me to take a firm line with them, but I will if it goes a single step further. I’d move your table if I could, but there isn’t a cranny anywhere else.’

There was a big group of a dozen people at the table next to theirs, and several pushed-back chairs revealed that more of the party were in the throng on the dance floor.

Jack and Amy sat down. Jack leaned back with one arm hooked over his chair and his eyes half-closed against the smoke of his cigar. There was a loud burst of laughter from the next table, and the sound of breaking glass followed by more laughter. Out of the corner of her eye Amy saw Madame Ondine undulating towards the source of trouble.

When they could hear themselves again Jack said musingly, ‘I wonder whether your brother-in-law is being deliberately indiscreet? I should say that he is treading on the very thinnest of thin ice.’

Amy’s hand stopped with her glass halfway to her mouth. She followed the direction of Jack’s lazy stare, and saw Peter Jaspert.

Peter was dancing, his high-coloured face brick red and his eyes closed. He was moving slowly, not quite in time to the music, and his partner was bent against him like a bow. Her face was hidden against his shoulder. One of Peter’s big hands held her hips against his, and the other had drawn their twined fingers in against her breast.

Amy felt the colour rising in her cheeks at the thought that she and Jack might ever have looked so openly, nakedly in possession of each other.

The band had been playing a sweet, slow arrangement of ‘These Foolish Things’. The music stopped on a long drawn-out note, Peter turned his partner, and they stopped with a tipsy flourish.

Amy recognized the woman then. It was Sylvia Cole. She put her glass down again and looked away.

As Peter and Archer Cole’s wife rejoined their noisy party she heard several of their friends ironically clapping their performance. Amy bit her lip and stared down at the tablecloth. Peter was the last person she wanted to see, but it was already too late. With euphoria and whisky clearly buoying him up, Peter blundered over to their table.

‘Well. My little sister-in-law. Hello, Amy. Can’t I have a kiss, as family? Mmm. There. ‘Evening, Roper.’

‘Jaspert.’ Jack nodded coolly.

‘We’re having a party. Join us; you must know Talbot and Harrington, and Sylvia, of course you know Sylvia.’

Amy found her voice. She looked up at Peter. ‘Thank you, but Jack and I are having a very quiet evening. We shall be leaving soon, and we wouldn’t want to break up your party for you.’ She could feel the heat of him from where she was sitting. He was like some big, steaming animal still hot from a chase. The thought of Isabel’s remoteness and pallor came back to her, and she shivered a little.

‘Dance, then,’ Peter begged her. ‘Just one. You won’t mind, Roper, will you, if I take her off for just one dance?’

Jack inclined his head very slightly. ‘Amy?’ he asked drily. Jack wouldn’t decide anything for her, of course. Amy would have refused Peter Jaspert whatever he asked her, but then she thought with a sudden wave of exhaustion that it would cause less trouble to do what he wanted. She stood up, and Peter held out his arm to her. She took it, and he pulled her with a flourish on to the dance floor. His breath smelt of whisky and was hot enough to burn her cheek. She would have pulled away, but he was holding her too tightly. Even in the early days of dinners at Ebury Street, Amy had seen Peter the worse for drink, but he seemed much coarser, and heavier now. She felt her flesh grow chilly under his hands.

‘It’s a pity,’ he was mumbling, ‘that it’s all come to this. I like your mama, you know. And you, Amy.’ He pulled her a little closer, if that was possible. ‘But that was a terrible thing that Isabel did, y’know. Apart from all the other things I could tell you about. What’m I to do? How can a man trust a wife like that? There can’t be a divorce, of course. Not in my position. Wouldn’t help my chances. Bad enough as it is.’

Amy went stiff with anger. The combination of cold dismissal of Isabel and amorousness towards herself disgusted her.

‘Isabel had a breakdown,’ she said coldly. ‘I don’t know exactly what drove her to it, but I could guess. How can you talk about trust? While Isabel sits in her nursing home, you are at a nightclub sprawling all over someone else’s wife.’

Surprisingly, Peter Jaspert chuckled. ‘Sylvia and I are good friends. The best. And this is a private club. What goes on here is nobody’s business. I would have thought that you of all people would see that.’

‘What do you mean – of all people?’

He was still chuckling, insinuating. ‘I mean you and Jack Roper. Look at you. You’re humming with it. You know what it’s all about, Amy, so don’t put on the wide-eyed debutante act. What am I supposed to do, with a crazy wife locked up in a mental home? Turn monk?’

Amy stopped dead. Peter, still blundering with the music, tripped over her feet and almost stumbled.

‘Good night, Peter.’ She turned her back on him and began to thread her way through the dancers.

‘Anyway,’ she heard him say, too loudly, determined to have the last shot, ‘Isabel’s got her own fish to fry in that home. Don’t think I don’t hear.’

With her chin up, looking straight ahead of her, Amy reached the table. Jack stood up and drew out her chair for her. Then he saw that she was trembling. His warm hand covered hers.

‘I shouldn’t have let you. He was tight. What did he say to upset you?’

Amy’s smile was bitter. She was thinking about the difference. ‘He didn’t upset me.’

The physical intimacy that she had discovered with Jack had seemed so natural just because he was Jack. His ability to piece together fragments into a satisfying whole had been her good fortune. Isabel had had nothing of the kind. Amy could still feel the heat of Peter Jaspert’s hands on her, and she understood.

‘Jack, I’d like to go home.’

‘Of course.’

Peter Jaspert’s arm was around Sylvia Cole’s shoulders again as Jack shepherded her away. He didn’t look up as they passed.

In the car Jack asked her, ‘Bruton Street or Chelsea?’

‘Chelsea,’ she answered. She wanted very much to be with Jack tonight.

In the quiet little house Jack poured a tumbler full of brandy and put it into her hands, then drew her down on the sofa beside him.

‘Why did that upset you so much? Couldn’t you tell me?’ he persisted.

‘For Isabel. When he touched me …’ Amy shivered, and took a gulp of her brandy. ‘I don’t know why. He isn’t ugly, or even particularly obnoxious. He’s just … poor Isabel. I didn’t understand before. Do you know what he said? That a divorce would be out of the question, in his position. And that Isabel has other fish to fry.’

Jack made a face at her, so full of comical shock and distaste that there was almost a smile in Amy’s eyes again. ‘Didn’t I tell you that Isabel is better off where she is? I’d rather live with Bill Parfitt than Herr Jaspert, any day. And I love his position. Horizontal on top of Sylvia Cole, did he mean? I can’t believe it’s the way to get on, publicly rogering your Minister’s wife.’

Amy did laugh now. ‘It doesn’t seem to be doing him any harm. I heard he’s a great success. Do you think Archer knows?’

‘He can’t do. Yet.’ Jack leaned against the cushions, stretching out his long legs and settling Amy’s head against his shoulder. Gently he stroked her hair. ‘Mmm. That’s better. It won’t be long before Archer Cole does find out. I wouldn’t put any big money on Jaspert’s further advancement.’

Amy settled herself so that her cheek rested against the pleated front of his shirt.

‘Why do you call him Herr Jaspert?’

‘Oh, partly because Massey & Dart are still heavily involved in German loan deals. They must be very good friends of Hitler’s by now. Particularly as he’s using the money to rearm as fast as he can. Archer Cole and his Cabinet pals refuse to see it, of course. The Red menace is the only thing that worries them.’

‘Jack,’ Amy asked very quietly, ‘will there be another war?’

‘Yes. Not yet, but it’s coming.’ He sat up abruptly and reached out for the brandy bottle. ‘So let’s gather our rosebuds while we may.’ When he sat back again his hand moved to stroke Amy’s breast.

The room was silent except for the soft whisper of ash falling from the glowing log fire and the slow ticking of a gilt clock.

‘What’s the other reason?’ Amy asked at last.

‘Do we need a reason? Oh, about Herr Jaspert, d’you mean? I’d hoped we could forget him. The man’s a Fascist. An out-and-out Mosleyite, and beyond. Of course all the Conservatives have been dithering about whether to jump right or left, and Jaspert’s chosen to jump about as far right as you can go. As you rightly said, he’s making a big success just now because they’re all so terrified of Reds. His law-and-order and Trots-off-the-streets-and-into-the-cells policies are going down well with certain segments. It won’t last. He can’t help his temperamental inclinations, but they’ve led him to make the wrong choice. When it comes, the fight will be against Fascism. Look at Italy and Spain, as well as Germany.’

Amy sat watching the fire and thinking. She had heard her brother-in-law’s name mentioned often enough at Appleyard Street, most recently by Jake Silverman only a few days before. Jake was out of gaol again, his face pallid under the black beard but with his fervour burning more brightly than ever.

Tony Hardy had kept her secret loyally. None of the comrades had any idea of Amy’s connections. She listened silently to their denunciations of Peter Jaspert along with Mosley and his sympathizers. Her own dislike of him enabled her somehow to disconnect the memory of his relationship. Tonight, and the insinuating heat of him, had fanned it alive again. It was an ugly thought.

She turned her face against Jack’s shoulder. ‘Let’s not talk about him any more.’

‘By all means.’

‘Jack?’

‘Mmm?’

He was very warm, and close, and she longed to cling to the protection he had given her. But that wasn’t possible, any more.

‘I know we’ve come to a kind of end, together. Do you remember, right at the beginning, I said that I understood the rules?’ Jack moved to put his fingers lightly to her mouth, but Amy turned her head aside. ‘I wanted to say thank you. For giving me what you have done, and for making it happy. That’s all.’

‘Oh, my love.’

Jack stood up and took her hands. He led her up the stairs and laid her down on the black silk cover, and Amy looked round for the last time at the familiar place before he bent over her.

She saw the light glitter on his hair, and the little, tender creases at the corners of his eyes. He kissed her mouth and undid the buttons of her dress, sliding it off so that he could kiss her shoulders and her bare breasts.

Jack had given her her physical self, whole and miraculous. Thank you, for that. Amy let her head fall back. He put his hands up to her face and held it, looking into her eyes. And then he lay down beside her, holding her and stroking her until she moaned deep in her throat and turned imploringly to him.

He tore off the smooth satin of her underclothes and ran his hands over her skin. She reached out for him in her turn, impatient, and she felt his restraint as he guided her, directing her pleasure, as he had always done.

She begged him, please.

At last he fitted himself within her and she wound her arms and legs around him, holding him. They lay still, their faces together, for a long moment of silence. And then they began to move together and Amy forgot their parting, forgot the world itself beyond the bedroom walls. For the last time they belonged together, and there was no more consideration than their bodies’ delight.

Later, in the safe darkness, Amy let her head rest in the hollow of his shoulder. Her eyelashes were heavy, glued together with dampness, and behind them the hot prickle of tears was starting. Amy stared straight up and blinked them back again.

‘May I come with you to Southampton? I’ll wave you off at the dockside.’

And then, in the silence that followed, she heard the sound of solitude.

‘No, my darling,’ Jack said softly. ‘I can’t bear shipboard goodbyes. Let’s say it just as if you were going off to the hospital for an ordinary day.’ The warmth of him curled round her, but she knew that Jack was already gone. His mouth brushed against her forehead. ‘Good night, my love.’

After a moment, with the heat burning her eyes, she whispered, ‘Good night.’

Then there was only work.

The days and nights seemed longer and harder without Jack to look forward to when her duty spells ended. Amy felt wearier than she had ever done after the strenuous night-clubbing and party-going. She went mechanically through the rituals of living as the cold, wet winter dragged interminably on and then grudgingly slipped into a damp, chilly spring. There was little else for her to focus on, and even if there had been anything outside the hospital and hostel walls to tempt her away she could scarcely have afforded the time. For all the nurses of Amy’s set, the final examinations for State Registration loomed in May.

When she came off the wards each day Amy would sit over her textbooks and her lecture notes, anxiously aware that her mind seemed to be working only at half pressure. She seemed to be forgetting even the simplest facts that she had known for years. The anxiety nagged at her, and even though she was perpetually exhausted she slept badly. She had no appetite either, and she lost so much weight that the bones showed too sharply in the planes of her face.

Adeline was concerned when she saw her. She sat on one of her white sofas, with a posy of waxy-white overpoweringly scented stephanotis in a bowl beside her, and took Amy’s hands.

‘I can’t bear it, Amy. You look so ill.’

The scent of the flowers was making Amy feel sick. She tried to smile at Adeline. ‘I’m working hard and sleeping badly, that’s all. I’ll take a holiday after the exams. I’ll go to Chance and stuff myself with butter and eggs.’ Her stomach heaved at the mere thought of it. Adeline’s face suddenly went stiff.

‘My dear, I don’t want to pry, of course. But is it possible that you are enceinte?’

Amy smiled crookedly at her mother’s delicacy. After her own stints on the Lambeth’s labour and maternity wards she had acquired a matter-of-fact view of the female mysteries.

‘No. I’m certain of that.’

When she had first started sleeping with Jack she had trusted him so implicitly that she had left the responsibilities to him. Later, at the height of her happiness, she had believed that she would be glad to bear him a child. Yet nothing had happened, and Amy knew that she wasn’t pregnant.

‘At least that’s something. Darling, it rends me to see you so sad. I wish I hadn’t ever introduced damned Jack if he’s done this to you. But you do understand, don’t you, that that’s the man he is? Gloriously here, and then not here and a vale of tears left behind him?’

‘Yes. I always knew that. It’s all right, I promise. I’m not in love with Jack. Just let me get these bloody exams over…’

‘Amy.’

Even though Amy was conscious of being absurdly and unnecessarily on the verge of tears, Adeline comforted her. Her gaiety was like a rock.

The week of the exams came. Amy fumbled through them, panic alternating with dull apathy. By the time they were over, she was convinced that she had failed. On the night after her last paper, she went to bed with a headache that was almost blinding her. She woke up again at five in the morning shivering uncontrollably, and soaked in her own sweat. She pushed back the bedcovers and tried to stand up and her knees buckled beneath her. Somehow she crawled back and lay down. She was puzzled by the illusion that she seemed to be floating somewhere above the narrow bedstead, and almost amused by the way that the room changed its dimensions around her. Amy had no idea how long it was before her door opened and someone leant over her. A hand that felt as cold as ice touched her forehead. After that Dr Davis appeared. Amy tried to struggle respectfully upright, certain that he was on ward rounds and had caught her asleep on an empty bed.

‘I’m sorry,’ she murmured. ‘I’m so sorry. It was a silly mistake.’

After that, time was confusion. Night and day came at unpredictable intervals, and her head and chest hurt unbearably. Once or twice Amy woke up and saw Bethan knitting at her bedside. It convinced her that she was a little girl again, and she turned her head on the pillow towards Isabel. She called for her, and then cried when she wouldn’t come.

Then, one morning, she woke up and found herself in her own room at Bruton Street. A nurse she didn’t recognize was opening the curtains on a fresh, pale blue summer sky.

‘Hello, dear,’ the nurse said brightly. ‘Are we feeling ourself this morning?’ She took Amy’s hand to feel her pulse. Amy tried to struggle upright, and felt her physical weakness.

‘What is the matter with me?’

‘Nothing that won’t mend. Don’t worry yourself. Mr Hardwicke will be in later to see you.’

Sure enough, the family doctor came with his leather bag and a watch chain looped across his waistcoat front. For a moment Amy was disoriented again, wondering if she was still a little girl with measles, and everything else no more than a dream.

‘What’s the matter with me?’ she repeated, hearing weak petulance in her voice.

‘Mhmm. Mhmm.’ Mr Hardwicke was examining her. He took the stethoscope out of his ears. ‘Well now. You’ve had a nasty bout of influenza. I think you were a little rundown before it, so it laid you particularly low. There was a touch of chest infection which worried us all for a day or two as well, but I think you’ve got the better of that now. You’ll be up and about in no time. Nurse?’

He was talking to the attendant who had woken her up, but Amy felt herself jump automatically to attention at the summons. She laughed weakly, with a touch of hysteria.

‘That’s it,’ the doctor said benignly. ‘Soon be your old cheerful self.’

After Mr Hardwicke came Adeline, perfumed and jewelled and like a breath of summer in the sickroom.

‘Have I been very ill?’ Amy asked in bewilderment. Adeline put her arms round her to hide her face for a moment. When she had it under control again she answered, ‘My darling, for twenty-four hours at death’s door. I actually went down to St Margaret’s and said a prayer. Can you imagine? Me?’

Amy lay back against the pillows. The room was light and bright, washed with pale sunshine. The sun touched her pictures and the tattered covers of her girlhood books and the flowers, and shone on her mother’s dark red hair. Outside were the windows of the houses opposite, clear sky, and the rumble of London. The world was beautiful. She felt calm, and warm, and glad to be in it.

It was two weeks before Amy was well enough to go to Chance. When the day came she tottered down the stairs, supported by Mr Glass and one of the footmen. Adeline sailed ahead to where her chauffeur was waiting with the Bentley. They lowered Amy into her seat, and wrapped the fur rugs around her legs as gently as if she might break.

‘I can manage,’ she protested, half-laughing. ‘And it’s June. I don’t need rugs.’

‘Don’t argue,’ Adeline said.

Chance soothed her as it hadn’t done for years.

As the long summer days began to slip past Amy got better by steady leaps. She had been recuperating for almost a week when the letter came from the Royal Lambeth. She had passed. She was almost at the bottom of the list, but she had passed. She was a State Registered Nurse at last. Amy tucked the letter into the pocket of her dress. It was completely unexpected because she had been so certain she had failed, and the good news gave her more quiet pleasure than anything since Jack’s time. Feeling the slight, stiff crackle of it as she walked, Amy wandered through the sunlit house. For no particular reason her feet led her down the long carpeted corridor to the carved double doors that closed off the orangery.

Thinking of Richard and Tony she slipped inside, her soft shoes noiseless on the marble floor. The morning sun slanted obliquely through the glass roof and the tangle of leaves and strange blossoms cast distorted shadows over the statues in the wall niches. The heat was almost tropical, and it drew the scent from the dampened earth and from the throats of the brilliant flowers.

Amy sat down on the seat at the end and let the warmth wrap its soothing languor around her. Then she heard water dripping and looked up to see one of the gardeners working. He was bent intently over an orchid, feeling the earth with his fingers. Amy saw that he was bare-armed and bare-throated in the heat.

She knew the shape of his head, and the way that he stooped, even in the high orangery, as if he was too used to cramped places.

She knew that the hands stroking the petals of the orchid were marked with blue scars.

It was Nick Penry.