Follies
Rosie Thomas
From the bestselling author of The Kashmir Shawl. Available on ebook for the first time.They were three modern women. They came to Oxford University full of hopes and dreams and would leave forever changed.Helen: shy, quiet and hopelessly in love with Lord Oliver Mortimore, the dazzling, self-destructive blond who lives for fast cars, drink and drugs.Chloe: glamorous and confident, abandoning a high-powered career and broken affair, obsessively drawn to her philandering English professor.Pansy: stunning heiress and aspiring actress, driven to prove she is more than an irresistible magnet to the men who flock to her.Together for one unforgettable year, they would share a lifetime of emotions and a very special friendship…
Follies
BY ROSIE THOMAS
Contents
Title Page (#u7fc21230-bb3e-59f4-b489-66be753e5b49)
Michaelmas Term
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Christmas
Six
Hilary Term
Seven
Eight
Nine
Easter
Ten
Trinity Term
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Summer
Fifteen
Keep Reading
About the Author
Also by Rosie Thomas
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher
Michaelmas Term (#u33195f01-9141-5db1-86d1-a990d5a298d4)
One (#u33195f01-9141-5db1-86d1-a990d5a298d4)
In a moment, she would see it.
The train swayed around a long curve, and then rattled over the iron arches of a little viaduct. Helen pressed her face against the smeared window, waiting.
Then, suddenly, it was ahead of her. The oblique sun of the autumn afternoon turned the spires and pinnacles to gold, and glowed on the rounded domes. The light made the stone look as soft and warm as honey, exactly as it had done for almost four hundred years.
The brief glimpse lasted only a few seconds, then the train shuddered and clattered into an avenue of grimy buildings and advertisement hoardings. But when Helen closed her eyes she saw it again, a sharp memory that was painful as well as seductive. She loved the place as she had always done, but she was a different person now. She shouldn’t have come back. Home was where she was needed now, not here under these honey-gold spires. Yet her mother had insisted, her face still grey with strain. And Graham, with all the sudden maturity that had been forced upon his thirteen years, had told her that it would break their mother’s heart to see Helen give up now. So she had repacked her cheap suitcase with her few clothes, the paperbacked texts and the bulging folders of notes, and she had come back.
Helen opened her eyes again as if she couldn’t bear to think any more.
The train hissed grudgingly into the station and she stood up as the doors began to slam. Two foreign tourists, encumbered with nothing more than expensive cameras, reached to help her with her luggage. A deafening crackle overhead heralded the station announcement.
‘Oxford. Oxford. This is Oxford.’
The tourists smiled at each other, pleased to have their destination confirmed. They bowed to Helen before they left her.
Where else? she thought. Even the air was unmistakable, moist with the smell of rivers and the low mists that the autumn sun never shone strongly enough to dispel. The yellow and gold leaves in the roadway beyond the station entrance were wet, and furrowed by bicycle wheels.
Helen picked up as much of her baggage as she could manage and went in search of a taxi. It was an unaccustomed luxury and uncertainty sounded in her voice as she told the driver, ‘Follies House, please.’
The oak door was heavy, and studded with iron bolt heads. A drift of crisp, yellow-brown leaves had blown up across the threshold, giving the house an abandoned air.
Helen stopped pulling at the iron ring that hung unyieldingly in place of a doorknob and stepped back to peer at the narrow windows set in the high wall. There was nothing to be seen, not even a curtain in the blackness behind the glass. The traffic, roaring close at hand over Folly Bridge, seemed miles away. It was the gush of running water that filled the air, the river racing between the mossed arches of the old bridge.
Helen glanced down at her luggage, piled haphazardly in the pathway where the taxi driver had left it. Her mouth set in a firm line and she turned back to bang on the door with her clenched fist.
‘Anyone … at … home?’ she shouted over the hammering.
From startlingly close at hand Helen heard footsteps, and then a rattle before the door swung smoothly open.
‘Always someone at home. Usually me,’ the fat woman answered. Helen remembered the facts of the loose grey hair, the billowing, shapeless body and the alert little eyes in the dough-pale face. What she had forgotten was the beautiful smile, irradiating the face until the plainness was obliterated. ‘I’m sorry to disturb you, Miss Pole,’ Helen murmured. ‘The door wouldn’t open. Helen Brown?’ she added, interrogatively, afraid that the woman might have forgotten, after all.
‘You call me Rose, pet. I told you last term, when you came for a room. Don’t forget again, will you? Now then, for the door you need a key.’ The ordinary-looking Yale swung at the end of a strand of dirty orange wool. Rose fitted it into the lock and showed Helen how the door moved easily on the latch. ‘Simple, you see.’ Rose waved towards the stairs. ‘No-one to help with your stuff, I’m afraid. Gerry’s never here when you want him, and I’m far too infirm.’ The smile broadened for an instant, then the fat woman turned and disappeared into the dark as quickly as she had materialised.
Helen scuffled through the leaves and stepped into Follies House.
The hall was dingy and smelt of cooking, but the grandeur was undimmed. It was high, four-square and wood-panelled to the vaulted plasterwork of the Jacobean ceiling. The bare wood stairway mounted, behind its fat balusters, to the galleried landing above. In the light of an autumn afternoon the atmosphere was mysterious, even unwelcoming. Yet Helen felt the house drawing her to it, just as she had done the first time. It had been a brilliant June morning when she had applied to Rose for a room. ‘Not my usual sort,’ Rose had told her bluntly. ‘Mostly I know them, or know of them. Reputation or family, one or the other. But you’ve got a nice little face, and Frances Page won’t be needing her room next term, not after all this bother.’
‘I know,’ Helen had said humbly. ‘Frances is in my College. She told me there might be space here.’
‘Oh well,’ Rose had said, looking at Helen more closely. ‘Why didn’t you tell me you were a friend of Frances?’
And so it had been arranged.
Now, after the long, sad summer, she was here. Usually her family had come with her, driving up to her College in the little car. Helen shook her head painfully. This time she was alone, standing in the muffling quiet of a strange house. Again, through the stillness, she heard the pouring gush of the river as it tumbled past the house and on under the bridge, and the sound soothed her. Determinedly, one by one, she hoisted her cases and boxes over the doorstep and into the hall. With the last one she kicked the door shut on the fading yellow light outside and began to climb towards her room with the first load.
Follies House was square, and the first-floor gallery ran round the staircase which led off up to the third floor. Servants’ quarters, she thought with a faint smile, as she panted up into a smaller corridor, even dustier, with uneven, wide oak floorboards. There was no name-card on the low oak door in front of her, but the room was hers just the same. Helen pushed open the door and dropped her burden gratefully on the worn carpet.
The room was the smallest of Rose’s undergraduate quarters, Helen knew that, but the size was unimportant. What mattered was the view. It was a corner room, no doubt freezing cold in the coming damp of the Oxford winter that already seemed to hover in the air. But there were windows in two of the walls, square windows with stone facings set in the red Jacobean brickwork, with cushioned window seats in the recesses beneath them.
Helen knelt on one of the seats and, through the fog of her breath on the cold glass, stared out over Oxford. Due north, ahead of her, was Carfax with its ancient tower, the crossroads that was the nominal centre of the city. Beyond that lay Cornmarket with its chain stores and shoe shops, and beyond that the dignified spread of North Oxford.
Helen turned away to the second window. There, to the east, was the heart of Oxford. The towers and pinnacles and domes were familiar to her now, but the sight of them spread out before her never failed to thrill her.
A little bit of this is mine, thought Helen, as her eyes travelled from the distant perfection of Magdalen Tower, along the invisible but well-remembered curve of the High past All Souls’ and St Mary’s, to the magnificence of Christ Church’s Tom Tower in the foreground. I do belong here, she whispered to herself, and knew that she was glad to be back. Glad, in spite of and also because of the deadening sorrow that she had left behind in the cramped rooms of her parents’ house.
As Helen knelt on her window seat and watched the teeming life passing to and fro over Folly Bridge, up and down St Aldate’s and past Christ Church, a figure appeared in the ribbed archway beneath Tom Tower, over the main entry. It was a young man in a soft tweed jacket, breeches and tall polished boots. He stood for a moment with his hands in his pockets, watching the shoppers and cyclists and homebound office workers with an air of faint surprise. Then he shrugged, adopting an expression of mild resignation in place of the surprise, and began to stroll towards the bridge. Several of the faces in the crowd streaming past him turned to watch him pass, but the young man was oblivious. He merely lengthened his stride, lifted his head to taste the damp smells of leaves and woodsmoke that mingled with the exhaust fumes, and smiled in absent satisfaction. With the wind blowing the fair hair back from his narrow, tanned face and the brilliance of his smile, he attracted even more attention.
Helen, high up in her window, stayed at the vantage point long enough to register the fact of Oliver Mortimore turning out of Christ Church and down St Aldate’s. He was the kind of Oxford figure whom she had spotted and categorised for herself early on in her life there. She had expected him, and would have been disappointed not to have discovered his kind. She knew that he was ‘a lord, or an earl, or something’ because a breathlessly impressed friend had told her so. And she knew that he drove a fast car, and had beautiful friends and expensive tastes, because she had observed as much for herself. Oliver Mortimore was a famous figure in Oxford, well known even to Helen, even though he moved through its world at a level that couldn’t have been further from her quiet round of library, lecture room, and College.
Helen smiled tranquilly and sat for a moment more, immersed in her own thoughts as she stared unseeingly out at the view. Then, reminding herself that there were things to be done, she swung her legs briskly off the window seat and set off for the next armful of possessions.
Her foot was on the last step of the broad lower staircase when the front door banged open. It brought with it a gust of damp, river-redolent air, a small eddy of dead leaves, and Oliver Mortimore. In the dimness he stumbled against Helen’s shabby pile of belongings, lost his balance and fell awkwardly. Oliver swore softly. ‘Jesus, what is all this? Looks like a fucking jumble sale.’
Helen sprang forward, contrite. ‘I’m sorry. It’s all my luggage. Stupid place to leave it.’
Oliver looked up at her, and the frown disappeared from between his eyes.
‘I didn’t see you there,’ he said. ‘Sorry for the language. Good job I didn’t break my leg on your impedimenta, that’s all. It’s the first Meet tomorrow.’
Helen nodded politely, evidently not understanding, and Oliver grinned at her as he scrambled up. She saw that there was a long scrape in the high polish of his boots, and had to resist the impulse to kneel down and rub the blemish off such a vision of perfection. At close quarters Oliver Mortimore was not only the most beautiful but also the most physical man she had ever encountered. He radiated such confidence, such highly-charged animal pleasure in his own existence, that set her skin tingling in response. He made Helen feel hot, and shapeless inside her clothes. Oliver held out his hand. He was six inches taller than Helen, but it felt like twice that.
‘I’m Oliver Mortimore,’ he said lightly. ‘Who are you, and why don’t I know you?’
‘I know who you are,’ Helen countered. ‘You don’t know me because there’s no particular reason why you should. My name’s Helen Brown.’
‘And what are you doing at Follies, Miss Brown?’
Helen moved forward under his gaze to pick up one of the scattered boxes.
‘What I’m doing is moving in. I’m going to live here for a year.’
Oliver was staring at her now with undisguised interest.
‘Oh really? You’re not in the usual run of socialites and harpies that Rose collects around her, are you?’
He was so clearly stating no more than the obvious that Helen found herself laughing with him.
‘I imagine not. Frances Page let me inherit her room. We’re friends,’ Helen told him crisply, ‘in a way.’
Oliver raised his eyebrows, but politely made no other comment on such an unlikely sounding friendship. ‘Ah, unlucky Fran,’ he said. ‘Perfectly okay for one’s own use, of course; but not very clever to start dealing in the stuff. Still, if you’re a girl with expensive tastes and no cash, like Fran, the books do have to be balanced somehow.’
Helen looked away. She didn’t care to hear muddled, aristocratic, silly Frances spoken of so lightly. For the time that they had lived in adjacent College rooms, she had been a good friend to Helen. She hadn’t been sent to prison for what Helen thought of as her witless dabbling on the fringe of the cocaine-peddlers’ world, though she could have been. But she had been sent down from Oxford, and Helen missed her.
Oliver was counting up the remaining items of Helen’s luggage.
‘Cases, three; cardboard boxes, miscellaneous, secured with string, four. You can’t possibly manage all this yourself. Where’s bloody Gerry?’
He picked up the nearest box. ‘Oof, what’s in here? Rocks or something?’
Helen put out her hand. The material of his sleeve felt very soft. ‘Books, mostly. Don’t bother, really. Rose told me I’d have to cope myself, and I’m quite ready to.’
‘Lazy old trout.’ Oliver had already started for the stairs. ‘Where’s your room?’
‘Top floor.’ Helen had no alternative but to pick up the remaining case and follow him.
Oliver chuckled. ‘Good old Rose. Trust her to have stuck you right up there. Who’re the lucky occupiers of the smarter quarters this year?’
‘No idea. Isn’t this Gerry one of them?’
‘God, no. Gerry is Rose’s half-brother. He calls himself a writer, but he’s actually a drunk and a lecher. He also claims to be a distant relative of mine, because Rose is, but I find that hard to swallow. You’ll be seeing lots of him, which is hard luck.’
They reached the door of Helen’s room and Oliver shouldered it open. He dropped his armload and strolled over to the window. ‘Nice view, anyway. Hey, you can almost see my windows over at the House.’ Oliver flexed his shoulders inside their second skin of tweed, easing them after the long pull up the stairs, then turned back to Helen.
‘Come and have tea with me, won’t you? Tomorrow. No – wait – Friday. Yes?’
Helen looked straight back into his tanned, smiling face for a long moment before she answered. But there was no possibility that she could refuse.
‘Yes. On Friday, then.’
To her amazement, Oliver leaned forward and kissed her, quite casually, on the corner of her mouth. ‘Cheer up,’ he said softly. ‘You should smile a bit oftener. You’ve no idea how much it suits you.’
From the doorway he waved, without looking at her again, and Helen heard him clatter away down the stairs.
For a moment she stood stock-still in the middle of the room, absently touching the corner of her mouth with her fingertips. Then she sank down at one end of the narrow bed. Follies had cachet, Helen knew that. The idea of Helen Brown, who had none at all, living there had given her some rare moments of private amusement over the summer. And now here she was, in the house for barely an hour and already she had been invited to tea and kissed by Oliver, practically a being from another planet. Helen rocked back on the bed and laughed out loud, a transforming giggle that Oliver would have approved of. It was absurd to think anything of their encounter, let alone to take it as an augury for the new year, but she would do it anyway. It was a good one, Helen was sure of that.
Chloe Campbell registered the road sign as it flicked past her on the motorway. Oxford 15 miles. Shit, almost there. A little shiver of nervousness snaked along her spine before she realised it. Well, there was nothing to be apprehensive about. Nothing at all. Chloe jammed her foot down on the accelerator and swung her slick, little black Renault Gordini out into the overtaking lane. A glance in the mirror showed the family saloons dropping satisfactorily away behind her, and she relaxed her too-tight grip on the wheel. Nice little car, she thought. Thank you, Colin. Thank you, but goodbye in the end, just the same. Goodbye to a lot of things, come to think of it.
Chloe, darling, are you serious about all this?
The question was addressed to her own reflection briefly glimpsed in the mirror. The huge green eyes with their sooty black lashes were perfectly made up as usual. The dark coppery-red hair gleamed over the diamond ear-studs, just as always. But where were all the other things she used to identify herself by?
Chloe began her reckoning once more, already repeated once too often since she had left London.
No job, to start with. She had resigned from that, her ridiculously well-paid job as a top copywriter in a smart little ad agency. Well, except for the money, that was no great loss. Trying to create the perfect lines for the perfect housewife in her dream kitchen with the superlative packet soup bored Chloe nowadays, like so many other things.
No lover, either. All the available ones bored her too, and it irked her to think of the unavailable one. Leo Dawnay, damn him. All of this was really because of him. Leo was in the business, the perfect Englishman who had made it his particular business to trade on that on Madison Avenue. A big joint campaign had brought him briefly back to London, and into Chloe’s bed. It was Leo who had said it as they lay wound together after one of their long evenings of love-making.
‘You don’t have to be so competitive in everything. You’ve got an intellectual chip on your shoulder, that’s your problem.’
‘What? That’s crap.’ Chloe sat up and the sheets fell away from her silky shoulders. ‘I’ve got twice the wits of any of the little graduate mice that they send along to type my letters and answer my phone nowadays. When I was eighteen I just wanted to get on with life, not moulder in some dusty library.’
‘Well,’ Leo had said coolly, ‘you mentioned graduates, not me. But you’re twenty-eight now, and perhaps you’ve done enough getting on. Take some time off. Test yourself a bit. You’d enjoy it.’
Leo, of course, had been at Balliol. And had taken a First.
‘I don’t need it,’ Chloe had whispered into his thick, black hair. ‘What I need is you. Again.’ And his hands had moved across her belly and between her legs once more with unquestioning assurance. In the first pleasure of the moment Chloe had forgotten his words, but later they kept coming back to her. She thought about them when she recognised the uncomfortable feeling that permeated her life as boredom, and she remembered them again when she realised one day that she wasn’t interested in the challenge of pitching for a major new account. She felt that she was running along in comfortable, well-oiled grooves, and that she wasn’t thinking about anything, any more. She began to be afraid that even falling in love with Leo had been no more than a way of filling the vacuum that yawned in the centre of her life.
Another day she had pushed aside the story boards for a new bra commercial and typed a letter to the Principal of an Oxford College, making the choice just because she had seen the College featured in a magazine.
‘That’s that,’ she thought. ‘The answer will be no, of course.’
But with surprising speed, the letter had led to an interview with the austere Principal in her book-lined drawing room. Then, after some hasty reading, there had been papers to write on Victorian novelists and Romantic poets. She had been interviewed again, making her joke to her friends that she felt that she was being looked over for the chairmanship of Saatchi and Saatchi, not a commoner’s place at an obscure women’s College. At last the Principal had told her: ‘We have a policy here, Miss Campbell, of accepting mature students and other unusual folk. You’re more mature than most, of course, and you’ll have a lot of catching up to do. But we think you’ll make a useful contribution of College life, even if you turn out not to have a first-class mind. Would you like to come up this October?’
At first, going to Oxford had been no more than a teasing idea for Chloe. She had wanted to prove to Leo that she could win a place, and she had wanted to show him that it impressed her so little that she could turn it down without a second thought. Then she had found herself enjoying the preparation for the entrance papers, hurrying home to dig poetry books out of the inner pocket of her briefcase instead of going out to cocktails and dinners with friends from the agency. She had started to use the cool, remote thought of Oxford as an antidote for her grating London world.
Yet, even so, when the moment finally came she was shocked to hear herself saying, ‘Thank you, Dr Hale. I’ll do my very best. And I’d like to start in October.’
Now, Leo was back in Manhattan, or with his top-drawer wife up in East Hampton or wherever it was. Chloe Campbell was slowing down before the Oxford bypass, her car loaded with her expensive but not-too-new-looking leather suitcases, piles of crisp empty notebooks and brand new standard texts, and feeling as apprehensive as any sensitive adolescent on the way to a new school. It was too late now. Chloe negotiated the tangled city traffic, and parked the Renault defiantly half on and half off the pavement on Folly Bridge. Only a single window in the old house showed a light.
Chloe hitched her shaggy wolf-pelt jacket closer around her and began to pick her way down the slippery stone steps. Her hair looked as bright as a beacon in the wintry dusk. Before she reached the front door which had barred Helen’s entry, it swung open and Gerry Pole lounged out. His grey sweater was filthy and his lined face was unshaven, but the tattered remnants of a more wholesome romantic youth clung about him. Chloe responded with a brief flicker of interest as Gerry grinned at her.
‘One of Rose’s new tenants, I take it? And very lovely, too. I’m Gerry Pole, by the way, token male on the premises …’
‘Oh, good,’ Chloe said quickly, waving up towards her car perched on the bridge. ‘Perhaps, then, you could possibly give me a hand with my things? So inaccessible, down here.’
‘Delighted.’ Gerry smiled again, showing off the attractive crinkles around his pale blue eyes and revealing uncared-for teeth.
So Chloe made her entrance into Follies House burdened with nothing more than her handbag and her portable typewriter. Gerry obligingly toiled to and fro with the leather cases and set them carefully down in Chloe’s first-floor room. The long windows looked out on almost total blackness now, but the little lamps inside glowed invitingly on panelled walls and solid furniture. Chloe looked around her with approval. The panelling was painted soft bluey-green, like a bird’s egg, and the curtains and faded Persian rugs stood out against it in warm reds and garnets. She laid her typewriter down on the bare desk and switched on the green-shaded library lamp to make a little, welcoming circle of light.
Here, Chloe thought with a sigh of satisfaction, she could work. Books. Peace, calm and no hassles. Perhaps this crazy idea was going to work out after all. A little sound from behind her reminded her that Gerry was still hovering by the door. She shot him a brilliant, dismissive smile.
‘Thanks very much. I expect we’ll be meeting again soon, if you live here too?’
‘Oh yes, certain to,’ Gerry rubbed his dry hands expectantly. ‘I could more than do with a drink now, in fact, after all that lifting. Won’t you join me? I’ve got a little something …’
The flip-flop shuffle of down-at-heel slippers came up the stairs and along the gallery towards them. A second later the mass of Rose’s bulk filled the doorway. She jerked her head at her half-brother and, with surprising speed, he was on his way.
‘Another time, then,’ he winked at Chloe and vanished.
Rose eased herself down on the foot of the bed and rested her podgy hands on her spread knees. The two women smiled.
‘Still not quite sure about it, eh?’ Rose asked. Chloe took off her jacket and stood stroking the fur absently.
‘Not a hundred per cent,’ she admitted. ‘Or even fifty. Sometimes it feels like a crazy decision to have made, three years up here reading George Eliot and trying to make ends meet on a grant. Not that it isn’t perfect to be at Follies House,’ she added warmly.
Rose chuckled flatly and her little eyes flickered over the diamonds in Chloe’s ears, the discreet but heavy gold chain around her neck and the supple, rust suede of her tunic dress. ‘Don’t tell me that girls like you ever have to manage on a grant,’ she murmured. ‘And you’ll enjoy it here, mark my words. All kinds of people to meet, for a start. Different from your London ad men.’
‘I hope so,’ countered Chloe fervently.
‘Look at me,’ Rose went on. ‘I just have this house, nothing else. But enough goes on here to keep me looking forward to tomorrow.’ As she winked at Chloe she looked, for an instant, very like her half-brother. ‘So long as I choose the right people to live with me here at Follies, I have everything I need in these four walls. Which is just as well, because where could I go outside with a face and figure like mine?’ The white hands fluttered vaguely over the forbidding fleshy mass. Chloe could do no more than turn the talk with a question.
‘Who else lives here now? Since Colin Page’s sister left?’
Rose’s face brightened in anticipation. ‘Ah. All new this term. You, dear, of course. A little mite called Helen, who you shall meet in one second, unless my predatory young cousin has swept her out of the house already. And by the end of the week there’ll be a pretty love called Pansy. Such a beautiful name, isn’t it? There’s just the three of you. I think you’ll make such an interesting combination.’ Rose’s fingers knitted across the mound of her stomach as she nodded happily at Chloe. Just for the moment she looked like a complacent puppet-mistress with her pretty dolls on sticks, waiting for the show to start. The idea amused Chloe rather than alarmed her. Why shouldn’t Rose live a little through her lodgers, after all?
The landlady heaved herself to her feet and padded to the door.
‘Helen!’ she shouted up into the darkness. ‘Helen, darling, come down and meet a new friend.’
Chloe wasn’t sure who she had been expecting as another member of Rose’s ‘family’, but the figure who appeared obediently a moment later came as a surprise.
‘Helen Brown, Chloe Campbell,’ Rose said easily. ‘And now I’m off. Tell me if you need anything simple. Anything strenuous, ask Gerry.’
‘Hello,’ Chloe said to the girl in the doorway. Helen was small and fine-boned, too thin, with collarbones that showed at the stretched neckline of her royal blue sweater. In her grey corduroy skirt she might have been a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl, but something in the poised tilt of her head told Chloe that she was older, twenty or perhaps even a little more. Her skin was very pale and creamy under a mass of short black curls, and the huge grey eyes in the heart-shaped face were smudged underneath with violet shadows.
‘Hello,’ Helen responded warily. There was an exotic atmosphere in the room that wasn’t just compounded of expensive scent and suede, nor of the rich colours and fine proportions that were missing from her own room upstairs. The atmosphere came from the girl herself, prowling like a taut red-brown tiger on the Persian rug. Yet as soon as Chloe smiled at her it was different again. She looked ordinary, friendly and inquisitive now. Chloe seized Helen by the wrist and propelled her to an armchair.
‘For God’s sake, sit here and talk to me while I get my bearings. It’s my first day at Oxford, and you’re the first real person I’ve met. Are you new, too?’
Helen shook her curls vigorously. ‘No. My last year. But it’s my first time living out of College. Follies isn’t exactly my natural habitat either. It’s been a strange day.’
Chloe was rummaging in one of her bags. At length she lifted out a green and gold bottle and brandished it triumphantly. ‘Share this with me? It won’t be very cold, but it’ll do.’
Helen watched the champagne sparkle into a pair of glasses and then lifted hers to Chloe. The strangeness of the day evidently wasn’t over yet, and something inside her didn’t want it to be.
‘Welcome to Oxford,’ she toasted the newcomer.
‘And to Follies House.’ Chloe’s bright green eyes glittered at her over the glass and they drank together.
They finished the bottle as Chloe unpacked. Helen sat curled up in the armchair with her cold feet underneath her and listened as the other girl talked. The champagne sent unfamiliar waves of warmth and lassitude through her veins, and she found herself sinking into the cushions and smiling at the warm colours and scents around her. Chloe’s cases seemed to contain unbelievable piles of silks and cashmere and butter-soft leather, marching ranks of shoes and boots, and handbags in soft, protective wrappings.
There were other pretty, more eccentric things too. A huge, fragile butterfly gaudily painted on rice paper swung airily on one wall. A silver-framed mirror bore the raised motto ‘Look, but linger not’. Chloe made a mock-grimace into it as she swung it into place on the mantelpiece. A collection of heart-shaped tortoiseshell frames all seemed to enclose pictures of different men. All these Chloe laid out among the vanity cases, silver hairbrushes and tiny crystal bottles.
All the time, as she moved to and fro, Chloe went on talking. Had Helen but known it, she needed to talk more than anything else. She needed to put London firmly behind her; Leo and the agency and San Lorenzo and everything else. Almost by accident, the possibility of Oxford had today become a reality. Chloe was so used to feeling confident that it was doubly disconcerting to be nervous and apprehensive. Talking to this quiet girl seemed to help. She told Helen everything, but it was as much for Chloe’s own benefit. The explanation helped to put this mad, life-changing decision into perspective. She had no need of an Oxford degree and it was exactly the abstract, stringent challenge set by gaining one that Chloe knew she needed.
With the last drop of champagne she smoothed a remaining square of tissue paper and tucked it into the last empty suitcase. Helen, who had drunk the lion’s share of the champagne as she listened, smiled vaguely up at her.
‘So here I am.’ Chloe gestured theatrically. ‘Unfettered, and as yet unlettered …’ they giggled happily, ‘… although Dr Hale is about to put that right. And feeling much, much better.’
She stopped in front of Helen and put her hand over the younger girl’s. ‘Thank you for listening to all that. You’re a good listener, aren’t you?’ On impulse she knelt down and took both of Helen’s thin hands between her own warm ones.
‘Helen, I’ve done all the talking, like a self-centred old witch. Now you tell me some things. You’re sad, aren’t you? Why’s that?’
Helen looked into Chloe’s concerned eyes and in an instant the champagne, her loneliness and this unexpected warmth from a woman she barely knew blurred inside her. Boiling tears swept down her face. In an instant Chloe’s arms came round her and Helen’s face was buried in soft suede and the thick mass of dark red hair.
‘What? Helen, what is it?’
There was a second’s quiet before she answered. ‘My father. My father killed himself.’
At once Chloe’s arm tightened around the younger girl’s thin shoulders, but she said nothing.
‘Yes,’ said Helen after a moment, speaking as softly as if to herself. ‘It was in the summer. The middle of August, when the world was hottest and brightest outside. Daddy must have found that very hard, looking inwards at the darkness gathering for him in our house. I suppose it had been dark for weeks before that, months even. At the end, it was as if everything positive and hopeful had wilted, through lack of light. Even our love for him seemed to have no life in it any more, because he couldn’t lean on it. Right at the end, in the last hopeless days, I was still sure that it would brighten the gloom for him. But it didn’t, because he killed himself.’
‘Why did he do it?’ Chloe whispered, as gently as she could, and felt an answering movement that might have been a shrug.
‘It’s a banal story, I suppose,’ Helen told her with a new bitterness in her voice. ‘He lost his job. Not a particularly high-powered job, or anything, just as a middle manager in a middle-sized manufacturing company. My father was always a quiet man – grey, they call it here – quietly doing what he was supposed to do. He came home in the evenings on the train, mowed the lawn, listened to the radio, did what was involved in being a husband and father, but mostly he just did his unassuming job. He must have enjoyed it … no, perhaps needed it is nearer the truth. Because when they took it away, he collapsed inside. They did it all particularly brutally, just pushed him out with a tiny amount of compensation. But that’s not unusual. In my father’s case, I think he knew from the first moment that there was no chance of finding another job. And he wasn’t the kind of man who could turn round and just create another life for himself. He was too mild, and puzzled, and overwhelmed by the circumstances of the life he already had. He just let himself feel shamed and rejected. There was no money, you see. He had no prospects at all, and there was nothing he could do for us or anyone else. So he retreated further into the dark and silence, leaving us behind. Until the day came when he went into the garage, locked the doors and turned the car engine on. He lay down on a tartan knee rug that we used to keep on the back seat. Do you know, he was still wearing a tie?’
‘What about your mother?’ Chloe asked.
‘She loved him. It was the worst kind of shock for her. She’s not very good at being alone.’ Helen rubbed her face with the flat of her hand and, as if noticing that Chloe’s arms were still around her, stiffened and drew back a little. Chloe let her go, noticing the tired pallor and the shadows under her eyes.
‘And you?’ she asked. Helen shrugged again.
‘There are money problems, of course. My mother does some part-time supply teaching, and there’s a tiny pension. But my brother is still a child, really, and needs everything. And there’s a big mortgage, the three of us to clothe and feed, all the household bills. So much money to find, and nowhere …’ Helen’s voice trailed away hopelessly. When she spoke again the reawakening of anxiety had drained away all the colour that the champagne had put into her cheeks. ‘I shouldn’t be here. I should never have come back. The right thing would have been to get a job, doing anything, anywhere. Whatever brings in the most money. I can help a tiny bit out of my grant, but …’ The shrug, when it came, was defeated, ‘… it isn’t enough.’
‘But they insisted, your mother and brother, that you did come back? Said you’d be letting them down, and your father, if you didn’t?’
Helen smiled wryly. ‘Exactly. How did you know that?’
Chloe laughed at her. ‘Because it’s what any right-thinking people would have said. It matters, doesn’t it? You’re probably very bright.’
Helen was too natural to attempt a modest contradiction.
‘I’m bright enough. I could get a First, if I’m lucky. Before Dad died I’d wanted to stay on and do research. Now, of course, I’ll have to look for something that’s more of a paying proposition. But not to have got a degree at all, that would have been very hard.’
As she watched the anxiety in Helen’s face, Chloe felt the weight of her own privilege. Her own background was not wealthy, but never at any time since her early and rapid success at her job had she had to deny herself anything. Travel, new books, designer clothes, a luxurious flat were as much an unquestioned part of her life as they were remote from Helen’s. Chloe reflected that even her place at Oxford had begun as a move in her sexual game with Leo. Set beside Helen’s difficulties and her family’s sacrifices, that suddenly seemed frivolous and wasteful. She shook herself in irritation and turned to listen to Helen again. The other girl’s face was brighter and more animated now.
‘It’s strange to be back here, after so much. And in this weird house …’
‘Isn’t it?’ Chloe grinned at her.
‘… I’d only been in the house an hour before Oliver Mortimore appeared, kissed me, and asked me to tea on Friday.’
‘Who’s that?’
Helen’s smile transformed her face and the grey eyes shone with amusement in the absence of the shadows. She had no idea why she was talking like this to Chloe, but it felt perfectly natural.
‘Oh, a bright star in the local firmament. Rich, titled, amusing, and the most beautiful young man you ever saw.’
‘Love the sound of it,’ said Chloe, ‘but does such a sum of perfection do anything as ordinary as have tea?’
The sound of their laughter reached Rose as she slid across the dark hallway below, and it brought a flicker of a satisfied smiled to her broad face.
‘Now I’m sitting here drinking champagne and talking to you as if I’ve always known you,’ Helen went on. ‘Odd, isn’t it? It feels a long way from home, too, and that isn’t fair.’ The sadness flooded back into her face.
‘Listen to me, Helen,’ Chloe said firmly. ‘It would be wrong to destroy the value of being back here by immersing yourself in guilt and grief. That would make your family’s sacrifice useless, wouldn’t it? You can’t forget your father’s death – how could you? – and you shouldn’t try. But you can find your own strength to carry on positively, where he couldn’t.’ Chloe broke off and bit her lip. Her face reddened as she met Helen’s serious straight gaze. ‘I don’t know why I’m preaching at you,’ Chloe said uncomfortably, ‘particularly when I’ve got the feeling that there are several things for me to learn myself before too long.’
The silence stretched on for a second or two before Helen broke it. ‘You’re right, though. Thank you, Chloe. Tea on Friday with Oliver,’ she added lightly. ‘I’ll have to be profoundly positive to cope with that. Will you … do you think you could lend me something beautiful to wear?’
There was relief in Chloe’s face as she responded warmly, ‘With pleasure. To seal the deal, let’s go out and eat now – I’m ravenous. You tell me where’s good, and I’ll treat you. Okay?’
‘Sounds wonderful.’
The two girls left Follies House together and climbed the cold, slippery steps up to the bridge. Inside her Renault, Chloe revved the engine decisively and glanced at Helen’s profile beside her. ‘Well then, Oxford, here we come,’ she murmured into the icy air.
On Friday afternoon Helen slipped through the great wooden gates of Christ Church and crossed to the porter’s glassed-in box, incongruously snug under the splendour of Wren’s tower.
‘Oliver Mortimore’s rooms, please?’ she asked, remembering that Oliver had made no mention of where he was to be found. Perhaps he just assumed that everybody knew.
‘Canterbury Quad, Miss,’ said the porter, pointing, and gave her a staircase and room number. Following his directions Helen came out into the sunlight in Tom Quad. For a moment, nervous but unwilling to admit to herself that a mere tea-party could intimidate her, she stood to admire the view. Cardinal Wolsey’s great unfinished quadrangle seemed to capture and intensify the Oxford light. The gold of late autumn afternoon sunshine was reflected from the deeper gold stone, the rows of leaded windows, and the flat face of the water in the fountain basin. The space seemed immense and airy, yet the proportions made it intimate, too. The only sounds, magnified in the stillness, were the faint splash of water spouting from the statue of Mercury, and the whirr of cameras belonging to a distant group of Japanese tourists. Ahead of her the smooth green lawns rolled away to encircle the fountain and its fringe of lily pads. An undergraduate in a fluttering black scholar’s gown brushed past Helen and it occurred to her that, tourists apart, this scene must be almost unchanged since the sixteenth century.
Then in a babble of noise a crowd of jostling people emerged from one of the doorways and simultaneously a blare of music burst from an upstairs window. Helen jerked herself back into the present and walked on towards whatever awaited her in Oliver’s rooms.
She found Canterbury Quad without difficulty. Built more than two hundred years after Tom Quad, it still looked to Helen profoundly ancient and magnificent as she stared up at its classical proportions. She was used to her own College, of which the oldest parts were late nineteenth century, and to its comfortable air of being a random collection of reasonably well-preserved outbuildings to something much more important.
Oliver’s rooms were on the first floor of the central building. Helen read the white-painted names on the board in his staircase doorway: Mr G.R.S. Sykes, Lord Oliver Mortimore, Mr. A.H. Pennington. At the top of the stone staircase she came to Oliver’s outer door, open, and then tapped lightly on the inner one.
‘Cm’in,’ someone shouted. Helen squared her shoulders inside the vivid scarlet of Chloe’s brief sweater dress, glanced down briefly at what felt like far too much leg which it left on show, and went inside.
The room seemed at first sight to be uncomfortably full of people, all of them women. The atmosphere was charged with smoke and the sound of laughter and clamouring, insistent talk.
‘… all through the Vac, darling. Not just in London, but in Italy as well …’
‘… so I told him to stuff it. No, honestly, he was such a swine …’
‘… Mummy bought it in the end, it was so funny …’
Everyone seemed to know everyone else very well indeed. Helen’s first impulse was to turn and run, but then she saw Oliver refilling someone’s glass. There was no sign anywhere, Helen realised, of a teacup or a piece of buttered toast. The carpet was cluttered with glasses and ashtrays.
‘Hello,’ Oliver said beside her, surprising her again by his height. His kiss, quickly brushing her mouth, surprised her less this time but had no less of an effect. Oliver took her hand and helped her to pick her way through the sprawled legs and gossiping bodies. ‘You look very pretty,’ he told her casually. ‘Red suits you almost as much as smiling.’ A blonde girl with a sulky face jerked her head up to look at Helen as she passed. There was a sofa in the corner, occupied by yet another pair of girls. Oliver eased her down between them, and they made room for her reluctantly.
‘You must know Fiona? No? And Flora? Well then, now’s your chance. This is Helen, and this … is … Helen’s drink.’ Oliver handed her a glass, winked, and went away.
Two surprised faces stared at Helen. Politely, but insistently, with their questions, they tried to find out who Helen was and where she fitted in. It gave Helen a kind of half-satisfaction to demonstrate that she didn’t fit in anywhere, but once that was done the girls went back to their conversation, leaning across her in their animated talk. Helen wriggled back against the cushions to look at the rest of the room.
It wasn’t all girls, she saw now. Three or four young men, in jeans and sweaters like Oliver, lounged among the more carefully turned-out girls. The striking exception was a dark, confident-looking man with a high-bridged nose and long hands that he used to make incisive gestures as he talked. He seemed older than the others and was dressed differently in a loose, pale jacket and beautifully-cut trousers with front pleats. He evidently felt Helen’s stare from across the room because he stopped talking, and his eyes held hers for a second. Then he raised his eyebrows in surprising, friendly complicity. Helen guessed at once that he didn’t belong here either, but he was making himself ten times more at home than Helen herself. After a moment he came over to her and helped her up from her captivity between Flora and Fiona.
‘More room on the window seat,’ he grinned at her. ‘I’m Tom Hart.’
Expertly he ensconced them on the cushioned seat where they were half hidden from the rest of the room by loops of curtains.
‘Well?’ he went on, lighting himself a cigarette. Helen shook her head at the held-out pack. He sounded American, she thought. What was he doing here?
‘Helen Brown,’ she told him, and to forestall a repeat of her interview with Fiona and Flora she added, ‘I don’t know Oliver from London, or from Gloucestershire either. I’m not a friend of Annabel, whoever she is, nor of any of these people.’ Helen’s small, firm chin jerked towards the chattering roomful and Tom grinned at her again. ‘I met Oliver once, at Follies House, which is where I live, and he asked me to tea. God knows why, now I come to be here.’
She lifted her glass to Tom and took a gulp of the cold white wine.
‘Quite,’ said Tom equably. ‘But I think that one might as well make the best of Oliver’s excellent Alsace, now that one is here. Noll!’ he shouted, and Oliver drifted over to refill their glasses.
‘Take good care of her,’ he told Tom smoothly when he saw Helen behind her half of curtain. ‘I shall be needing her as soon as all the rabble has gone.’
Tom ignored him. ‘Follies?’ he asked her. ‘Where Frances was going to live?’
Helen nodded, and Tom’s face set harder for a moment. ‘I miss her,’ he said. ‘She’s very unlucky, and very helpless.’
Helen knew from that moment that she and Tom would be friends.
‘Mmmmm.’ Tom was looking harder at Helen now. ‘D’you act at all?’ He turned her face to the light and stared a little too deeply into the grey eyes.
‘Act?’ Helen blinked and caught herself blushing. ‘No, not at all. I couldn’t. Far too inhibited.’
‘Pity. I’m directing the OUDS major next term. As You Like It, you know. I thought you might like to audition for me.’
‘No, thanks.’ Helen shuddered at the idea. ‘But I’ll come along and see it. Will that do?’
Her turn had come, she thought, to ask questions. ‘You’re American, aren’t you? Are you studying here?’
Tom Hart laughed at the idea. ‘Hell, no. Well, not in the conventional way. I’m a theatre director, and I’m spending a year or so at the Playhouse here. Purely in an assistant capacity, you understand, as they keep reminding me. My old man’s in the theatre in New York. Management.’ Something flickered in Tom’s face, as if a disagreeable memory had bothered him for a moment, before he went on. ‘I needed some time away from home, before deciding what to do for real, so here I am. One of my projects now is this students’ Shakespeare. As a matter of fact, in a brilliant piece of innovative casting, Oliver is to be my Orlando.’ Tom confidently waved away Helen’s start of surprise. ‘You’d be amazed. He moves beautifully, and he has a real unaffected feel for the verse. You may think he’s a mere aristocratic thicko, with a flair for nothing more taxing than horses and dogs, but you’d be wrong.’
Helen’s gaze travelled from Oliver, tall and tousled in the middle of his friends, and back to Tom. There was something in the way that the American looked at Oliver, with both fascination and a kind of unwilling admiration, that puzzled her.
‘Anyway,’ Tom went on quickly, aware that Helen was watching him, ‘Orlando himself isn’t a character endowed with a great deal of brain. No, Rosalind’s the important one, and I can’t find the right girl anywhere. I was hoping I might spot someone here amongst Noll’s grand friends, but they’re all far too old already. Look at them.’ He waved his hand expressively across the room. ‘Twenty years old and experienced enough for forty. I need someone fresh, and full of innocence, yet with that sexy edge of natural cleverness and the beginnings of maturity. A bit like you. But not really like you,’ he added, with beguiling frankness.
‘Thank goodness.’ Helen smiled back at him.
Oliver was seeing people to the door. There was a flurry of kissing and hand-waving, then when Oliver turned back into the room Helen saw the sulky blonde girl jump up and push her arm through his. There was a possessive glow in her face and Helen thought, at once, Of course he would have someone. The little, frivolous flame of excitement that she had been shielding went out immediately. The blonde girl tugged Oliver’s head down to hers and kissed his ear, then let him go with a tiny push.
Tom stood up and pushed his hands deep into this pockets. ‘Time I was off,’ he told Helen. ‘Sure you won’t audition for me?’
Helen shook her head. ‘No. I’d be no good. I’m too busy, anyway. I have to work.’
Tom stared at her for a moment. ‘Jesus, you can’t work all the time. That’d be very dull.’
Helen was aware of a prickle of annoyance. She felt that this dark, forceful man was pushing her in some way and she recoiled from the idea.
‘I am dull,’ she told him dismissively.
Tom’s face remained serious but there was an underlying humorousness in it that threatened to break out at any minute. ‘Somehow I doubt that,’ he said, very softly. ‘But it was only an idea. See you around.’ With a casual wave that took in Oliver as well as Helen, he was gone.
Helen realised that she was almost the last remaining guest. The blonde girl was at Oliver’s side again, turning her pretty, petulant face up to his. ‘Oliver,’ she said in a high, clear voice, ‘so lovely to see everyone again. But,’ and there was no attempt to lower the upper-class tones, ‘the mousy girl in red, who on earth was she?’
Oliver’s good-humoured expression didn’t change, but he shook his hand free. ‘Don’t be such a cow, Vick. I don’t know any mice. Where’s your coat?’
‘Don’t bother, darling,’ Vick said sweetly. She blew him a kiss, danced to the door and slammed it behind her.
At last, Helen saw that she was alone with Oliver. He came, picking his way through the debris of bottles and glasses on the floor, and held out his hands to her.
‘You’ve such a sad face,’ he said. ‘Didn’t you like my party?’ His hands, as they closed over hers, felt enormous and very warm.
‘I liked Tom Hart,’ Helen told him carefully. ‘I’m sorry about looking sad. It must be the way I am.’ There was no question of confiding anything to Oliver. Helen was still surprised that she had let out so much to Chloe. Yet Helen was shrewd enough to know that the very remoteness of Oliver’s world from her own was part of the unexpected, exotic fascination that she felt for him. She was clever enough too to guess that whatever it was that Oliver saw in her, he wouldn’t be attracted by the poverty and awkwardness of her background.
She felt, for an instant, guilty of disloyalty, but she turned the thought away deliberately. What was it that Chloe had said? ‘Find your own strength to carry on. Positively.’ Well, she would do just that.
‘I shall have to try and cheer you up,’ Oliver was saying lightly. ‘Here. Have another drink. Always helps.’ He filled her glass up with the heady, flowery wine and came to sit beside her on the window seat. His long legs sprawled in the faded blue jeans, and his forehead rested against the window pane as he stared out. After a moment’s silence, in which Helen’s eyes travelled from the clear-cut planes of his face to the tiny pulse that jumped at the corner of his eye, Oliver said, ‘So quiet. Just the light and the dark out there. No talk. No noise or confusion. Do you ever wish that you could keep moments? Freeze them or something, just the odd minutes when everything is right. There are so bloody few of them.’
Even in your life? Helen wanted to ask. Perhaps after all he wasn’t such a bizarre choice for Orlando. He had the face of a romantic hero, and there was enough of uncertainty in it now for her to imagine him as a boy in love with an illusion.
‘Times when I want to stop everything, and say yes. Like this. This is how I want it to be?’ Helen answered him. ‘Not very many. Some, perhaps.’ Like now, she could have added. Being here with you, of all strange people, talking like this.
Oliver stopped staring out into Canterbury Quad as if after all he was rejecting this moment as one to be kept.
‘Well, what shall we do? More drink?’ He waved the bottle and when Helen shook her head he refilled his own glass and drained it. ‘Mmm,’ he murmured, and lifted Helen’s hand from where it lay in her lap. He traced the shape of her fingers and the outline of her nails with his own forefinger and then, with his face turned away from her into the room, said, ‘Would you like to go to bed?’
The words seemed to hang, echoing, in the air between them.
Helen was not a virgin, but never in the course of the single, bashful relationship she had known had there been an instant like this. Half of her, astoundingly, wanted to say – just as casually – yes, let’s do that. But it was a hidden half that she was far from ready to reveal, even to herself. The practical, careful Helen of old, the one who took stock and who watched intently from the sidelines, was the one who answered.
‘No,’ she said, as if considering it. ‘Not yet.’
‘Yet?’ Irritation flickered in Oliver’s blue eyes as he stared at her. He seemed to see her, very close at hand, yet not to notice her at all. ‘What can you mean, yet?’
‘People,’ Helen told him mildly, ‘usually leave a decent interval between meeting and going to bed.’
Oliver’s quick, sardonic smiled surprised her. ‘A decent interval, then. How many days? How many dinners? God, I hate waiting. And I hate decency even more. It’s a proletarian idea, hasn’t anyone told you that?’
Helen was stung. She jumped up from the cushions, and as she moved she saw Oliver’s eyes on the length of thigh showing beneath her scarlet hemline. Her blush deepened and she lost the sharp retort which had been ready. Oliver stood up too, grinning, and then swung her round by the shoulders. His mouth found the nape of her neck under the black curls and he kissed her.
‘Ah, a warm place at last,’ he teased. ‘You’re dressed to look like a flame, but your skin feels as cold as marble. Funny girl.’ Then he turned her round to face him and kissed her mouth, deliberately, still smiling against her closed lips. ‘Don’t worry. If you prefer decency, we’ll let it lie for now, like a fat bolster between us.’ The good humour in his voice changed everything for Helen. He did understand, then. The sensitivity she had guessed at was there in him, waiting. Helen stood in the circle of his arms for a second and wished that it was all different. If she had said yes … If she had been a different person.
Flora or Fiona would have said yes, and they would have been able to keep him for a while. And now he was moving away from her, disentangling himself as he had done from the blonde Vick. Oliver.
‘Come on,’ he said kindly. ‘I’ll walk you back to Follies. I’d like to drop in and see old Rose for half an hour before Hall.’
Helen nodded dumbly. As they walked together across the Quad the ancient bell, Great Tom, struck six. The long, tolling notes lapped sonorously inside her head, uncomfortably like a knell. Yet Oliver drew her arm snugly through his as they turned down St Aldate’s. He was whistling softy, a single phrase over and over again, as if he was trying to tease the rest of a forgotten theme out of his subconscious. Helen fell into step with him, half carried along by the support of his arm. He was wearing a shabby, brown leather aviator’s coat with a lining of tightly curled sheepskin, and in the warmth of a deep pocket his hand still held Helen’s. Remembering the first of his questions, she knew that this was a moment she would like to freeze for herself. If only it was possible to keep him here, beside her, just like this.
When they reached Follies Oliver handed her elegantly down the steep stone steps to the island, walked up through the silent house and stopped outside her door. His eyes glowed very bright and amused in the darkness.
‘I’ll be back,’ he told her, ‘to check out the bolster before too long. Such uncomfortable, old-fashioned things.’
‘That’s good,’ Helen responded equally brightly. ‘I shall look forward to that.’
Oliver raised his arm in a half wave and turned away again. Helen stood listening until the sound of his footsteps had been swallowed up in the recesses of the house. She heard a burst of radio music followed by a door closing, then silence. The thought of her own cold, empty room was uninviting. Helen slipped down the stairs to the grander spaces of the gallery below.
‘Come in,’ Chloe’s low, musical voice answered her knock at once.
Chloe was sitting curled up in her armchair in a pool of lamplight. There was a red-embered fire burning in the grate and her hair was glowing even brighter in the double warmth of the two lights. She closed her book with an exaggerated gesture of relief and grinned up at Helen.
‘Well, and how did it go?’
It was easy to tell Chloe things. Helen clasped dramatically at her heart and stumbled forward into the light. ‘Wonderful. And awful. He asked me to go to bed with him and I said no. Oh God, Chloe, what shall I do?’ It was half a joke, but only half. Something intriguing had come in to fill a cold, empty space inside Helen, and now she didn’t want to let it go.
Chloe’s eyebrows lifted a fraction. ‘Horny little bugger,’ she said, amused. ‘You were quite right to tell him to get lost. He’ll be back, love, don’t you worry.’
‘I hope you’re right,’ said Helen softly. ‘I want him to be back, very much.’ She didn’t, in her preoccupation, see the quick anxious glance that Chloe shot at her.
After an hour of sitting with Rose in the impenetrable untidiness of her kitchen, Oliver stood up restlessly. He drank the remains of the dark brown sherry in his glass and made a face. Rose went on impassively with her sewing, not looking at him. ‘Before you go,’ she said, ‘what are you doing to that nice little thing upstairs?’
Oliver shrugged himself into his coat without answering, turned to go, and then as an afterthought sketched a kiss in the air between himself and Rose. ‘Doing nothing at all, darling Rose. All the treasures are kept securely locked away, as you must have guessed. Bloody boring. And now, au revoir or I shall be late for Hall.’
Rose, left alone in the kitchen, smiled a little and went on sewing.
Oliver took the steps into the misty dampness shrouding the city two at a time. He noticed the outline of a big car parked on the bridge as he came level with it, then as he swung out on to the pavement he saw that it was a white Rolls. Beside it, a man in a peaked cap was lifting a heavy trunk. Three other people were standing close together in the orange glare of the street lights, moisture from the mist beading brilliantly on their hair and clothes. The tallest was a thickset man in an expensive overcoat; one of the two women was clinging affectedly to his arm.
But it was the other woman who drew Oliver’s startled attention.
She looked very young. Over a cloud of pure white fur, the face was as innocent as an angel’s, and as expressionlessly beautiful as if carved in marble. Oliver stopped dead. At once, the face burned itself into his memory. He knew that he had never seen it before, yet it was familiar, even down to the faintly startled reflection in the depths of the immense eyes. And the girl went on looking back at him, her lips slightly parted and the street lights darting jewels of dampness among her snow-white furs.
The thickset man made an irritable sound and Oliver wrenched his attention from the girl.
‘Can I help?’ he asked politely.
The man stabbed a finger towards the square black bulk of Follies House.
‘Is this Follies House?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Jesus, will you look at those steps!’ The accent was mid-Atlantic, but beneath it were the unmistakable echoes of London’s East End. Hobbs, can you get all this down there?’
The chauffeur leaned over the parapet. ‘Yes, Mr Warren, I think so.’
The other woman clung more tightly to the cashmere sleeve. ‘Oh, Masefield, it’s so wet out here. My hair.’ Without a word her escort opened the passenger door and handed her back into the Rolls. Hobbs bent to lift the trunk again. The girl stared back at Oliver, motionless. The shroud of mist seemed to swallow all the sounds around them, so that they moved in eerie, silent isolation.
‘Can I help?’ he asked again, but the thickset man glanced at him only briefly. ‘Thanks. No.’
The girl in white ducked her head and followed her father down the steps. Hobbs bent to the trunk again and bumped awkwardly after them. The woman sat in the car, staring ahead of her and rhythmically stroking her hair.
Oliver walked away, back up St Aldate’s to Christ Church. He whistled to himself as he went, the same few, unfinished notes. Now he knew. The man was Masefield Warren. More, the white girl was his daughter, Pansy. Her face, wide-eyed and startled, was familiar from the flashbulb shots of a hundred gossip columns. Pansy Warren was not only beautiful, she was the heiress to her father’s by now uncounted millions.
As Oliver walked back under Tom Tower the rest of the little whistled tune came spilling out, unchecked.
Two (#u33195f01-9141-5db1-86d1-a990d5a298d4)
Oliver came looking for Helen again on Sunday morning.
On Sunday mornings Oxford was always full of the peals and counterpeals of church bells, and today they sounded louder and even sweeter than usual. The skies were clear after the days of rain of the term’s beginning, and the trees without their muffling shrouds of leaves let the echoes through with extra clarity.
Helen was planning to do some reading in a library with a view over lawns and towers. It is Sunday, she told herself, as she gathered up her books. You must work as hard as you can, for Mum’s sake and Graham’s, but it can’t be flat out all the time.
When she came out of the front door of Follies House she saw Oliver at once. He was leaning on the parapet of the bridge, watching her. He made no move as she climbed the steps towards him, feeling clumsy in her thick overcoat and encumbered by her books. But as soon as she came level with him, he smiled. Helen was struck at once by the way his face, the same features that must have belonged to the parade of illustrious ancestors stretching behind him, was repossessed by the smile to become Oliver himself, unique. He stepped forward, blocking her path.
‘No work today,’ he said firmly. ‘Don’t you know it’s Sunday?’ One by one he took the books from under her arm. ‘Come with me instead.’
He wasn’t being persuasive; he was simply telling her what she must do.
‘We can go anywhere you like. The whole world’s waiting.’
Helen let him unburden her, unable to protest or insist that indeed she must work.
‘Books, books,’ Oliver was saying breezily. ‘I was sent out for tutoring last term to a man called Stephen Spurring. He kept trying to make me go to gloomy seminars with anxious girls from Colleges I’ve never heard of …’
‘Like me?’ Helen was laughing in spite of herself.
‘No. Not a bit like you. You don’t go to seminars and adopt a Marxist interpretation of Wuthering Heights, do you?’
‘Oh, all the time. Stephen Spurring’s very highly thought of, you know.’
‘Then you must stop it at once.’ Oliver stood squarely in front of her and cupped her chin so that she looked up into his face. He was mock-serious, grinning at her as he dropped his hand again so that she wanted to say, Come back. ‘It can’t be good for you. And highly thought of by whom? Hart has discovered that Spurring has got some kind of senior-member responsibility for As You Like It. Of all the tedious little men.’
So Oliver dismissed the bright star of the English faculty. How confident he is, Helen thought, as she followed him.
Oliver dropped the pile of books haphazardly into the well behind the seats of his open car. It was waiting for them at the kerbside, looking to Helen absurdly low-slung, sleek and highly polished. She had often seen Oliver driving around town in it. Now she said, ‘It’s such a pretty car. What kind is it?’
He opened the passenger door with a flourish, handed Helen into the leather bucket seat and swung him legs over the door on his own side.
‘A Jaguar,’ he said, with deep satisfaction, patting the walnut fascia. ‘XK 150. Rather old now, and quite rare.’ The engine roared throatily into life and Oliver beamed. ‘Looked after for me by a little man in the Botley Road. He just loves the innards of old cars, isn’t that lucky? Me, I don’t have any taste for sprockets and oil. I just want to drive her, the faster the better. So, really, the three of us have a perfect relationship.’
Helen watched him, fascinated. She had never met anyone so vibrantly pleased with life, and so certain of himself. The introspective moment of the other evening when he had sat staring out into the darkness of Canterbury Quad, and Helen had thought that after all he might make the perfect romantic hero, was forgotten.
They were bowling through the wide, tree-lined streets of North Oxford now, where the pavements were drifted over with golden leaves. The few people who were about were strolling with newspapers under their arms, or walking dogs who scuffled in the piles of leaves.
‘Where are we going?’ Helen asked.
‘Where would you like to go?’ Oliver countered. ‘Anywhere in particular?’
‘No.’
‘Well then, you might as well leave it to me. We’re going to have lunch, as it happens. And to see a man about a dog.’
Helen asked no more questions. Instead she sat back in her seat and let the wind blow away everything but the immediacy of this extraordinary morning. When she closed her eyes, the sunlight and the shade from the trees flashing past dappled patterns through her eyelids. When she opened them again there was the long, black car bonnet in front of her, the outskirts of the city dropping away, and Oliver beside her. He drove negligently, one hand on the wheel and the other resting on the polished wooden knob of the gear lever. They sliced in and out of the traffic on the busy road and then, suddenly, they were in the open country. Helen felt the acceleration pressing her back into her seat as the car surged forward. The shadows swept over her face, faster and faster, and the wind whipped her hair back.
Oliver glanced at her, sidelong. If Helen had known him better she might have recognised the small, secret smile with which he always congratulated himself on getting his own way. When she looked round at him again the smile had vanished and he asked, casually, ‘Warm enough? My coat’s in the back if you need something to put over your knees.’ It was the brown leather aviator’s coat which he had been wearing the other evening. Helen instinctively pulled her own well-worn duffel coat more tightly around her.
‘I’m fine. Thanks.’
The car swept on. They were in the Cotswolds now, driving through villages built of honey-coloured stone and past winter-ready fields showing countless shades of brown and ochre.
‘It’s a beautiful day,’ Oliver said, stretching back in his seat and bracing his arms straight against the wheel. ‘Better than mouldering with all that lot in some library?’ He jerked his head backwards at the pile of books behind them.
Much better, Helen told herself, shutting her mind resolutely to the niggling voice of conscience and another, much fainter, murmur of apprehension. She didn’t feel safe with Oliver Mortimore. But then, what was so appealing about safety? Helen wriggled a little deeper into her seat and stared along the low line of the Jaguar’s bonnet at the open road hurtling towards them. She thought, fleetingly, of Chloe; feeling safe wouldn’t be high on Chloe’s list of priorities, she was certain. Perhaps, after all, it didn’t come so high on her own either. Helen couldn’t explain to herself why she had been swept up by Lord Oliver Mortimore. But it gave her an unfamiliar glow of flattery and excitement. And now she was here she would enjoy it, whatever was to come. The recognition of that whatever, too, gave Helen a thrill of recklessness. She so rarely did anything without thinking very hard about it first. But there just wasn’t any leeway for thinking, where Oliver was concerned. He had just happened to her, and she was ready to accept that.
Just as he would have to accept her.
Helen was clear-sighted enough to know that there was nothing to be gained by pretending to be something she wasn’t, in the hope that would make her more interesting to him. Whatever it was that he had seen in her in the first place would have to go on being enough, and Helen lifted her chin determinedly at that. But she definitely wanted him to go on seeing something in her. Her eyes were drawn to him again as he sat negligently at the wheel. He was unusually good-looking, yes, but his attraction was more magnetic than that. It was the ease, the casualness and the assurance that drew Helen, who possessed none of those things. She felt as if she wanted to warm herself by him. And there was something else, too. She thought she detected a sensitivity in him, under all that urbane gloss, that made him doubly attractive. A little mysterious, too.
Be careful, Helen’s sane little inner voice warned her. Another, louder voice responded. I’m always careful. This time I just want to see what happens. I don’t care if it isn’t real. If it doesn’t last any longer even than today.
The Jaguar was slowing down. They had left the main road and, at the end of a much narrower road, they came to a compact little village. A cluster of stone cottages around an uneven triangle of green, a church with a squat stone tower masked by a belt of yew trees, and at the apex of the triangle, there was a pub. A mulberry tree was painted on the sign over the low door.
Oliver switched off the ignition and his smile flashed at her again.
‘This is where we’ll have lunch.’ Again there was no possibility of disagreeing with him, even if Helen had wanted to. Instead, she let him escort her across the green to the door under the mulberry tree sign. Oliver’s arm sat lightly across her shoulders as they walked. Inside, there were log fires and high-backed oak seats.
‘You’re always so cold,’ Oliver grinned down at her. ‘We’d better sit close to the fire.’ His hand touched the nape of her neck again, just briefly, under the tangle of black curls.
‘Morning, Lord Oliver,’ the man behind the bar greeted him. ‘And Miss.’ This was Oliver’s home ground in some way, Helen realised.
‘Hello, Bill. Drink, Helen?’ A quick glance round the bar confirmed Helen’s instinctive choice.
‘Sherry, please. Dry, with ice.’
‘Quite safe, but a little dull.’ Oliver’s voice was teasing. ‘I’m going to have champagne, and I think you should too.’
The drinks arrived at once, Oliver’s in a silver tankard and Helen’s foaming in a tall, narrow glass. Twice in one week, Helen thought, amused. And I’ve hardly ever even tasted real champagne before. How odd things are. She raised her glass to Oliver in a quick, half-ironic toast and there was a flicker in his eyes as he responded.
‘You are pretty,’ he told her. ‘Why do you hide it?’
‘I don’t,’ she said, quickly defensive. ‘Anyway, being pretty isn’t everything.’
‘You’d be surprised.’ He was laughing at her. ‘What else is there? Tell me with special reference to Helen Brown, please. I didn’t have a chance to talk to you at my tea-party. And we did get off on rather the wrong footing afterwards.’ Oliver took a long pull of champagne and looked at her expectantly.
‘Mmm, your tea-party.’ Helen picked the least dangerous avenue out of his questions. ‘Are those people all friends of yours?’
Oliver shrugged, not interested. ‘Acquaintances, mostly, not many friends. Except Tom Hart. He’s very different, and rather formidable.’
Helen remembered the dark, intense face among the pink- and-whiteness of the English upper classes, and smiled a little. She remembered him, too, as much less formidable to her than the closed ranks of Oliver’s social peers.
‘Don’t change the subject, anyway,’ Oliver reprimanded her. ‘Don’t you like talking about yourself? Every other woman I know adores it.’ He leaned back in his seat and clasped his hands behind his head, waiting for her to speak.
Helen was silent. How could she talk to this suave, privileged young man about any of the things that mattered to her? She knew, instinctively, that Oliver would just be puzzled, and probably embarrassed, if she told him about the problems that beset her now. She had no desire to talk to him about her father, or even her mother and brother at home in their underheated little house. And then, the things that didn’t really matter were so dull. She couldn’t hope to amuse Lord Oliver Mortimore by giving him the details of her quiet, work-filled life and the few small diversions that she allowed herself. She felt herself colouring under his stare before her resolution to stay true to herself came back to her.
‘No,’ she said coolly. ‘I’d prefer not to talk about me.’ The amiability in Oliver’s face didn’t fade, but Helen was aware that he was staring at her with a shade more curiosity in his eyes. Unexpectedly, she grinned at him. ‘Doesn’t that make me fascinatingly different from all the other women you know?’
Oliver shrugged briefly. ‘Different, anyway.’ He raised his hand in a gesture to the barman to show that he wanted more champagne.
Aware that she had dampened the conversation, Helen cast about for a neutral topic to fill the silence between them.
‘Where do you live? When you’re not in Oxford, I mean.’
Oliver frowned over his tankard. ‘Quite near here. At least, my family does. Thankfully, as a younger son, I’m not expected to involve myself too closely in all that.’ Helen could only guess at what ‘all that’ might be. She had a dim vision of a feudal hierarchy presided over in baronial magnificence by Oliver’s father. What would he be? A duke? A viscount?
‘What about you?’
Helen told him the name of her home town and Oliver looked blankly back at her. ‘Ah. Is it nice?’
‘Not especially. But then we can’t all have Gloucestershire estates.’ I shouldn’t have said that, she thought, as soon as it was out, but Oliver only smiled his brilliant smile.
‘No,’ he agreed as if she had made a telling point. ‘It’s a pity.’
Helen was realising as she sat in her corner, caressed by the glow of the champagne and the warmth of the log fire, that she and Oliver were even further apart than she had first thought. They might as well have come from different planets. Yet, surprisingly, the knowledge excited rather them depressed her. Covertly, Helen watched him lounging opposite her. He was playing absently with his silver tankard, turning it to catch the reflection of the fireglow. His fine blond hair was reddened by the warm light and his cheeks were faintly flushed by it. The aquiline features that reminded Helen of a marble knight on a marble tombstone were softened, so that he looked – as he did when he smiled – more like Oliver himself than Oliver the scion of a noble house.
I want him. The words sprang into Helen’s head unvoiced, and for an instant they shocked her. What do you want, she made herself ask. A share, came back the answer from the other, hidden Helen. To share a little bit of him, because he’s exotic and glowing and – perhaps – more than a bit dangerous. And to share through him all those things that I admire and have never had, like certainty and assurance. Not the money, or privilege necessarily, except that those things make it easier to have the others. I do want him, she thought, but I’m not making a very good job of getting what I want. If I was Flora or Fiona, I could giggle and gossip; maybe he’d think I was stupid but at least I wouldn’t be sitting here in silence.
As if to help her out, a waiter in a sleek, black jacket came over to their corner.
‘Your table is ready, Lord Oliver.’
‘Great. Are you ready, Helen?’
Under his casual demeanour, Oliver sometimes displayed beautiful, rather old-fashioned manners. His hand was under her elbow to help her negotiate the single step up into the dining room. He waved aside another hovering waiter and pulled out Helen’s chair himself, settling her into it and shaking out her thick, white linen napkin before laying it across her lap.
‘What d’you think?’ From across the starched white cloth Oliver waved around the little dining room. Helen peered about her. The light outside was brilliant, but in here it was all absorbed by dark walls and heavy oak furniture. Small, shaded lamps on each table cast pools of light, but the rest of the room was dim. There were only a dozen tables. The other diners were mostly much older than Oliver and Helen; men with port-wine complexions and silvery moustaches, women with high voices and well-cut tweeds.
‘I’ve never been to one,’ Helen told him, ‘but it looks like I imagine the dining room of a gentleman’s club.’
Oliver laughed, surprised. ‘You’re quite close. Except that the food’s a million times better. And, considering it’s really only a country pub, it has the most amazing cellar.’
He means wine, Helen reminded herself, dispelling the image of a mysterious cobwebby recess beneath her feet.
Oliver nodded to the still-hovering waiter. At once a bottle was reverently brought, wrapped in a white napkin. Oliver tasted the half-inch of red wine which was poured into his glass, frowning, intent. Then another sharp nod to the waiter gave him the signal to fill Helen’s glass. She watched, intrigued, then picked up her glass and sniffed at it as Oliver had done. The wine smelt rich, fat and beguiling, quite unlike the smell of any wine she had tried before. And a single sip told her that it was indeed something very different.
‘This,’ said Oliver, ‘is burgundy. Gevrey-Chambertin, Clos St Jacques. Not quite the very greatest, but as good as one can find almost anywhere.’ He turned his glass to the light and looked at it intently, then drank. ‘Yes,’ he said at last, and Helen knew that she was forgotten.
After a moment Oliver looked up again and recollected himself. ‘One comes here for the game,’ he told her. ‘We’re having grouse, okay?’ She nodded, not caring if they were going to eat penguin.
In fact the food, when it came, didn’t appeal to her. The meat tasted strong and not very fresh. Helen ate what she could and gave all her attention to Oliver. In response, he set out to amuse her. She realised that when he chose, he could be excellent company. He made her laugh with stories of his own casual irresponsibility, and he swept the conversation along without making any more awkward demands on Helen’s self-protective quiet. He seemed to live in a world of parties, weekends in Town, as he called London, dining clubs – and, even less intelligibly to Helen – dogs and horses.
‘Do you do any work?’ she asked.
‘Not a jot.’ His beguiling smile drew her own in response. ‘I shall get a Third, of course. Just like my father. And his father, for that matter. My brother didn’t bother with a degree at all. What difference does it make?’ He shrugged amiably. ‘More wine?’
Halfway through the meal Oliver drained his glass, tipped the empty bottle sideways, then signalled to the waiter to bring another.
‘Another?’ Helen said it out loud, in spite of herself.
‘Of course another.’ Oliver looked faintly surprised. ‘The days of the one-bottle lunch are, as far as I am concerned, ancient history.’
He drank most of the burgundy, but he took care, too, to refill Helen’s glass whenever she drank a little.
After the grouse came thick, rich syllabub in little china cups, and then brandy which made even Helen’s fingers warm as she wrapped them round the glass.
When they had finished, one of the self-effacing waiters brought the bill. Helen tried to look away, but curiosity dragged her eyes back to Oliver’s negligently scribbled cheque. It was for an amount almost exactly equal to the money she would have to live on for the rest of the term.
When they came out into the late afternoon sunshine, Oliver’s eyes were hooded and he was talking just a little more deliberately than usual, but there was no other sign of how much he had drunk.
Once again he flung open the Jaguar’s passenger door with a flourish and waved her towards it.
‘Can you drive all right?’ she asked, knowing that it was a pointless question.
‘Perfectly.’ His arm came round her shoulders again and with one finger he raised her chin so that he could look down into her eyes. ‘Don’t worry so much,’ he told her. ‘Don’t be so frightened of everything.’ His hand moved to tangle itself in the mass of black curls and Helen felt the tiny, caressing movements of his thumb against her neck. He smelt of leather and wool and very faintly of dark red burgundy. For a moment they stood in silence. Helen was waiting, half apprehensive and half eager. Then Oliver laughed softly, deep in his throat. ‘You seem so timid. But you aren’t, really, are you? What door do I have to open to let the other Helen out?’
The other Helen. She caught her breath, thrown off balance by his sudden astuteness. Ever since he had kissed her, up in her bare room at Follies House, two Helens had been sparring inside her. She had no idea which one was her real self. How could she begin to find an answer for Oliver?
He didn’t wait for one. Instead, he took her hand firmly and guided her into the car. ‘Come on. We’ve got things to do.’ Oliver hoisted his leather coat out from behind the seats and tucked it around her. Helen buried her nose luxuriously in the sheepskin lining.
‘Where?’
‘I told you. To see a man about a dog.’
The car shot forward. Oliver was driving even faster than before, but it seemed to Helen just as competently. He was very sure of where he was going.
The sun was low behind the trees now, and the shadows were thickening between the hedges in the narrow lanes. For a mile or so they skirted a long wall that looked as if it might enclose a park, then suddenly Oliver swung the wheel and the car skidded in through a gateway flanked by tall stone posts. They passed a low building that might have been a gatekeeper’s lodge, its windows warmly lit behind drawn curtains. Beyond the lodge was a driveway, arched over with massive oak trees. As they sped towards it, Helen became aware of the dark, crenellated bulk of a big house sitting squarely on a little rise ahead.
Beside her, Oliver’s face was expressionless.
To one side of the house was an outcrop of lower buildings, and Oliver turned the car decisively towards them. A moment later they were in a cobbled yard, the roar of the Jaguar’s exhaust thrown back at them by the enclosing walls. Oliver vaulted out of the car and simultaneously one of the stable doors swung open. A shaft of yellow light struck across the cobbles.
‘Evening, my lord,’ said the little man who had come out to meet them. He was toothless, brown-skinned and dressed in moleskin trousers and a coat so ancient that all the colour had been drained out of it.
‘Hello, Jasper,’ said Oliver, grinning at him. ‘Where are they?’
‘End barn, my lord.’
‘Come and see them too, Helen. This is Jasper Thripp, by the way. Miss Brown, Jasper.’
‘Evening, miss,’ said the little man, and hobbled towards the door of the end barn.
Uncomprehending, Helen followed them.
Inside the barn were the mingled smells of bran, paraffin from a heater, and warm milk. In a large box near the heater was a beagle bitch, surrounded by a warm, wriggling mass of brown, black and white-patched puppies. Oliver stooped over them, murmuring endearments to the mother as he lifted each pup in turn. His face was soft in the harsh light cast by the bare, cobwebbed lightbulb overhead. As he turned the puppies to and fro, running a practised finger over their legs and backs, Helen saw that his hands were long and sensitive like the hands in an eighteenth-century portrait. At length he nodded and smiled at Jasper. ‘Three first-rate, and a couple more pretty good. Yes?’
Jasper sucked at his toothless gums. ‘Yup. I’d say so. She’s done well this time, the old gel.’ They were talking as equals now.
When the last of the pups had been gently returned to the security of its box, Oliver moved aside briskly. The softness was gone from his face, replaced by the more familiar authoritative mask.
‘We’ll give them a couple more weeks, then pick the ones we need for the pack.’
‘Right you are, my lord.’
Master and servant again, Helen thought.
‘And now, let’s have a drink before I take Miss Brown off. There’s a bottle in the tack-room safe.’
They retraced their steps to the door from which Jasper had emerged. The tack-room was stuffy and crammed with ranks of saddles and bridles, folded horse-blankets, combs and brushes and mysterious bottles and jars. Oliver was rummaging in an ancient green metal safe. Triumphantly he produced a whisky bottle and three thick tumblers. Helen shook her head at his invitation, but Oliver and Jasper both took liberal measures.
The old man drained his at a gulp, murmuring first, ‘Here’s to ’em, then.’ Oliver tossed back his drink too, then stood up to go.
Jasper eyed him. ‘Will you be taking Cavalier or The Pirate to the Thursday meet?’
Oliver was zipping himself into the aviator’s coat. He took Helen’s hand and squeezed it.
‘Neither. Got to work this week.’ Seeing Jasper’s face, he laughed delightedly. ‘Well, rehearse anyway. I’m in a play, did you know?’
‘I’m sure you’ll be the star of the show, my lord,’ said Jasper drily and picked up a saddle from one of the pegs. It was clear that he had a low opinion of anything that took the place of hunting in his lordship’s life. Oliver was still laughing as they climbed back into the car together. Helen could swallow her curiosity no longer.
‘What is this place? The house? Who’s Jasper?’
It was almost completely dark now and she could barely see Oliver’s face. But she did see that he hesitated a moment before answering, poised with his fingers on the keys in the ignition. And she was certain, too, that after a moment’s hesitation he looked backwards over his shoulder in the direction of the big house. Then the car’s engine roared into life again.
‘Jasper is an old ally of mine,’ he told her. ‘He’s part groom, part gamekeeper and a fund of useful knowledge. He taught me to ride when I was about three. Nell – the dog you saw – is as much his as mine, and he’s in charge of the pups. I’m the Master of the House beagles this year, and I want to present the best of the litter to the pack.’ There was pride in his voice as he spoke.
He does belong with another world, Helen thought. I don’t know what he’s talking about half the time.
As an afterthought, Oliver said quietly, ‘And the house … it’s where my parents live.’
The car surged forwards so fast that Helen was jerked backwards in her seat. She settled back, ready for the return drive to Oxford, but Oliver merely drove down the little rise away from the house, took another road across twilit parkland from which a damp mist was already rising and drew up in front of a cottage that might have belonged to a groundsman. It was screened on three sides by tall trees and all the windows were dark.
Helen followed Oliver through the drifts of leaves to the front door and stepped inside after him. When the lights came on they blinked at each other.
‘Home,’ he said.
The door had opened straight into a low, square room. It was shabby, filled with a mixture of what looked like outworn drawing room furniture and outgrown nursery pieces. The atmosphere was unmistakably welcoming. Helen looked round at the worn chintz covers, overlapping and unmatching rugs and the plain cream walls with an air of relief. She suddenly felt more comfortable with Oliver than she had done all day.
‘Make yourself at home while I do the fire.’ He knelt down at the open hearth. ‘Or, better still, be an angel and make some tea.’
The kitchen was at the back. Helen hummed softly as she rummaged in cupboards to discover thick red pottery mugs and a homely brown teapot. When she carried the tray in, Oliver was lying on a rug in front of the fire, his head propped against the sofa cushions. He watched her as she put the tray down on the floor and then rocked back on her heels to meet his eyes. Oliver patted the cushions beside him, but Helen ignored him for a moment. Instead she poured tea into the red mugs and then handed him one. Then she wrapped her thin fingers round her own. Emboldened by the cosy domesticity of the little room, she asked him, ‘Why do you call this home? If your parents live over there?’
‘I’ve used this little house to escape to for years. When I was younger, to escape from the family. Nowadays, when I’m here, which isn’t often, it’s to avoid the tourists.’
‘Tourists?’
‘Mmm. The house is open to the public. Hordes of it. We’ve retreated to one of the wings, like survivors in a sinking ship.’
‘What is this place?’ Helen asked again.
‘It’s called Montcalm.’
Of course. Oliver’s father, then, was the Earl of Montcalm. And this blond boy who was laughing at her in the firelight came of a family whose history stretched back to the Plantagenets.
‘Didn’t you know?’ he asked her.
‘No,’ Helen said humbly. ‘Or, if I did know who you were, I’d forgotten.’
‘How lovely.’ Oliver was laughing delightedly, and her own laughter echoed his. ‘Come and sit here.’
Helen went. Her head found a comfortable hollow in the crook of his shoulder, and his chin rested in her hair. In front of them the fire crackled and spat. Helen let her eyes close, thinking of nothing but the sound of their breathing and the immediate sensations that lapped around her. Oliver’s sweater was rough against one cheek and the heat of the fire was reddening the other. She felt his mouth moving in her hair.
‘Comfortable?’
‘Mmm.’
Gently, Oliver began to stroke her cheek. Instinctively, Helen turned her face closer to his. Her body felt soft, warm after the day’s bright cold and relaxed with the ebbing of tension.
Very slowly, Oliver bent his head and kissed her mouth. Even as she felt herself respond to him, answering his kiss with a kind of hunger that surprised her, Helen heard a cold little voice inside her head.
You know that there will be no going back, after this?
You could still stop him.
You could still play safe.
No. I don’t want to be safe. I don’t want to lose him. I don’t care what happens. This is all that matters now. This room, the firelight, the roughness of the rugs beneath us. Oliver.
His hand was on her breast now and his mouth was more urgent over hers. Like a suicide pushing away the lifebelt that drifted within reach, Helen shut her ears and eyes and let herself be submerged in him.
‘You look so fragile,’ he whispered, ‘but your strength is all inside, isn’t it?’
He lifted her from the cushions and peeled her sweater off. Her eyes focused on his hands, portrait hands, insistent as they took off the rest of her clothes. Helen’s skin was creamy-pale, but the light and warmth made it rosy now. Intently Oliver’s fingers traced the line of her collarbone and the tilt of her small breasts, ran over the smooth flesh that stretched tight over her ribcage and then grasped her waist. She felt herself pulled towards him and her hands reached, in turn, at his clothes, wanting to touch him too.
At last, they faced each other, kneeling naked in the red glow.
‘Now,’ he said, and she echoed him on a long breath. Helen’s fingers slid over him as he waited for her.
The dreamy languor which had bathed them both was gone in that instant. A flash of longing for him swept through her, making her gasp aloud. Her fingers knotted in his hair as they came together and her head arched back, and further back, as his mouth slid from hers to her throat, and then to the hardness of her nipples. His hands explored her, relentless now, and she felt herself open to him like a flower.
‘Oliver,’ she murmured, ‘Oliver.’ It was the first time she had called him by his name, but she felt as though it had been in her head for her whole life. His eyes were closed and his breath was coming in quick gasps.
Still kneeling, Oliver lifted her effortlessly and then drew her down on top of him. He pierced her with a single thrust and at once she felt a wave of pleasure so intoxicating that she cried out loud. Her legs wound around him, jealously imprisoning him inside her. Poised, they moved together, at first slowly and then fiercely, unstoppably.
Helen felt the deep buried stirrings of her own climax with the first low moan in Oliver’s throat. Her back arched, taut, as he ground deeper into her. Then her fingers clenched, once, and fell open as the liquid currents shot through her veins, pulsed, extinguished everything except the man within her and then, slowly, exquisitely, receded.
By infinitesimal degrees, time started up again. Helen lifted her head from where it had sunk against Oliver’s shoulder. Looking down at him she saw that his face was soft, just as it had been when he bent over the tiny pups. Sweat had damped his fine blond hair so that it lay close against his head and his eyelashes were dark and spiky. For an instant, Oliver looked almost vulnerable. Helen stroked the hair back from his face and laid her cheek against his.
Beside them the fire sank deeper into its own red heart.
After a moment Oliver stirred and smiled lazily at her. ‘So that was the door.’
‘Door?’ Helen was bewildered.
‘The door to let the other Helen out.’ He chuckled. ‘You surprised me. So much heat under that cold skin.’
Helen felt herself blushing, and uncertainty took the place of the peaceful satisfaction of the moment before. Had she done something wrong? Her knowledge of sexual matters was so slight that she might well have. She had simply trusted in the force of her own instincts to guide her and she had believed that Oliver was doing the same. Now, she saw, that could have been a mistake. It was all so confusing, not least her disconcerting longing to please him.
What was the right thing? She felt that he had been surprised by her refusal of him the other evening, and now after her passionate surrender of herself, he was no less surprised.
‘Did I do something wrong?’ she asked simply.
‘Wrong?’ His blue eyes were very bright. ‘No, of course not. You were charming. Just not very like other girls. Or like what I expected.’
I’m not like Flora or Fiona, Helen thought. Or like Vick. I know that. But what did he expect? She wanted to ask him, wanted to make him talk, but the words eluded her. Instead, she became uncomfortably conscious of her nakedness, and she reached out for the tangle of clothes beside her. Quickly, acutely aware of the clumsy awkwardness of putting on clothes, she pulled on her crumpled shirt. Then she saw that Oliver was looking away from her, into the depths of the fire. He seemed utterly unconscious of his body, and at once Helen regretted her prudish scramble to get dressed.
Uncomfortable, unexplained hot tears pricked behind her eyes. What’s the matter with me, she asked herself bitterly.
Oliver lay calm and unmoving. His body was evenly and deeply tanned, every inch of it. Helen knew that meant remote, exotic beaches, or very fashionable ones where everyone was free of stupid inhibitions. He looked fit, too, with the flat belly and developed muscles of the all-round athlete. Alongside him Helen felt herself bony and uncoordinated, as well as pallid from lack of sunlight. There had been too many weeks of not caring what she ate, too many nights with very little sleep.
With his eyes fixed on the fire, Oliver put out a hand and caught her wrist.
‘Stop jumping about,’ he ordered her. ‘Lie still, here.’ He made space on the rug beside him and obediently Helen lay back with her head against the cushions. His fingers encircled her wrist, and, as if to underline her own image of her body, he murmured, ‘So thin and brittle. One false move and it might snap. Poor Helen. You need feeding up.’ And he laughed again, pleased with the idea.
In the quiet that followed, Helen collected herself. What else did you expect? Or want? You shared those moments of love-making with him, and in those moments he was yours. Nothing can take that away. And now, what point is there in wishing it had happened some other way? Or hadn’t happened at all? You wanted to give yourself to him, because what else could you have offered? And he’s still here beside you. With his fingers around your wrist. Take what you’ve got, and believe in your own convictions.
The threatened tears were gone now, and the determination was back in Helen’s face again.
Oliver sat up and reached for a log from the basket. When he threw it on the fire, the embers glowed hotly and sent out a last fierce blush of heat before settling again.
He let go of her wrist and leaned away from her to fumble in one of his pockets. When he settled himself, Helen saw that he was holding a key ring, with a small, silver propelling pencil dangling among the keys. Quickly, Oliver unscrewed it and Helen saw that it was not a pencil at all, but a hollow tube. Oliver patted his pockets again and then produced a tiny silver-backed mirror. Finally from his wallet he extracted a single, crisp pound-note.
‘I can’t stand the ostentation of people who use fifties,’ he told her. Helen watched, bewildered.
Frowning with concentration now, Oliver shook a tiny drift of white powder from the tube on to the mirror. Then he held it out to her.
‘Snort?’ he asked, casually.
‘What is it?’
‘Cocaine,’ he answered, enunciating the word very carefully. ‘What did you think?’
‘No,’ Helen cried out before she could bite back the word behind her teeth. Suddenly, and with startling vividness, she remembered Frances Page being driven away in an unmarked car by a young and pretty policewoman and a creased middle-aged man who bore no resemblance to the drug-squad officers of television serials.
Oliver shook his head. ‘It’s harmless, you know, unless you’re very stupid. And it is instant sunshine.’ He offered the mirror again, as if it were chocolates.
‘No. Thank you.’
Oliver shook his head again, as if to say please yourself, then rolled the crackling note up into a narrow tube. With a sharp sniff at each nostril the white powder vanished from the mirror.
This time the tempo of their love-making was languid and dreamy. To Helen each movement seemed slower, as if replayed before her eyes by an unseen camera, but yet more piercingly sweet than she could have believed possible. The world beyond the little circle of firelight, beyond this coupling of tanned skin with her own pale translucent flesh, meant nothing.
This was Helen’s first experience of living for the moment, of being absorbed in the sensations of the instant, and she was transfixed by it. At last Oliver drifted into sleep with his head heavy against her breast. For a while Helen stared over the crest of blond hair into the greyness of the dead fire. Then she, too, closed her eyes, as if surrendering herself once again, and then slept with him.
It was very late when the black Jaguar slid alongside the steps leading down to Follies House.
Oliver switched off the engine and glanced sideways at Helen. Her chin was sunk against the collar of his coat which he had wrapped around her, and she seemed to be lost within her own thoughts.
‘Follies,’ he said, to nudge her back into awareness. ‘I told you I’d deliver you back, safe and sound.’
Helen stared at him, her face drained of colour by the orange street lights. Something in her expression made Oliver uneasy.
‘You’re not sorry are you? About today?’ He had meant it lightly, half referring to her missed day’s work, but Helen interpreted it differently.
‘No, not sorry. Stunned, perhaps. And bewildered. But happy too.’ She smiled at him, and her small, cold hand reached out for his as it rested on the gearstick. ‘Are you sorry?’
Her question disconcerted Oliver but he kept the lightness in his voice as he answered. ‘No, why should I be? One only feels sorry if things turn out badly. And this evening wasn’t bad. Not bad at all.’
There was a small silence before Helen spoke again.
‘Will you come back again? Soon?’
‘Of course. I’m always in and out of Follies. Rose likes to see me about the place.’
Helen nodded, accepting that.
Oliver leaned back to gather up her books from where they lay scattered behind the seats. He glanced at them before handing them over.
‘God, serious stuff.’ His voice was teasing. ‘Do you work all the time?’
‘No,’ said Helen in a small voice. ‘I didn’t work today, did I?’
Once again, a little silence hung between them before she took the books from his hands. ‘It’s late,’ she said, as if reminding herself rather than Oliver.
‘Mmm. And Hart has decreed that tomorrow work starts on the play in earnest. Something tells me that he’s likely to be a slavedriver.’
Cheerfully Oliver climbed out of the car and opened Helen’s door. He helped her out and they faced each other in the livid light. As he looked down at Helen’s pale, heart-shaped face framed by black curls, Oliver saw that there was something unfamiliar in the huge eyes that met his. It was something that he didn’t want to confront too closely. Instead he kissed her lightly on the cheek and swung her round to face the steps.
‘Safe home,’ he told her.
‘Goodnight.’ Her fingers touched the cuff of his jacket for a second before she walked away.
Oliver leaned on the parapet to watch her go and noticed again how slight she looked. He remembered how light she had felt in his arms, like a small bird, and how the strength of her passion had seemed at odds with that fragile body.
He frowned and turned abruptly back to his car.
Before he drove away he glanced up at the square dark shape of Follies House. Lights showed at three long windows on the first floor, and Oliver knew that they were the windows of Pansy Warren’s room. The frown disappeared and Oliver was whistling as he eased the Jaguar away towards Christ Church.
Slowly Helen climbed through the dark house to her room. She had wanted, as she said goodnight, to seize hold of Oliver and never let him go. Even as she heard his car purr away she felt cold with the loss of him. But she squared her shoulders and, inside her head, tried to laugh away her feelings. Anyway, she reminded herself, he’ll be back soon. He told you so himself. Perhaps tomorrow. Or if not tomorrow, the next day.
Three (#u33195f01-9141-5db1-86d1-a990d5a298d4)
Stephen Spurring folded The Times into three, vertically, as he always did, and propped it against the coffee pot. The dining room was quiet, with thin autumn sunshine reflecting on the amusing pieces of high Victorian furniture collected by Beatrice and himself years ago, but from the kitchen came the confused babble of bickering children’s voices. Beatrice herself could be heard from time to time, refereeing in the state of constant war that seemed to exist among their children.
Stephen stirred his coffee very slowly. This moment of privacy, ‘Daddy must have some peace over breakfast, darling, because he needs to think,’ was a legacy from the early days of their marriage, and he still clung tenaciously to it. It was little enough, Stephen thought. In a very few minutes Beatrice and the children would get into one car to do the round of bus stops and school gates, and he would take the other into Oxford. The day would officially have begun.
In the meantime, there was his oasis of quiet and the newspaper. When he glanced back at it the print blurred obstinately in front of his eyes. Damn. His reading glasses were upstairs, and the thought irked him. Needing glasses at all made him feel old and creaky. Irritably, Stephen abandoned the paper, picked up his cup and went over to look out of the French windows. The gardens around the old stone rectory looked very bright, gaudy with autumn colours. As he stood watching, a grey squirrel bounced jerkily across the grass.
Thirty-nine wasn’t so old, Stephen told himself.
It was October again now. This was the time of year when everything came to life for him after the long silence of the summer, just as it had done for the last twenty years. Twenty? Had he really been in Oxford for that long? Stephen smiled wryly, reflecting that this was the last year before middle age. Well, there was still time. For what? he might have asked himself, but he chose not to.
He was surprised to find himself humming as he picked up his briefcase in the black-and-white tiled hallway. A glance in the ornate gilt hall mirror cheered him further. Stephen had never belonged to the dusty corduroys and down-at-heel shoes school of University teachers. Today he was wearing a soft grey tweed suit, and a bright blue shirt without a tie. He looked sleek, and younger than his age even with the threads of grey in his silky hair. Satisfied, Stephen went on into the kitchen to say goodbye to his wife.
Beatrice looked round at him, tucking the loose strands of dark hair behind her ears as she did so. It was a gesture that she had used ever since he had known her, and it still made her look like a schoolgirl.
‘Goodbye, darling,’ Stephen murmured. ‘Have a good day. I might be a bit late – faculty get-together.’ They kissed, automatically, not meeting each other’s eyes. Stephen reached out to touch his younger son’s shoulder as he passed, but Joe jerked his head away. Sulking about something, Stephen remembered, but couldn’t recall what. Five minutes later he was in his car, ready to drive the numbingly familiar ten miles into Oxford.
Beatrice watched him go, half regretfully. Fifteen years felt like a long, long marriage, but her husband still had the power occasionally to make her catch her breath and wish that he would stay. Even though she knew him much better than he knew himself, and that knowledge left no room for illusions, she still half loved him, half craved for him. Well, she reminded herself, the days of ducking guiltily out of whatever they were supposed to be doing and staying at home alone together were far behind them now. Beatrice reached for the tendrils of hair again, then remembered the marmalade on her fingers from Sebastian’s plate. She wiped them slowly on her apron, staring out of the gateway where Stephen had disappeared. She was still tasting, as she did every day, the odd mixture of frustration at her dependence on him and the satisfaction that, in spite of everything, they were still together.
‘Mum? My gym shirt?’ Eloise’s voice came demanding from the doorway. Gratefully, Beatrice stopped thinking and began to rehearse the daily list: clean football kit, riding lesson after school, three things beginning with J for Sebastian to take with him. Another day.
Stephen was still humming under his breath as he strolled into the packed lecture room. The sight was familiar, but it still touched him. There were the dozens of fresh faces, the clean notebooks and brand new copies of his own Commentaries. The size of the audience was gratifying. Stephen had given not a thought to his lecture, but that didn’t matter. He had delivered this introduction to his pet subject so many times that it was as familiar to him as his own name. He put his unnecessary sheaf of notes down on the desk and smiled around the room.
‘Okay,’ he said softly, as if speaking to just one of the faces turned up to him. ‘I’m going to talk to you today about love. Romantic love, sexual love, real love, as we find it in the greatest of Shakespeare’s great comedies.’
There was a ripple around the room as pens were unscrewed and eager hands began to scribble down Stephen’s words.
Chloe Campbell was the only person who didn’t move.
Instead she cupped her chin in her hands and looked intently back at Stephen. Fortyish, she thought, and not a bit like the stooped academic she had expected from reading the lecture list. This Doctor Spurring was slim, not tall, but undeniably sexy. His hair was just a little too long but it was well shaped. He wasn’t conventionally good-looking but his eyes were a startling clear blue. And his mouth, almost too full and curved, looked as soft as a girl’s. There was something in his voice that attracted her too. Under the conventional, cultivated tones there was something – someone – else. Was Stephen Spurring a Yorkshireman, Chloe wondered, or a Geordie perhaps?
After his forty-five fluent minutes, Stephen began smoothly to wind up his introductory lecture. All around her Chloe saw that there were sheets of notes with underlined headings and numbered points, now being clipped with satisfaction into new folders. Dr Spurring was an excellent teacher, she realised, but she hadn’t written down a single word of his instruction. Stephen Spurring the man interested her far too much.
When Stephen came out of the lecture, hitching his black gown familiarly over his shoulder and thinking cheerfully of coffee and the rest of The Times, he found three people waiting for him. Two of them, he saw, were Oliver Mortimore who was lounging characteristically against the wall to watch the girls streaming past, and an intent-looking Tom Hart from the Playhouse. The third was a girl. Stephen had glimpsed her mass of dark red hair in his lecture audience, and now he took in green eyes, an aura of self-possession and a direct, challenging smile. He had no idea who she was, and wished that he did.
He turned reluctantly to Oliver and Tom.
‘Still no Rosalind?’ he asked, without much interest. Stephen was the senior faculty member responsible for student drama productions, and usually he enjoyed the involvement. He liked the passionate enthusiasms of his undergraduates, and even more he like the steady trickle of pretty would-be actresses that it brought him into contact with. Yet this particular production, Tom Hart’s As You Like It, threatened to be less agreeable. To begin with, casting Oliver Mortimore as Orlando was an absurdity. The boy knew nothing about Shakespeare and seemed to care less. Stephen guessed that he had agreed to act the role simply out of amusement and curiosity. And Oliver was devoted to amusing himself, the older man thought with dislike. He stood for so many of the things that Stephen had despised Oxford for twenty years ago, and mistrusted even now – inherited privilege, too much money, the unquestioning belief that life owed to its brightest and most beautiful the leisure to eat, drink, ride horses and indulge themselves in and out of bed. Stephen, with no such privilege behind him, had little time for Oliver’s kind. Then there was Hart. He irked Stephen too, although the reasons were less clear-cut. His very presence, the suggestion of foreign, Broadway glitter which he brought with him, was a mystery. He was difficult to place, and so just a little threatening. Stephen waited without enthusiasm to hear what the two of them had to say.
Tom didn’t hesitate. He started talking quickly in the confident manner that annoyed Stephen. ‘We’ve got a couple of girls coming to audition for Rosalind at twelve. Can you be there?’
It was a mere courtesy that the senior member was invited to approve of the casting, at least in Tom’s view. Stephen hadn’t wanted Oliver, but that was just too bad.
Stephen frowned and glanced at his watch. The way that Tom Hart always addressed him as an absolute equal didn’t help, either. But he wasn’t going to give up and take a back seat, because that was probably exactly what Hart wanted.
‘If I must,’ he answered. ‘Just don’t keep me hanging about for too long.’
‘Of course not.’ But there was more irony than courtesy in the response. Cocky bastard, Stephen thought, and turned away deliberately to the red-haired girl who was still waiting at his elbow.
‘Dr Spurring,’ she held out her hand. ‘I’m Chloe Campbell. I just wanted to say how much I enjoyed your lecture. And to ask you a couple of questions.’
Stephen saw that she had the clear, creamy skin of the true redhead, coupled strikingly with dark brows and eyelashes. She also had a wide, curving mouth which seemed made for laughter as well as for other, more intimate things.
‘Ask away,’ Stephen smiled at her. He looked round and saw with pleasure than Tom and Oliver had gone. ‘Or better still, let me buy you a cup of coffee, and then you can ask me.’
With a touch of his hand at her elbow, Stephen turned Chloe round in the direction of the senior common room.
‘In here,’ he murmured.
Chloe found herself sitting in a deep, leather-covered armchair in a sombre, quiet room. There was a log fire at one end, and at the other a long table covered with a white cloth and trays of china and silver. There was a promising smell of fresh coffee.
This is more like it, she thought.
Chloe had already admitted to herself that her first few days in Oxford had been very short on glamour of any kind. She hadn’t come up expecting immediately to dine off gold plate in ancient halls while the greatest minds in the world sparred wittily around her, but neither had she anticipated quite so many anoraks and queues, and so much junk food served and eaten cheerlessly in plastic cafeterias. And Follies House had been lonely, echoingly quiet. She had heard the third lodger, Pansy whoever-it-was, arriving with huge quantities of luggage, but she had left again immediately, apparently for a long weekend. Helen had been there and Chloe would have liked to see her, but she had vanished disconcertingly early every morning with a forbidding pile of books. Chloe’s only chance of companionship had been with fat, chuckling Rose in her witches’ kitchen. Pride was the only thing that kept Chloe from turning tail and running back to London.
But this was different. This peaceful room with its scattered figures in black gowns was more what she had expected. And here was Stephen himself, leaning over to pour coffee, his eyes even bluer at close quarters than they had looked across the lecture room.
‘Cream? Sugar?’ he asked, then handed over a deep cup with, she saw in amused satisfaction, the University crest emblazoned on the side.
‘Well?’ he asked, smiling a lopsided smile that made Chloe shift a little in her chair and forget, for a moment, the bright opening that she had planned.
‘Ummm …’ Now they were both laughing. He’s nice, Chloe thought. Nicer than anyone I’ve met for, oh, a long, long time.
‘Dr Spurring,’ she began, but Stephen leaned across at once and rested his fingertips lightly, just for an instant, on her wrist.
‘Stephen,’ he told her. ‘Even my students call me that.’
‘I am a student,’ she told him, half regretfully. ‘A mature one, as they say. That’s one of the things I wanted to ask you about, as it happens. I’m very new to all this, you see. I haven’t read nearly enough. And I’ve been out of the way of – oh, just thinking properly, for years and years. Will you give me some advice about where to start? Tell me what to read, to begin with. Not just reading lists, but what’s really important. I feel at a disadvantage. And I’m not used to that,’ she finished, candidly. She had intended to make herself sound interesting for Stephen Spurring’s benefit, but she seemed to have blurted out something that was closer to the real truth. I’ve only made myself sound naive, Chloe thought, with irritation.
‘You? Feel at a disadvantage?’ Stephen leaned further back in his chair and grinned at her. ‘Come on … Chloe … look at yourself, and then look at those kids out there.’ He waved in the direction of the window and its view down a flight of steps crowded with people hurrying between classes. ‘Okay, apart from your obvious advantages, and you don’t need me to list those, you’re a little bit older. It can’t be by very much …’ he smiled again, into her eyes this time, ‘but you’ve had the chance to live some real life. Adult life. Which means you know yourself a whole lot better, and you understand people and their funny little motives more clearly. Isn’t that true?’
Chloe nodded slowly. ‘Yes, but …’
‘Listen. What could be more important, particularly in our field, in literature?’
Our field, Chloe thought, suddenly proud. I really am here, talking to this clever man, who’s still got the sexiest mouth I’ve ever seen. Even better, he’s not going to start the bitchy business gossip in five seconds’ time, nor is he going to try to get me to put some work his way. I’m glad I’m here. This is where I want to be.
‘… what matters is what comes from you,’ Stephen was saying. ‘Your own ideas, drawn on your own experience. That’s better than having read and being able to regurgitate every work of criticism on every set text there is. And that’s why you’re lucky. Literature is about people, after all,’ he said softly. ‘Men. Women. Their loves and their tragedies. Yes?’
Yes, Chloe thought. ‘In your lecture you said …’ but Stephen interrupted her.
‘In my lecture, in my lecture. I’m a teacher. I have to put things across in a certain way because that’s what I’m paid to do. But as a human being, as a man, I might think differently. I’m not just a don, although students tend to forget that.’
I won’t tend to, Chloe told herself, I can promise you that.
‘You know,’ Stephen’s eyes travelled over her face, from her eyes to her mouth, ‘I envy you. Having put whatever, whoever it is behind you, to come here, you’re starting afresh. Make sure you enjoy it, won’t you?’
Was he challenging her? They were looking intently at each other as Chloe whispered, ‘Yes, I will,’ and it was a long moment before either of them spoke again. In the end it was Chloe who broke the silence. She reached forward to the silver pots. ‘More coffee?’
Stephen shook himself slightly. For both of them, it was the signal to slow down just a little. Chloe always thought that the anticipation was half the fun, and she didn’t want whatever was going to happen with Stephen Spurring to unfold too quickly. She was delighted to find that Stephen’s understanding matched her perfectly.
‘Thank you. Well,’ he said, in quite a different, polite voice, ‘what does bring you here? Thirst for learning, or something more necessary?’
He was an easy audience, Chloe found. She made the edited version of why she had decided to come to Oxford sound as amusing as she could, and she gave him a quick, vivid sketch of her London advertising life. Stephen laughed with her, admiring her animated face as she talked. The morning’s good humour consolidated itself inside him. At length, he made himself look at his watch.
‘Oh God, I’m due to watch some auditions at twelve. I must go.’
‘With the young Apollo and his business manager?’
Stephen laughed. ‘Exactly. I’d forgotten you were there.’
‘Who are they?’
‘The tall fair one is Lord Oliver Mortimore.’
Chloe saw again the aquiline good looks and the unmistakable hauteur in Oliver’s bearing as he stood back to watch the world go by. Just as if it was there for his benefit alone, she thought, and her heart sank for Helen’s sake. Helen’s eyes had been just too bright when she talked about him, and her bewildered eagerness had been just too obvious. Chloe sighed. A mismatch, she thought, if ever there was one, and the only person likely to be damaged by that was Helen herself. Well, perhaps it would come to nothing anyway.
‘Do you know him, then?’ Stephen was asking.
‘No. It’s just that a friend of mine does. And who was the other, the business manager?’
‘You’re quite close to the truth, as it happens. Tom Hart, son of Greg Hart and heir to just about the entire New York theatre business.’
‘What can he be doing here?’ Chloe asked, interested. Hart was a famous name.
‘God knows. Nothing to do with the University. He’s got an assistant directorship at the Playhouse, so I suppose he’s dabbling in front of the scenery instead of behind it. He seems to have a dramatically clear idea of who he wants to know over here, anyway. He attached himself to young Mortimore within days of arriving in Oxford, and now he’s cast him as Orlando. Not that they make a bad pair – they’re both as self-satisfied as each other. I’m responsible for seeing that they don’t make a travesty of the production …’ Stephen made a quick, boyish face, ‘… and so I try to sit in on things from time to time.
‘Look, why don’t you come along too, if you’re not doing anything else? It might interest you; they’re looking for Hart’s idea of the perfect Rosalind.’
‘Yes, why not?’ Chloe wanted to see if her first impression of Oliver had been the right one, and she was more than happy to spend another hour in Stephen’s company.
Once more she felt the light touch of Stephen’s guiding hand at her elbow, and they walked down the steps together and out into the wintry sunshine. As they turned in the direction of the theatre, Stephen peeled off his gown and bundled it under his arm. Chloe tucked her hands deep into her pockets and let herself enjoy the cold air in her face and the play of the light on the stonework around them. They were crossing the inner quadrangle of the great library, the Bodleian, and unconsciously Chloe’s step slowed as she looked up at the ancient façades.
‘Mmm, yes,’ Stephen said beside her. ‘I must have walked through here a million times, and it can still stop me dead in my tracks. On the right day, and in the right company, of course.’
They paused for an instant in silence, and as Chloe’s gaze travelled downwards she caught sight of a familiar, slight figure. Helen was standing under the great arch that led through into Broad Street, silhouetted against the intricate tracery of the wrought-iron gates. She was carrying a stack of books that looked too heavy for her thin arms, and was struggling to hoist a heavy bag over her shoulder.
Chloe waved at once, and called out, ‘Helen! Over here!’
Helen stopped at once and they caught up with her a moment later. It was Chloe, she saw, with Stephen Spurring. She couldn’t prevent a smile from escaping. It was so perfectly in character that Chloe should already have secured for herself a tête-à-tête with the heart-throb of the faculty. Helen herself suspected that Stephen was more two-dimensional than the image he projected, but she was well aware that he cut a wide and successful swathe through the hordes of women surrounding him.
‘I was just going to lunch,’ she told them quickly, not wanting to interrupt whatever it was they were doing together. ‘If you go early it doesn’t take so long, and I want to get back to work …’
‘Hello, Helen,’ said Stephen easily. ‘I haven’t seen you since last term, have I? Good Vac?’
Helen bit her lip, but it wasn’t a question that needed to be answered. Stephen had cocked his head to one side to read the titles of the books under her arm.
‘Mmm, mmm, good. Oh, don’t bother with that one,’ he pointed. He was effortlessly back in the role of teacher again.
Impulsively, Chloe took Helen’s arm. ‘Look, we’re going to the Playhouse to hear some girls audition for your friend Oliver’s play. Come with us. That’ll be all right, Stephen, won’t it?’
‘I should think so,’ Stephen said without enthusiasm. He would have preferred to keep this effervescent, glowing girl to himself rather than have half the students in town accompanying them.
‘Really?’ Helen’s face lit with a wash of colour that spread over her pale cheeks. ‘I’d love to come along and watch. You know, Tom Hart even asked me to have a go, so I’d be intrigued to see what people have to do.’
It was something else that had brought the blush to her cheeks. Oliver had asked her, too, one morning during the breathless week that had just passed.
He had come strolling into the library where she was working and she heard the rustle of people turning to stare before she looked up herself. Oliver leaned over and took the pen out of her fingers before kissing the knuckles. The girl next to Helen gasped audibly.
‘Come and be my Rosalind,’ he said. He made no attempt to whisper and she heard his voice carrying to the far corners of the room. But no-one tried to say hush to Oliver.
‘I can’t act,’ she murmured.
Oliver’s eyebrows shot up. ‘A good thing too. Don’t ever try to act with me, because I’ll know.’ He kissed her, a gentle experimental kiss as if they were alone in the world. Even here, Helen felt herself tremble in response. ‘No,’ he said meditatively. ‘You don’t pretend anything.’
Helen left her papers in a drift on the desk and stumbled out of the library.
Oliver followed her, bestowing his dazzling smile on the rows of readers.
‘Oliver,’ she gasped, shaking with laughter, ‘don’t do this. What must all those people think, in there?’
There was a narrow stone window beside them, with a dizzy view down to an oval of lawn set like a green jewel in an ancient ring. He drew her into the window embrasure and held her there against the smooth stone.
‘It doesn’t matter to us,’ he told her, ‘what anyone thinks. Does it?’
Helen looked up into his tanned face and saw his tongue against his even teeth. ‘No,’ she said, almost believing him. ‘Not one bit.’
Oliver reached out to her and undid one button at her throat.
‘Cold, and then hotter than fire,’ he murmured. ‘You know, I came to ask if you would sit in at a rehearsal for us. Read Rosalind’s lines and help me to concentrate. But now I don’t feel like rehearsing at all. Come back to the House with me. Now.’
‘I can’t …’
‘Oh yes, Helen, you can.’
They laughed at each other, and she repeated, delighted at how easy it was, ‘Oh yes, I can.’
He took her hand and they ran down the spiral stairs, along a cobbled lane and across a little square, and out into the brightness of Canterbury Quad. Oliver banged his oak behind them and locked the inner door.
‘You see?’ he asked. ‘It’s easy.’
‘Yes,’ Helen said. His closeness chased everything else out of her head. She was shaken by her own urgency, and she looked down unbelievingly at her own hands between them.
‘Never say you can’t,’ he said, with his mouth at her throat and then moving so that his tongue traced a slow circle around her breast. ‘There isn’t much time.’
Helen felt a beat of cold anxiety. She looked down sharply but his face was hidden from her.
‘Why?’ she asked, feeling that she was stupidly not understanding something. ‘Surely there’s all the time we need?’
She wanted to look into his eyes, but his head was still bent. She thought that there was something stiff about his shoulders.
‘There’s only ever now, this moment,’ he said. ‘Try to understand that. I don’t want to hurt you.’
‘You won’t,’ she reassured him.
But even as he reached to unleash the floodwater dammed up inside her, she was sure that he would hurt her. At that moment she knew too that she didn’t care.
‘I love you,’ she said afterwards, so softly that she was sure it was inaudible. But Oliver stirred and opened his eyes. He stared at her before his quick smile came back.
‘That’s very reckless of you,’ he told her, and she couldn’t gauge his seriousness from his voice. ‘Shall we go out to lunch? We definitely need to be fortified after expending all that energy. I think oysters and Guinness, don’t you?’
The moment was past and she let Oliver take her hands and draw her to her feet. He watched her dressing so appreciatively that she forgot her embarrassment, and she felt herself growing more comfortable with him.
Outside, the black Jaguar was parked in a space marked ‘Reserved for the Dean’. When Helen was settled in the low seat, Oliver bent so that their eyes were level.
‘I like you. And I enjoy your company,’ he said. Then, as if the admission surprised him, he vaulted into his seat and the car shot forward into the cold air.
If this is all, Helen thought, it will just have to be enough. It’s more, much more, than I’ve ever had before.
Helen stared unseeingly at Chloe and Stephen, deep in conversation just ahead of her. In just a few minutes she would see Oliver again. A blurry kind of happiness mixed with apprehension gripped her, and for a panicky moment she thought that her knees might give way beneath her. Then as they reached the door of the Playhouse, she saw Chloe and Stephen pause for her to catch up, and she hurried blindly forward.
The unflattering house lights were on inside the theatre, revealing the worn red plush seats and the threadbare patches in the crimson carpet between them. Three or four people were sprawling in the front stalls, with Tom Hart’s dark head prominent among them. Helen took all this in in a second, and then she saw Oliver. He was sitting centre stage with his legs dangling over the edge, intent on a paperback copy of the play.
Stephen strode down the centre aisle towards them.
‘Right,’ he said crisply. ‘Let’s not waste time.’ He settled himself in the third row, and Chloe and then Helen slid in beside him.
Oliver looked up. There was a flicker of surprise when he saw Helen, then a cheerful wave of greeting. He held up his play text with a grimace, then went back to studying it.
Helen was oblivious to everything else. She missed Tom Hart’s brief nod of greeting, and the frisson of irritation which vibrated between Tom and Stephen.
‘You won’t mind my bringing a little audience to keep you on your toes,’ Stephen said easily.
‘Not particularly,’ Tom answered. ‘Okay, everybody. We’re reading Act Three, Scene Two, Rosalind and Orlando. Ready?’
Chloe watched the director with interest. With his quick, economical movements and his authoritative manner, he looked a natural leader. His dark, sardonic, goods looks interested her without attracting her. An arrogant young man, she thought, as she watched him positioning Oliver and the plump girl who was to read Rosalind. But clever, too.
Tom had settled himself at the back of the stalls.
‘When you’re ready,’ he called, and the scene began.
‘I will speak to him like a saucy lackey, and under that habit play the knave with him …’
‘Speak up, Anne. We hope that the audience will fill more than just the front row.’ Tom’s voice was cool, businesslike. The scene started up again.
Helen watched spellbound. It was Rosalind’s scene, but this Orlando was more than equal to it. Tom Hart’s right, she thought. Oliver does have a feel for it. All the self-confident grace of Oliver’s natural movements stayed with him on the stage. And the loose, half-ironical lightness of his manner spoke subtly for Orlando. The girl opposite him had a sweet, melodious voice but her body looked wooden beside his.
Chloe leaned across to Helen. ‘If they’re going to play it in doublet and hose,’ she whispered, ‘that girl’s legs are too fat.’
‘Thank you,’ Tom called. ‘Can we try it again with Belinda now?’
Another hopeful Rosalind climbed on to the stage. This girl was taller and slimmer and she moved well. But as the to and fro of the elegant, sparring speeches began again, it was still Oliver who drew all the attention. He looked gilded on the stage, as if he were already spotlit instead of quenched by the dull house lights like everyone else.
Stephen fidgeted in his seat and peered impatiently at his watch. ‘So much for the perfect Rosalind,’ he murmured.
There was a shade less confidence in Tom Hart’s manner as he retraced his steps to the stage.
‘Thanks,’ he said briefly. ‘Stephen, could we talk about …’
From the back of the auditorium a clear voice cut across the ripple of talk.
‘Is this the right place for the audition?’
They turned to stare at the newcomer.
Helen heard the soft hiss of indrawn breath before she turned round too.
A girl was standing against the red velvet curtaining that hung over the exit doors. In the second before she spoke again, she looked almost too pretty to be real, like an exquisite statue without warmth of flesh and blood. But as soon as she moved, smiled her question again, animation came flooding back and lit her face up.
‘The As You like It audition?’
Still no-one answered. The girl came down the aisle towards the stage. She had silver-blond hair, cut fashionably short and feathery to show the oval perfection of her face. Her wide-set dark blue eyes flicked from one to another of them and she smiled again, teasingly, and with a little challenge now. Although she was young, no more than nineteen, the newcomer was evidently used to the effect of her appearance.
‘Who is this vision?’ Chloe breathed to Stephen.
‘No idea. But I’m not going without finding out.’ He winked at her, and Chloe had the pleasurable sensation that there was already an understanding between them.
Tom collected himself first. ‘Yes, we’re auditioning now. You’d like to read for us?’
The girl turned her dazzling face to him.
‘May I? I don’t want to butt in. Let me explain first – my name’s Pansy Warren, and I’ve just come to live at Follies House. The landlady, Rose Pole, told me that you were looking for a Rosalind. I’d love just to have a try. I’ve acted a little bit, at school and in Switzerland, but …’ Pansy shrugged, self-deprecating.
‘Okay,’ Tom’s voice was crisp again. He handed his copy of the text to Pansy and helped her up on to the stage. Oliver bent to take her hand, and between them they led Pansy into her scene as if she were a piece of priceless china.
Helen sank lower in her inconspicuous seat. I could never, she thought, ever have walked in here as she did, unknown and unexpected, and asked to be auditioned. But then I don’t look like that.
There was a faint shadow on her face as she watched the players begin on the familiar lines again.
Pansy was wearing a loose roll-collared sweater that masked her slim, small-breasted figure, jeans, and soft suede ankle boots. With her cap of tousled hair she looked completely the girl-dressed-as-a-boy which the scene demanded.
‘Love is merely a madness,’ read Pansy, ‘and I tell you, deserves as well a dark house, and a whip, as madmen do.’
Her voice was soft, but surprisingly resonant.
There was no need for Tom to tell her to speak up.
She’s good too, Helen told herself. Good in the same way that Oliver is. She doesn’t care who is looking at her, or what they think. She can just be herself because she’s sure of being right. Like Oliver, she doesn’t have to try.
Helen was too intent on Pansy herself to notice something else, but Chloe saw it. There was a crackle between this Orlando and Rosalind that had been completely missing from the earlier attempts. There was a new edge of seriousness in Oliver’s performance as the youth in love with love, which made his posturing credible. Before, it had only been amusing.
And Pansy’s Rosalind, although she was mocking her lovesick youth, showed the girl’s attraction to the young man too.
That was right, as well.
‘With all my heart, good youth,’ said Oliver softly.
‘Nay, you must call me Rosalind.’ The balance of humour and longing in Pansy’s exit line was perfect. They want each other already, Chloe thought. And people like those two always get what they want. She shot a quick glance at Helen’s rapt profile and sighed for her.
The spatter of involuntary applause brought Oliver and Pansy to the front of the stage, flushed and pleased.
‘Weren’t they good? Wasn’t Oliver good?’ Helen was beaming at Chloe.
‘Very good,’ she answered shortly. ‘Unless the director is as blind as a bat, Follies House has provided the world with a Rosalind. What do you think of our house-mate?’
They looked at the slim, silvery figure between Tom and Oliver on stage.
‘How exotic to be living in the same house as someone like that. But she looks nice, don’t you think?’ Helen kept her voice deliberately neutral.
‘Mmmm.’ Chloe thought that indeed she looked nice, but it wasn’t the kind of niceness that Helen would benefit from.
Clearly the auditions were over. The two disappointed Rosalinds had slipped away and now Tom was flicking off the lights. Helen stood up uncertainly, longing to go to Oliver but too shy to make the first move. Behind her, she heard Stephen Spurring murmuring to Chloe, ‘There’s still time for some lunch. Would you like to?’
Tactfully, Helen hurried to pick up her things. She didn’t want to make Chloe feel that she should be invited too. ‘See you later,’ she said firmly. Oliver and Pansy were still standing at the edge of the stage.
When they spoke, neither of them mentioned their first meeting in the mist on Folly Bridge. Instead they let the memory of it hang between them like a shared secret.
‘You read well,’ said Oliver. ‘It was a good scene.’
Pansy’s eyes looked straight back at him.
‘Thank you. You weren’t too bad either. Quite good, in fact.’ When she laughed, Pansy’s prettiness took second place to her overflowing vitality. It was an irresistible combination. ‘We should do quite well together. If your friend the director gives me the part, of course.’
‘Oh, I think he will. Unless he casts you as my Rosalind, he’ll find himself with no Orlando either.’
Oliver vaulted down from the stage and, reaching up for Pansy’s hands, swung her down beside him. At once Tom went to join them.
Helen saw that they were absorbed and oblivious to her. Don’t get in the way, she told herself. They’re busy. He’s busy. She walked away to the exit briskly enough, but then she found herself lingering bleakly in the deserted foyer. She wanted to see Oliver. The prospect of going back to her books without even a word from him seemed impossible. But how could she go back and interrupt him?
She was still hovering indecisively when the three of them came out. They saw her at once.
‘Hello again,’ Oliver said lightly, as if they had last met at a bus stop or in a cinema queue. ‘What did you think of it?’
‘It was good,’ Helen said weakly. ‘Both of you … very good.’
Is that all? Then, more sternly, she reminded herself, what else could he say? In front of … other people?
‘Are you part of the cast?’ Pansy asked warmly. At close quarters her eyes showed a dozen different shades of blue. She was wearing a scent which reminded Helen of summer gardens.
‘No. But we will be seeing each other again. I live at Follies House too.’
‘Really? That’s wonderful. Isn’t it weird? And the woman who runs it all, Rose, what d’you make of her?’
‘Be careful,’ Helen warned her, ‘she’s a relative of Oliver.’
Oliver shrugged, not interested in the turn the conversation had taken. ‘A very distant one, for whom I accept no responsibility.’
Tom was impatient too. ‘Let’s go and eat, for God’s sake. Come with us, Helen. Are you sure you can’t do something for my production? Backstage, perhaps. ASM …’
‘I’ll think about it,’ Helen told him absently. Her eyes were on Oliver, wanting him to echo Tom’s invitation, but he had said nothing. Please, she wanted to beg him, it’s me. Don’t you remember our days together? Didn’t they happen? Then the other Helen, coolly reasonable, reminded her. Don’t grovel. He’ll hate that.
But as they turned to leave, it was Pansy who took her arm. ‘Please come. Let’s get to know each other if we’re to live in the same house.’
Helen went, incapable of walking away from Oliver just yet.
The pizza parlour next door was crowded and steamy. Oliver hung back with an expression of distaste but Tom strode past the queue and secured a table.
‘No, I’m afraid it’s mine,’ he told the protesting party who had been just about to take possession of it.
‘Neat,’ said Oliver, with grudging approval as they sat down.
When the pizzas came, Oliver scowled at his. ‘Why are we eating this garbage?’
Helen remembered the splendours of the meals they had shared and smiled to herself. She stopped herself from murmuring how the other half live. Tom, completely uninterested in food except as the means of supplying himself with more energy, said briskly, ‘This isn’t a gourmet outing. We’re here to do business.’
The conversation centred on the production.
They were drinking red plonk, over which Oliver had also made a wry face, and Tom raised his glass to Pansy. ‘Here’s to you,’ he said. ‘You’re not quite the perfect Rosalind, but you’ll do.’
‘What do you mean, not perfect? I shall be a theatrical sensation, just wait and see.’
Helen sat quietly, watching and listening. Plainly Oliver and Tom had eyes for no-one but their new Rosalind. And Pansy bubbled between the two of them, laughing delightedly and turning her perfect face from one to the other. It must always be like this for her, Helen thought. She must always be the centre of attention. No wonder she can just stroll into auditions and expect to be heard. Not only to be heard, but to walk off with the part.
Helen’s gaze took in Pansy’s expensively casual haircut, her light all-year-round tan, and her tiny, jewelled wristwatch. I don’t suppose anyone ever denies her anything, she thought. Jealousy was an unusual emotion for Helen but she felt jealous of Pansy now.
Oliver was leaning negligently back in his chair, but his eyes were fixed on Pansy’s face. He had forgotten Helen, but she was no less electrically aware of him than ever. The four of them were packed close around the little table, and her skin prickled with the nearness of his long sprawled legs. The sight of his fingers curled round the wineglass brought a flush to her cheeks and the sound of his voice, not even what he was saying, obliterated the clatter of the noisy restaurant. Yesterday, just to have been close to him like this would have enough to make her happy. But the intrusion of this beautiful, assured newcomer had changed all that. Helen looked from Pansy to Oliver, whose dégagé air had completely disappeared, and felt a twist of apprehension.
She turned back to her unwanted food, oblivious to everything but the threat that suddenly loomed in front of her. She didn’t see a pair of her College friends gazing round-eyed across the room at the sight of quiet bookish Helen Brown in such glossy company. It would have come as a surprise to Helen to know that she was part of a striking picture, with the two bright blonde heads and two intensely dark ones bent close together.
At last Pansy looked at her tiny gold watch. ‘God, look at the time. I was supposed to be at a tutorial five minutes ago.’ She made the word sound archaic and faintly ridiculous. And she made no move to get up. Instead, she poured herself another glass of wine and beamed round at them. ‘Still, I expect he’ll wait for me. I’m not a real student anyway, I’m just doing a one-year art history course. To please Daddy, really. He wanted me to come to Oxford to meet the right people. Future kings of Broadway. And lords, that sort of thing. And brilliant women dons.’ Generously, she included Helen too, and Helen felt herself warming in response to Pansy’s friendliness. ‘I have to do something while I’m here and I don’t know anything about art or history, so it seems as good a choice as any. Daddy said doing a typing or cookery course wasn’t “suitable”, and Kim backed him up. Kim’s my stepmother. My third stepmother, actually. She’s all of twenty-seven, and acts like seven. You must all meet her, it’s a real eye-opener.’
‘Why?’ asked Tom, interestedly. ‘Does she beat you and dress you in rags, like a proper stepmother does? Even though she’s a bit young for the job?’
Pansy laughed merrily.
‘Just the opposite. I don’t care much about clothes, but Kim endlessly drags me round to shops and fittings and designer shows. And she’s too languid to mix a cocktail, let alone beat me. But if you think I’m not very bright, you should meet Kim.’
‘I suspect you’re quite bright enough,’ Tom said quietly.
‘You are a darling. And don’t worry, I’ve got enough native wit to handle Rosalind. Inherited from Daddy, no doubt. Oh Lord, he’ll be furious if I don’t even get to my first lesson. I don’t even know where the place is.’
Pansy fumbled in the soft Italian leather pouch bag that was slung over the back of her chair and brought out a list. ‘Ashmolean Museum?’
Oliver, who had been watching her with fascination, suddenly stood up. ‘I’m going over there. I’ll take you.’
Solicitously, just as he had done yesterday for Helen, he drew back her chair and helped her to her feet. Pansy put her hand on his arm, thoughtlessly accepting it as her right to be escorted and protected.
‘’Bye, then.’
‘Oliver …’ Helen had no idea what she wanted to ask him, but he half turned in response and she thought his face softened.
‘I’ll see you soon,’ he said. ‘At Follies.’
He was gone so quickly with Pansy that Helen found herself staring at the empty space where they had been.
I’ll see you soon. She would have to be content with that.
Opposite her Tom was staring blankly too. It was a moment before they faced each other and realised that they were alone.
‘Well.’ Tom was smiling crookedly. ‘Shall we finish the wine?’
Helen pushed her glass across to him. Instinctively, she liked Tom Hart and – more than that – he was Oliver’s friend. She could at least talk about him.
‘I’ve never met anyone like him before,’ she said softly.
‘Oliver? Neither have I. He’s got a lot of style, and I admire that. He doesn’t give a damn about anything either, and I don’t think that’s just because of who he is. Although that helps. Think of living in a place like Montcalm. Of coming from a family like that … holders of the highest offices in the realm for hundreds and hundreds of years.’
You’re impressed by that, Helen thought. Am I? Am I? Perhaps.
Tom was still talking. His dark eyebrows were drawn together over his high, beaked nose and his mouth, usually compressed in a sardonic line, curved wider as he looked into the distance.
‘That’s quite something, you know, to a Jewish boy like me. My family tree goes back no further than my great-grandfather. He was called Hartstein, and he arrived in New York with no more than the clothes he stood in. He scraped a kind of living for his wife and kids by doing piecework in the garment trade. The business he slaved for happened to have a sideline in theatrical costuming. My grandfather had a flair for that, took it over at the age of twenty, and ended up a celebrated costumier. And my father – well, my old man has a flair for everything. Greg Hart owns five Broadway theatres now, and a string more across the country.’
‘I think that’s more impressive than just being born a Mortimore,’ Helen told him gently.
Tom smiled at her in response, and she saw that although his face was stern and his mouth ungiving, there was real kindness behind his dark, hooded eyes.
‘Perhaps.’
‘What about you?’ she asked. ‘What are you really doing in Oxford, if you’ve got all that waiting for you in America?’
Tom picked up a fragment of bread from the tablecloth and rolled it between his fingers into a grey, doughy ball.
‘I’m in disgrace, as it happens. Serving out a year’s exile in the guise of doing my apprenticeship in the British theatre. By the time I get back, my old man reckons all the fuss will be forgotten.’
Helen stared at him, intrigued. She had forgotten herself enough not to worry about being tactful. ‘What fuss?’
‘D’you really want to know?’
‘Of course. What could be bad enough to deserve being banished from home for a whole year?’
Tom laughed shortly. ‘It’s not so bad. I miss New York, that’s all. Do you remember that production of The Tempest that was so successful in the West End last year? With Sir Edward Groves and Maria Vaughn?’
Helen nodded, dimly recollecting having read about it.
‘My father brought the production over for his summer season. With the original cast, starring the theatrical knight and his new wife Miss Vaughn.’
Helen remembered that, too.
‘Well, whatever Maria had married her knight for, it had nothing to do with bed. In spite of the fact that she’s very interested in that side of things herself. Most of us are, after all. When I was offered the choice, before the run had even started, I was hardly likely to turn her down. She’s very beautiful, and disturbingly sexy. Before long we were screwing each other at every possible opportunity. At my apartment, in her hotel room, in her dressing room. And that’s where Sir Edward caught us at it. Careless of me, really. The scene that followed was high drama – threats, screams, hysterical weeping, the whole works. It culminated with Sir Edward stamping down to my father’s office and announcing that the Hart family was not to be trusted, so he and Maria were back off to London and fuck the opening night. Greg flung himself into the scene like the old trouper he is. There were more accusations of filial disloyalty, immorality, perfidy and general filthiness. Of course, Edward really had no intention of missing out on the chance to bestow his Prospero on Manhattan. They compromised by despatching me to England instead. This job was fixed up for me in about forty seconds, and here I am.’
Helen thought for a moment. ‘Isn’t that rather hard on you? Surely your father must have seen your side, just a little?’
Tom laughed again.
‘Oh, it’s much more complicated than that. You see, Greg certainly had Maria carved out for himself. He does quite a good line in leading ladies – he’s always been very successful with women. And he’s used to thinking of himself as the young phenomenon. Suddenly, there he was, seeing that his own son had cut him out. What would it be next, he must have asked himself. His theatres. His whole empire, perhaps. So, get rid of the little bastard for a convenient space of time by packing him off to Oxford, England, to produce piddling student productions of the classics.’
‘Did you have to come?’
The answer came without a trace of hesitation. ‘Oh yes. If I want to get the business in the end, I do. And I want it very much. I love the theatre.’
‘Except for piddling little productions in Oxford.’
Tom shot her a quick glance, his eyebrows raised. ‘Yes. I asked for that. I didn’t mean it, except as a comparison with what I could be doing if I was back home. Of course this show is just as important in its way as the biggest musical spectacular on Broadway. That’s why I’ve taken so much care to get the casting right. And it’s why I’m so pleased with Oliver and Pansy. Particularly Pansy. I knew as soon as she walked into the theatre that she was the one I was looking for. She’s amazing, isn’t she?’
Tom’s habitual cynical expression had melted, replaced by an enthusiasm that was almost boyish.
‘Yes.’ Helen didn’t want to talk about Pansy Warren. She switched the subject again. ‘And you? Will you make a wild success of being here? It’s what happens in all the books.’
‘Not wild. There’s hardly scope. But I’ll do well enough.’
Helen knew that he would, from the determined lines etched in his dark face. Tom Hart was bound to succeed in whatever he did. It was in his blood. You’re probably quite ruthless, Helen thought. You can be kind too, but you wouldn’t let that impede you where it matters. Probably you just feel genuinely sorry as you plunge the hatchet in. I know I wouldn’t like to cross you.
Tom was looking at her now, his gaze level. ‘Why am I treating you to this self-centred recital? It must be something to do with your having such a calm, attentive face.’
I don’t want to be just a calm, attentive face. A sudden spurt of resentment took possession of Helen. I want to be beautiful, like Pansy and Chloe, the kind of woman that people look at, not talk at. I want to be rich, and confident, and amusing. It’s not fair. And then at once she felt ashamed again. You’re so lucky in so many things, she reminded herself. Think of Mum, and Graham. And Dad.
Tom turned from signalling to the waitress and saw a brightness in Helen’s eyes that might have been the start of tears. His hand touched hers.
‘What is it? Did I say something?’
She shook her head fiercely. ‘No. I just … remembered something. Look – it’s late.’
‘I know. I must go too.’ When the bill came, Helen remembered that Oliver and Pansy, unthinking, had left without paying their share.
‘Can I go halves with you?’ she ventured.
‘No. Of course not.’ Without even looking, Tom dumped a fistful of notes on the plate and stood up.
It’s just different for them, Helen told herself. It’s wrong of you to feel resentful.
Tom left her with a brief goodbye at Carfax. Helen turned to watch him for a moment as he walked off down the long, golden curve of the High. His clothes were stylish, almost flamboyant, and with his alert face and purposeful walk, he stood out in high relief from the anonymous blue denim crowds that drifted around him.
As soon as he was gone, Helen was surprised to feel the loss of his bracing company. The lunch had been uncomfortable, but for some reason her sharpest impression now was of this brisk American. He was as different from the ordinary run of University people as Oliver himself. Helen thought he was more than a little frightening, because his cleverness made him intolerant, but she remembered the kindness she had sensed in him as well as the flash of vulnerability when he had looked at Pansy Warren. She liked him, too, for the straightforward way he had told her the story of his exile to Oxford. Tom Hart would not be easy to know well, she reflected, but once he had committed himself, she guessed that he would be a valuable friend. Helen wondered if Pansy, in her glancing appraisal, had seen that too. No, she wouldn’t have. Beside Oliver’s glitter, Tom seemed saturnine and acerbic. And it was Oliver, inevitably, who had scooped Pansy up and spirited her away.
Helen sighed, stuck her hands in her duffel coat pockets and began to walk down St Aldate’s towards the river and Follies House.
As she stepped into the hallway and let the massive oak door swing to behind her, Helen knew immediately that there was something different about the old house. The dim, spidery spaces in the hall were deserted and looked just as they always did, but there was light filtering through from somewhere. And then the noise began – unbelievably loud rock music that bounced off the panelling and echoed along the stone floors. When she looked up, Helen saw that the door at the head of the stairs was open. A shaft of bright sunlight shone through it.
Pansy was home.
Helen knocked on the door jamb and, knowing that she wouldn’t be heard above the music, peered inside. Pansy was dancing alone and with her eyes shut. She was smiling a small, happy, secretive smile.
‘Hello.’ Helen had to shout. Pansy opened startled eyes.
‘Hel-lo. Sorry. D’you ever feel so happy that you just have to dance? Wait while I turn it down.’
‘That was a short tutorial,’ Helen said into the new quiet.
‘He didn’t wait, can you believe it? I wasn’t that late.’ Pansy was wide-eyed, genuinely surprised. ‘Anyway, it means I’ve got a lovely free afternoon now. Don’t go. Stay here and talk while I sort some of this junk out.’
Unlike Chloe, Pansy had made no effort to settle into her room. Suitcases and a huge trunk were all open, the tumbled contents showing that their owner had rummaged through in search of the things she needed without bothering to unpack anything. Pansy was standing in the middle of the jumble now, staring round in exasperation.
‘God, what a mess. I hate all this stuff. Wouldn’t life be easy if we were allowed to own only ten things each.’
Pansy, like Chloe, seemed to possess an unbelievable number of clothes.
‘No,’ said Helen a little sadly. ‘It’s nice to have things. I love clothes.’
Pansy glanced across at her and then scrabbled in another suitcase.
‘Do you? Would you like these? Kim bought these for me because she thought they were Oxford-y. I’ll never wear them, and they’d suit you.’
There were two Shetland jerseys, one in soft, sugared almond pinks and one in stronger blues. They had little round collars with picot edgings. She was holding out a skirt too, folds of pale grey fine wool challis.
There was a small, surprised silence.
‘I couldn’t possibly,’ Helen said stiffly. She would have loved to own such pretty things, but it was impossible. She was not so hard up that she needed to accept Pansy’s casual largesse.
‘What a pity, because I won’t wear them.’ Pansy shrugged dismissively and tossed the clothes back into the suitcase.
The silence was uncomfortable now.
Helen knew that she should go away, but it was unthinkable to leave without having mentioned Oliver. She had the impression that his name hovered in the air between them, waiting to be uttered.
‘Are you pleased about the part?’ she asked at last.
‘Oh, yes. So long as it doesn’t mean too much hard work. Still,’ Pansy was holding an evening frock up against herself, her head on one side to consider it. It was a frothy mass of Zandra Rhodes squiggles and ruffles, ‘… with two lovely men like that about, even rehearsing shouldn’t be too much of a bore.’
Now that the opening was here, Helen shied away from it.
‘Tom Hart’s rather exotic for Oxford,’ she said.
‘Mmmm. I wouldn’t choose him, though. Bit too saturnine and Jewish, if you call that exotic, for my taste.’
Of course, Helen thought, you do only have to choose. Not Oliver, please.
‘But Oliver, that’s different. Bit unfair of him to be so beautiful and a Mortimore, don’t you think? What can a girl do, confronted with that?’ And Pansy laughed, pleased with herself and with the pleasant prospect ahead of her.
Helen felt a slow, dull crimson flush creeping over her face. Her chest and throat felt tight, and her fingers itched with a sudden surge to slap Pansy’s bright face. The violence inside her astonished and frightened her. But this girl would take Oliver away, she knew that now, and in that instant she hated her. She must say something. Not let him go without a struggle.
Helen struggled to make her voice sound cool and light, but when at last it came out it shook and cracked.
‘Yes, Oliver and I …’ she faltered, not knowing how to put it.
Pansy swung round in genuine surprise.
‘You?’
Helen flinched. As she stared back at Pansy, she felt the ugly flush deepening over her face and neck. It was so humiliating, that surprise, the more so because it was completely natural. What could Oliver, it said, with his looks and his charm and his position, see in a little mouse like you?
‘Yes,’ Helen said, finding defiance in the anger that threatened to choke her. ‘Me. Why not?’
Pansy was looking defensive now, her eyebrows pulled into a frown over the chameleon blue eyes, and a trace of hurt lingering about her vulnerable, flower-like mouth.
‘I’m sorry. It’s just that … you didn’t look or behave as if you belonged together.’
Belonged together? How Oliver would hate that, Helen realised. She was giving Pansy the wrong impression, making her undefined relationship with Oliver seem too formal, but it was too late to backpedal now.
‘I don’t want to tread on anybody’s toes,’ Pansy added, with such clear sincerity that Helen’s anger faded as quickly as it had come. After all, Pansy had done nothing yet, except exist.
‘It’s all right,’ she said wearily. ‘You aren’t. Nobody belongs to anybody. Forget it.’
‘Forget what?’
Chloe had come up the stairs without either of them hearing her. Now she was standing in the open doorway, almost striking a pose. She had one hand on her hip and the other was raised to coil the dark red hair into a knot on top of her head. The stance emphasised her height and slimness and for a moment as she stood there, it was Chloe who was the beauty and not Pansy.
Pansy’s sharp stare missed nothing.
‘Hello. You were at the audition too, weren’t you?’
‘Pansy,’ said Helen, ‘this is Chloe Campbell. Rose’s third tenant.’
There was a little, wary moment as the two women looked at each other. Then, immediately after the practised appraisal of attractive women confronting one another, came the answering smiles of complicity. To Helen, watching, it was as if they belonged to a desirable club from which she would be forever excluded. She was oppressed by a sense of her own plainness and dowdiness.
‘Forget what?’ Chloe was asking Helen again.
‘We were talking about Oliver Mortimore,’ Pansy said, before Helen could frame an answer. ‘Helen was kindly warning me off.’
Helen wished she could find something as lightly dismissive to say, but nothing came. Chloe felt the tension vibrating in the room and tactfully turned her attention to dispersing it.
‘Really?’ she said vaguely, feigning lack of interest as she wandered round Pansy’s room. There were arched windows with views of the river and Christ Church, and panelling and furniture similar to her own, but here everything was fresher and there were thick new carpets. Chloe peered through the adjoining doors. One led to a bedroom with a glimpse of a bathroom beyond, another revealed a tiny, compact kitchen.
‘You’ve got a whole flat,’ she said to Pansy enviously. ‘Mine’s next door, but it’s only a room and a bit.’
‘What’s yours like?’ Pansy was asking Helen, and Helen knew that it was a peace-offering. She was being drawn into the conversation as a means of calling a truce in a skirmish that had never really started. It was generous of Pansy, she thought. More generous than she was herself – but then Pansy could afford to be.
‘My room’s a small, square cell on the floor above,’ she said, managing a smile. ‘Servants’ quarters.’
Chloe and Pansy both laughed, relieved. The tension was ebbing away.
‘How rotten. My father found this, I’ve no idea how. I suppose it is rather stylish. He’s good at things like that.’
‘Is your father Masefield Warren?’ Chloe asked.
‘That’s right.’
Of course. Pansy’s father’s name was almost synonymous with ruthless success. He was a self-made man with an iron reputation who now controlled an empire that embraced oil, newspapers, property and films. And Pansy was his only child. One day she would be very, very rich, as well as startlingly beautiful.
Poor Helen, Chloe was thinking. I can’t see her gilded Apollo resisting all that. And Helen was staring down at her clasped hands, not wanting to think at all. To shut off the dull ache of anxiety, she turned to Chloe.
‘Nice lunch?’ she asked politely.
Chloe laughed, pleased with the chance to talk about it.
‘Extremely nice. I’d almost forgotten how delicious it is, meeting someone and realising that you’re attracted to him. Then guessing that he feels the same and waiting to see how you’re both going to play it.’
She had released the knot on top of her head and her hair came tumbling around her face. It made her look much younger, and her features were alight with an excitement that was almost childish.
It had been a very satisfactory lunch. Stephen Spurring had achieved just the right inviting blend of intimacy and remoteness. Chloe hated pushy men. She wanted to know him better now, and her head was full of the way he had looked and the way his mouth had lifted, crookedly, into a smile of invitation.
When it had been time to leave, Stephen had put his hand over hers.
‘Will you dine with me one night at High Table? It might amuse you.’
‘I’d like that.’
She was responding to this quiet, subtle man in a way that she hadn’t done for years. The recollection of it made her smile again.
‘Be careful,’ Helen warned her. ‘Stephen eats girls. And … did you know that he’s married?’
‘I know he’s married because he told me,’ Chloe said coolly. For an intelligent woman, she thought, Helen could be very prissy. ‘And I think I can look after myself. In fact, Dr Spurring had better be careful that I don’t eat him. He’s quite appetising enough.’
All three of them laughed, a little uneasily, before Pansy asked, ‘Who’s this Dr Spurring?’
‘He’s an English don,’ Helen told her. ‘He was watching you audition too.’
‘Him?’ Pansy said, a little absently. ‘I thought he looked interesting.’
For a moment nobody spoke. Chloe’s voice was firm when she answered. ‘He certainly interests me.’
In the silence, a little quiver of reawakened tension whispered at them.
Helen collected herself. Now was the time to escape. From the doorway she said a muted goodbye and then climbed heavily up to the deserted box of her room.
There was nothing she could do. Pansy was here, and there was no point in making an enemy of her. All Helen could do was wait, first of all to see whether Oliver would be true to his word and come to look for her here at Follies House. Helen walked over to her window. With the height of the extra storey she could see over the rooftops to the outline of Canterbury Quad and, she imagined, even the windows of Oliver’s rooms.
Only wait. Already it felt like the beginning of a vigil. And from downstairs, only just audible, she thought she heard the murmur of conversation and a burst of laughter from Chloe and Pansy. What had once felt to Helen like the unassailable Gothic calm of Follies House, now seemed heavy with vague threats, and half-formed mysterious alliances that excluded her.
Suddenly Helen felt cold, and lonely. She shivered. She needed Oliver’s warmth and assurance badly, but he wasn’t there.
Four (#u33195f01-9141-5db1-86d1-a990d5a298d4)
Helen drew up her knees and rested her chin on them. It was cold in her room, and colder still sitting on the window seat against the misted glass, but she didn’t think of moving to turn on the heater. Instead she went on staring out at the height of Tom Tower and the smooth stone front of Christ Church. It was a grey cloudy November day with a vicious wind that whipped the black branches of the trees. On the pavements below, Helen could see passers-by shrunk into their winter clothes, their faces raw in the wind.
Very faintly she could hear the river and the hum of traffic but inside it was completely silent. Follies had the ability to swallow sound and spin a sense of isolation around the listener.
Once Helen had relished the peace, but lately it had oppressed her.
Work, her faithful remedy, was no longer any use. For days she had stared blankly at her books, watching the lines of grey type jumping meaninglessly in front of her eyes. Then she had given up the struggle. All she had in its place was the persistent whisper of guilt, chaffing her painfully but doing nothing towards driving her back to her desk.
Helen knew that if she wasn’t working, she had no justification for staying in Oxford. That knowledge was the most difficult thing to live with. If she wasn’t working, then she should be at home where she was needed.
Last time they had talked, Helen’s mother had struggled to keep the anxiety out of her voice, for her daughter’s sake, but Helen had heard it anyway. Her mother was lonely, there was so little money, and the two of them had nobody to turn to but each other.
Helen winced and pressed her forehead against the cold window pane.
What’s the matter with me? she asked herself again, knowing the answer all too well.
She had done something she would have believed impossible. She had fallen in love, awkwardly and painfully, and whichever way she turned, there was no escaping or forgetting it.
In the days since Pansy had come, Helen had seen Oliver a mere handful of times, but each time she had wanted him more. He seemed to have the power, simply by existing, to blot everything else out of her life. When she saw him sitting at the table in Rose’s kitchen she was oblivious of Rose’s sly watchfulness. At the few play rehearsals she had been to, the rest of the cast – even Pansy – shrank to grey shadows beside him.
She found that her eyes followed him when he moved, even though she hated her own slavishness.
Pansy’s arrival seemed to have made no difference. Pansy herself gave no more of her attention to Oliver than to anyone else. She simply laughed and joked from day to day with everyone’s eyes on her, from Oliver to Gerry Pole who watched her with dog-like devotion. Whether Pansy was present or nor, Helen’s relationship with Oliver was as puzzlingly tenuous as it had been from the beginning.
But it was still there.
His arm would drop around her shoulders and pull her close to him, or he would kiss the top of her head and draw her hair up to reveal the fragile whiteness of her neck. She would turn blindly to him for a second, and then he would be gone again.
Once, a little while after the auditions, he had come to find her in her room. He had leaned against the door, smiling down at her, and from the brightness and distance in his eyes, she guessed that he had been taking drugs again. But it was unthinkable to resist when he reached for her, and pulled her down beside him on the narrow little bed.
Blindly, she pressed against him, thinking here, now, he’s with you. Nothing else matters.
Afterwards, when he lay in her arms and she was secure in his warmth, Helen studied the curves and angles of his face. She thought she saw in them the gentleness of the other Oliver, the half of himself he must feel compelled to hide for some reason that she didn’t understand.
Oliver had drifted off to sleep and Helen had gone on lying beside him, her mouth against his hair, lost in the pleasure of possession.
When he woke up again, he seemed to be listening for something in the quiet of the house.
Then he rolled away from her, his lazy, assured manner making her doubt the existence of another Oliver after all. When he was dressed he had refused her offer of a cup of tea, kissed her briefly, and gone away.
Helen had quickly learned to accept that.
He came and went as he wanted, and up until now she had seized gratefully and unquestioningly on the few times that they were together without asking for anything more.
It occurred to her that she wouldn’t have known what else to ask for, anyway.
Helen frowned. Up until the last few days, that was how it had been. But this afternoon was different. She was not simply numbed by his presence, she was hurt by it. She hadn’t seen Oliver for four days, and her need for him was growing acute. Part of the grey afternoon’s discomfort was the way her body ached for him. I was so self-controlled once, Helen remembered. Is this what sex is like for everyone? So potent as to rub out everything else, and so bitterly painful when it isn’t gratified?
The other sensation that troubled her was a dull sense of foreboding. The room was heavy with it and for a moment Helen imagined that the clouds outside the window bulged with it. Then she rejected the fancifulness of the idea with irritation. The rational Helen whose voice was still sometimes just audible told her that she was being a fool, and that she should go back to her work and forget Oliver until he appeared again. But the emotional Helen who ruled so capriciously now knew that she couldn’t do that.
She was sunk in irritable apathy, hurt and impatient and powerless to do anything. The solitude and silence pressed around her, almost tangible.
Suddenly Helen jumped up. She couldn’t bear to sit here any longer. Someone to talk to, that was what she needed.
There was no response to her knocking at Chloe’s door. Along the panelled gallery at the head of the stairs, Pansy’s door was open. Helen looked in at the jungle of record sleeves, empty cups and discarded clothes and half smiled. Pansy was always out somewhere.
Helen leaned on the carved banister and looked down into the body of the hall. The panelling seemed to absorb the light. It was numbingly quiet. Then, astonishingly, Helen heard a babble of voices. Almost at once she realised that it was a radio play. Rose must be listening in the kitchen, probably squashed into her battered armchair beside the Aga. Helen was still a little afraid of Rose, but her need for human company now was so imperative that she didn’t hesitate.
‘Come in, love,’ Rose said easily. She was indeed in the armchair, with the massive shapeless tubes of her legs propped up on a stool. ‘Sit down somewhere. Move that pile of stuff off the chair.’
Helen tried not to look at the overflowing ashtrays and smeared plates on the table. Rose lived complacently in a ripe, untidy web like a fat spider. Helen came in here rarely, and mostly in the hope of seeing Oliver. When she did meet him, it always surprised her, because he looked bored and irritable and faintly disgusted by the mess.
As she sat down Helen saw Gerry leaning against the dusty dresser behind the door. He was unshaven and his clothes were filthy. He was clutching a teacup and, as he stared at her with unfocused eyes, he lifted it and took a gulp, smacking his lips. There was a strong smell of whisky.
Helen moved uncomfortably. When she met Gerry on the stairs or along the deserted gallery, his hands invariably reached out to touch her while he joked, disconcertingly, in his cultured voice.
‘Don’t mind him,’ Rose ordered. ‘He’s having one of his bad days.’
Pansy and Chloe had joked about that. Gerry’s ‘bad days’ were the ones when he got drunk. Good days were the ones when he stayed sober, despite his failure to write a word of the non-existent novel promised to follow his single, long-ago success.
‘Tea in the pot,’ Rose told her.
As she lifted the teapot, Helen noticed that there was a crusty dribble of dried egg yolk down the side of it. She poured dark brown tea into a mug, resisting the impulse to wipe the inside of it first with her handkerchief.
‘Well, it’s not often that we see you, dear. What is it, feel like a chat?’ There was an avidity in Rose’s eyes that Helen chose not to see. Instead she nodded, grateful for the sympathy.
‘It’s my work, I suppose. I have to …’
‘Work?’ Rose’s chuckle was derisive. ‘No-one looks like you do because of work, darling. Oliver, is it? Take my advice. Give as good as you get.’
In his corner Gerry gave a short, hard laugh. ‘Always Oliver. He’s too damned lucky by half. Got the lot, he has, and acts like it isn’t worth tuppence.’ His voice was blurred and bitter, but there was a note of grudging admiration in it too. ‘If I was younger, if I could have my time over again …’
‘You aren’t. And you won’t.’ Rose interrupted him wearily.
Helen turned to watch him go and then looked away sharply. Just for an instant she had caught an echo of Oliver’s voice, and glimpsed the mint-brightness of his features distorted in Gerry’s. Surely their relationship was too distant for such a startling likeness, however fleeting?
Rose picked up a long greasy straggle of knitting and attacked it vigorously. When she spoke again, she seemed to have forgotten Oliver.
‘You may think he’s a wreck now, poor Gerry. But you should have seen him years ago. Handsome, and talented. Women fought to get at him. And he was so sure that he was going to be famous and rich. I used to be asked everywhere just because I was his half-sister. Ha, those were the days.’ She was laughing wheezily.
‘What happened?’
‘Bugger all. A little, early-flowering talent, that was Gerry. He had too much, too easy and too early, and he frittered the whole lot away. He’s been trying to get some of it back ever since.’
‘How sad,’ Helen said absently.
‘Sad? Not at all. Pathetic, perhaps.’ Rose’s voice was harsh. ‘He’s luckier than most. At least he had something, once. You know,’ she said, meditatively, as if it had just occurred to her, ‘I think perhaps Oliver’s a little like him.’
‘No, he isn’t.’ It was Helen’s turn to sound harsh now. ‘Oliver’s nothing like that.’
Rose’s white face hung expressionlessly in front of her like a pasty moon.
‘Oh, Oliver’s got money, of course. Not a lot, but enough to keep him going at the rate he spends it. Gerry never had that. And there’s Montcalm, and the title, and all that aristocratic rigmarole. But if you took all that away, you’d see the same thing in them both. Self-destructiveness.’
Helen remembered the inner, secret Oliver that she wanted so much to believe in. Perhaps his cool arrogance was to protect that. Not destructive, but protective. ‘I’m sure you’re wrong,’ she told Rose, as humbly as she could. There was a little, bitten-off smile at the corners of Rose’s mouth. ‘Perhaps. Tell me, love, are you serious about him?’
‘Yes. No. Does it matter?’
‘Only to you, love.’ Rose smoothed her knitting with an air of having finished the conversation. ‘Did you come down here hoping to find him?’
‘No,’ said Helen bleakly.
‘Because, as you see, he isn’t here. He only comes when he needs something. He’s at the rehearsal rooms. If you want him, you should go straight out and get him. Just like he’d do himself.’
Yes, thought Helen. She’s right.
Without moving or saying any more, Rose watched her leave. Then, very slowly, she shook her head and turned back to her knitting.
It was even colder outside than it had looked from her window. Helen shivered and plunged forward. She was thinking of nothing, not imagining what she would find when she reached the address that Rose had given her, except that Oliver would be there.
She was breathless when she reached the disused warehouse that was used as a rehearsal room. A blank grey door in the side wall had a rainwashed notice on it reading ‘PLAYHOUSE’. There was no bell or knocker, but the door opened when she pushed it. Inside was a little windowless lobby with a heavy steel sliding door blocking one wall. A flight of stone steps faced Helen, and as she ran up them, there was still no thought in her head except Oliver. At the top of the steps she groped in the airless darkness and then caught a breath of clearer air. Following it, she came out on to a catwalk that looked down into the main body of the warehouse.
In the middle of the bare concrete floor below her, lit by a single desk light, was a battered table covered with notes. On hard chairs drawn up to the table, Pansy and Oliver were sitting facing each other.
Helen heard Pansy’s voice first. It was soft but penetrating, filling the warehouse to the remotest corner. She was reading a scene and Oliver was following the lines, waiting for his cue.
Helen started forward to call out to them, then stopped herself. Don’t interrupt. She would let them finish the scene. She leaned back against the wall to watch, folding her arms patiently.
Oliver and Pansy were completely unaware of being watched. Pansy kept starting her speech and then stopping, trying new emphases. Oliver watched her face intently, and when Pansy looked up to meet his eyes, there was a ripple of laughter between them.
‘Perfectionist,’ Oliver murmured.
‘It will be perfect,’ Pansy whispered back. ‘It must be. When we stand up there …’
‘If you want it, then it will be.’
She was looking across at him, serious-faced. ‘What do you want, Oliver?’
The warehouse was a pool of silence. Helen’s spine crawled, icy with sudden dread.
As she watched, incapable of moving, Oliver’s hand reached out. Pansy’s was resting on the table and Oliver took it and touched each of the fingers in turn. Then he traced a circle in the palm.
‘You,’ he said simply.
The sudden, shocking clatter was his chair overturning as he stood up. Both his hands grasped Pansy’s and he lifted her from her seat to face him. Slowly, as if she was frozen, Helen’s fist went to her mouth. She bit into the clenched fingers and tried to force her eyes to close, but the scene refused to disappear. They were standing close together now, the gold head bent over the silvery one, their hands still locked together. Neither of them spoke, but their eyes explored each other’s faces, waiting.
Then Pansy smiled. It was unmistakable, both an invitation and a challenge to him. At once Oliver dropped her hands. His fingers went to her face, combing back the points of hair so that her cheeks were left exposed and vulnerable. Then, with her dazzling face cupped in his hands, his mouth moved to her. For a second they hung there, motionless, then Pansy reached to pull him closer. At once their kiss was open, hungry and self-devouring. Their two bodies were glued inseparably together.
Helen was hit by a wave of physical jealousy so naked and powerful that it almost choked her. It swept over her simultaneously with a surge of shocked self-disgust. I want him to do that to me, her body told her imperatively. I need him, and he was mine. At the same time she thought, why am I creeping and spying like this? I must get out of here. Stop humiliating myself. The realisation unlocked her frozen muscles. She wrenched her head away from the sight of Pansy stretched on tiptoe to reach Oliver’s face and stumbled back against the door to the catwalk. As she moved, her foot caught against something hollow and metallic and sent it rolling and bouncing away from her.
In the circle of light below, two heads jerked upwards.
‘Who’s there?’ Oliver’s voice was sharp, angry. In spite of the gloom, he saw her almost at once. ‘Helen? Oh, Lord. What the hell are you doing here?’
‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ Helen’s voice was unnaturally high and shaky. ‘I didn’t mean … I just came to see you.’ Trembling with shock and with tight bands of panic spanning her chest, Helen groped for the door, opened it and fled. She had just had time to see Pansy staring after her, her eyes and mouth three circles of surprise and concern.
She was outside in the dreary, early dusk before she realised that someone was running after her. There was time for her to have a wild, surging hope that it was Oliver, coming to explain and to make everything all right again, before a hand gripped her shoulder and pulled her round.
It was Tom.
‘Wait,’ he said. His face was dark and angry, and his mouth was compressed into a thin line. He looked round swiftly, then guided her into the sheltering angle of a building. As she backed against it, Helen felt crumbling mortar and little cushions of moss beneath her fingers.
‘You look terrible,’ Tom told her. ‘Don’t go and … just don’t be stupid, okay? I saw it too. We were both spying, and we saw what we deserved to see. Finish. Forget it now.’
Helen struggled to focus on what he was saying. What was he doing, intruding into this?
‘I’m not stupid,’ she told him mechanically. Then the thought struck her that he must feel for Pansy as she did for Oliver. Of course Tom loved her. Even this detached, accomplished man was vulnerable to her. He must be stinging from what they had just seen as much as she was herself.
For a moment sympathy flickered in her, drawing her to Tom in spite of herself. He didn’t look angry any more. His eyes were hooded and unfathomable in the fading light, but his face had relaxed and there was even a twist of wry amusement around his mouth. He must already be thinking that their mutual exclusion was funny, Helen saw. How cool he was. Yet he was generous enough to look out for her too. Tom Hart could be a valuable friend, she remembered. And she felt that she needed one now more than she had done in all her life. He stood between her and the bleak street, like a refuge.
Then she stiffened. Tom was no refuge. His sympathy and understanding, however real, was useless to her because of his love for Pansy. That made him hers, just like Oliver. That in itself divided him from Helen like a curtain of steel.
Behind her eyes she saw the scene in the warehouse again, with Pansy’s pliant body bent like a bow against Oliver’s.
No-one could help exorcise that. All she wanted was to be alone, as far away from here as possible.
‘Come home with me,’ Tom said gently. ‘We’ll do something English, like have a cup of tea. Then perhaps we’ll follow it up with a lot of bourbon. All this is quite funny, when you come to think of it.’
Helen shook her head. His amusement, and even his kindness, suddenly grated unbearably. She gathered her strength to push past him, staring deliberately over his shoulder.
‘I’d rather be by myself. I don’t want any tea, or any bourbon.’
The sob rising in her throat made her voice sound harsher than she had intended. Tom stood back at once to let her go and she stumbled away.
His half-smile had vanished. When she had gone he picked up a pebble and threw it sharply against the angle of the wall. It clattered dismally and then rolled away into a bed of sodden leaves.
All the way back to Follies House, she held herself rigid, as if she was afraid that something inside her might split and spill, messily, in front of the strangers who were passing by.
As last she reached the house. There was no-one there, and not a sound to be heard. As she went up she counted the stairs, numbering them off in her head to stop having to think about anything else. Only when she had unlocked her door and bolted it behind her, did she feel safe enough and private enough to cry.
She stumbled to the bed and, almost gratefully, let the tears come. Helen rarely cried, but now she abandoned herself to it. The storm of weeping that overtook her was not just for Oliver, but for herself too. Disjointed images and phrases flitted through her head with the shaking sobs. She saw Oliver’s face in the firelight at the Montcalm cottage.
He was so beautiful, and so gentle then.
She remembered the exhilaration of being driven at speed in his Jaguar and the prickle of champagne in her mouth.
Nothing like him has ever happened to me before. And never will again.
The excitement she had felt at simply being close to him was still with her.
I didn’t make demands on him.
But she had not been brilliant enough to keep him.
How could I, after he’d seen Pansy?
And, again,
It isn’t fair.
Alone in the dark, Helen cried as if she could never stop. But at last no more tears would come. Still in the same position, cold and cramped, she stared unseeingly upwards and forced herself to think.
She knew that she had walked into this loss with open eyes. She remembered thinking I don’t care what happens. I just want him now. She had relished the reckless thrill that the thought had given her.
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