The maid came in with the tray, and the sight of Isabel enjoying her hostess role made Amy feel more cheerful for a moment or two.
When they were alone again she said, ‘Tell me about it. You’ve been away for six weeks.’
‘Didn’t I, in my letters?’
‘Not really. I could have got exactly the same news from the Guide Michelin. Are you happy, Bel?’
Surprisingly, Isabel laughed and the shadows disappeared. ‘Oh, I’ve missed you too. Amy the insistent. Yes, darling, of course I’m happy.’
‘Is it what you expected?’
‘Rather early to say, after only six weeks. And not very typical wedded weeks, either. It’s more than I expected, I think.’ Isabel looked down at her wrist, turning her bracelet so that the stones caught the light. ‘And it takes a little getting used to, you know. You’ll find out for yourself, when the time comes.’
‘I expect so,’ Amy said noncommittally. She was relieved, in a sense, that Isabel wasn’t making wild claims of perfect happiness. Marriage would take some getting used to. Isabel looked tired, and she seemed a little withdrawn, but she appeared to be reacting with all her old calm, common sense. Perhaps the fears that her letters had aroused in Amy were unfounded, after all. Isabel was moving gracefully around the drawing room now, using the refilling of their glasses as a pretext for adjusting an ornament and straightening a cushion. Suddenly she looked every inch the proud new wife, and Amy smiled.
‘Not a lot has happened to me. I’ve been out two or three times with Tony Hardy.’
‘Mmm? I saw him briefly at the wedding. I didn’t know he was a friend of yours.’
‘I think he is, now. He took me to a political meeting because I was complaining that I never met anyone different. Almost everyone was a Communist.’
‘Amy, for God’s sake don’t say anything about that to Peter. He thinks they should all be clapped into prison.’
They looked at each other apprehensively and then they started to laugh, just as they had always been able to do.
Peter came in. His hair was brushed flat and sleek and he looked even healthier than he usually did, if that was possible.
‘Oh dear,’ he said genially, ‘the terrible twins. Giggling, just like always. How are you, Amy m’dear?’
‘In the pink, thank you Peter.’
There was the faintest of suppressed snorts from Isabel.
‘I really don’t understand you two, you know,’ Peter said. He poured himself a whisky in a crystal tumbler and splashed soda into it from a siphon on the tray. He crossed the room to where Isabel was sitting and stood behind her sofa, one hand resting on her shoulder. Amy saw her sister glance up at her husband. It occurred to her that there was a kind of wary anxiety in the look.
Whatever there was, Peter didn’t see it.
‘Have you had a good day, darling?’ Isabel asked him. His hand moved, lightly, to stroke her neck.
‘An excellent day.’
They faced Amy now, both smiling, and she thought how handsome they looked. Mr and Mrs Jaspert, comfortably at home.
Amy felt a frown gathering behind her eyes with the sense, still persistent, that everything was not quite right, for all the external harmony. But Isabel went on smiling and Peter’s hand tightened affectionately on her shoulder before he moved away again.
They were extolling the beauties of Tuscany, reminding one another of sights and improving on one another’s descriptions, when the maid appeared to show in the other guests. Two couples came into the room, exclaiming conventionally at its prettiness. There was another Tory MP, senior to Peter, and his ambitious wife, and a sharp-eyed City man with whom Peter went into a huddle at one end of the room while his wife talked about horses at the other.
A moment or two later Amy’s partner for the evening arrived.
She had been vaguely expecting someone in the Johnny Guild mould and the blond young man who shook her hand surprised her a little. He looked hardly older than herself, twenty or perhaps twenty-one. He had a gentle, unassuming manner and Amy could see that he was shy in Peter Jaspert’s house. But when, at length, his eyes did meet hers his blue, direct glance seemed at odds with the rest of him.
‘Amy, may I introduce Charles Carew? Charles, this is Miss Lovell, Isabel’s sister.’
They found themselves sitting together on the sofa, isolated by the conversations on either side of them. Glancing up, Amy saw Isabel talking animatedly to one of the wives about the arrangement of her drawing room. She looked proud and happy, and Amy felt her anxiety dissolving. Following her gaze Charles Carew said quietly, ‘It must be strange, finding oneself married.’
His perception startled her and she asked, absurdly, ‘So you aren’t married, Mr Carew?’
He laughed, and then tried to smother the sound. For a moment he was so like one of the ‘suitable’ boys who had been invited as dancing partners to Miss Abbott’s school that Amy looked down, half-expecting to see Charles Carew’s knobby, adolescent wrists protruding from his shirt cuffs in just the way that theirs had done. But his cuffs were long enough to hide his wrists. She saw that his hands were well scrubbed with long, square-ended fingers.
‘No,’ he said, his amusement under control. ‘I’m a doctor.’
He must be older than he looks, then, Amy thought.
‘I’m almost entirely dependent on my father. Surgery is a long training. A wife and family’s a long way in the future. If it happens at all, that is.’
They found themselves smiling at each other.
‘I think I feel the same,’ Amy confided.
When they went down to dinner, Charles took Amy’s arm politely, with old-fashioned manners.
The dining room was filled with more flowers. Isabel must have spent the whole day arranging them. The table was a polished oval reflecting the candlelight and the pink, white and gold of Isabel’s wedding china, and the faces around it looked pleased and relaxed. Isabel herself was beaming with pleasure at the success of her arrangements.
Amy felt herself relaxing too, with the laughter and talk and Peter’s elegant claret. Suddenly she was enjoying being in Isabel’s house, amongst her own generation. It was quite different from being at Bruton Street, or Chance, or one of the formal dinners before a dance. And because of his seeming youth, and his shyness, and the memories that he’d stirred in her, Charles Carew seemed more like a childhood ally than a dinner partner.
Amy looked from Isabel at one end of the table to Peter at the other. Perhaps this was what marriage was. Being in your own house, with your own friends. Perhaps it wasn’t surprising at all that Isabel looked strained after six weeks’ travelling. Being at home would make all the difference.
If I marry, will it be like this? Amy asked herself. She tried to imagine Tony Hardy at the other end of the polished table, but the picture eluded her. Chianti and sardines at Appleyard Street were the things that went with Tony. The thought of him made her smile.
‘Will you share the joke with me?’ Charles Carew asked her softly. He had been watching her, she realized.
‘I’m sorry, that was rude of me. I was just thinking of a friend of mine and trying to imagine him here.’
‘And could you?’
‘Not really.’ The idea was irresistibly funny, but Amy suppressed it because it seemed inappropriate to be talking about Tony, however obliquely, to this shy, polite boy. To deflect him, she asked, ‘Are you an old friend of Peter’s?’
‘My father was in India with his, years ago. The Jasperts came home when Peter’s grandfather died whereas we stayed, but the families have kept in touch. Otherwise