repeated. She knew that Helen’s eyes followed her around the corner, and that she was listening as her footsteps receded up the ward.
‘Well,’ Tony said, ‘I have to hand it to you, Amy my love. I thought you’d hate it, and that it would disturb you. But here you are, prettier and happier-looking than I’ve ever seen you, and coping perfectly.’
‘It does disturb me,’ Amy told him, thinking of Helen again. ‘I haven’t learnt professional detachment yet. I’m not sure that I want to. And it’s bloody hard work, like nothing I’d ever imagined. Sometimes at the end of the day my arms and back ache so much that I can’t eat because the knife and fork seem too heavy to lift. But yes, I am happy. Doing it makes everything else, everything outside, look quite different. I don’t feel so guilty any more.’ She faced Tony squarely as she said it. Since Helen had identified her luxury so clearly Amy was admitting it as openly as she could.
‘Nor should you.’ Tony smiled at her and lifted his glass. ‘Here’s to you, Amy.’
She sighed with pleasure and leaned back in her chair. They were having dinner together in the little Italian restaurant in Soho that Amy always enjoyed and begged to be taken back to again. The waiters in their striped aprons and the noisy, vociferous diners were exactly the same, and now she felt that she wasn’t just a sightseer but a part of the cosmopolitan bustle herself. She had her own work to do, just like Tony and the girls in his office, all the people in the restaurant crowded around the checked tablecloths, and like Jake Silverman, and Kay and Angel.
Amy had found her way back to Appleyard Street once or twice on her evenings off. If Tony wasn’t going to take her, she decided, she would go on her own. Usually she made the long bus journey in her black stockings and navy nurse’s cape. If any newspaper columnist might be remotely interested in Peer’s Daughter at Communist Meeting, no one would cast a second glance at Lambeth Nurse in the same place.
On her first visit she had been apprehensive, not even sure whether she would be recognized or allowed into the upstairs meeting room. But as soon as she arrived at the top of the dimly lit stairs she saw Jake’s huge, bear-like shape and immediately he bellowed, ‘Amy Lovell! So you’ve turned up again so that I can say thank you!’
He was wearing the same red and black checked shirt, and as he hugged her she remembered the bulkiness of the body she had tried to drag away from the horses and the trampling feet.
‘I know I do have something to thank you for. I don’t remember a damned thing, but I’m told that you plunged in when I went down, and then stuck with me all the way to the hospital. I’m grateful, Amy.’
‘I didn’t do anything. I didn’t know how to. It was the miner who carried you out, Nick Penry.’
‘I know Nick was there.’
It was odd to hear someone else saying his name when she hadn’t spoken it herself since he had left Bruton Street. She had thought about him and isolated him into a private experience of her own, and now she felt a quiver of something that might almost have been jealousy. She wondered too how much he might have told Jake about where she lived. Amy felt the importance of preserving her anonymity at Appleyard Street.
‘He’s a friend of mine,’ Jake went on. ‘He wrote, and said you found him a bed for the night as well.’
If that was all he had said, Amy thought with relief, then Nick Penry knew how to be discreet despite having disapproved so sharply of everything she stood for.
‘Kay, look who’s here.’
Kay came up behind him. ‘Why haven’t you come before this?’ she demanded fiercely, but her smile was full of warmth. ‘We tried to find out where you live from Tony, but he was very cagey about you.’
‘I’m a student nurse now,’ Amy said quickly, gesturing at her cape. ‘I don’t have very much spare time.’
Kay put her arm through hers. Jake was greeting someone else at the top of the stairs. ‘Thank you for looking after him. He’s as strong as a horse and he got better very quickly, but he could have died there in the bloody square.’
‘Why did it happen?’ Amy asked.
‘Oh, it probably wasn’t completely deliberate. They’re frightened of Communists. They think we’re going to crush the capitalist machine. We are, of course.’
Kay was laughing and shaking her head so that her huge brass earrings jangled. Amy liked her infectious enthusiasm and good humour. Kay pulled her into the room, and across it Amy saw Angel Mack, her eyes extravagantly made up in glittering green, waving a greeting at her.
‘Come and sit down. It’s “Europe and the Threat of International Fascism” tonight. You’ll enjoy it.’
As at the other meetings she attended, Amy sat quietly and listened to the fervent discussion. As always, she was impressed most of all by the compelling force of Jake Silverman’s convictions. When he spoke, she believed every word he said. Otherwise she tried hard to understand the theories and counter-theories that flew over her head, and accepted the pamphlets and poorly printed booklets that were handed out. She took them back with her to the hostel and read them scrupulously when she could find a spare moment. She also thought carefully about what she had heard and read for herself, usually when she was buffing brass sink taps to a blinding shine or folding and counting linen supplies in one of the store cupboards. Amy was still far from believing with the Appleyard Streeters that the only way ahead lay in the complete destruction of capitalism and the restructuring of life along rigidly Soviet lines. She was too caught up in her new-found satisfaction, and the way of life that she knew and understood was too deeply and unconsciously ingrained in her for that. But the things she saw and heard every day on the wards made her ever more sharply aware of the separation between herself and her family and friends on one side, and the patients of the Royal Lambeth and all those who were like them on the other. It must, Amy thought, be possible to devise some system by which all the wealth and comfort and privilege need not be bestowed just on a handful of people who happened to be born to it. The Appleyard Street doctrines were much harsher than Amy’s own tentative ideas, but still something drew her back there yet again and compelled her to sit listening quietly as she struggled to understand what their revolution might mean.
‘Grazie, bella mia.’ The waiter with the most luxuriant moustache put Amy’s plate in front of her with a flourish. She was ravenously hungry and the glistening heaped-up spaghetti alla vongole smelled exquisite. She sighed again at the sheer pleasure of being waited on, and there was silence as she attacked the first mouthfuls. When she looked up again Tony was watching her.
‘You’re rather a sensual person, aren’t you?’
‘Whatever do you mean? I’ve never had a chance to find out.’
Tony laughed. ‘Not necessarily in the sexual sense. Although I’m sure you’ll enjoy that too.’
Amy hadn’t drunk quite enough Chianti to have the courage to say Why don’t we try it then? although she was longing to. She was thinking how attractive he was as she sat across the table from him trying to twirl her spaghetti like an expert. She liked the downward curl of his mouth. It would have been nice to lean across and kiss it, tasting the wine on his lips as well as her own.
But whenever Tony kissed her he did it ironically, as if kissing at all was faintly ridiculous.
‘No,’ he was saying. ‘I was thinking of the way you enjoy everything. You like tasting and touching and smelling things. Ve-ery uninhibited. Almost pagan. You were the same even when you were quite a little girl. I remember the summer I was tutoring Richard, seeing you at Chance kneeling by the lavender border with your face buried among the flower spikes. And then at Biarritz, standing with your eyes closed taking tiny cat-licks at a pistachio ice-cream from that place on the promenade.’
‘Fendi’s.’
‘Isabel was quite different. She thought more, and enjoyed things less.’ Seeing Amy’s face, Tony asked, ‘How is she?’
‘I