her brother and sister and she knew that she was lost to the old safe world for ever.
Over Isabel’s cropped head Amy and Richard looked at each other. The white knobs at the nape of her neck stood sharply out.
‘I’m sorry,’ Richard said awkwardly. ‘I’m very, very sorry.’
The terrible crying was unstoppable. At last Amy called a nurse who brought Isabel a sedative and sent the two of them out.
‘I could cut out my tongue,’ Richard said as they walked slowly away together. ‘An all-too-familiar feeling.’
‘It wasn’t your fault. Isabel’s ill.’
Richard looked sideways at Amy. ‘Head ill?’
‘I think so. Mummy’s going to take her away for a while.’
She sensed his shrewd glance again. ‘Away from Jaspert?’
‘Yes.’
‘What a very good idea.’ They stopped at the corner of the street. ‘I have to go back now.’ Richard made a quick, disgusted face. ‘I’m in bad enough trouble as it is. And don’t ask me about that, either. But you’ll stay with her as much as you can, won’t you? I love you both.’ He touched her wrist quickly and then walked away, leaving Amy to watch until he was out of sight and wish that she knew her brother better. For all his whimsy Richard was tough, and it would have helped to have him with her now.
After three weeks the doctors judged that Isabel was strong enough to be allowed home. After another two weeks, they said, she might travel in easy stages with her mother and a nurse to Spain and then, perhaps, to the sun in North Africa. The flowers in Isabel’s room had withered and the presents had been taken home with the folded-up greetings and telegrams.
The tomato had stayed on the bedside locker until the bracts curled and blackened like a spider, and the red skin puckered. Then a nurse threw it away.
Isabel was taken home in the Daimler, tucked up in a fur rug. Bethan took the baby separately in his voluminous white wrappings.
The Ebury Street bedroom was bright and warm. The day bed was drawn up beside a low table where a cloisonné bowl filled with pot-pourri gave out a cloud of spicy perfume. The flowers had been carefully arranged, shaggy bronze and white and gold chrysanthemums and heady forsythia from the hothouses at Chance. There were new books and magazines on the table too, and Isabel’s embroidery laid out neatly in its frame.
Adeline and Amy had been carefully preparing for her return, Isabel thought, but instead of welcoming her the warmth and bright colours and scents made her feel her own chill brittleness more intensely. She moved slowly around the room, touching the green silk coverings and the stiff curve of a chrysanthemum petal, then with horrified fascination the handle of the door leading into Peter’s dressing-room. Isabel was shivering, and the high, thin screaming that plagued her constantly was much louder here. Ebury Street didn’t feel like home. Everything was too light and bright and shiny. It attacked her senses, making her feel even thinner and colder and more isolated than she had done in hospital. Isabel made another circuit of the room. It occurred to her that she was looking for somewhere to crawl into and find shelter in, and her own bedroom offered nowhere.
I don’t live here. I can’t stay here. Where can I go?
She couldn’t think of anywhere, and she felt like a small animal caught in a box. Adeline had talked about travel, of going south in search of the sun, and she shrank from that idea too. The sun would probe her and shine through her raw skin when she longed for darkness and silence.
From the other end of the house, where Bethan and the trap-mouthed night nurse appointed by Lady Jaspert shared the nursery suite, Isabel heard the baby Peter crying.
The two screams, internal and external, merged and became one.
Please stop. I want to be quiet. Please stop.
When Peter came home he was exhilarated by the first of a series of committee meetings under his own chairmanship. Archer Cole had appointed him to head a vital and timely investigation of public order and the processes of police control. Peter was in complete agreement with the Home Secretary that street political demonstrations and mass displays posed a threat to public safety, and he was looking forward to drafting legislation that would forbid them, and to increasing police powers to deal with them when they did erupt. Peter believed that politics were the rightful and hereditary affair of his own class, and that any attempt by the remaining masses to involve themselves was an intrusion.
He found Isabel’s room in semi-darkness, and his wife in the farthest corner of it. Her white face half-turned towards him, and Peter thought impatiently that she looked like a cringing animal. After the committee he had stopped in for a drink with Sylvia Cole, who had poured out whisky and flattered him with political gossip and assurance of how very highly Archer valued him. Sylvia was electrically charged by her husband’s new power and prominence. She was wearing red lipstick with her fingernails varnished the same colour, and her bright scarlet cocktail frock showed off the tops of her full breasts. As he watched her striding up and down her drawing room talking and laughing and waving her cigarette holder, Peter was reminded of an exotic tropical bird. When she drank, Sylvia’s mouth left a red print on her glass and Peter could hardly take his eyes off it when she put it down on the tray again.
When he stood up he had to control an urge to pick the glass up and press his own mouth to it.
Compared with Sylvia’s brilliance his white, trembling wife seemed hardly alive at all. Her helplessness suddenly made Peter angry, and when he was angry he was brutal.
‘Welcome home,’ Peter said. ‘It will be nice to have a wife again. Now that we’ve got the boy safely.’ He caught Isabel’s wrist, and it felt like a stick. He pulled her towards him so that her head jerked back, and looked down into her face. Isabel’s skin was drawn and there were dark, unhealthy circles under her eyes. He thought with impatience that his wife was losing her looks faster than he could have believed possible, and her eye-catching, windflower beauty was one of the main reasons why he had married her. Angrily his fingers tightened on her arm and he kissed her, his mouth open over her compressed lips. She was shaking so much now that her head wobbled, and Peter thought it was like kissing one of the wax-faced clockwork dolls in his sister’s collection at West Talbot. The idea disgusted him, and he pushed her away so that she half-stumbled against the bed. As if the touch and sight of it galvanized her Isabel backed away from it, her hands to her mouth.
‘What’s the matter with you?’ Peter hissed at her. ‘What? What? Look at it all.’ He gestured wildly at the pretty room. ‘You’ve got everything, every damned thing, and you look like a scared nanny goat. What do you want, Isabel? I know what I want. I need a wife. I need a wife like other men have, like Sylvia Cole. You can’t even smile at my table and open your legs in bed at night. Look at you.’ Isabel saw the spray from his mouth as Peter swung round and swept the cloisonné bowl and the books and papers and sewing off the table. The pot-pourri scattered in dry, aromatic dust and the bowl, unbroken on the rug, rang with a single resonant note.
The hum of it and Peter’s shouting pierced Isabel’s skull and even cut through the screaming. Her hands moved from her dry mouth to her ears as she tried vainly to block out the din. She shook her head in bewilderment.
‘I can’t … be … like … Sylvia Cole. Never.’ Was that her own voice? Isabel wondered within a corner of herself. Were the words really coming out of her mouth, or was she just imagining herself saying them? ‘And you ask me what I want. I want you not to touch me. You make my skin crawl. The things you … the things you do to me are disgusting. I hate them. I hate you.’
She really was saying the words. Isabel knew it from the disbelief and then the blind anger mounting in her husband’s face.
‘You’re mad,’ he told her. ‘I’ve wondered, and now I know. You’re insane.’
Isabel pressed her hands flatter to her head.
‘Don’t say that.’ Her