will it?’ When Amy didn’t answer, Adeline said more patiently, ‘Why don’t you go and find the boys? They were making you laugh last night. I saw them. At least twice.’
By ‘the boys’ Adeline meant Richard and Tony Hardy. To Amy’s surprise, Richard had turned up on Christmas Eve with Tony. Clearly Adeline had been expecting them both. Amy found herself placed next to Tony at dinner. They had seen each other two or three times since the night in Soho Square, but the old easiness between them had faltered a little. Yet on Christmas Eve in the ambiguous atmosphere of the servants’-hall party, Amy found herself liking him as much as ever.
The boys had indeed made her laugh. After the family and houseguests had left the dancing the three of them had gone upstairs and drunk quantities of brandy together. Richard was a natural mimic, and he had honed to perfection the set piece of Gerald thanking the staff for another year: ‘Ah … the family here at Chance … and we are a family you know, all of us, working together. Except for me, that is …’
Tony was the perfect, dry foil for Richard. Watching them over the rim of her glass, and all through the hours of Christmas Day with the dry headache that the brandy had given her, Amy understood why Richard’s antics seemed more frenzied than ever. He didn’t talk about her, but Amy knew that he was trying to fill the void that Isabel had left.
He could make everyone laugh, the cobras and their husbands and the powdered wives. Everyone except Gerald.
Now, on Boxing Night, Amy decided that Adeline was right. She would go and find the boys, and they would have a stiff drink together before the ritual of dinner. She kissed her mother, who nodded absently and went on with her animated scribbling.
Amy left the drawing room where the footman had just stirred the fire to a fresh, scented crackle and crossed the panelled height of the hallway. The family Christmas tree stood here, a blaze of white and silver light in the dimness, tipped with a diamanté star.
A handful of unopened presents remained from the great heap that had circled it yesterday, and at the sight of them Amy put her fingers up and touched her necklace. She had unwrapped her holly-sprigged packages alone in her bedroom. Helen had hoarded discarded woollens and had painstakingly unpicked them, choosing the gentlest blues and greens that blurred together, and had knitted them up into a soft scarf. Amy wore it to church on Christmas morning. Her present from Freda and Jim was a string of blue and green glass beads to match the scarf, carefully threaded by Jim and fastened with a pretty clasp that Freda had found and saved.
Amy was thinking of the three of them now as she hesitated by the Christmas tree, and wondered if their Christmas at Auntie Mag’s had been a happy one. Happier than her own at Chance, despite all the music and the exquisite food under the silver-domed dishes and the warmth of the crimson-throated log fires? Amy shivered a little. To find Richard and Tony, that was the thing, and share a large drink with them.
Instinctively she left the hall by the south door and walked quickly down a long, carpeted corridor where a colonnade of arched doors opened in summer on to the terrace. The arches were shrouded with heavy drawn curtains now and the corridor was filled with a muffled, undisturbed silence that seemed to cut it off from the rest of the great house. At the end of the corridor was a pair of intricately carved double doors that led into the orangery on the south side of the house. Amy paused, frowning slightly as she found herself in front of them and wondering why she had come here instead of any of the more obvious places.
But in the silence she pushed one of the carved doors and it swung smoothly open. At once the scent flooded out to her, a sharp reminder. Isabel and she had played for hours in the orangery as children. Breathing in the memories, Amy slipped inside.
The Chance orangery had been built in the eighteenth century in a severely classical style, with a long span of white-arched columns echoing the corridor that led to it. The house wall was lined with niches for prim classical statuary, and the floor was tiled with severe black and white marble blocks. But overhead the arches soared into a magnificent ogee-shaped glass roof, and in summer the sun poured into the orangery with almost tropical splendour. The Lovells who had built it had intended a fashionable adjunct where the ladies could parade gently in inclement weather, the trains of their dresses swishing gently on the marble floor, and it had stayed that way for almost a hundred and fifty years. But Gerald’s Victorian grandfather had been a traveller and a plantsman, and he had made the orangery his own. Over a long lifetime he had filled it with his botanical trophies until the arching fronds of palm trees brushed the glass roof, and the strange tendrils of sub-tropical creepers snaked treacherously across the floor. The old man had designed the ingenious stovehouse that heated his domain, and in the warmth the orchids with strange, sticky, pungent blooms flourished alongside weird growths that oozed with resinous gum. A family of greenfinches twittered and swooped in the thickening jungle.
Amy prowled down the central avenue, absorbing the scents of rich, dark earth and dripping leaves. The thick foliage swallowed the sound of her footsteps and the glass space around her was alive with other noises, the rustle of unfurling leaves and peeling bark, and the flutter of the finches. Like all the rest of the festive house the orangery was brightly lit, electric lamps flaring in sconces on the house wall. But the greenness dimmed it, and outside the pitch darkness pressed against the glass, misted and dribbled with condensation. Amy was about to turn away again, out of the oppressive air, when -somebody spoke.
She looked, and saw them in the little bay at the end of the orangery. There was a white-painted scrolled iron seat under a tree that hung green fingers down to hide it. Beside the seat was a stone statue of Pan, holding the pipes to his lips, with green moss clinging to the stone furrows of his beard.
Tony and Richard were facing each other, as if they had just stood up to continue their stroll and had paused to exchange a last remark. Amy opened her mouth to call out to them, and then she felt the hair lift at the nape of her neck and in the heat a cold, slow trickle run down her spine.
‘I don’t give a damn where we are,’ Richard said clearly. ‘Or a bugger, for that matter.’
‘I know that,’ Tony said. His voice was low, but something in it reminded her of Soho Square and the plane trees black against the indigo sky. By contrast the orangery felt clammy and the reek of it suffocated her.
‘Well, then,’ Richard said, and Amy heard Tony’s answer, ‘Not here.’
But they were still standing facing each other, and Tony reached out for Richard’s wrist and held it, and then he pressed the inner side against his cheek. Then, with a small movement as if his head and neck hurt him intolerably, Tony turned his face so that his mouth was pressed against the veins of Richard’s wrist. Richard was looking at Tony as she had never seen him look at anyone before, with all the posturing animation drained away, as vulnerable as a child and yet not a child at all any longer. With his free hand he touched Tony’s bent head, and then Tony looked up and their eyes met.
Amy stood rigid, listening to the whispering leaves and the insistent drip of condensation. She was aching to move, to be anywhere else in the world, but she was transfixed. She was longing to be blind and deaf, but every movement and sound was painfully magnified.
The chink of green air between the two familiar profiles had closed. She saw Richard’s hand again, with the crested gold ring he wore on his little finger, moving to touch Tony’s cheek in a gesture of almost unbearable tenderness. It was the most fleeting of kisses, but it was the longest second Amy had ever known. When it was gone, everything had changed. It was as if the orangery with its snaking tendrils and weird blossoms had shaken, and all the world beyond it, to jolt the pieces of a puzzle she had only been able to glance at. The shudder had slid the pieces into place, and Amy saw the picture now with all its depths of shade and rolling contours. What had been flat and coarsely black and white before was suddenly grained with infinite subtlety. In all the surge of feelings that followed, she tasted humiliation at her own hopeless, naïve yearnings for Tony Hardy, and the opposite relief of understanding at last why he had seemed to reject her.
But Richard? What did it mean for Richard? The new landscape lurched, threateningly steep, as Amy thought of her father, and then without warning of Airlie, proud in his Sam Browne