face she read sympathy and an echo of her own relief. She lifted her chin and squared her shoulders deliberately. ‘Don’t think I was spying on you. I wasn’t. I’m going now. I didn’t see anything. I don’t know anything about it.’
She turned and walked back up the green-arched aisle to the carved doors, and she closed them firmly behind her. Her hands and legs were trembling as she walked on. Was that the right thing to have done? Was that what they would have wanted?
As she retraced her steps down the silent corridor and past the glittering tree Amy felt the layers of security and comfortable childhood assumptions drop painfully away. She was afraid suddenly that she didn’t know anything, or anybody. Not her own sister and brother, certainly not her mother and father, or any of the truths that mattered about Tony Hardy, or Moira O’Hara, or any of the people who filled her days. All she knew were little, trivial things, and attitudes solidified in her through privilege and habit. Helen Pearce in her dim basement room, existing on her terrible diet of penny buns and tea, knew a thousand times more than she did.
Amy went slowly up the grand staircase, feeling the smooth-rubbed wood of the banister curve and twist upwards under her hand. She opened the door of her room and saw the folds of her evening dress laid out ready by the maid. Her evening slippers stood side by side, ready for her to step into them. Amy wanted to laugh, but she wanted to cry even more. She knew, as she stood there staring at her satin shoes, that she was experiencing her first moment of adult loneliness. There was nowhere to hide, or anyone to run to so that her hurt could be rubbed better. She had only herself, and here and now.
Amy wasn’t going to let herself cry.
Instead she went to her jewel case and took out a pair of diamanté pendant earrings that she had dismissed as too flamboyant. She clipped them on to her ears and then she wound her hair up to leave her long neck bare. She put the pretty pastel-coloured dress back in her wardrobe and took out a slim black one that flared around her calves. Sitting in front of her mirror, she painted her mouth and rubbed colour on to her cheeks with the little pink puff from its gilt case. Then she looked at herself once more in the mirror, seeing a red-lipped stranger with very bright eyes, and went down to the drawing room for cocktails before dinner.
Later, fortified by gin and wedged in her place at the dinner table, she looked down the polished length of it and saw Richard, relentlessly amusing his neighbours. Tony was opposite her, turning his glass round in his fingers. She smiled at him, a smile of perfectly normal friendliness, and gave her attention back to her neighbour on the left-hand side. From her place at the foot of her table, Adeline nodded her approval of her daughter’s bright new demeanour.
Gaiety is all there is. Well, Amy thought. She would give it a try.
She had understood something tonight, and understood it with startling clarity. She couldn’t live Isabel’s life for her, or Richard’s for him. She had only her own. And with the knowledge of that, to compensate her for the new, chilly loneliness, Amy thought that she had gained the first, durable shell of maturity.
In the morning she went into the billiards room where Richard and Tony were lounging against the big green table, and kissed them both goodbye. Then Adeline’s chauffeur drove her to the local station in the Bentley and Amy caught the London train. From Euston she plunged into the grimy clatter of the Underground with her thoughts already fixed on the Royal Lambeth.
There was always work, Amy told herself.
For the next weeks, with the rest of her set, Amy worked an eighteen-hour day. The crucial first batch of examinations was looming ahead of them.
‘I’ll never make it,’ Moira groaned. ‘I might just as well head back to Mother Ireland now. Perhaps I could get myself a little job in the draper’s in Portair.’
‘Don’t be so spineless,’ Amy retorted. ‘And if you’re not going to do your own work, at least shut up and let me get on with mine.’
‘I don’t know what’s come over you, Lovell. You used to be such a normal person. Got to come top, have you?’
‘I just want to pass these exams,’ Amy told her with an attempt at patience. ‘I need something to go right, just now.’
Moira looked shrewdly at her. ‘How’s your sister?’
‘The same.’
Isabel didn’t want to leave Thorogood House. Adeline showed signs of winning her battle with Peter Jaspert for Isabel’s guardianship, but when she had mentioned Lausanne and Dr Ahrends, Isabel had said in her quiet, firm way, ‘I want to stay here.’ She had made a friend of one of the other patients, and they sat in the day room together and walked in the grounds under the dripping rhododendron trees.
Amy and Richard went to see her, and came away silenced by Isabel’s remoteness. They travelled back to London and had dinner together at Bruton Street, but they never mentioned the orangery. Yet Amy felt that Richard held her less firmly at arm’s length than before. As their concern for Isabel drew them closer Richard tried less hard to be witty and surprising and let her occasionally glimpse his inner, reflective self. Amy loved her brother very much. Resolutely she had convinced herself that it wasn’t abnormal for boys to have love affairs with other boys. The judgement made her feel sage and mature. It was a phase that Richard would surely grow out of, and then he would marry and have children like everyone else. More than like everyone else, because Richard’s children would be Lovells. And Tony Hardy wasn’t difficult to love. She knew that, painfully well, herself. If Tony was truly homosexual – well, he had his own life too. Even with her new maturity Amy couldn’t bring herself to speculate beyond that. After Christmas at Chance Tony didn’t write to her or telephone again, and she accepted it sadly as she had accepted her loneliness.
The weeks dragged and then accelerated past towards the examinations. Amy had worked to the point where she felt nauseated by the sight of her file of lecture notes and dreamed at night of burns that she had forgotten how to dress and boils that swelled under her fingers.
There was little time for anything, even visiting Helen. In the few, snatched times that they spent together Amy was distressed by Helen’s listlessness and by the cough that had taken hold of her yet again.
Once, not expected, she came plodding down the street through drifting snow that piled against the steps and capped the black area railings. The door to Helen’s basement room was ajar and she was pushing it open as she heard Helen shout, ‘Look at it. Get out, will you? Go away. Don’t come back. I hate you. All of it.’ Thoroughly alarmed, Amy went in. To her astonishment there were only Freda and Jim, white-faced, and Helen at the table with her head in her hands. On the rubbed, faded linoleum were the tracks of dirty, melting snow that the excited children had tramped in with them. Hand in hand they pushed past her and escaped into the harsh white light again. The door slammed dully.
Amy went behind the screen at the sink and brought out a bucket and a floorcloth. Carefully she dried and polished the floor, and when she had finished she went and put her arm around Helen.
‘I don’t hate them,’ Helen said, her voice muffled by her hair and hands. ‘They’re everything in the world, and I bloody yell at them every hour of the day. They’d be better off on the parish, anyway.’
Amy stroked her hair back, feeling how hot she was. ‘Hush. You’re tired. And ill, you know that. I think you should be in hospital again.’
‘No.’
‘Please, Helen.’
‘It’s winter, or haven’t you noticed? Who’s going to find the money to feed them and keep them warm while I lie in bed?’
‘I will,’ Amy said quietly.
‘No, thanks.’
Helen hadn’t even paused to think and the abruptness of her rejection stung Amy.
‘Why not? Don’t be so selfish. Why kill yourself out of pride?’
There was a long, quiet moment. Then Helen said, ‘You don’t know everything, do you? If