outgoing officers.
At seven the next morning Nick was ready to go. The cardboard suitcase that had belonged to his father was packed. He had arranged a ride in a delivery van as far as Newport. After that he would walk, hitching lifts where he could, eastwards to Chance.
He put his empty cup down on the kitchen table and Mari snatched it up at once and took it to the sink. Her hands were shaking and the cup rattled as she rinsed it. Nick knelt down by Dickon in his seat by the range. He ruffled the crest of hair and then lifted the boy in his arms. He smelled unhealthy, faintly of soured milk, and his limbs were like knobby sticks. Nick kissed him, closing his eyes for a moment to seal the memory within himself, and hugged the frail weight against him. Then he folded Dickon back into his blankets.
‘Be a good boy for your mam until I get back.’
Mari followed him to the back door. She was still in her nightdress, with her hair hanging loose over her shoulders. She looked like a young girl until she stopped and he saw the deep lines around her eyes.
‘Good luck,’ Mari said simply.
Nick nodded. She didn’t turn her face up to be kissed, and he didn’t try to put his arms around her. He touched her hand instead, but their fingers didn’t grasp at each other.
‘I’ll write,’ he promised. ‘When I send the money. Take care of you both.’
Nick almost ran down the passage, out into the street and down the hill to where he had arranged to meet his friend in the van.
He didn’t reach Chance until the middle of the next day. Rides were hard to come by, and after he had slept the night burrowed into the prickly warmth of a haystack he knew that he looked rumpled and disreputable. At last, a baker’s van set him down at a crossroads.
‘Down that road,’ the driver directed him. ‘A mile or so, you’ll come to the gates. You can’t miss it.’ He was chuckling as he drove off.
Nick trudged the distance down the quiet green road and understood why. The high stone wall that the road had clung to gave way to tall iron gates topped with the increasingly familiar crest. He stopped and peered through them, and then whistled. It was so big. The great house stood on rising ground in a wide space of shimmering parkland. A long driveway, swept and raked, curved away towards it from the gates. A little stone lodge stood beside the driveway with lavender and hollyhocks in the trim garden.
Nick put his suitcase down to push at the gates, and they creaked reluctantly open.
A man came out of the lodge at once and hurried towards him.
‘That’ll do. You’ve no business here.’ He looked more closely at Nick’s case and added, ‘No work either, if that’s what you’re after.’
‘I have a job here,’ Nick said coldly. ‘I am to see Mr Mackintosh.’
The lodge keeper frowned at his Welsh voice, unmollified. ‘Mr Mackintosh? Then what are you doing here? This is the carriage drive. For the family.’
Nick was amused to hear the man uttering the word with the same reverence as for God, or the King.
The keeper pointed to the road curving onwards with the wall. ‘Follow this into the village. There are tradesmen’s gates there, and the estate buildings. I’ll telephone to Mr Mackintosh …’
… to check up on me, Nick thought, as he plodded away.
It was hardly a welcome to the vast acres of Chance, but he hadn’t expected one in any case. He was thinking of Amy as he walked on, and the way that she had taken him home without ceremony. She had been welcoming, he thought, and generous as well.
But then, she could afford to be.
Two weeks, Amy told herself cheerfully. Two glorious, sybaritic weeks off. Fourteen mornings to lie in bed until she felt like getting out of it, with the prospect of nothing to do that wasn’t thoroughly enticing for the rest of the day. She rolled up her discarded apron and stuffed it into the laundry chute and sent her cap and cuffs rustling after it.
For the next two weeks there would be lipstick instead of starch, champagne instead of lysol. ‘Thank God,’ Amy murmured. She glanced at her watch. Adeline was sending her car to the hostel for her. It was time to go down and see if the chauffeur was standing in his lavender-grey breeches at the porter’s cubicle. Amy had stopped worrying about whether the other girls might judge her for her rank and money. She knew that Moira O’Hara didn’t, and nor did the others of her circle of nursing friends. And if Mary Morrow chose to hate her, well, then that was Mary’s privilege.
Amy picked up her belongings and ran down the stairs. The chauffeur was waiting. He bowed slightly before taking her bag, ushered her out to the Bentley and handed her in. The car’s patrician nose slid out between the buses and tradesmen’s vans and then they were bowling north towards the river and freedom. Amy sighed with pleasure. She didn’t even glance backwards as the Lambeth vanished behind her.
Her love affair with nursing had died with Helen Pearce.
The old, urgent longing to be of help, and the pleasure in it that soothed all the other anxieties, had vanished with her. Amy had never regained the silver pin. She knew that she was a competent nurse, and she did her job as well as she could. But the tedious formality of hospital procedure irked her, and she still felt the callousness at the heart of the machine that healed or failed to heal in about equal proportions. A little of that callousness, she thought sometimes, had rubbed off on her. Either that or she had adopted it for her own protection. Probably, she decided coolly, she was a better nurse for it. Whatever the truth was, there never would be another Helen Pearce.
After her precious leave, Amy would return as a third-year student, with only a year separating her from the examinations of State Registry. And after she was registered, near-freedom beckoned seductively. She could live outside the hostel, even have some say in regulating her hours of duty. There were only twelve more months of slavery. And in the meantime, there was her annual fourteen days in the old world.
Adeline was waiting for her in the white drawing room. There were lilies everywhere in tall white porcelain vases. The white blinds were lowered against the midday sun, so that the light in the long room was pearly-soft.
‘Darling.’ They hugged each other. As their cheeks brushed Amy felt her mother’s taut shoulders and with a little shock she saw the fan of tiny wrinkles at the corner of her eye. ‘Darling, you do smell of hospitals. I’ve got some perfectly delicious new bath scent. Want to try? Be quick if you can, there’s a dear old friend of mine for luncheon. And Richard has promised to come, so we’ll be four …’
Adeline was anxious, and that was unusual. Mildly, Amy said that she was sorry about the hospital smell and of course she would change because she hadn’t expected there would be guests. Adeline was wearing a Schiaparelli dress and jacket in black and fuchsia pink, as sharp as a gleaming blade in the pale room. As Amy left the room a maid brought in a tray with the cocktail shaker and chill-frosted glasses. Perfect, she thought, as she went up to Adeline’s bathroom. A dry martini, talk, a long luncheon with more talk and nowhere to hurry away to, and afterwards … perhaps a nap on her own wide bed without having to shake herself awake too soon to go on duty all over again. She was smiling as she drew the fragrant bath, and still smiling when she wrapped herself afterwards in one of her mother’s thick white robes and sat down in front of her dressing-table mirror to look at herself.
Amy felt that she had grown into her own appearance lately, as if her features had knitted together into a coherent whole at last. She thought critically that her mouth didn’t look too large and wobbly any longer, nor did her eyes seem to be set too far apart. They stared back into the mirror, blue-green, direct. Amy reached for one of Adeline’s pots and deftly brushed gloss on to her eyelids. She chose one of the array of gilt-cased lipsticks and lightly painted in her mouth. Her hand hovered over the other brushes and jars, and then rejected them all. Her skin was pale from long hours in the wards, but it still had the faint apricot glow from which the freckles had faded at last. Her hair was cut short because that was the easiest way