close they are to each other, she thought, with a little shock. Much closer than I am to either of them. How alike, too. I’ve never noticed that before.
‘Thank you, darling,’ Adeline said. ‘That wasn’t such a brilliant luncheon, was it? I love Jack dearly. I always have. But seeing him after so long made me realize that I’m old. I’ve always hated old age. Ugliness. Being alone …’ She faltered, and then her face crumpled once more. Richard drew her close again and murmured against her hair as Amy stood helplessly by.
‘You are just forty-two years old. You will never be ugly. And people will always love you, because you are you.’
After a moment Adeline sniffed self-derisively. She blew her nose on Richard’s handkerchief and stood up, frowning at the creases in her silk dress. ‘I think I will go upstairs and have a tiny nap. Quite probably everything will look different afterwards. One shouldn’t drink immoderately, at my age.’
They watched her to the door, and then turned to each other. Richard pursed his lips in a long, slow whistle.
‘So what did you think of him?’
‘Mr Roper?’
‘Who else, darling?’
‘I thought he was … impressive. And attractive, I suppose.’
‘So did I.’ He smiled his wry smile as Amy tried to put aside the fear that had closed round her in the hallway.
‘Did you mean what you said, about not going back to Eton?’ she asked, to distract them both. ‘And being a man of letters?’
‘Yes,’ Richard said airily. ‘Eton and I hold nothing for each other now. I would prefer to leave before they ask me to. And I’ve written a novel that’s going to make me rich and infamous. Tony Hardy says it needs completely rewriting, and it will take me a year, but it will do in the end. Hasn’t he told you?’
‘I don’t see much of Tony nowadays.’
It was a mark of their closer relationship since the orangery that he acknowledged her friendship with Tony. But they had never spoken about what had happened there.
‘Too busy bandaging?’ he asked.
‘Something like that,’ Amy responded with equal lightness. ‘You know, I think I might follow Mama’s example and lie down this afternoon. I’m not very used to wine in the daytime.’
But although she lay on her bed and stared up at the ceiling, sleep didn’t come. She was thinking, instead, a knotted and insistent tangle of thoughts that coiled around the reality of Jack Roper.
Adeline was out to dinner that evening, and absent from the house all the following day. Amy found her at last at seven o’clock, in her room changing for another evening.
‘Come in, dear heart,’ Adeline called out in response to her knock. ‘See? Do you think this will make me look too much en fête? Too tinselly?’ She held up a short slip of pearly-grey dress and the straight, silver-sequinned jacket that went over it.
‘Like the fairy on the tree? Why not? No, I don’t think so, anyway.’ Amy put her head on one side to consider it, but Adeline had already hung the dress up.
‘Jack said that. Rather romantic, for someone who claims to be so hardboiled. D’you think he meant it?’ She laughed, not waiting for an answer. ‘Did you like him?’
‘Yes.’ Amy was hesitant, now that the moment had come. ‘I wanted to talk to you about him. He said I should. I thought…’
Adeline sat down in one of a pair of velvet-covered armchairs and pointed to the other. She was wearing a peach-coloured robe trimmed with ostrich feathers, and more feathers trimmed the toes of her high-heeled slippers. ‘Go on,’ she ordered.
‘I wanted to ask you if Jack Roper might be my father.’
For a brief, frozen moment Adeline stared at her. It’s true, Amy thought, and then Adeline threw her head back and laughed. In confusion Amy looked at her mother’s smooth white throat and the feathers drifting around it. She had expected anger, or shock, or an admission of the truth, but not so much obvious amusement. Adeline had a rich, musical laugh. At last it died away and she sat upright again.
‘I’m sorry to laugh. But it was rather funny. Amy, your father is your father. Isabel’s and Richard’s too. I loved him distractedly until the day Richard was born, and even for quite a long time after that. But when Airlie died all those years ago something died in Gerald too. It was the part of him I loved, surprising and secretive, and it left me with the dry, British shell that I didn’t. That’s all.’ Adeline shrugged to dismiss the pain. ‘I’m not very good at being brave, or soldiering on alone and all the things one is supposed to do. I found other people to love, and to love me. You know that, of course. Jack wasn’t the only one. But he was special, in a way. We shared the same roots, you see, even though they grew on different sides of the tracks. We were both adventurers, in our own ways. And we both needed to enjoy ourselves, because we couldn’t see the point in living otherwise. We don’t believe much in duty, and honour, and doing what is right, like you British.’
You British, Amy thought, and then: yes, that’s fair, I suppose.
‘That’s why I made such a damn fool of myself yesterday. The terrible mistake of one cocktail too many, like any old dowager trying to convince herself through a haze of gin that she’s still dynamite. It hurt, a little, to see Jack Roper look at you in that particular way, and not at me. I dare say it comes to every mother of daughters.’
Amy felt that she was smiling, just a little vacantly, still digesting her relief that after all Jack Roper was just a man like any other.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t be. I wouldn’t want you to look like the back of a cab, would I?’ Adeline changed her tack, suddenly brisk. ‘I want you to enjoy yourself too, darling. Not to spend all your best years up to your elbows in some dreadful old lady’s operation. This nursing game has gone on altogether too long.’
‘I am a nurse, it’s not a game,’ Amy said automatically. ‘And they’re not dreadful at all. But I feel, just a little, that the time might have come for some fun after all.’
‘Thank God. So. Did you like Jack Roper as much as he liked you?’
‘I liked him,’ Amy said quietly. She wouldn’t admit to Adeline how much, nor exactly what she had thought, even in the face of her lurid imaginings that he might be her father.
‘I imagine he might suit you better than, what’s-his-name, the stuffed shirt in the army?’
‘Johnny Guild.’
‘Or Mr Hardy.’
‘I don’t think Tony Hardy would do at all, actually.’
Adeline was dressing now. She slipped the grey dress over her head and stood up straight. It showed off her perfect legs, as smooth as a girl’s.
‘Mmm.’
‘Jack Roper asked if he might telephone me. He asked about dinner, tomorrow night.’
On went the silver-sequinned jacket. There was a white gardenia for the buttonhole.
‘So, will you go?’
Amy crossed the room in two steps and wrapped her arms around her mother. She smelt the familiar scent of her, that from her childhood had breathed glamour and the romance of adulthood.
‘May I?’ she said.
Adeline’s arms came round her in response and they stood, cheeks together, reflected almost like twins in the long mirrors.
‘Listen to me. I would rather see you with Jack Roper than almost anyone else in the world. And I would rather see you in love and free and true to yourself than married to a man like Peter Jaspert. Do what your heart tells you, Amy. It’s a sensible heart and not a poor romantic