‘It’s all right,’ she told him. ‘I think I understand the rules.’
‘Not rules,’ he corrected her. ‘Except, perhaps, in the sense that a game has rules.’
It was a game. Amy had sensed from the beginning that what was happening with Jack Roper could hardly lead to their engagement, and her picture in the Tatler in a demure dance dress with a rope of pearls. It had been an invitation and a step into a new, exotic world for Amy, and she was grateful to Jack for the graceful way he had done it. It was as if he had given her a present of herself, rich and intact, and a million times more precious than the diamonds. But for Jack himself, she knew with perfect clarity, it was a diversion amongst many others. He would be her lover, she hoped, for a little while longer yet, and he would be her friend for ever.
They leaned back in their seats in the aeroplane, and tightened the seat buckles across their laps.
‘I wish,’ Jack said softly, ‘there were more girls in the world like you.’
The engines spluttered and roared, and then they were taxiing.
‘I loved it all,’ Amy said. ‘Being with you, and going to the parties, and the scavenger hunt, and the Prince of Wales, all of it. Who could ask for two happier weeks?’
She had intended to reassure him that she was safe, and playing the game with as much assurance as Jack Roper himself. But he was looking away from her, out of the tiny porthole window as the huddle of airport buildings vanished behind them. There was a folded copy of the London Times lying in his lap.
‘I’m glad, Amy. There may not be so very many more years of parties to come.’
Amy sat very still. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Chancellor Herr Hitler. German rearmament.’
Appleyard Street and its slogans, the threatening march of Capitalism and Comrades against Fascism, seemed to Amy at that moment to belong to another world. The plane was airborne now and climbing steeply. Far below her Amy glimpsed the curve of coast and the blue-green sea with its tiny white fringe as they banked in a slow curve and turned inexorably northwards. A slow, cold shiver touched her spine as the Mediterranean swung and vanished behind them.
The Lagonda was waiting for them at Croydon. Jack’s mood had changed again and he grinned at her as he slid behind the wheel.
‘Shall we drive straight to Chertsey? Why not?’
England seemed lushly green and shady, although the roads were white with dust in the mid-August sun. Even Thorogood House looked merely cool and solid amongst its shrouding evergreens that allowed shafts of sunlight to flicker over the lawns.
Isabel was sitting in a white wicker chair against a high rhododendron wall. Another chair was drawn up close to hers and she was reading aloud to a thin man in a grey woollen shirt. His long, thin grey-flannelled legs stretched out in front of him. Amy was unsurprised by the sight. Isabel and her friend were almost always together.
Isabel saw them coming towards her across the grass and stood up, blushing slightly. She looked pale beneath the pinkness after the tanned St Tropez faces, but she seemed composed enough.
‘Darling.’ The sisters hugged each other. Amy glanced down at the book that Isabel had hastily closed up. It was Kipling, she saw.
‘This is Jack Roper, Bel.’
As they shook hands Amy saw her sister look from Jack’s face to her own. There was a flicker, and the pink flush over Isabel’s cheekbones deepened a little. She saw at once, Amy knew that. Isabel’s vagueness had gone, and sometimes she seemed almost herself again. But she had withdrawn into the protection of Thorogood House, and the world beyond it was a threat that she had no wish to confront, as yet. After her brief home visits she went back to Thorogood House with a relief that was clear to them all.
At Chance, Isabel spent her days sitting quietly reading in her room or in the gardens. When she was at Bruton Street, Bethan brought the baby Peter to visit her. At Adeline’s insistence, Bethan was part of the rigid Ebury Street nursery hierarchy. Peter Jaspert and his mother tolerated her presence, and the visits to Bruton Street were permitted so long as Isabel was carefully watched at all times. They need not have worried. Isabel would play politely with the baby for an hour or so, as if he was the child of a rather distant cousin, and then Bethan would bear him away again, anxiety and incomprehension creasing her kindly face.
Amy herself could just understand that Isabel had cut his baby out of her consciousness in the same way as she had excised Peter Jaspert himself, because it was her only, distorted, hope of survival. But to Bethan it was a mystery. Loyalty to Isabel on the one hand, and on the other to the little boy under her care even though he was a living replica of all the other Jasperts, pulled Bethan painfully in two opposite directions.
Isabel would go happily back to Thorogood House after her visits so that her treatment could continue. For months Amy had known that the reason for her sister’s tranquil acceptance of the grim nursing home was the thin, grey man beside her.
‘How do you do, Mr Roper?’ Isabel said pleasantly. ‘May I introduce Captain William Parfitt?’ She glanced back at the red-brick house as confidently as if she was the mistress of her own house. ‘I’ll ask them to bring us some tea out here, shall I?’
They sat down in a circle in the rhododendron shade.
‘You look so well, Amy,’ Isabel said. ‘So pretty.’
‘Jack and I have been in St Tropez. It was so hot there.’
Isabel shivered a little. She glanced quickly away, her shadowed eyes flicking over the mown grass until they fixed on Captain Parfitt.
Amy bit her lip. It had been a mistake to come here with Jack. A reassurance, selfish, for herself and a cruel statement to make to Isabel. It was the insistent memory of Isabel as her best friend and her equal that made her want to share her happiness with her even now.
The tea tray arrived, white china arranged on a blue linen cloth.
‘It’s been so hot here, too. Hasn’t it, Bill?’
‘Oh, yes. So hot.’
They smiled at each other, and Isabel put a reassuring hand on his sleeve before she turned to pour the tea.
Captain William Parfitt had been so severely shell-shocked that he had been invalided out of his regiment in 1918. For most of the years since then he had been institutionalized. Until Isabel came to Thorogood House he had spent his days sitting alone, shaking, almost completely mute. Now, companionably, they spent their days together. Bill Parfitt followed Isabel everywhere.
He could talk again, but he turned to Isabel for confirmation of every word. And Isabel was proud and protective of him. Sometimes, even now, Bill’s eyes would fill with tears. Isabel would simply take his hand and wait until his face was in control again. They read aloud to one another and walked in slow circuits between the dank evergreens.
Now they sat side by side across the tea-table facing Amy and Jack. The talk moved on from the hot weather to cricket, and Larwood’s bodyline bowling that was causing a storm in Australia.
‘Damned un-un-un … unsporting,’ said Bill Parfitt and Isabel nodded her encouragement.
‘Oh, I don’t know.’ Jack was reasonable. ‘The man’s a fine cricketer.’
The two men plunged into discussion, and animation began to shine in Bill Parfitt’s thin face. Isabel watched him for a moment, and then turned a smile of gratitude on Amy that was startling in its warmth and naturalness.
‘Bill misses the chance to talk about cricket to someone who understands it. I don’t, although I try for Bill’s sake.’
So Jack was accepted, in spite of the threatening, unthinkable implications that surrounded him, because he could talk to Bill. Amy smiled back, but anxiety nagged at her.
They sat talking mildly for another hour.