could make her forget everything, as always, when he lay beside her. But afterwards, when he had padded back to his own room, Amy lay staring up into the darkness, feeling the melancholy gathering around her.
On Boxing Day, almost the whole of the party went off to the local meet. Jack had been mounted by Gerald on a big, nervy bay.
‘At least the fellow can handle a horse,’ Lord Lovell had muttered. ‘I’ve never seen that he’s good for anything much else except driving damned noisy cars.’
Jack had looked more handsome than ever under the black brim of his top hat. He bent down to kiss Amy on the cheek as the cavalcade moved away. She smelt the familiar scent of saddle soap and horses with a quick lift of excitement, but somehow she didn’t have the heart to ride out herself today.
Instead she put on her boots, and the scarf that Helen had knitted for her two years ago, and set off to walk across the park.
There had been a heavy frost, and the grass was crackling white as she walked away from the house and under the branches of the huge cedar tree. In the circle of its shelter the grass showed its thin winter colouring. Amy shivered, and her breath hung in front of her in a misty plume. The cold was biting and she began to walk faster in an effort to keep warm. She took the neat gravelled walk beside the wide curving herbaceous bed that was the glory of the gardens in summertime. The earth was bare now, spiked here and there with frost-blackened stalks. The gardeners had industriously cut everything back, and carried the debris away to bonfires and compost heaps. There was nothing here to remind her of the languid, scented warmth of summertime. Amy went on walking, head down against the cold, thinking. She followed the gravelled walk beyond the grey stone wall of the gardens and down the ridge towards the little huddle of houses at the village gates. The smoke from one of the chimneys made a blue-grey smudge against the colourless sky.
The high gates were locked, and the village street beyond them was deserted except for a tabby cat lifting its paws off the frosty stones. Amy turned around again and glanced at the little houses. Behind the trim curtains the men were at home with their families, enjoying their Christmas together. The estate office was locked too. Peering through the window she saw a calendar on the green wall and Mr Mackintosh’s bare wooden desk.
She was thinking about Nick Penry.
In the months since he had written to her, she realized, she had almost forgotten him. In her hours off the wards there had been Jack, and the parties and dancing and champagne bottles clinking in their silver buckets, and the nights when she had submerged herself in him and forgotten the whole world.
Now, suddenly, Nick Penry was as clear in her mind again as if he was standing beside her. Amy swung around, half-expecting to see him watching her. But there were only the blank eyes of the office windows, and she knew each of the families who lived behind the curtains of the others. She didn’t even know for sure whether Nick had come to work at Chance at all, and she had never bothered to find out.
Amy felt that the cold was cutting right through her and into her bones. As she stood hesitating, remembering Nick’s face and quiet voice and the well-shaped hands with the livid blue scars, one of the cottage doors opened. She started with pleasure, a smile of greeting already beginning, and then saw that of course it was only Mrs Wathen, the gamekeeper’s wife.
‘Good morning, Miss Amy. Merry Christmas to you. Would you like to come indoors now for a cup of something warm? You look half-starved out there.’
The smile was fading into disappointment, and Amy forced it politely back again. ‘Merry Christmas to you too, Mrs Wathen. I came out for a walk, but it’s much colder than I thought. I think I’ll just walk straight back up to the house, thank you very much.’
With the smile that she didn’t feel, Amy retraced her steps, following the marks that her feet had made in the frost. Sadness and a sense of emptiness that she couldn’t have explained folded around her. There was an image of Nantlas in her head, vivid from what Nick and Bethan had told her as if she had seen it all herself. It stayed with her all day, and it was still there when the riders came crowding back, exhilarated and red-cheeked from the gallop.
‘We killed over at Collyer’s Copse,’ Gerald announced.
‘You should have come,’ Jack smiled at her. His hands were wrapped gratefully around a brandy glass. ‘You look sad. Why’s that?’
Suddenly Amy wanted to tell him.
She wanted to talk about Helen Pearce in the desolate graveyard beside the railway line, and about Nick’s handicapped son in Nantlas, and the men she had seen swinging bravely up Park Lane with their lamps at their belts and their worn-out boots. And then she could have told him about the day she went back through the little Lambeth streets to Mag’s, looking for Freda and Jim, only to find that Mag had moved away and taken the children with her, leaving no address. People like Mag often moved away and were swallowed up, untraceable. Amy knew that. Then she could have described the Royal Lambeth to Jack and the people who came in and struggled and died in the high iron beds, night after night. But he had never asked her about that. Never, except to find out when she would be free again to come with him to yet another party. It was a part of her life, a half of her that was just as important, but it might never have existed.
Amy looked back into Jack’s level, bright blue eyes and knew that she would never talk to him about any of those things.
Jack believed in living and enjoyment and in finding happiness wherever possible, just as her mother did. And he was wrong about Amy herself, because half of her wasn’t like Adeline at all.
‘I do feel sad,’ she said. The hollowness around her was vast and frightening. She had lost her sense of happy unity with Jack. She liked him still, but she knew with sad clarity that she wasn’t in love with him any longer.
‘Don’t,’ he said cheerfully. ‘There isn’t any need. Listen, Adeline’s got a scheme for this evening …’
Stiffly, Amy turned away. ‘I don’t think I want to,’ she said.
She was remembering Nick Penry again, and wondering whether he was still here among the trees and meadows of Chance.
It was a month later that Jack told her he was going back to New York.
‘There are some things I have to see to there,’ he said, with an expression of faint distaste. Just as he never spoke of Amy’s work, he never mentioned his own business either. It was better, Amy had discovered, not to enquire too closely into how he had amassed his fortune.
There had been no change in their relationship, and Amy liked him just as much as she had always done. But on one or two of her free evenings lately Jack had not been there. Without having to ask she knew, as she had guessed would happen some day, that he had found someone who did not have to get up at dawn to be on duty at six a.m., and who didn’t yawn with tiredness just as an evening was fizzing to its high point. Amy didn’t know if the new somebody was American and so made New York important again, and she didn’t ask that either.
She simply said, with perfect truth, ‘I’ll miss you, Jack. Life will be very grey without you.’
‘I’ll miss you too,’ he said, and tilted her chin up so that he could kiss her.
Amy knew that even her mouth tasted sad, and she thought back regretfully to the summer when she had felt strong enough to take on the whole world.
Jack was to sail on the Mauritania at the end of February. On their last night together he took Amy to Ondine’s again. The decorations had grown endearingly familiar, and Madame Ondine greeted Amy as a favoured regular.
‘Such a crowd in tonight, darling. They haven’t had quite enough for me to take a firm line with them, but I will if it goes a single step further. I’d move your table if I could, but there isn’t a cranny anywhere else.’
There was a big group of a dozen people at the table next to theirs, and several pushed-back chairs revealed that more of the party were in the throng on the dance floor.
Jack