After that, time was confusion. Night and day came at unpredictable intervals, and her head and chest hurt unbearably. Once or twice Amy woke up and saw Bethan knitting at her bedside. It convinced her that she was a little girl again, and she turned her head on the pillow towards Isabel. She called for her, and then cried when she wouldn’t come.
Then, one morning, she woke up and found herself in her own room at Bruton Street. A nurse she didn’t recognize was opening the curtains on a fresh, pale blue summer sky.
‘Hello, dear,’ the nurse said brightly. ‘Are we feeling ourself this morning?’ She took Amy’s hand to feel her pulse. Amy tried to struggle upright, and felt her physical weakness.
‘What is the matter with me?’
‘Nothing that won’t mend. Don’t worry yourself. Mr Hardwicke will be in later to see you.’
Sure enough, the family doctor came with his leather bag and a watch chain looped across his waistcoat front. For a moment Amy was disoriented again, wondering if she was still a little girl with measles, and everything else no more than a dream.
‘What’s the matter with me?’ she repeated, hearing weak petulance in her voice.
‘Mhmm. Mhmm.’ Mr Hardwicke was examining her. He took the stethoscope out of his ears. ‘Well now. You’ve had a nasty bout of influenza. I think you were a little rundown before it, so it laid you particularly low. There was a touch of chest infection which worried us all for a day or two as well, but I think you’ve got the better of that now. You’ll be up and about in no time. Nurse?’
He was talking to the attendant who had woken her up, but Amy felt herself jump automatically to attention at the summons. She laughed weakly, with a touch of hysteria.
‘That’s it,’ the doctor said benignly. ‘Soon be your old cheerful self.’
After Mr Hardwicke came Adeline, perfumed and jewelled and like a breath of summer in the sickroom.
‘Have I been very ill?’ Amy asked in bewilderment. Adeline put her arms round her to hide her face for a moment. When she had it under control again she answered, ‘My darling, for twenty-four hours at death’s door. I actually went down to St Margaret’s and said a prayer. Can you imagine? Me?’
Amy lay back against the pillows. The room was light and bright, washed with pale sunshine. The sun touched her pictures and the tattered covers of her girlhood books and the flowers, and shone on her mother’s dark red hair. Outside were the windows of the houses opposite, clear sky, and the rumble of London. The world was beautiful. She felt calm, and warm, and glad to be in it.
It was two weeks before Amy was well enough to go to Chance. When the day came she tottered down the stairs, supported by Mr Glass and one of the footmen. Adeline sailed ahead to where her chauffeur was waiting with the Bentley. They lowered Amy into her seat, and wrapped the fur rugs around her legs as gently as if she might break.
‘I can manage,’ she protested, half-laughing. ‘And it’s June. I don’t need rugs.’
‘Don’t argue,’ Adeline said.
Chance soothed her as it hadn’t done for years.
As the long summer days began to slip past Amy got better by steady leaps. She had been recuperating for almost a week when the letter came from the Royal Lambeth. She had passed. She was almost at the bottom of the list, but she had passed. She was a State Registered Nurse at last. Amy tucked the letter into the pocket of her dress. It was completely unexpected because she had been so certain she had failed, and the good news gave her more quiet pleasure than anything since Jack’s time. Feeling the slight, stiff crackle of it as she walked, Amy wandered through the sunlit house. For no particular reason her feet led her down the long carpeted corridor to the carved double doors that closed off the orangery.
Thinking of Richard and Tony she slipped inside, her soft shoes noiseless on the marble floor. The morning sun slanted obliquely through the glass roof and the tangle of leaves and strange blossoms cast distorted shadows over the statues in the wall niches. The heat was almost tropical, and it drew the scent from the dampened earth and from the throats of the brilliant flowers.
Amy sat down on the seat at the end and let the warmth wrap its soothing languor around her. Then she heard water dripping and looked up to see one of the gardeners working. He was bent intently over an orchid, feeling the earth with his fingers. Amy saw that he was bare-armed and bare-throated in the heat.
She knew the shape of his head, and the way that he stooped, even in the high orangery, as if he was too used to cramped places.
She knew that the hands stroking the petals of the orchid were marked with blue scars.
It was Nick Penry.
In the same instant, Nick looked up and saw her. A girl with dark red hair cut short around a thinner, paler face than he remembered. The blue-green eyes were the same, watching him, unstartled.
Nick put down his watering-can and half-straightened, on the point of greeting her like a friend. As he moved, one of the greenfinches fluttered noisily from the fronds of the tallest palm and began to peck at the scatter of crumbs that he brought in every day for them. No one but the gardeners ever came to the orangery, and he had welcomed the birds’ company. Now the sound reminded him of where he was. He turned the warm flash of recognition into a distant nod, and stooped to his work once more. Amy went to him, brushing the glossy leaves aside impatiently. She stood beside him, forcing him by her closeness to look up and acknowledge her again.
‘Hello,’ she said quietly. ‘Don’t you remember me?’
He remembered her. He remembered her with perfect clarity from the soft silence of her house in Bruton Street, and since he had come to Chance he had glimpsed her again, even watching for her with a kind of perverse fascination. He had seen her walking slowly on the terraces with her father, and once riding a big brown horse, her hair in a net under her peaked cap. He had seen her last Christmas, when he had brought a barrowload of red-berried holly up to decorate the hall for the servants’ party. She had been kneeling under the half-dressed tree, holding up a silver star. The last time had been on Boxing Day, standing in the middle of a knot of wheeling horses whose breath clouded the air. A man in white breeches with a top hat shading his handsome face had leaned down from his saddle to kiss her on the mouth. Nick had turned sharply away into the emptiness of his Christmas holiday.
‘You look different,’ he said defensively.
‘I look better than I did.’ Suddenly she was grinning at him. ‘I’ve been ill. I’ve been sent home to recuperate. I don’t quite know what to do with myself, actually.’
After the surprise of seeing her Nick was in possession of himself again. He was standing politely waiting for her to finish, the picture of a deferential servant. Amy heard as clearly as if he had said it aloud his ironic Will that be all, ma’am? She felt a slow, red flush spreading over her cheeks. ‘What are you doing?’ she asked, to cover herself.
‘Working.’
The single word held all the weight of difference between them. The work he had needed so desperately, and she had held in the palm of her hand. The need to go on at it, whatever came, while Amy rested and recovered. The difference, again.
‘Do you like it here?’ she asked. She sounded like Royalty visiting a hospital, she thought, or her mother gracing a local church fête.
‘I like the flowers.’
Amy turned round in surprise. Nick was bending over the cream and gold petals of the orchid again, his thumb just touching the bloom of the inner lip.
‘What’s that one?’ she asked, clinging to the hope of a safe topic.
‘Don’t you know?’ His dark eyebrows went up, mocking