routine plans failed to calm her nerves. Amy was still shaking, and the thought of Isabel running desperately stayed obstinately with her. Instead of heading for the bathroom Amy went quickly to Moira O’Hara’s door and tapped urgently.
‘Dear Lord,’ she heard Moira murmuring. ‘Is that you, Lovell? Do you have any idea what the time is?’
Her friend came shuffling to the door and opened it, blinking.
‘Moira, will you do something for me? Will you tell Blaine that I’m sick and can’t come on this morning?’
‘Are you ill? You look white enough.’
‘No. I’m worried about my sister. I want to go home and see her. Will you tell Blaine?’
Moira looked doubtful. ‘Sure I will, but they’ll come down here and check on you, you know. If they find you out it’ll be big trouble.’
‘I’ll risk it. I might be back before they notice I’m gone.’
Amy ran back to her room and pulled on her clothes. To fool the porter in his cubicle by the front door into thinking she was simply going on duty early, she wrapped her nurse’s cape around her and slipped out of the hostel. The street was dark and deserted, with the few lit-up hospital windows reflected icily in the puddles. The air tasted raw and cold, with a sour lacing of smoke and the dustbins in the yard at the side of the hospital. Amy glanced up and down. There was no hope of a taxi, of course, and she thought that it was probably much too early for a bus. Grateful for the heavy warmth of her cape, she pulled it around her and began to walk north towards the river.
By the time she reached Lambeth Bridge her feet were soaked and she was chilled through by the raw November air. But on the corner of Marsham Street a cab stopped right beside her and disgorged two couples in evening clothes. One of the women, in a silver lamé dress with a little fur shoulder cape, stumbled and the two men caught her, laughing. Amy ran past them, waving to the driver. He stared doubtfully at her nurse’s cape and her damp hair loose and clinging to her face.
‘I said Ebury Street. At once,’ Army repeated sharply. Hearing the authority in her voice, the driver jerked his head to motion her into the cigar-reeking interior.
The house in Ebury Street seemed to be in forbidding, total darkness but as Amy came up to the area railings she saw a light in the basement kitchen window. She ran down the area steps and, through the half-drawn curtains, she saw that it was Bethan inside, sitting alone at the square scrubbed table. Her face was buried in her hands. Bethan’s head jerked up in fright and Amy saw the tears.
The anxiety tightened its grip within her.
‘Bethan. It’s me. Let me in, will you?’
A second later the area door swung open and the two women stood facing each other in the tradesmen’s lobby.
‘Oh, Miss Amy, thank God.’
‘What’s happened?’
‘He’s locked her in. Why should she try to hurt him? The little mite was asleep. But her poor, white face, Amy. She didn’t know what she was doing …’
Bethan’s incoherence was enough to tell Amy that something was terribly wrong. She fought against the infectious panic and gripped Bethan’s arm firmly to steer her back into the kitchen. She made her sit down and drew her own chair up so that they sat knee to knee.
‘Now. Tell me slowly.’
‘I didn’t hear anything. The nurse woke me, with the baby in her arms. She said … she said that Isabel had tried to kill him. By smothering him with a blanket. She said that she heard her, and saw her.’
‘That can’t be true.’ But even as she said it, Amy knew that it could be. Isabel.
‘I saw her too. She didn’t look like our Isabel at all. She was as white as death, and her eyes stared like stones. She said something like she wanted to stop the noise. But he was asleep, Amy. There wasn’t a whisper of noise.’
Amy stood up. Somehow, she discovered, the months of training on the wards had given her a kind of quick-thinking calm. It helped her to suppress the pity and horror welling inside her and ask levelly, ‘Where’s Isabel now?’
‘In her room. Mr Jaspert locked her in, he wouldn’t let me be with her. He said that she should be locked up. He’s going to bring the doctors in in the morning.’
They both looked up at the white-faced kitchen clock. Not quite six a.m. ‘He said that she was mad, Amy …’
‘She’s ill, that’s all, and she needs help. We’ll get it for her.’ Amy was already at the door, wrapping the anonymity of her dark cape around her.
‘Where are you going?’
‘To Bruton Street, to get my mother. We’ll come back and take Isabel away with us.’
Outside it had begun to rain, and it was at least another hour before the beginning of the winter dawn. Incredibly, or so it seemed to Amy, another taxi was unloading a party of late revellers. One of them looked a little like Johnny Guild, and she smiled bitterly at the remoteness of that other world now. The taxi swept her on through the streets that were already beginning to come alive with delivery boys and shop workers, and deposited her on the steps of Bruton Street. Amy hadn’t thought of bringing her own key and it took prolonged ringing to summon a faintly dishevelled footman to open the huge door.
‘Good morning, Miss Amy, ah, Miss Lovell.’
Amy brushed past him and into the hallway. ‘Is Lady Lovell at home?’
‘Yes, I believe so, miss. Ah, Parker usually takes up her tray at nine-thirty.’
Amy was taking the steps of the great curving stairway two at a time. She ran under the glass dome and past the ranks of portraits to her mother’s suite. Her private sitting-room was empty, but there were two glasses on a little tray beside the dead fire. In her dressing-room one of the mirrored doors along its length had swung open to reveal the skeletal shoulders of dresses on their padded hangers. The bedroom door was closed. There wasn’t a thought in Amy’s head except Isabel, and taking Adeline to her as quickly as possible. Amy knocked lightly on the door and pushed it open at once, intending to tiptoe in and wake her mother gently. Her first confused sight was of a man’s forearm forcibly pinning Adeline against the pale peach bedcovers. She saw black hair on the pillow, and the glowing red-brown of her mother’s tangled with it.
As Amy realized that her mother was asleep in a man’s arms, Adeline woke up and stared at her. Her blue eyes were clouded with sleep at first, and then they snapped open wide. For the first time in Amy’s life, she saw her mother at a loss. The man beside her stirred and murmured something, and then he was looking at Amy too, frozen into immobility.
If it hadn’t been for her anxiety for Isabel, Amy might almost have laughed. It was an absurd role to find herself in, to be the innocent daughter discovering her mother in bed with a lover. And yet. Although she had known for years that Adeline had lovers, to be so brutally confronted with it shocked her. Amy took a faltering step backwards, pulling her cape up around her throat as if she was the naked one. It didn’t take long for Adeline to collect herself.
‘You know, darling,’ she drawled, ‘it’s never advisable to burst into people’s bedrooms unannounced. Or is the house on fire?’
‘It’s Isabel,’ Amy blurted. ‘She’s ill. I came to get you.’
‘I see.’ Adeline was sitting up, drawing the covers around her smooth, creamy-pale shoulders. ‘If you’ll go back to your room, darling, and ring for some tea, I’ll join you in a tiny tick.’
She came almost immediately, wrapped in a slither of pale peach silk that fell around her like sculpted marble. She had tied back her hair with a peach satin ribbon, and her skin glowed.
Does sex make you feel wonderful as well as looking it? Amy wondered, with an odd, wild tinge of bitterness.
‘Tell