letting her mother stroke her hair as if she was a girl, conscious of the unfamiliarity of being on the brink of happiness.
‘Thank you,’ she whispered.
Amy waited all through the next day, refusing to admit her anxiety, but refusing also to leave the house in case she missed him. The telephone rang incessantly, but always for Adeline or Richard.
At six o’clock she was sitting in the library leafing unseeingly through the Illustrated London News. She had stared irritably a dozen times at the silent telephone on the table beside her, but when it rang at last she jumped like a rabbit.
‘Amy Lovell speaking.’
‘Shall we say eight o’clock?’ he asked without preamble.
‘Eight-thirty,’ she said crisply, and hung up smiling.
She was ready for something to happen.
No matter what.
Within five days, Amy was Jack Roper’s mistress.
From the first evening they spent together, a pattern was set for what Amy came to think of as Jack’s time. He lifted her out of the world of the Royal Lambeth and introduced her to another, so remote from it that it might have belonged to another universe.
On the first evening he came in his bright scarlet Lagonda and drove her to an impeccably proper dinner at the Savoy, just as Johnny Guild might have done. But when they had eaten and his cigar smoke was curling around them, he produced a midnight-blue velvet box from his pocket and slid it across the table towards her.
‘Happy birthday,’ he said.
Inside, nestled in the white satin folds, were the diamond earrings. Amy lifted one and cradled it in the palm of her hand. The stones shone back at her, a thousand facets of light in their white-gold settings. Then she looked up to see Jack watching her, with one slightly raised eyebrow. In the soft lighting he looked tough, and handsome. He was stroking the side of his jaw, meditatively, with his thumb. Amy realized that she wanted him to stroke her too, and she looked down again at the diamonds in her hand so that he wouldn’t read it too clearly in her eyes.
‘Do polite manners dictate that I should say Oh, Jack, I couldn’t possibly … I don’t want to. They’re so beautiful.’
She looked up again and they both laughed.
‘If you do, I’ll take them away again.’ He reached out for the earrings, handling them like trinkets. ‘May I?’ Gently, touching the softness of her ear lobes first, he fixed the earrings in place. Then he turned her chin with his forefinger so that he could look at her, and traced the line of her neck down into the hollow of her collarbone.
Clavicle, Amy recited to herself with blind irrelevance as all her bones, with all the names she had learned for them in another world, melted within her.
‘You are very beautiful,’ Jack said softly. ‘I was right about the diamonds. And now, do you think we should go on to Ondine’s? Would you like that?’
‘Yes,’ Amy said. ‘I’ve never been.’ But she had heard of it, and she was impressed, even though from what she already knew of Jack Roper it was inevitable that he would be a member. Ondine’s was the nightclub for the innermost of London’s circles, not just for the titled and the very rich, although many of its members were both. The clever and the famous, in almost any field, so long as they were fashionable, might also be invited to join. Ondine’s had the reputation of being both smart and raffish, lavish and louche at the same time as rigidly exclusive. And she knew too that the very grandest nightclub patron of all made regular appearances at Ondine’s.
Jack drove the Lagonda to Mayfair at breakneck speed.
‘Why so fast?’ Amy gasped, and he turned to grin at her, shouting over the engine’s roar.
‘Bad habits die hard. In my day I was an amateur racing driver. Not any more, sadly. Reactions too slow, now.’ The street lights streaked overhead and then they swerved and the big headlamps cut through the dimness of a deserted side street. ‘Didn’t you know? Hasn’t Adeline told you anything about me?’
A touch of vanity, there, Amy thought. ‘I’d never heard of you until the day before yesterday.’
‘I don’t know whether or not to be flattered by that.’
She was profoundly relieved when the Lagonda drew up at the bland façade that fronted Ondine’s. The little street was solidly lined with cars. Jack took her arm and led her in through the anonymous front door.
The dance floor and the packed tables that surrounded it were in the basement, and must have extended through the cellars of several houses on either side. As they came down the steps into the club, the talk, the music and the décor assailed Amy simultaneously. The room was solid with people and the décor was Egyptian as Egypt had never been. The doorways and panels around the walls were obelisk-shaped, and the negro band, in glittering priests’ robes, was playing on a dais surrounded by silver pyramids. On the wall opposite Amy was a huge, blindly staring reproduction of the mask of Tutankhamun.
‘It aims to be exotic but is in fact perfectly cosy,’ Jack murmured beside her.
The club’s owner saw Jack as soon as he reached the bottom step, and undulated forward to greet him. Ondine was wearing a sheath of glittering green, and her eyes were made up to echo the stare of Tutankhamun over her head. Even though her dress was only just held up over her breasts by a huge scarab pin, Ondine was rumoured to be a man.
Jack kissed her on both cheeks.
‘Zhack Ropaire, chéri. You are at ze table tonight?’
‘Madame Ondine. Yes, if you please.’
Ondine guided them to the booths against the wall away from the band, where round tables and red velvet chairs were separated by more pyramids. Jack held out one of four empty chairs in the most secluded of the booths, and Amy sat down. A moment or two later champagne in an ice-bucket materialized beside them. Jack’s head bent and almost touched hers as he gossiped amiably about the dancers revolving in front of them. Amy knew one or two of the faces from her mother’s drawing room, others from the newspapers, but most of them were strangers. As she watched she had the feeling that this was a stratum of society that would be as interesting as the debutante dances of Berkeley Square had been dull.
Amy was excited, alive with every fibre of herself, and more wide awake than she had felt for months.
‘Couldn’t we dance?’ she asked Jack. It would be an added pleasure to feel his arm around her, and the weight of his hand in the small of her back.
‘Would you mind if we go on sitting here for a moment?’ he answered. Jack was glancing at his watch with the first hint of anxiety she had glimpsed in him. He was waiting for something.
‘Of course not,’ Amy murmured. She drank her champagne, and watched the kaleidoscope turning in front of her.
A moment or two later Amy felt rather than heard the ripple that washed through the room. It was like a little wave that gathered its own momentum into a crest before breaking away into whispers of foam around the room. And when she did look to see where it had come from, it was the woman of the couple approaching their table that she noticed first. She was tall and stately, with dark hair drawn back in smooth waves from the centre. She had full, reddened lips and dark eyes, and she was wearing a perfectly simple dress of gleaming topaz satin. It was Thelma, Lady Furness, one of the celebrated Morgan twins. The man at her shoulder was the Prince of Wales.
Jack Roper stood up and bowed and Amy stumbled to her feet beside him.
‘Good evening, Sir. Thelma, how lovely you always are.’ Jack took Amy’s hand. His was firm and dry and perfectly cool, unlike her own.
‘Sir, may I introduce