and her family’s sacrifices, that suddenly seemed frivolous and wasteful. She shook herself in irritation and turned to listen to Helen again. The other girl’s face was brighter and more animated now.
‘It’s strange to be back here, after so much. And in this weird house …’
‘Isn’t it?’ Chloe grinned at her.
‘… I’d only been in the house an hour before Oliver Mortimore appeared, kissed me, and asked me to tea on Friday.’
‘Who’s that?’
Helen’s smile transformed her face and the grey eyes shone with amusement in the absence of the shadows. She had no idea why she was talking like this to Chloe, but it felt perfectly natural.
‘Oh, a bright star in the local firmament. Rich, titled, amusing, and the most beautiful young man you ever saw.’
‘Love the sound of it,’ said Chloe, ‘but does such a sum of perfection do anything as ordinary as have tea?’
The sound of their laughter reached Rose as she slid across the dark hallway below, and it brought a flicker of a satisfied smiled to her broad face.
‘Now I’m sitting here drinking champagne and talking to you as if I’ve always known you,’ Helen went on. ‘Odd, isn’t it? It feels a long way from home, too, and that isn’t fair.’ The sadness flooded back into her face.
‘Listen to me, Helen,’ Chloe said firmly. ‘It would be wrong to destroy the value of being back here by immersing yourself in guilt and grief. That would make your family’s sacrifice useless, wouldn’t it? You can’t forget your father’s death – how could you? – and you shouldn’t try. But you can find your own strength to carry on positively, where he couldn’t.’ Chloe broke off and bit her lip. Her face reddened as she met Helen’s serious straight gaze. ‘I don’t know why I’m preaching at you,’ Chloe said uncomfortably, ‘particularly when I’ve got the feeling that there are several things for me to learn myself before too long.’
The silence stretched on for a second or two before Helen broke it. ‘You’re right, though. Thank you, Chloe. Tea on Friday with Oliver,’ she added lightly. ‘I’ll have to be profoundly positive to cope with that. Will you … do you think you could lend me something beautiful to wear?’
There was relief in Chloe’s face as she responded warmly, ‘With pleasure. To seal the deal, let’s go out and eat now – I’m ravenous. You tell me where’s good, and I’ll treat you. Okay?’
‘Sounds wonderful.’
The two girls left Follies House together and climbed the cold, slippery steps up to the bridge. Inside her Renault, Chloe revved the engine decisively and glanced at Helen’s profile beside her. ‘Well then, Oxford, here we come,’ she murmured into the icy air.
On Friday afternoon Helen slipped through the great wooden gates of Christ Church and crossed to the porter’s glassed-in box, incongruously snug under the splendour of Wren’s tower.
‘Oliver Mortimore’s rooms, please?’ she asked, remembering that Oliver had made no mention of where he was to be found. Perhaps he just assumed that everybody knew.
‘Canterbury Quad, Miss,’ said the porter, pointing, and gave her a staircase and room number. Following his directions Helen came out into the sunlight in Tom Quad. For a moment, nervous but unwilling to admit to herself that a mere tea-party could intimidate her, she stood to admire the view. Cardinal Wolsey’s great unfinished quadrangle seemed to capture and intensify the Oxford light. The gold of late autumn afternoon sunshine was reflected from the deeper gold stone, the rows of leaded windows, and the flat face of the water in the fountain basin. The space seemed immense and airy, yet the proportions made it intimate, too. The only sounds, magnified in the stillness, were the faint splash of water spouting from the statue of Mercury, and the whirr of cameras belonging to a distant group of Japanese tourists. Ahead of her the smooth green lawns rolled away to encircle the fountain and its fringe of lily pads. An undergraduate in a fluttering black scholar’s gown brushed past Helen and it occurred to her that, tourists apart, this scene must be almost unchanged since the sixteenth century.
Then in a babble of noise a crowd of jostling people emerged from one of the doorways and simultaneously a blare of music burst from an upstairs window. Helen jerked herself back into the present and walked on towards whatever awaited her in Oliver’s rooms.
She found Canterbury Quad without difficulty. Built more than two hundred years after Tom Quad, it still looked to Helen profoundly ancient and magnificent as she stared up at its classical proportions. She was used to her own College, of which the oldest parts were late nineteenth century, and to its comfortable air of being a random collection of reasonably well-preserved outbuildings to something much more important.
Oliver’s rooms were on the first floor of the central building. Helen read the white-painted names on the board in his staircase doorway: Mr G.R.S. Sykes, Lord Oliver Mortimore, Mr. A.H. Pennington. At the top of the stone staircase she came to Oliver’s outer door, open, and then tapped lightly on the inner one.
‘Cm’in,’ someone shouted. Helen squared her shoulders inside the vivid scarlet of Chloe’s brief sweater dress, glanced down briefly at what felt like far too much leg which it left on show, and went inside.
The room seemed at first sight to be uncomfortably full of people, all of them women. The atmosphere was charged with smoke and the sound of laughter and clamouring, insistent talk.
‘… all through the Vac, darling. Not just in London, but in Italy as well …’
‘… so I told him to stuff it. No, honestly, he was such a swine …’
‘… Mummy bought it in the end, it was so funny …’
Everyone seemed to know everyone else very well indeed. Helen’s first impulse was to turn and run, but then she saw Oliver refilling someone’s glass. There was no sign anywhere, Helen realised, of a teacup or a piece of buttered toast. The carpet was cluttered with glasses and ashtrays.
‘Hello,’ Oliver said beside her, surprising her again by his height. His kiss, quickly brushing her mouth, surprised her less this time but had no less of an effect. Oliver took her hand and helped her to pick her way through the sprawled legs and gossiping bodies. ‘You look very pretty,’ he told her casually. ‘Red suits you almost as much as smiling.’ A blonde girl with a sulky face jerked her head up to look at Helen as she passed. There was a sofa in the corner, occupied by yet another pair of girls. Oliver eased her down between them, and they made room for her reluctantly.
‘You must know Fiona? No? And Flora? Well then, now’s your chance. This is Helen, and this … is … Helen’s drink.’ Oliver handed her a glass, winked, and went away.
Two surprised faces stared at Helen. Politely, but insistently, with their questions, they tried to find out who Helen was and where she fitted in. It gave Helen a kind of half-satisfaction to demonstrate that she didn’t fit in anywhere, but once that was done the girls went back to their conversation, leaning across her in their animated talk. Helen wriggled back against the cushions to look at the rest of the room.
It wasn’t all girls, she saw now. Three or four young men, in jeans and sweaters like Oliver, lounged among the more carefully turned-out girls. The striking exception was a dark, confident-looking man with a high-bridged nose and long hands that he used to make incisive gestures as he talked. He seemed
