friendly complicity. Helen guessed at once that he didn’t belong here either, but he was making himself ten times more at home than Helen herself. After a moment he came over to her and helped her up from her captivity between Flora and Fiona.
‘More room on the window seat,’ he grinned at her. ‘I’m Tom Hart.’
Expertly he ensconced them on the cushioned seat where they were half hidden from the rest of the room by loops of curtains.
‘Well?’ he went on, lighting himself a cigarette. Helen shook her head at the held-out pack. He sounded American, she thought. What was he doing here?
‘Helen Brown,’ she told him, and to forestall a repeat of her interview with Fiona and Flora she added, ‘I don’t know Oliver from London, or from Gloucestershire either. I’m not a friend of Annabel, whoever she is, nor of any of these people.’ Helen’s small, firm chin jerked towards the chattering roomful and Tom grinned at her again. ‘I met Oliver once, at Follies House, which is where I live, and he asked me to tea. God knows why, now I come to be here.’
She lifted her glass to Tom and took a gulp of the cold white wine.
‘Quite,’ said Tom equably. ‘But I think that one might as well make the best of Oliver’s excellent Alsace, now that one is here. Noll!’ he shouted, and Oliver drifted over to refill their glasses.
‘Take good care of her,’ he told Tom smoothly when he saw Helen behind her half of curtain. ‘I shall be needing her as soon as all the rabble has gone.’
Tom ignored him. ‘Follies?’ he asked her. ‘Where Frances was going to live?’
Helen nodded, and Tom’s face set harder for a moment. ‘I miss her,’ he said. ‘She’s very unlucky, and very helpless.’
Helen knew from that moment that she and Tom would be friends.
‘Mmmmm.’ Tom was looking harder at Helen now. ‘D’you act at all?’ He turned her face to the light and stared a little too deeply into the grey eyes.
‘Act?’ Helen blinked and caught herself blushing. ‘No, not at all. I couldn’t. Far too inhibited.’
‘Pity. I’m directing the OUDS major next term. As You Like It, you know. I thought you might like to audition for me.’
‘No, thanks.’ Helen shuddered at the idea. ‘But I’ll come along and see it. Will that do?’
Her turn had come, she thought, to ask questions. ‘You’re American, aren’t you? Are you studying here?’
Tom Hart laughed at the idea. ‘Hell, no. Well, not in the conventional way. I’m a theatre director, and I’m spending a year or so at the Playhouse here. Purely in an assistant capacity, you understand, as they keep reminding me. My old man’s in the theatre in New York. Management.’ Something flickered in Tom’s face, as if a disagreeable memory had bothered him for a moment, before he went on. ‘I needed some time away from home, before deciding what to do for real, so here I am. One of my projects now is this students’ Shakespeare. As a matter of fact, in a brilliant piece of innovative casting, Oliver is to be my Orlando.’ Tom confidently waved away Helen’s start of surprise. ‘You’d be amazed. He moves beautifully, and he has a real unaffected feel for the verse. You may think he’s a mere aristocratic thicko, with a flair for nothing more taxing than horses and dogs, but you’d be wrong.’
Helen’s gaze travelled from Oliver, tall and tousled in the middle of his friends, and back to Tom. There was something in the way that the American looked at Oliver, with both fascination and a kind of unwilling admiration, that puzzled her.
‘Anyway,’ Tom went on quickly, aware that Helen was watching him, ‘Orlando himself isn’t a character endowed with a great deal of brain. No, Rosalind’s the important one, and I can’t find the right girl anywhere. I was hoping I might spot someone here amongst Noll’s grand friends, but they’re all far too old already. Look at them.’ He waved his hand expressively across the room. ‘Twenty years old and experienced enough for forty. I need someone fresh, and full of innocence, yet with that sexy edge of natural cleverness and the beginnings of maturity. A bit like you. But not really like you,’ he added, with beguiling frankness.
‘Thank goodness.’ Helen smiled back at him.
Oliver was seeing people to the door. There was a flurry of kissing and hand-waving, then when Oliver turned back into the room Helen saw the sulky blonde girl jump up and push her arm through his. There was a possessive glow in her face and Helen thought, at once, Of course he would have someone. The little, frivolous flame of excitement that she had been shielding went out immediately. The blonde girl tugged Oliver’s head down to hers and kissed his ear, then let him go with a tiny push.
Tom stood up and pushed his hands deep into this pockets. ‘Time I was off,’ he told Helen. ‘Sure you won’t audition for me?’
Helen shook her head. ‘No. I’d be no good. I’m too busy, anyway. I have to work.’
Tom stared at her for a moment. ‘Jesus, you can’t work all the time. That’d be very dull.’
Helen was aware of a prickle of annoyance. She felt that this dark, forceful man was pushing her in some way and she recoiled from the idea.
‘I am dull,’ she told him dismissively.
Tom’s face remained serious but there was an underlying humorousness in it that threatened to break out at any minute. ‘Somehow I doubt that,’ he said, very softly. ‘But it was only an idea. See you around.’ With a casual wave that took in Oliver as well as Helen, he was gone.
Helen realised that she was almost the last remaining guest. The blonde girl was at Oliver’s side again, turning her pretty, petulant face up to his. ‘Oliver,’ she said in a high, clear voice, ‘so lovely to see everyone again. But,’ and there was no attempt to lower the upper-class tones, ‘the mousy girl in red, who on earth was she?’
Oliver’s good-humoured expression didn’t change, but he shook his hand free. ‘Don’t be such a cow, Vick. I don’t know any mice. Where’s your coat?’
‘Don’t bother, darling,’ Vick said sweetly. She blew him a kiss, danced to the door and slammed it behind her.
At last, Helen saw that she was alone with Oliver. He came, picking his way through the debris of bottles and glasses on the floor, and held out his hands to her.
‘You’ve such a sad face,’ he said. ‘Didn’t you like my party?’ His hands, as they closed over hers, felt enormous and very warm.
‘I liked Tom Hart,’ Helen told him carefully. ‘I’m sorry about looking sad. It must be the way I am.’ There was no question of confiding anything to Oliver. Helen was still surprised that she had let out so much to Chloe. Yet Helen was shrewd enough to know that the very remoteness of Oliver’s world from her own was part of the unexpected, exotic fascination that she felt for him. She was clever enough too to guess that whatever it was that Oliver saw in her, he wouldn’t be attracted by the poverty and awkwardness of her background.
She felt, for an instant, guilty of disloyalty, but she turned the thought away deliberately. What was it that Chloe had said? ‘Find your own strength to carry on. Positively.’ Well, she would do just that.
‘I shall
