seat. His long legs sprawled in the faded blue jeans, and his forehead rested against the window pane as he stared out. After a moment’s silence, in which Helen’s eyes travelled from the clear-cut planes of his face to the tiny pulse that jumped at the corner of his eye, Oliver said, ‘So quiet. Just the light and the dark out there. No talk. No noise or confusion. Do you ever wish that you could keep moments? Freeze them or something, just the odd minutes when everything is right. There are so bloody few of them.’
Even in your life? Helen wanted to ask. Perhaps after all he wasn’t such a bizarre choice for Orlando. He had the face of a romantic hero, and there was enough of uncertainty in it now for her to imagine him as a boy in love with an illusion.
‘Times when I want to stop everything, and say yes. Like this. This is how I want it to be?’ Helen answered him. ‘Not very many. Some, perhaps.’ Like now, she could have added. Being here with you, of all strange people, talking like this.
Oliver stopped staring out into Canterbury Quad as if after all he was rejecting this moment as one to be kept.
‘Well, what shall we do? More drink?’ He waved the bottle and when Helen shook her head he refilled his own glass and drained it. ‘Mmm,’ he murmured, and lifted Helen’s hand from where it lay in her lap. He traced the shape of her fingers and the outline of her nails with his own forefinger and then, with his face turned away from her into the room, said, ‘Would you like to go to bed?’
The words seemed to hang, echoing, in the air between them.
Helen was not a virgin, but never in the course of the single, bashful relationship she had known had there been an instant like this. Half of her, astoundingly, wanted to say – just as casually – yes, let’s do that. But it was a hidden half that she was far from ready to reveal, even to herself. The practical, careful Helen of old, the one who took stock and who watched intently from the sidelines, was the one who answered.
‘No,’ she said, as if considering it. ‘Not yet.’
‘Yet?’ Irritation flickered in Oliver’s blue eyes as he stared at her. He seemed to see her, very close at hand, yet not to notice her at all. ‘What can you mean, yet?’
‘People,’ Helen told him mildly, ‘usually leave a decent interval between meeting and going to bed.’
Oliver’s quick, sardonic smiled surprised her. ‘A decent interval, then. How many days? How many dinners? God, I hate waiting. And I hate decency even more. It’s a proletarian idea, hasn’t anyone told you that?’
Helen was stung. She jumped up from the cushions, and as she moved she saw Oliver’s eyes on the length of thigh showing beneath her scarlet hemline. Her blush deepened and she lost the sharp retort which had been ready. Oliver stood up too, grinning, and then swung her round by the shoulders. His mouth found the nape of her neck under the black curls and he kissed her.
‘Ah, a warm place at last,’ he teased. ‘You’re dressed to look like a flame, but your skin feels as cold as marble. Funny girl.’ Then he turned her round to face him and kissed her mouth, deliberately, still smiling against her closed lips. ‘Don’t worry. If you prefer decency, we’ll let it lie for now, like a fat bolster between us.’ The good humour in his voice changed everything for Helen. He did understand, then. The sensitivity she had guessed at was there in him, waiting. Helen stood in the circle of his arms for a second and wished that it was all different. If she had said yes … If she had been a different person.
Flora or Fiona would have said yes, and they would have been able to keep him for a while. And now he was moving away from her, disentangling himself as he had done from the blonde Vick. Oliver.
‘Come on,’ he said kindly. ‘I’ll walk you back to Follies. I’d like to drop in and see old Rose for half an hour before Hall.’
Helen nodded dumbly. As they walked together across the Quad the ancient bell, Great Tom, struck six. The long, tolling notes lapped sonorously inside her head, uncomfortably like a knell. Yet Oliver drew her arm snugly through his as they turned down St Aldate’s. He was whistling softy, a single phrase over and over again, as if he was trying to tease the rest of a forgotten theme out of his subconscious. Helen fell into step with him, half carried along by the support of his arm. He was wearing a shabby, brown leather aviator’s coat with a lining of tightly curled sheepskin, and in the warmth of a deep pocket his hand still held Helen’s. Remembering the first of his questions, she knew that this was a moment she would like to freeze for herself. If only it was possible to keep him here, beside her, just like this.
When they reached Follies Oliver handed her elegantly down the steep stone steps to the island, walked up through the silent house and stopped outside her door. His eyes glowed very bright and amused in the darkness.
‘I’ll be back,’ he told her, ‘to check out the bolster before too long. Such uncomfortable, old-fashioned things.’
‘That’s good,’ Helen responded equally brightly. ‘I shall look forward to that.’
Oliver raised his arm in a half wave and turned away again. Helen stood listening until the sound of his footsteps had been swallowed up in the recesses of the house. She heard a burst of radio music followed by a door closing, then silence. The thought of her own cold, empty room was uninviting. Helen slipped down the stairs to the grander spaces of the gallery below.
‘Come in,’ Chloe’s low, musical voice answered her knock at once.
Chloe was sitting curled up in her armchair in a pool of lamplight. There was a red-embered fire burning in the grate and her hair was glowing even brighter in the double warmth of the two lights. She closed her book with an exaggerated gesture of relief and grinned up at Helen.
‘Well, and how did it go?’
It was easy to tell Chloe things. Helen clasped dramatically at her heart and stumbled forward into the light. ‘Wonderful. And awful. He asked me to go to bed with him and I said no. Oh God, Chloe, what shall I do?’ It was half a joke, but only half. Something intriguing had come in to fill a cold, empty space inside Helen, and now she didn’t want to let it go.
Chloe’s eyebrows lifted a fraction. ‘Horny little bugger,’ she said, amused. ‘You were quite right to tell him to get lost. He’ll be back, love, don’t you worry.’
‘I hope you’re right,’ said Helen softly. ‘I want him to be back, very much.’ She didn’t, in her preoccupation, see the quick anxious glance that Chloe shot at her.
After an hour of sitting with Rose in the impenetrable untidiness of her kitchen, Oliver stood up restlessly. He drank the remains of the dark brown sherry in his glass and made a face. Rose went on impassively with her sewing, not looking at him. ‘Before you go,’ she said, ‘what are you doing to that nice little thing upstairs?’
Oliver shrugged himself into his coat without answering, turned to go, and then as an afterthought sketched a kiss in the air between himself and Rose. ‘Doing nothing at all, darling Rose. All the treasures are kept securely locked away, as you must have guessed. Bloody boring. And now, au revoir or I shall be late for Hall.’
Rose, left alone in the kitchen, smiled a little and went on sewing.
Oliver took the steps into the misty dampness shrouding the city two at a time. He noticed the outline of a big car parked on the bridge as he came level with it, then as he swung out on to the pavement he saw that it was a white Rolls. Beside it, a man in a peaked cap was lifting a
