quiet pleasure than anything since Jack’s time. Feeling the slight, stiff crackle of it as she walked, Amy wandered through the sunlit house. For no particular reason her feet led her down the long carpeted corridor to the carved double doors that closed off the orangery.
Thinking of Richard and Tony she slipped inside, her soft shoes noiseless on the marble floor. The morning sun slanted obliquely through the glass roof and the tangle of leaves and strange blossoms cast distorted shadows over the statues in the wall niches. The heat was almost tropical, and it drew the scent from the dampened earth and from the throats of the brilliant flowers.
Amy sat down on the seat at the end and let the warmth wrap its soothing languor around her. Then she heard water dripping and looked up to see one of the gardeners working. He was bent intently over an orchid, feeling the earth with his fingers. Amy saw that he was bare-armed and bare-throated in the heat.
She knew the shape of his head, and the way that he stooped, even in the high orangery, as if he was too used to cramped places.
She knew that the hands stroking the petals of the orchid were marked with blue scars.
It was Nick Penry.
In the same instant, Nick looked up and saw her. A girl with dark red hair cut short around a thinner, paler face than he remembered. The blue-green eyes were the same, watching him, unstartled.
Nick put down his watering-can and half-straightened, on the point of greeting her like a friend. As he moved, one of the greenfinches fluttered noisily from the fronds of the tallest palm and began to peck at the scatter of crumbs that he brought in every day for them. No one but the gardeners ever came to the orangery, and he had welcomed the birds’ company. Now the sound reminded him of where he was. He turned the warm flash of recognition into a distant nod, and stooped to his work once more. Amy went to him, brushing the glossy leaves aside impatiently. She stood beside him, forcing him by her closeness to look up and acknowledge her again.
‘Hello,’ she said quietly. ‘Don’t you remember me?’
He remembered her. He remembered her with perfect clarity from the soft silence of her house in Bruton Street, and since he had come to Chance he had glimpsed her again, even watching for her with a kind of perverse fascination. He had seen her walking slowly on the terraces with her father, and once riding a big brown horse, her hair in a net under her peaked cap. He had seen her last Christmas, when he had brought a barrowload of red-berried holly up to decorate the hall for the servants’ party. She had been kneeling under the half-dressed tree, holding up a silver star. The last time had been on Boxing Day, standing in the middle of a knot of wheeling horses whose breath clouded the air. A man in white breeches with a top hat shading his handsome face had leaned down from his saddle to kiss her on the mouth. Nick had turned sharply away into the emptiness of his Christmas holiday.
‘You look different,’ he said defensively.
‘I look better than I did.’ Suddenly she was grinning at him. ‘I’ve been ill. I’ve been sent home to recuperate. I don’t quite know what to do with myself, actually.’
After the surprise of seeing her Nick was in possession of himself again. He was standing politely waiting for her to finish, the picture of a deferential servant. Amy heard as clearly as if he had said it aloud his ironic Will that be all, ma’am? She felt a slow, red flush spreading over her cheeks. ‘What are you doing?’ she asked, to cover herself.
‘Working.’
The single word held all the weight of difference between them. The work he had needed so desperately, and she had held in the palm of her hand. The need to go on at it, whatever came, while Amy rested and recovered. The difference, again.
‘Do you like it here?’ she asked. She sounded like Royalty visiting a hospital, she thought, or her mother gracing a local church fête.
‘I like the flowers.’
Amy turned round in surprise. Nick was bending over the cream and gold petals of the orchid again, his thumb just touching the bloom of the inner lip.
‘What’s that one?’ she asked, clinging to the hope of a safe topic.
‘Don’t you know?’ His dark eyebrows went up, mocking her. ‘It’s the Brazilian orchid, Epidendrum fragrans.’
‘My great-grandfather was the only plantsman in the family. He brought all these things back from his travels.’ Amy gestured around at the moist greenery, the aerial roots that curled and looped and the heavy-scented, florid blooms. She was conscious of the hothouse heat under her hairline and the dampness gathering in the small of her back and at the cuffs of her dress. She saw that there was a faint sheen of sweat in the hollow of Nick’s throat where the dark hair showed at his open collar. He saw her looking.
‘I’m very sorry.’ The stiffness momentarily dispelled by the orchids’ beauty was back again. ‘Mr Dawe doesn’t permit the gardeners near the house without collars and ties. But no one ever comes in here.’
Mr Dawe was the ancient, formally trained head gardener. He regarded every flower cut from his beds and borders as a sacrifice. Amy smiled faintly at the thought of him.
‘It doesn’t matter to me,’ she said, ‘I’m a nurse now, you know.’ She had meant to imply that she was a matter-of-fact, hard-working person herself, but it had come out instead sounding as if the sight of a man’s bare chest was a familiar one. Amy felt the colour deepening in her already flushed face. Nick Penry was standing watching her, his respectful attitude only a veneer over the challenging mockery. Amy remembered the anger he had stirred in her on the day of the hunger march, and she swallowed it down again, determined to be friendly. He could laugh at her if he pleased, but she wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of seeing that she minded.
‘Do you know a lot about flowers?’
‘I didn’t, until I came here. Not much grows, down the pits,’ he said drily. ‘When I came here, they started me off in the gardens as a handyman. Digging, forking manure, that kind of thing. Easy work, but not exactly interesting. Then, not long afterwards, one of the lads went off sick and they pulled me in to work in the cold houses. It was fascinating, seeing all the cuttings standing up in those little pots as if they would wither and die for sure, and then coming back and seeing that they’d taken, with all the white roots curled in the pot like threads. Mr Dawe said I had a talent for it, and kept me there. Then a couple of months ago he put me in charge of this place.’ Nick glanced up at the curve and swell of glass roof rising to the central ridge. ‘I’m going to put the blinds down on the sunny side,’ he said.
On the house wall a system of metal rods was connected to a polished brass handle. Nick began to wind it round and with grudging squeaks of wire against metal faded rolls of green canvas unfurled against the glass. When one side of the ogee roof was covered, a mysterious green shade fell across the jungle of plants and dimmed the strident blossoms. Amy felt the coolness fall across her face and looked up gratefully. The orangery felt like a rain forest instead of a tropical island.
Nick had gone back to his flowers. She was afraid, from his absorbed expression, that the moment of confidence was over. But after a moment he began to talk again, almost to himself.
‘I like the orchids best. Look at this one.’ He reached out to touch a dark pink flower with a soft lip that turned downwards and out
