wonder if your father would agree with that, after tonight?’
Amy’s smile was brilliant. ‘I’m twenty-one years old, I don’t need my father’s safe-keeping any more. Good night, Nick. Think of me.’
Nick was standing beside his paraffin lamp, the shadows it cast black across his face. ‘I will.’ She had already turned away when he called after her. She heard the crackle in his voice. ‘You think,’ he ordered.
‘Yes.’
Then she was gone, closing the door behind her with a soft click of the latch. Nick went back to his chair, looking down at the books she had brought for him. ‘Thank you for the orchid journals,’ he murmured. Against the dull brown covers, watching him, he saw Amy’s vivid face with her eyes as bright as stars.
Outside in the darkness Amy was running. Exhilaration bubbled up inside her like a spring and carried her towards where the lights of the big house sailed like a liner across the park.
The house was silent when she reached it, but as she passed the library door, the telephone began to ring. Knowing that her father would already be asleep, she went in and picked up the receiver. ‘Chance,’ she said automatically.
‘Amy, my darling love, this is your erring brother.’
‘Richard?’ He sounded drunk, and triumphant, with an edge of apprehension that reminded her of when he had misbehaved as a small boy.
‘The same.’
‘Where are you?’
‘At Bruton Street, at this very moment. Dear old Glass keeps the door so well against the vulgar columnists that it seems the sensible spot. And Mama is being a perfect archangel, too. Shocked to the core, of course, but just a tiny bit proud as well.’
‘Richard, what are you talking about? You’re tight, aren’t you?’
‘Fractionally. Oh dear, this conversation has come out completely back to front. I’m telephoning to say that the balloon has gone up, and all that. Keep your dear head down, and watch out for the old man.’
‘What?’
‘It’s my novel, dearest. Just out this week, and I have to say attracting attention from every quarter. Respectable literary notices, but some thoroughly prurient bits of gossip as well, and seedy-looking fellows hanging round the back door reading the laundry lists. The news hasn’t penetrated to the rural depths of Chance yet, then?’
Amy frowned as she tried to take in what Richard was saying. He had talked about a novel, of course. She even knew that he had finished writing it. But she had never taken seriously the idea of its publication. Clearly that had been a mistake, Amy thought with a touch of grimness. Knowing her brother as well as she did, it was hard to believe that his novel would be particularly good news for the family.
‘What’s it about?’ she asked cautiously.
‘About me, of course.’
Amy closed her eyes, wondering if there was any way that the whole thing could be kept from Gerald. There wasn’t, of course. He would hear about it in the end.
‘I’ll send a copy down for you to read, Amy. I’ll be interested to hear what you think.’
‘I know what I think already,’ she snapped. ‘Couldn’t you have found a rather less cruel way of telling him?’
To do Richard justice, there was a moment or two of awkward silence before he answered, a shade too brightly, ‘No, I don’t think so. Did you really expect me to pop down to Chance and confront him over a game of billiards? “My cue, I think, Papa. By the way, I’ve been meaning to ask you. Do you know that I’m queer? No? Well, there it is. Nothing to be done about it, I’m afraid. Oh I say, good shot.” Do you think that’s how it should have been?’
Amy sighed. Clearly there was no use in trying to find out any more from him now.
‘I’d go to bed, if I were you, Richard. I’m coming up to town in the morning and I’ll see you then. Don’t say anything to Papa yet, will you? Has there been anything in The Times?’
‘No. Literary mags and scandal sheets.’
‘He’s not likely to see any of those, thank God. Until tomorrow, then, damn you.’
‘Looking forward to it.’
‘Good night,’ Amy said coolly. And damn Tony Hardy as well, she thought, as she hung up.
Amy went slowly up the stairs to her room. The curtains were tightly drawn, her bed had been turned down and her night things laid out for her. On the table beside her bed the nurse had left her dose of tonic, and her sleeping draught already mixed. Amy picked up the little glass of cloudy liquid and looked at it, then poured it away. Sleep was irrelevant tonight. She didn’t want to fall asleep and lose the thread of closeness that linked her to Nick across the silent park. She sat down in her armchair and leant back with her eyes closed. At once he was there, with his head bent in the lamplight, and then with his face so close to hers that she saw the muscles move at the corner of his mouth.
If Richard chose to make his life into a matter for public gossip, then that was Richard’s own business. She would do what she could when the time came to soften it for Gerald, but she couldn’t change the truth. The anxiety for them both was real but it was pale tonight beside the brilliance of what she had discovered. She felt as exhilarated as if she were drunk herself.
‘Nick,’ she said softly.
She had to do what she had promised, and think about what loving him would mean. She could do that as easily in Bruton Street as here. More easily, perhaps, without the constant hope of seeing him in the garden or the orangery.
And then she would come back to him. She was as certain of that as if she had already done it, and the thought of it filled her with soft, quiet happiness.
Amy smiled. She was still smiling when, curled up on the bed in all her clothes, she fell dreamlessly asleep.
When she arrived the next day, the house in Bruton Street looked perfectly normal. Even if she had only half-expected to see a rabble of gossip columnists besieging the door, it was a relief to find that there wasn’t one. Glass was his usual impassive self as he ushered her inside.
Amy went up to Adeline’s white drawing room. Her mother, in a perfectly draped Mainbocher dress, was sitting on a sofa reading a magazine.
‘Darling!’ she exclaimed. ‘The drama, you would scarcely believe. Richard is so wicked. I guessed, no, I knew, of course, not that it matters nowadays except for the sake of the inheritance. But to put it all in a book, Amy, for everyone to read …’
And there, on the table beside her, was Richard’s novel.
‘Where is he?’ Amy asked, picking it up.
‘Lunching somewhere. The attention is turning his head. He does nothing except go out, come home to change into even more flamboyant clothes, and go out again.’
Amy could almost have smiled. There was the faintest note of pique in Adeline’s voice. Her description of Richard’s day was exactly the kind
