again, she can come home to you both.’
My daughter for your son, in other words. The bargain was clear to all three of them.
‘Isabel is going to Chertsey this morning,’ Peter repeated.
‘You can’t do it.’
‘I’m afraid,’ he said evenly, ‘that it is already as good as done. I cannot risk my son.’
Amy had jumped to her feet ready to launch herself into a protest, but then she saw Adeline’s shoulders drop and knew that if her mother was giving up the fight so quickly, then they didn’t stand a chance at all. Peter was Isabel’s husband and her lawful guardian now if she had lost the precious responsibility for herself, and he held all the cards against them.
‘I want to see her,’ Amy demanded. As she spoke, they heard dragging footsteps come slowly down the stairs. Adeline wrenched open the door and Isabel confronted them. She was wrapped in a blanket and there was a nurse on either side of her, holding her arms. A doctor was coming down the stairs in the wake of the procession.
‘Isabel,’ Amy said, but her sister barely looked at her. Her hair was matted around her face and one cheek was swollen and puffy, the eye above it watery and blank. ‘I just wanted to be quiet,’ she explained to them all in a thin, childish voice.
Adeline made as if to go to her, but Peter caught her arm and the nurses gestured her back.
‘I’m afraid it isn’t advisable,’ the doctor said. ‘Any excitement, or sudden movement. In any case, we’re not sure that she knows who anyone is. We’ve given her a sedative, and she will be quite calm shortly. If you will let us through?’
They stood in a huddle in the drawing-room doorway, watching in silence as Isabel was led shuffling away, her head hanging like a convict’s. Peter shook himself and followed the little group down to the street. The door of the black car opened and swallowed Isabel, and then it drove away from them and disappeared.
Amy heard her mother utter a single, black obscenity. Peter came slowly back into the house and Adeline raised her chin and swept past him without a glance. Shaking, with her legs almost giving way underneath her, Amy followed her. She was aware of Peter closing the door on them and on his wife being sped away somewhere to a discreet, distant and unmentionable locked room.
Amy sank into the car beside her mother and the Bentley purred off in the opposite direction.
All Amy’s calm was gone and she turned to Adeline and begged her, like a child, ‘Mummy, what can we do? If we had been earlier …’
Adeline’s face was turned away, out to the busy, everyday streets.
‘It wouldn’t have made any difference. He owns her, don’t you see? He is her husband, and her keeper. Oh, we’ll get her back in the end, but it will take time.’
There was a long silence, and then she said fiercely, ‘Don’t marry, Amy, will you? Do anything else you like, but don’t marry anyone.’
‘And how long will they make her stay there?’ Helen asked.
‘I’ve no idea,’ Amy said. ‘I don’t think anyone has.’
They were sitting together in Helen’s clean, bare room. In the corner beside the grate was a fire bucket filled with sand and swathed with red paper, with a fir branch stuck firmly into it. The spiky green arm was liberally hung with paper decorations, cut out and coloured by Jim.
It was the week before Christmas and in pride of place on the mantelpiece next to the photographs were the presents that Amy had just bought for Helen and Freda and Jim. The glossy wrappings and the determined effort at a tree made an almost festive glow in the colourless room.
Amy tried to smile over the rim of the best teacup, but the smile failed and Helen looked sharply at her.
‘It’s me sitting here, you know. Helen. I thought we were friends. You don’t have to be cheerful if you don’t feel like it. Have a bloody cry, if you feel like that. I probably would, if it was my sister in the loony-bin.’
The smile did come now, even if it was a slightly twisted one. ‘Sanatorium and Rest Home, Helen. They would shudder to hear it called anything as honest as loony-bin. And I’ve done enough crying. It won’t help Isabel, will it?’
The room was warm, with a small fire lit in honour of her visit, but the chilly fingers of Thorogood House, Chertsey, seemed to reach out and touch Amy even here and she shivered involuntarily.
The secure rest home that Peter Jaspert had chosen precipitately for Isabel was in a quiet road lined with similar gloomy Victorian houses standing in huge, dripping gardens. There was a cramped attempt at a carriage drive leading from the locked iron gates to the locked front door, and the raked gravel was overhung with laurels and rhododendrons. While visitors waited for someone to peer through a slot in the door before undoing the locks, they stood on the stone steps listening to the rain drumming in the evergreens and breathing in the scents of sour earth and prowling cats. When the door was finally inched open, visitors were ushered into a little green-painted room off the dark panelled hallway. From there they were summoned either to the communal sitting room or to the discreet suites on the upper floors, depending on the patient’s health. Isabel’s doctors were advising complete rest and calm. On the few visits Amy had been allowed to make, Thorogood House had struck her as the most depressing place on earth. How could anyone get well, surrounded by so much ugliness and gloom?
Isabel seemed to have retreated so far into herself as to be almost unreachable. She was quiet and docile, and so the staff let her sit for hour after hour beside the window in the day room, staring out at the dank, mottled leaves. She hardly ever spoke, and when she did it was with faint, puzzled politeness.
‘There’s no need for her to be in that place,’ Amy said now, with sudden violence, ‘if Peter hadn’t gone so wild. He signed everything there was to sign, just to keep her away from the baby and out of the papers. He wanted her taken away, there and then. If he could only have been patient and calm, she could have been in Lausanne now, where Adeline could go and stay with her. But he was so afraid that he couldn’t think. I despise him for that more than for anything else.’
Helen reached over and peered into the teapot. The sudden movement made her cough, and she sat still to let it subside. ‘Here,’ she said. ‘Have a fill-up before it gets stewed. So what happens? Can’t your ma do anything?’
‘Eventually. She’s got plenty of influence, but she wants things done discreetly as much as Peter does. Madness isn’t chic, is it? Isabel will be moved somewhere, probably to the Lausanne clinic. But without Peter’s help it will take time. And I’d have gone mad already myself, locked up in that place for so long.’
Helen shook her head sympathetically. ‘I’m sorry. But she will get better, won’t she? In the end?’
‘Oh God, I hope so.’
They were silent for a second or two. Then Amy shook herself deliberately. ‘I shouldn’t be unloading my problems on to you. I will have some more tea, please. And if you’re not going to have any cake I’ll eat it myself.’
Amy had brought a dark, rich fruit cake
