fierce, but Helen was quicker. ‘Aw, I know you think you can do something, with all your meetings and leaflets.’ Amy had told her about Appleyard Street, and had shown her the pamphlets until Helen had dismissed it with ‘Your Commie tendencies are all guilt, y’know.’ Helen went on now. ‘But you can’t. The gap’s getting wider, not narrower, didn’t you know? I appreciate the gesture. But I can’t come home to the manor with you for Christmas.’
‘I didn’t ask you as a political gesture,’ Amy said stiffly. ‘I asked because you are my friend.’
‘Nor did I refuse as a political gesture. I don’t believe in politics. But it’s there, isn’t it? And you’re my friend, as well.’
‘I’d better go.’ Amy pulled her cape around her.
‘Here.’ Helen held out the holly-wrapped packages. ‘Don’t go without your presents.’
In the doorway, suddenly, they hugged each other.
‘Happy Christmas.’
‘Happy Christmas.’
As she fled down the street towards the hospital Amy heard Helen coughing, as if she had managed to contain the spasm all the time she had been with her.
The Christmas rituals at Chance were all performed with a kind of mechanical cheerfulness that depressed Amy deeply.
The house was full of the usual shifting crowd of guests who came and went over the holiday. Gerald had mustered a quartet of friends for shooting and cards, three of them equipped with fading, powdered wives who sat in the drawing room after dinner and listened with fascinated disapproval to the fast, cliquey gossip of Adeline’s women friends. Adeline’s set smoked and left the ashtrays full of lipsticked butts and drank complicated cocktails. They talked a great deal about people called Bunny and Buffy and Tiger, and laughed in flurries that baffled their powdered rural counterparts. Watching them, in her depressed mood, as they turned their long necks to listen to a new story or to sip at a champagne glass and their diamonds flashed, Amy was reminded of so many hooded cobras.
It seemed inevitable and yet sharply painful that her parents should pretend that everything was normal and as it should be. Adeline sparkled and clapped her hands to demand charades, or Clumps, or forfeits, and Gerald drank and gambled and went out all through the frosty days with the guns. She reflected that they were adept at it, after all. The keeping up of carefully controlled appearances must be more than second nature after so many years. Isabel’s absence, glaring at Amy through every minute of the day, was neither spoken of nor questioned. Peter Jaspert was never mentioned either. The acceptable match and the glittering marriage might never have been made.
The cobras knew, of course, all of them. But not a word was spoken.
It was almost worse, Amy thought, the way that Isabel had just been allowed to fade away, than if they had all been talking about her. For her sister she was there in every stone of the great house and every white-rimmed blade of grass across the park.
‘I miss Isabel. Don’t you?’ she answered sharply, when Adeline complained of her long face. Surprisingly, they found themselves alone in the drawing room in the mysterious hour between tea and the appearance of the first Lanvin sheath and white waistcoat before dinner. Amy was sunk into the depths of one of the sofas with an unopened book beside her, and Adeline was writing a letter, covering sheet after sheet of crisp blue paper with her leggy, energetic scrawl.
‘Of course I miss her. So what shall we do, sit in darkness and silence until she’s well again?’
‘No. Just not be quite so determinedly gay, perhaps.’
With an exasperated shrug Adeline screwed the cap on her gold pen and folded up her letter.
‘Gaiety is all there is. Without it, you might as well be in the grave, my darling one. Stop looking as if you’re carrying the cares of all the world on your shoulders and who knows? You might even find that you’re enjoying yourself. Not doing so won’t help Isabel, in any case, will it?’ When Amy didn’t answer, Adeline said more patiently, ‘Why don’t you go and find the boys? They were making you laugh last night. I saw them. At least twice.’
By ‘the boys’ Adeline meant Richard and Tony Hardy. To Amy’s surprise, Richard had turned up on Christmas Eve with Tony. Clearly Adeline had been expecting them both. Amy found herself placed next to Tony at dinner. They had seen each other two or three times since the night in Soho Square, but the old easiness between them had faltered a little. Yet on Christmas Eve in the ambiguous atmosphere of the servants’-hall party, Amy found herself liking him as much as ever.
The boys had indeed made her laugh. After the family and houseguests had left the dancing the three of them had gone upstairs and drunk quantities of brandy together. Richard was a natural mimic, and he had honed to perfection the set piece of Gerald thanking the staff for another year: ‘Ah … the family here at Chance … and we are a family you know, all of us, working together. Except for me, that is …’
Tony was the perfect, dry foil for Richard. Watching them over the rim of her glass, and all through the hours of Christmas Day with the dry headache that the brandy had given her, Amy understood why Richard’s antics seemed more frenzied than ever. He didn’t talk about her, but Amy knew that he was trying to fill the void that Isabel had left.
He could make everyone laugh, the cobras and their husbands and the powdered wives. Everyone except Gerald.
Now, on Boxing Night, Amy decided that Adeline was right. She would go and find the boys, and they would have a stiff drink together before the ritual of dinner. She kissed her mother, who nodded absently and went on with her animated scribbling.
Amy left the drawing room where the footman had just stirred the fire to a fresh, scented crackle and crossed the panelled height of the hallway. The family Christmas tree stood here, a blaze of white and silver light in the dimness, tipped with a diamanté star.
A handful of unopened presents remained from the great heap that had circled it yesterday, and at the sight of them Amy put her fingers up and touched her necklace. She had unwrapped her holly-sprigged packages alone in her bedroom. Helen had hoarded discarded woollens and had painstakingly unpicked them, choosing the gentlest blues and greens that blurred together, and had knitted them up into a soft scarf. Amy wore it to church on Christmas morning. Her present from Freda and Jim was a string of blue and green glass beads to match the scarf, carefully threaded by Jim and fastened with a pretty clasp that Freda had found and saved.
Amy was thinking of the three of them now as she hesitated by the Christmas tree, and wondered if their Christmas at Auntie Mag’s had been a happy one. Happier than her own at Chance, despite all the music and the exquisite food under the silver-domed dishes and the warmth of the crimson-throated log fires? Amy shivered a little. To find Richard and Tony, that was the thing, and share a large drink with them.
Instinctively she left the hall by the south door and walked quickly down a long, carpeted corridor where a colonnade of arched doors opened in summer on to the terrace. The arches were shrouded with heavy drawn curtains now and the corridor was filled with a muffled, undisturbed silence that seemed to cut it off from the rest of the great house. At the end of the corridor was a pair of intricately carved double doors that led into the orangery on the south side of the house. Amy paused, frowning slightly as she found herself in front of them and wondering why she had come here instead of any of the more obvious places.
But in the silence she pushed one of the carved doors and it swung smoothly open. At once the scent flooded
