the orangery as children. Breathing in the memories, Amy slipped inside.
The Chance orangery had been built in the eighteenth century in a severely classical style, with a long span of white-arched columns echoing the corridor that led to it. The house wall was lined with niches for prim classical statuary, and the floor was tiled with severe black and white marble blocks. But overhead the arches soared into a magnificent ogee-shaped glass roof, and in summer the sun poured into the orangery with almost tropical splendour. The Lovells who had built it had intended a fashionable adjunct where the ladies could parade gently in inclement weather, the trains of their dresses swishing gently on the marble floor, and it had stayed that way for almost a hundred and fifty years. But Gerald’s Victorian grandfather had been a traveller and a plantsman, and he had made the orangery his own. Over a long lifetime he had filled it with his botanical trophies until the arching fronds of palm trees brushed the glass roof, and the strange tendrils of sub-tropical creepers snaked treacherously across the floor. The old man had designed the ingenious stovehouse that heated his domain, and in the warmth the orchids with strange, sticky, pungent blooms flourished alongside weird growths that oozed with resinous gum. A family of greenfinches twittered and swooped in the thickening jungle.
Amy prowled down the central avenue, absorbing the scents of rich, dark earth and dripping leaves. The thick foliage swallowed the sound of her footsteps and the glass space around her was alive with other noises, the rustle of unfurling leaves and peeling bark, and the flutter of the finches. Like all the rest of the festive house the orangery was brightly lit, electric lamps flaring in sconces on the house wall. But the greenness dimmed it, and outside the pitch darkness pressed against the glass, misted and dribbled with condensation. Amy was about to turn away again, out of the oppressive air, when -somebody spoke.
She looked, and saw them in the little bay at the end of the orangery. There was a white-painted scrolled iron seat under a tree that hung green fingers down to hide it. Beside the seat was a stone statue of Pan, holding the pipes to his lips, with green moss clinging to the stone furrows of his beard.
Tony and Richard were facing each other, as if they had just stood up to continue their stroll and had paused to exchange a last remark. Amy opened her mouth to call out to them, and then she felt the hair lift at the nape of her neck and in the heat a cold, slow trickle run down her spine.
‘I don’t give a damn where we are,’ Richard said clearly. ‘Or a bugger, for that matter.’
‘I know that,’ Tony said. His voice was low, but something in it reminded her of Soho Square and the plane trees black against the indigo sky. By contrast the orangery felt clammy and the reek of it suffocated her.
‘Well, then,’ Richard said, and Amy heard Tony’s answer, ‘Not here.’
But they were still standing facing each other, and Tony reached out for Richard’s wrist and held it, and then he pressed the inner side against his cheek. Then, with a small movement as if his head and neck hurt him intolerably, Tony turned his face so that his mouth was pressed against the veins of Richard’s wrist. Richard was looking at Tony as she had never seen him look at anyone before, with all the posturing animation drained away, as vulnerable as a child and yet not a child at all any longer. With his free hand he touched Tony’s bent head, and then Tony looked up and their eyes met.
Amy stood rigid, listening to the whispering leaves and the insistent drip of condensation. She was aching to move, to be anywhere else in the world, but she was transfixed. She was longing to be blind and deaf, but every movement and sound was painfully magnified.
The chink of green air between the two familiar profiles had closed. She saw Richard’s hand again, with the crested gold ring he wore on his little finger, moving to touch Tony’s cheek in a gesture of almost unbearable tenderness. It was the most fleeting of kisses, but it was the longest second Amy had ever known. When it was gone, everything had changed. It was as if the orangery with its snaking tendrils and weird blossoms had shaken, and all the world beyond it, to jolt the pieces of a puzzle she had only been able to glance at. The shudder had slid the pieces into place, and Amy saw the picture now with all its depths of shade and rolling contours. What had been flat and coarsely black and white before was suddenly grained with infinite subtlety. In all the surge of feelings that followed, she tasted humiliation at her own hopeless, naïve yearnings for Tony Hardy, and the opposite relief of understanding at last why he had seemed to reject her.
But Richard? What did it mean for Richard? The new landscape lurched, threateningly steep, as Amy thought of her father, and then without warning of Airlie, proud in his Sam Browne belt.
Amy looked past the vivid picture and realized that Richard and Tony were watching her. Richard was angry and in Tony’s face she read sympathy and an echo of her own relief. She lifted her chin and squared her shoulders deliberately. ‘Don’t think I was spying on you. I wasn’t. I’m going now. I didn’t see anything. I don’t know anything about it.’
She turned and walked back up the green-arched aisle to the carved doors, and she closed them firmly behind her. Her hands and legs were trembling as she walked on. Was that the right thing to have done? Was that what they would have wanted?
As she retraced her steps down the silent corridor and past the glittering tree Amy felt the layers of security and comfortable childhood assumptions drop painfully away. She was afraid suddenly that she didn’t know anything, or anybody. Not her own sister and brother, certainly not her mother and father, or any of the truths that mattered about Tony Hardy, or Moira O’Hara, or any of the people who filled her days. All she knew were little, trivial things, and attitudes solidified in her through privilege and habit. Helen Pearce in her dim basement room, existing on her terrible diet of penny buns and tea, knew a thousand times more than she did.
Amy went slowly up the grand staircase, feeling the smooth-rubbed wood of the banister curve and twist upwards under her hand. She opened the door of her room and saw the folds of her evening dress laid out ready by the maid. Her evening slippers stood side by side, ready for her to step into them. Amy wanted to laugh, but she wanted to cry even more. She knew, as she stood there staring at her satin shoes, that she was experiencing her first moment of adult loneliness. There was nowhere to hide, or anyone to run to so that her hurt could be rubbed better. She had only herself, and here and now.
Amy wasn’t going to let herself cry.
Instead she went to her jewel case and took out a pair of diamanté pendant earrings that she had dismissed as too flamboyant. She clipped them on to her ears and then she wound her hair up to leave her long neck bare. She put the pretty pastel-coloured dress back in her wardrobe and took out a slim black one that flared around her calves. Sitting in front of her mirror, she painted her mouth and rubbed colour on to her cheeks with the little pink puff from its gilt case. Then she looked at herself once more in the mirror, seeing a red-lipped stranger with very bright eyes, and went down to the drawing room for cocktails before dinner.
Later, fortified by gin and wedged in her place at the dinner table, she looked down the polished length of it and saw Richard, relentlessly amusing his neighbours. Tony was opposite her, turning his glass round in his fingers. She smiled at him, a smile of perfectly normal friendliness, and gave her attention back to her neighbour on the left-hand side. From her place at the foot of her table, Adeline nodded her approval of her daughter’s bright new demeanour.
Gaiety is all there is. Well, Amy thought. She would give it a try.
She had understood something tonight, and understood it with startling clarity. She couldn’t live Isabel’s life for her, or Richard’s for him. She had only her own. And with the knowledge of that, to compensate her for the new, chilly loneliness, Amy thought that she had gained the first, durable shell of maturity.
In
