the toes of her high-heeled slippers. ‘Go on,’ she ordered.
‘I wanted to ask you if Jack Roper might be my father.’
For a brief, frozen moment Adeline stared at her. It’s true, Amy thought, and then Adeline threw her head back and laughed. In confusion Amy looked at her mother’s smooth white throat and the feathers drifting around it. She had expected anger, or shock, or an admission of the truth, but not so much obvious amusement. Adeline had a rich, musical laugh. At last it died away and she sat upright again.
‘I’m sorry to laugh. But it was rather funny. Amy, your father is your father. Isabel’s and Richard’s too. I loved him distractedly until the day Richard was born, and even for quite a long time after that. But when Airlie died all those years ago something died in Gerald too. It was the part of him I loved, surprising and secretive, and it left me with the dry, British shell that I didn’t. That’s all.’ Adeline shrugged to dismiss the pain. ‘I’m not very good at being brave, or soldiering on alone and all the things one is supposed to do. I found other people to love, and to love me. You know that, of course. Jack wasn’t the only one. But he was special, in a way. We shared the same roots, you see, even though they grew on different sides of the tracks. We were both adventurers, in our own ways. And we both needed to enjoy ourselves, because we couldn’t see the point in living otherwise. We don’t believe much in duty, and honour, and doing what is right, like you British.’
You British, Amy thought, and then: yes, that’s fair, I suppose.
‘That’s why I made such a damn fool of myself yesterday. The terrible mistake of one cocktail too many, like any old dowager trying to convince herself through a haze of gin that she’s still dynamite. It hurt, a little, to see Jack Roper look at you in that particular way, and not at me. I dare say it comes to every mother of daughters.’
Amy felt that she was smiling, just a little vacantly, still digesting her relief that after all Jack Roper was just a man like any other.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t be. I wouldn’t want you to look like the back of a cab, would I?’ Adeline changed her tack, suddenly brisk. ‘I want you to enjoy yourself too, darling. Not to spend all your best years up to your elbows in some dreadful old lady’s operation. This nursing game has gone on altogether too long.’
‘I am a nurse, it’s not a game,’ Amy said automatically. ‘And they’re not dreadful at all. But I feel, just a little, that the time might have come for some fun after all.’
‘Thank God. So. Did you like Jack Roper as much as he liked you?’
‘I liked him,’ Amy said quietly. She wouldn’t admit to Adeline how much, nor exactly what she had thought, even in the face of her lurid imaginings that he might be her father.
‘I imagine he might suit you better than, what’s-his-name, the stuffed shirt in the army?’
‘Johnny Guild.’
‘Or Mr Hardy.’
‘I don’t think Tony Hardy would do at all, actually.’
Adeline was dressing now. She slipped the grey dress over her head and stood up straight. It showed off her perfect legs, as smooth as a girl’s.
‘Mmm.’
‘Jack Roper asked if he might telephone me. He asked about dinner, tomorrow night.’
On went the silver-sequinned jacket. There was a white gardenia for the buttonhole.
‘So, will you go?’
Amy crossed the room in two steps and wrapped her arms around her mother. She smelt the familiar scent of her, that from her childhood had breathed glamour and the romance of adulthood.
‘May I?’ she said.
Adeline’s arms came round her in response and they stood, cheeks together, reflected almost like twins in the long mirrors.
‘Listen to me. I would rather see you with Jack Roper than almost anyone else in the world. And I would rather see you in love and free and true to yourself than married to a man like Peter Jaspert. Do what your heart tells you, Amy. It’s a sensible heart and not a poor romantic one like Isabel’s. I was beginning to worry that it was just a little too sensible.’
Amy stood still for a moment, letting her mother stroke her hair as if she was a girl, conscious of the unfamiliarity of being on the brink of happiness.
‘Thank you,’ she whispered.
Amy waited all through the next day, refusing to admit her anxiety, but refusing also to leave the house in case she missed him. The telephone rang incessantly, but always for Adeline or Richard.
At six o’clock she was sitting in the library leafing unseeingly through the Illustrated London News. She had stared irritably a dozen times at the silent telephone on the table beside her, but when it rang at last she jumped like a rabbit.
‘Amy Lovell speaking.’
‘Shall we say eight o’clock?’ he asked without preamble.
‘Eight-thirty,’ she said crisply, and hung up smiling.
She was ready for something to happen.
No matter what.
Within five days, Amy was Jack Roper’s mistress.
From the first evening they spent together, a pattern was set for what Amy came to think of as Jack’s time. He lifted her out of the world of the Royal Lambeth and introduced her to another, so remote from it that it might have belonged to another universe.
On the first evening he came in his bright scarlet Lagonda and drove her to an impeccably proper dinner at the Savoy, just as Johnny Guild might have done. But when they had eaten and his cigar smoke was curling around them, he produced a midnight-blue velvet box from his pocket and slid it across the table towards her.
‘Happy birthday,’ he said.
Inside, nestled in the white satin folds, were the diamond earrings. Amy lifted one and cradled it in the palm of her hand. The stones shone back at her, a thousand facets of light in their white-gold settings. Then she looked up to see Jack watching her, with one slightly raised eyebrow. In the soft lighting he looked tough, and handsome. He was stroking the side of his jaw, meditatively, with his thumb. Amy realized that she wanted him to stroke her too, and she looked down again at the diamonds in her hand so that he wouldn’t read it too clearly in her eyes.
‘Do polite manners dictate that I should say Oh, Jack, I couldn’t possibly … I don’t want to. They’re so beautiful.’
She looked up again and they both laughed.
‘If you do, I’ll take them away again.’ He reached out for the earrings, handling them like trinkets. ‘May I?’ Gently, touching the softness of her ear lobes first, he fixed the earrings in place. Then he turned her chin with his forefinger so that he could look at her, and traced
