said Bill Parfitt and Isabel nodded her encouragement.
‘Oh, I don’t know.’ Jack was reasonable. ‘The man’s a fine cricketer.’
The two men plunged into discussion, and animation began to shine in Bill Parfitt’s thin face. Isabel watched him for a moment, and then turned a smile of gratitude on Amy that was startling in its warmth and naturalness.
‘Bill misses the chance to talk about cricket to someone who understands it. I don’t, although I try for Bill’s sake.’
So Jack was accepted, in spite of the threatening, unthinkable implications that surrounded him, because he could talk to Bill. Amy smiled back, but anxiety nagged at her.
They sat talking mildly for another hour. To an onlooker it might have been a tea party on the lawn of a big house anywhere in England. Madness seemed far removed from the sunny order of things, and so it was hard to believe that this Isabel wasn’t exactly the same sister that she had always known. The sense of loss and futility boiled up inside Amy while she talked neutrally of France and London.
When she stood up at last to leave with Jack, Isabel hugged her warmly. ‘I like your friend,’ she murmured. ‘And Bill does, too. Will you bring him down again?’
It was time to go. When she turned back for the last time to glance at them from the corner of the house, Amy saw that Isabel had already picked up the volume of Kipling and she was reading again. Bill Parfitt was listening, one hand held up to shade his face from the sun.
Amy was very quiet on the drive back to London.
At length she said abruptly, ‘Isabel really doesn’t need to be in that place any more. She’s well enough to be at home, or in Switzerland, or anywhere that would do her good. She only wants to stay there because of Bill Parfitt.’
Jack looked sideways at her, quizzical creases showing at the corners of his eyes. ‘Haven’t you considered that Bill Parfitt might do her more good than anything else?’
‘Why?’ Amy sensed her own anger.
‘Just because he needs her. Because she can feel stronger than he is. I’m not a brain doctor, but I’d guess that’s just what Isabel needs. Love the healer, and so on. Don’t you think so?’
‘Do they love each other?’ she snapped at him. ‘Surely, after Peter Jaspert, after what’s happened to her, Isabel wouldn’t want …’
Jack laughed at her. ‘Oh, Amy. Why shouldn’t they? You don’t imagine everyone loves in the same way as you, do you? White-hot and body and soul? Isabel could do worse than love poor Bill Parfitt.’
Amy’s knuckles went white as she gripped the leather seat. ‘That’s just it, Poor Bill Parfitt. Isabel is Isabel, and she’s lovely and clever and capable of all kinds of things. She’s just been ill, that’s all. There’s everything that she should do, if she’s well again. Not … not just sit there, vegetating, with him.’
Jack said nothing, and Amy glared at him. ‘How can you say that she ought to stay there?’
He was still silent, as if to let her listen to her own words, and then he said, ‘Nobody can say what Isabel ought to do, if she really is well again. That is for her to decide. If she’s happy, and she looked happy to me, shouldn’t you accept that? She isn’t you, my love, and nor are you Isabel. You’re different people.’
Amy wanted to shout at him for his arrogant reasonableness. Then she remembered how patiently he had talked to Bill Parfitt, waiting for him to form the stammering commonplaces, and Isabel’s radiant smile of gratitude.
Impulsively she reached and hugged him. The car swerved violently.
‘Don’t kill us both, Amy.’
‘I love you.’
He swung the long scarlet nose of the car straight again, and then drew up at the roadside so that he could put his arms around her.
‘I love you too.’
It wasn’t a pledge, or any kind of a promise. It was a simple, satisfying statement of a simple truth.
Eighteen tiny buttons on the uniform dress. Over it went the apron, starched so stiffly that it crackled. Then the frilled cap that hid the sun-bleached copper lights in her hair.
In ten minutes, she would be on duty. Amy smiled ruefully as she straightened the seams of her black stockings. She had already forgotten the smell of the sun on the sea and the blossoms that had overhung their balcony. The hospital smelt just as it always did, obliterating everything else. But yet, not quite. Jack had brought her back to the hostel, sliding right up to the door in the gleaming car and kissing the tip of her nose.
‘Telephone me,’ he had ordered imperiously, ‘as soon as you have your barbarous duty hours quite clear. Then I shall come and take you away from all this for a minute or two.’ Then he had waved and tooted the horn, and driven away in a blaze of scarlet.
The first person Amy saw was Moira O’Hara.
‘Holy Mother, Lovell. You look like a foreigner. Where’ve you been?’
‘I’ve been to the South of France. With a lover. Just wait till I tell all. It beats cups of cocoa and The Primer of Nursing, believe me. It’s vile to be back. Except for seeing you, of course.’ And in her exuberance Amy swung Moira around until they stumbled against each other, giggling.
‘God, I could do with a lover. Is he rich?’
‘And handsome. And a friend of the Prince of Wales.’
Moira asked in sudden alarm, ‘You’re not going to pack it in, then, are you? Be a lady, after all?’
Amy laughed. ‘No. I can’t marry Jack. I shall stick it out here with you, through thick and thin.’
‘Speaking of which, it’s thin for you all right. You’re under Blaine this week.’
‘Oh no.’
‘Oh yes.’
‘Oh damn and blast. I’d better go, I’m late …’
Jack Roper was true to his word. When Amy was off duty he would come purring up to bear her away to a party, or to a nightclub, or to a dinner à deux where he would fill her up with oysters and caviar and laugh through the smoke of his cigar at her groaning descriptions of hospital food.
Once there was a great fancy-dress ball in a country house where three marquees were decorated as circus rings, and the hostess presided as ring-master on a towering white stallion. Two plane-loads of flowers had been specially flown in from Paris for the ball, and the lake beyond the house was carpeted with floating petals.
Amy, in her tiny spangled trapeze-artist’s costume, was awed by the profligate splendour of it all.
‘It’s the beginning of the last fling,’ Jack said, with his touch of grimness. Fear flickered in Amy again, even more coldly because now she understood some of the reason. She had been back to Appleyard Street again, and found it seething with anti-Fascist feeling. Jake Silverman had been arrested and was still in gaol after leading some violent
