the old dilettantism bled out of them.
‘I wish I was a man,’ Angel declared. ‘I could fight then, instead of just waiting and stuffing pamphlets through letterboxes. Why is it that everything that happens is by and because of men?’
Amy began to see the parties and the nightclubbing against an increasingly sombre backdrop. She felt like a schizophrenic as she shuttled from Jack and Bruton Street and the noisy glamour of that world, and back to the wards again, and then on to the quiet tension of Appleyard Street.
Autumn turned slowly into winter, and the happiness that the summer had brought to Amy seemed to fade a little with the sunshine.
Christmas came, and this time Amy had only a short leave. Jack came with her to join the house party at Chance. Isabel was home too, for a whole week. She was as pleasant and withdrawn as always, nowadays. She seemed content to sit and read or to watch the boisterous party games that Adeline insisted on. There was never any question that Isabel might join in.
‘Bill’s gone to his sister at Broadstairs for a few days,’ she explained to Amy. ‘He’s really so much better. They think he might be able to live outside, soon.’
Remembering the day of her visit with Jack, and the way that he had reprimanded her for her judgements, Amy simply nodded. ‘I’m glad,’ she said.
The Christmas rituals were performed with the enthusiasm that Adeline insisted on. It should have been a happy time for Amy. Isabel was here, at least, and Richard was home too, in the highest possible spirits. She was with Jack, who prowled along the dark passage to her room as soon as the huge house had settled for the night. ‘Shh …’ he whispered, with his cheek against her hair so that she felt rather than saw his brilliant smile. ‘I can hear Gerald stalking with his twelve-bore …’
He could make her forget everything, as always, when he lay beside her. But afterwards, when he had padded back to his own room, Amy lay staring up into the darkness, feeling the melancholy gathering around her.
On Boxing Day, almost the whole of the party went off to the local meet. Jack had been mounted by Gerald on a big, nervy bay.
‘At least the fellow can handle a horse,’ Lord Lovell had muttered. ‘I’ve never seen that he’s good for anything much else except driving damned noisy cars.’
Jack had looked more handsome than ever under the black brim of his top hat. He bent down to kiss Amy on the cheek as the cavalcade moved away. She smelt the familiar scent of saddle soap and horses with a quick lift of excitement, but somehow she didn’t have the heart to ride out herself today.
Instead she put on her boots, and the scarf that Helen had knitted for her two years ago, and set off to walk across the park.
There had been a heavy frost, and the grass was crackling white as she walked away from the house and under the branches of the huge cedar tree. In the circle of its shelter the grass showed its thin winter colouring. Amy shivered, and her breath hung in front of her in a misty plume. The cold was biting and she began to walk faster in an effort to keep warm. She took the neat gravelled walk beside the wide curving herbaceous bed that was the glory of the gardens in summertime. The earth was bare now, spiked here and there with frost-blackened stalks. The gardeners had industriously cut everything back, and carried the debris away to bonfires and compost heaps. There was nothing here to remind her of the languid, scented warmth of summertime. Amy went on walking, head down against the cold, thinking. She followed the gravelled walk beyond the grey stone wall of the gardens and down the ridge towards the little huddle of houses at the village gates. The smoke from one of the chimneys made a blue-grey smudge against the colourless sky.
The high gates were locked, and the village street beyond them was deserted except for a tabby cat lifting its paws off the frosty stones. Amy turned around again and glanced at the little houses. Behind the trim curtains the men were at home with their families, enjoying their Christmas together. The estate office was locked too. Peering through the window she saw a calendar on the green wall and Mr Mackintosh’s bare wooden desk.
She was thinking about Nick Penry.
In the months since he had written to her, she realized, she had almost forgotten him. In her hours off the wards there had been Jack, and the parties and dancing and champagne bottles clinking in their silver buckets, and the nights when she had submerged herself in him and forgotten the whole world.
Now, suddenly, Nick Penry was as clear in her mind again as if he was standing beside her. Amy swung around, half-expecting to see him watching her. But there were only the blank eyes of the office windows, and she knew each of the families who lived behind the curtains of the others. She didn’t even know for sure whether Nick had come to work at Chance at all, and she had never bothered to find out.
Amy felt that the cold was cutting right through her and into her bones. As she stood hesitating, remembering Nick’s face and quiet voice and the well-shaped hands with the livid blue scars, one of the cottage doors opened. She started with pleasure, a smile of greeting already beginning, and then saw that of course it was only Mrs Wathen, the gamekeeper’s wife.
‘Good morning, Miss Amy. Merry Christmas to you. Would you like to come indoors now for a cup of something warm? You look half-starved out there.’
The smile was fading into disappointment, and Amy forced it politely back again. ‘Merry Christmas to you too, Mrs Wathen. I came out for a walk, but it’s much colder than I thought. I think I’ll just walk straight back up to the house, thank you very much.’
With the smile that she didn’t feel, Amy retraced her steps, following the marks that her feet had made in the frost. Sadness and a sense of emptiness that she couldn’t have explained folded around her. There was an image of Nantlas in her head, vivid from what Nick and Bethan had told her as if she had seen it all herself. It stayed with her all day, and it was still there when the riders came crowding back, exhilarated and red-cheeked from the gallop.
‘We killed over at Collyer’s Copse,’ Gerald announced.
‘You should have come,’ Jack smiled at her. His hands were wrapped gratefully around a brandy glass. ‘You look sad. Why’s that?’
Suddenly Amy wanted to tell him.
She wanted to talk about Helen Pearce in the desolate graveyard beside the railway line, and about Nick’s handicapped son in Nantlas, and the men she had seen swinging bravely up Park Lane with their lamps at their belts and their worn-out boots. And then she could have told him about the day she went back through the little Lambeth streets to Mag’s, looking for Freda and Jim, only to find that Mag had moved away and taken the children with her, leaving no address. People like Mag often moved away and were swallowed up, untraceable. Amy knew that. Then she could have described the Royal Lambeth to Jack and the people who came in and struggled and died in the high iron beds, night after night. But he had never asked her about that. Never, except to find out when she would be free again to come with him to yet another party. It was a part of her life, a half of her that was just as important, but it might never have existed.
Amy looked back into Jack’s level, bright blue eyes and knew that she would never talk to him about any of those things.
Jack believed in living and enjoyment and in finding happiness wherever possible, just as her mother did. And he was wrong about Amy herself, because half of her wasn’t like Adeline at all.
‘I do feel sad,’ she said. The hollowness around her was vast and frightening. She had lost her sense of happy unity with Jack. She liked him still, but she
