any need. Listen, Adeline’s got a scheme for this evening …’
Stiffly, Amy turned away. ‘I don’t think I want to,’ she said.
She was remembering Nick Penry again, and wondering whether he was still here among the trees and meadows of Chance.
It was a month later that Jack told her he was going back to New York.
‘There are some things I have to see to there,’ he said, with an expression of faint distaste. Just as he never spoke of Amy’s work, he never mentioned his own business either. It was better, Amy had discovered, not to enquire too closely into how he had amassed his fortune.
There had been no change in their relationship, and Amy liked him just as much as she had always done. But on one or two of her free evenings lately Jack had not been there. Without having to ask she knew, as she had guessed would happen some day, that he had found someone who did not have to get up at dawn to be on duty at six a.m., and who didn’t yawn with tiredness just as an evening was fizzing to its high point. Amy didn’t know if the new somebody was American and so made New York important again, and she didn’t ask that either.
She simply said, with perfect truth, ‘I’ll miss you, Jack. Life will be very grey without you.’
‘I’ll miss you too,’ he said, and tilted her chin up so that he could kiss her.
Amy knew that even her mouth tasted sad, and she thought back regretfully to the summer when she had felt strong enough to take on the whole world.
Jack was to sail on the Mauritania at the end of February. On their last night together he took Amy to Ondine’s again. The decorations had grown endearingly familiar, and Madame Ondine greeted Amy as a favoured regular.
‘Such a crowd in tonight, darling. They haven’t had quite enough for me to take a firm line with them, but I will if it goes a single step further. I’d move your table if I could, but there isn’t a cranny anywhere else.’
There was a big group of a dozen people at the table next to theirs, and several pushed-back chairs revealed that more of the party were in the throng on the dance floor.
Jack and Amy sat down. Jack leaned back with one arm hooked over his chair and his eyes half-closed against the smoke of his cigar. There was a loud burst of laughter from the next table, and the sound of breaking glass followed by more laughter. Out of the corner of her eye Amy saw Madame Ondine undulating towards the source of trouble.
When they could hear themselves again Jack said musingly, ‘I wonder whether your brother-in-law is being deliberately indiscreet? I should say that he is treading on the very thinnest of thin ice.’
Amy’s hand stopped with her glass halfway to her mouth. She followed the direction of Jack’s lazy stare, and saw Peter Jaspert.
Peter was dancing, his high-coloured face brick red and his eyes closed. He was moving slowly, not quite in time to the music, and his partner was bent against him like a bow. Her face was hidden against his shoulder. One of Peter’s big hands held her hips against his, and the other had drawn their twined fingers in against her breast.
Amy felt the colour rising in her cheeks at the thought that she and Jack might ever have looked so openly, nakedly in possession of each other.
The band had been playing a sweet, slow arrangement of ‘These Foolish Things’. The music stopped on a long drawn-out note, Peter turned his partner, and they stopped with a tipsy flourish.
Amy recognized the woman then. It was Sylvia Cole. She put her glass down again and looked away.
As Peter and Archer Cole’s wife rejoined their noisy party she heard several of their friends ironically clapping their performance. Amy bit her lip and stared down at the tablecloth. Peter was the last person she wanted to see, but it was already too late. With euphoria and whisky clearly buoying him up, Peter blundered over to their table.
‘Well. My little sister-in-law. Hello, Amy. Can’t I have a kiss, as family? Mmm. There. ‘Evening, Roper.’
‘Jaspert.’ Jack nodded coolly.
‘We’re having a party. Join us; you must know Talbot and Harrington, and Sylvia, of course you know Sylvia.’
Amy found her voice. She looked up at Peter. ‘Thank you, but Jack and I are having a very quiet evening. We shall be leaving soon, and we wouldn’t want to break up your party for you.’ She could feel the heat of him from where she was sitting. He was like some big, steaming animal still hot from a chase. The thought of Isabel’s remoteness and pallor came back to her, and she shivered a little.
‘Dance, then,’ Peter begged her. ‘Just one. You won’t mind, Roper, will you, if I take her off for just one dance?’
Jack inclined his head very slightly. ‘Amy?’ he asked drily. Jack wouldn’t decide anything for her, of course. Amy would have refused Peter Jaspert whatever he asked her, but then she thought with a sudden wave of exhaustion that it would cause less trouble to do what he wanted. She stood up, and Peter held out his arm to her. She took it, and he pulled her with a flourish on to the dance floor. His breath smelt of whisky and was hot enough to burn her cheek. She would have pulled away, but he was holding her too tightly. Even in the early days of dinners at Ebury Street, Amy had seen Peter the worse for drink, but he seemed much coarser, and heavier now. She felt her flesh grow chilly under his hands.
‘It’s a pity,’ he was mumbling, ‘that it’s all come to this. I like your mama, you know. And you, Amy.’ He pulled her a little closer, if that was possible. ‘But that was a terrible thing that Isabel did, y’know. Apart from all the other things I could tell you about. What’m I to do? How can a man trust a wife like that? There can’t be a divorce, of course. Not in my position. Wouldn’t help my chances. Bad enough as it is.’
Amy went stiff with anger. The combination of cold dismissal of Isabel and amorousness towards herself disgusted her.
‘Isabel had a breakdown,’ she said coldly. ‘I don’t know exactly what drove her to it, but I could guess. How can you talk about trust? While Isabel sits in her nursing home, you are at a nightclub sprawling all over someone else’s wife.’
Surprisingly, Peter Jaspert chuckled. ‘Sylvia and I are good friends. The best. And this is a private club. What goes on here is nobody’s business. I would have thought that you of all people would see that.’
‘What do you mean – of all people?’
He was still chuckling, insinuating. ‘I mean you and Jack Roper. Look at you. You’re humming with it. You know what it’s all about, Amy, so don’t put on the wide-eyed debutante act. What am I supposed to do, with a crazy wife locked up in a mental home? Turn monk?’
Amy stopped dead. Peter, still blundering with the music, tripped over her feet and almost stumbled.
‘Good night, Peter.’ She turned her back on him and began to thread her way through the dancers.
‘Anyway,’ she heard him say, too loudly, determined to have the last shot, ‘Isabel’s got her own fish to fry in that home. Don’t think I don’t hear.’
With her chin up, looking straight ahead of her, Amy reached the table. Jack stood up and drew out her chair for her. Then he saw that she was trembling. His warm hand covered
