had to convince myself that this injury was a temporary blip on the upward trajectory of my career. The gods had been with me so far. I would earn their respect by maintaining a positive cheerfulness in the face of this minor disaster.
I put on a hat and gloves and tried to read more Gibbon with nothing but my watering eyes over the bedclothes before giving in and shivering with Siggy in the darkness beneath the blankets, popping our heads out at intervals for oxygen. I had never thought about it before because I had been too busy, but now I realized that happiness, my happiness anyway, depended on structure and order. From the age of ten almost every minute of my life had been organized. A dancer’s body is like a fine instrument that needs delicate tuning. After even a few days’ rest, one’s muscles become stiff and uncooperative. However tired we were, however bad our headaches or colds, six days out of seven we went to at least one class a day. On Sundays, Nancy, Sorel and I exercised for several hours in our sitting room, which had a barre and a large mirror that we had fixed to the wall ourselves. Now the hours stretched ahead of me, blank, frighteningly empty.
I was roused from a state of semiconsciousness by a knock on the front door. I looked at my clock. Half-past seven in the evening of the longest day of my life. The knock came again. Pulling the eiderdown round me, I limped into the hall. I lifted the letterbox flap. A delicious and reassuring scent drifted through the draughty rectangle. I opened the door.
‘Marigold! Thank … goodness!’
‘Bobbie! How wonderful! But you’re almost the last person in the world I expected to see! I thought you were in Ireland.’
‘I am … usually. Can … come in? … as … phyxiating out here.’
‘Of course!’ I embraced her enthusiastically. ‘Oh, sorry, I probably stink to high heaven. I haven’t been able to have a bath today and you smell gorgeous.’
‘Luckily … bottle of scent to … drown myself … might not … made it … top.’ Bobbie was puffing like one of those little funicular trains that run up cliffs. ‘… going to see … Giselle … last night but you … not dancing … rang the company … at home … broken leg.’ She hugged me again then held me at arm’s length. ‘… look at you.’ Her eyes took in my cap, my gloves, my cast and my shivering state. ‘Marigold! … mauve … cold! Bed … at once!’
I was too weak to do other than obey. Bobbie brought a chair up to the bed and sat panting for a while, holding my hand and chafing my back.
‘All right, I’ve got my breath now. Why is this place colder than a polar cap?’
I explained about the boiler. She went away and came back with the blankets from the other two beds. She piled them on my recumbent form, keeping one to wrap round herself. ‘That’s better. Now tell me about your poor leg.’
‘Foot actually. It’s a comminuted fracture but the surgeon thinks it’ll mend all right. I’m starting to feel warmer already. I don’t know why I didn’t think about Nancy and Sorel’s bedclothes.’
‘I expect you’ve got mild hypothermia. The mind is the first thing that goes, apparently.’
‘Oh, Bobbie!’ I looked at her with pleasure. Even had she been as ugly as a warty old crone I would have been thrilled to see a fellow human being, but she happened to be remarkably beautiful. ‘I hope you aren’t a dream. I couldn’t bear it if you vanished now.’
‘I’m here, darling, and I’m not going to leave you until I know you’re all right. Why aren’t you being properly looked after?’
‘Sebastian told the clinic I was going to a nursing home so they’d let me out early, but it would have been too expensive. And everyone in the company’s either away or too busy.’ I brought Bobbie up to date with the events of the past week, feeling warmth return to my extremities and optimism to my powers of reasoning. ‘I don’t need looking after, really. I can hobble about. It’s just that it’s so difficult to get up and down the stairs.’
‘I’ll find something for us to eat and then we’ll think what’s the best thing to do.’
‘There’s a tin of frankfurters.’ I pulled a face. ‘Otherwise it’s brawn, I’m afraid.’
Bobbie picked up a pale green carrier bag with ‘Fortnum and Mason’ written on it. ‘I stopped on my way to pick up a few bits and pieces. I won’t be a minute.’
She returned with a tray piled with good things.
‘Smoked salmon!’ I cried. ‘Oh, the luxury! A whole camembert! Tomatoes and olives! Cold chicken!’ I felt my mouth fill with saliva. ‘And little fruit tarts! You angel!’ I winked away tears of gratitude.
She had also brought a bottle of claret that tasted deliciously of raspberries and liquorice. While we ate and drank we talked as easily as though we had met yesterday, though in fact it had been two years since we had last seen each other.
I had known Bobbie all my life. Our mothers had been at the same boarding school. As a homesick new girl, my mother, who was much given to hero-worship, had developed a crush on Bobbie’s mother, who was several years her senior. She had run errands for her and written her passionate notes and spent all her pocket money on presents of chocolates and bath salts. To judge by her adult personality, Bobbie’s mother, Laetitia, had been a good-looking but reserved and probably rather friendless girl. It must have suited her to have an acolyte.
Somehow the relationship had lasted beyond school and even after marriage. Laetitia was invalidish. My mother spent weeks with the Pickford-Nortons in their large, gloomy house in Sussex, surrounded by dripping trees and sodden shrubberies, cooking little delicacies, running baths, fetching books from the library, a willing slave. After she married my father the visits became much less frequent, but once a year my mother, my sister Kate and I made the long journey from Northumberland to the south coast to stay for a week or two at Cutham Hall.
Given the eight-year age gap, it would have been quite understandable had Bobbie chosen to ignore me altogether during these visits, but she had been angelically kind and looked after me like a mother – which was just as well as my real mother was too busy to have time for me. Laetitia became more demanding with age. She had to have shawls, spectacles, hats and pills fetched, and constant cups of tea and cakes made while she lay either in bed, on a sofa or in a deckchair in the garden. Her cook and her daily gave notice almost hourly and had to be cajoled into staying. During the sulking periods, my mother had to vacuum acres of carpet, polish her way through cupboards of silver and rustle up lunch and supper for Major Pickford-Norton, a small man with a peppery temper and a selfishness quite as colossal as his wife’s.
Bobbie had taken us for walks and helped us make daisy chains and grass whistles or collect conkers, depending on the time of year. Sometimes we went to the beach. Bobbie would give us piggybacks down to the place where it briefly became sand and we’d make mermaids with shells and bladderwrack and skate’s-egg cases and she would plait my hair so that it wasn’t torture to brush afterwards. On wet days she took us in turn on her knee and read us stories and played Happy Families and Ludo. I thought her the most beautiful creature in the world, with her long fair wavy hair and eyes that were the colour of the sea. Despite my dislike of Cutham Hall and my fear of Major Pickford-Norton, it was a huge disappointment when Laetitia wrote to say that her indifferent health precluded any more visits.
‘How’s your mother? Is she managing without your father?’
Bobbie’s father had died two years ago.
‘Very
