close to the fire in the drawing room. Evelyn was conspicuous because of her formidable chic. Her hair, cut short, was silvery white and had been for years. Though she was nearly sixty her skin was hardly lined and her figure was excellent. On Evelyn’s face, Isobel’s features, the slanting eyes, the Grecian nose and the slightly receding chin, had sharpened and refined further with age. She reminded me of a beautiful hawk. She wore a full-length black-velvet-flocked chiffon dress, beautifully cut with a wide satin belt fastened with a diamante clasp. The drawing room, with its panelled walls painted several shades of grey, was the perfect background for her. I would have liked to be invisible for a few minutes so I could glide about uninterrupted and reacquaint myself with the furniture and objects in this most elegant of rooms.
‘Marigold!’ Evelyn advanced with outstretched arms. ‘My poor wounded girl!’ She enfolded me briefly in Après L’Ondée, the scent she had always worn. ‘It’s been too long, darling. I don’t count that marvellous ballet. Such a crush and I was in a hurry. Too lovely, all those swans …’ There had not been so much as a cygnet in The Firebird but I knew better than to contradict her. She ran her eye quickly over my dress. ‘Hm. Unusual. A good colour with your hair.’ Sheltering me with her arm as within a palisade, she turned back to her guests. ‘Everyone, this is Marigold Savage. I have known Marigold since she was a baby and I’m very proud of her. She is a prima ballerina.’
Most of the other guests looked blank but one man said, ‘Not really! Well, this is exciting!’ He stepped forward to shake my hand. He had pale wispy hair and a thin, lanky body. The only substantial thing about him was his enormous nose. ‘Duncan Vardy. I’m something of a balletomane. Marigold Savage.’ He wrinkled his nose as he thought, exposing a forest of nostril hair. ‘I can’t quite … which company are you with?’
‘The Lenoir Ballet Company,’ I said. ‘And I’m not a prima ballerina, I’m afraid, just a principal dancer.’
‘Jolly good.’ He laughed uncertainly.
‘Duncan is a writer,’ said Evelyn. ‘I’m reading his most fascinating book at the moment about …’ she paused, hardly perceptibly, ‘the Cosmic Visions of Volupsà.’
Evelyn liked to leaven the dough of hunting Tories with the yeast of artists and intellectuals.
‘Voluspà,’ corrected Duncan with an air of patience. He must have been used to people not quite grasping his subject. ‘Are you interested in Old Norse, Miss Savage?’
‘I’m sure I would be if I knew anything about it.’
Duncan’s pale eyes gleamed. ‘You have heard, I’m sure, of the Nornor.’ He sucked his lower lip and looked at me expectantly.
‘The gnaw-gnaw?’
‘Yes, the Fates of Scandinavian myth. They spin the threads of man’s destiny and when they decide that his end has come they cut the thread.’ Duncan made a snipping movement with two fingers in illustration. They are usually represented as harbingers of suffering and misfortune. They tend the Yggdrasil.’
‘Egg-drazzle?’
‘Ig. Ig. It’s an evergreen ash that connects heaven, earth and hell. At its foot is a fountain of wonderful virtues. In the tree are an eagle, a squirrel and four stags. A dragon gnaws at its roots.’
‘Really!’ I tried to imagine it but there were too many components for a clear picture.
‘Marigold.’ A jolt ran through my nervous system as I felt a hand on my elbow. Rafe – my idol, my prince lointain, the top brick of my childhood chimney – stood beside me, holding a glass of champagne. ‘Come and sit by the fire and rest that leg. You can talk to her later, Duncan.’ He smiled down at me. ‘Look, she’s blue with cold.’
I smiled back. ‘I hope not literally.’
Rafe was taller even than I remembered him, perhaps six foot three inches, and his shoulders were proportionately broad.
‘Yes, your arms are the colour of forget-me-nots. It’s perfectly charming.’ He kept hold of my elbow and steered me over to the fireplace. Everyone was obliged to move out of the way because a person on crutches takes up a lot of room. ‘Here we are.’ He indicated a low stool before the fender, took the crutches from me and laid them on the rug before the hearth, thus securing the only two cubic metres of really warm air exclusively for us. I sat down gratefully. ‘Move up a bit. I don’t want to crush that pretty dress. Duncan’s terribly disappointed. You’ll have to be nice to him after dinner.’
‘I’m sure he isn’t.’
‘Don’t argue. A man knows these things. This is cosy, isn’t it? Can’t you feel envious eyes trained on our slowly thawing backs? You needn’t thank me – you’re just an excuse. I haven’t been home long enough to acclimatize myself to steaming breath, frozen lavatories and ice on the breakfast milk.’
‘I’m delighted to be of use to someone. Recently I’ve been nothing but a nuisance.’
I allowed myself to look full into his face. If he’d been an actor he would have got all the David Niven parts. He had fair hair and blue eyes but this softness was contradicted by the masculinity of the high forehead, straight nose and firm chin. Running from his temple to his jawbone was a thin red scar. This added a singularity to his appearance, which might otherwise have been too conventionally handsome to be truly magnetic. My tastes had become more exotic since we had last met. But I enjoyed looking at the Phoebus Apollo of my girlhood.
‘A nuisance? I don’t believe you ever could be.’ Rafe smiled, making the scar crinkle attractively. A group of strangers finding themselves trapped in a lift or marooned on a desert island would have appointed him their leader without hesitation. ‘Well, Miss Marigold Savage.’ He smiled more broadly, showing strong white teeth, and a teasing light appeared in his eyes. He was more magnetic than I had first thought. ‘Evelyn tells me you’re becoming famous. I wonder if some day biographers will ask me about the carroty little thing I once knew who turned scarlet whenever she was spoken to.’
His voice was attractive too, light and good humoured. I imagined him, debonair in cricket flannels, acknowledging with a wave of his bat the cheers of the crowd as he made a century and won the match.
‘How unfair!’ I grinned to show I didn’t mind being teased. ‘By the time I was old enough to notice, you’d already gone through the stage of being gauche and gangling.’
How well he would look in the cockpit of a Spitfire, wiping the sweat from his eyes as he fired off round after round, singlehandedly saving a phalanx of crippled bombers …
‘Gauche, undoubtedly, but I deny that I was ever gangling. As a child I was short and fat. I didn’t grow until I was about twelve. And I ate lots of tuck to compensate for having my head pushed down the lavatory every day at prep school.’
‘You’ve made up for it since.’
‘You, on the other hand, have scarcely begun.’
‘Actually I’m quite big for a dancer.’
‘The others must be leprechauns. How did you break your leg?’
‘Foot. I landed too heavily. Nothing more than a stress fracture to begin with. But I went on dancing on it, that was the trouble.’
‘No doubt you had a good reason
