at last it came out it shook and cracked.
‘Yes, Oliver and I …’ she faltered, not knowing how to put it.
Pansy swung round in genuine surprise.
‘You?’
Helen flinched. As she stared back at Pansy, she felt the ugly flush deepening over her face and neck. It was so humiliating, that surprise, the more so because it was completely natural. What could Oliver, it said, with his looks and his charm and his position, see in a little mouse like you?
‘Yes,’ Helen said, finding defiance in the anger that threatened to choke her. ‘Me. Why not?’
Pansy was looking defensive now, her eyebrows pulled into a frown over the chameleon blue eyes, and a trace of hurt lingering about her vulnerable, flower-like mouth.
‘I’m sorry. It’s just that … you didn’t look or behave as if you belonged together.’
Belonged together? How Oliver would hate that, Helen realised. She was giving Pansy the wrong impression, making her undefined relationship with Oliver seem too formal, but it was too late to backpedal now.
‘I don’t want to tread on anybody’s toes,’ Pansy added, with such clear sincerity that Helen’s anger faded as quickly as it had come. After all, Pansy had done nothing yet, except exist.
‘It’s all right,’ she said wearily. ‘You aren’t. Nobody belongs to anybody. Forget it.’
‘Forget what?’
Chloe had come up the stairs without either of them hearing her. Now she was standing in the open doorway, almost striking a pose. She had one hand on her hip and the other was raised to coil the dark red hair into a knot on top of her head. The stance emphasised her height and slimness and for a moment as she stood there, it was Chloe who was the beauty and not Pansy.
Pansy’s sharp stare missed nothing.
‘Hello. You were at the audition too, weren’t you?’
‘Pansy,’ said Helen, ‘this is Chloe Campbell. Rose’s third tenant.’
There was a little, wary moment as the two women looked at each other. Then, immediately after the practised appraisal of attractive women confronting one another, came the answering smiles of complicity. To Helen, watching, it was as if they belonged to a desirable club from which she would be forever excluded. She was oppressed by a sense of her own plainness and dowdiness.
‘Forget what?’ Chloe was asking Helen again.
‘We were talking about Oliver Mortimore,’ Pansy said, before Helen could frame an answer. ‘Helen was kindly warning me off.’
Helen wished she could find something as lightly dismissive to say, but nothing came. Chloe felt the tension vibrating in the room and tactfully turned her attention to dispersing it.
‘Really?’ she said vaguely, feigning lack of interest as she wandered round Pansy’s room. There were arched windows with views of the river and Christ Church, and panelling and furniture similar to her own, but here everything was fresher and there were thick new carpets. Chloe peered through the adjoining doors. One led to a bedroom with a glimpse of a bathroom beyond, another revealed a tiny, compact kitchen.
‘You’ve got a whole flat,’ she said to Pansy enviously. ‘Mine’s next door, but it’s only a room and a bit.’
‘What’s yours like?’ Pansy was asking Helen, and Helen knew that it was a peace-offering. She was being drawn into the conversation as a means of calling a truce in a skirmish that had never really started. It was generous of Pansy, she thought. More generous than she was herself – but then Pansy could afford to be.
‘My room’s a small, square cell on the floor above,’ she said, managing a smile. ‘Servants’ quarters.’
Chloe and Pansy both laughed, relieved. The tension was ebbing away.
‘How rotten. My father found this, I’ve no idea how. I suppose it is rather stylish. He’s good at things like that.’
‘Is your father Masefield Warren?’ Chloe asked.
‘That’s right.’
Of course. Pansy’s father’s name was almost synonymous with ruthless success. He was a self-made man with an iron reputation who now controlled an empire that embraced oil, newspapers, property and films. And Pansy was his only child. One day she would be very, very rich, as well as startlingly beautiful.
Poor Helen, Chloe was thinking. I can’t see her gilded Apollo resisting all that. And Helen was staring down at her clasped hands, not wanting to think at all. To shut off the dull ache of anxiety, she turned to Chloe.
‘Nice lunch?’ she asked politely.
Chloe laughed, pleased with the chance to talk about it.
‘Extremely nice. I’d almost forgotten how delicious it is, meeting someone and realising that you’re attracted to him. Then guessing that he feels the same and waiting to see how you’re both going to play it.’
She had released the knot on top of her head and her hair came tumbling around her face. It made her look much younger, and her features were alight with an excitement that was almost childish.
It had been a very satisfactory lunch. Stephen Spurring had achieved just the right inviting blend of intimacy and remoteness. Chloe hated pushy men. She wanted to know him better now, and her head was full of the way he had looked and the way his mouth had lifted, crookedly, into a smile of invitation.
When it had been time to leave, Stephen had put his hand over hers.
‘Will you dine with me one night at High Table? It might amuse you.’
‘I’d like that.’
She was responding to this quiet, subtle man in a way that she hadn’t done for years. The recollection of it made her smile again.
‘Be careful,’ Helen warned her. ‘Stephen eats girls. And … did you know that he’s married?’
‘I know he’s married because he told me,’ Chloe said coolly. For an intelligent woman, she thought, Helen could be very prissy. ‘And I think I can look after myself. In fact, Dr Spurring had better be careful that I don’t eat him. He’s quite appetising enough.’
All three of them laughed, a little uneasily, before Pansy asked, ‘Who’s this Dr Spurring?’
‘He’s an English don,’ Helen told her. ‘He was watching you audition too.’
‘Him?’ Pansy said, a little absently. ‘I thought he looked interesting.’
For a moment nobody spoke. Chloe’s voice was firm when she answered. ‘He certainly interests me.’
In the silence, a little quiver of reawakened tension whispered at them.
Helen collected herself. Now was the time to escape. From the doorway she said a muted goodbye and then climbed heavily up to the deserted
