someone shouted. Helen squared her shoulders inside the vivid scarlet of Chloe’s brief sweater dress, glanced down briefly at what felt like far too much leg which it left on show, and went inside.
The room seemed at first sight to be uncomfortably full of people, all of them women. The atmosphere was charged with smoke and the sound of laughter and clamouring, insistent talk.
‘… all through the Vac, darling. Not just in London, but in Italy as well …’
‘… so I told him to stuff it. No, honestly, he was such a swine …’
‘… Mummy bought it in the end, it was so funny …’
Everyone seemed to know everyone else very well indeed. Helen’s first impulse was to turn and run, but then she saw Oliver refilling someone’s glass. There was no sign anywhere, Helen realised, of a teacup or a piece of buttered toast. The carpet was cluttered with glasses and ashtrays.
‘Hello,’ Oliver said beside her, surprising her again by his height. His kiss, quickly brushing her mouth, surprised her less this time but had no less of an effect. Oliver took her hand and helped her to pick her way through the sprawled legs and gossiping bodies. ‘You look very pretty,’ he told her casually. ‘Red suits you almost as much as smiling.’ A blonde girl with a sulky face jerked her head up to look at Helen as she passed. There was a sofa in the corner, occupied by yet another pair of girls. Oliver eased her down between them, and they made room for her reluctantly.
‘You must know Fiona? No? And Flora? Well then, now’s your chance. This is Helen, and this … is … Helen’s drink.’ Oliver handed her a glass, winked, and went away.
Two surprised faces stared at Helen. Politely, but insistently, with their questions, they tried to find out who Helen was and where she fitted in. It gave Helen a kind of half-satisfaction to demonstrate that she didn’t fit in anywhere, but once that was done the girls went back to their conversation, leaning across her in their animated talk. Helen wriggled back against the cushions to look at the rest of the room.
It wasn’t all girls, she saw now. Three or four young men, in jeans and sweaters like Oliver, lounged among the more carefully turned-out girls. The striking exception was a dark, confident-looking man with a high-bridged nose and long hands that he used to make incisive gestures as he talked. He seemed older than the others and was dressed differently in a loose, pale jacket and beautifully-cut trousers with front pleats. He evidently felt Helen’s stare from across the room because he stopped talking, and his eyes held hers for a second. Then he raised his eyebrows in surprising, friendly complicity. Helen guessed at once that he didn’t belong here either, but he was making himself ten times more at home than Helen herself. After a moment he came over to her and helped her up from her captivity between Flora and Fiona.
‘More room on the window seat,’ he grinned at her. ‘I’m Tom Hart.’
Expertly he ensconced them on the cushioned seat where they were half hidden from the rest of the room by loops of curtains.
‘Well?’ he went on, lighting himself a cigarette. Helen shook her head at the held-out pack. He sounded American, she thought. What was he doing here?
‘Helen Brown,’ she told him, and to forestall a repeat of her interview with Fiona and Flora she added, ‘I don’t know Oliver from London, or from Gloucestershire either. I’m not a friend of Annabel, whoever she is, nor of any of these people.’ Helen’s small, firm chin jerked towards the chattering roomful and Tom grinned at her again. ‘I met Oliver once, at Follies House, which is where I live, and he asked me to tea. God knows why, now I come to be here.’
She lifted her glass to Tom and took a gulp of the cold white wine.
‘Quite,’ said Tom equably. ‘But I think that one might as well make the best of Oliver’s excellent Alsace, now that one is here. Noll!’ he shouted, and Oliver drifted over to refill their glasses.
‘Take good care of her,’ he told Tom smoothly when he saw Helen behind her half of curtain. ‘I shall be needing her as soon as all the rabble has gone.’
Tom ignored him. ‘Follies?’ he asked her. ‘Where Frances was going to live?’
Helen nodded, and Tom’s face set harder for a moment. ‘I miss her,’ he said. ‘She’s very unlucky, and very helpless.’
Helen knew from that moment that she and Tom would be friends.
‘Mmmmm.’ Tom was looking harder at Helen now. ‘D’you act at all?’ He turned her face to the light and stared a little too deeply into the grey eyes.
‘Act?’ Helen blinked and caught herself blushing. ‘No, not at all. I couldn’t. Far too inhibited.’
‘Pity. I’m directing the OUDS major next term. As You Like It, you know. I thought you might like to audition for me.’
‘No, thanks.’ Helen shuddered at the idea. ‘But I’ll come along and see it. Will that do?’
Her turn had come, she thought, to ask questions. ‘You’re American, aren’t you? Are you studying here?’
Tom Hart laughed at the idea. ‘Hell, no. Well, not in the conventional way. I’m a theatre director, and I’m spending a year or so at the Playhouse here. Purely in an assistant capacity, you understand, as they keep reminding me. My old man’s in the theatre in New York. Management.’ Something flickered in Tom’s face, as if a disagreeable memory had bothered him for a moment, before he went on. ‘I needed some time away from home, before deciding what to do for real, so here I am. One of my projects now is this students’ Shakespeare. As a matter of fact, in a brilliant piece of innovative casting, Oliver is to be my Orlando.’ Tom confidently waved away Helen’s start of surprise. ‘You’d be amazed. He moves beautifully, and he has a real unaffected feel for the verse. You may think he’s a mere aristocratic thicko, with a flair for nothing more taxing than horses and dogs, but you’d be wrong.’
Helen’s gaze travelled from Oliver, tall and tousled in the middle of his friends, and back to Tom. There was something in the way that the American looked at Oliver, with both fascination and a kind of unwilling admiration, that puzzled her.
‘Anyway,’ Tom went on quickly, aware that Helen was watching him, ‘Orlando himself isn’t a character endowed with a great deal of brain. No, Rosalind’s the important one, and I can’t find the right girl anywhere. I was hoping I might spot someone here amongst Noll’s grand friends, but they’re all far too old already. Look at them.’ He waved his hand expressively across the room. ‘Twenty years old and experienced enough for forty. I need someone fresh, and full of innocence, yet with that sexy edge of natural cleverness and the beginnings of maturity. A bit like you. But not really like you,’ he added, with beguiling frankness.
‘Thank goodness.’ Helen smiled back at him.
Oliver was seeing people to the door. There was a flurry of kissing and hand-waving, then when Oliver turned back into the room Helen saw the sulky blonde girl jump up and push her arm through his. There was a possessive glow in her face and Helen thought, at once, Of course he would have someone. The little, frivolous flame of excitement that she had been shielding went out immediately. The blonde girl tugged Oliver’s head down to hers and kissed his ear, then let him go with a tiny push.
Tom stood up and pushed his hands deep into this pockets. ‘Time I was off,’
