would have prepared for a stiff evening like this one together, and then afterwards they would have laughed about it. But tonight the guests were elderly relatives and old family friends who had come up from the country for the wedding, and the party was to be their introduction to the bridegroom. Because Peter was to be there, the bride had to stay hidden. ‘What archaic rubbish,’ Amy had said, but nobody had paid any attention. The bride was to have a tray in her room, and Amy would have to go down and go through the smiling rituals and the interminable dinner afterwards on her own. There would be Colonel Hawes-Douglas, and the local Master of Foxhounds, and numerous old aunts and second cousins. There wasn’t even Richard to help her out. He was supposed to be coming home from Eton on twenty-four hours’ leave, but he hadn’t put in an appearance yet.
‘Bugger,’ Amy said. ‘Bugger it all.’
She went across the landing and ran her bath, then she plunged into the water and topped it up until it was as hot as she could bear. It would make her face as red as a boiled beetroot, but that was too bad. Perhaps the heat would sap some of the loneliness and frustration and irritation out of her.
If it had been different with Mother and Father, Amy thought, perhaps losing Isabel would have been easier to bear. But it wasn’t different. It was exactly the same as it had been for years and years.
Hugh Herbert had been the first of Adeline’s lovers. It had all been conducted with perfect discretion, and with never a whisper of scandal, but it had been the end of her marriage to Gerald. There could be no question of divorce for Lord and Lady Lovell, but they had simply arranged their lives so that they didn’t meet. When Adeline was in London, or staying in a house party where Hugh was tactfully given a bedroom close to hers, Gerald was at Chance. When Adeline entertained one of her carefully chosen gatherings of amusing people at Chance, Gerald was in London or shooting in Scotland. They were only obliged to meet each other on rare, formal occasions such as family weddings or the girls’ presentations at Court. They were always rigidly polite to one another, as if they had just met, and they would be just the same tonight. It was just that sometimes Amy saw her father look at her mother with a kind of baffled, suppressed longing, and Adeline never noticed it at all. She would say, ‘Gerald, do you think we should move through into dinner?’ but she would never see him properly.
Amy could remember exactly when she had recognized the truth. They had been sitting on the lawn at Chance, under the cedar tree, and a man called Jeremy had been leaning over her mother’s shoulder, pointing to something in the magazine she was holding. His hand had brushed her shoulder, and Adeline had smiled like a young girl. They love each other, she thought, and suddenly she understood the succession of special friends, always men, who took up so much of her mother’s time. She had confided in Isabel, and Isabel had nodded gravely. ‘Yes. I think you’re right. But you must never, ever mention it to anyone.’
That night Amy had committed it all to her journal, under the big black heading PRIVATE. She was fifteen.
Amy sighed now in her over-hot bath. It was making her feel sadder instead of soothing her, and the prospect of the evening was growing steadily blacker. She stood up to break the mood and rubbed herself ferociously with the big white towel that Bethan had put out for her.
Perhaps Richard would have arrived.
It would help to have him here, even though it was Richard who chafed the soreness between their parents. Amy had witnessed it dozens of times, first seeing Gerald flare from silence into scornful rage at some refusal or attitude of Richard’s, and then watching Adeline leap to Richard’s defence. They were the only times that her languid, social mask dropped in family gatherings. Gerald would frown angrily and walk away, but there was something in the way he carried himself that betrayed loneliness to Amy. She had tried sometimes to offer him her company, but he always said something like, ‘Shouldn’t you be in the schoolroom?’ or, more lately, ‘Haven’t you got a party to go to?’
Back in her room Amy put on her dress without enthusiasm. Adeline’s taste in her own clothes was impeccable, and so simple as to be almost stark. Her utterly plain sheath dresses worn with a sequinned blazer were much copied, as were her dramatic strokes like wearing a necklace of wildflowers when every other woman in the room was loaded with diamonds. Adeline always had the best idea first. But she preferred to see her daughters in what she called ‘fresh, pretty clothes’. Isabel would have looked ravishing in these sweet ruffles, but against Amy’s rangy height and firm, high-cheekboned face they were less successful. She hooked the dress up and stared briefly at her reflection.
‘Oh God,’ she said, and then smiled. Well, the effect wasn’t quite so bad when she smiled.
In the long drawing room on the first floor a handful of elderly guests were already peering mistrustfully into their cocktail glasses. A trio of red-faced men were standing with Gerald in a semicircle around the fire, and their wives were perched with Adeline on the daringly modern white-upholstered sofas. Adeline had had the drawing room done over, and had banished all the glowering family portraits and brocaded covers in favour of pale polished wood and white hangings. In the middle of it, in her plain black crêpe, Adeline looked stunning. Amy kissed her cheek.
‘Darling, such a pink face,’ Adeline murmured. ‘Thank God you’re down. Is Isabel all right?’
‘Cool as a cucumber.’
‘That’s something. Where is Richard, the little beast?’
‘I haven’t seen him. He can’t have turned up yet.’
‘That means utter destruction of the dinner placement. I was counting on him to talk nicely to Lady Jaspert.’
‘Probably exactly why he isn’t here. I shouldn’t worry about the table. It’s only family, isn’t it? It’s not as though we’re expecting the Prince of Wales.’
‘No, unfortunately.’
That was a sore point, Amy recalled. Adeline moved on the fringes of the Fort Belvedere set, but HRH had declined the wedding invitation. The Yorks would represent Their Majesties at St Margaret’s, Westminster, tomorrow, but it wasn’t quite the coup for Adeline that the presence of the Prince himself would have been.
‘Do go and talk to people, Amy, before Peter gets into completely full flood.’
Isabel’s fiancé was a bulky, handsome man with a high, English county complexion, very sleek blond hair and bright, shrewd eyes. As the eldest son he would inherit in due course, but he was not attracted by the prospect of following his father into obscurity as another country peer. Peter Jaspert was an ambitious City man. (‘Metals. Manganese or aluminium or something,’ Adeline would say with deliberately affected vagueness. She had long ago given up the cherished dream that Isabel might make the grandest match of all, but still Peter Jaspert wasn’t quite what she had hoped for. There were no possible grounds for objecting to him, but Adeline was faintly disappointed. ‘Her happiness is all that matters. Anything else is up to you now, darling,’ was the only oblique reference she had ever made about it to Amy.)
Peter had also recently fought and won a by-election as the Conservative candidate. He had proposed to Isabel the day after taking his seat in Parliament. He was poised for rapid advancement, and he had chosen Isabel Lovell as the utterly correct wife to help him on his way.
Amy crossed the room to him. He was talking to one of Gerald’s ancient, deaf cousins.
‘What? What?’
‘I said there will certainly have to be a General Election by the end of the year. We can win it, on the National coalition ticket if you like, and then
