by Rosie Thomas
His eyes had the unnatural glitter that she had seen before, and he was smiling a shade too brightly. Helen knew that he had been fortifying himself for the evening.
Instinctively she looked to Tom, and his tiny frown was a warning before he kissed her.
‘You look beautiful,’ he said, with his mouth against her hair.
‘Is he all right?’ Helen asked in a low voice. Tom made a quick, dismissive gesture.
‘So far. He can take care of himself this evening. I’m tired of being a buffer between Oliver and life. I’ve been doing it for a week. I want to enjoy myself tonight. You should stop thinking, just for a few hours, and do the same.’
His dark eyes held hers for a moment. There was a question in them, but she had no idea what answer was expected of her.
She smiled at him. ‘I shall. Watch me.’
Helen felt suddenly buoyant, free of a black cloud that had hung about her for months. It was New Year’s Eve. The end of a dark year, bringing the hope of a better one to come.
Montcalm’s state dining room was a blaze of candlelight. Points of light darted from Lady Montcalm’s diamonds. At the head of the table, Lord Montcalm had a duchess at his right hand.
Helen had been placed between one of the red-faced military gentlemen, and a young man with straw-coloured hair and very big ears.
‘What do you do?’ he asked her as soon as Maitland had eased their chairs forward.
‘I’m at Oxford.’
‘Oh God,’ the young man groaned, blushing to the tips of his ears. ‘You can’t possibly be clever as well as beautiful. What am I to say to you?’
Helen was enjoying herself. ‘Well, what would you say to anyone else?’
‘I’d ask – were you out today?’
‘Yes, it was beautiful. I had a lovely walk, right across to …’
The young man stared. ‘I meant out. Hunting.’
‘Oh, that.’ They both dissolved into laughter.
This is perfectly all right, Helen thought. Here I am, sitting in the midst of the diamonds and the duchesses. Perhaps I can deal with Montcalm quite well after all.
Across the table, she saw Oliver draining his wine at a single gulp. He looked drunk, she thought, and just a little dangerous. Determinedly, she looked away again. Tom was right. It was time to enjoy herself for a few hours.
‘May I have the first dance?’
She smiled back at her dinner companion. ‘Of course.’
Guests were already crowding in through the great doors and the space under the dome echoed with laughter and music. Lord and Lady Montcalm with the Master and his wife stood under the glittering tree to welcome the arrivals. The long driveway was a string of lights as the cars rolled up.
Helen’s partner took her arm and led her through to the ballroom. The band was playing but although the empty, shining floor beckoned, no-one was dancing. Then, through the groups of guests came Oliver. Helen followed his blond head with her eyes. Pansy’s hand was in his but Helen sensed that she was holding back a little. Oliver was not to be deflected. In the middle of the floor he stopped and made a mocking little half-bow, not to Pansy but to everyone else. There was something uncoordinated about his movements that told Helen he was drunker than he looked.
Every face in the room turned to them. Pansy, as pretty as a flower in her blue ruffles, looked apprehensive.
Then Oliver raised a hand to the bandleader. The music faltered to a stop and there was a surprised moment of suspense before he lifted his hand again. The bandleader raised his baton, obedient as a clockwork toy, and a waltz began to ripple over the sudden quiet.
Oliver took Pansy in his arms and flung her in a wide, flamboyant circle. Then Helen saw him stumble on one of the cascading blue ruffles. For a split second he swayed and she felt a stab of fear.
Don’t, Oliver. Whatever it is you’re trying to do, don’t do it here with all these eyes on you.
Oliver recovered himself almost at once and smiled. Perhaps only Helen saw that it was, again, too brightly. Then they were moving, waltzing over the wide floor in curving arcs, almost a blur of black and blue and gold. They danced beautifully, instinctively, as if they were one body.
A voice somewhere behind Helen said, ‘They make a beautiful couple.’
The music swelled and couples began to flood on to the floor. Laughter and talk broke out again.
But for Helen there might have been no-one there but Oliver and Pansy, waltzing, and herself. She was transfixed by a sudden sadness, brought by the certainty that she must let him go. The Oliver that she had created in her mind drifted away. All that was left was the beautiful, faintly desperate man now holding Pansy in his arms. He was nothing to do with Helen, she understood that at last. Perhaps the other, hidden Oliver that she had glimpsed and fallen in love with was no more than a reflection of the tension within him. And for all the gilded exterior she knew that something was wrong, badly wrong. Helen could only guess at what it was, but as she watched him dancing her sadness for him was mingled with fear.
‘Come and have some champagne. I can’t do this sort of dancing, but there’s a disco somewhere.’
Her pleasant, dull partner looked imploringly at her. Very slowly, Helen turned her back on the bright blond head and the classic perfection of the face that had filled her dreams for so long.
It was time.
As they left the ballroom the gaping edges of the canvas in Helen’s head began to knit together. The landscape that was revealed was flat and unremarkable, but at least it was whole.
Champagne, Helen thought. Why not? Froth and sparkle to drown the last few hours of a year she was glad to be leaving. Perhaps next year would be like life had always been before, calm and monotonous.
The discotheque, in sharp contrast to the ballroom, was hot, noisy and almost dark. Helen surrendered herself to the music and the tide of champagne. The faces here were much younger, some of them were familiar. Different people kept asking her to dance, and she was happily drawn deeper and deeper into the party. The chiffon points of her dress floated as she danced.
It’s easy, she thought. There’s nothing to be afraid of.
At eleven o’clock one of the procession of pleasant and flatteringly attentive young men took her to the supper room. The little round tables were candlelit and crowded with laughing faces. Maitland and Mrs Pugh were in charge at the long buffet and Maitland himself prepared her plate for her with the greatest care.
At the table her partner led her to, Helen saw Flora and Fiona.
They made room for her at once. ‘Hel-lo’, Flora said. ‘You look knockout.’
It’s easy, Helen thought again, and drank another glass of champagne.
Candlelight blurred the faces, making them look warm and friendly. Helen began to feel a little as if she was floating somewhere outside the old, awkward Helen who had felt so out of place at Montcalm.
She was laughing, leaning forward to catch the end of a lengthy joke, when she heard some confused shouting, pounding feet and then the shiver and smash of breaking glass. There were a few ironic cheers in the supper room but no-one looked round. Then Helen saw Tom slipping past and the laughter faded in her. She murmured a brief excuse into the air and followed him.
Outside was a milling hubbub of people, nearly all men, some of them still laughing uproariously while others looked faintly shamefaced. The floor was covered with broken glass and dark with spilt wine. Then the crowd shifted a little and she stared downwards. At once the ugly little tableau burned itself unforgettably into her head.
Oliver was lying in an awkward heap with the smooth stuff of his tailcoat twisted round him. His face was white with red patches on the cheekbones and he was breathing noisily through his mouth.
Tom was kneeling over him, and the sharpness of his dark, intelligent face made the grinning heads around him look bloated and coarse.
Tom loosened Oliver’s white tie and turned his head to one side. Then he looked up at Helen.
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‘Will you ask Maitland to come out and help me with him?’ he asked quietly. Helen whirled round but Maitland was already beside her with a white-jacketed waiter.
‘Leave it to us, please, sir,’ he said calmly to Tom. They bent down and took Oliver’s arms, then hoisted him between them. Oliver’s head rolled and he murmured something thickly. As they half carried, half dragged him away his feet tangled and bumped as if he was a huge doll.
Helen looked away, full of humiliation for Oliver.
Someone in the crowd brayed with laughter.
‘Whoops, there goes Mortimore again. Poor bugger’s getting past it.’
Guffaws broke out all round and the crowd jostled restlessly, uncertain of where to turn next.
‘What are we waiting for?’ someone else said. ‘The lake.’
They crunched over the broken glass and pounded away like clumsy dogs.
Helen became aware of curious faces peering out of the supper room.
Tom straightened up. He looked tired. ‘Come on,’ he said, very quietly, and led her away.
They crossed the mosaic floor of the hall in silence and wound up the shallow curves of the great staircase. In the gallery above they found a semicircular niche with a little padded seat between two marble busts.
For a moment they sat and stared at the light welling up from below. Helen could just see the silver star on top of the Christmas tree.
‘What happened?’ she asked at length.
‘I didn’t follow the course of his evening,’ Tom answered grimly. ‘Mostly because I was dancing with Pansy.’ His voice softened at her name and Helen looked away. ‘But I can guess. Booze, plus whatever cocktail of pills and dope he fancied. Then I suppose he passed out. Quite inconspicuously, really. Only about five hundred people saw him. Christ, what a fool.’
‘What was he doing with all those horrible, crass people?’
Tom laughed humourlessly. ‘They’re upper-class hooligans. I’ve seen him with them before. It amuses him in some perverse way, egging them on to run riot and break the place up. Doing it in his own home is just the latest development, I guess.’
Helen felt the last vestiges of champagne elation ebbing away. She remembered the crumpled guy of Oliver, and the feet bumping as he was taken away and fear stabbed at her again. Poor Oliver. Tom had been dancing with Pansy, and she had been basking in the glow of strangers’ attention, while Oliver was filling himself with whatever lethal concoction it was that had left him in a pathetic bundle outside the supper room door.
If he had asked the three of them here to save him from himself, they had made a poor job of it.
Sorrow and foreboding crawled icily under her skin. She shivered a little and the folds of her dress whispered around her. In the shadows Tom’s brooding profile shifted and he shrugged, as if to dismiss his own uncomfortable thoughts.
Then, to her surprise, he took her hand and began to trace the shape of her fingers with his own.
‘Helen. Mysterious Helen,’ he said in a lighter, teasing voice that startled her. She realised that Tom had been drinking too. Now that the crisis was over there was no need for him to stay sober any more, and she thought he was retreating gratefully behind a screen of tipsiness. Just the opposite of me, she thought, and remembered with fleeting regret her elated mood of the early evening.
‘Helen?’ Tom said again.
‘What?’ she asked, stupidly. Her voice was shaky and as she shivered again the folds of her dress rustled between them. Suddenly she became acutely conscious of his hand still holding her own.
‘This,’ he answered and bent his head quickly over hers. He kissed her once, lightly, then pulled her close to him. Then he was kissing her again, forcing her head back so that the breath caught in her throat and surprise lapped through her. His fingers felt like iron on her bare arms and for a moment she could have let herself fall against him.
After the shock of his kiss came bewilderment, and then anger. ‘Don’t,’ she said sharply, and pulled away from his hands.
Tom raised one eyebrow and his mocking smile came back.
‘Whyever not? Don’t be so Victorian.’
‘It’s not that.’
A half-thought, like a fish moving in deep water, stirred briefly within Helen. Even in that instant the implications of it made her giddy. The idea was so extraordinary and so dangerous that even before it was wholly acknowledged her mind was struggling to suppress it.
‘What, then?’
She couldn’t look at Tom. She stared up into the voluptuous curves of the dome, and her thoughts were racing.
Oliver, her inner voice said, and then she remembered. Oliver was gone, changed into someone different who no longer belonged to her at all. It wasn’t Oliver whose kiss still stung her mouth.
Out of the whirlpool of emotions Helen seized desperately on one. Anger came back to her. Of course, that’s what was happening. Tom couldn’t have Pansy and so he was making do with herself. She fanned her anger deliberately. Tom was amusing himself. He was tight, and making a casual pass at her. Not only that, he was choosing the worst time.
She had taken him for a friend.
The strange giddiness was no more than shock, and disappointment, and too much champagne.
The dark, threatening idea slipped away back into her subconscious.
‘What then?’ Tom persisted. He hadn’t taken his eyes from her profile, as if he was seeing it for the first time.
At last Helen said, ‘I don’t want to be a substitute for Pansy. If you can’t have her because of Oliver, then you’ll make do with me, just for this evening. That’s it, isn’t it?’
His anger suddenly matched hers. ‘No, it isn’t. Don’t be a fool.’
Helen drew away from him and wrapped her arms protectively around herself. After a long moment Tom stood up and stared down at her.
‘Helen, you’re too clever for this. You can’t go on for ever selling yourself short as a dull little mouse that nobody wants. It gets boring, and it’s not the truth.’
He put out his hands to pull her to her feet and closer to him.
‘I want you.’
Helen believed herself certain of her ground now. He was patronising her, and she let his words sting her.
‘That’s too bad. Perhaps I don’t want you. What right have you got to think you know who I am, or what I need? You, Pansy, Oliver – none of you knows anything about the real world. Or about me.’
Tom looked down at the sudden colour in Helen’s face, the hard set of her mobile mouth and the furious light in her eyes. At once she seemed much more important than a way to forget Oliver unconscious on the floor. Involuntarily he put his arms round her again and tried to turn her face up to his.
Helen reached back with her free hand and slapped him as hard as she could. Tom lurched back a step, hand to his face.
‘Don’t ever touch me again,’ Helen whispered. Then she turned and walked away, along the gallery and down the stairs with the greens and lemons of her dress floating around her like a summer morning.
Tom’s fingers smoothed the red patch on his face. ‘Bitch,’ he murmured under his breath. Then he thought of pliant, flowery Pansy in her blue ruffles, and after Helen’s dark fury, the beautiful face in his mind’s eye looked dim and vacuous.
As soon as Helen knew that she was out of Tom’s sight, she almost broke into a run. The hall was crowded with people, talking and laughing and gathering round the Christmas tree ready for the stroke of midnight. Blindly she pushed through them, wishing she had turned the other way for the sanctuary of her room.
She was shocked by the violence of her reaction to Tom. He had seemed an ally. Yet a few moments had changed that irreparably. As she forced her way through the revellers Helen had a vertiginous sense of everything peeling away, running out like the last moments of the year, and leaving her standing alone.
Unthinkingly, she was following the route that she had taken with Oliver and Pansy last night. Now she fo
und herself standing in front of the billiard room door. The solid panels offered a secure retreat. She had pushed the door open and closed it behind her before she saw that the room wasn’t empty. Someone was sitting on the corner of the table, turning a billiard cue to and fro in his fingers. With the room lit only by the long light behind him, it was impossible to see his face. She groped again for the handle but he called after her.
‘You don’t have to run away.’
When she looked back he had moved, and she could see him clearly. He had a homely, rubbery face and colourless hair that fell untidily over his forehead. She guessed that he was about thirty. From the weathered but capable hands wrapped round the cue, she thought he might be a farmer, or perhaps a vet. When he smiled, his unmemorable face lit up with quiet good humour.
‘Good,’ Helen said. ‘I can’t think of anywhere else to run to.’
The man made room for her on the corner of the billiard table and she swung herself up to sit beside him. He looked at his watch.
‘A minute to twelve. If I’d brought some glasses and a bottle of champagne we could have toasted each other.’
‘But you didn’t …’
‘So we can’t.’
They broke into laughter. The seconds ticked by and then they heard the long, sonorous strokes of a clock chiming midnight. At once there was a gale of clapping and cheering and then the raucous singing of ‘Auld Lang Syne’.
The stranger smiled again at Helen.
‘Happy New Year,’ he said, and she answered, ‘Happy New Year.’
Surprisingly, in the dusty remoteness of the billiard room, the rest of the evening was forgotten. She felt quite calm, and perfectly happy.
‘My name’s Darcy,’ he told her.
‘Helen.’ They shook hands on it, formally, but still smiling at each other.
‘Who were you running away from?’
Helen reflected for a moment. ‘Myself, mostly.’ To deflect him, she asked, ‘Are you hiding in here?’
‘Not exactly. I don’t like parties, that’s all. I suppose you don’t play billiards, do you?’
Helen winced as she remembered the night before.