by Rosie Thomas
Just let her try, she thought. I won’t give him up to her. Never.
Chloe glanced at Oliver. His anger had faded and he looked sullen now. ‘What’s up?’ she asked lightly.
Oliver pointed. ‘Look. Look at Spurring, grabbing at Pansy as if she’s some kind of merchandise. Smirking, and no doubt spouting some kind of pretentious literary crap. Jumped-up little toad.’
Chloe couldn’t help laughing. ‘Oh, I think the grabbing’s the other way round. Pansy knows what she’s doing.’
Suddenly, painfully, she felt a wave of tenderness and love for Stephen. He looked older beside Pansy’s brightness, tired and a little bewildered. The mixture of awe and uncertainty in his face as he looked at Pansy touched Chloe, and her anxiety evaporated. He’s human, she told herself. How could he resist? She’s so lovely to look at, and how could he know yet that she’s vain and superficial as well? He needs me, she thought protectively. For all his cleverness, he can’t see very straight.
Beside her, Oliver flung himself back against the cushions.
‘Stupid bitch, then. Oh Christ, what does it matter anyway?’ He poured red supermarket wine from a litre bottle into his glass and made a face as he drank it. ‘Talk to me instead, Chloe. Tell me, d’you ever get the feeling that you’re in one of those horror-movie rooms where the walls and floor and ceiling creep inwards to crush whoever’s inside? D’you ever feel that’s what life is?’
‘No,’ Chloe said, half-joking. ‘More like a wheel in a hamster’s cage.’ But Oliver wasn’t listening. He had seen Gerry peering round the door and then sliding into the room.
‘For God’s sake, that’s all I need.’ Gerry came over to them, smiling hopefully at Oliver.
‘Hello, dear boy. You’ve been neglecting us lately. Not surprising though, with so much better scenery to look at.’
His wink acknowledged Chloe, and she thought again as she always did how handsome he must once have been and how dissipated he looked now. His blond hair had faded to pepper-and-salt and there were stubbly patches on his cheeks that the razor had missed. He groped for the litre bottle and sloshed the thin red wine into a glass. Oliver was eyeing him with distaste.
‘You drink too much, Gerry,’ he told him.
‘Just like you, dear boy.’ Gerry’s voice was good-humoured but there was an anxious, uncertain look in his face that told Chloe he was frightened of Oliver as well as admiring of him.
Oliver frowned. ‘At least I do it with some sort of style.’ He looked restlessly around the room. ‘God, how boring everything is. Why is everyone always the same? Even Pansy.’
Pansy was sitting cross-legged in front of the fire with a plate of goulash balanced on her knee. She was waving her fork as she talked, surrounded by a ring of admiring faces. Stephen, on the edge of the group, had recovered his quizzical poise. He beckoned complicitly to Chloe but she shook her head.
‘Even Pansy,’ Oliver said again. Then, abruptly, ‘Where’s Helen? She makes me feel so calm, and then when she’s not around, I forget.’
Chloe shook her head quickly. Oliver was bad news for Helen. And anyway, his job was to keep Pansy occupied. As far away from Stephen as possible.
Upstairs in the room above Pansy’s, Helen pulled her reading lamp down to concentrate the circle of light on the page. She was reading Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella, and the hopeless love of the sonnet sequence saddened and depressed her. From Pansy’s room the noise of talk and laughter grew louder, and then swelled with music and vague thumping. They must be dancing, she thought, and leaned more deliberately over her work. In the past she had sometimes gone with Chloe to Pansy’s impromptu parties, but no longer. It disturbed her to see Oliver. Helen still loved the man she had known, and she missed him almost as much as she had done at the beginning. When she was apart from him, it was easier to live stoically with the loss of him, and the poignant pleasure that her memories of him still brought.
When he was near, in the same room or lounging unthinkingly beside her, it was much harder. He had the same physical effect on her that he always had done. Yet even that she could have dealt with. It was something else that made her uncomfortable. His brilliant, reckless smile was just the same, but Helen thought that the man behind it was changing, and slipping away from them all. He was more capricious, moodier than he had ever been, and the dark moods lasted much longer. His charm was less apparent, and his selfishness more so. Within herself Helen was fiercely loyal to him, but she couldn’t help seeing that he was becoming daily more difficult. She sensed that he was struggling, somewhere that no-one could see or reach, and that he needed help. She loved him, but she knew that he would reject whatever small support she could have offered him. The knowledge was painful so, reluctantly, Helen kept away.
There was another reason, too, why Helen kept away from Pansy’s rooms. The reason was Tom Hart.
The evening at Montcalm had come awkwardly between them. Helen would have given much for it never to have happened. She knew that her reaction had been absurdly violent. He had kissed her, and he had told her a truth about herself. That was all.
Her anger had been out of proportion, and now in retrospect it puzzled her. It was as if she was protecting herself with it, but that cast Tom in the role of the marauder, and he was far too subtle for that.
On the two or three occasions since when they had met at Follies House, Helen had caught herself staring covertly at him. She felt how well she knew the decisive lines of his face, and then she saw afresh the amusement that lurked around his mouth. She thought his amusement masked the calm assumption that she would apologise, and his determination not to make the overture himself. Annoyance would well up inside her and she would turn away, more stony-faced than she had intended.
The breach was not healed, and though she told herself it didn’t, it mattered to her more than she dared to admit. It mattered, because in spite of her resolution to avoid him, her eyes raked the crowded streets for his dark head, and she listened for his voice in the clamour that rose from Pansy’s room.
Helen’s floor was shaking with the vibrations of the music now. She sighed and pressed her fingers against her forehead, staring at the words in front of her.
There was yet another reason for staying away from Pansy’s party, although if this noise went on she might as well go and join in. There was very little time left between now and the Final Schools in June. Helen fought the panicky feeling that she was behind with her work. So much had happened. Her father. Oliver. Her mother’s job, and her own fear of having to leave Oxford. Then Oliver’s wonderfully tactful present. Helen sighed. There was that; he had done that, even if he refused to let her acknowledge it.
So much had happened, and now it was over. Now she must work to make up for lost time. Helen read on, her shoulders hunched as if to cut herself off from the din downstairs.
When someone knocked at her door, she frowned quickly before calling, automatically, ‘Come in.’
Then she turned round in her chair to see Darcy.
‘The downstairs door was open,’ he said mildly. ‘People were teeming in and out.’
‘To see Pansy Warren,’ she smiled back at him.
‘Oliver’s girl?’
‘The same.’
‘Ah.’ Darcy wandered in and began picking up books, examining the titles with an expression of bafflement before putting them carefully back in their places again. ‘She looks like a picture in one of the glossy mags. Just about as much substance, too. You don’t mind, then?’
Helen reflected that her visitor didn’t look much like a Viscount. His clothes were shabby and definitely muddy around the edges, and his colourless hair needed cutting. His homely face was anxious, with none of Oliver’s hauteur showing in it.
‘Mind?’ Helen couldn’t help smiling. Darcy was so appealingly vague, so obviously good-natured. ‘Mind what?’
‘Well, me turning up to see you. I could have phoned, but I was passing and …’
�
��No, I’m pleased. You’re a wonderful reason for not struggling to work any more with all this going on.’ She pointed at the floor, laughing.
‘What is going on?’
‘Pansy’s having a party. It happens quite often. Oliver’s probably there. D’you want to go down and join in?’
‘No,’ Darcy recoiled. ‘Let’s go for a walk instead.’
‘At eleven at night?’
Darcy looked surprised. ‘Why not? What else shall we do? The pubs will be shut. If you like, next time I take you out, we can go to one of Oliver’s flash restaurants, if I steal his address book first. But it’s a beautiful night tonight. We can go along the river.’
Helen snapped her book shut and reached for her coat. Together they slipped down the stairs, by unspoken agreement making a wide detour around the open door of Pansy’s room. A couple of people were sitting on the stairs with their arms around each other, but neither of them looked up as Darcy and Helen stepped past. Then the heavy door banged shut behind them and Darcy breathed deeply in the sudden quiet. He steered Helen up the steps from the island, across the orange-lit ribbon of road and down again to the towpath. They began to walk together, side by side, hands in their pockets. The silence between them was companionable. Once past the bridge the river ran slow, and there was no sound except the occasional gurgle and slap of a ripple against the bank. Lights from a group of moored barges made wavering patches of brilliance on the black water. The sky was overcast and as black as the water but the air was surprisingly gentle and still. Along the bank under the willows were the pale-bleached splashes of crocuses. Although it was only February, Helen thought she could smell the first warm sweetness of spring.
‘I walk a lot at night,’ Darcy said. ‘There aren’t enough daylight hours for a farmer just to wander around looking. I can see things at night that I wouldn’t be able to during the day. There’s a badger colony in one of my woods.’
‘Do you farm at Montcalm?’ Helen asked, curious. She remembered the manicured parkland, but no ploughed fields or untidy cows.
‘No. We’ve another working estate, about twenty miles away. I … prefer to spend most of my time there. I have to be at Montcalm sometimes, like the evening when I met you. And one day I’ll have to live there because that’s what I’m for, in a way. But just now I’d rather be at home on the farm.’ There was a resigned wistfulness in his voice. Helen guessed that he was no more in love with his ancestral home than Oliver, but for different reasons.
As if his thoughts were following the same track Darcy asked, ‘Do you know my brother well?’
Helen answered as honestly as she could. ‘I don’t think I know him at all well. I suppose I was “Oliver’s girl” for a while. An extremely short while.’
‘What happened?’
‘Oh, he turned his attention elsewhere. To Pansy, actually.’
‘Mmm. Were you hurt?’
‘Yes. But it doesn’t matter now.’ Helen was lying, she hoped convincingly.
‘I don’t think I know him either,’ Darcy said, very softly. ‘My own brother. I wish I could do something to … make things easier for him. But I can’t. I don’t understand his world any more than he wants to live in mine. We barely inhabit the same planet. I wish we’d been born the other way round. I think if Oliver had been the elder son he’d have felt less of an anomaly.’
Don’t, Helen thought. Don’t you think that too.
‘Let’s not talk about Oliver. Tell me about something else. Farming. Badgers.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said gently. ‘Funny, isn’t it? People always talk about Oliver. It’s something about him. Like your friend Pansy, too.’
They were quiet for a moment as they walked, and then hesitantly Darcy took Helen’s arm. Unthreatened, she let herself be drawn against him and lengthened her stride to fit his. Darcy began to talk about the antics of the badgers in the wood.
When they reached the point where the river curved back on itself and into the town, and the lit-up façades of student residences began to lean over them, Darcy stopped and firmly turned around. It was as if he was reluctant to slip by them even in the dark. They retraced their steps to Follies House.
Darcy led her down the steps to the island and watched gravely while she groped for her key. With the door open into the square height of the hall, Helen stopped and asked impulsively, ‘Darcy, what’s your first name? Your real name. Do I have to go on calling you by your title for ever?’
Darcy leaned against the door post, watching her face.
‘John William Aubrey Frederick Mere,’ he recited. His smile was lopsided, rueful. ‘You can choose whichever you like. But I’m always called Darcy.’
‘I’m not surprised,’ Helen laughed. ‘Goodnight, Darcy, then.’
Before she turned away Darcy reached out and brushed her cheek with his fingers. ‘Goodnight, Helen. Can I come again?’
She nodded in the darkness. Just in that instant, in the tilt of his head and the timbre of his voice, she had caught a flicker of Oliver.
‘Flash restaurant?’
‘Absolutely not.’
No, he wasn’t Oliver at all. He mustn’t be.
Darcy watched to see her safe inside the house and then walked away, whistling softly, towards his muddy, battered little car.
Helen ran up the stairs. Confronting her in the narrow space of the gallery was a little knot of people at the door of Chloe’s room. Tom was there, and her gaze went straight to him. Forgetting herself in the sudden pleasure of seeing him, she smiled a question at him. Then his sombre face and the stillness of the group struck her. She looked over Tom’s shoulder into Chloe’s room. Oliver was innocently asleep on Chloe’s bed. Her exotically patterned oriental bedcover was rucked up around him.
Looking from Chloe to Stephen, Helen saw that Chloe looked anxious, almost imploring, and that Stephen was impatient.
‘He asked me for a proper drink, came down and had a couple of brandies, and then just fell asleep,’ Chloe said. ‘Now he seems dead to the world.’
Pansy had been apparently intent on making intricate pleats in the sleeve of her sweatshirt, but she lifted her silver-gilt head now and said coolly, ‘Passed out, more like.’ Her eyes fixed on Stephen and she shrugged, making a little, pretty, regretful face. ‘Shame,’ she whispered.
Stephen moved forward an inch, then collected himself. With an effort he looked at his watch.
‘Thank you for supper, Pansy. I can probably find you an hour if you really think you need some Shakespeare background. There’s a new feminist book on his heroines that might be useful for your role.’ But his little speech didn’t sound quite right. For once Stephen wasn’t entirely the confident don. He was tentative, not quite certain of his ground, and the whisper of diffidence suited him. He seemed younger, vulnerable.
Chloe’s eyes glittered as she watched him.
‘Goodnight, Chloe, love,’ he said, more smoothly, but Tom’s hand caught his arm.
‘You might help me get him back to the House,’ Tom said sharply.
‘If I must,’ Stephen responded.
The curious little scene had held them all so intent that only Helen had noticed that Oliver was awake. He smoothed the dazed expression from his face with one hand and then stood up.
‘Kind of you both, but not necessary. And I don’t care for being talked about as if I’m incapable.’
He was prickly with anger.
‘Why act like it then, darling?’ Pansy’s voice was languid. Oliver took her arm and tried to turn her away towards her room but she shook him off.
‘Perhaps you’d be better in your own little bed tonight.’
Oliver stepped back. His face went white and deep vertical lines showed in his cheeks. Then, abruptly, he turned and walked away down the stairs.
Helen looked away, suddenly cold. The tension in the air was ugly, vibrating threateningly among them.
It was Pansy who broke the silence. She laughed a little, then said, ‘
Well. Sorry everyone. It’s not like this at Follies every night, Stephen.’
With evident relief, Stephen said a brief goodnight and went. Pansy leaned over the carved gallery rail and called softly after him, ‘Can I ring you in College about my tutorial?’
‘Of course.’ His voice carried up through the vaulted space, then the door thudded shut behind him. Chloe hadn’t moved a muscle. Her fists were clenched, creasing the soft suede of her tunic.
At last, Helen met Tom’s eyes. They looked at each other for a long moment. She searched her mind for the right thing to say, aware that Pansy and Chloe were watching too. But the phrases that tumbled in her head all sounded too flippant, or too revealing, and she was silent.
At last Tom said, ‘As Oliver doesn’t appear to need an ambulance service after all, I think I’ll go home. Remember your exercises, Pansy.’
The ghost of a smile which he gave them included Helen too. She watched his dark head retreating with a sadness that she couldn’t have explained.
The three women stood facing each other in the splash of light from Chloe’s doorway. Very slowly, Chloe unclenched her fists.
‘Must you acquire him, too, Pansy?’ she asked, tonelessly. Pansy’s eyebrows went up, almost into the tousled fringe of hair.
‘What?’ She couldn’t have looked more innocent. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Oh, I think you know what I mean.’ Chloe’s voice was dangerously low. ‘I mean Stephen. I mean your teeny little flirtatious gambits, and your worming your way into his rooms for some totally irrelevant coaching. You took Oliver from Helen. Isn’t that enough? Stephen belongs to me. Don’t you understand?’ With the last words the control ebbed out of her voice. She was too close to tears, and she bit her lip savagely to hide the humiliation.
Helen watched numbly. She put out her hand to Chloe, then drew it back. There was nothing she could do.
‘Don’t be a fool,’ Pansy said, suddenly steely. The flowery innocence melted away and her little pointed face turned pitiless.
Masefield Warren’s daughter, Helen thought.