Rosie Thomas 3-Book Collection

by Rosie Thomas

  ‘Helen, are you happy?’ he asked.

  She knew, however vehemently she insisted that she was, Tom would see that it was a lie. She looked back at him, protecting herself but infinitely vulnerable to him.

  ‘I’m very happy.’ The words came out sounding thin and defiant. Disappointment in her showed clearly in his face. Helen found herself half wanting to escape from him, and half longing to run to him and tell him no.

  The chance was gone.

  Tom stood up, and then held out a square package neatly wrapped in brown paper and tied with string. When he spoke again his voice was flippant.

  ‘Congratulations. We can call this an engagement present.’

  He managed to make the idea of an engagement sound like an amusing anachronism. Some of the old irritation that he always stirred in her revived Helen, but she took the brown parcel without comment and turned it in her hands.

  ‘Go on,’ he ordered.

  Helen pulled at the string, then folded back the paper. The first thing she saw was a hammer, and then a twist of tissue paper that revealed a slim nail and a hook. Frowning now she tore away more paper, and then found herself staring into the turquoise brilliance of the sea behind a vase of summer flowers. It was the little oil painting that she had seen in pride of place over Tom’s fireplace.

  Helen held it up and marvelled again at how the economical brushstrokes, there for all to see, could conjure up so much dancing light.

  Then she turned to Tom. The downward turn had come back to his mouth, and he was watching her sombrely.

  ‘I can’t take this,’ she said. ‘You can’t part with anything so beautiful.’

  Tom’s hand closed over hers so that it tightened on the frame of the picture. ‘It’s yours now,’ he told her. ‘I wanted to give you something … and Darcy … for everything you did to help the play, and Oliver. I saw you at the party, looking up at my picture, and I knew that you’d love it as much as I do. And what better occasion could there be for a present than your engagement? To Darcy himself. What could be neater?’ Again there was the flash of mockery. ‘So let’s hang it and see how it looks.’

  Tom went over to the mantelpiece of the little iron grate and deftly swept it clear of the student clutter of lecture lists and invitations to long-past faculty sherry parties. He held the picture up against the chimney breast, cocked his head to one side to judge it, then put it down to hammer in the picture pin.

  They stood back shoulder to shoulder to examine it.

  The little picture was perfectly at home on the bare wall. It seemed to brighten the room, and to bring with it a breath of flowers and the salt sea air.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, almost inaudibly. Afraid that he hadn’t heard her, Helen put out her hand and met the supple leather of his bright blue jacket, then stretched to kiss his cheek. As she moved he turned his face and her lips were faintly grazed by the prickle of beard on his jaw. Her mouth met the corner of his and she started back, shocked by the electricity that seemed to crackle through them.

  Tom’s faint smile might have been an acknowledgement of her thanks, or of something else altogether. ‘And now,’ he said, ‘I think we should celebrate by going out to dinner.’

  ‘I can’t …’

  ‘You’ve taken my picture,’ he reminded her coolly. ‘The least you can do is let me buy you dinner as a way of saying goodbye to it.’

  Helen knew that she didn’t want to say no.

  Tom drove her out to Woodstock, and they sat over drinks in a garden heavy with the scent of lilacs and wet grass. Helen was uncomfortable, but she was also vividly aware that her depression had lifted. The evening scents, and the texture of grass or paving beneath her feet, seemed sharp and precious. Ordinary things seemed significant, whether it was the low murmur of voices from an open window or the arc of a car’s lights in the lane beyond.

  ‘Are you warm enough out here?’ His voice, too, seemed to have a different timbre.

  ‘Yes,’ she said softly. ‘It’s beautiful.’

  Tom leaned across and lifted her hand from her lap. He turned it to and fro in his and then looked at her, quizzical.

  Helen resisted her first impulse to snatch her hand away, and let it lie. ‘There is a ring,’ she heard herself saying. ‘The Viscountess’s ring. Darcy took it away to be remade because it’s too big. It’s a ruby, about the size of golfball, and about ten diamonds besides. I don’t think it’s me, really.’ Her voice trailed away into silence. Tom still held her hand in his, but he was looking away across the restaurant garden as if his mind was somewhere else.

  ‘Remember New Year’s Eve?’ he asked.

  Helen snatched her hand away now as if it had been burned. ‘Vividly. Rather a lot of things happened.’

  ‘I haven’t been slapped for kissing someone since I was about twelve and tried to grab Ellen Lou Parker at a Saturday morning movie show. It was rather exciting, once I’d got over the shock.’

  ‘I was upset,’ she defended herself. ‘After we’d just seen Oliver …’

  ‘I don’t want to talk about Oliver right now.’

  Helen was painfully conscious of his dark stare, and behind that the sense that he expected something of her. She retreated further behind a barrier of tumbling words.

  ‘I remember running off to hide in the billiard room, and finding Darcy hiding there too …’

  ‘I particularly don’t want to talk about Darcy right now.’

  A sudden brittle silence yawned between them.

  Helen had the feeling that whatever she said to break it would change things for good.

  A shadow fell across the table. It was the waiter.

  ‘Are you ready to order now, sir?’

  Tom’s face showed only the faintest flicker as he picked up his menu. ‘I think so. What are you going to have to start with, Helen? The duck terrine is wonderful …’

  The moment was past.

  As Tom escorted her across the restaurant he was greeted by two separate parties. He stopped to kiss one woman theatrically on both cheeks, and to exchange jokes with another group, one of whom Helen recognised as a middlingly famous television actor.

  At last they reached their table, discreetly placed in a corner. Tom sighed comically as he sat down opposite her.

  ‘Business, business.’

  Throughout the meal they devoted themselves to keeping the conversation on neutral ground. Tom asked her about Venice, and she found herself talking stiltedly at first about the paintings and the frescoes and the Renaissance palaces. Then, her tongue loosened by good food and wine, and led on by Tom’s gentle questions, she began to describe the odd, sensual spell that the city had cast over her.

  ‘It was like living in one of those very vivid dreams one has, just before waking up.’

  The word ‘dream’ struck her, but this time she didn’t blush.

  ‘It affects me too, in just the same way. It always makes me feel unbearably randy.’ Tom was smiling at her, appreciative of the animation in her face. ‘Tell me, did you discover that church in a little square? San Zaccaria, I think. There’s an altarpiece, a Bellini, the Madonna with Four Saints …’

  ‘Yes. Oh yes. I saw it late one afternoon, and the doorkeeper was standing in a shaft of light with a huge key, waiting to close up, like a Bellini figure himself. I wanted to go back and see it again but I never did.’

  ‘I’ll take you. I’d like to see it with you more than anyone else.’ He said it very quietly, but perfectly matter-of-fact. When Helen met his eyes she saw the challenge in them, and some of the old mockery. She didn’t hesitate.

  ‘That’s impossible.’

  ‘Because of Darcy?’

  ‘Of course because of Darcy. I’m going to marry him.’

  ‘Helen …’ Tom put his warm hands over hers. ‘Are you really going to marry Viscount Darcy? Or is it an elaborate joke?’

  Defiance stiffened her. She lifted her chin and looked straight into his face.

  ‘It woul
dn’t be a very funny joke, would it? Yes, I’m going to marry Darcy. I love him.’

  Whistling in the dark, her inner heart said sadly.

  Slowly Tom lifted her clasped hands between his and kissed the knuckles of each before lowering them again.

  ‘In that case,’ he said, ‘I wish you both every happiness.’

  He signalled to the discreetly distant waiter.

  They must all think we’re lovers, Helen thought miserably.

  There was nothing else to say, and it was time to go.

  They drove back to Oxford in almost unbroken silence. Then, as they approached it past the flat, watery reaches of Port Meadow, they rounded a sharp corner and at once dipped over the steep bridge over the Isis.

  ‘Look.’

  Helen drew in her breath at the sight. In front of them, hidden until the last moment by the curve of the road and the protective willows, were the lights of a travelling fair. The brilliant dazzle lay in the dark, empty space like a mirage. Across the meadows towards them drifted the tinny music and the shouts of the barkers.

  Tom stopped at once. They climbed out into the night air and leaned together on the five-barred gate to stare. The world seemed utterly deserted, shrouded in darkness and the mist rising from the river, but there in front of them were the diamond necklaces of lights chaining the roundabouts, the flash of scarlet and blue and green, and the distant determined gaiety of the music.

  ‘It’s not really there,’ Helen breathed. ‘It’s a ghost fair. Or a scene from a Fellini film.’

  ‘No,’ Tom corrected her. ‘More like early Antonioni.’

  A bubble of laughter burst between them, the tension all forgotten. Tom’s face was alive with sudden childish anticipation. ‘What are we waiting for?’

  They vaulted the gate and ran towards tangled necklaces of lights, with the multi-coloured spokes of the Big Wheel revolving slowly over them like a great star.

  The fair was real enough. They wandered between the booths, breathing in the competing smells of candyfloss, hot dogs, trampled grass and oil, and hailed on every side by stallholders eager for custom.

  ‘Come on now, try yer luck.’

  ‘Prize every time. Hit the red and win yer girlfriend this lovely tea-service.’

  ‘Want to try?’ Tom was heaping wooden balls into her arm. Gaudily painted clowns’ faces with wide-open mouths rotated in front of her. ‘Watch me then.’ Laughing at each other they showered balls at the targets. Helen proved to be a much better shot. Her prize was a pink nylon-fur teddy bear and she held it out to Tom.

  ‘Tom, I … want you to have this.’

  ‘Helen, I shall treasure it for ever. Now, please let me get back some of my masculine pride by winning on the rifle range.’

  He led her insistently from stall to stall and they shot, rolled balls and flung hoops. They were almost the only customers and Helen half imagined that Tom had laid on the fair for her alone, as a whimsical after-dinner amusement. ‘I don’t think we need any more coconuts,’ he said at last. ‘Time for the rides, now.’

  At the heart of the fair were the hobby horses. The huge Victorian merry-go-round sparkled with lights, mosaics of mirror and engraved glass and swags of painted flowers. The horses themselves, galloping hooves and gold-painted manes and staring eyes, flew round on their barley-sugar twisted poles to thundering organ music.

  Tom and Helen stood at the steps lost in admiration. At last the machine slowed and the music wheezed away into a murmur.

  ‘Which one?’ Tom asked and Helen ran to one of the outer horses, cream and gold with ‘Prancer’ painted around its neck in a garland of painted flowers. Tom handed her up into the high saddle and she gathered the reins into her fingers. When he came up behind her, he steadied them with an arm around her waist.

  Slowly the horses began to move again, up and then down, and in a slowly blurring circle of white and gold. Helen felt Tom at her back, and then his mouth against her ear.

  ‘Not quite riding out with the Montcalm foxhounds. But more fun, don’t you think?’

  ‘Yes,’ she flung back at him.

  Helen let the rise and fall of the wooden horses and the wild blare of the music carry her away on the wings of exhilaration. The rest of the world beyond this painted horse and its cocoon of light was, for a precious few minutes, no more than a meaningless blur.

  Once she turned around and caught the white flash of Tom’s smile answering her own. His hands tightened on her waist as she leaned back against him. There was nothing else that mattered at all.

  Yet, all too soon, the carved ripples of Prancer’s mane rose and fell slower and slower and the lights beyond the merry-go-round steadied and swung to a standstill. Tom was lifting her back to the trodden grass again and she stumbled, dizzy, and almost fell against him. He hugged her, laughing, as he supported her.

  ‘I think it’s got to be the Ferris wheel to finish with, don’t you?’ The big wheel was at a standstill, waiting for riders. In a moment they were in the little car, and the attendant bolted the safety bar in front of them. The wheel turned and they were swept backwards swinging, and on up into the darkness.

  Helen gasped and her fingers tightened on the bar.

  At the highest point the wheel stopped and they hung, rocking, high up in empty space. Far below another couple were climbing into a car to balance their own.

  ‘Scared?’

  Tom seemed very close and solid beside her in this airy, swinging emptiness. The noise and clatter of the fair sounded far off.

  ‘Don’t be,’ he said softly. ‘There’s no need.’

  Awkward in the confined space he reached for her. Helen had the confused memory of another dark space where they had once sat together, isolated above a carpet of light. She had rejected him then. Now she couldn’t do it. Something like greed rose in her. In the half-second as their eyes met before they kissed, Helen and Tom saw that they came together under the same compulsion. He kissed her lightly at first, tasting her mouth and then her skin. Helen’s fingers found the crisp hair at the nape of his neck and she drew him closer, her mouth opening to drink in the taste of him, forgetting herself in her own hunger for him.

  ‘Helen?’ His mouth moved against hers and she answered, ‘I’m here. I’m here.’

  When she opened her eyes again she saw the shadow in the hollow of his cheek, and the dark line of his eyebrows fiercely drawn together. Behind him was the wide open blackness of Port Meadow and beyond, so far off that it scarcely mattered at all, the faint orange glow of Oxford.

  The wheel jerked again and they rolled forward, swinging out into space, swooping down past the bored attendant and back into their own world of silent, windy nothingness.

  The momentum of the great wheel possessed them as they rocked in one another’s arms. The alternating dark of the high-point and confused brightness of the low swept over their closed eyelids. Just once, Tom tried to pull her closer so that their bodies could touch but they were confined by the brutal metal bar.

  ‘Curse this little box,’ he groaned.

  But when the wheel described a slower circle, and their car stopped at the wooden platform at the bottom, Helen said, ‘No. I don’t want to get out yet.’

  ‘Again,’ Tom said, and stuffed the money into the attendant’s hands. Helen saw the man’s tattooed forearms with bemused clarity before the wheel swept her away again to the place where there was only Tom.

  When they were suspended again above their kingdom of space, Tom said, ‘We can’t stay up here all night, darling. I can’t reach enough of you.’ She felt the tightness in the muscles of his throat as he spoke, and heard the happiness in his voice. ‘I want to take you home to bed.’

  Helen was possessed by a delicious sense of abandonment, of being beyond reality suspended here above the mysterious, deserted fair.

  ‘When the wheel stops,’ she said dreamily. ‘When the wheel stops.’

  Almost at once, it seemed, they were slowing again and coming to rest
in the intrusive glare of the lights.

  ‘Ready this time, guv?’ said the wheel man.

  They looked at each other, glowing with excitement. Helen felt that her hair was tangled and her mouth burning, and that she couldn’t have cared less.

  ‘I think so,’ Tom said.

  ‘Yes,’ Helen told him. ‘Ready this time.’

  The bar swung up and they stepped shakily out into the world once again. Tom’s hand clasped hers and he began to draw her away. Helen followed him, willing, light-headed.

  Then a voice called after them.

  ‘Having a nice time?’

  They stopped dead, still hand in hand, and turned slowly around. Gerry Pole was standing at the steps up to the hobby horses, and beside him was Oliver.

  ‘Up until now,’ Tom said curtly. He had sized up the intrusion at once, and made to turn Helen away again. But she was frozen to the spot. The sight of Gerry and Oliver brought back reality with an icy, threatening blast. She saw that Gerry was drunk, and Oliver drunker still. But they were here in front of them, and she saw how she must look. She was guiltily trapped with her hand in Tom’s and her face burning with his kisses. Gerry’s face was alive with prurient curiosity.

  Oliver swayed forward. ‘My darling Helen,’ he said very carefully. ‘I’ve been so remiss. I should have come at once to see you and offer my condolences on the prospect of becoming a Mortimore. Are you quite sure? Not too late yet, you know. Sure Darcy would understand.’ His glazed eyes travelled away to Tom, and she saw clearly the confused connection of his thoughts.

  ‘Hello, Oliver,’ Helen said in a small, flat voice. ‘Of course I’m sure. Darcy and I are very happy.’

  Oh God, her inner voice whispered, how have I got everything so badly wrong?

  ‘How lovely,’ Oliver said, vague now. ‘Darcy’s a lucky man. I’m an unlucky man, on the other hand. As I’ve been telling old Gerry here.’ He put his arm round Gerry’s shoulder and they staggered a little, laughing. As she had been once before, Helen was struck by their physical likeness. Oliver’s face was tanned from his ski-ing holiday, but it was thinner, and marked by the beginnings of the same creases that split Gerry’s. The gold of his hair seemed to have faded, so that in the garish fairground lights it was closer to Gerry’s lifeless grey.