Rosie Thomas 3-Book Collection

by Rosie Thomas

  By the end of the meal Lady Montcalm was satisfied that Helen had come from nowhere, knew no-one and had no idea of the world she was marrying into. Darcy’s choice was as bad as it could be.

  She dabbed at her lips with a napkin.

  ‘This is all wonderful.’ Helen knew that she had failed all the tests, and she knew equally that Lady Montcalm was far too clever to let her opposition show. ‘Is there any hurry, Darcy?’ she was asking. ‘Let’s all spend some time getting to know each other before putting the announcement in the papers and so forth.’

  ‘I’m sure you’ll deal with all that beautifully,’ Darcy said. ‘Helen wants to sit her Schools first, in June. She’s going to get a First.’

  ‘Oh yes. Helen’s exams.’ They might have been talking about some bizarre ritual engaged in by a remote primitive tribe, Helen thought, trying to raise her own spirits. No wonder Oliver had no interest in his own academic progress.

  Lady Montcalm made a tiny gesture and Darcy moved to pull back her chair. As she stood up, she bent her head towards Helen and said, ‘I’m so very, very pleased. Darcy must bring you to Montcalm very often. But now, I’m afraid …’ she sighed again, ‘… I must go up and have my rest.’

  A brief kiss was bestowed on the air close to Darcy’s head and his mother was gone. ‘Take me home,’ Helen said. ‘Please, let’s go home. To Follies.’

  She thought that she would never be happier to see the square bulk of the old red house.

  They left Montcalm behind them, the dome and turrets leaden against a heavy grey sky.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Darcy said humbly as they drove.

  ‘I don’t want you to be sorry.’ Helen was fierce. She was thinking of the warmth with which her own mother had welcomed Darcy. But then that isn’t quite the same, she thought, struggling to be fair. ‘We’ve done it now anyway.’ They smiled at each other, more relieved than triumphant. You’ve done it now, she echoed to herself. Today’s tense little encounter had had one surprising effect. It had made her want to love Darcy more than anything, and to be a new family for him. And if she wanted it enough, she told herself almost grimly, then she could do it. For Darcy.

  And Tom …

  Helen stared at the Oxford road unwinding in front of them. He still seemed tangibly close, his features vivid inside her eyelids.

  There could be no Tom. No more thinking about him, no more seeing him as anything but a friend. In time, the hurt of that would fade until it was no more painful than an old bruise. In time, she thought.

  Helen had made her choice.

  Twelve

  Summer began in Oxford that year, just as it always did, on the morning of the first of May.

  For hours before dawn the streets were packed with surging crowds. They spilled out of parties and continued their celebrations in the cobbled alleys and courts. Under the trailing branches of the willows fringing the river, the punts slid down to Magdalen Bridge. They were packed with more noisy party-goers, heading for the focus of the night’s festivity. Behind them empty champagne bottles bobbed in the black and gold-rippled water. As the city’s clocks struck five, and then the half-hour, the revellers in the streets were drawn to the river too. They massed on Magdalen Bridge in the brightening grey light. A cold wind blew off the water, more reminiscent of March than the first summer’s day.

  As six o’clock approached faces began to turn upwards to Magdalen Tower, waiting. A scarlet kite with a tail of streamers dipped in the wind, higher than the tower’s flagpole, and was greeted by a hubbub of cheering.

  Chloe and Helen had left Follies together in the chilly, early summer dawn. It was Chloe’s first May morning, and Helen’s last. Pansy had declined to come, saying that even the best party in the world wouldn’t tempt her out at five a.m. In the subdued atmosphere that reigned in the house, no-one had felt like staying up all night.

  So Helen and Chloe walked through Christ Church Meadows together, and joined the rowdy throng under the tower. It was a colourful gathering in the pale light. Bunches of bright balloons bobbed from the lamp-posts, and gaudily dressed morris men with garters of jingling bells jigged to insistent fiddle music. From the river came screams and rising plumes of water as people pushed each other in. With the shouting and singing and competing bands, the noise was deafening. Helen and Chloe were swept backwards and forwards by the jostling mass.

  But at six o’clock the first bell tolled, and was taken up by chime after chime across the city. Silence fell, and the crowd waited.

  Helen craned her neck to look upwards and glimpsed a flag of white sleeve. Then she heard the first notes rising, pure and clear, as the tolling bells died away.

  The Chapel choir had filed out on to the leads, their surplices fluttering. As they did every year, they sang a spring anthem into the windy space over the tower. Beneath them hundreds of faces turned up to hear the high, thin singing as it was snatched away from them into the grey-white sky.

  It was over almost as soon as it had begun. Magdalen bells rang out again, almost drowned by the storm of cheering and singing, whistles and handclapping.

  Another summer had been welcomed.

  Suddenly Helen was blinking back tears. It was almost all over. It was a bare month until Schools, and then Oxford would erupt in the brief, hectic glitter of Commem week. After that it would be finished. And she herself would be Darcy’s wife.

  It was in that moment, fighting against the stinging tears, that she saw Tom watching her. He was quite close, sitting on the parapet of the bridge with his back against the latticed pillar that carried one of the white-globed lights. His bright, flippant clothes made him part of the crowd, but he was separate too. Helen thought she saw the detached amusement in his face at the eccentric Englishness of it all. But when his eyes met hers there was no mockery in them. There was simply a question, wordless but no less clear to both of them. His dark eyes held hers insistently, demanding a response.

  They hadn’t seen each other since their evening at the fair.

  Without a glance left or right, blind and deaf to everything except the imperative need within her, Helen began to stumble towards him. Longing flooded through her and she already felt the weight of his arms around her, and the pressure of his mouth against hers.

  The rest of the world was forgotten in the surge of pure joy at the sight of him.

  The crowds tangled around her, pinioning her arms and keeping her agonisingly apart from him. She saw Tom hold out his hands to her before a long chain of conga dancers twisted between them and he was hidden.

  Helen snatched her cold hands out of her pockets to help force her way through the crowds. As she moved she felt the weight sliding on her finger and then heard a tiny clink as the Viscountess’s ring dropped and rolled away. She froze in her headlong rush. Slowly she tore her gaze from the point where she had seen Tom and made her eyes quarter the pavement between the shuffling feet. The ring lay a few inches away, as ominously bright as a splash of new blood on the paving. Helen sank stiffly to her knees and reached for it. When her fingers closed over it again, she felt it cold and bulky and almost unbearably heavy.

  Darcy. Darcy’s ring. Her promise, and her vow not to see Tom any more. I can’t trust myself, she whispered, and she knew they were the truest words she’d ever spoken. Desperately her fingers tightened around the ring until the stones bit cruelly into her flesh. She scrambled up and saw that the space in front of her had miraculously cleared. Only a few yards separated her from Tom and he was still waiting for her, one hand outstretched.

  ‘No,’ Helen shouted desperately. ‘I can’t.’

  The dancers looked curiously at her and then swirled around to separate them again.

  With every bone and muscle in her body aching and crying out against the movement, Helen turned away. She felt Tom’s gaze on her back, and knew that she would never forget how he had looked as he sat there with his black hair blown into a peak by the river wind.

  Chloe was in the crowd to the right
of her. Helen pushed frantically towards her, longing but not daring to look back at the bridge parapet. She reached Chloe and grasped at her arm. The solid warmth of it gave her the strength to look back.

  Tom had vanished. The space on the bridge mocked her with its emptiness. The crowds were already streaming away, to breakfast parties or to dance and sing in the streets with the fiddle-players and morris men, and they had engulfed him.

  Helen swayed slightly, suddenly icy cold. She was numbly aware of having made a terrible decision; a decision that had left her lonely and hopeless.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Chloe’s voice was anxious at her side. ‘You look ill.’

  ‘Yes.’ Helen fought to collect herself. No-one must know, not even Chloe. ‘Yes. I’m okay. Just cold, that’s all. There are too many people here. Let’s walk a little way to warm up.’

  They followed the press of people up the High, and were swept on into Broad Street. There, in front of the Bodleian, Helen glimpsed him again, standing poised under one of the stone emperors. They were separated by a gaggle of morris dancers. One of them capered in and out of the dance with a pig’s bladder on a stick. Tom was watching, frowning, with his hands deep in his pockets. This time Helen gave herself no chance to think. She started to run to him, blind to the intricate dance that she would have to cut through, but it was too late.

  Much closer, two girls in extravagant twenties costumes and heavily rouged cheeks had seen him too. They pounced on him with cries of greeting, and took his arms insistently in theirs. After only an instant’s hesitation, Tom kissed the rouged cheeks and turned on his laconic smile. The girls were pointing, pulling him away, and he let himself be drawn along with them to join their party.

  He hadn’t seen Helen. She stopped short and then turned blindly back.

  ‘Wasn’t that Tom?’ Chloe asked.

  ‘Was it?’ Helen responded tonelessly. ‘I didn’t see.’

  Chloe looked sideways at her friend and then suggested, ‘Let’s walk through the Parks. It’s too beautiful to go inside yet.’

  The grey-white sky had turned eggshell blue, and the wind had dropped. There was a promise of warmth in the still air. Chloe and Helen passed the red and yellow brick slab of Keble Chapel and turned into the University Parks. The trees were still heavy with blossom but the grass underneath was starred with white petals. Helen walked slowly, concentrating on the scent of blossom and mown grass and on the exuberant song of a blackbird.

  ‘Are you sure you don’t want to sit down for a while?’ Chloe said at length. ‘You look a bit better, but you went so white back there, I thought you were going to faint.’

  Helen shook her head. ‘No, let’s walk on. I just want to get away from … all those crowds.’

  The steadiness of her own voice surprised her. She felt that within herself she was running headlong, trying to escape the panicky conviction that she was wrong, all over again. Wronger this time than she could have believed possible.

  What do I want?, she kept asking herself, and getting back only the numbing answer that it was too late to allow herself any kind of choice.

  Helen looked desperately around, at the summer-green brilliance of the empty Parks, and at Chloe’s calm profile tactfully turned away towards the river. Everything was as it always was, and yet horribly dislocated too. All the natural rightness of the summer morning was bathed in a lurid new light, the certainty that she wanted to run to Tom.

  Fear and apprehension welled up in her. She struggled against it, and at last managed to replace it with Darcy’s face. It was suffused with pride, as it had been when she held out her hand for him to see the ruby ring.

  Her engagement ring.

  Not here, not here. It was impossible to think about anything here. Back home in the safety of Follies, she would face this horrible problem there. In the meantime there was this expanse of petal-covered grass to cross, and Chloe beside her who must not be allowed to guess at anything. With superhuman effort Helen said, ‘I’m sorry. I’m not very good company this morning.’

  She saw that they were coming to the river. The bank was lined with willows, and the olive green water tugged endlessly at the trailing branches. Just in front of them a high-arched bridge spanned the water like an iron rainbow.

  ‘Look,’ Chloe said, pointing. Someone was sitting huddled on a wooden bench to one side of the bridge. ‘It’s Beatrice.’

  Helen was so lost in the turmoil of her thoughts that she caught herself wondering wildly who Beatrice was. Only when they had stopped in front of the bench did she see that it was Stephen’s wife.

  Beatrice looked years older. The wings of grey hair over her ears had thickened, and the taut skin of her face had sagged. Her eyes were dark, and dull with watching. She had been feeding the ducks with bread from a brown paper bag, and she held the last crust in her fingers. She was shredding it into grey crumbs that scattered over the front of her raincoat.

  When she saw them, she smiled vaguely, unsurprised, and said, ‘Stupid, isn’t it? Even when the children aren’t around, I automatically bring bread to feed the bloody ducks.’

  They stood awkwardly in front of her, not knowing whether to stop or move on and leave her to her solitude.

  ‘Sit down,’ Beatrice said. ‘It’d be nice to have someone to talk to.’

  ‘Where are the children?’ Helen asked, grateful for something – anything – external to focus on. Beatrice flung the last crumbs of bread across the water and brushed away the crumbs.

  ‘Staying with my mother for a while. It’s supposed to give me a chance to think, but in fact I can’t find anything to do to fill the time. Have you seen Stephen?’ The abruptness of the question betrayed her anxiety. Helen and Chloe glanced at one another, not sure of what to tell her.

  ‘Yes,’ Chloe said at last. ‘I saw him at Follies.’

  ‘He was with her, I suppose?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Beatrice ducked her head and the wings of her hair fell forward across her cheek. She was looking down at her hands, the fingers splayed out flat against the dark stuff of her raincoat. They were faintly roughened with gardening, and the only ring was her thin gold wedding band.

  ‘Strange, isn’t it?’ she said, ‘How fifteen years, three children, all those days and hours and minutes together, awake and asleep, seem to count for nothing now?’ Her voice was muffled and she kept her head bent to hide the tears behind her veil of hair. ‘Stephen’s always been in love with being young. Being young himself, and proving it with endless girls.’

  Chloe listened, wishing that she didn’t have to hear. She didn’t care for the image of herself glimpsed through Beatrice’s eyes. Beatrice sensed her stillness and said, ‘I’m sorry. You were one, weren’t you?’ She was sad rather than bitter. ‘He probably hurt you, too.’

  ‘I deserved it,’ Chloe said grimly.

  Beatrice’s attention had already shifted to the thought that was preoccupying her. ‘Pansy Warren is different. I wasn’t afraid of any of the others, but I’m afraid of Pansy. I can cope with her being so beautiful, and likeable, and having all the things she does. It’s her carelessness that frightens me. It makes her invulnerable. Stephen is vulnerable, and God knows, so am I.’ She spread her fingers further apart in her lap. ‘What can either of us do? And how can I compete?’ Beatrice was crying openly now. ‘I don’t want to have to compete for my husband. Do you know, they say that children keep you young? They don’t. They make you old, and then you find that your husband doesn’t want you any more. He’s gone to live with a lovely child who trails him around like an emasculated shadow.’

  The bitterness was clear now. Helen and Chloe sat numbly, at a loss for anything to say or do.

  So that’s marriage, Helen thought. The exquisite freshness of the morning seemed to turn dark and chilly around her. Once, briefly, she had envied Beatrice at home in her family-warm rectory kitchen. Helen was going to have just that sort of life herself now, in the pleasant security of Mere. And Darc
y would never be like Stephen Spurring. She knew without a flicker of doubt that once his promise was made, Darcy would be honest and faithful to her until the day he died.

  But still there was no glow in the sunlight, and the breeze felt cold at her back.

  What is the matter? Helen asked herself. Is it really true that I’ve promised to marry the wrong man?

  Unseeingly she watched the ragged flutter of pink and white blossom as it drifted down around her.

  Beatrice stood up stiffly. ‘I’m going to walk on,’ she told them. ‘Give my love to Stephen, won’t you, next time you see him?’

  ‘Beatrice,’ Chloe said quickly, ‘if it’s any consolation, it won’t last for ever. Pansy is already looking over his shoulder.’

  Beatrice laughed without amusement. ‘It isn’t any consolation. Do you suppose that Stephen will want to come back when Pansy has finished with him? Or that I should take him back? What would you do? No.’ She answered herself. ‘There isn’t any point in asking you that. You couldn’t know what fifteen years of marriage is like without having lived it.’ Beatrice pulled her raincoat more tightly around her, ready to walk on, and then remembered something. ‘Helen, I heard about your engagement. I wish you both every happiness. Don’t take Stephen and me as an advertisement for marriage. At least, don’t take what you can see now.’ Suddenly she smiled, and the years fell away from her face. ‘Anyway, one survives. Somehow one survives. Women are much better at that than men, you know.’

  In that moment they glimpsed her mettle. Beatrice was brave, and she had the enviable clear-sightedness of experience.

  ‘Goodbye, Helen, Chloe. Come out to the Rectory and see me sometime. I could do with the company.’ Then she turned and walked away along the river path, a slight figure in a black raincoat with her head held up.

  There was a long silence before Chloe said savagely, ‘He doesn’t deserve her, does he?’ And then, with the anger giving way to weariness, ‘Why are we all such fools? Except you, Helen.’

  ‘Oh, I’m the biggest fool of all.’ Helen’s voice was so low that Chloe turned to her, uncertain of whether she had heard correctly. Helen gave her no chance to press her any further. ‘Come on,’ she said, with a pretence of briskness. ‘I really need a cup of coffee. Let’s go to the market.’