by Rosie Thomas
The indoor market with its rows of close-packed shops and stalls was beginning to fill up with people in search of breakfast after a long night. The taxi-drivers’ cafe in the middle was packed with a motley crowd of people, porters in overalls and impatient cab-drivers and jostling students, some of them still wet from the river, and a sprinkling of faintly defiant people in evening clothes. The atmosphere was thick with frying bacon, and the windows were running with condensation.
‘Can you stand this?’ Chloe asked.
‘Just about.’
They found themselves two seats and wrapped their hands gratefully round thick white pint-mugs of coffee. Helen had barely tasted hers before there was a crash behind her, a roar of warning and then someone fell against her so that coffee slopped over her fingers. Protestingly she turned around and half recognised the four reddened faces scuffling together.
‘I’m frightfully sorry,’ one of them said. There was no mistaking the intonation. They were Oliver’s hearty friends from Christ Church. In the same instant she saw Oliver behind them, and she was struck cold by his air of being a spectre at a particularly jolly party. His face was almost gaunt, and the fresh-minted quality of his golden good looks was fading fast. Once again, Helen thought of Gerry. His friends were boisterously merry, but Oliver was sober for once. Only his unnaturally wide eyes gave him away.
‘Hello,’ he said carefully. ‘You keep catching me at the real high points of my dizzy social life. This,’ and he gestured at his friends who now had the air of looking around for bread rolls to throw, ‘is the Christ Church Commem Ball Committee. We started out last night with the definite intention of discussing marquee hire and cloakroom facilities. Somehow the night has slipped away, and we are no further forward. But don’t worry. We shall keep on trying. You’ll come to our Ball, won’t you, darling Helen? Oh, of course you will. Darcy will escort you and see you safe home afterwards. What about you, Chloe? Shall I fix you up with one of my friends here? Or you could always risk it with me.’ Chloe looked away from him, trying not to remember.
Helen rounded on him, white-faced. ‘Why, Oliver? What’s the matter with you? Have you got to fling everything away, and with people like those?’
Oliver mimed a travesty of surprise. ‘But they are my peers, darling. The so-privileged few with whom I am supposed to spend my time. The others, the ones with dirty white shirts and pale faces and little phials full of fascinating things, they’re the ones I’m not supposed to know.’ Oliver put his arms around their shoulders and bent so that his face was close to theirs. ‘But the funny thing is that they’re all, all of them, equally and disastrously fucking dreary. So what can one do in this waste of dullness but soldier on, taking one’s enjoyment where one can? I’m only sorry, sweet wholesome Helen, that it incurs your disapproval.’ Oliver’s mouth twisted uncomfortably as he stood up again.
‘I’ll leave you to your breakfast. I’m sure that you’ll want to hurry off soon to make sure that no-one has taken your special seat in the Upper Reading Room.’ Before Helen could collect herself, Oliver had slammed away, without a backward glance at her or at his oblivious companions.
Helen buried her face in her hands. ‘I didn’t mean to say it like that,’ she whispered. ‘It just came out too quickly. I didn’t mean to be priggish, and pompous, and all the other things he recoils from. Chloe, all I wanted to say was Look. You don’t have to make yourself like this. Why can’t he see? I just wanted …’
‘I know,’ Chloe told her gently. ‘But he can’t hear that.’
Helen’s sleeve was soaked with cold coffee and she tried vainly to roll it back. There was a leaden, stifling weight inside her chest and a taste of metal deep in her throat. There seemed to be nothing in the whole world that she could focus on that was clear, and sweet, and straight. Then she thought again. There was Darcy, in all his goodness and devotion. And there was Tom, with his uncompromising clear sight and the sharp weapon of his intelligence. Two opposite sides of the same truth, she thought. But which of them was the truth that she needed for herself?
Helen pushed back her chair with a sharp scrape. ‘This is a horrible day,’ she mumbled to Chloe. ‘I’m going to do just as Oliver said. I’m going to go away and work. That’s easy to understand, at least.’
She turned away in the same direction as Oliver, and Chloe watched her go with a deep frown marked between her eyes.
‘I hate this house.’
Stephen Spurring was looking up into the shadowy height of Follies’ hall.
Chloe smiled faintly. ‘Why? I should have thought it was right up your street.’
They had come face to face one evening at the steps leading down to the island, where it was impossible for either of them to turn aside. Although they had barely spoken since the play, they managed to put a casual gloss on this awkward meeting. Stephen asked politely about her work, and Chloe responded with equal formality. Now she was surprised by the sudden vehemence in his voice.
He shrugged, irritable. ‘Not the shell itself. That’s very fine, of course. Just the atmosphere. I wish Pansy would come and live somewhere else. I’ve tried to persuade her, but she won’t hear of it. I could rent us a place, at least.’
Chloe couldn’t resist a tiny pinprick.
‘Surely Pansy could buy a house? Or Masefield would set her up in anything she wanted.’
Stephen flushed uncomfortably. ‘There wouldn’t be any need for that.’
Poor Stephen, Chloe thought suddenly. Married, and in love with a mercurial girl half his age. And a rich man’s daughter, at that. He must know he can’t give her any of the things she’s used to.
Chloe saw that her old lover looked weary, and diminished. The air of confident, pedagogic authority that had once attracted her was gone. Even his feminine good looks had turned faintly seedy. He wasn’t the man she had fallen in love with at the beginning of the year, and that must mean that he was no longer the man that Pansy had so unerringly reached for either.
Poor Stephen.
‘Come and have a drink,’ she said warmly. His eyes met hers in a surprised stare. ‘Don’t worry.’ Her voice was softer. ‘It’s all right. I’m all right.’
He followed her up the stairs but at her door, he hesitated.
‘I don’t want Pansy to come back and find that I’m not here. She’ll just go off somewhere again.’
‘Leave the door open then. You can see her coming up the stairs. Where is she?’
Stephen took a glass of wine, and sat down where he could see along the gallery.
‘London. For an interview. She won’t say any more … you know what Pansy’s like.’ He seemed to crumple in front of Chloe’s eyes. ‘I thought at first I understood her, and now I see that I don’t at all. All I do know is that I need her.’ Stephen collected himself with an effort. ‘Chloe, I shouldn’t be talking like this. To you, of all people.’
‘Don’t worry,’ she murmured again. ‘I had a bad time, but that was more to do with my own mistakes than you.’ She remembered sharply the aching days of As You Like It, Oliver’s clammy desperation, and then the clinic off Harley Street and the void inside her. That void was still with her, and always would be, and beside that Stephen was irrelevant. He was as small as if viewed through the wrong end of a telescope. I’ve survived, she thought. I’ve learned. Gratitude swept over her, and through it, she looked calmly at Stephen. ‘Talk about it if it helps,’ she said.
Stephen was wry, a flicker of his old self showing. ‘Nothing helps much, except being with her. I’ve never longed to possess anyone so totally before. I’ve always found possessiveness rather a shortcoming. As you know.’
Neither of them smiled.
‘What about your … what about Beatrice?’
He looked away.
‘Beatrice is very unhappy.’ There was a long silence before he went on. ‘I’d give anything not to be hurting her like this. But it’s too late. I can’t be without Pansy now. I’m like an addict, Chloe. Waiting
around Follies for my fix.’ Crumpled in Chloe’s armchair with his head in his hands, Stephen looked just that. Chloe watched helplessly. There was nothing to say. There was no point in telling him that Pansy was the last woman in the world to be addicted to. She was too quick, too changeable, and most of all too private. Stephen, from the defeated lines in his face, knew that already.
The silence was broken by the sound of someone running up the stairs. Stephen jerked upright, already smiling at the doorway. Then Pansy was there, bright as a flame. She swooped in on them. Her greeting was for both of them, impartial. ‘So. Having a party without me. Am I invited now, or shall I go away?’ Belatedly she kissed the top of Stephen’s head and he reached out for her, but she was already whirling away again.
‘Stay, of course,’ they told her.
‘Don’t ask me how it went,’ Pansy ordered. ‘I can’t talk about it till I know. But …’ her face broke into her enchanting smile, ‘I feel lucky.’
‘Did you go dressed like that?’ Stephen asked. Pansy was wearing a tiny skirt, two tiers of scarlet ruffles that made her legs look endless. The tight blue T-shirt with a trail of glitter over the shoulder showed every line of her small breasts. There was glitter on her eyelids too, and her hair was combed into a peak at the front and close into the nape of her neck. She looked like an innocent child playing at being streetwise; an irresistible combination. Stephen swallowed, dry-mouthed.
‘Sure. I’m not asking to be a curator at the British Museum, you know. Or a lecturer in palaeontology.’
Wherever Pansy had been, it was somewhere that was already carrying her far beyond the narrow horizons of Oxford. Her words showed no more than an amused affection for Stephen’s academic world. Her Oxford don, once captured, wouldn’t hold her for very long. Chloe saw the beginnings of impatience with him in her face. But when he pulled her into his arms, she still capitulated. She let her pliant body bend against his, and his hands slide down the length of her back to the scarlet ruffles. Chloe saw that Stephen was still partly in possession. Abruptly she looked away, remembering the pleasure that his love-making had given her, too. Even now, after all that had happened, she didn’t want to think of him doing that to Pansy.
‘We must go,’ Stephen said huskily. Chloe watched them, unspeaking. Some of the old, satisfied glow showed in Pansy’s face. They murmured their goodbyes and went along the echoing gallery. Pansy’s door closed fast behind them.
Chloe’s face set in new, determined lines and she sat down at her desk. Briefly she thought of Pansy, imagining how she would go on through life just as she did now. There would be the steely, unwavering concentration on getting what she wanted, followed by the intense, fruitful period of radiant satisfaction when she had achieved it. Then the focus would shift to something new, whether it was a different lover or a mysterious job. Pansy would be a success, there was no doubt about it, because Pansy always got what she wanted. It was no real concern of hers that she left a trail of wreckage in her bright wake.
The thought floated away from Chloe as she looked down at her work. Pansy and Stephen were forgotten as the waters of concentration closed over her head.
Helen, too, closed herself off in her books. She let herself sink deeper and deeper, living in the worlds created for her by Elizabethan poets or Victorian novelists in preference to her own.
Every morning she woke up to the weight of the same unanswered question, and every day she pushed it aside. After Schools, she repeated to herself. When it’s all over, I’ll confront it then. But not now, not yet. Instead she read more and more avidly, and sat up late under the green-shaded library lamp writing with a compulsion that she had never experienced before. She was working well, better than she could have hoped, and she clung tenaciously to the coolness of academic discipline. Here at least, in this dry world, emotions were at one remove safely between book covers. Helen knew that with every day she allowed to pass, she was making the tangle worse, and part of her detested her own cowardice. Yet she let herself go on hoping that when the right time came she would somehow know what to do, and how to do it without causing pain. The weeks of May and brilliant early June slipped by.
Darcy’s patience both humbled and chafed her. He never complained at the long hours she spent working, and he developed a knack of coming to meet her at the right time, and knowing whether she needed to be left with her own thoughts or to be jollied with cheerful talk. Almost as if she was ill, he coddled her with translucent pink curls of smoked salmon sent by Mrs Maitland, or half-bottles of luscious dessert wine that they drank under the willows beside the river.
Just once, sitting on the shaded white seat where they always picnicked, Darcy turned to her and said, ‘You aren’t very happy, are you?’
A motorboat passed, ploughing a green-white furrow of water that fell away into long ripples licking along the bank.
Helen looked at him, her eyes travelling over his sun-reddened cheek and the square line of his jaw. She could almost hear the seconds ticking past.
Love, fear, and a sudden optimism flared inside her. Maybe it would work.
‘I’m trying to be,’ she said humbly. ‘I’m sorry to make it seem so difficult.’
Darcy’s eyes were still on the river but he took her hand and wound their fingers together. ‘Do you want to change anything?’
The sun warm on her head and shoulders made her uncertainty seem colder and even more threatening.
‘No,’ Helen whispered, hoping.
He turned his head and looked straight into her eyes.
‘Come home to Mere with me for the weekend.’ Prove it, he was saying. Prove us. The shadow was there in his face before she could even reply.
‘Not yet. I can’t yet, Darcy.’
Usually it was Helen who looked at her watch and insisted that she must go back to work. Today Darcy stood up first and began to repack the picnic things. He drove her to the library without speaking and left her with a kiss that barely brushed her cheekbone, yet she felt that it had burned into her skin.
But the next day he was waiting for her again, and the old gentle intimacy between them resumed.
Helen began to number the days left until Schools with painful anticipation. Eleven left, then seven, then only four.
In all this time she saw Tom only once. She had written him a stilted little note to thank him for the sea picture, without mentioning the fair or May Morning. It had gone unacknowledged and she had taken the picture down and hidden it away, rather than let it confront her mutely with his absence, and yet his closeness. Now, in the last week before the deadline of exams that she had set herself, she had been out walking directionlessly through the streets. The close library air had begun to oppress her. Passing the Museum of Modern Art she slipped inside on impulse, thinking that it would help her to empty her mind if she sat in front of a picture. The words inside her head set up reverberations, almost a premonition, but she dismissed them.
Inside the gallery was the confused babble from a private viewing of a new exhibition. Helen began to back away, then a lazy voice behind her said, ‘Going already?’
Tom was instantly so sharply there, so physical and important to her that his nearness shut off the noisy party like a glass wall.
‘I should stay a little. The pictures are worth a look, and the wine’s really quite good.’ He held out a glass to her but she shook her head. She couldn’t trust her fingers to hold it, or her legs not to melt underneath her.
‘What are you doing here?’ she asked foolishly.
‘Waiting.’
As he said it, Tom’s mask slipped. He looked at Helen’s candid grey eyes and the mass of black curls that she had tied severely back from her cheeks. It made her look fragile, and touchingly determined. Tom put his hand out clumsily to reach her and he thought he saw answering hunger leap into her face. They moved together like robots in the empty space that they had created in the crowded room. Her hand came up to his, but she was fending him off instead of pulling
him towards her.
‘Don’t. I don’t want you to wait for anything, do you hear?’
That was so like her, so much the paradox of reserved English Helen denying the sensuality inside her like fire within marble, that he almost laughed out loud. Then anger at her wilful stubbornness possessed him. They both snapped upright, almost spitting at each other.
‘Ostrich,’ he taunted her.
‘Leave … me … alone.’ Helen bit off each word, her voice as sharp as a knife.
Then she turned and walked away from him. Her shoulders were square and her back absolutely straight. Even Tom couldn’t have guessed at the effort it cost her just to keep on walking.
Three days, two days.
There was no more work to do. Helen knew that she should be resting now, hoarding her energy for the physical effort of writing exams six hours a day for the next five days. Five short days, the culmination of three years’ work. Numbly she sat with Chloe in her room, staring out at the golden front of Christ Church over endless cups of coffee, trying not to think.
Chloe was taut with anticipation too, but she hid it even from Helen. It was Chloe’s way to joke about the unimportance of Mods, her first-year exams, admitting to no-one but herself her surprising, fierce desire to acquit herself well.
On the second to last day, Darcy came to wish Helen luck. They had already agreed that she would stay alone through the week of exams, keeping her concentration finely honed. Helen knew that that wasn’t the only reason, but she swallowed the guilt. She was becoming quite the expert at not facing things, she told herself wryly.
When the time came for Darcy to leave, he stood uncomfortably at the door. Helen knew that he had something difficult to say and waited, knowing that his directness would force him to bring whatever it was out complete, without prompting.