by Rosie Thomas
Tom bent and kissed her, and there was a kind of fulfilment in his face that had never shown there before.
‘Yes,’ he said gently. ‘That’s just what we’ll do. Oliver would appreciate that.’
Summer
Fifteen
They went to the old pub in the Cotswold village where Oliver had once taken Helen to lunch. She looked up as they went in at the creaking sign with its painted mulberry tree, remembering.
The discreet dining room was full, but somehow Tom had secured a table. Chloe looked doubtfully around at the heavy oak furniture, the dark panelling and the middle-aged diners.
‘And this is Oliver’s favourite restaurant?’
Tom smiled at her through the candlelight. ‘One of them. Look at the wine list.’
They bent their heads over it together, discovering a common language.
‘Mmm. Oh yes, I see. Clever Oliver.’
Tom was decisive. ‘There’s no choice, really. We must have Krug, Oliver’s champagne. And then the burgundy. Gevrey-Chambertin.’
Clos St Jacques, Helen remembered. ‘Not quite the very greatest, but as good as one can find almost anywhere.’ His voice sounded as clearly as if he was sitting beside her. She leaned back in her chair and looked at her friends. Chloe in a pink ruffled shirt that showed the top of her breasts, her magnificent tawny-red hair pinned back from her face with a jet comb. Flamboyant long jet earrings dangled in her ears. Pansy sat beside her in one of her understated, expensive silk T-shirts. The vivid cornflower blue came nowhere near eclipsing her eyes. And next to her, Tom. Helen didn’t need to look at him. He felt as close to her as if he was part of her own flesh. His hand brushed hers as he filled her glass, and Pansy and Chloe saw their involuntary smiles. The happiness radiating from them would have made explanations seem pedantic.
Chloe and Pansy had seized the chance to say their own kinds of farewell. For all of them, the funeral had been so much empty ritual. Now, gathered around the table with the champagne that had fuelled so many of Oliver’s nights prickling in their mouths, they felt his loss more sharply. Yet, for all the sadness of the evening, there was no unhappiness. They were drawn together, closer than friends, into a kind of family.
They talked about the shared year that had gone, and about the separate routes ahead of them.
Pansy made them laugh by guying the idea of herself as a movie star. She could mimic Scot Scotney’s carefully preserved Glasgow accent to perfection too.
‘Ye’ve got a long way to go, but ye won’t du it wi’out harrrd werrk, an’ ye won’t du it wi’out me.’
Tom put his hand over hers. ‘Pansy darling, you’re a born comedienne as well. Will you come back to New York one day and act for me again?’
‘Oh sure, if the deal’s right.’ Her eyes narrowed, mock-tough.
‘Not just for old times’ sake?’
‘Certainly not. What do you take me for, an amateur?’
Helen laughed with them, but she said little. She simply let herself slip into the intimacy of the evening, and the champagne’s warm glow, without thinking of tomorrow. There were still so many questions; the prospect of her mother’s bewilderment at her broken engagement and immediate re-engagement to somebody else … in spite of herself, Helen’s face lit with a smile at the thought. And there was the question of her own future too. Helen had no intention of living as an appendage of Tom’s, in New York or anywhere else. But not tonight. After the extraordinary tumult of today, and with these faces around the glowing table with her, there was no need to ask anything at all.
‘And you, Chloe?’ Tom was asking. The old asperity that had lingered on between them, even through the success of their working partnership, had all evaporated now. Chloe lifted her glass and her green eyes met each of theirs in turn.
‘Oh, a long, hard summer of writing body copy for something or other. And then, in October …’ she smiled, conspiratorial, ‘… I shall just come back to Oxford. Do you know, I can’t think of anything else I want to do, or anywhere else I want to be? I think I’ve just discovered job satisfaction. I shall take over your discarded role, Helen, when Tom has carried you off into the stratosphere somewhere.’
As she spoke, they turned to each other, and their fingertips met on the white cloth. Their oneness was acknowledged, and there was no need for anyone to say any more.
Chloe was laughing. ‘I shall fling myself into my books, I shall get my First in due course, and I shall stay on here, growing increasingly spinsterish and set in my eccentric ways, turning out intensely clever articles for the learned journals. Look out for me in Notes and Queries, won’t you?’
They looked back at Chloe’s tawny, exotic glamour and the idea was so preposterous that they dissolved into laughter once more.
When the food came, they found that they were ravenously hungry. There was no game, so they ate rare, tender beef as the nearest substitute and heaped it with the simplicity of summer vegetables. The rich, stylish burgundy lapped them in its generous warmth. When the second bottle came, Helen recalled Oliver joking about the one-bottle lunch being a thing of the past, and how afterwards his mouth had tasted of the wine when he kissed her.
Goodbye, she murmured in her heart. Goodbye.
After the beef came summer pudding, the first of the year, running in its own crimson juice.
‘How perfect,’ Pansy sighed, as she spooned up the last mouthful.
Much later, over the brandy glasses, it was Pansy who spoke the words that were in each of their minds.
‘How Noll would have enjoyed that. Except he would have insisted “At least another bottle”.’ Her eyes went round the table, almost as though she was measuring the space for another chair. ‘It’s as if he’s sitting here with us. I couldn’t think about him at that graveside this afternoon. But now, tonight, he’s here. Slouching back in his seat, holding his glass up against the candlelight.’ Her lovely voice was husky and hardly more than a whisper, but they heard and remembered every word.
Pansy was a little drunk, and she let her guard slip lower than they had ever known it. ‘The trick is to be able to forgive yourself, isn’t it? Noll couldn’t do that. He couldn’t be gentle with himself. Funny that someone so outwardly invulnerable should be the most fragile person I have ever known.’
Fragile, Helen thought. Yes, that’s what it was. His world had made his hold on reality too fragile, and he distorted it beyond that with drink and drugs.
‘D’you think he wanted to die?’ Pansy whispered.
Tom stirred a little. ‘Perhaps, in the bad times, just once or twice. But not when it happened. He was too alive, then. It was the cruellest accident.’
His voice trailed away and Helen reached and took his hand. They sat in silence, thinking about him and the void that he had left.
‘Here’s to him,’ Pansy said, and swallowed her brandy in a long gulp. In their candlelit circle they drank to him. ‘He’s here when we meet like this. We’ll do it again, won’t we?’
Yes, they answered her. Somehow or other, we’ll do it.
‘Another toast,’ Pansy added. ‘You two.’
And Helen and Tom exchanged the fleeting, complicit glance of lovers.
‘What about Darcy?’ Chloe asked gently. Tonight had brought them too close for them to need to keep tactful silences.
‘I think Darcy will be all right,’ Helen answered her. ‘We didn’t belong together in that way, you know. I tried to believe that we did, from the very beginning in Venice, but it never was the truth.’
Pansy spoke again. ‘I was watching him this afternoon. I think Oliver cast a long shadow. Darcy will grieve for him, but he’ll grow too.’
I hope so, Helen thought. If there were ever to be a fifth in this circle, I wish it could be Darcy.
The evening was over.
They were quiet as they watched the miles to Oxford slide past, but it was the quiet of calm, not sadness.
They came back to Follies House for the last time, down
the steps with their faces turned away from the river race.
Hobbs had already taken Pansy’s vast load of luggage back to London. Chloe’s trunk of books stood corded and waiting for the carrier in the shadows of the hallway.
Helen hesitated at the foot of the stairs, looking up into the panelled heights. Each of them was aware that the moment of separation had come, and they hung back from it.
It was Pansy who broke the silence. Quickly she kissed Helen’s cheek.
‘Au revoir,’ she said, and went on up into the gallery. Her blonde head was a bright spot in the dimness and the scent of summer gardens drifted behind her. Chloe turned back and hugged them both, wordlessly.
Helen wanted to say Wait. Don’t go yet. But Tom was beside her and she knew too that, more than anything, she wanted to be alone with him again.
The year that was gone flashed through her memory, linking her for an instant to her own earlier self. Am I the same Helen? she thought, and answered herself No. The Follies year had changed her beyond recall, and it had brought her to Tom. Her fingers tightened gratefully on his.
It was time to leave Follies, and Oxford, behind her now, and she was ready for that. There was no question that she was leaving Pansy and Chloe, because they would always be with her.
Her smile broke out as she wrapped her arms around Chloe and hugged her until the breath was squeezed out of them both.
‘Don’t work too hard,’ she ordered her. ‘All work and no play, remember?’
‘Oh no,’ Chloe said with her throaty chuckle. ‘I don’t think I’ll altogether lose the knack of playing. I like it far too much. Just hope I hit the jackpot in the end, like you.’
They didn’t say goodbye. She blew a kiss down to them over the carved baluster and the silence of the house wrapped round them once again.
Helen shivered a little and said, ‘I don’t belong here any more. Tom, do I live with you now?’
He laughed at her. ‘Try and live anywhere else. Come on. I want you to myself again.’
The plush anonymity of the little rented house welcomed them. It doesn’t matter where we are, Helen realised. I live where Tom is, just like he is now, pouring tea into two striped mugs.
The exhilarating sense of freedom returned to her, doubly sweet because it was shared and untinged with loneliness. We can go anywhere, she thought. Do anything. And then, Montcalm would have crushed me with its very weight.
Tom felt her eyes on him and looked up, his dark face suddenly serious.
‘No regrets?’
‘Not one.’
‘You don’t feel that you are leaving too much behind? Do you remember the day we met in Addison’s Walk? You told me that you were saying goodbye to Oxford, and you looked so sad, and so brave, that I wished there was anything in the world that I could have done to change it for you. Perhaps without knowing it that was when I fell in love with you.’
‘You were thinking about Pansy,’ Helen reminded him cheerfully. ‘And no, I don’t care about anything except being with you. I’ve done everything I want to do here. There are all kinds of things and places I want to do and see, but I couldn’t begin without you.’
‘Thank you,’ he said simply. ‘We’ll do them all, I promise, together.’ He came to her and rested his cheek against her hair. ‘I’m glad you’re not at Follies any more,’ he murmured. ‘While you were there I was still afraid that I might lose you. Not like Oliver, and not quite to Rose’s malign influence, but something like that.’
‘To Rose?’ Helen started back.
‘You didn’t know?’ Tom asked her gently. ‘That it was Rose who supplied him with the pills, and the coke, and the rest of her stock-in-trade? That was her particular hold over him. And over your unhappy friend Frances Page, who was more loyal to the old witch than she ever deserved.’
Helen leaned her head against the solidity of his shoulder again. She saw the unwholesome tangle of Rose’s kitchen web, and the whole little history with shadowless clarity.
‘No,’ she said humbly. ‘I didn’t know that. I just felt sorry for her.’
Tom’s arms tightened around her.
‘Don’t change,’ he said with sudden fierceness. ‘Not ever.’
‘I don’t think so,’ she answered, half to herself. If we can stay just like we are now. If we can only be so lucky. ‘Tom? Let’s go to bed. Now. I need you very much.’
Almost roughly, he lifted her and carried her away.
Helen stood at the high window and looked out, still not quite believing it or herself. The New York skyline was just as she had seen it in a thousand corny pictures, but not one of them had prepared her for the exuberance of the real thing. The flash and glitter of sun on glass and the minutely shaded perspectives of block laid against block receded up town ahead of her, beckoning seductively.
‘Can you fall in love with somewhere so quickly?’ she had asked Tom. ‘And why didn’t you tell me it was so beautiful?’
‘Would you have believed me? And yes, either you love it or you don’t. Thank God you do. Look at you,’ he teased her. ‘More New York than the New Yorkers.’
It was true. She had responded to the raucous vigour of the city with an excitement that was infinitely more alive than the languor that had possessed her in Venice. Yet it had the same effect of arousal. Their hungry exploration of each other was fuelled for her by the sleepless energy around them. She felt more positive and more potent than she had ever done, and she understood the ironic detachment that had set Tom aside as a spectator in Oxford. It was all gone now and he was plunged into work again. She felt that without seeing him here in his native city she could never have understood him, or loved him half as much as she did now.
A month separated them from the evening under the mulberry tree sign when they had made their own kind of peace with Oliver.
Helen’s memory of it was still sharp, but it was overlaid with a patina that spoke of more than a month in time and a distance greater than the width of the Atlantic. A different life. Tom and New York.
Helen shivered a little. She was still unused to the sudden awareness of complete happiness. Anxiously she cocked her head to the silence in the apartment, then heard the splash of the shower. Tom was singing above it.
Helen smiled as she crossed the great white space of the loft and looked south to the peaks of the financial district away down town. If she craned her head downwards, she could see the quiet street outside Tom’s warehouse building. Greene Street, SoHo, New York, she repeated to herself. I’m here. And I can be here, with Tom, for ever.
Over her head in the upper loft space, the little painting of wild flowers against the turquoise sea hung over their bed. It looked as if it had been there always.
Tom came out of the shower in his bathrobe, rubbing at his black hair with a towel until it stood in a rakish crest over his head.
‘Want to go to the Market Diner for breakfast?’
Helen loved the hubbub of Lower West Side diners, and the intricate permutations of breakfast menus.
‘I’ve made coffee. Let’s stay home and have it.’
Tom slung his towel round his neck and reached out for her. ‘Mmm. We could take it back to bed.’
Behind them in the lobby, the letterbox rattled and Helen lifted her head away from his.
‘Post,’ she said, and Tom corrected her cheerfully. ‘Mail.’ He went out for it, and came back leafing desultorily through the envelopes. He stopped at a square white one and held it out to her.
‘One for you. Forwarded from Oxford.’
Helen sat down very quickly.
‘It’s the exam result.’
The words brought it all back. The black and white week, and the endless leaves of paper under her hands. She had walked out at the end of it into Tom’s arms. He knelt down beside her now and held out the letter.
‘Open it.’
Stiff-fingered and clumsy, she ripped the envelope and took out the white card with the University crest. A clerk h
ad written on it, in loopy, unformed handwriting, two words.
Class One.
Helen dropped the card and her head flopped forward against Tom’s shoulder. She felt how tensely he was waiting and bubbles of delighted laughter erupted inside her.
‘I did it. It’s a First.’
‘Zowie.’ She had never seen Tom so delighted. His pleasure in the news eclipsed her own, and anything she had ever seen him show for his own successes. He took her hands and waltzed her in and out of the pillars until she gasped for breath.
‘My clever darling. My beautiful, totally un-bluestocking, brilliant first-class girl. This calls for the biggest celebration ever. Hell, where can we go at nine a.m.? Champagne. Let me get at the fridge …’
‘Wait,’ she begged him.
‘Wait? What for?’ He snatched up the telephone. ‘Call Greg. He’ll fall in love with you all over again. Or no, your mother first. Ruth’ll want to give you a party. “My son’s fiancée, the college professor.” Imagine.’
They laughed at the thought, as pleased as children at an unexpected treat.
‘Wait.’ She rubbed her face against his. ‘I don’t want to share it with anyone else yet. Only you. Celebrate by having breakfast with me here in the sun.’
She set the little table up in front of the window and Tom pulled across the low chairs. He poured her coffee for her, and put the cup into her hands. They acknowledged the touch of their fingers with a glance, then moved back with the luxury of having all the time together that they needed.
Helen looked away at the panorama outside. A long white yacht was making its way slowly up the Hudson.
‘There is someone else to share it with,’ she said softly. ‘Oliver made it possible for me to go on and finish it.’
Tom watched her profile against the light, and waited. He felt a tiny beat of jealousy, and leapt within himself to suppress it.