LITMIR.BIZ

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Amy said quietly and Tony’s stiff mask dissolved. He put his hand over hers.

      ‘I hate what he stands for, and so would most of the people I call my friends.’

      Jake, Amy thought. And Angel, and Kay. And Nick.

      ‘So long as there are men like Jaspert entrusted with the running of it, this country will always be as bitterly class-divided as it is now.’ Tony’s fingers tightened. ‘Do you believe that, Amy? Do you believe that there is a war between people like us, sitting here, and him?’

      Amy followed his stare past the looped curtains at the plateglass restaurant window. Outside in the street a man was standing at the kerb. He was wearing a cloth cap and a torn coat, and he was playing a whistle. At his feet stood an empty tin cup. The passers-by streamed past him, on their way from Shaftesbury Avenue in search of dinner, and they never heard the whistling. Behind him in the street a taxi roared past, and then a low open tourer driven by a man in evening dress.

      Amy looked away, back to Tony’s fingers covering her own. She thought of Helen lying in the Royal Lambeth, and then of Nick and his handicapped son. Her thoughts always came back to Nick.

      ‘I believe it,’ she said heavily. Tony’s thumb was stroking the side of her hand, very gently, to and fro. ‘I just don’t know how I’m supposed to fight in it.’

      Tony didn’t answer that, nor did she expect him to. As they sat, preoccupied with their own thoughts, a little silence beat between them.

      After a moment Tony sat upright again and lifted a finger to the waiter to refill their coffee cups.

      ‘Anyway, to answer your question properly, no, I don’t hate Jaspert himself. How could I? I don’t even know him. All I do know is that there are dozens of other men just like him, and quite a lot of them are happily married to girls like Isabel. His business and political lives may be one thing and his personal self quite another. He’s probably a model husband and father, and kind to animals and his old mother as well.’

      ‘Or he may be just as predatory at home as elsewhere.’

      Tony looked sharply at her over the rim of his cup. ‘You shouldn’t assume that.’

      ‘Why not? I know that something is making my sister unhappy, and I think it’s him.’

      ‘Oh, Amy. You may be right. But when two people are married they are accountable to each other. It’s a contract between consenting adults. By definition. If I were you I’d leave them alone, unless Isabel comes to you.’

      Tony was the one who was right, of course. Isabel was a Jaspert herself now. It was absurd to think that she was trapped by them.

      Suddenly, Amy felt that she was on the verge of tears. She was worried, and tired from the incessant work. And the insistent, hopeless whistling from the street was filling her head. The cheerful restaurant bustle and clatter was grating.

      ‘Tony, do you mind if we go now? Perhaps we could walk a little way.’

      ‘Of course.’

      He paid the bill and steered her out into the street. At the kerb Amy fumbled in her bag but Tony was quicker. He dropped a coin into the tin cup and then took her arm in his.

      ‘Let’s walk up to the square.’

      It was a warm, still night and through the pall of soot and smoke came the scent of moist earth and leaves. Amy had never spent August in London before, and she realized as she sniffed the air how much she was missing the wide green spread of Chance.

      As they came into Soho Square a burst of dance music and laughter drifted into the quiet, and was swallowed by the netted black leaves of the plane trees against the indigo sky. They walked slowly, arm in arm, with the lights of an occasional car picking them up and then letting them fall back into the dark. Through the trees and over the rooftops was the faint acid glow of light from Oxford Street where the late buses were still clanking past. It was soothing to think of London spreading all round, for miles and miles in every direction, full of separate lives that would never touch on hers, full of people settling down for the short summer night. It wasn’t all men whistling hungrily in a gutter, any more than it was all dances in Berkeley Square. Amy smiled at the thought that her own particular London, Society London, was scattered abroad and to the depths of the country, and yet the city hummed on unnoticing. In the stillness Amy felt her anxiety dropping away. Instead she felt a kind of languid fatalism. She could do nothing more than she was doing now, and it was pointless to try to drive herself beyond it. And if going on just as she was meant walking on beside Tony Hardy, then she was happy with that too. They were almost the same height and they moved perfectly in step, hip to hip. Tony’s arm and hand felt warm against hers, and she saw the quick turn of his profile as he looked away across her at the mottled columns of the trees.

      ‘Tony?’ she heard herself asking, ‘why aren’t you married?’

      Without letting the smoothness of their steps falter, he said, ‘Because I don’t, personally, believe in it.’

      ‘Why?’ she asked, and then he did stop and turn to stand squarely in front of her. In the shadow of the trees it was almost completely dark. Out of the corner of her eye Amy caught the movement of a blacker shadow still, and then saw it was a cat prowling across the fenced-in grass.

      ‘I couldn’t make it work,’ Tony whispered. Then with the tip of his finger he turned her face so that she had to stop watching the cat, and counting the beats of her own heart, and look full at him instead. His eyes were almond-shaped, she noticed, and there was an expression in them she had never seen before. He moved again, and his face was so close to hers that she felt, rather than heard, him say, ‘Although there are times when I could almost believe it might work.’ The tip of his finger traced the curve of her cheek and then the corner of his mouth touched hers.

      Amy closed her eyes. They were standing very close. Very slowly Tony put his arms around her and she felt him touching her, as if he was gauging the weight of her against him. His mouth moved over hers, exploring, stiff at first and then softening.

      At last, she thought, and there was a moment of relief as Soho Square stood utterly silent and dark, and Tony kissed her as she had longed for him to do. His hand slid from the small of her back up the length of her spine, then to the bare nape of her neck, and his fingers touched the thick waves of her hair, pinned up with tortoiseshell combs. He touched one of the combs experimentally and then pulled it out. The waves of hair fell loose at one side. Amy laughed and shook it back over her shoulder but Tony was still touching it, lifting the thickness of it almost unbelievingly.

      ‘Amy,’ he said in an odd voice. ‘Why are we doing this? We were good enough friends already, weren’t we?’

      The shock was like a splash of icy-cold water.

       Because I love you. Don’t you love me?

      She almost said it, and then heard the bewildered plaintiveness that the words would have held, like a little girl denied a promised treat. The soothing darkness had turned hot and threatening, and full of invisible pitfalls.

      Tony was tucking her hair back into place, and pulling her wrap around her bare shoulders again.

      He didn’t love her, she understood that. He wasn’t going to love her either, however long she waited and watched the beguiling curl of his mouth. Humiliation and a fierce longing to be by herself almost choked her.

      ‘Of course we’re good friends.’ She forced the lightness into her voice, hearing the words coming through her clenched teeth. She kept them bitten shut to stop the other things from spilling out, so that at least he would never know how she was feeling now.

      ‘Shall we walk up and look for a taxi?’ Amy said pleasantly. ‘I should get back home. I have to be on duty by noon tomorrow.’

      Tony took her arm again and they strolled on under the spreading branches as if nothing had happened at all.

      *

      Amy

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