LITMIR.BIZ

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and agonizing bumping, then bright lights overhead and pink face-blobs that kept coming and going. A vile-smelling rubber flap came down over her face and she knew that she was going to be sick, and then there was only delicious, peaceful dark.

      ‘A fine chap,’ someone was saying over and over again. ‘Yes, a fine little chap. Look at his face, he’s got Jaspert written all over him.’

      Isabel opened her eyes. She remembered that she had been awake before, but there had only been nurses and white sheets and welcome silence. Now the first thing she saw was a hazy blur of colour with a dark column towering beside it. When her eyes focused the colour turned into flowers, banks of them all around, with Peter in a City suit standing in front of them. He was leaning over a white crib, smiling with satisfaction. Isabel felt the skin at the back of her neck prickle, then down the length of her spine. She wanted to shut her eyes again and plunge back into the safe darkness. Then she saw another face, closer to her. It was Amy, sitting beside the bed.

      Isabel tried to turn to see her better, and then she felt the burning slice across the middle of her. At once, she understood what they had done. She had refused to have his baby for him, and so they had sliced her open and pulled it out of her anyway.

      A fine little chap.

      Inside Isabel’s head someone who wasn’t herself at all began helplessly screaming.

      ‘Bel, darling? Are you awake now?’ Amy was leaning forward. Her hand touching Isabel’s felt solid and warm.

      ‘Am I awake?’

      Peter swung round at her. ‘You are, aren’t you? Look, he’s all right. It was touch and go, but you needn’t worry now. You mustn’t blame yourself. Come on, look at him.’ He was lifting a white bundle, pushing it towards her.

      ‘No.’

      Amy moved protectively in front of her. ‘She’s barely out of the anaesthetic. She should rest, Peter. Perhaps if you come back this evening, she’ll be more alert to the baby.’

      Reluctantly he lowered the white shape back into the crib. ‘Peter George Jaspert,’ he murmured. ‘Peter George Lovell Jaspert, if Isabel insists. Well then, I’ll look in later if I can. I have to see Archer Cole again. It’s an important time for me now. There are all sorts of things in the wind.’

      Covertly Isabel watched him go. When the door closed the scream in her head faded a little.

      Amy didn’t try to talk. She sat beside Isabel holding her hand and concentrating on keeping the anxiety out of her face. Her sister had lost a good deal of blood and had taken an unusually long time to rally from the anaesthetic. It was only because she was a nurse herself that they were allowed to be alone together, and still one of the hospital staff came in every five minutes to check on her. The baby, almost nine pounds of him, big-boned and lusty, was in perfect health. Amy had never seen Peter Jaspert look so pleased with himself. It was as if he had produced the big pink baby alone and unaided, seeing it spring direct and untainted from healthy Jaspert stock.

      She looked back at Isabel and saw that she had drifted into sleep again. Amy had gathered from the doctors’ euphemisms and from the half-heard professional murmuring that Isabel had fought against the birth up to the point when they had taken the choice away from her. She could only guess at why, but from Isabel’s face when she looked at him she knew that Peter was at the hidden root of it all. Somehow, Amy resolved, Isabel would have to be kept away from him until she had recovered herself. Somehow it would have to be done. Adeline would have to know, and perhaps together they could find a way of rescuing Isabel.

      It took Adeline twenty-four hours to reach London after receiving the cable in Morocco. She came to the hospital the next morning, tapping into Isabel’s room on high, tapering heels. She was wrapped in silvery furs and there was a little round fur hat perched on her beautiful hair. Her eyes were very blue and wide, and Amy thought as she hugged her that her mother looked no older than she did herself.

      ‘Mummy, thank God you’re here.’

      ‘Thank God I’m here,’ Adeline echoed in her famous drawl, and Amy smiled at her.

      Amy had spent the night with Isabel, dozing in the chair beside her bed, and now she was due back on duty at noon. She felt exhausted, but her mother’s determined sparkle was as much of a tonic as always.

      ‘The poor invalid.’ Lightly Adeline stroked Isabel’s forehead. ‘She’s terribly white and thin. How do they say she is? Have we got the best man?’

      ‘Yes. She’ll be all right, with rest and proper treatment.’

      ‘And my grandson?’ Adeline moved gracefully to the crib. ‘Mmm. He’s enormous.’

      ‘There isn’t any problem with the baby,’ Amy said quietly.

      They looked at each other, and Amy saw that her mother understood and was thinking quickly. Under all the frivolity and fashionable detachment she knew that Adeline loved the three of them dearly, and would defend them fiercely against the world. And she was as shrewd as anyone Amy had ever met.

      ‘And so what shall we do?’ Adeline murmured.

      Isabel had retreated into the safety of sleep yet again. Amy took her mother’s arm, smelling how the perfume that clung to her furs overpowered even the massed blooms around the bed.

      ‘I think we should talk. There’s a little private sitting room across the hall.’

      And there, with Adeline wrinkling her nose over the hospital’s attempt at China tea with lemon, Amy told her why she was so frightened for Isabel’s sake. She told her about the strange lunch at the Ritz, about Isabel’s growing remoteness and the tautness that had replaced her old even composure. She described Isabel’s extraordinary physical denial of giving birth, and the expression in her eyes when Peter held the child out to her. She remembered everything, even the colourless letters from the Italian honeymoon, and as she recited it the evidence seemed to mount damningly. Isabel was unhappy with Peter. By her very nature, because she was loyal and steadfast and proud, she wouldn’t be able to leave him, or even admit it to anyone. And the lonely pressure of it, together with the stress of her pregnancy, had made her ill. Had unbalanced her, somehow.

      There, it was said. The worst of Amy’s fears was that her sister wasn’t normal any more.

      Adeline was looking at her exquisitely manicured oval fingernails. Her rings flashed blue sapphire light.

      ‘Do you know they aren’t happy?’

      ‘Not for certain. I only imagine it, from the man he is and the way Bel has changed.’

      ‘And do you know that all marriages are not automatically happy? That peaceful and equable solutions can be found to the problem that don’t involve hasty, dramatic gestures or public scandal or stories in the newspapers?’

      Adeline was still studying her fingers. In all the years she had never, never, even obliquely, referred to the meaningless façade of her own marriage. Amy thought briefly of Gerald immured in solitude at Chance, and wondered if the solution was peaceful and equable for him too.

      ‘Yes,’ Amy said softly. ‘I know that.’

      ‘Do you also know that in a marriage it is the two married people who matter, and interference from outsiders, however well they mean, can be an impertinence?’

      Tony Hardy’s words, almost exactly. ‘I know that, too.’

      ‘So what are you suggesting, Amy darling?’ From the look in her eyes, and Adeline’s half-smile, Amy knew that her mother was with her.

      ‘Just that we rescue her from him, somehow or other. So that she can recover from all this and then decide in peace whether or not she wants to go back.’

      ‘Ah. Well, that seems quite rational, except that the idea of rescuing her is just a little extreme. Isabel is twenty-one years old, you know.’

      Amy nodded meekly, and said nothing about the strong sense

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