LITMIR.BIZ

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here. There’s penny buns as well, if you want.’

      Helen insisted that as she was the guest Amy should have the armchair. She sat down in one of the upright ones herself, poured out the tea, and they began to talk.

      They were still talking at six o’clock, with the teapot cold between them. Amy thought that she had never talked as easily or openly to anyone, even to Isabel.

      When Freda and Jim came in at last, Amy knew that she had found a friend for life.

      ‘Where’s our tea, Helen?’ the little boy said plaintively.

      The two girls blinked at each other, and laughed.

      ‘That’s never the time, is it?’ They stood up, together.

      ‘I’ve got to get back,’ Amy said reluctantly. ‘But I’ll be back. When can I come?’

      ‘Whenever,’ Helen said simply.

      The three of them came with her to the top of the area steps, and then stood waving until she reached the end of the street.

      Looking back from the corner, she saw the thin girl with the little, healthy replicas of herself on either side of her. Suddenly Helen looked fragile and too small against the gaunt height of the old houses.

      Biting her lip, Amy made herself smile and wave one more time.

      Then she turned the corner and walked slowly back to the hostel.

       Nine

      In the warm, pin-neat Ebury Street basement kitchen, Bethan looked at the tray and sighed.

      There was clear soup in a gold-rimmed bowl and bread cut transparently thin. A little dish of green-gold grapes was set beside a wedge of creamy cheese. As she watched, Cook smoothed the starched cloth and carefully positioned a long-stemmed wineglass, then brought a decanter and filled the glass with red wine.

      ‘That will put some heart into her,’ Cook said with conviction. ‘When I was with Lady Kiftsgate and she was in the same condition, I always made sure she drank wine.’

      Bethan had heard enough about Lady Kiftsgate, and she was afraid that all the wine in France wouldn’t change Isabel’s heart now. But she said, ‘Thank you, Cook. I’ll take it up now, and we’ll just hope she eats some of it.’

      At Isabel’s bedroom door Bethan knocked, and when there was no response she knocked louder and pushed the door open. Isabel was lying on the day bed in the window, exactly as Bethan had left her an hour before. Her eyes were closed and her hands were hanging awkwardly at her sides as if she didn’t want to clasp them over her mounded stomach.

      Bethan put the tray down on the table beside the day bed. ‘Mrs Jaspert? Isabel, love, are you asleep?’

      Isabel’s eyes opened and stared, wildly, before they focused at last.

      ‘Not sleeping. Trying … trying to think.’

      ‘What have you got to be thinking about?’ Bethan tried to soothe her. ‘All you’ve got to do is rest, and not let yourself get worked up again. Here, now. Cook’s made some special soup for you. Try and eat it for me, will you?’

      She put her arm behind Isabel’s shoulders and eased her upright.

      ‘Please eat some,’ Bethan whispered, trying to reach out to the Isabel she had always known, to the gentle child within the correct little girl, and the vulnerable adolescent who had sheltered in the self-possessed young woman. But all the familiar faces of Isabel had vanished in the last weeks, shrivelling away into this wild-faced stranger who seemed to have lost all touch with her own world. Bethan felt that there was a household conspiracy – Peter Jaspert, Lord and Lady Jaspert, the staff of Ebury Street, all of them seemed wilfully set on ignoring Isabel’s distress. Yet she ate almost nothing now, and sat all day in her room staring as if she was looking in fear into her own head. And yesterday, Bethan had found her crying. The tears came silently, unstoppably, and they had gone on for hours. Bethan had been on the point of telephoning Mr Hardwicke when Isabel fell into an exhausted sleep.

      With an effort now, Isabel leaned forward and tasted the spoonful of soup that Bethan held out for her. It felt thick on her lips, like blood. She shivered and swallowed against the nausea. The thin triangle of bread was as dry as ash and her throat closed up against it.

      Instead she made herself concentrate on Bethan’s arms around her and the soft, Welsh voice begging her just to talk a little.

      Hopelessly Isabel shook her head. The warmth of Bethan’s shoulder, her innocent scent of soap and toilet water, brought back the very first time that Bethan had comforted her. A long, long way off, like a tableau spotlit at the end of a dark tunnel, Isabel saw the nursery at Chance and the bars of sunlight sloping over Airlie’s rugs. A weight was crushing her, squeezing the breath and life out of her.

      ‘I’m afraid,’ she said. ‘I’m so afraid.’

      ‘Oh, there.’ Bethan’s arms tightened. ‘There’s no need to be afraid. The doctors all say so. They won’t let you have a bad time. It isn’t like that nowadays, all the wonderful things they can do.’

      But Isabel only shook her head again.

      How could she explain to anyone that it wasn’t the birth that was frightening her? She wasn’t frightened for herself, for the physical pain or the risks that women whispered about and Mr Hardwicke soothingly never mentioned. She wasn’t afraid for the baby, either. The weight of it sat broodingly within her, sometimes like a cold, heavy stone that had nothing to do with her own flesh and blood. At other times it was turbulent, writhing inside her as though it had taken over her system and reduced her to a dry husk.

      Just by looking at herself in the mirror, Isabel could see that was what really was happening. With her arms as thin as sticks and the bones knobbed at the base of her neck, and the huge, swollen pod in front of her, she knew that she was grotesque. The baby possessed her, branding her and reminding her of how it had come there.

      She wasn’t afraid for herself, nor for the baby because it was a hundred times stronger, and a Jaspert.

      It was everything else that frightened her. The bright, busy jigsaw of the world had shaken and the neat, familiar components of it had clicked out of place one by one and spiralled away. Isabel frowned, trying to recall what the pieces of it had been. She only dreamed about them nowadays, long vivid dreams of parties where she laughed as she danced and the men’s whitegloved hands correctly holding her never wandered or turned hot, pink and fleshy. She dreamed of walking with Amy at Chance, hiding in the hollow heart of the great box hedge in the formal gardens, and then of riding her mare at a canter up and over the long ridge that sheltered the estate.

      The dreams were more vivid than life, now. Life had become fear, and watching, and waiting.

      Am I ill? Isabel wondered.

      There were nightmares, too. Peter came to her in them, and she felt the hot, stifling weight of the bedclothes, and the guilt of terrible secrets. There were other men in the nightmares, too. There was Mr Glass. Even, once, her own father. I must be ill.

      ‘Isabel, dear, couldn’t you talk to me? Or Amy? I’ll tell you what, I’ll ring Amy at her hospital and ask her to come to see you.’

      ‘No,’ Isabel said sharply. ‘Don’t do that.’ Amy shouldn’t be here in this place. Amy shouldn’t be contaminated by it. She was trapped herself, but it must never happen to Amy.

      ‘Or Lady Lovell, then.’

      ‘She’s abroad.’ The baby wasn’t due for another three weeks. Lady Lovell would fly back from Morocco in good time for the birth, of course. Isabel was wondering vaguely at the note of triumph in her voice. Did she want to be so isolated, then? How much of all this weight of despair was her own doing?

      ‘Where’s my husband?’ she asked, feeling briefly

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