‘I saw you, under the banner. Looking out over the crowds as if you were saying I’m right.’ Amy stopped, feeling her cheeks redden with the sense of having said too much.
But Nick only said softly, ‘Oh, we’re right. I’m certain of that.’
The plates were replaced again. Now there was breast of duck, thinly sliced in a mysterious peppery sauce, and early vegetables from the walled gardens and greenhouses at Chance. In fresh glasses the wine was garnet red and when Nick drank some it reminded him of the scent of violets.
Amy saw with relief that the tense, aggressive set of his shoulders had relaxed a little, and that some of the exhausted lines were smoothed out of his face.
‘You said in the taxi that you knew someone from Nantlas.’
‘Bethan Jones. She’s been my friend since I was a baby, almost.’
‘Your friend?’
‘Why not? She’s looked after my sister and me as if we were her own children. Is there any reason why I shouldn’t think of her as a friend?’
‘No reason at all.’
In the silence that followed, as Nick watched her over the rim of his glass, Amy wondered what they were both defending so fervently against each other. And if they were in opposition, so naturally and immediately, why were they sitting here facing each other between the brilliant points of the candles?
‘Do you know her?’ she asked lamely at last. ‘Her mother is the local midwife.’
‘Yes, I remember Bethan Jones. And I know Myfanwy well.’ Nick thought of Dickon, and the night he was born, and the way he said ‘Da? Dada?’ over and over again, insistent and uncomprehending, in the cold little house.
Nick’s face darkened as he saw himself sitting in this opulent room, enjoying the scent of violets opening up as the wineglass warmed in his fingers. Da? Dada?
Seeing his face, Amy could think of nothing to say. The silence spread and seeped coldly between them, and the chance of breaking it receded.
Glass and the footman came in again with pudding in a cut-glass bowl, fruit and cheese and port in a decanter for Miss Amy’s strange guest if he should want it. They felt the silence and glanced at each other as they moved between the table and the long sideboard.
‘Will there be anything else, Miss Amy?’
‘I don’t think so, Glass, thank you. I’ll ring for coffee if we need it later.’
It was a mistake.
It had been a mistake to bring the man home and imagine that she could do anything to help. It was an interference, no more than that. This painful silence was proof of it. Amy stared dully at the fruit knife placed beside her plate and unexpectedly the tears pricked in her eyes like a reminder of her weakness. She felt her powerlessness, and her isolation, and the little certainty that she had possessed this afternoon ebbed away. She didn’t understand what she wanted to do, nor did she understand why this dark, frightening man was suddenly a symbol of it. She only knew that she had wanted to reach out, and that the simple gesture was suddenly threateningly complex and utterly beyond her.
‘I’m sorry.’
The words startled her so much that she jumped. There were tears on her eyelashes and the realization made her redden with humiliation.
‘I’m sorry,’ he repeated. He stood up and walked all the way round the great table to Amy’s chair, and then he put his hand on her shoulder. She felt his fingers resting in the hollow of her collarbone. ‘I’m not schooled, like your friends probably are, in masking feelings with manners. Talking about Myfanwy Jones made me think of my son. She delivered him, one night when the doctor wouldn’t come out to my wife because we couldn’t pay him. Myfanwy saved his life, and probably my wife’s too. She did all she could. But the baby was damaged. He’ll never be able to do anything much. Nothing, without Mari and me to help him. Thinking about him in the middle of all this …’ the sudden sweep of Nick’s other hand took in the table, the glinting silver and the polished hothouse fruit, the white and gold china and the port waiting in the decanter on the sideboard. ‘It made me angry, for a moment. I’m sorry if I upset you. You’ve been kind, and you were brave in that crowd this afternoon and when you didn’t know what to do to help Jake. I would have expected a woman of your class to run away, if she had been there in the first place.’
Amy shook her head to clear the tears. She didn’t know why, but it was important that Nick Penry shouldn’t see that she was crying.
No wonder his face had frozen her. No wonder she had been unable to think of a light, casual word to break the ice of silence.
The tip of his finger touched her shoulder and then he was strolling away again, back to his place at the table.
‘Shall we talk about something else?’ Nick asked. ‘You could tell me why you were in Trafalgar Square this afternoon.’
Amy looked up. What else was there to say? That she was sorry about his son? That she couldn’t help it if she was rich and Nick Penry was poor? That she had wanted to help, and had just seen, humiliatingly, that she couldn’t?
She shook her head slowly. ‘I was at Appleyard Street when they were planning the march. By accident, really. A friend of mine took me because he thought it might amuse me, more or less. But I was interested. I liked the people there because they seemed to believe so strongly in what they were doing. And they were much livelier than a lot of the people I know. What I heard there made me start thinking a little about differences. And asking myself whether it was fair, I suppose. It’s partly to do with feeling rather … pointless myself lately.’ Amy felt that her face was red again. She was making herself sound like a pampered society girl in search of fresh diversions. She didn’t think that was the real truth, but what else would Nick Penry think? ‘I can’t dress it up in the right comradely words, like Jake Silverman would. I just felt that there was more I should know. That I should try to find out for myself, because nobody else was going to show me. I went this afternoon just to see. For a moment while I was there I was sure I knew. I knew what was right, and what I must do, and whose side I was on. It seemed perfectly simple.’ Determined to be as truthful as she could, Amy added defiantly, ‘It was the boots. The sound they made as you marched. You can laugh if you like.’
Across the table Nick was watching her intently without even a flicker of a smile. ‘Go on, Amy.’
My friends call me Amy, she remembered telling him.
‘Not ringing out like you’d expect, like soldiers’ boots, but flapping and shuffling. I thought, if men can walk so far in those boots to ask for help then they must need it badly.’
Nick said crisply, ‘The boots aren’t important. Nor were we marching to beg for help. What we want, you know, is what is ours by rights. To work under fair conditions for fair wages. Oh, I know that Jake Silverman and his friends put a different colouring on it for political purposes. But that was what the march was really for. Not begging, but demanding. But for Jake, I would have been in the deputation of men meeting the government committee on the mines this afternoon. Who knows, they might have achieved something by now.’
Amy nodded, realizing again how little she knew and how little she understood. ‘I thought I could help in some way. I felt full of glory, marching along Oxford Street. I suppose this evening has demonstrated that I can’t. We seem to be in opposition, don’t we?’
Nick did smile now. ‘You helped. You got to Jake Silverman before I did. And you’ve given me the best meal I’ve ever eaten, sorry though I am that the rest of them at Bethnal Green haven’t shared it. Can I finish it now on temporarily neutral ground?’
Amy was touched and pleased that he should let the Lovells’ formal dining room be neutral ground.
‘Please do. Will you have lemon pudding or cheese?’
‘Both.’