‘You’re a fool, then,’ she said hotly. ‘It was an honest offer to help. Why should I want to patronize you? Why should you think I’d care enough?’
Nick looked at her, and she felt the full insulting weight of his appraisal. And then he laughed at her.
‘As you correctly remarked earlier, you can’t help. People like you can’t do anything for us. You are the enemy. Go and learn how to wind bandages to fill up your time between parties, if it makes you feel better. But don’t imagine that by trotting along to Appleyard Street or marching under a banner with the working classes you’re going to change anything. Least of all your spoilt self.’
He stood up, and then yawned ostentatiously. ‘I will make use of your brother’s comfortable bed, since you offered it. Goodbye, Miss Lovell.’
Amy was shaking with shock and anger. She stood up to face Nick, clenching her fists at her side. ‘Have you finished now?’
Nick had half-turned away, but he swung back and stood as if considering something. ‘Not quite,’ he said.
His fingers closed around her wrist. Slowly he lifted it so that their forearms touched. And then he bent and kissed her. Amy felt the hardness of his mouth against hers and the brush of his tongue. The breath caught sharply in her chest. Savagely she jerked her arm up, bringing Nick’s with it, and she bit into his imprisoning hand with all her strength.
‘Bitch.’ She heard the word under his breath. Nick let go of her at once. He stepped back, rubbing the round red mark among the blue scars.
‘Don’t ever touch me,’ Amy said. Anger was almost choking her, but it was anger with herself as much as Nick. The violence of her own reaction baffled her. It had only been a kiss, and an hour ago she had felt close enough to Nick to want him to touch her.
Nick was looking at her glittering eyes and flushed cheeks with amusement tinged with admiration.
‘So they taught you biting at school as well as curtseying. Hasn’t anyone ever kissed you before?’
‘Of course they have.’
But not like that, Amy thought, remembering the hot, half-drunk boys in taxis. And Tony’s distant gentleness. ‘I’m sorry I bit you.’
‘Oh, not at all.’
This is ridiculous. Amy stood up straight, trying to muster the remains of her dignity. She felt a sudden fatal desire to laugh. ‘I don’t think there’s much point in prolonging this evening.’
‘There doesn’t appear to be,’ Nick said equably.
‘Can you find your way to your room, or shall I ring for somebody?’
‘Oh, I think I can manage.’
He was perfectly cool now, the amenable guest determined not to let his hostess’s outburst mar the end of the evening. The irrational laughter died in Amy as she recognized something. Nick Penry was clever, and formidably quick. With all her advantages, she was nowhere near a match for him. How many masks have you put on tonight? Amy wondered. Which is your real face?
In his turn he was looking through her, as if her own amateurish disguises were transparent.
‘Good night, then,’ she said abruptly and turned to the door.
Nick watched her go, his hand with the red weal resting on the old chintz sofa back.
In her room Amy found that she was shaking. She dropped her pearl necklace on the dressing-table top with a clatter, stripped off her dress and underclothes and left them where they fell, and slid under the bedclothes to curl up in the safe darkness like a child.
But even there she felt that the man was still staring through her.
‘Go away,’ she said aloud to the muffled stillness. ‘Leave me alone.’
*
In the morning Amy changed her clothes twice before finding an outfit that pleased her, and then she frowned at herself in the mirror at the thought that she might be dressing to please anyone except herself. She pinned her hair up carefully and made up her face before marching briskly down to Richard’s room. She had rehearsed what she was going to say this morning. She would apologize, lightly and humorously, for her double gaucheness of last night, and Nick would apologize in his turn. Then they would go down to the dining room and she would make sure that Nick had an enormous breakfast before he set out for Bethnal Green. She hadn’t yet worked out how she could tactfully pay for him to get there, but she would think of something when the time came.
There was no answer to her knock on Richard’s door. The bathroom door opposite it stood wide open.
‘Mr Penry? Nick?’ There was still no answer. Amy pushed open the bedroom door and looked inside. The bed was as smooth as if it had never been slept in, but on the chair beside it, neatly folded, was the navy sweater, the white shirt and the grey flannel trousers.
‘Nick?’
Amy looked again, but she knew that he was gone.
Without faltering, and with her chin firmly up, Amy went down to breakfast on her own.
There was a single place laid at the table. If Adeline was at home she would be having breakfast on a tray in her room. Adeline never appeared before midday.
Mr Glass was standing at the sideboard in front of the silver-domed hot dishes.
‘Good morning, Miss Amy.’
‘Good morning. My guest, Mr Penry, did he have breakfast?’
‘Mr … ah, Penry left the house two hours ago. He said that he wouldn’t be requiring breakfast. He left this for you, Miss Amy.’
It was an envelope with the Lovell crest, with a single sheet of crested writing paper inside it. Amy looked at the few words. Nick’s handwriting was firm, black and confident. Educated writing, she thought, and knew that she should have expected it.
Thank you for everything last night. Even for the job offer. I’m not a fool, you know. Neither are you. Learn to be a nurse, but try to be a real one like Myfanwy Jones and not a society girl filling in time. Then when the day comes you may really be able to help. Good luck. Nick Penry.
PS. Do some more kissing. You might get to like it. The bite is healing quite nicely.
With a smile lifting the corners of her mouth, Amy refolded the paper along its crease and put the envelope safely in her pocket.
Mr Glass lifted the silver cover off one of the dishes.
‘Eggs and bacon, Miss Amy?’
She sat down in her place, with her own pink and white china breakfast cup laid in front of her, just as always, and her napkin in one of her silver christening rings. Just as always.
Well then, Nick Penry had disappeared as quickly as he had materialized. But Amy felt that he had lifted the pall of the last weeks for her.
She knew what she was going to do.
The interview with the matron of the Royal Lambeth Hospital, when it finally came, was almost an anti-climax.
As she sat down facing the grey, starched martinet in her office lined with bound copies of nursing journals, Amy thought that whatever was coming it couldn’t possibly be as complicated as the course she had steered to get even this far.
Amy had first of all confronted Adeline with her plan, on the morning of Nick Penry’s departure. She had found her mother sitting up in bed, her breakfast tray pushed to one side. With her uncoiled mass of dark red hair fanned over the shoulders of her dove-grey silk robe, Adeline looked about eighteen years old. The white bedcovers were strewn with her morning post, engraved invitations