‘How wonderful, how wonderful. A baby. I should have guessed. When?’
‘November, apparently.’
‘And how do you feel?’
‘Sick,’ Isabel said, and the comical mixture of expressions in Amy’s face brought back the urge to laugh. For some reason Isabel felt that she should suppress the laughter.
‘Oh, Bel, why didn’t you say something? You shouldn’t be sitting in restaurants. Let’s go home right away.’
‘There’s no need. I’m all right, really I am. Life can’t stop, just because you’re pregnant, can it? Anyway, I want to hear all about you and the nursing. When did you decide and when do you begin?’
The anxiety flickered again in Amy. Surely, as well as feeling tired and unwell, Isabel should be pleased with herself? The few expectant mothers that Amy had encountered positively glowed with pride. She could see nothing of the sort in Isabel’s thin, closed-in face.
‘Later. Tell me more about the baby first. Peter must be thrilled?’
‘Oh yes. He’s being marvellous.’
Marvellous meant that her husband came home nowadays and went straight to bed. She didn’t any longer have to lie shaking and listening to which way his footsteps would turn. Peter left her alone except for an indirect solicitousness that made her feel like a biological machine temporarily housing his baby. It was hard, Isabel discovered, to think of her pregnancy in any other way. There it was, growing and protecting her every day.
After it was born, what then? Isabel bundled the thought up hastily and pushed it away from her.
‘Do you feel all … fulfilled, and ripe, like pregnant women always look as if they feel?’
What she mostly felt, Isabel reflected, was cold, and empty. As detached from what was happening inside her as from everything else.
‘It’s early days yet, you know,’ she answered with forced brightness. ‘Wait till I’m huge and lying on a sofa all day, and then ask me. Do you have any free time when you’re a nurse? Will you be able to come and sit with me? I’ll miss you, Amy,’ she said with a sudden rush of real feeling. Amy was going off to do a proper job, moving into a world that Isabel would have no insight into, and she felt suddenly that Amy was her only link with normality.
‘Whenever I have an hour, I’ll come,’ Amy reassured her. ‘I miss you, too.’
Their food was laid ceremoniously in front of them. Isabel picked up her fork and prodded her omelette with it. ‘It doesn’t look edible at all,’ she remarked. ‘More like a piece of folded underwear.’ Then she began to talk very rapidly about her last fitting at Vionnet, and how her vendeuse had remarked on how slim she had become. ‘Not for long,’ Isabel added flatly.
The whole lunch was like that. Amy felt that they were moving elliptically around each other, almost touching before Isabel swung away again in her own eccentric orbit.
Isabel ate nothing at all.
Amy forced her food down, ordering more than she wanted to keep up a pretence of normality. To stop the talk from dying away into awkward silences she found herself chattering too brightly about her enrolment at the Royal Lambeth, then about Jake Silverman and the afternoon of the hunger march, and how Tony Hardy and Appleyard Street had led her there, and then at last about meeting Nick Penry and taking him home to Bruton Street.
A flash of the old Isabel followed that. She laughed almost naturally. ‘Amy, I don’t know anyone else in the world who would have done that.’
‘He had nowhere to go.’
‘You could have helped him to find somewhere. What made you decide to take him home?’
‘I didn’t decide. I just did it. He wasn’t the kind of man you hand out money or charity to. He was too … important for that.’
‘You liked him, didn’t you?’
Amy shrugged. ‘Yes, I suppose I did. Although he made me angry, too. For being so arrogant. No, not arrogant, exactly. Dominating, rather.’ But she saw that she had lost Isabel again. Her sister was looking away, and her face had gone taut.
‘Name any man who isn’t,’ she said, in a voice so low that Amy had to lean forward, and then wasn’t sure if she had heard correctly.
‘Tony Hardy,’ she said at once, but Isabel wasn’t listening. ‘Why do you say that?’ Amy persisted. ‘Is it Peter?’ Peter Jaspert, she thought. If you are doing this to Isabel …
‘Oh no,’ Isabel said deliberately. ‘Peter’s fine now.’ She was gathering up her gloves and handbag. ‘Do you mind very much if we leave? I think I’d like to go outside for a while.’
‘Of course.’ Amy found herself stumbling after her. The uniformed doorman sprang forward as he saw them coming and handed them out under the colonnade fronting Piccadilly. There were early flowers in the baskets hanging under the arches and Amy caught the sudden scent of them. If only they were safely at Chance together, she thought irrelevantly. The doorman’s piercing whistle brought a cab to the kerb. Isabel was about to step inside with Amy following her when she turned abruptly aside.
‘You take it,’ she ordered. ‘I’m going to walk somewhere.’ Amy found herself bundled inside, the door was slammed on her and the cab was swinging away. She turned to look out of the little rear window and saw Isabel, perfect in her modish clothes, hesitating under the arches as if she didn’t know which way to turn. But then, with a little shielding gesture that drew the soft furs up around her throat, she began to walk slowly westwards. Amy’s last glimpse before the traffic swallowed her up was of Isabel walking unevenly, as if she was playing the old, superstitious childhood game of not stepping on the cracks. Amy remembered how they had chanted the rhyme on town walks with Bethan.
If you step on a crack, you’ll marry a Jack,
If you step on a square, you’ll many a bear.
The anxiety that had nagged Amy all through lunch redoubled.
Something was badly wrong with Isabel, and the shutters seemed to have come down between them just when her sister might need her most.
Amy frowned out at the afternoon bustle of shoppers crowding the pavements, thinking of Isabel walking blindly through them, alone.
Well then, if Amy herself couldn’t help, perhaps Bethan might. Somehow, she vowed, she would see that Bethan was installed at Ebury Street.
Bethan wouldn’t allow any harm to come to Isabel.
Amy was still thinking about Isabel and Peter as she let herself in through the front door at Bruton Street. The wide hallway was empty and shadowy. The house seemed as quiet as always. Amy sighed as she peeled off her gloves. She took her hat off and threw it on to a stiff-backed chair, then ran her fingers through her hair and wondered what she was going to do with herself for the rest of the afternoon. Then she cocked her head to listen. The house wasn’t perfectly quiet after all. There was music playing upstairs somewhere, loud, brash dance music.
She was standing with her face turned upwards when Richard appeared at the head of the stairs.
Amy’s face lit up and she flung her arms open wide.
‘Richard! I can’t tell you how pleased I am to see you.’
He ran lightly down the stairs and across the marble floor. Amy put her arms around him and hugged him with delight.
‘Such a warm welcome,’ he murmured. ‘Do I deserve?’ But Richard was smiling too, and he returned her hug with equal warmth.
Amy stood back to look at him. Her little brother was growing up,