There was a long silence, and then she said fiercely, ‘Don’t marry, Amy, will you? Do anything else you like, but don’t marry anyone.’
‘And how long will they make her stay there?’ Helen asked.
‘I’ve no idea,’ Amy said. ‘I don’t think anyone has.’
They were sitting together in Helen’s clean, bare room. In the corner beside the grate was a fire bucket filled with sand and swathed with red paper, with a fir branch stuck firmly into it. The spiky green arm was liberally hung with paper decorations, cut out and coloured by Jim.
It was the week before Christmas and in pride of place on the mantelpiece next to the photographs were the presents that Amy had just bought for Helen and Freda and Jim. The glossy wrappings and the determined effort at a tree made an almost festive glow in the colourless room.
Amy tried to smile over the rim of the best teacup, but the smile failed and Helen looked sharply at her.
‘It’s me sitting here, you know. Helen. I thought we were friends. You don’t have to be cheerful if you don’t feel like it. Have a bloody cry, if you feel like that. I probably would, if it was my sister in the loony-bin.’
The smile did come now, even if it was a slightly twisted one. ‘Sanatorium and Rest Home, Helen. They would shudder to hear it called anything as honest as loony-bin. And I’ve done enough crying. It won’t help Isabel, will it?’
The room was warm, with a small fire lit in honour of her visit, but the chilly fingers of Thorogood House, Chertsey, seemed to reach out and touch Amy even here and she shivered involuntarily.
The secure rest home that Peter Jaspert had chosen precipitately for Isabel was in a quiet road lined with similar gloomy Victorian houses standing in huge, dripping gardens. There was a cramped attempt at a carriage drive leading from the locked iron gates to the locked front door, and the raked gravel was overhung with laurels and rhododendrons. While visitors waited for someone to peer through a slot in the door before undoing the locks, they stood on the stone steps listening to the rain drumming in the evergreens and breathing in the scents of sour earth and prowling cats. When the door was finally inched open, visitors were ushered into a little green-painted room off the dark panelled hallway. From there they were summoned either to the communal sitting room or to the discreet suites on the upper floors, depending on the patient’s health. Isabel’s doctors were advising complete rest and calm. On the few visits Amy had been allowed to make, Thorogood House had struck her as the most depressing place on earth. How could anyone get well, surrounded by so much ugliness and gloom?
Isabel seemed to have retreated so far into herself as to be almost unreachable. She was quiet and docile, and so the staff let her sit for hour after hour beside the window in the day room, staring out at the dank, mottled leaves. She hardly ever spoke, and when she did it was with faint, puzzled politeness.
‘There’s no need for her to be in that place,’ Amy said now, with sudden violence, ‘if Peter hadn’t gone so wild. He signed everything there was to sign, just to keep her away from the baby and out of the papers. He wanted her taken away, there and then. If he could only have been patient and calm, she could have been in Lausanne now, where Adeline could go and stay with her. But he was so afraid that he couldn’t think. I despise him for that more than for anything else.’
Helen reached over and peered into the teapot. The sudden movement made her cough, and she sat still to let it subside. ‘Here,’ she said. ‘Have a fill-up before it gets stewed. So what happens? Can’t your ma do anything?’
‘Eventually. She’s got plenty of influence, but she wants things done discreetly as much as Peter does. Madness isn’t chic, is it? Isabel will be moved somewhere, probably to the Lausanne clinic. But without Peter’s help it will take time. And I’d have gone mad already myself, locked up in that place for so long.’
Helen shook her head sympathetically. ‘I’m sorry. But she will get better, won’t she? In the end?’
‘Oh God, I hope so.’
They were silent for a second or two. Then Amy shook herself deliberately. ‘I shouldn’t be unloading my problems on to you. I will have some more tea, please. And if you’re not going to have any cake I’ll eat it myself.’
Amy had brought a dark, rich fruit cake glistening with cherries and peel, and a big bowl of oranges that made another splash of colour in the dimming firelight. Helen sliced the cake and put one piece on a plate.
‘Aren’t you going to eat anything?’ Amy persisted.
‘Nah. I’ll save the rest for Freda and Jim.’
‘There’s plenty.’
‘I don’t want anything,’ Helen said, with the stubborn air that Amy now knew better than to argue against. She drank her tea and ate her own cake, and noticed that Helen’s hands were thin and veined under the rough skin.
‘Let’s talk about something cheerful,’ Amy said to break the silence. ‘What about Christmas? What do you do?’
‘On Christmas Eve, after the carol singers have been along the street, we all go down to the boozer. Only the one on the corner, you know? Kids and babies and all. There’s an old joanna in there and someone thumps on that and we sing all the old songs. I had rum toddy last year. Got quite tiddly. On Christmas Day we go to Aunt Mag’s for our dinner, we’ve always done that even before Ma went. Mag makes plum pudding you’d die for. There’s presents and a tree and all that. But we’ll open yours before we go.’
Amy had bought a soft, jade green cashmere jacket for Helen. It was feather-light and folded up almost into nothing, but it was as warm as a heavy coat. For Freda there was a bright red knitted skirt with matching mittens and cap, and a perfect scale model of a Hispano Suiza for Jim that ran jerkily on a wind-up clockwork motor.
Helen stood up and went behind the screen that hid the sink. She came out with two packages wrapped in holly-sprigged paper and laid them awkwardly beside Amy’s plate.
‘These are for you. This one’s from me.’ A soft parcel, carefully sealed. ‘And this is from Freda and Jim.’ A small, bundled-up package that rattled. ‘It isn’t very much, but make sure you think of us on Christmas morning.’
‘I will,’ Amy said softly.
‘So what do you do?’
‘Almost exactly the same thing every year, ever since I can remember.’ Although that wasn’t quite true. Amy could just remember Airlie’s last Christmas, and that had been magical and glittering in a way that none of the others had ever matched. But Adeline loved Christmas as much as any child, and she threw herself into the preparations and the celebration itself with infectious excitement. But what celebration could there possibly be this year, without Isabel? Amy had half-expected, even half-hoped, that she would be on Christmas duty. But when the duty rota had been pinned up and the students crowded round it, she saw that she was one of the half-dozen lucky ones who had been given leave. She was free for five whole days, from Christmas Eve.
‘Lovell’s got the time off, of course,’ Mary Morrow had said sourly. ‘Wouldn’t you know it?’
And so she would be going to Chance, to join her family, and Adeline’s traditional house party.
‘On Christmas Eve,’ she told Helen, ‘there is the servants’ dance. It’s a big party for everyone who works in the house and on the estate. There’s a tree, specially chosen from the fir copse and brought up to the house on one of the wagons. Isabel and I and our governess used to decorate it. There’s a present underneath for everyone. My mother does that. She’s very clever at knowing who enjoys a drink and who would rather have silk stockings than linen handkerchiefs. For the dinner, long trestle tables are laid up in the servants’ hall, covered with white cloths and decorated