by Rosie Thomas
There was no sign of Beatrice.
Pansy was immediately swallowed up by a hubbub of people. As she accepted the kisses and congratulations, she looked all set for a night of enjoying the limelight. So Helen was the more surprised when she looked up a little later to see Pansy slipping into a seat beside her. Deliberately Pansy set her shoulders against the room and, glancing at Darcy, reassured herself that he was occupied in talking to someone else.
‘Are you avoiding me, Helen?’ she asked directly.
‘Not exactly,’ Helen responded carefully. She wasn’t sure that she even liked Pansy any more, but she shrank from letting her see it. Suddenly she had a sense that Pansy needed friends too. ‘You haven’t been around much,’ she said, truthfully.
‘I’ve been with Stephen.’ Pansy looked down at her thin fingers and restlessly twisted the rings. She was struggling with what she wanted to say. ‘He’s … left Beatrice, you know. Left it all behind. His children, that house and all their lives in it … given it up to camp out in his College rooms, with me.’ She bit her lips and Helen saw her knuckles whitening as she pressed her fists together in her lap. ‘I love him now, Helen, today. Very much. He makes me happier than anyone else has done.’
‘I could see that,’ Helen said quietly.
‘I won’t try to tell you why,’ Pansy went on. Her crooked smile was painful, hiding something. ‘But I do. Perhaps I’ve only just discovered that older men turn me on. Perhaps it doesn’t matter exactly why, it’s enough that we do love each other like this. But I’m trapped, now. How can I promise him that it’ll still be there tomorrow? And all the other days to justify what he’s given up? I’m scared, you know.’ Pansy looked back over her shoulder at the room full of people. ‘There’s never a simple, finite action, is there? Everything reverberates, messily. Look at us all. Oliver. Beatrice, Stephen, you and me. Chloe.’
Helen looked. Chloe had just come in. She was wearing jaunty, scarlet harem pants and a little sequined top that sparkled when she moved. But her face was tired and drawn. Tom was shepherding her over to a knot of people. He began to make introductions and Helen saw her struggling to smile and listen to the names belonging to the anonymous faces. Then she looked back into Pansy’s blue-painted eyes.
‘Perhaps you’re always presented with too many choices, Pansy,’ she said.
I used to envy you, Helen thought, but I don’t think I do, any more. She wanted to say that even for Pansy, there were choices to be made that wouldn’t hurt anyone, but could think of no way to say it that didn’t sound priggish.
Pansy stood up, as supple as a cat now after Tom’s autocratic rehearsal regime.
‘Oh yes,’ she answered softly. ‘Far, far too many choices. It’s rather limiting, in a way, you know. Not to speak of isolating. But I shouldn’t have asked you to listen about me and Stephen. You wouldn’t have approved, would you?’ Then she added, in quite a different voice, ‘There just isn’t anyone else. But we’re not really made to be friends, you and me. We’re like oil and water. The trouble is, I’m scared that I’m the water. I just evaporate.’ Abruptly, she turned aside. ‘Shit, what does it matter? I’m going to find Stephen.’
Left alone, Helen sat very still for a long moment. She was stuck with a sense of having failed to say or do something important. And now she had lost the chance.
Instinctively she moved closer to Darcy. He was talking calmly to a geologist about the land at Mere. Helen smiled a little. In that moment she realised that Darcy was the most straightforwardly good person she knew. Everything he did, at least, was clear-cut and honest, and as dependable as the rounds of the seasons themselves over the carefully tended acres of Mere. She watched the familiar, undistinguished face and the play of kindliness in it with new affection.
Across the room Chloe drained her glass of champagne, and at once it was refilled. The alcohol made her feel better, less tempted to run away and less afraid of crying. She had dressed so carefully for tonight, and made up her face to hide the ravages of the last few days, then had come tensely to the party. All through the long evening before it, she had been reminding herself that there was nothing to hope for, that all she wanted was just to see Stephen, perhaps talk to him for a few moments. But now she was here she knew that of course she had been hoping, hoping so desperately that it had left her almost breathless as she came up the path to Tom’s front door. Her eyes had obsessively raked the crowd as soon as she was inside, and she had seen Stephen at once. He was listening to someone, with his head on one side in his characteristic intent pose. Chloe’s heart almost turned over in her chest. It was days since she had seen him and she had been counting the hours up to this second without really knowing what it was that she was expecting and longing for.
The intensity of her gaze drew Stephen’s attention. When he looked up and saw her, he made a little, embarrassed gesture that was barely a wave. Then he looked away and tilted his head again as if the conversation he was listening to was so fascinating that he couldn’t risk missing a syllable.
Chloe’s head swam and the room blurred around her. When it cleared again she knew that she had been absurd. Stephen would never reach out for her again. Even as she watched, Pansy came through the crowd, looking almost a child under the flamboyant make-up. Her hand slipped into Stephen’s and they stood there shoulder to shoulder. In his face there was incredulous happiness, and Pansy was defiant in her possession. There could have been no clearer declaration that they were together. Everyone in the room saw it. Chloe felt an added surge of bitterness. It was Beatrice who would have their sympathy.
With unflattering clarity Chloe saw the tiny role that she had played. She was just the last in a long line of girls who had failed to do what Pansy had succeeded in so effortlessly. And more, she understood that Pansy had succeeded because she was more beautiful, richer, and above all hardly more than a child. Clever, learned Stephen had been impressed by just that.
The coldness of disillusion made Chloe shiver. Stephen wasn’t clever at all. He was a fool. Anger, bitterness and resentment slowly faded away to be replaced by emptiness. ‘Pretty, isn’t it?’ somebody said beside her. Chloe looked and saw Oliver. His face had grown thinner and some of the boyish beauty had given way to harder lines. Chloe thought that he looked handsomer now.
‘Very touching,’ she answered, and turned deliberately away from the sight of Stephen and Pansy. ‘Well. Shall we go and eat?’
Chloe had always felt that there was something just a little wrong about Oliver, but tonight she was glad to have his company. She even felt, as she looked round, that he was the only other person at the party she could bear to be with.
In the dining room, Oliver heaped salmon mousse liberally on to her plate.
‘Christ, I’m so glad it’s over. I want to celebrate.’
‘The play?’
‘The play, of course. What else?’ Their eyes met and they smiled, cynical smiles that tried to give nothing away.
‘Aren’t you eating anything?’ Chloe asked.
‘No. I’m drinking instead. Let’s drink lots and lots together.’
Chloe gave him her glass.
Oliver filled it, and then filled it again.
The party began to blur a little. She left her plate almost untouched, but she went on drinking champagne. The suffocating hurt dwindled to a little black lump that seemed not quite a part of her, and was easy to ignore. Easy except when Stephen and Pansy swam into view, dancing with their arms wrapped round each other or smiling with their faces almost touching, and then Chloe only had to turn away and look at something else. Increasingly she found herself looking at Oliver. She noticed the set of his head and the length of his eyelashes. She saw the fine gold hairs glinting at the neck of his shirt, and a small scar on his wrist. Behind him, the room was a jumble of pale faces and swirling colours, but Oliver was sharply defined. She saw him so clearly that it was as if she had never even looked at him before.
They danced a little, but
they kept bumping awkwardly into each other and Chloe had to avert her eyes from Stephen too often amongst the other dancers. They found one of the velvet sofas in a corner instead. Oliver was drinking whisky now and when he kissed her she could taste it on his lips. She turned her head aside a fraction and he opened his eyes, very blue and distant. She had the sudden, disconcerting sense that he wasn’t seeing her at all.
‘Why not?’ he said sharply.
Chloe knew that she should stand up now, call for a taxi and go home alone to her empty room at Follies. The decision was still within her grasp, but when she tried to make the first move, she knew that it was too late. The simple chain of actions seemed impossibly complicated. She lay back against the velvet cushions again and closed her eyes.
‘Why not?’ she answered tonelessly. ‘Why anything?’
Oliver’s hand with the scar at the wrist moved to her breast.
Later, she became aware of Darcy and Helen looking down at them.
‘Want to share a cab home?’ Helen asked.
‘I’m not ready to go yet,’ Chloe told her. Oliver’s arms were insistently around her. She felt smudged and dishevelled and dimly uncomfortable with herself, but still unable to face the prospect of her deserted room.
‘Darcy,’ Oliver said, ‘you look just like a quiz-master in that bow tie.’ He and Chloe found this hilariously funny. They collapsed against each other, shaking with laughter.
When Chloe looked again, the party was over. Tom was leaning against the mantelpiece under a little blue painting of some flowers and the sea.
He looked very cool and detached, the antithesis of the tangle of herself and Oliver.
‘There are spare rooms, if you’d like to stay,’ he said politely.
Chloe collected herself with dignity.
‘No need,’ she said. ‘Is there, Oliver?’
‘Not the slightest,’ Oliver agreed. ‘Let’s not trespass on Hart’s generous hospitality an instant longer. He must be longing for his sober, bachelor bed.’
Tom watched them out through the hallway, one eyebrow slightly raised. As they reached the front door he called after them, his voice sharper.
‘Oliver. Don’t drive.’
Oliver swung round and there was dull red flush of anger rising from his jawline.
‘It’s finished, you smug bastard. I’ve done your play. I don’t need to be watched and nannied any more. Now leave me alone.’
Despite the drink and the desperation of her mood, the vestiges of Chloe’s normal good sense still clung to her.
‘We were going to walk anyway,’ she said, enunciating clearly although she was not sure for whose benefit, ‘because it’s such a lovely night.’ Firmly she took Oliver’s arm.
‘Goodnight, then,’ Tom said imperturbably. The door closed and they were out in the night together.
‘What a good idea,’ Oliver said. ‘Clever of you, because I’ve forgotten where my car is. We’ll walk, and by the time we get back to the House, it’ll be time for a nightcap. You’ll join me, of course?’
‘Yes,’ Chloe answered, ‘I’ll join you.’
She knew vaguely that Oliver was drunker than she was, and she knew that she should see him safely home and then go back to Follies. But a mixture of loneliness and perversity born of bitterness made her reject the knowledge. She didn’t want to be alone tonight, and it didn’t matter any longer what she did.
They wandered through the deserted streets, Oliver’s arm around her shoulders. ‘How deliciously warm you are,’ he told her. ‘I seem always to be cold these days.’
The trees and street lights appeared to swim around Chloe. She hung on to Oliver’s arm, wanting him to be a rock but knowing that he was just as much adrift as she. They reached Christ Church and passed under Tom Tower where the porter’s lodge was shuttered for the night. Canterbury Quad was all in darkness. They groped up the dark staircase to Oliver’s room, and then stood blinking in the brightness when he turned on the light.
Oliver looked down the length of the room and Chloe saw his face contract with dislike.
‘Christ,’ he whispered. There were two dirty wineglasses on a table and he poured whisky into them. Chloe took hers from him but she knew as soon as she smelt the spirit that she couldn’t drink any more. But Oliver gulped his without even glancing at it.
Then he lifted his head and for a long moment they looked blankly into each other’s eyes. Chloe heard her own heart beating, and told herself that it still wasn’t too late to say goodnight and go peacefully home. But still she stayed silent. She saw that Oliver was sweating a little, and the gold hair clung darkly to his forehead.
He held out one hand, very slowly uncurling the fingers.
‘We seem to need each other tonight,’ he said. Then he reached out for her and Chloe clung to him, digging her fingers into the solid flesh of his arms, holding his body between herself and tomorrow, and all the tomorrows after that. Oliver stroked her hair.
‘Come on,’ he said urgently. ‘Come to bed.’
He led her into his bedroom and they stared down at the tumble of covers. Oliver fumbled with her buttons and then groaned.
‘I can’t,’ he said. ‘You do it for me.’
So Chloe undressed herself. She laid her clothes carefully on a chair and then stood still with the dim light throwing bluish shadows in the curves of her body. Oliver looked, and there was the same distance in his eyes as at the party. It was almost as if he didn’t know her. But still he drew her down beside him on to the bed. Gratefully, she turned her face into the hollow of his shoulder, feeling the warmth of their flesh together, ready to be gentled into making love.
Something tugged at her consciousness, something she knew that she should remember.
But it was too late, and there was to be no gentleness. Oliver was brutally fierce. He held both her hands imprisoned in his and rolled on top of her. His mouth bruised her lips against her own teeth and then he was pushing so hard into her that she winced with pain.
‘No …’ she started to say, but the weight of him crushed the breath out of her. His fingers knotted and tangled in her hair and their bones ground painfully together. For a few fleeting seconds Chloe felt the pressure of her own response to his violence. ‘Oliver,’ she half moaned. ‘Oliver …’
Oliver went rigid. He half drew away from her and there was a long, agonised shudder. Then he fell back against her with his face buried in her hair and Chloe’s fingers felt the cold dampness of sweat on his back.
In the enveloping silence, she looked round the unfamiliar room. Even with the solid weight of the man’s body in her arms, she had never felt more alone in all her life.
At last Oliver rolled to one side. His eyes flickered open and travelled over her face. There was such blackness in them that she thought it’s worse for him. Infinitely worse. Cold fear touched her, colder than the sweat that still stood in beads on Oliver’s skin. Protectively she pulled the covers up around his shoulder.
‘I’m very sorry,’ he said formally.
Then he closed his eyes and fell immediately into a deep, unmoving sleep. Chloe shut her own eyes, wanting nothing more than to blank out the rest of this wretched day. But at once the room lurched and started to spin sickeningly so she forced them open again and focused grimly on the extravagant plaster-work of the cornice.
Grey light was beginning to show at the edges of the curtains before she fell into an exhausted doze.
The light was much brighter when Chloe woke again. For a bewildered moment she looked around, and then remembered. Her head throbbed, and she was excruciatingly thirsty. From the sharp, early-morning quality of the light she guessed that she had slept for only a very few hours.
Oliver was still deeply asleep, frowning against the light with two deep vertical clefts between his eyebrows. His fists were lightly clenched. With the play of consciousness rubbed from his face by sleep, Chloe thought that he looked exhausted.
She slid away from under the bedcl
othes and stood up. The sight of her neatly folded clothes on a chair made her remember the night before with a slight shudder. In the time that it took her to dress, Oliver never moved. Chloe glanced down at him. She knew that she wanted to leave this room and close the door on what had happened here, and all the night before, for good. She was almost at the door before she turned back, and with a quick movement pulled the curtains close so that the light no longer fell across Oliver’s face. He stirred very slightly, but the frown didn’t disappear.
Chloe went, crossing the gold and green expanse of the Quad and turning out into the humdrum length of St Aldate’s. It was cold, and she shivered in her thin party clothes. But through the cold and her hangover, even through the sickening sense of having made a bad mistake with Oliver last night, Chloe felt the beginnings of strength beginning to flow back. She would survive all this, and the survival was starting even now on this cold but bracing morning. The thought lightened her step as she walked briskly down to Folly Bridge.
Inside the house she met Rose, mountainous in a stained pink wrap. Rose’s little eyes took in her crumpled clothes, missing nothing.
‘That’s it, darling,’ she chuckled. ‘You make sure you have a good time. One door closes and another opens, eh?’
Chloe smiled a thin smile and went on up the stairs. There was no sense in falling out with Rose, but the thought of her watching over the comings and goings in her house, like a spider in a web, was faintly distasteful.
