by Rosie Thomas
Simple love for him filled Helen as she watched his dark profile. He was looking straight ahead of him as he bent with the others and they shouldered their burden. Slowly, in step, the bearers moved away down the aisle, taking Oliver out into the sunshine for the last time. Lord and Lady Montcalm followed him together, heads up now. The pews disgorged their dark occupants in their wake. Helen hung back and was swallowed up in the slow press forward. They came out of the cool church and into the light, where the afternoon sun was dipping lower and lengthening the shadows behind the headstones. White butterflies skimmed over the wild flowers that fringed the churchyard.
With Chloe and Pansy, Helen stood at the edge of the solid black crowd. She knew that Tom, and Darcy, and the other bearers were straining to hold the coffin steady on its band as it made the slow descent into the dark hole. Then there would be the scattering of earth, and the last, great, solemn words.
She struggled to hold the reality of Oliver close to her, away from here, as he had once been. She felt the vibrant life in him as he braced himself beside her in the black Jaguar. The curled sheepskin lining of his aviator’s coat tickled her throat and wrists. Suddenly, suffocatingly, he was all round her. She remembered his kiss after their first lunch together, and how he had tasted faintly of the rich burgundy.
They had gone to the little house that he called home on the Montcalm estate. He had carried her away, effortlessly out of herself, so that she didn’t belong to herself any more, but to him. Remembering his love-making, the natural way he had taken her as if she was a ripe fruit, the days of her love for him came flooding back as vividly as if they had just happened. It had been Oliver’s way to take, unthinkingly, with the assurance born of extreme privilege. But he had given too, his vitality and mercurial charm, with prodigal generosity while it was still his to give.
Love for him flowed through Helen once again, against the fierce current of sorrow and bitterness at his loss.
Out of the crowd a face caught her attention. It was Jasper Thripp, almost at the grave-mouth. Tears were sliding down his seamed brown face and falling unregarded on to his ancient, greeny-black suit. Helen jerked her eyes away again, unwilling to witness the nakedness of grief.
At once her gaze encountered someone else. Beatrice was listening intently with the grey sweeps of hair over her ears pinned youthfully back. The ravaged expression that she had worn beside the river had gone. She looked, once again, the intelligent, slightly harried, middle-aged mother and wife. Helen searched for him and found Stephen standing next to her. Their hands were even discreetly clasped behind the folds of Beatrice’s skirt. They had made their own compromises, Helen thought. Stephen looked sorrowful, but his attention was elsewhere. Helen wondered what he was really thinking about.
Compromises. The reasonableness of the word mocked her and her own mistaken idealism.
The funeral was over. In twos and threes the mourners were turning away from the graveside and along the flagged path to the lych-gate. It was Lord and Lady Montcalm who stood in the porch now, finding the sombre strength to acknowledge the condolences. Rose Pole came past. She was dry-eyed at last, and with a kind of defiant dignity showing in her blotched face. Gerry was beside her, ginny tears still streaming. Darcy had a gentle word for them, but when they reached Lady Montcalm she shot a glance of such poisonous hatred at Rose that the fat woman ducked her head and shuffled wordlessly past.
Helen’s thoughts were too intently fixed elsewhere even to wonder why. The bearers were the last to leave the graveside. She stood stock-still as they filed past. Tom was staring straight ahead again, and she saw how drawn his face was. He walked by without a word, or even a glance at her, and Helen knew that she had been expecting nothing else. There was nothing for them to say to each other, and they were avoiding the pain of pretending that there was.
She stood watching with numbed, patient acceptance as Darcy moved to and fro. He managed to find the right words and the right gestures for everyone. He had become himself, as if the finality of Oliver’s loss had set him free from the confines of his own fears.
I wish I loved him. I wish.
He put his arms round his mother’s shoulders and led her away to the funereal black Rolls. Lady Montcalm put her white hand up to his cheek as she shrank inside, and he kissed it.
Cars purred away through the village. They were taking people away back into the sunshine, where they would undo tight collars and buttons with relief, sigh, and turn their attention back to the business of life.
Darcy was coming back down the path to where Helen waited for him. They were the only people left in the churchyard except for the sexton and his boy who were bending to their task with the dark, raw earth. The heady scent drifting from the heaped-up flowers was overpowering.
Darcy turned abruptly away.
‘Come round to the other side of the church,’ he said, and for the first time Helen heard from his voice that he was close to breaking down.
They walked away, the unclipped grass brushing at their ankles. The shadowed north side of the church was cooler. The tombstones here were ancient, leaning crazily over sunken slabs mossed with yellow lichen. Beyond the drystone wall was open pastureland and the bulk of Mere House against its yew-dark setting. ‘Come and sit on the wall. I used to spend hours here when I was a kid.’ Darcy led her to the place, and they sat on the flat stones with their backs to the churchyard. Ahead of them Mere’s acres spread under the lazy fingers of sun.
Helen listened to the superficial silence of rural peace, underscored by the hum of insects and the rustle of grass and leaves.
Darcy said, ‘It isn’t any use, is it?’
Away somewhere behind them a blackbird launched into a torrent of liquid song. ‘I wish it could have been,’ she whispered.
The bird sang on, its own exultant fountain.
She turned to look at him, and her eyes travelled over the lines of his open face, exactly as familiar and dear to her as it always had been.
‘I’m sorry.’ She offered him the honesty of her heart.
‘Don’t be. There’s no reason. It shouldn’t have taken me so long to find the courage to face it. Peculiar, isn’t it, that losing Oliver should have given it to me?’
‘I think I understand,’ Helen told him.
Darcy lifted her hand and surprised her with his old, half-smothered laugh. ‘You always hated this, didn’t you?’
The Viscountess’s blood-red ruby shone in its net of diamonds.
‘I’d never have made a viscountess for you. Somebody else will.’ She slid the heavy weight off her finger and gave it back to him. He dropped it into his pocket without looking at it. His eyes were on the meadows and the plain grey face of Mere House.
‘I hope so. I need that.’
‘I know so,’ she promised him. ‘But it couldn’t have been me.’
‘No. I was wrong to try to convince us both otherwise.’
They sat for a moment longer looking out at the view. Nothing to do with me, any longer, Helen told herself, these fields and stones and all the centuries of tradition lying behind and ahead. Relief lifted a heavy weight from her shoulders like a stifling blanket. Her hand felt as if it could fly up from her lap, weightless.
She wanted Darcy to know something, a truth that seemed vitally important now. ‘I love you,’ she said, knowing that he would understand.
He smiled back at her. ‘I love you too. I always will.’
Darcy stood up and put out his hands to swing her down from the low wall. There was no more to add. Helen felt that the old, peaceful intimacy had come back between them, and that they could keep it for ever now.
They circled the church once more and stood beside the long mound of fresh sweet earth. Long moments passed and the stillness lapped around them. Helen looked away at the low hillside, believing that Darcy wouldn’t want her to see his tears now.
At length he rubbed his eyes with his knuckles, like a schoolboy.
‘I’m gl
ad you were here,’ he said softly. And then, ‘Come on, I’ll take you home.’ Back to Follies. They turned away together and left the deserted churchyard.
Outside Follies House, neither of them looked at the bridge or the river beneath. Darcy’s hands rested on the wheel.
‘Be happy, won’t you?’ he said, uncertainly. Helen looked down at her bare fingers.
‘I don’t know,’ she answered, ‘if I deserve that.’
Darcy smiled at her. ‘You do. And he deserves you. Tom Hart is a good man.’ He leaned across and opened the door for her. Helen stepped automatically out, the shock wave that his words had set up ringing in her ears. He knew, then. Of course he knew.
‘Go on,’ Darcy told her. He lifted his hand in a brief salute, let in the clutch, and drove sharply away.
When he had gone, Helen didn’t look round at the steps, or up at the big red house. Instead she turned and started walking up St Aldate’s. Ahead of her lay Carfax and the ugly jumble of chain stores and bus stops. Beyond that was the calm spread of North Oxford, and Tom’s rented house in the garden square. She walked quickly. The pavements were hot under her feet and drifted over with the litter of the city’s summer invasion. Two coaches were parked beneath Tom Tower, disgorging their loads of tourists who streamed into the green space of the Quad. Carfax was wedged with buses and the faces in the shopping thoroughfare beyond had turned suddenly middle-aged. The year was over.
Helen walked under the shade of the tall plane tree in St Giles, and then into the leafy residential streets that fanned out beyond it.
When she came into the little square, her eyes fastened at once on the white-painted house. She saw with a beat of relief that the first-floor windows stood open on the wrought-iron balcony. Tom must be there. As she came through the late-afternoon hush she was almost running.
The front door was ajar. She pushed it open and walked into the hall. The pictures had been taken down from one wall, and were being packed into waiting crates. Tom’s year was over too.
Helen felt a surge of panic. Was she too late?
The house was very quiet. She went along the hall and into the neat, white, rented kitchen.
‘Tom?’ she called. French windows stood open on a little square of brick-paved garden. It was shaded with trailing green leaves, and there were tall terracotta pots bright with splashes of scarlet and pink. Tom was sitting in a white-painted wicker chair, his hands dangling loosely.
‘Tom.’
He jerked around, and then leapt to his feet. The wicker chair scraped backwards. Before she ran to him, Helen glimpsed that he had taken off his dark clothes. He was in jeans, and a torn sweatshirt that showed his lean chest. His face was tense. He was still waiting for something.
‘It’s all right.’ She put her arms out, and at once he pulled her to him with a force that frightened her. Her face was crushed against his shoulder and she still pressed herself closer, submerging herself in him.
‘What?’ he said roughly.
‘It’s all right,’ she repeated, and she was smiling ecstatically into the grey stuff of his sleeve. She opened her eyes and saw a scatter of red petals on the bricks, and the moving patterns of shade under the leaves. She felt that the little corner of view was clearer, sweeter and more significant than anything she had ever set eyes on before.
Without looking, Tom’s left hand found hers. He felt the nakedness of it and then clenched her fingers in his. With their clasped hands pulled between them, he kissed her and she closed her eyes on the leaves and the patterns of light. There was nothing now but Tom, and the avenues of freedom that opened out in front of them. Yet he lifted his head an inch from hers, and when she tried to draw him back she felt that his muscles were like iron. She opened her eyes to look into his and saw the fierceness. Her smile faded into anxiety. Was there still, still something wrong?
‘Have you told Darcy?’ There was the old insistent, uncompromising Tom. Nothing less than the full truth would satisfy him. Helen shook her head and saw the instant flash of anger before she answered.
‘I didn’t have the courage. Tom, it was Darcy who told me. He knew. He … he told me that you were a good man.’
She felt the taut muscles flutter and relax under her hands. Tom’s mouth was close to hers again.
‘I think we will be good for one another,’ he said, and she felt the beguiling warmth of his tongue as it traced her mouth.
‘And are you all mine now?’
She nodded mutely.
‘All mine?’
‘Yes.’
Insistently Tom drew her away from the dappled shade of the garden. They walked through the house together hand in hand, not letting go, as if they were afraid that the other could still disappear.
Tom’s room was shadowy, and there were thin white curtains lifting in the slow breeze at the windows. He took off her black dress, letting it rustle to a heap at their feet. He unpinned her hair and for a moment he stood with her locked in his arms, watching the black curls uncoiling across the whiteness of her skin. Then deftly he peeled off the last things and she stood in front of him, not proud or diffident, but simply ready to give herself.
Tom took her in his arms and lifted her on to the bed.
Her mouth, her flesh and the inner chasms of herself opened at the insistence of his touch. Tom was a faultless lover that first time. He made her cry out under the gentle brutality of his hands and mouth, and then he bore her away to remote, rocking islands of pleasure that she had never dreamed existed. He was her equal and her opposite half, both knowing and innocent, as gentle as a child and so powerful that even as she cried for him to go on, and on, she was afraid that he would break her in half.
And over himself, his dominance was steely. Only when Helen lay limp in his arms did he release himself, and the cry that he gave was more in pain than pleasure.
When at last he lay still she watched his face and saw it suffused with weariness. Tom had been performing for her, a performance born more out of passion than love.
His dark eyes opened and held hers, and the black lashes were stuck into points with the heat of their bodies. Gently Helen stroked back the damp hair from his forehead. They had taken possession of each other’s bodies, but something still held their hearts apart like a thin, cold sheet of glass. She took his face in her hands and forced him to look at her.
‘What?’ she demanded. Pain came with the weariness into his face, and she felt him shiver.
‘I can’t cry for him.’
Helen circled him with her arms and drew his head down between her breasts. Her hair fell down across his face like a protective curtain.
‘Cry,’ she whispered. ‘My darling, cry now.’
His tears came with long, shuddering sobs that tore at them in the sweet afternoon silence. Helen hunched over him, the meaningless, murmured words of tenderness swallowed between them. She understood his loss, and his grief, and his crying for the imagined, but still shocking moment of negligence that had lost him his friend’s life.
The weeping man in her arms was not the dictatorial and steely Tom Hart of the Playhouse, nor the ironically smiling and impervious man who had angered and unconsciously attracted her all through the Follies year. Magically he had become the equal and exact counterpart that she longed for, but she saw that he was as vulnerable, and as needy too, as she was herself. He was a whole, round person, grief-stricken now but still strong, and so alive that she wanted to seize him, and hold him, and absorb the warmth and solidity of him into herself. He was the man she loved.
‘I love you,’ she whispered. ‘I love you more than all the world.’
The crying had stopped. His wet face lay against hers and his fingers fluttered over her skin, and then his hands closed over her breasts. The length of his body tensed and hardened, and he came to her again.
The performance was forgotten now. He arched into her, and moaned, lost within himself, and she rocked him in her arms and rejoiced in the oblivion he had found.<
br />
Too soon Tom cried out again, utterly defenceless, and fell blindly against her. The thin, cold sheet had all dissolved away. They were at one, and they had found their own peace at the year’s end.
‘I’m sorry,’ Tom said. His voice was hoarse, but there was the faint lift of a smile at the corner of his mouth.
‘Don’t be. I liked that much better.’
‘Perverse girl. After all my efforts.’
Smiling, they locked their arms around each other. The white curtain blew gently at the window, and they drifted into untroubled sleep.
When they woke up the light had softened to the soft, pale grey of evening. It was delicious, cool and sweet-smelling. It must have rained while they were asleep. Helen heard the high, sharp peet of swallows dipping over grass somewhere nearby.
Tom stirred, smiling, and reached out for her.
‘Again?’ She smiled at him, pretending prim surprise.
‘Why ever not? You might as well know that I shall be an intensely demanding husband.’
Laughing, Helen spread her fingers over his mouth.
‘Who said anything about marriage?’
‘I gave you my favourite picture, didn’t I? Marrying you is the only way I can think of to get it back.’
‘Oh well, in that case …’
Tom rolled her over in his arms and they retreated into the intricate labyrinths of their new-found world.
Afterwards, Helen stood dreamily at the long window, wrapped in Tom’s bathrobe. It smelt of him and she stretched luxuriously, glowing with the happiness that seemed so strong around her that she felt she could touch it. Behind her Tom lay propped up on one elbow, watching her half-turned profile.
The moment was so perfect that fear touched her.
‘You won’t go away, will you?’ she whispered.
‘Never.’
Helen turned back from the window and sat down beside him.
‘Do you know what I would like us to do, tonight?’
‘Anything in the world.’
‘I want us to go out, to somewhere that Oliver especially liked. I want us to go with Pansy and Chloe, and I want us to drink a lot of his favourite wine, and eat great platefuls of all the things he liked. I want us to talk about him as if he hasn’t just … gone away. I want to say goodbye to him like that. I didn’t feel that this afternoon, all that sorrow and black ceremonial, was anything to do with Oliver.’
