Follies

‘Anyway,’ Tom went on quickly, aware that Helen was watching him, ‘Orlando himself isn’t a character endowed with a great deal of brain. No, Rosalind’s the important one, and I can’t find the right girl anywhere. I was hoping I might spot someone here amongst Noll’s grand friends, but they’re all far too old already. Look at them.’ He waved his hand expressively across the room. ‘Twenty years old and experienced enough for forty. I need someone fresh, and full of innocence, yet with that sexy edge of natural cleverness and the beginnings of maturity. A bit like you. But not really like you,’ he added, with beguiling frankness.

‘Thank goodness.’ Helen smiled back at him.

Oliver was seeing people to the door. There was a flurry of kissing and hand-waving, then when Oliver turned back into the room Helen saw the sulky blonde girl jump up and push her arm through his. There was a possessive glow in her face and Helen thought, at once, Of course he would have someone. The little, frivolous flame of excitement that she had been shielding went out immediately. The blonde girl tugged Oliver’s head down to hers and kissed his ear, then let him go with a tiny push.

Tom stood up and pushed his hands deep into this pockets. ‘Time I was off,’ he told Helen. ‘Sure you won’t audition for me?’

Helen shook her head. ‘No. I’d be no good. I’m too busy, anyway. I have to work.’

Tom stared at her for a moment. ‘Jesus, you can’t work all the time. That’d be very dull.’

Helen was aware of a prickle of annoyance. She felt that this dark, forceful man was pushing her in some way and she recoiled from the idea.

‘I am dull,’ she told him dismissively.

Tom’s face remained serious but there was an underlying humorousness in it that threatened to break out at any minute. ‘Somehow I doubt that,’ he said, very softly. ‘But it was only an idea. See you around.’ With a casual wave that took in Oliver as well as Helen, he was gone.

Helen realised that she was almost the last remaining guest. The blonde girl was at Oliver’s side again, turning her pretty, petulant face up to his. ‘Oliver,’ she said in a high, clear voice, ‘so lovely to see everyone again. But,’ and there was no attempt to lower the upper-class tones, ‘the mousy girl in red, who on earth was she?’

Oliver’s good-humoured expression didn’t change, but he shook his hand free. ‘Don’t be such a cow, Vick. I don’t know any mice. Where’s your coat?’

‘Don’t bother, darling,’ Vick said sweetly. She blew him a kiss, danced to the door and slammed it behind her.

At last, Helen saw that she was alone with Oliver. He came, picking his way through the debris of bottles and glasses on the floor, and held out his hands to her.

‘You’ve such a sad face,’ he said. ‘Didn’t you like my party?’ His hands, as they closed over hers, felt enormous and very warm.

‘I liked Tom Hart,’ Helen told him carefully. ‘I’m sorry about looking sad. It must be the way I am.’ There was no question of confiding anything to Oliver. Helen was still surprised that she had let out so much to Chloe. Yet Helen was shrewd enough to know that the very remoteness of Oliver’s world from her own was part of the unexpected, exotic fascination that she felt for him. She was clever enough too to guess that whatever it was that Oliver saw in her, he wouldn’t be attracted by the poverty and awkwardness of her background.

She felt, for an instant, guilty of disloyalty, but she turned the thought away deliberately. What was it that Chloe had said? ‘Find your own strength to carry on. Positively.’ Well, she would do just that.

‘I shall have to try and cheer you up,’ Oliver was saying lightly. ‘Here. Have another drink. Always helps.’ He filled her glass up with the heady, flowery wine and came to sit beside her on the window seat. His long legs sprawled in the faded blue jeans, and his forehead rested against the window pane as he stared out. After a moment’s silence, in which Helen’s eyes travelled from the clear-cut planes of his face to the tiny pulse that jumped at the corner of his eye, Oliver said, ‘So quiet. Just the light and the dark out there. No talk. No noise or confusion. Do you ever wish that you could keep moments? Freeze them or something, just the odd minutes when everything is right. There are so bloody few of them.’

Even in your life? Helen wanted to ask. Perhaps after all he wasn’t such a bizarre choice for Orlando. He had the face of a romantic hero, and there was enough of uncertainty in it now for her to imagine him as a boy in love with an illusion.

‘Times when I want to stop everything, and say yes. Like this. This is how I want it to be?’ Helen answered him. ‘Not very many. Some, perhaps.’ Like now, she could have added. Being here with you, of all strange people, talking like this.

Oliver stopped staring out into Canterbury Quad as if after all he was rejecting this moment as one to be kept.

‘Well, what shall we do? More drink?’ He waved the bottle and when Helen shook her head he refilled his own glass and drained it. ‘Mmm,’ he murmured, and lifted Helen’s hand from where it lay in her lap. He traced the shape of her fingers and the outline of her nails with his own forefinger and then, with his face turned away from her into the room, said, ‘Would you like to go to bed?’

The words seemed to hang, echoing, in the air between them.

Helen was not a virgin, but never in the course of the single, bashful relationship she had known had there been an instant like this. Half of her, astoundingly, wanted to say – just as casually – yes, let’s do that. But it was a hidden half that she was far from ready to reveal, even to herself. The practical, careful Helen of old, the one who took stock and who watched intently from the sidelines, was the one who answered.

‘No,’ she said, as if considering it. ‘Not yet.’

‘Yet?’ Irritation flickered in Oliver’s blue eyes as he stared at her. He seemed to see her, very close at hand, yet not to notice her at all. ‘What can you mean, yet?’

‘People,’ Helen told him mildly, ‘usually leave a decent interval between meeting and going to bed.’

Oliver’s quick, sardonic smiled surprised her. ‘A decent interval, then. How many days? How many dinners? God, I hate waiting. And I hate decency even more. It’s a proletarian idea, hasn’t anyone told you that?’

Helen was stung. She jumped up from the cushions, and as she moved she saw Oliver’s eyes on the length of thigh showing beneath her scarlet hemline. Her blush deepened and she lost the sharp retort which had been ready. Oliver stood up too, grinning, and then swung her round by the shoulders. His mouth found the nape of her neck under the black curls and he kissed her.

‘Ah, a warm place at last,’ he teased. ‘You’re dressed to look like a flame, but your skin feels as cold as marble. Funny girl.’ Then he turned her round to face him and kissed her mouth, deliberately, still smiling against her closed lips. ‘Don’t worry. If you prefer decency, we’ll let it lie for now, like a fat bolster between us.’ The good humour in his voice changed everything for Helen. He did understand, then. The sensitivity she had guessed at was there in him, waiting. Helen stood in the circle of his arms for a second and wished that it was all different. If she had said yes … If she had been a different person.

Flora or Fiona would have said yes, and they would have been able to keep him for a while. And now he was moving away from her, disentangling himself as he had done from the blonde Vick. Oliver.

‘Come on,’ he said kindly. ‘I’ll walk you back to Follies. I’d like to drop in and see old Rose for half an hour before Hall.’

Helen nodded dumbly. As they walked together across the Quad the ancient bell, Great Tom, struck six. The long, tolling notes lapped sonorously inside her head, uncomfortably like a knell. Yet Oliver drew her arm snugly through his as they turned down St Aldate’s. He was whistling softy, a single phrase over and over again, as if he was trying to tease the rest of a forgotten theme out of his subconscious. Helen fell into step with him, half carried along by the support of his arm. He was wearing a shabby, brown leather aviator’s coat with a lining of tightly curled sheepskin, and in the warmth of a deep pocket his hand still held Helen’s. Remembering the first of his questions, she knew that this was a moment she would like to freeze for herself. If only it was possible to keep him here, beside her, just like this.

When they reached Follies Oliver handed her elegantly down the steep stone steps to the island, walked up through the silent house and stopped outside her door. His eyes glowed very bright and amused in the darkness.

‘I’ll be back,’ he told her, ‘to check out the bolster before too long. Such uncomfortable, old-fashioned things.’

‘That’s good,’ Helen responded equally brightly. ‘I shall look forward to that.’

Oliver raised his arm in a half wave and turned away again. Helen stood listening until the sound of his footsteps had been swallowed up in the recesses of the house. She heard a burst of radio music followed by a door closing, then silence. The thought of her own cold, empty room was uninviting. Helen slipped down the stairs to the grander spaces of the gallery below.

‘Come in,’ Chloe’s low, musical voice answered her knock at once.

Chloe was sitting curled up in her armchair in a pool of lamplight. There was a red-embered fire burning in the grate and her hair was glowing even brighter in the double warmth of the two lights. She closed her book with an exaggerated gesture of relief and grinned up at Helen.

‘Well, and how did it go?’

It was easy to tell Chloe things. Helen clasped dramatically at her heart and stumbled forward into the light. ‘Wonderful. And awful. He asked me to go to bed with him and I said no. Oh God, Chloe, what shall I do?’ It was half a joke, but only half. Something intriguing had come in to fill a cold, empty space inside Helen, and now she didn’t want to let it go.

Chloe’s eyebrows lifted a fraction. ‘Horny little bugger,’ she said, amused. ‘You were quite right to tell him to get lost. He’ll be back, love, don’t you worry.’

‘I hope you’re right,’ said Helen softly. ‘I want him to be back, very much.’ She didn’t, in her preoccupation, see the quick anxious glance that Chloe shot at her.

After an hour of sitting with Rose in the impenetrable untidiness of her kitchen, Oliver stood up restlessly. He drank the remains of the dark brown sherry in his glass and made a face. Rose went on impassively with her sewing, not looking at him. ‘Before you go,’ she said, ‘what are you doing to that nice little thing upstairs?’

Oliver shrugged himself into his coat without answering, turned to go, and then as an afterthought sketched a kiss in the air between himself and Rose. ‘Doing nothing at all, darling Rose. All the treasures are kept securely locked away, as you must have guessed. Bloody boring. And now, au revoir or I shall be late for Hall.’

Rose, left alone in the kitchen, smiled a little and went on sewing.

Oliver took the steps into the misty dampness shrouding the city two at a time. He noticed the outline of a big car parked on the bridge as he came level with it, then as he swung out on to the pavement he saw that it was a white Rolls. Beside it, a man in a peaked cap was lifting a heavy trunk. Three other people were standing close together in the orange glare of the street lights, moisture from the mist beading brilliantly on their hair and clothes. The tallest was a thickset man in an expensive overcoat; one of the two women was clinging affectedly to his arm.

But it was the other woman who drew Oliver’s startled attention.

She looked very young. Over a cloud of pure white fur, the face was as innocent as an angel’s, and as expressionlessly beautiful as if carved in marble. Oliver stopped dead. At once, the face burned itself into his memory. He knew that he had never seen it before, yet it was familiar, even down to the faintly startled reflection in the depths of the immense eyes. And the girl went on looking back at him, her lips slightly parted and the street lights darting jewels of dampness among her snow-white furs.

The thickset man made an irritable sound and Oliver wrenched his attention from the girl.

‘Can I help?’ he asked politely.

The man stabbed a finger towards the square black bulk of Follies House.

‘Is this Follies House?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Jesus, will you look at those steps!’ The accent was mid-Atlantic, but beneath it were the unmistakable echoes of London’s East End. Hobbs, can you get all this down there?’

The chauffeur leaned over the parapet. ‘Yes, Mr Warren, I think so.’

The other woman clung more tightly to the cashmere sleeve. ‘Oh, Masefield, it’s so wet out here. My hair.’ Without a word her escort opened the passenger door and handed her back into the Rolls. Hobbs bent to lift the trunk again. The girl stared back at Oliver, motionless. The shroud of mist seemed to swallow all the sounds around them, so that they moved in eerie, silent isolation.

‘Can I help?’ he asked again, but the thickset man glanced at him only briefly. ‘Thanks. No.’

The girl in white ducked her head and followed her father down the steps. Hobbs bent to the trunk again and bumped awkwardly after them. The woman sat in the car, staring ahead of her and rhythmically stroking her hair.

Oliver walked away, back up St Aldate’s to Christ Church. He whistled to himself as he went, the same few, unfinished notes. Now he knew. The man was Masefield Warren. More, the white girl was his daughter, Pansy. Her face, wide-eyed and startled, was familiar from the flashbulb shots of a hundred gossip columns. Pansy Warren was not only beautiful, she was the heiress to her father’s by now uncounted millions.

As Oliver walked back under Tom Tower the rest of the little whistled tune came spilling out, unchecked.

Two

Oliver came looking for Helen again on Sunday morning.

On Sunday mornings Oxford was always full of the peals and counterpeals of church bells, and today they sounded louder and even sweeter than usual. The skies were clear after the days of rain of the term’s beginning, and the trees without their muffling shrouds of leaves let the echoes through with extra clarity.

Helen was planning to do some reading in a library with a view over lawns and towers. It is Sunday, she told herself, as she gathered up her books. You must work as hard as you can, for Mum’s sake and Graham’s, but it can’t be flat out all the time.

When she came out of the front door of Follies House she saw Oliver at once. He was leaning on the parapet of the bridge, watching her. He made no move as she climbed the steps towards him, feeling clumsy in her thick overcoat and encumbered by her books. But as soon as she came level with him, he smiled. Helen was struck at once by the way his face, the same features that must have belonged to the parade of illustrious ancestors stretching behind him, was repossessed by the smile to become Oliver himself, unique. He stepped forward, blocking her path.

‘No work today,’ he said firmly. ‘Don’t you know it’s Sunday?’ One by one he took the books from under her arm. ‘Come with me instead.’

He wasn’t being persuasive; he was simply telling her what she must do.

‘We can go anywhere you like. The whole world’s waiting.’

Helen let him unburden her, unable to protest or insist that indeed she must work.

‘Books, books,’ Oliver was saying breezily. ‘I was sent out for tutoring last term to a man called Stephen Spurring. He kept trying to make me go to gloomy seminars with anxious girls from Colleges I’ve never heard of …’

‘Like me?’ Helen was laughing in spite of herself.

‘No. Not a bit like you. You don’t go to seminars and adopt a Marxist interpretation of Wuthering Heights, do you?’

‘Oh, all the time. Stephen Spurring’s very highly thought of, you know.’

‘Then you must stop it at once.’ Oliver stood squarely in front of her and cupped her chin so that she looked up into his face. He was mock-serious, grinning at her as he dropped his hand again so that she wanted to say, Come back. ‘It can’t be good for you. And highly thought of by whom? Hart has discovered that Spurring has got some kind of senior-member responsibility for As You Like It. Of all the tedious little men.’

So Oliver dismissed the bright star of the English faculty. How confident he is, Helen thought, as she followed him.

Oliver dropped the pile of books haphazardly into the well behind the seats of his open car. It was waiting for them at the kerbside, looking to Helen absurdly low-slung, sleek and highly polished. She had often seen Oliver driving around town in it. Now she said, ‘It’s such a pretty car. What kind is it?’

He opened the passenger door with a flourish, handed Helen into the leather bucket seat and swung him legs over the door on his own side.

‘A Jaguar,’ he said, with deep satisfaction, patting the walnut fascia. ‘XK 150. Rather old now, and quite rare.’ The engine roared throatily into life and Oliver beamed. ‘Looked after for me by a little man in the Botley Road. He just loves the innards of old cars, isn’t that lucky? Me, I don’t have any taste for sprockets and oil. I just want to drive her, the faster the better. So, really, the three of us have a perfect relationship.’

Helen watched him, fascinated. She had never met anyone so vibrantly pleased with life, and so certain of himself. The introspective moment of the other evening when he had sat staring out into the darkness of Canterbury Quad, and Helen had thought that after all he might make the perfect romantic hero, was forgotten.

They were bowling through the wide, tree-lined streets of North Oxford now, where the pavements were drifted over with golden leaves. The few people who were about were strolling with newspapers under their arms, or walking dogs who scuffled in the piles of leaves.

‘Where are we going?’ Helen asked.

‘Where would you like to go?’ Oliver countered. ‘Anywhere in particular?’

‘No.’

‘Well then, you might as well leave it to me. We’re going to have lunch, as it happens. And to see a man about a dog.’

Helen asked no more questions. Instead she sat back in her seat and let the wind blow away everything but the immediacy of this extraordinary morning. When she closed her eyes, the sunlight and the shade from the trees flashing past dappled patterns through her eyelids. When she opened them again there was the long, black car bonnet in front of her, the outskirts of the city dropping away, and Oliver beside her. He drove negligently, one hand on the wheel and the other resting on the polished wooden knob of the gear lever. They sliced in and out of the traffic on the busy road and then, suddenly, they were in the open country. Helen felt the acceleration pressing her back into her seat as the car surged forward. The shadows swept over her face, faster and faster, and the wind whipped her hair back.

Oliver glanced at her, sidelong. If Helen had known him better she might have recognised the small, secret smile with which he always congratulated himself on getting his own way. When she looked round at him again the smile had vanished and he asked, casually, ‘Warm enough? My coat’s in the back if you need something to put over your knees.’ It was the brown leather aviator’s coat which he had been wearing the other evening. Helen instinctively pulled her own well-worn duffel coat more tightly around her.

‘I’m fine. Thanks.’

The car swept on. They were in the Cotswolds now, driving through villages built of honey-coloured stone and past winter-ready fields showing countless shades of brown and ochre.

‘It’s a beautiful day,’ Oliver said, stretching back in his seat and bracing his arms straight against the wheel. ‘Better than mouldering with all that lot in some library?’ He jerked his head backwards at the pile of books behind them.

Much better, Helen told herself, shutting her mind resolutely to the niggling voice of conscience and another, much fainter, murmur of apprehension. She didn’t feel safe with Oliver Mortimore. But then, what was so appealing about safety? Helen wriggled a little deeper into her seat and stared along the low line of the Jaguar’s bonnet at the open road hurtling towards them. She thought, fleetingly, of Chloe; feeling safe wouldn’t be high on Chloe’s list of priorities, she was certain. Perhaps, after all, it didn’t come so high on her own either. Helen couldn’t explain to herself why she had been swept up by Lord Oliver Mortimore. But it gave her an unfamiliar glow of flattery and excitement. And now she was here she would enjoy it, whatever was to come. The recognition of that whatever, too, gave Helen a thrill of recklessness. She so rarely did anything without thinking very hard about it first. But there just wasn’t any leeway for thinking, where Oliver was concerned. He had just happened to her, and she was ready to accept that.

Just as he would have to accept her.

Helen was clear-sighted enough to know that there was nothing to be gained by pretending to be something she wasn’t, in the hope that would make her more interesting to him. Whatever it was that he had seen in her in the first place would have to go on being enough, and Helen lifted her chin determinedly at that. But she definitely wanted him to go on seeing something in her. Her eyes were drawn to him again as he sat negligently at the wheel. He was unusually good-looking, yes, but his attraction was more magnetic than that. It was the ease, the casualness and the assurance that drew Helen, who possessed none of those things. She felt as if she wanted to warm herself by him. And there was something else, too. She thought she detected a sensitivity in him, under all that urbane gloss, that made him doubly attractive. A little mysterious, too.

Be careful, Helen’s sane little inner voice warned her. Another, louder voice responded. I’m always careful. This time I just want to see what happens. I don’t care if it isn’t real. If it doesn’t last any longer even than today.

The Jaguar was slowing down. They had left the main road and, at the end of a much narrower road, they came to a compact little village. A cluster of stone cottages around an uneven triangle of green, a church with a squat stone tower masked by a belt of yew trees, and at the apex of the triangle, there was a pub. A mulberry tree was painted on the sign over the low door.

Oliver switched off the ignition and his smile flashed at her again.

‘This is where we’ll have lunch.’ Again there was no possibility of disagreeing with him, even if Helen had wanted to. Instead, she let him escort her across the green to the door under the mulberry tree sign. Oliver’s arm sat lightly across her shoulders as they walked. Inside, there were log fires and high-backed oak seats.

‘You’re always so cold,’ Oliver grinned down at her. ‘We’d better sit close to the fire.’ His hand touched the nape of her neck again, just briefly, under the tangle of black curls.

‘Morning, Lord Oliver,’ the man behind the bar greeted him. ‘And Miss.’ This was Oliver’s home ground in some way, Helen realised.

‘Hello, Bill. Drink, Helen?’ A quick glance round the bar confirmed Helen’s instinctive choice.

‘Sherry, please. Dry, with ice.’

‘Quite safe, but a little dull.’ Oliver’s voice was teasing. ‘I’m going to have champagne, and I think you should too.’

The drinks arrived at once, Oliver’s in a silver tankard and Helen’s foaming in a tall, narrow glass. Twice in one week, Helen thought, amused. And I’ve hardly ever even tasted real champagne before. How odd things are. She raised her glass to Oliver in a quick, half-ironic toast and there was a flicker in his eyes as he responded.

‘You are pretty,’ he told her. ‘Why do you hide it?’

‘I don’t,’ she said, quickly defensive. ‘Anyway, being pretty isn’t everything.’

‘You’d be surprised.’ He was laughing at her. ‘What else is there? Tell me with special reference to Helen Brown, please. I didn’t have a chance to talk to you at my tea-party. And we did get off on rather the wrong footing afterwards.’ Oliver took a long pull of champagne and looked at her expectantly.