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  ‘Whatever is this White Rose?’ asked one man. ‘You having me on?’ And another said, ‘The White Rose? I used to see Sonia Dresdel there, love, when you were in short socks – it’s a rep company you know.’

  In the end I was taken on by a firm of Harrogate solicitors, to work for the managing clerk, a Mr Jowett. Desperate for a job by this time, and filled with romantic excitement at the thought of doing work connected, however vaguely, with Richard, I must have presented a picture both of keenness and a humble willingness to please:

  ‘You’ll do – I suppose,’ said Mr Jowett. My mother, her face puffy with hay-fever, commented only that she was glad it was a job with a profession, and not in trade.

  Working for Mr Jowett however turned out to be a very high price to pay, even for imaginative involvement with Richard. He had indeed heard of the White Rose: ‘And I can tell you – I think nothing to it.’ Plump and usually short of breath, he had a very red face and shiny pate; his pipe was rarely out of his mouth and his small office, cluttered with overflowing papers was dense always with tobacco smoke. From the beginning he devoted himself to catching me out: delighted when I spelt a word wrong or better still, misunderstood some legal term. My best work he described as ‘too fancy’; coughing and spluttering, he’d say, ‘We don’t need any of your la-di-dah touches here.’

  The other girls in the office looked understandably wary when they heard where I’d been trained, and for the first few days passed remarks behind cupped mouths whenever I came in and out. But once they saw that Mr Jowett was giving me a terrible time, their attitude changed completely. Stella, who was fat, engaged to be married, and a few years older than the rest, took me under her wing. ‘It’s a shame,’ she would say, every time I came out of Mr Jowett’s den.

  For the first couple of weeks I was kept buoyed up by the sheer novelty of having a job, and even more important, by the hope -certainty almost – that one day, Richard would walk into the office. But the days passed and there was no sign of him. Mr Jowett became more and more trying, cantankerous and demanding by turns. I began to worry that perhaps, since being jilted by Juliet, Richard had gone into a decline.

  June came; the purple lilac outside the Georgian house had turned brown, its scent frowsty. I meant each day to get in touch with Jennifer, but did nothing about it. Each evening I spent sitting with my mother, listening to the wireless and knitting a long shapeless cardigan in blue baby wool. In the meantime, my father went up to London for a three-day business trip: ‘It seems pathetic,’ she said, ‘that he’s not even particularly good at his job. I think he just roisters in City pubs.’

  The evening he was to return, she went up to bed early. When he came in, seeing me alone, knitting, he said sharply, ‘Why don’t you find yourself a boy friend, eh?’ Then he added, ‘Get something that’ll make you stay up north?’

  Surprised and touched by this near admission that he cared whether I stayed or went, I muttered something, my head bent over the knitting.

  He stood in the doorway. ‘Please yourself,’ he said, shortly. He lit up a cigarette then going over to the piano struck a few random chords. ‘Your friend Juliet’s in the Big Smoke now,’ he said casually, ‘did you know that? She’s got a job, a receptionist somewhere, dealing with foreigners.’

  ‘Who told you?’ I asked breathlessly. My ball of wool fell down; too tightly wound, it rolled across the floor, unravelling as it went.

  ‘She did.’ He played a few bars of ‘Kitten on the Keys’. ‘I met her on the train; she’d been up north for the weekend.’ He added: ‘If you’re wondering what she was doing, passing through third class – she got on late. Only just made it in fact.’

  He got up and came over, crushing out his cigarette half-smoked in a souvenir ashtray; then he ran his finger along one of the Wemyss cats, bringing it away dusty. ‘Ugh.’

  Seeing that he was about to go out I tried to stop him; although Juliet had rejected Richard, to talk of her was still almost to talk of him. Chasing my ball of wool across the floor, I asked, ‘Is she going to stay there long?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he replied abruptly, gathering up some papers and going straight out of the room.

  But my fallow period was nearly over. A week later, hurrying out of the office at lunchtime – so unimportant as to be invisible – I squeezed past two of the partners in the corridor. They were talking, and I overheard the fragment, ‘… doubtless you’ll be notified. I think Oldenshaw’s arranged for young Ingleson to be in court…’

  It wasn’t very much. But I ran with it straight to the Valley Gardens: sitting on the same bench, saying over and over again, ‘Oldenshaw’s arranged for young Ingleson to be in court,’ delighting in the new image to add to my now jaded collection; but most of all rejoicing in the knowledge that if he was working, then however inconsolable he hadn’t broken down, hadn’t pined away completely for love of Juliet.

  Back at the office, uplifted by such a trifle I felt the afternoon speed by. My mood must even have communicated itself to Mr Jowett, since he went so far as to admit of some conveyancing typed as a rush job, ‘Not bad – not bad at all, lass.’

  From that day the weary flatness began to lift. During the next week my lightness of mood surprised me; walking home dreamily in the early evenings, the June warmth ceased to mock me. It was all for no reason that I could see but I was too pleased, too grateful to question it.

  Then one Friday evening, as I stood eyes screwed up in the sun, waiting in the thickening traffic at the top of James Street, someone shouted, ‘Locket!’ I looked up, and a car coming across drew up by the pavement facing the wrong way.

  ‘That hair shouldn’t be allowed,’ said Quentin, leaning out. ‘It stops the traffic.’

  I was speechless; I saw that Richard was beside him, smiling at me.

  ‘Come on a picnic tomorrow,’ said Quentin. ‘I’ve just thought of it this moment. My Nell comes back this evening.’ He turned, ‘Okay with you, Richard?’ Behind them a car tooted impatiently as Richard, leaning across, said, ‘Yes – do come, Lucy –’

  ‘Your address, Locket?’ asked Quentin. There was another angry blast behind, finger on the horn, and a moment later, shouting ‘tomorrow at your house when the pubs shut,’ he shot the car dangerously back into the traffic.

  My mother, surrounded by photographs and cuttings was having an evening with the Memory Box; my father had gone to London again, and wasn’t due back till tomorrow.

  ‘This summer I really am going to make an album, darling. We’ll get it all done before you go to London. And I was thinking – rather than arrange everything by people, we could arrange it by years.’

  I’d just met Quentin, I told her casually, and he’d invited me on a picnic tomorrow.

  ‘Isn’t he the one who’s marrying the Ingleson girl?’ she asked, holding up for comparison two faded pictures of the Patmore stables; then, looking only mildly interested, she added, ‘who else is going – Richard, Juliet?’

  Certain that my father wouldn’t have bothered to tell her about the meeting with Juliet, nevertheless I’d been dreading that from some source or other she would find out that Richard was now free; but when I mumbled some answer, it seemed, as I’d suspected, that all her hopes and ambitions were focused on the wonderful things that were to befall me in London, for she merely said, ‘Well, if Richard is there, you might ask about Father Ainslie, Lucy. I never got round to mentioning it that day.’ Then she turned back to the Box:

  ‘Just look at this, Lucy. 1911. That was a very special year! That was the year, Lucy – I first noticed Gervase noticing me. And it was a wonderful summer, darling…’

  At the office next morning, my abstracted state was too much for Mr Jowett.

  ‘It’s Saturday is it?’ he queried belligerently. ‘You’re all the same nowadays – summat for nowt.’ Puffing smoke in my face, he told me, ‘When I got started, in nineteen-o-five, we knew what work was.’

  When I’d left in the morning my moth
er hadn’t been awake; now as I returned her curtains were still drawn, and when thoughtlessly I turned on the light, she gave a little moan, then half sitting up, clutched her hand to her forehead. Her face was puffy, crisscrossed with pain.

  ‘And yesterday evening I felt so well, Lucy.’ She lay down again: ‘Your picnic, Lucy?’ she said anxiously. ‘You’ll go on your picnic, won’t you?’

  ‘If you’re sure –’

  ‘But you must, darling! After all, they may have asked other friends. And one never knows … It’s all practice, Lucy.’

  Could I get her anything, I asked. ‘Tea, toast?’

  ‘Just some tea, darling, very weak.’ Shamed gratitude overwhelming me (I would have gone whatever she said), I ran down to put on the kettle.

  There wasn’t time for any lunch. It had been a rush back, and I hurried now over my face and hair: putting off the decision about what to wear. Rare luxury for me, I had two dresses to choose from. One I’d bought in the January sales with Elizabeth’s help: a conventional print of stripes and dots which nipped me tightly at the waist. ‘Pushes you right out on top,’ said Elizabeth in the fitting room. ‘It’s grand.’ But since then it had shrunk sadly; and when I’d tried it on last night I’d realized the bodice was now a binder. The other one I’d bought at Easter. Simple in style, of russet slubbed cotton, it reminded me of Juliet both in taste and expense (I had only just finished paying for it), and since her visit I’d somehow not wanted to wear it. But today it seemed the obvious choice. I was hurriedly stepping into it – when a car horn sounded outside. Without going in to my mother, I rushed downstairs.

  Richard was already walking up the garden path. I tried to look casual; but I was breathless from hurry. The car, a Morris Eight Tourer, stood outside, its roof rolled back. Nell was sitting in the front with Quentin.

  Fiery red, I couldn’t look at Richard’s face. As we walked down, he said, ‘I really must apologize. It was a scatty invitation – I’d meant to ring up and confirm it.’ Then he added, ‘You’ll find Quentin a bit over-exuberant. I must apologize for him, too.’

  Nell said as we came up, ‘Hallo, love.’ Her voice, warm, rather fruity, didn’t seem so very different from the drinkful one at Christmas. Quentin had his arm round her: ‘She didn’t get a First, Lucy. She’s my paid-up, finished-off, second-class mate –’

  ‘Oh you!’ said Nell, pushing up the back of his hair roughly, pressing hard against the neckbone; he ducked, then freeing his arm, kissed her; a moment later starting the car, flinging me suddenly against the warmth of Richard sitting cramped with me in the back. Hooted at furiously by a gravel lorry we shot out into the main road.

  Tremblingly happy, I sat very quiet. The sun beating down on us was unbelievably hot and the speed of the car lifted my hair up and back. Although I looked out of the window, I didn’t notice much of the scenery: the twisting of a lane, dappled light becoming green shade as we drove between overhanging willows; splashing through a ford, and jerking after as we tested the brakes; some rocks, a stretch of dark water, the change to drystone walls.

  I wanted to ask about the Italian holiday, but couldn’t. Richard, full of sympathy about Mr Jowett, told me, ‘He used to be called the Gnome of Princes Square, when your office was there – before the War. His bad temper’s proverbial.’

  After a while they began to talk among themselves; things, people, I didn’t know about. And it was then that I suddenly remembered the kettle. In my haste I’d never gone down to make the tea, and by now boiled dry, it would be a charred mess – or worse still a lump of red hot metal; I might even have started a fire.

  ‘Oh heavens!’ I exclaimed, my hand to my mouth.

  ‘What is it?’ they asked instantly, all sympathy. ‘But wasn’t it electric? wouldn’t it cut out?’

  ‘She’s sure to smell it,’ Nell said; and Richard, concerned, asked, ‘Would it help at all if we looked for a phone?’

  But frightened that I’d been boring, I assured them that no, no it didn’t matter at all. We had been climbing for some time anyway and were now in open moorland, far from a telephone.

  We jogged for a mile or two more over unmade road, before rattling to a halt just beyond a gateway. Except for a grey farmhouse in the distance, there was no building in sight. All around us was heather, pale still, and beyond that an expanse of green bracken. On one side of the path some black-faced sheep were grazing.

  We all got out, and Richard went to shut the gate; for a moment we stood looking at the view; in the heat, the hills in the distance formed a blue-green haze.

  Nell said, ‘God, this is glorious.’ She poked the ground idly with her foot, revealing a disintegrating condom: ‘Hell,’ she said. ‘The boy scouts have been here.’

  ‘Oh, be prepared,’ sang Quentin, and trod it into the ground.

  We moved on, all carrying something from the car. ‘Shall we keep the champers on ice?’ Quentin asked, ‘or look for a stream?’ Nell and I had the rugs; he and Richard opulent-looking hampers of the sort I’d seen only in jewellers’ windows and glossy magazines. When we’d settled on a place we sprawled on the rugs, faces upturned to the sky. For a while no one talked; I wished I could forget the kettle, but it buzzed in my mind – a fat persistent fly.

  As if half reading my thoughts Nell said, turning over, ‘No insects yet, thank God.’

  Quentin put his arm round her: ‘Those damned Italian mozzies last summer,’ he murmured. ‘Drunk on your delicious blood. Lucky, lucky zanzare.’

  ‘That foul-smelling ointment,’ said Nell, her voice muffled on the rug. ‘And then, the catchword …’

  ‘Seventy zooming zanzare snapping a zany on the zanzariera. Six times right – and you won’t get bitten.’

  Nell, with her forefinger, idly traced a pattern on his lips. In the unaccustomed sensuous heat this small action aroused in me a sudden delight. Richard, who had said nothing at this memory of last summer, was lying only a few inches away; I felt myself tremble, the skin on my bare arms tautening.

  Resting on one elbow, I sat up and looked around; just near were a few bilberry plants, waxy, unripe; higher up would be many more.

  I remembered my father – it must have been after some Home Guard exercise, about the third or fourth year of the War. He’d brought back two bursting, stained paper-bags full of the fruit: ‘Something for a pie, Winifred,’ he’d said. My mother, receiving them (or him) with distaste, had said coldly, ‘I never make pastry.’ My father, colouring, had replied, ‘I should know better than to ask for anything.’ Then he’d muttered something I didn’t catch, adding: ‘That is, of course, if it’d be worth having now.’ My mother, her mouth trembling, had rammed the berries into a bowl still in their paper bags, where I’d found them two weeks later: grey fur growing over the crushed purple. The exchange had hung in my memory like an unsolved puzzle. That it had been sexual I’d not realized till much later.

  But my father’s was not the only ghost abroad. A few moments later Quentin, leaping up, announced that he was hungry and above all thirsty. He and Richard went to the car to fetch the champagne and Nell, turning to me suddenly, said:

  ‘This outing. I hope it isn’t too ghastly for you. Richard’s been so shot up since the Juliet affair. But we wanted him along for the celebrating, and we were sure he’d have said no to bringing along any friends we suggested. Then Quentin saw you, like that, by chance. And it was all right.’ Opening one of the hampers, she took out four silver tumblers. ‘That little b! Q and I couldn’t stand her, and God, she treated Richard badly – we were terrified she’d marry him. Terrified –’

  The men returned. Moments later, the first cork shot upwards and fizz rushed, dazzling, down the side of the bottle. We drank to Nell’s and Quentin’s happiness. Thirstily, I finished almost at once; my tumbler was refilled. Richard, only half joining in the conversation seemed a little removed, and I wondered how, unhappy as he must be, he could bear to celebrate.

  We opened another bottle. Their voices aro
und me seemed first to boom then to grow faint. I talked a little myself and once – incredibly – made them laugh. I remembered distantly about the kettle and thought: But it’s not important at all.

  The food was laid out; it looked lavish, unreal: pâté, several sorts of bread, Camembert, chicken, salad. The heat, as we sat about, seemed to grow. Strawberries, cream, amaretti – I scarcely tasted what I ate. Biting into a biscuit I felt my head, fuzzy, float about me and my hand, enlarged and numb at the fingertips, reach out for my drink, and miss it.

  ‘Have I drunk too much?’ I asked: my voice sounded distant as from another person; but Richard, passing me the tumbler shook his head and smiled.

  Quentin, lying luxuriously, his head cradled in Nell’s arms, said, ‘Fancy feeling so bloody good at four in the afternoon –’

  ‘Five, love,’ said Nell. ‘Five. Five-thirty.’

  My feet, like a badly focused photo ballooned into view. I heard Richard say, ‘I don’t know why you two bother to bring anyone else along …’

  Heavy and sleepy, we lay on the rugs; Nell said something about making coffee; then for a while there was silence. I noticed only vaguely the dry click of a grasshopper nearby before, blurred with drowsiness, I slipped into a numbing doze.

  I came round, to hear Quentin laughing, protesting, saying, ‘I can’t, love,’ Nell pulling him up limb by limb, caressing him as she did so. ‘But love,’ he said, ‘you can’t want to take exercise!’

  Richard sat up. ‘Lucy and I’ll go for a walk. How’s that?’

  Nell said from the rug, ‘You’re a dear, Richard.’

  ‘And you’ll be rewarded,’ said Quentin. ‘We’ll have tea for you.’

  Richard pulled me up lightly; as we moved off I stumbled almost at once and he took my arm, steering me clear of where the heather, spongy, concealed water. Choosing my words with care I said, ‘I’m not really used to drink.’ I’d eaten no lunch, I explained, and not much breakfast either.