The White Dove

London, February 1931

Amy was wandering listlessly around the room, picking up a crystal bottle and sniffing at the scent before putting it down again unremarked, then fingering the slither of heavy cream satin that was Isabel’s new robe waiting to be packed at the top of one of the small cases.

It was peculiar to think that tomorrow night Peter Jaspert’s large, scrubbed hands would probably undo this broad sash, and then reach up to slip the satin off his wife’s shoulders. Isabel would be Mrs Peter Jaspert then. Amy wondered whether Isabel was thinking about that too. Didn’t every bride, on the night before her wedding? But it was impossible to judge from Isabel’s face what she was thinking. She looked as calm and serene as she always did. She was sitting patiently in front of her dressing-table mirror while her maid worked on her hair. Isabel had her own maid now, who would travel with her on the honeymoon, and then they would settle into the house that Peter Jaspert had bought in Ebury Street.

Amy and Bethan would be left behind at Lovell House in Bruton Street. The town house didn’t feel as cavernously huge as it had done when Amy was a child, but it could be very quiet and empty, and faintly gloomy. It was all right now, of course, because it was full of preparations for the wedding. But once that was over, what then?

‘I’ll miss you so much, Bel,’ Amy said abruptly. Isabel looked at her sister’s reflection in the glass beside her own. She thought that you could tell what Amy was like just by watching her for five minutes. She was so restless, incapable of keeping still so long as there was any new thing to be investigated or assimilated. When there was nothing new or interesting, she was stifled and irritable. Her face reflected it all, always flickering with naked feelings for anyone to read. Isabel herself wasn’t anything like that. Feelings were private things, to be kept hidden or shared only with the closest friends. Amy didn’t care if the taxi driver or butcher’s boy knew when she was in the depths of despair.

She needed a calming influence, and a focus for her days, Isabel decided. A husband and a home would give her that, when the right time came. She smiled at Amy.

‘I’m hardly more than a mile away. We’ll see each other every day, if you would like that. And I’ll be a married woman, remember. We can do all kinds of things together that we couldn’t do before.’

Amy dropped the robe back on to the bed. ‘Go to slightly more risky restaurants for lunch, you mean? To the theatre unescorted? Will that really make any difference? You’ll be gone, and you can’t pretend that anything will ever be the same. That’s what I’m worried about. You’ll be too busy giving little dinners for Peter’s business cronies and his allies from the House, and going to their little dinners, and whenever I come to see you I’ll be just a visitor in your house …’

‘That’s what wives do, Amy,’ Isabel said quietly. ‘You don’t understand that because you’re not ready to marry. And I’m sorry if you feel that my house, and Peter’s house, won’t be just as much a home to you as this one is.’

Amy was contrite immediately.

‘Oh darling, I’m sorry.’ She knelt down beside Isabel’s chair. ‘I shouldn’t go on about my own woes when it’s your big day tomorrow and you’ve got enough to think about. They’re such little woes, anyway.’ She forced the brightness back into her face and hugged her sister. ‘I shall love to come to see you in your pretty house, if Peter will have me, and of course we’ll do all kinds of things together. I hope you’ll be very, very happy, too. If anyone deserves to be made happy it’s you, Isabel Lovell. Mrs Jaspert-to-be.’

Bethan came in, her arms full of the freshly ironed pieces of Isabel’s complicated trousseau. It had taken two months to assemble it. Bethan’s eyes went straight to the robe on the bed.

‘The creases! Amy, is this your doing? Isabel will be taking it out of her bag tomorrow night looking like a rag.’

‘All my doing, Bethan. I’m sorry. I just looked at it. I’ll take it down now and press it again myself.’

Bethan took it out of her hands at once. ‘You’ll do nothing of the kind. A nice scorch mark on the front is all it needs. Just go and get yourself ready for the party.’

‘Do, Amy,’ Isabel said. ‘They’ll need you.’ Her maid had finished wrapping the long red hair up in tight papers, and now she was methodically stroking thick white cream on to the bride’s face. Amy nodded. Isabel meant Gerald and Adeline. Amy blew a kiss from the door and went next door to her own room, wondering if she looked as heavy-hearted as she felt. If she did, she was not going to be a great asset at the pre-wedding party.

Bethan had laid her evening dress out on the bed for her, and in the bathroom across the corridor that she shared with Isabel everything would be put out ready for her bath. But instead of beginning to get ready, Amy sat down in the chair at her writing desk. The curtains were drawn against the February dark, but she stared at them as if she could see through and into the familiar street view. She was thinking that for nineteen years, ever since babyhood, she had shared a room with Isabel, or at least slept in adjoining rooms as they did now. They had hardly ever been separated for more than a night or two. And now they had come to the last night, and tomorrow Isabel would be gone.

It was going to be very lonely without her. It had started already. Usually Isabel and Amy would have prepared for a stiff evening like this one together, and then afterwards they would have laughed about it. But tonight the guests were elderly relatives and old family friends who had come up from the country for the wedding, and the party was to be their introduction to the bridegroom. Because Peter was to be there, the bride had to stay hidden. ‘What archaic rubbish,’ Amy had said, but nobody had paid any attention. The bride was to have a tray in her room, and Amy would have to go down and go through the smiling rituals and the interminable dinner afterwards on her own. There would be Colonel Hawes-Douglas, and the local Master of Foxhounds, and numerous old aunts and second cousins. There wasn’t even Richard to help her out. He was supposed to be coming home from Eton on twenty-four hours’ leave, but he hadn’t put in an appearance yet.

‘Bugger,’ Amy said. ‘Bugger it all.’

She went across the landing and ran her bath, then she plunged into the water and topped it up until it was as hot as she could bear. It would make her face as red as a boiled beetroot, but that was too bad. Perhaps the heat would sap some of the loneliness and frustration and irritation out of her.

If it had been different with Mother and Father, Amy thought, perhaps losing Isabel would have been easier to bear. But it wasn’t different. It was exactly the same as it had been for years and years.

Hugh Herbert had been the first of Adeline’s lovers. It had all been conducted with perfect discretion, and with never a whisper of scandal, but it had been the end of her marriage to Gerald. There could be no question of divorce for Lord and Lady Lovell, but they had simply arranged their lives so that they didn’t meet. When Adeline was in London, or staying in a house party where Hugh was tactfully given a bedroom close to hers, Gerald was at Chance. When Adeline entertained one of her carefully chosen gatherings of amusing people at Chance, Gerald was in London or shooting in Scotland. They were only obliged to meet each other on rare, formal occasions such as family weddings or the girls’ presentations at Court. They were always rigidly polite to one another, as if they had just met, and they would be just the same tonight. It was just that sometimes Amy saw her father look at her mother with a kind of baffled, suppressed longing, and Adeline never noticed it at all. She would say, ‘Gerald, do you think we should move through into dinner?’ but she would never see him properly.

Amy could remember exactly when she had recognized the truth. They had been sitting on the lawn at Chance, under the cedar tree, and a man called Jeremy had been leaning over her mother’s shoulder, pointing to something in the magazine she was holding. His hand had brushed her shoulder, and Adeline had smiled like a young girl. They love each other, she thought, and suddenly she understood the succession of special friends, always men, who took up so much of her mother’s time. She had confided in Isabel, and Isabel had nodded gravely. ‘Yes. I think you’re right. But you must never, ever mention it to anyone.’

That night Amy had committed it all to her journal, under the big black heading PRIVATE. She was fifteen.

Amy sighed now in her over-hot bath. It was making her feel sadder instead of soothing her, and the prospect of the evening was growing steadily blacker. She stood up to break the mood and rubbed herself ferociously with the big white towel that Bethan had put out for her.

Perhaps Richard would have arrived.

It would help to have him here, even though it was Richard who chafed the soreness between their parents. Amy had witnessed it dozens of times, first seeing Gerald flare from silence into scornful rage at some refusal or attitude of Richard’s, and then watching Adeline leap to Richard’s defence. They were the only times that her languid, social mask dropped in family gatherings. Gerald would frown angrily and walk away, but there was something in the way he carried himself that betrayed loneliness to Amy. She had tried sometimes to offer him her company, but he always said something like, ‘Shouldn’t you be in the schoolroom?’ or, more lately, ‘Haven’t you got a party to go to?’

Back in her room Amy put on her dress without enthusiasm. Adeline’s taste in her own clothes was impeccable, and so simple as to be almost stark. Her utterly plain sheath dresses worn with a sequinned blazer were much copied, as were her dramatic strokes like wearing a necklace of wildflowers when every other woman in the room was loaded with diamonds. Adeline always had the best idea first. But she preferred to see her daughters in what she called ‘fresh, pretty clothes’. Isabel would have looked ravishing in these sweet ruffles, but against Amy’s rangy height and firm, high-cheekboned face they were less successful. She hooked the dress up and stared briefly at her reflection.

‘Oh God,’ she said, and then smiled. Well, the effect wasn’t quite so bad when she smiled.

In the long drawing room on the first floor a handful of elderly guests were already peering mistrustfully into their cocktail glasses. A trio of red-faced men were standing with Gerald in a semicircle around the fire, and their wives were perched with Adeline on the daringly modern white-upholstered sofas. Adeline had had the drawing room done over, and had banished all the glowering family portraits and brocaded covers in favour of pale polished wood and white hangings. In the middle of it, in her plain black crêpe, Adeline looked stunning. Amy kissed her cheek.

‘Darling, such a pink face,’ Adeline murmured. ‘Thank God you’re down. Is Isabel all right?’

‘Cool as a cucumber.’

‘That’s something. Where is Richard, the little beast?’

‘I haven’t seen him. He can’t have turned up yet.’

‘That means utter destruction of the dinner placement. I was counting on him to talk nicely to Lady Jaspert.’

‘Probably exactly why he isn’t here. I shouldn’t worry about the table. It’s only family, isn’t it? It’s not as though we’re expecting the Prince of Wales.’

‘No, unfortunately.’

That was a sore point, Amy recalled. Adeline moved on the fringes of the Fort Belvedere set, but HRH had declined the wedding invitation. The Yorks would represent Their Majesties at St Margaret’s, Westminster, tomorrow, but it wasn’t quite the coup for Adeline that the presence of the Prince himself would have been.

‘Do go and talk to people, Amy, before Peter gets into completely full flood.’

Isabel’s fiancé was a bulky, handsome man with a high, English county complexion, very sleek blond hair and bright, shrewd eyes. As the eldest son he would inherit in due course, but he was not attracted by the prospect of following his father into obscurity as another country peer. Peter Jaspert was an ambitious City man. (‘Metals. Manganese or aluminium or something,’ Adeline would say with deliberately affected vagueness. She had long ago given up the cherished dream that Isabel might make the grandest match of all, but still Peter Jaspert wasn’t quite what she had hoped for. There were no possible grounds for objecting to him, but Adeline was faintly disappointed. ‘Her happiness is all that matters. Anything else is up to you now, darling,’ was the only oblique reference she had ever made about it to Amy.)

Peter had also recently fought and won a by-election as the Conservative candidate. He had proposed to Isabel the day after taking his seat in Parliament. He was poised for rapid advancement, and he had chosen Isabel Lovell as the utterly correct wife to help him on his way.

Amy crossed the room to him. He was talking to one of Gerald’s ancient, deaf cousins.

‘What? What?’

‘I said there will certainly have to be a General Election by the end of the year. We can win it, on the National coalition ticket if you like, and then there’s nothing standing in the way of tariff reform. Which is the thing the economy needs, as we all know. Hello, hello, little sister. What a pretty frock. Everything ready for the big day, is it?’

‘Hello, Peter. GOOD EVENING, Uncle Edward.’

The evening was perfectly orchestrated, perfectly predictable and completely dull. Gerald sat at the head of the massive, polished dinner table, separated from his wife by twenty people. Peter Jaspert dutifully made sure that he spoke to every one of the guests who had been invited to meet him. Amy smiled long and hard and reassured a succession of aunts that yes, Isabel was blissfully happy and yes, they did seem to be very much in love.

Richard didn’t put in an appearance at all.

Gerald’s face betrayed a flicker of cold fury when they went through to dinner and he saw that Glass had discreetly rearranged the places, but that was all.

It was past midnight when Glass finally saw the last guests into their cars. He left the huge double doors firmly closed, but not locked, and then he walked silently back across the marble floor where the exquisite arrangements of arum lilies stood ready for tomorrow.

Up in her drawing room Adeline sighed. ‘Well, that was rather a trial. Isabel must be asleep by now, so I won’t disturb her. Good night Gerald, Amy. Let’s pray for not a wisp of fog tomorrow, shall we?’