The White Dove

Oh yes, Nick, you believe it, Mari thought. It’s all you care about, except perhaps for Dickon. And standing up there, somehow you can make everyone else believe whatever you want. You’ve got a talent, sure enough. And you’re not the kind of man to waste a talent, are you?

The room was full of the warmth of friendliness. Mari lifted her head, watching her husband.

‘There you are,’ he said. ‘I told you I wasn’t going to make a speech. Let’s get on now and dance and sing, and forget everything for a few hours. We’re here to celebrate a wedding, aren’t we? I hope you’ll be very happy, Nannon and Gwyn. I hope you’ll be as happy as Mari and I have been.’

Nick had ducked down from the stage and was pushing his way through the crowd. She saw his head, taller than the others, looking around for her. In Mari’s arms Dickon said ‘Da’ in a pleased voice and held out his arms to him. When Nick reached her side Mari said, without looking at him,

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘Would you have wanted to know?’ As he always did, Nick met a challenge with a challenge.

‘Husbands and wives usually mention these things to each other. You make me feel like a stranger, Nick. And why wish that on Nannon and Gwyn? I wouldn’t want anyone else to have to enjoy our kind of happiness.’

‘You still make me happy, Mari,’ he said softly. He put his arms around her and Dickon, and forced her to look up so that he could see her face. ‘I’m sorry if I can’t do the same for you. I’m still the man you married, you know. Just the same.’

Regardless of the crowd around them he kissed her, warm against her cold cheek. ‘I could prove it to you, if you’d only let me. Come on, dance with me. At least then I can hold you close and still look decent.’

‘What about Dickon?’

‘Give him to your mam to hold, for God’s sake. Just this once.’

The band was assembled on the stage, and after the tootlings as they tuned up they swept into a waltz. Couples stepped out on to the creaky floor. Amongst the replete pink faces and careful best clothes there was an atmosphere of revelry almost forgotten in Nantlas.

‘Why do you blame me,’ Nick whispered, ‘for trying to make it possible for nights like this to happen every week?’

‘I don’t blame you, my love.’

Mari carried Dickon over to her mother. The child allowed himself to be handed over uncomplainingly, but he never took his eyes off his parents.

‘That’s better,’ Nick said. ‘And now, may I have the pleasure?’ He looked proud, and happier than she had seen him for a long, long time.

Mari saw his arms held out to her, and she smiled. Her eyes met Nick’s and she caught his happiness. Suddenly, surprisingly, she felt like a young girl again. Their quarrel was all forgotten. The music lifted her spirits higher and she stood for a second swaying in time to it. Then Nick’s arms came around her and they were off across the splintery wooden floor.

Mari tilted her head back so that she could look at him. Nick saw a flush of colour in her cheeks, and a light in her face that turned her back into the pretty, merry Mari he had married. He held her tighter and they spun in the dance together.

‘Nick?’ she whispered.

‘Yes, my love?’

‘I’m still the woman I was, you know. And I’m … glad you’re doing the work you are.’

Nick stopped dancing. His head bent quickly over hers and he kissed her. And all around them the waltzing couples smiled and nodded to each other.

When Mari’s eyes opened again they were sparkling. For a moment the world felt a warm and festive place.

‘Come on, Nick Penry,’ she ordered him. ‘Let’s dance.’

They moved again, holding each other close. Nick was humming to the music. With her head against his shoulder Mari could hear the sound of it, deep in his chest.

It had been a beautiful wedding. There was no need to cry, Amy told herself. Adeline hadn’t cried at all, and the bride’s mother was almost expected to do that. Amy thought of her mother at the front of the packed, flower-massed church, her skin like white silk against the black velvet Cossack coat and her hair flaming red under the shako hat. No, Adeline wouldn’t have cried. Not in front of the Royal Family, and Lady Colefax, and Mr Baldwin. It had been a great day for Adeline and she had orchestrated it perfectly. Nothing as spontaneous as tears would have been allowed to spoil it.

Amy wrung her facecloth out in cold water and pressed it against her eyes. Just five minutes up here in her room, just five minutes to collect herself, and then she would go downstairs again.

The new Mr and Mrs Jaspert had driven away at last, only a few minutes ago, but the party had barely faltered. Adeline’s parties were famous, and the departure of the principals was going to make no difference to this one. Or two, rather, Amy decided. In the huge, long room on the first floor the grandees were dancing stiffly under the chandeliers. There was a buffet supper in the dining room, where the pink claws and ridged shell backs of lobsters stood ferocious guard around the silver bowls filled with black beads of caviar. In the library the tables were set out for cards. But in Adeline’s white drawing room and further up the house, there were noisier, smarter people. Amy had glimpsed a woman in a man’s evening suit, with her hair cropped and brushed flat to her head, and another with her arms loaded from wrist to shoulder with ebony and ivory carved bangles. This party, where the sharp babble of conversation rose to the same crescendos as the jazz, was the one Amy wanted to join. She had been slipping into it, listening to the talk and searching for someone she knew well enough to attach herself to, when Bethan came to whisper to her that Isabel and Peter were leaving. They had gone down to the hall together.

Isabel was standing in a blaze of light while Peter shook the hand of everyone in sight. Her going-away suit was the colour of honey, the ankle-length skirt and slim jacket making her look taller. A cloud of fur framed her face, and a single jaunty feather stuck straight up from the top of her little tilted hat.

‘She looks lovelier than I’ve ever seen her,’ Bethan murmured.

The sisters kissed each other.

‘I’ll be back soon,’ Isabel promised. Amy gripped her arms. Perhaps she was imagining it, but she thought that under the soft stuff of her suit Isabel was trembling.

Lord and Lady Lovell, perfectly correct, were saying goodbye now. Peter Jaspert shook their hands firmly, and kissed Adeline on both cheeks. Then the front doors were open and a gust of cold air swept around them. Peter put his arm around his wife’s shoulders and hurried her out to the car waiting at the foot of the steps. There was a flurry of waving and shouting and then the car roared away. They were gone, and not even Isabel had any idea where Peter was taking her. Glass, his normally impassive face creased by the faintest of smiles, was shutting the doors again. Amy felt a moment of pure, panicky loneliness. She turned round to see that her mother was already on her way up the great curving staircase. Her black dress left her back completely bare, with an impertinent flat bow at the bottom of the deep V. Gerald Lovell, without a backward glance, was on his way to join the card-players in the library. From now on, the party was Adeline’s business.

Amy had run up through the crowded house to her bedroom. The day had gone so quickly, she needed a moment to straighten it out in her head, and to fight back the threatening tears. Even in the silence of her room, she could only see a series of images flashing in front of her eyes. Isabel drifting down the aisle on Gerald’s arm, a column of pure white silk and lace, with points of blue light flashing from the diamonds in the Lovell tiara. Peter at the altar, turning back the lace veil to touch his lips to Isabel’s. Eight tiny bridesmaids and pages in white satin, all blinking at the press photographers clicking at them. Gerald and Adeline, standing stiffly at the head of the stairs to receive the guests, and Richard’s studiedly impassive face winking at her over his starched collar. Isabel’s small hands closed over Peter’s as they pressed the silver knife into the crenellated cake. And Bethan, sobbing quietly in the corner of Isabel’s empty room after the last leather trunk had been carried away. Bethan had cried, on the day when her own sister was being married far away without her.

Amy screwed the facecloth up into a ball and flung it away from her. She faced the mirror and addressed herself squarely.

‘Pull yourself together. Isabel’s married. Of course Isabel was going to marry. Would you have wanted to stop her? What you should do, Amy Lovell, is go downstairs and drink some champagne. Look for someone to dance with. And tomorrow, find something positive to do instead of feeling so sorry for yourself. Is that quite understood?’

The face that looked back at her was still watery-eyed and pink around the nose, but it was less obviously woebegone. Amy shook her head briskly, and her gleaming hair swung in exotic, unfashionable waves around her face. She picked a brush up from the dressing table and whisked some colour on to her cheeks. ‘Much, much better. Someone might actually ask you to dance now.’ As she stood up, Amy thought she caught the faintest drift of Isabel’s flowery perfume. She took up her own crystal bottle and squirted it determinedly around her. Then she shook out the folds of her dress, thinking approvingly that the pale lavender colour actually suited her, and marched to the door.

The white drawing room was packed to the walls.

Amy edged her way slowly into it, listening to the snippets of talk that floated out to her.

‘Ninety per cent pure shit, darling, but ten per cent genius.’

‘A tonal symphony. Poetic asymmetry.’

‘And so we went for a Friday-to-Monday, but there was not a soul there …’

‘Hello.’ Someone pushed out of the crowd and stood squarely in front of her. Amy looked up to see Tony Hardy. He still appeared to have inherited his evening clothes from a misshapen relative.

‘Don’t you remember me?’

‘Tony? Of course I do. Isabel always said I should call you Mr Hardy, not Tony.’

Tony smiled at her. ‘I remember. Should I call you Miss Lovell, now?’

‘Definitely not.’

‘So, Amy, are you looking for someone in particular?’

‘Just someone to talk to. I know quite a lot of these people by sight, and a few of them well enough to say how d’you do, but no one at all to attach myself to and ask why I feel like an ostrich in my own home at my own sister’s wedding. Except for you, that is. Oh, I could go downstairs and dance with Johnny Guild or somebody, and then go out on the balcony and do some damp embracing. But if I stay up here I thought I might be able to step across to where debutantes don’t tread. Like Richard did, last night.’

Amy was conscious that she wasn’t sounding quite rational. It must be the champagne. Another of the day’s images drifted into her head, of the Duchess of York in the church, floating blue feathers framing her face.