Follies. Rosie Thomas

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      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 СКАЧАТЬ