Irene set off for the first full-length rehearsal of The House on the Canal at the beginning of the following week, feeling as though she were on her way at last. Short of an earthquake or the outbreak of civil war, the play was going to be performed. It might yet fail, but it would be seen. Her name would be on the programme. Her words would be spoken; her ideas heard. Some people at least would take her seriously. At forty-six, she was making a very late start, but it was a real start, and no-one could take that away from her.
She arrived at the church hall in good time, just as Richard swept up in his Audi soft-top. He had Bella Hawkins in the passenger seat beside him. She opened the car door as soon as he had pulled up the brake and smiled up at Irene, who thought that she looked remarkably pleased with herself.
‘Hello,’ Irene said as casually as though she had expected to see Bella in Richard’s car.
Bella put one long bare brown leg out of the car and stood up with enviable ease. She was wearing an impossibly short orange skirt, which looked as though it had been made from deckchair canvas, and a cobweb-thin white muslin shirt with tactfully placed double-thickness pockets over her small breasts. Her long hair fell down her back almost to her waist, and it looked much blonder than it had done at the read-through. She had an entirely new aura of sleek confidence.
Irene, who was feeling distinctly glad of her loose black linen trousers and the expensive Italian jacket that skimmed past all her bulges, hoped that the confidence had come only from Bella’s success in rehearsals.
‘Good morning, Mrs Webton,’ she said politely, shaking hands.
Irene, feeling every one of her twenty-seven years’seniority, could not for the moment think of anything to say to her and stood in silence until Richard walked round the long bonnet of his car and kissed her casually on the cheek.
‘Hello, Richard.’
‘It’s good to see you, Irene. Things have been going reasonably well, as you’ll see in a minute or two. Especially as far as our sparkling new star is concerned.’ He patted Bella on the head and she twisted round so that she could smile up at him. ‘I hope you’ll be pleased with what you see, Irene. Coming?’
He strode off towards the hall without waiting for either of them to agree or precede him. Irene raised her eyebrows at the patronizing tone he had taken towards Bella and turned to smile sympathetically at her. Bella looked momentarily confused, but then she fell back on one of the brilliant smiles Irene had begun to recognize as the typical actor’s mask to hide nervousness. She began to feel more warmly towards Bella and urged her to go ahead into the church hall.
Some of the others had already arrived, but Peter Callfield was still to come. The stage managers had made tea as usual and Irene took a mug herself and perched on the edge of a chair, sipping the raw-tasting liquid. Rather to her surprise, Bella came to sit beside her and said: ‘Mrs Webton, can I ask you something?’
‘Yes, of course, Bella.’
‘It’s just that all last week Richard was telling me to make Maria fluttery and fragile, and somehow that doesn’t feel right to me. I’m not sure if it’s simply that I can’t do what he wants because I’m not at all fragile myself, or if he’s … well, you know, sort of wrong about the character.’
Irene put her cup down on the floor and swivelled in her chair to look directly at the girl.
‘Good,’ she said after a while. ‘I’m glad you’re not so much under his spell that you can’t question his judgement.’
To Irene’s distress Bella blushed, but she did not say anything. Trying to ignore all her reawakened suspicions and concentrate on the play, Irene went on: ‘And in this case I think you’re right. Maria is certainly ignorant but she’s not remotely fragile. In fact she has a dangerous kind of confidence. That’s really what the play’s all about.’
‘Ignorant of what?’ asked Bella, giving Irene a chance to offer at least a veiled warning.
‘Herself, other people, what she wants of them and of life – everything really. It’s what makes her both so strong and so vulnerable. But her vulnerability is anything but fragile. It’s dangerous, not pathetic. D’you see the difference?’
‘Absolutely,’ said Bella. Her smile had changed completely. It was not as glamorous as the professional version, but it offered hints of all sorts of interesting and difficult emotions. ‘And so the house is a kind of metaphor, is it, for her unthinking certainties? Once she leaves it – is forced to leave it – she can’t get back in because she knows too much to have that kind of dangerous over-confidence ever again? Is that right?’
Irene put her hand on Bella’s knee. ‘I knew you’d be right for the character,’ she said. ‘That is certainly part of it, although I’m not sure I’ve ever thought it out as clearly as that myself. Good for you. Play the girl like that and all should be well.’
Bella’s face lit with pleasure and she dropped her hand over Irene’s for a second.
‘Thank you for that confidence-boost,’ she said as she stood up. ‘It’ll help me stand up to Richard when he starts bullying me.’
‘Yes, you need to stand up for yourself,’ said Irene slowly enough to make it sound important, but she did not look at Bella. She did not want to see her blush again.
They both started as they heard the sound of short, sharp clapping and then Richard’s voice: ‘Come on, come on. Settle down. We’ve a lot to get through. I want to take it from scene two, getting as far as we can, although I will stop you whenever I have to.’ He turned to say over his shoulder to Irene: ‘If there are things you want to say, I’d like you to keep them until the end of each scene unless someone stops to ask you something. Can you do that?’
‘I expect so.’
‘Take notes as we go or you’ll forget what you want to say. There’s a pad and pen here if you haven’t thought to bring any of your own.’
There was no scenery, but tapes had been pinned to the floor to represent the various doors and walls, the canal and the bridge. A shabby old formica-topped table stood in for the darkly polished oak version Irene had imagined and a row of chairs represented the deep window seat on which Bella was leaning as the scene opened. Her back was to the audience. Irene remembered her own stage directions: ‘Almost all the light is on the canal outside so that the audience does not know how old the woman is or what she looks like. They must simply get an impression of stillness, of satisfaction and yet of an underlying, only half-recognized yearning to escape.’
Even at the moment when she was writing the words, she had understood that she might be asking too much. After all how could any silent, still woman persuade an audience that she was both satisfied and trapped? But she had left it in as a clue to the actors. As far as she could see, Bella was merely still and silent, but it would have been hard to establish anything else with no scenery and a glaring, even light falling directly on her. But there was something in her stillness and in her pose that was arresting. As they waited, Irene began to feel part of what she had hoped the girl would express.
Then an older woman’s voice called from off-stage. In the real play light would flood the front of the stage at that moment. As Bella half turned her head towards both the audience and the sound, the back of Irene’s neck felt cold. It was an extraordinary sensation, and quite unexpected. In that moment Bella’s short skirt, the lack of scenery, subtle light and everything else no longer mattered. She had become the girl who had lived in Irene’s head for so long.
Bella’s face had something of the incommunicable feeling of Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring. She could have been sad or sympathetic, greeting or saying farewell, on the point of speech, or never to speak again. At last she moved once more and began to say her first lines.
The moment was over, but Irene was so shaken by it that she could not quite distinguish her gratitude to Bella from a feeling that something she should have kept private had been betrayed.
Richard let Bella and Annette Brimfield, the actress playing her mother, perform the whole scene without interruption. At the end, he said simply: ‘It’s really coming now. Well done. Irene?’
‘Yes?’
‘Any problems for you?’
‘None at all. Bella, I … You did that first movement extraordinarily well. Thank you.’
‘Good,’ said Richard, not bothering to hide his impatience to get on. He did not even look at Irene. The moment that had meant so much to her seemed to have barely registered with him. ‘Then, Peter, when you’re ready.’
The play proceeded with many interruptions. There were no more moments of chilling emotion for Irene, but as the morning went on she began to feel increasingly uncomfortable. Watching the actors, she realized that they had peeled a masking layer off her play and revealed something she had not known was there.
She had always admitted to herself that there were echoes of her own story in the play, but she had thought that they were quite distant and would not be heard by anyone else. Sitting in the silence that Richard had ordered, she was shocked into admitting that they were not so much echoes as deafening trumpet blasts.
Neither the actors nor Richard could have known what they had done, because none of them knew enough about her or her history to understand what she had used in the play, but the thought of Fin and the children, even Helena, seeing it as it was turning out to be was worrying. And what Fin’s friends like Geoffrey and Elizabeth Duxford would make of it, Irene did not want to think.
It was not so much Bella’s character that worried her; the girl Irene had been was strange enough to everyone likely to see the play for her revelations not to matter. And in any case, there were a great many things about the girl that had nothing to do with Irene, even as she had been before Fin had taken her away from the Theatre School into the exile that her marriage had become. But the older version, the woman who was trying to get back into the house, played by Carrie Fletsham seemed frighteningly familiar and, which was worse, almost completely unsympathetic. Irene sat watching Carrie’s performance and absorbing a whole series of unpleasant revelations.
The great pile of luggage that Irene had imagined as part of the elder Maria’s burden was represented by an unstable-looking pile of boxes beside the chairs that were standing in for the airport benches. As she spoke her lines, she was forever fiddling with the boxes, obsessively checking that they were all there and that their fastenings were tightly shut. Instead of the bravely enduring character Irene had thought she was creating, she was faced with a grudging, self-absorbed woman, on whom she herself would not have wasted any affection whatsoever.
At one moment, when Richard was preparing Bella for her big scene, Peter Callfield came to sit beside Irene.
‘How are you enjoying it?’ he asked as gently as his trademark voice would allow.
‘I’m not entirely sure that enjoyment plays any part in what I’m feeling,’ she said, watching Richard and the girl arguing. ‘But I think you’re all amazing, and the things you’ve done to the play are stirring me up summink chronick.’
He laughed at her outdated cod-cockney expression.
‘Why is it agitating you? Because a lot of it is rather personal?’
‘What makes you say that?’
‘Because the whole play has the feeling of something pretty real,’ he said without any suggestion of criticism or mockery. If anything he sounded admiring, which gave Irene enough confidence to say: ‘If you’d asked me yesterday, I’d have said that very little of substance had anything to do with me at all, but sitting here this morning, I’ve been seeing that I’ve put into it all sorts of things that are – well, fairly personal.’
‘And that’s worrying you?’ Callfield sounded surprised as he said that.
‘Wouldn’t it you?’
‘Not exactly.’ He frowned as though he was finding it difficult to choose exactly what words to use, which seemed unlike the little she knew of him. ‘Perhaps because it’s something we actors have to do all the time: find a way to reveal ourselves on stage, in public. Is it the act of revelation that’s a problem for you or what people will think?’
‘You see too much.’
Irene had had to turn away from him and was surprised when he said: ‘Did you say “see” or “say”?’
‘I’m not sure. But I meant “see”.’
‘That’s all right then. You mustn’t let me say any more than you can take. What worries you most?’
Irene was quite unable to tell one of the truths, which she had only just seen for herself: that in revealing herself in all her unattractive self-indulgence she would be giving Fin a whole new range of weapons to use against her, along with the equivalent of an instruction manual with precise descriptions of the best way to operate them to inflict maximum damage.
‘Is Richard sleeping with that girl?’ she said instead.
‘I’m afraid so,’ answered Callfield without even trying to keep Irene to the point. ‘But don’t worry about it too much. I suspect that it’ll give her a great thrill for a while, a little pain when he moves on, as he will, and some charming memories of her own naivety to recapture when she’s become cynical and famous. In a way, it’s not much more than a rite of passage. A lot of other young actresses have been through it before her and come out the other end none the worse. And it helps Richard cope with a fairly tricky situation at home.’
‘I wonder.’
‘I can assure you it does help him.’
‘That’s not quite what I meant.’ For once Irene stopped to think before rushing into speech and then said slowly as she tried to separate her memories of her own life from her fears for Bella: ‘It’s the lack of damage I was questioning. Whatever he did or didn’t do to the others, this one’s so young, so unaware. I do think he might damage her.’
‘I don’t think you need worry so much. Truly,’ said Callfield, just as Richard yelled: ‘Peter, where the hell are you? You’ve missed your cue.’
Richard had never sounded so abrasive and Irene was impressed when Callfield did not retaliate, but merely raised his remarkable voice to say clearly but peaceably: ‘Coming. I was having a word about the character with Irene. A very necessary word. I’ll be with you in a second.’ He stood up but waited long enough to say privately to Irene: ‘Try not to worry about it quite so much. I know it must feel like hell, watching us work on what you’ve written, but it’ll all come out right in the end. You’ll see.’
He moved away towards the improvised stage, shambling slightly and looking not at all attractive, until he reached Bella’s side. There he slotted into his part without apparently doing anything at all.
The wise, experienced comforter who had been talking to Irene had gone, and in his place was a tempting Mephistopheles, all charm and a need that only the girl on stage could not see was spurious. She was doing remarkably well, wide-eyed but not stupid, tempted but no pushover. Her attraction for the man was absolutely clear and his for her. For a second Irene found herself longing to call out to Bella and say: ‘See! That’s exactly what you’re risking with Richard. Don’t let him use you. Get out while you can before you give up too much.’
Richard himself was lounging against the wall, his spectacles perched on the end of his nose so that he could both look over them at his actors and down at the crumpled, annotated script he held in his hands. He stopped the actors and issued a terse instruction to Bella, who clearly could not understand what he wanted. She asked him what he meant.
His voice sharpened so much that Irene had difficulty not wincing at the sound. Bella seemed to be growing tenser as he criticized her acting. After a moment Callfield intervened, moving her three steps towards the back wall, where he whispered something to her. No-one else, even Richard, could possibly have heard what he said.
Bella wiped the back of her hand across her eyes, nodded, and returned to her original position. They replayed the last three lines with only the subtlest of differences.
‘That’s a bit better,’ said Richard, nodding his head in the rhythm of their speech. ‘But you must try harder, Bella. It’s the part you always get wrong. On you go. Yes!’
In the end it was that tiny scene that remained longer with Irene than any of her own fictional ones. Bella’s small failure reminded her so vividly of her own inability to understand what Ben had tried to teach her of acting that she was forced to confront it directly. For years she had blamed Fin for stealing her chance of a career when all he had really done was present her with the opportunity to give up something she had found humiliatingly difficult. He had not forced her to leave the Theatre School; he had merely opened the door for her and she gone through it without a moment’s thought for what she might meet on the other side. Callfield’s remarkable voice broke into her thoughts: ‘It’s very easy,’ he said at his most seductive.
Bella gazed up at him, the personification of yearning. Her hands were clasped beneath her chin and the very tightness of her grip on herself told the small audience that it was he whom she wanted to touch.
‘All you have to do is say “yes”. Once you’ve said it, you won’t have anything more to worry about ever again. I’ve never found anyone else like you and I thought I never would. Come with me and save us both.’
He had put so much sly menace into the apparently flattering words that Irene decided she might have been a little too harsh with herself. After all, even if Fin had not forced her to abandon the life she had originally chosen, he had undoubtedly played a part in what had happened to her after she had left it. She might have gone to war with him out of unfair resentment at what she herself had given up, but he had fought her, too, and with a harshness that could not have come only from self-defence. Beginning to feel better as soon as she regained her sense of justified anger, Irene was able to think about the actors rather than her own memories once more.
By the end of the afternoon everyone in the hall was tired and most of them were irritable. So many mugs of tea had been drunk that Irene feared a mass outbreak of tannin poisoning. When Richard announced that they had done enough for the day there was a distinct air of relaxation in the gloomy great room. The actors began to collect their scattered belongings and talked about having a drink in the local pub on the way home.
‘Bella? What about you?’ said Carrie Fletsham.
Looking drained and red-eyed, Bella shook her head.
‘Oh, come on,’ said Carrie, rubbing her shoulder. ‘It’ll do you good. I know you feel as though you haven’t got enough energy even to get yourself home, but a drink and laugh will do you more good than anything else just now, even sleep.’
Bella smiled, half turned towards Richard as though she were about to ask his permission, and then shrugged.
‘Thank you,’ she said, looking towards Carrie again. ‘I’d like that.’ With no more hesitation, she hurried across the room to the far wall, where she had left her sloppy canvas bag.
Irene watched Richard with interest. He was ostensibly talking to Peter Callfield, but she knew that he had absorbed every nuance of the counter-seduction of Bella. He looked furious.
When Callfield had left, blowing a kiss to Irene, she strolled over to where Richard was still standing, glaring after the departed Bella.
‘Don’t have a row with her about it,’ she said. ‘She needs to play with people nearer her own age.’
‘Just what are you talking about?’ Richard took off his spectacles and let them drop against his chest. He rubbed his eyes.
‘Bella. You look as though you’ve got a headache. D’you want a pill? I’ve got some in my bag.’
‘No.’
Richard’s tone was so obstructive that Irene was tempted to say no more, but she was no coward, and it had to be said.
‘When you see her again, don’t bawl her out for going for a drink with the others. I don’t know whether you’d arranged something with her or whether you just assumed she’d wait for you to decide what to do this evening, but …’
‘You’re taking rather a lot on yourself, aren’t you?’ Richard’s voice was not friendly. The idea that she had been passionately kissing him only a few weeks earlier seemed impossible to believe.
‘I don’t think so. She’s so young, Richard. You …’
‘Ah, I see what it is: a spot of the old jealousy, eh? Really, Irene, isn’t that a bit undignified? What is it you mind so much? That I turned to her so soon after our little fiasco? Or that she’s young and pretty – and able to satisfy me when you couldn’t?’
Irene stared at him, finding it hard to believe that he was the same man who had been so generous to her in Amsterdam, so far-seeing and aware of the things that mattered to her. She was not sure whether it was her criticism of the way he was behaving that had aroused his unpleasant anger or whether it had something to do with his domestic situation. Peter Callfield had suggested that Richard was having a particularly bad time at home and so it might have been that.
Furious with herself for wasting so long daydreaming about how happy she could have been – and how kind – if she had spent her life with Richard rather than Fin, Irene said coolly: ‘Neither. What I mind so much is that you’re exploiting your age, glamour and power over her without a single thought about what your selfish pleasure will do to her, probably for the rest of her life.’
‘Oh, don’t be so prissy – or so melodramatic. You’ve no idea what you’re talking about. I don’t see that it’s any of your business, but if you must know, what I am doing is helping Bella produce what is going to be a spectacularly good performance in your play, provided that you don’t interfere.’
‘Oh, that’s a masterpiece, Richard.’ Irene’s anger was momentarily displaced by amusement.
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about and I don’t think I particularly want to continue this conversation. I’m tired and I want to go home.’
‘You can stay a moment longer and listen,’ she said firmly. ‘Here’s a translation of what you’ve just said: You’re not interested in your own gratification at all; your seduction of Bella has been almost entirely for her own good; the only other person likely to benefit from it is me because it’ll help my play. Have I got that right so far?’
Richard did not answer, but his face gave him away.
‘Yes, I thought so,’ said Irene with considerable satisfaction. ‘And there was a veiled threat in there, too, wasn’t there? If I criticize you for taking advantage of her naivety, you’ll make sure that my play is a failure.’
Richard laughed, great rolling gusts of unconvincing sound that reminded Irene that he, too, had once been an actor.
‘What a woman will do when she feels that she has failed as a woman! You mustn’t mind so much about your frigidity, Irene. It’s pretty common in a woman of your age with so little experience. If I’d had more time and energy in Amsterdam, I could have made you respond to me. But don’t worry, you will find someone who can make you come eventually. And then you’ll feel better about it all.’
He patted her cheek. ‘You’re still attractive enough. It’ll probably happen for you before it’s too late.’
Irene felt as though she had only two options. She could hit him or she could pretend not to have understood his various insults. Deciding that a blow would only add to his conceit, she smiled with all the saccharine sweetness at her disposal and thanked him.
‘Think nothing of it,’ said Richard ambiguously. She nodded and turned to go. ‘By the way,’ he said in a quite different voice, ‘there is one thing I need to talk to you about. Rather more important than all that. Sorry I lost my temper.’
His apology made her stop halfway to the door and she looked back, raising her eyebrows in a silent question.
‘Come back and sit down. This really is important, Irene. I should have said it first.’
Shrugging, she went back to the row of chairs and sat down. ‘Well?’
‘Bella told me that you gave her an alternative interpretation of her part.’
‘Yes, I did,’ said Irene in surprise. ‘She’d had an interesting idea about it and was finding your obstructiveness upsetting. I told her that I thought her idea was a good one and that she mustn’t let you bully her.’
She was even more surprised when Richard neither raised his eyes to the ceiling in exasperation nor shouted at her. Instead he came to stand beside her, put one foot on the stretcher of the chair next to hers, and spoke in a voice almost as familiar and friendly as the one he had used in Amsterdam: ‘I don’t mind your answering questions from any of the actors about what you have written, obviously, but I can’t let you question my interpretation of the piece or my instructions to them.’
‘But Richard, it’s my play. I wrote it. I know what it means and what the characters are like better than anyone. How can I possibly pretend to know less about them than you?’
‘It’s not exactly your play any longer.’ When Irene leaned away from him, Richard took her by the shoulders. ‘No, listen to me. This is important, Irene. It’s nothing to do with you and me or me and Bella or anything like that. As I said, I ought to have made sure we talked about it before we had our little spat, but you caught me on the raw.’
‘Did I really?’
‘Yes. But that’s over and this is work, so you must listen: not just to the sounds, but to what I’m saying. I’m not trying to score any points now. Can you accept that?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘Good. You wrote The House on the Canal, but I am the director, and for the moment I have to run things. Of course if you think I’m going wrong, you must say. But you must say it in private. In a way our partnership has to be like a good marriage. If you don’t trust me to play my part in the collaboration, we’re lost. D’you understand?’
‘Oh, I understand,’ she said bitterly. ‘And you’re right: it sounds precisely like a marriage, though perhaps not a good one. You’ve grabbed the high ground; you feel that you have some kind of authority over me; and I’m to keep my mouth shut and not challenge you. I know all about that, and I am not prepared to take it in my professional life, even if I’ve had to do it at home.’
Richard let her go and swung away from her to walk fast to the row of chairs that had stood in for Bella’s window seat. He sighed.
‘I hadn’t meant to tickle up your private resentments, Irene. Perhaps marriage was the wrong analogy. I keep forgetting that this is all new to you. Let me put it like this: the actors are afraid. All of them, even Peter. They have got to go through a painful and difficult process before we get to the first night. As I said, if they lose confidence in the play they won’t be able to give what we both want of them. And they will lose confidence if they see that you and I are not pulling in the same direction. D’you see that?’
‘Yes,’ she said reluctantly. ‘So far so understandable.’
‘Privately we can fight about anything you like, but it has to be private. They must be utterly convinced that we both know where we’re going together and are happy with it. OK?’
Irene took a moment to think through the implications and then nodded, feeling her lips stretch into a humourless sort of smile. Richard came back and held out his right hand.
‘Deal?’ he asked.
‘Yes.’ Irene took his hand. ‘It’s a deal. I do see what you mean.’
‘Good. Then we’ll get somewhere after all. And look here, you don’t have to worry about Bella. Honestly. She may be playing your part, but she’s not you, you know. She’s a tough little cookie.’
Irene laughed. It was only after she had declined a lift and seen Richard accelerate away down the road with quite unnecessary force that she remembered he had claimed to have remembered her as ‘tough’.
When she found a taxi, she asked the driver to take her up to Clerkenwell. She knew she could not go straight back to Herbert Crescent, and she wanted the comfort of Helena’s unemotional good sense and constant benevolence. But she found that she was not going to get it. There was no answer when she rang the front door bell.
As Irene was walking back down the front path, deliberately straightening her shoulders to counteract any tendency to a defeated stoop, she heard a car door bang and looked up in hope.
There was still no sign of Helena; only a tall man in his mid-thirties dressed in an impeccable suit made of dark bird’s-eye worsted. To her surprise he smiled as he came towards her.
‘This is probably going to sound impertinent,’ he said in a deep, affectionate kind of voice, ‘but could you possibly be Irene?’
‘Yes,’ she said, smiling herself. ‘Mike?’
‘The same. And I take it we’re here on the same mission.’
‘In search of Helena? Yes. But she doesn’t seem to be here. I dropped in on the off chance and assumed she must be with you. Was she expecting you?’
‘Not specifically this evening, no,’ he answered. ‘I’ve been in New York and I didn’t know when I was going to get back. I arrived on her doorstep about ten minutes ago and thought I’d hang around in case she’d just gone shopping or something.’
Irene hardly heard him. She felt unusually confused and could not think what to do. The idea of discovering something about Helena’s mysterious lover was intriguing and yet she did not like the thought of going behind her back.
‘This is the most tremendous luck,’ Mike said. ‘I’ve been longing to meet you, but Helena’s been reluctant to let it happen. I’m not sure why.’
‘I know, which makes me feel as though I shouldn’t be talking to you without her knowledge. It seems sneaky.’
‘I think it’s all right,’ said Mike with such an affectionate expression that Irene was almost reassured. ‘After all, this way, if we discover we can’t stand each other, we’ll be forewarned when she does eventually introduce us and so we can save her from one anxiety at least.’
‘If you want to do that,’ said Irene, smiling more naturally, ‘then I think we’ll probably like each other quite a lot. But I still think we ought to part now. I hope she lets us meet soon.’
‘Won’t you come and have a drink with me?’
‘No, I think I’d better not.’
‘Don’t you want to check me out?’ Mike asked, looking amused again.
‘What? To see if you’re a suitable companion for my stepdaughter?’
‘Just that.’
‘She’s a grown woman,’ said Irene, laughing. ‘And wholly capable of doing everything she needs. Any checking is up to her. I’ve enjoyed meeting you, and I’m glad to be able to put a face to your name, but I’ll say goodbye now.’ Irene held out her hand. Mike shook it.
‘Then could I give you a lift? I noticed that you didn’t come by car.’
‘No. Really, we must keep to what she wants us to do.’
Irene walked away, wishing that her scruples had let her take him up on his offer. She did in fact very much want to know what he was like and what he really felt about Helena, and whether he was likely to be good for her, but it would have been a betrayal. And Helena was far too valuable – and vulnerable – to betray.