Helena was never able to pinpoint the moment when she became convinced that it was safe to be happy again, but it must have been some time during August. It turned out to be a wonderful month for her: the sun shone every day; she was working well; Mike was his old self again and came to Clerkenwell as often as he had ever done; best of all, nothing dreadful had come of her hysterical report to Crimestoppers. In fact nothing had come of it at all.
The police had obviously investigated Ivo and the farmhouse and found that both were innocent. No-one knew what Helena had done, and her panic had gone completely. She was beginning to allow herself to believe that, having conquered that one, she really had conquered them all for ever.
Miranda had come several times to the house in Clerkenwell, and they usually managed the whole evening without quarrelling or going cold on each other. Helena had persuaded herself that Miranda’s presentation of the Land Registry certificate had not been made in malice. They had never spoken of it since.
Helena had not yet let her mother meet Mike, but he and Irene had been formally introduced. Since they obviously liked each other so much, Helena invited Irene to join her and Mike for dinner whenever Fin and Jane were otherwise engaged. Occasionally Franny and Jack joined them from next door.
They all seemed to belong to the same generation as Irene sat in the garden, swapping jokes with Mike and revelling in the City-slang he was teaching her. He had seemed a little surprised at first when Irene had asked whether he knew of any particularly salty insults and swear words she might not have come across, but her infectious enjoyment of them made him laugh, and he went out of his way to collect new ones for her.
When evenings alone with Mike had become something of a rarity, Helena began to treat them as special occasions. One evening when only he was expected she made a favourite salad of cold lamb and spinach in a sweet, garlic-flavoured dressing and laid the garden table with extra care. The night-scented stocks she had planted in the terracotta pots were smelling wonderful and the air was soft and warm. There were candles ready in the glass storm lanterns, but they would not be needed for hours. A bottle of Beaujolais was waiting in the fridge, and she put some yearny violin music on the CD player.
Mike arrived soon after nine, just as she was telling herself that he must be stuck in a meeting that might last the whole night, and she hugged him in delighted relief. When they had carried the food and wine out into the garden, Mike stripped off the jacket of his suit and, having asked if Helena minded, took off his shoes and socks as well.
‘Ah, that’s better,’ he said, wriggling his toes against the relatively cool flagstones. ‘I can’t wait for the autumn. This heat is killing me.’
‘I’m rather enjoying it for once.’
‘No doubt. But then you practically live in this garden and you don’t have to sweat in a suit all day.’
‘True,’ she said, spooning salad onto his plate and then her own. Mike filled their glasses with wine.
‘This smells glorious. Lots of garlic for my clogged-up arteries?’
‘Exactly that,’ she said, laughing. ‘You don’t mind, do you?’
The long buzz of the front door bell made her sigh and put down her fork.
‘Damn,’ she said, getting up. ‘Just when we were settled.’
‘Must you answer? You don’t always when you’re working.’
‘No, I know. But it might be Irene in a state about the play or Fin.’ Helena frowned.
‘Much more likely to be Jehovah’s Witnesses or someone trying to sell you something.’
‘Would you mind terribly if I see who it is, Mike? I know it’s not fair when you’ve had a hellish day, and we’ve hardly had any time on our own for weeks, but it might be someone in real need.’
He reached across the table to touch her hand. ‘Go on and answer it. I know you won’t be able to relax if you don’t. I don’t mind.’
‘Sure?’
‘Get on with it,’ he said with intimations of real impatience.
When she found her half-sister on the doorstep, gripping the handlebars of her bicycle and glowering, Helena unfairly wished that she had resisted her urge to answer the summons, but she pushed the door wide open and smiled.
‘Come on in and have some supper with us. There’s masses of food.’
Jane looked down at her watch. ‘Sorry, I thought you would have eaten ages ago. I don’t want to get in your way; I just had to get out of Herbert Crescent for a bit, and I thought …’
‘You won’t be in the way at all,’ said Helena, realizing that there was a real need to be answered and consequently feeling genuinely welcoming. ‘Chain up the bike and come on through to the garden. A friend of mine’s here. Mike. You’ll like him.’
When Helena had taken Jane out to be introduced to Mike, she fetched another plate and glass from the kitchen and a loaf of olive bread. Jane gruffly apologized again for interrupting them.
‘Don’t worry about it,’ said Mike kindly, pulling out the third chair for her. ‘Glass of wine or are you driving?’
‘God, no. My finances only just stretch to a bike. I’d love some wine.’
‘You can be done for being drunk in charge of a bicycle, too, you know,’ he said, sloshing the wine into her glass.
‘You sound nearly as neurotic as Helena,’ said Jane irritably. Looking at him, she caught the mockery in his eyes and laughed. ‘Sorry. I’ve been in the thick of a parental row and it’s clobbered my sense of humour.’
‘What were they fighting about?’ asked Helena.
‘All the usual things. I hope to heaven Ma’s play is a success.’
‘Why?’ asked Mike. ‘I mean we all do, obviously; why in particular?’
‘Because she’ll be free then, which may stop her indulging in these endless trivial rows. Tonight’s blew up out of almost nothing. I can’t even remember what he said; something to do with the food she’d cooked, I think. It was just a bit of tetchiness to begin with, but she couldn’t let it drop. Not that it’s only her. He’s just as bad. As soon as she accused him of being a skinflint, he yelled at her for wanton extravagance. One of them brought up my debts, and he yelled at me, and she yelled at him, and then they started talking about sainted Ivo, and the whole circus started up.’ Jane looked round the small peaceful garden and sighed. ‘So I came here. I must say, it’s lovely. So peaceful. You are lucky not to live at home any more, Hella.’
‘Your chance will come,’ said Helena, loading up a plate for her. ‘Tuck in and forget it.’
‘Thanks,’ said Jane as she began to eat hungrily. ‘This is great.’
Helena suddenly noticed that when Jane smiled she looked quite as attractive as Ivo. As the evening progressed, she smiled more often and more easily. Mike drew her out with enormous skill, never flattering her but showing apparently real interest in her work, her ideas, and her ambitions. As she talked, she grew less spiky and most of her sulky anger seemed to drop away. Helena watched them both with surprise and pleasure.
When Mike went into the house to make coffee, Jane turned to her.
‘He’s cool. You are lucky.’
‘I know. And he clearly likes you, too. It’s nice to see what good taste you’ve both got. How are you? Apart from tonight’s spat in Herbert Crescent, I mean.’
‘Oh, not so bad. Working quite hard, which at least gets me out of the way most of the time. It’s only meals that are so grim, and if I weren’t so greedy – or so poor – I could avoid them. I say, Helena, I ought to have come ages ago to thank you properly for that cheque, but I didn’t quite … which is why … But, look, it was incredibly generous of you.’
‘It was a pleasure and you’ve thanked me more than properly in your letters.’
‘Oh, well, look. Anyway. I haven’t spent any of it yet. Would you like it back? It’s an awful lot of money to hand out like that.’
‘Why not hang on to it until you’ve got your degree?’ said Helena, intrigued that none of it had been spent. ‘Even if you’ve managed without it so far, you might need it later. If you don’t, you can always give it me back then.’
‘Helena, I …’
‘What?’
‘I always used to think you were a stuck-up, Ivo-worshipping …’ She hesitated, a little of Irene’s mischief showing in her big dark eyes.
‘Cow?’ suggested Helena.
Unnoticed by either of them Mike stood at the top of the iron steps with the coffee pot in his hand, watching them both.
‘Bitch? Swine?’ Helena went on.
‘That sort of thing,’ said Jane as a blush stained her sallow skin. ‘But then we never have really talked, have we?’
‘No. Never.’ Reminding herself of her nine years’seniority, Helena resisted the temptation to express some of the things she had thought about Jane in the past, in particular her quite unnecessarily harsh treatment of Irene. ‘I wonder what’s happened to Mike.’
‘I’m up here. I thought I’d let you get your wallowing in sisterly devotion done with before I joined in again. I’ve never liked an excess of sentimentality, as you know.’
Both of them started laughing and their shared genetic inheritance was visible for once, in spite of their very different looks. Mike watched them both, amused to see a new side of Helena. It made him wonder even more what the family crisis had been and why it had made her behave so oddly. But he forgot it as soon as Jane left and he could take Helena upstairs to make love.
Jane bicycled round to the house after lunch the following day to leave a small bunch of anemones for Helena with a note thanking her for both the cheque and the impromptu supper. Helena, who had been out shopping, arrived home in time to stop her leaving and persuaded her to take some more time away from her books and cool off in the garden.
They spent the afternoon talking with unprecedented intimacy. They had never known each other particularly well, mainly because of the big gap in their ages, but also because of their very different relationships with Irene. As Jane talked about her memories of their shared past, Helena began to understand how difficult some of it must have been for Jane and to understand why she had often seemed so sulky and uncooperative.
When she eventually got up to leave, Helena asked her to come again whenever she felt like it. She took up the invitation several times in the following weeks, always telephoning first to make sure of her welcome and then arriving on her bicycle. Helena was concerned that it was too far to ride, but Jane assured her that she was quite fit enough to do it and was not going to waste any of her scarce resources paying for transport.
Mike was often sitting jacketless and barefoot in the garden when Jane arrived and would get up to give her a huge hug the moment he saw her. She, who had never let anyone touch her at home, seemed to revel in his boisterous affection. Helena watched the flowering of their friendship with almost as much pleasure as she felt about her own new relationship with Jane, but she was surprised to discover that Mike had such a high opinion of Jane’s brains that he had promised to give her a job during the Christmas vacation.
He was back in New York when Jane told Helena about the offer, and she did not see him to thank him until the evening before Irene’s first night. He appeared in Clerkenwell much earlier than usual, only just after seven, carrying a large bunch of pale green and white flowers.
‘You look lovely,’ he said, laying them down on the kitchen table. ‘How’ve you been?’
‘Fine.’ She kissed him. ‘Although I’ve missed you. What about you, though? You look worn out.’
‘I suppose I am. New York’s hell at this time of the summer, and we had an all-night meeting the night before last.’
‘And then jet lag on top of that. You ought to be in bed.’
‘I wanted to see you more than I wanted sleep,’ he said as he wrapped his arms round her and hugged her. ‘Are we on our own tonight?’
‘Yup. I’ve put out the word that we don’t want any interruptions from anyone, however important.’
‘Great. I like them both such a lot, but I need just you tonight,’ he said, laying his head on her hair and tightening his arms round her thin body.
‘Supper in the garden?’ she said when he eventually let her go. ‘It’s cooling off a bit now, but I think it’s still warm enough.’
‘Perfect,’ he said.
When she bent down to take the food out of the fridge, he stroked her shorts. Straightening up, she brushed his face with a hand made cold by its contact with the fridge. He shuddered pleasurably.
‘By the way, it is beyond the call of duty for you to have offered Jane a job. She’s over the moon about it.’
‘Is she? Good. It was pure self-interest, though,’ said Mike. ‘She’s got a lot about her and we’re always busy before Christmas. I’ll get my money’s worth out of her, don’t you worry.’
‘I won’t.’ Helena put everything on the tray and picked it up. ‘Come on. Let’s take this lot out and relax.’
Later, as she was sitting with her elbows on the table picking at a bunch of grapes, she noticed that Mike was looking very carefully at her, almost as though he were suspicious of something or had something difficult to tell her. Surprised, but not yet really worried, she raised her eyebrows in a silent question. He did not answer it and so she said: ‘What is it, Mike?’
‘Nothing really,’ he said and then quickly added: ‘Actually, there is something. You’re looking so easy and happy at the moment, quite different from how you were a month or two back, that I’ve been wondering whether something’s happened.’
‘In a way.’ Remembering the transforming relief that the knowledge that nothing was going to come of her telephone call to Crimestoppers had brought her, she stretched expansively, reaching up to push her hair away from her head and then letting it fountain back out of her hands. ‘But it isn’t anything you need to worry about. I was fantastically – and I mean it was like a fantasy – worried about something that never existed. Now that I know it was only fantasy, I feel unbelievably wonderful.’
‘So what was it that was bothering you so much?’
‘Oh, I couldn’t possibly tell you that.’ Helena felt herself blushing and laughed in an attempt to distract him, letting her arms drop to her sides again. ‘It’s too silly to admit.’
‘I’d like to know.’
‘No. Honestly, Mike, I can’t expose my stupid panics to anyone whose good opinion I value as much as I do yours.’
As he looked at her in silence, Helena thought that she could see a hint of anger in his eyes. She hoped that they were not going to have a repetition of the agonizing scene in her bathroom and felt herself tensing up to prepare for it.
‘Please, Mike,’ she said more urgently. ‘When we’re further away from it I’ll tell you if you seriously want to know, but bits of me still feel too raw to expose, even to you.’
He was silent for a while and her teeth clamped together and her neck began to stiffen as she waited. No longer looking at her, he said: ‘I don’t mean to sound vain or anything, but was it something to do with me? If it was, I think I have a right to know.’
‘No. I don’t mean you wouldn’t have a right, but no, it wasn’t anything to do with you. I promise you that.’
‘Helena,’ he said seriously.
‘Yes?’
There was a pause while she waited for him to tell her that if she couldn’t bring herself to trust him, he was going to leave her.
‘Will you come to bed?’
In her relief she laughed and reached both hands across the table to him, knocking one of the glasses onto the flagstones where it smashed into hundreds of pieces.
‘Yes, please, Mike.’
‘What about the glass? Hadn’t we better do something about it first?’
‘No. Let’s leave it. We have more important things to do. I’ll deal with it in the morning. But be careful of your bare feet.’
He stepped carefully over the glass splinters to take her in his arms, saying: ‘Wonderful!’
‘Why? I mean, what’s wonderful?’ she asked as they went through the french doors into the drawing room.
‘The ease in you. When we first met you’d never have left sharp bits of glass lying around. After all, what if a prowling burglar were to hurt himself?’
‘Tough,’ she said, knowing that he was laughing at her and positively enjoying it.
He stopped on the stairs and kissed her, running his big hands up and down her neck. She felt free and safe, and luxuriously sexy. Later that night she slept at his side almost as well as she would have alone. She woke only three times in the entire night and was heavily asleep when Mike got out of bed at six in the morning and stood looking down at her for a long time.