Follies. Rosie Thomas

easing them after the long pull up the stairs, then turned back to Helen.

      ‘Come and have tea with me, won’t you? Tomorrow. No – wait – Friday. Yes?’

      Helen looked straight back into his tanned, smiling face for a long moment before she answered. But there was no possibility that she could refuse.

      ‘Yes. On Friday, then.’

      To her amazement, Oliver leaned forward and kissed her, quite casually, on the corner of her mouth. ‘Cheer up,’ he said softly. ‘You should smile a bit oftener. You’ve no idea how much it suits you.’

      From the doorway he waved, without looking at her again, and Helen heard him clatter away down the stairs.

      For a moment she stood stock-still in the middle of the room, absently touching the corner of her mouth with her fingertips. Then she sank down at one end of the narrow bed. Follies had cachet, Helen knew that. The idea of Helen Brown, who had none at all, living there had given her some rare moments of private amusement over the summer. And now here she was, in the house for barely an hour and already she had been invited to tea and kissed by Oliver, practically a being from another planet. Helen rocked back on the bed and laughed out loud, a transforming giggle that Oliver would have approved of. It was absurd to think anything of their encounter, let alone to take it as an augury for the new year, but she would do it anyway. It was a good one, Helen was sure of that.

      Chloe Campbell registered the road sign as it flicked past her on the motorway. Oxford 15 miles. Shit, almost there. A little shiver of nervousness snaked along her spine before she realised it. Well, there was nothing to be apprehensive about. Nothing at all. Chloe jammed her foot down on the accelerator and swung her slick, little black Renault Gordini out into the overtaking lane. A glance in the mirror showed the family saloons dropping satisfactorily away behind her, and she relaxed her too-tight grip on the wheel. Nice little car, she thought. Thank you, Colin. Thank you, but goodbye in the end, just the same. Goodbye to a lot of things, come to think of it.

       Chloe, darling, are you serious about all this?

      The question was addressed to her own reflection briefly glimpsed in the mirror. The huge green eyes with their sooty black lashes were perfectly made up as usual. The dark coppery-red hair gleamed over the diamond ear-studs, just as always. But where were all the other things she used to identify herself by?

      Chloe began her reckoning once more, already repeated once too often since she had left London.

      No job, to start with. She had resigned from that, her ridiculously well-paid job as a top copywriter in a smart little ad agency. Well, except for the money, that was no great loss. Trying to create the perfect lines for the perfect housewife in her dream kitchen with the superlative packet soup bored Chloe nowadays, like so many other things.

      No lover, either. All the available ones bored her too, and it irked her to think of the unavailable one. Leo Dawnay, damn him. All of this was really because of him. Leo was in the business, the perfect Englishman who had made it his particular business to trade on that on Madison Avenue. A big joint campaign had brought him briefly back to London, and into Chloe’s bed. It was Leo who had said it as they lay wound together after one of their long evenings of love-making.

      ‘You don’t have to be so competitive in everything. You’ve got an intellectual chip on your shoulder, that’s your problem.’

      ‘What? That’s crap.’ Chloe sat up and the sheets fell away from her silky shoulders. ‘I’ve got twice the wits of any of the little graduate mice that they send along to type my letters and answer my phone nowadays. When I was eighteen I just wanted to get on with life, not moulder in some dusty library.’

      ‘Well,’ Leo had said coolly, ‘you mentioned graduates, not me. But you’re twenty-eight now, and perhaps you’ve done enough getting on. Take some time off. Test yourself a bit. You’d enjoy it.’

      Leo, of course, had been at Balliol. And had taken a First.

      ‘I don’t need it,’ Chloe had whispered into his thick, black hair. ‘What I need is you. Again.’ And his hands had moved across her belly and between her legs once more with unquestioning assurance. In the first pleasure of the moment Chloe had forgotten his words, but later they kept coming back to her. She thought about them when she recognised the uncomfortable feeling that permeated her life as boredom, and she remembered them again when she realised one day that she wasn’t interested in the challenge of pitching for a major new account. She felt that she was running along in comfortable, well-oiled grooves, and that she wasn’t thinking about anything, any more. She began to be afraid that even falling in love with Leo had been no more than a way of filling the vacuum that yawned in the centre of her life.

      Another day she had pushed aside the story boards for a new bra commercial and typed a letter to the Principal of an Oxford College, making the choice just because she had seen the College featured in a magazine.

      ‘That’s that,’ she thought. ‘The answer will be no, of course.’

      But with surprising speed, the letter had led to an interview with the austere Principal in her book-lined drawing room. Then, after some hasty reading, there had been papers to write on Victorian novelists and Romantic poets. She had been interviewed again, making her joke to her friends that she felt that she was being looked over for the chairmanship of Saatchi and Saatchi, not a commoner’s place at an obscure women’s College. At last the Principal had told her: ‘We have a policy here, Miss Campbell, of accepting mature students and other unusual folk. You’re more mature than most, of course, and you’ll have a lot of catching up to do. But we think you’ll make a useful contribution of College life, even if you turn out not to have a first-class mind. Would you like to come up this October?’

      At first, going to Oxford had been no more than a teasing idea for Chloe. She had wanted to prove to Leo that she could win a place, and she had wanted to show him that it impressed her so little that she could turn it down without a second thought. Then she had found herself enjoying the preparation for the entrance papers, hurrying home to dig poetry books out of the inner pocket of her briefcase instead of going out to cocktails and dinners with friends from the agency. She had started to use the cool, remote thought of Oxford as an antidote for her grating London world.

      Yet, even so, when the moment finally came she was shocked to hear herself saying, ‘Thank you, Dr Hale. I’ll do my very best. And I’d like to start in October.’

      Now, Leo was back in Manhattan, or with his top-drawer wife up in East Hampton or wherever it was. Chloe Campbell was slowing down before the Oxford bypass, her car loaded with her expensive but not-too-new-looking leather suitcases, piles of crisp empty notebooks and brand new standard texts, and feeling as apprehensive as any sensitive adolescent on the way to a new school. It was too late now. Chloe negotiated the tangled city traffic, and parked the Renault defiantly half on and half off the pavement on Folly Bridge. Only a single window in the old house showed a light.

      Chloe hitched her shaggy wolf-pelt jacket closer around her and began to pick her way down the slippery stone steps. Her hair looked as bright as a beacon in the wintry dusk. Before she reached the front door which had barred Helen’s entry, it swung open and Gerry Pole lounged out. His grey sweater was filthy and his lined face was unshaven, but the tattered remnants of a more wholesome romantic youth clung about him. Chloe responded with a brief flicker of interest as Gerry grinned at her.

      ‘One of Rose’s new tenants, I take it? And very lovely, too. I’m Gerry Pole, by the way, token male on the premises …’

      ‘Oh, good,’ Chloe said quickly, waving up towards her car perched on the bridge. ‘Perhaps, then, you could possibly give me a hand with my things? So inaccessible, down here.’

      ‘Delighted.’ Gerry smiled again, showing off the attractive crinkles around his pale blue eyes and revealing uncared-for teeth.

      So Chloe made her entrance into Follies House burdened with nothing more than her handbag and her portable typewriter. Gerry obligingly toiled to and fro with the leather cases and set them carefully