Follies. Rosie Thomas

ignored him. ‘Follies?’ he asked her. ‘Where Frances was going to live?’

      Helen nodded, and Tom’s face set harder for a moment. ‘I miss her,’ he said. ‘She’s very unlucky, and very helpless.’

      Helen knew from that moment that she and Tom would be friends.

      ‘Mmmmm.’ Tom was looking harder at Helen now. ‘D’you act at all?’ He turned her face to the light and stared a little too deeply into the grey eyes.

      ‘Act?’ Helen blinked and caught herself blushing. ‘No, not at all. I couldn’t. Far too inhibited.’

      ‘Pity. I’m directing the OUDS major next term. As You Like It, you know. I thought you might like to audition for me.’

      ‘No, thanks.’ Helen shuddered at the idea. ‘But I’ll come along and see it. Will that do?’

      Her turn had come, she thought, to ask questions. ‘You’re American, aren’t you? Are you studying here?’

      Tom Hart laughed at the idea. ‘Hell, no. Well, not in the conventional way. I’m a theatre director, and I’m spending a year or so at the Playhouse here. Purely in an assistant capacity, you understand, as they keep reminding me. My old man’s in the theatre in New York. Management.’ Something flickered in Tom’s face, as if a disagreeable memory had bothered him for a moment, before he went on. ‘I needed some time away from home, before deciding what to do for real, so here I am. One of my projects now is this students’ Shakespeare. As a matter of fact, in a brilliant piece of innovative casting, Oliver is to be my Orlando.’ Tom confidently waved away Helen’s start of surprise. ‘You’d be amazed. He moves beautifully, and he has a real unaffected feel for the verse. You may think he’s a mere aristocratic thicko, with a flair for nothing more taxing than horses and dogs, but you’d be wrong.’

      Helen’s gaze travelled from Oliver, tall and tousled in the middle of his friends, and back to Tom. There was something in the way that the American looked at Oliver, with both fascination and a kind of unwilling admiration, that puzzled her.

      ‘Anyway,’ Tom went on quickly, aware that Helen was watching him, ‘Orlando himself isn’t a character endowed with a great deal of brain. No, Rosalind’s the important one, and I can’t find the right girl anywhere. I was hoping I might spot someone here amongst Noll’s grand friends, but they’re all far too old already. Look at them.’ He waved his hand expressively across the room. ‘Twenty years old and experienced enough for forty. I need someone fresh, and full of innocence, yet with that sexy edge of natural cleverness and the beginnings of maturity. A bit like you. But not really like you,’ he added, with beguiling frankness.

      ‘Thank goodness.’ Helen smiled back at him.

      Oliver was seeing people to the door. There was a flurry of kissing and hand-waving, then when Oliver turned back into the room Helen saw the sulky blonde girl jump up and push her arm through his. There was a possessive glow in her face and Helen thought, at once, Of course he would have someone. The little, frivolous flame of excitement that she had been shielding went out immediately. The blonde girl tugged Oliver’s head down to hers and kissed his ear, then let him go with a tiny push.

      Tom stood up and pushed his hands deep into this pockets. ‘Time I was off,’ he told Helen. ‘Sure you won’t audition for me?’

      Helen shook her head. ‘No. I’d be no good. I’m too busy, anyway. I have to work.’

      Tom stared at her for a moment. ‘Jesus, you can’t work all the time. That’d be very dull.’

      Helen was aware of a prickle of annoyance. She felt that this dark, forceful man was pushing her in some way and she recoiled from the idea.

      ‘I am dull,’ she told him dismissively.

      Tom’s face remained serious but there was an underlying humorousness in it that threatened to break out at any minute. ‘Somehow I doubt that,’ he said, very softly. ‘But it was only an idea. See you around.’ With a casual wave that took in Oliver as well as Helen, he was gone.

      Helen realised that she was almost the last remaining guest. The blonde girl was at Oliver’s side again, turning her pretty, petulant face up to his. ‘Oliver,’ she said in a high, clear voice, ‘so lovely to see everyone again. But,’ and there was no attempt to lower the upper-class tones, ‘the mousy girl in red, who on earth was she?’

      Oliver’s good-humoured expression didn’t change, but he shook his hand free. ‘Don’t be such a cow, Vick. I don’t know any mice. Where’s your coat?’

      ‘Don’t bother, darling,’ Vick said sweetly. She blew him a kiss, danced to the door and slammed it behind her.

      At last, Helen saw that she was alone with Oliver. He came, picking his way through the debris of bottles and glasses on the floor, and held out his hands to her.

      ‘You’ve such a sad face,’ he said. ‘Didn’t you like my party?’ His hands, as they closed over hers, felt enormous and very warm.

      ‘I liked Tom Hart,’ Helen told him carefully. ‘I’m sorry about looking sad. It must be the way I am.’ There was no question of confiding anything to Oliver. Helen was still surprised that she had let out so much to Chloe. Yet Helen was shrewd enough to know that the very remoteness of Oliver’s world from her own was part of the unexpected, exotic fascination that she felt for him. She was clever enough too to guess that whatever it was that Oliver saw in her, he wouldn’t be attracted by the poverty and awkwardness of her background.

      She felt, for an instant, guilty of disloyalty, but she turned the thought away deliberately. What was it that Chloe had said? ‘Find your own strength to carry on. Positively.’ Well, she would do just that.

      ‘I shall have to try and cheer you up,’ Oliver was saying lightly. ‘Here. Have another drink. Always helps.’ He filled her glass up with the heady, flowery wine and came to sit beside her on the window seat. His long legs sprawled in the faded blue jeans, and his forehead rested against the window pane as he stared out. After a moment’s silence, in which Helen’s eyes travelled from the clear-cut planes of his face to the tiny pulse that jumped at the corner of his eye, Oliver said, ‘So quiet. Just the light and the dark out there. No talk. No noise or confusion. Do you ever wish that you could keep moments? Freeze them or something, just the odd minutes when everything is right. There are so bloody few of them.’

      Even in your life? Helen wanted to ask. Perhaps after all he wasn’t such a bizarre choice for Orlando. He had the face of a romantic hero, and there was enough of uncertainty in it now for her to imagine him as a boy in love with an illusion.

      ‘Times when I want to stop everything, and say yes. Like this. This is how I want it to be?’ Helen answered him. ‘Not very many. Some, perhaps.’ Like now, she could have added. Being here with you, of all strange people, talking like this.

      Oliver stopped staring out into Canterbury Quad as if after all he was rejecting this moment as one to be kept.

      ‘Well, what shall we do? More drink?’ He waved the bottle and when Helen shook her head he refilled his own glass and drained it. ‘Mmm,’ he murmured, and lifted Helen’s hand from where it lay in her lap. He traced the shape of her fingers and the outline of her nails with his own forefinger and then, with his face turned away from her into the room, said, ‘Would you like to go to bed?’

      The words seemed to hang, echoing, in the air between them.

      Helen was not a virgin, but never in the course of the single, bashful relationship she had known had there been an instant like this. Half of her, astoundingly, wanted to say – just as casually – yes, let’s do that. But it was a hidden half that she was far from ready to reveal, even to herself. The practical, careful Helen of old, the one who took stock and who watched intently from the sidelines, was the one who answered.

      ‘No,’ she said, as if considering it. ‘Not yet.’

      ‘Yet?’ Irritation