Free Harnessing Peacocks by Mary Wesley

do? Still burglar alarms?’
    ‘He is self-employed, goes solo now.’
    ‘Like you.’
    ‘Like me.’ Hebe returned Amy’s look calmly and added gently, ‘Like us.’
    Amy squeezed Hebe’s hand. ‘I never set about it like you. Didn’t read poetry and play backgammon. Didn’t call the tune. I don’t know how you get away with it.’
    Hebe looked away, not answering.
    ‘Lovely girls like you should get married. Hannah wants to re-marry.’
    ‘Her dentist.’
    ‘But she finds him dull. Edward Krull was dull, she doesn’t want to repeat her error.’
    ‘Oh, do you know someone who knows him?’ Hebe was surprised into gossip, not surprised when Amy did not answer. She sat in the small sitting-room in the house which Amy had made home for her in her time of crisis, sheltering her until after Silas’ birth, later renting her the house across the street. ‘What would I have done without you, Amy?’
    ‘You’d have managed.’
    ‘You saved us.’
    ‘Don’t exaggerate. If not me it would have been somebody else. You had got yourself into a fuss, that’s all.’
    ‘Fuss.’ Hebe thought fuss an understatement. She said, ‘There was nobody else. No, Amy, you saved us all right, then started me on the right track.’
    ‘Few people would call it the right track,’ Amy laughed delightedly.
    ‘You introduced me to Bernard.’
    ‘The old bastard. We could have managed without him,’ Amy sniffed.
    ‘He bought my things, didn’t cheat me, introduced me to the job at the hotel.’
    ‘Some job. I grant he did not cheat. He had no business to let you meet that Hippolyte. You could have worked for Lucy Duff and Louisa Fox.’
    ‘I do work for them.’
    ‘Decent people. I worked for them when they needed a secretary before—’
    ‘My grandfather.’ Hebe spoke stiffly.
    ‘Thought you didn’t like him mentioned.’
    ‘I don’t.’
    ‘Well, then. What did that chef teach you that you had not learned at the Cordon Bleu?’
    ‘Soufflés.’ Hebe remembered Hippolyte. ‘You laugh, you relax, you enjoy, you rise, light, generous, delicious, ready for a second helping.’ ‘He taught me how to make soufflés,’ she said gravely.
    ‘Ho,’ said Amy, doubtful still. ‘Ho.’
    Changing the subject, Hebe said, ‘I’m dropping Mrs Cook-Popham, Amy. I don’t like her son. I’m okay with Mrs Fox and Mrs Duff and the odd job.’
    ‘I distrust the odd jobs.’
    ‘I enjoy them,’ said Hebe, blithely thinking of Mungo and Hippolyte, regretting Terry. ‘It’s the odd jobs that make the money as you—’
    ‘As I should know. Odd jobs don’t last,’ said Amy sadly, remembering in old age the delights of waking up in the double bed in the Hotel d’Angleterre, the laughter, the rising sun glinting through the red plush curtains, the coffee and croissants. ‘They don’t last,’ she said in bitter recollection of the lonely journey home to London, the quack doctor in Battersea, the pain and anguish. ‘They don’t last. That’s why I became a secretary.’
    ‘And worked for the Duffs and Foxes and my grandfather,’ said Hebe sombrely. She could remember Amy the secretary, but found it hard to visualise Amy in her career in Paris. Who was the man who let her down, she wondered, and heard for a second those other voices asking, ‘Who was the man?’ and ‘Have an abortion’.
    ‘Shall I make us some tea?’ She stood up to break the spell.
    ‘Yes, love.’ Amy watched Hebe put on the kettle, lay out cups. She wondered for the millionth time who Silas’ father could be. One would think, if one had not seen the child born, that the man had never existed. She tells me about her lovers, thought Amy. Those grandparents had not found out. Fools, always on at the child, ‘Don’t mumble, don’t interrupt,’ always ‘Don’t’. And ‘Hold yourself up,’ ‘Don’t stoop.’
    Hebe, warming the pot, spooning tea, reaching for the kettle, thought, So Amy had an abortion. If she hadn’t her child would be