Snow Angels by Elizabeth Gill Read Free Book Online Page A

any girl that she had ever seen. Abby was wearing what she had thought was a pretty dress, but when she saw Helen’s she felt shabby and provincial. It was pale yellow spotted muslin with a tiny blue-and-yellow iris pattern. It was fashionable and shrieked to her of Paris, sophistication, society, adventure and involvement. Helen probably knew all the right people. Her life seemed dull to her. She caught a glimpse of herself in a nearby mirror and saw her defects, the too-long nose, the ordinary brown hair, her thin figure, her square, capable hands. Abby could have wept.
    Helen and Edward danced but, afterwards, Helen did what no girl Abby knew would have dared. She walked all the way across the room towards Gil Collingwood and quite obviously asked him to dance with her. Nobody did so except in a ladies’ excuse me and Gil had always managed to absent himself upon such occasions. To Abby’s dismay, Gil took the girl lightly into his arms as the music started and they began to waltz. He had lied. He did dance. Their steps matched perfectly and there were not now so many people, somehow, because Abby could watch them. Some woman beside her said to her friend, ‘Don’t they make a lovely couple?’ And they did, much more so than Edward and Helen. Gil, tall and dark and Helen, slight and fair, waltzed elegantly about the room.
    Abby thought of all the times when Gil could have danced with her and hadn’t, but he had known Helen Harrison barely an hour before dancing with her and he was talking to her quite comfortably by the look of things. Abby was angry, jealous, resentful, all things which she had not been before. She hated Gil in those moments when he had his arms around Helen Harrisonand was moving her so confidently about the floor and she was looking up into his eyes.
    *
    ‘Did you go to Oxford?’ Helen said. ‘I met you there, surely.’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Then where did we meet?’
    ‘I don’t know.’
    ‘Did you go to Cambridge? I have an aunt there—’
    ‘I didn’t go to university.’
    ‘My father says that education is the waste of a good childhood.’
    ‘Wasn’t he educated?’
    ‘Yes, I think that’s why he says it.’
    ‘My father had little education and thinks the opposite.’
    They didn’t talk any more. They didn’t need to. Gil had danced with no one other than his dancing teacher, but it felt as though he had danced with Helen dozens of times. It seemed as if he could almost remember it. She entranced him. Her eyes sparkled and she was soft and light in his arms. And at the back of his mind, he knew the place that they had met before. The walls were white and so was the bed. It was afternoon and they were inside because of the heat. The houses were white and so was the sunlight and outside fruit grew on the trees, oranges and lemons hanging there such as they never could in England. It was quiet. The floor of the room was bare wooden boards and there was not even a breeze to disturb the thin white curtains at the windows.
    *
    Abby went outside. Her feelings were all mixed up and tumbled as though she were an egg timer and somebody had turned her upside down. She told herself it didn’t matter that Gil had fallen in love with his brother’s betrothed, that he had not shown any preference for anybody before. She wondered why apparently nobody but she had noticed. Was it because she knew him sowell? Yet she didn’t. They had exchanged barely a dozen words in the past six months. She meant nothing to him and now he must mean nothing to her. She gave a little shiver in the warm night. No good could come of his regard for Edward’s bride to be. Perhaps it was just a momentary thing, passing.
    ‘Miss Reed?’
    She was standing on the lawn in front of the house. She turned around. Robert Surtees, handsome and smiling, was standing behind her.
    ‘I hope nothing’s wrong.’
    ‘It was too hot inside.’
    ‘Would you like to take a walk around the garden?’ he said and offered his arm.