‘I’ll only give you my promise, Emerald, if you promise me that from now on you won’t have anything whatsoever to do with Max Preston.’
Emerald shuddered. ‘Are you mad? Do you actually think that I’d want to after last night?’
‘That isn’t the answer I want,’ Rose told her firmly.
Emerald badly wanted to laugh but her ribs and her face were too sore. Did Rose actually really think that she would take Max back after this? Emerald never wanted to see him again. The words he had hurled at her, as much as the blows he had inflicted on her, had touched something raw and painful inside her; the vulnerability that came from knowing who had really fathered her, and what she might so easily have been without all that her adoptive father had given her.
No, she never wanted to see Max again because she couldn’t bear the pain of her own vulnerability.
‘I promise,’ she told Rose.
‘Then I promise as well,’ Rose smiled.
As she struggled to stand upright in the churning mêlée, Janey wondered if coming on the anti-Vietnam War march had been a good idea after all. She fully supported the marchers’ cause, but Charlie, whose idea it had been in the first place, hadn’t turned up at their designated meeting place. Then she hadn’t been able to back out of the commitment to go and get him out of bed, where she knew he was probably likely to be, because his friends were insisting that it was time to leave for the march. Now she was in danger of getting caught up in what was taking on the appearance of a very nasty fight indeed between some of the marchers and the police.
The original cause of the friction had been some of the more hot-headed marchers throwing bottles at the police cordon outside the American Embassy. Scuffles had broken out when the police had moved to stop them, and now Janey, carried along by the movement of the crowd, found that she was much closer to the violence than was comfortable. A missile of some sort, thrown from behind her, whizzed past her, just missing the side of her head, aimed for one of the policemen a few yards away. Some protestors were already lying on the ground and being dragged away. Janey had lost sight of Charlie’s friends. The noise was deafening, especially when the police started using loud-hailers to order everyone to disperse.
A fight broke out in front of her between two of the protestors, and quickly escalated. Janey wasn’t the sort to panic easily, but the violence now sweeping through the marchers around her made her want to run. She could see a street opening a few yards away and began to make for it, struggling against the press of the crowd.
Somehow she managed to make it to the edge of the crowd. She could see the faces of the onlookers now, their expressions disapproving.
Suddenly the police moved forward determinedly, forcing the marchers back, causing some of them to turn round and plunge back into th
eir own ranks. Janey could feel herself being swept back, away from the side street. Another few seconds and she would be dragged into the vortex of thrashing bodies that was the beginning of a dangerous stampede. If she lost her balance now she would be trodden underfoot. Panic filled her.
Someone grabbed hold of her arm. She tried to shake them off.
‘Janey…This way…’
The voice in her ear was familiar. She turned her head in its direction as she was pulled towards the safety of the pavement, falling heavily against her rescuer as he finally dragged her clear of the panicking marchers and into the relative peace of a nearby doorway.
‘John, what on earth are you doing here?’ she demanded once she had got her breath back and had pushed herself free of her childhood friend.
‘I had some estate business to attend to,’ he told her, ‘so I thought I may as well spend the weekend in town. I was thinking of calling in at Cheyne Walk; your mother gave me your telephone number.’
‘Oh, yes, you must,’ Janey told him warmly. She was still leaning on him. He felt so nice and solid and safe, somehow, that she was reluctant to move away.
The sound of the confrontation was beginning to die away as both marchers and police moved down the road, leaving the two of them virtually alone.
‘You’re a true knight in shining armour, John,’ she told him affectionately. ‘I was beginning to get frightened. I wouldn’t have joined the march if I’d known it was going to turn violent. Charlie, my boyfriend, should have been with me, but he obviously overslept. I’d better go round to his flat now and wake him up. He’s got an audition this afternoon. He’s an actor.’
‘I’ll go with you,’ John told her, heading off her objection with, ‘I insist. It’s what your father would expect me to do.’
How Charlie would laugh when she told him about John’s old-fashioned protective gallantry. She would have laughed herself, Janey suspected, if she hadn’t been feeling so shaky and somehow so relieved to have his support and his familiar comforting presence at her side.
‘You won’t tell the parents about this, will you?’ Janey begged him. ‘They’d worry and I’d hate that.’
‘Only if you promise me that you won’t put yourself in that kind of danger again.’
Janey looked at him in astonishment. ‘That’s not fair.’
‘Risking your life isn’t fair either. I was worried that you might lose your balance before I could get to you,’ John told her firmly.
Janey’s heart melted. He had been worried about her. How sweet. Charlie never worried about her. She was the one who worried about him. This made an unexpectedly welcome change.
Charlie’s one-room, and the share of a communal bathroom, flat–for which Janey had her own key, since she was the one who paid the rent, and because Charlie was prone to locking himself out–was in a tall narrow terrace of Victorian houses off the Edgware Road, the majority of the other flats in the house also let to young students.
Charlie had the ground-floor flat and, just as Janey had expected, the curtains were still closed.