returned to Cape Town.
However, all that had been before Ramsey entered her life. Since then she had become a shameless truant. In the weeks since they had returned from Spain, she had not visited her tutor once, and had barely had time to open a book.
Rather than labouring on her thesis, she rose before dawn and slipped away to ride with Ramefi in the park or to jog with him along the Embankment.
Sometimes they worked out together in the shabby little gym in Bloomsbury run by a Hungarian expatriate who had fled his own country after the abortive rising.
There Ramsey began to instruct her in the mysteries of judo and self-defence, arts in which he was frighteningly. adept. Sometimes they wandered hand-in-hand through the galleries and museums. They dreamt in front of the Turners in the Tate, or disparaged the new acceptances at the Royal Academy. Always they ended up in the bed in Ramsey's flat in Kensington. She didn't care to ask him how he was able to spend so much time with her instead of at his bank. She simply accepted it gratefully.
'You've turned me into a junkie,' she accused him. 'I have to have my regular fix.' Indeed, when he left London for eight days on some mysterious business for his bank, she moped and pined and truly sickened, even to the point of throwing up when she rose in the morning.
She kept half a dozen changes of clothing and a full range of perfumes and cosmetics at his flat and made it her duty to arrange the flowers and replenish the refrigerator daily. She was a talented cook and she loved to prepare food for him.
She began to neglect her duties at the embassy. She wormed her way out of official invitations and often left the chef and his staff to work on their own. Her father taxed her with her changed behaviour.
'You are never at home any more, Bella. I can't rely on you for a single thing. Nanny says that you slept in your bed only twice last week.' 'Nanny is a little tell-tale - and a fibber.' 'What's going on, young lady?' 'I'm over twenty-one years of age, Pater darling, and it was part of our agreement that I don't have to account to you for my private life.' 'It was also part of our agreement that you show your face at my receptions once in a while.' 'Cheer up, Papa.' She kissed him. 'We'll be going back to Cape Town in a few months' time. Then you won't have to fret about me any longer.' However, that evening she asked Ramsey if he wouldn't come to a cocktail-party that Shasa was holding at the embassy in Trafalgar Square to welcome the celebrated South African author Alan Paton to London.
Ramsey thought about it carefully for a full minute before he shook his head. 'It is not the right time to meet your father yet.' 'Why not, darling?' Up to that moment, it had not been important to her, but now his refusal piqued her.
'There are reasons.' He was often so damnably mysterious. She wanted to draw him out, but she knew she was wasting her time. He was the only man she had ever met who- could resist her. There was a lining of steel beneath that beautiful facade.
'Therein lies much of his appeal,' she laughed at herself ruefully. It was not that she wanted to share him with any other person, not even her father. She was more than content to be entirely alone with him; their love was so totally engrossing that they avoided other people.
True, they occasionally dined at Les A or the White Elephant with Harriet or some of the myriad other acquaintances that Isabella had made over the past three years. Once or twice they went on with the party to dance at Annabel's, but mostly they sneaked away from the others to be alone. Ramsey did not seem to have friends of his own or, if he did, he never invited her to meet them. It troubled her not at all.
On the weekends when she could wriggle out of the official ambassadorial arrangements, she and Ramsey threw their overnight bags and tennis-rackets into the back of the Mini-Cooper and escaped into the country. They were usually very late back to town on Sunday night.
At the beginning of August, they departed from their solitary habits and caught the train up to Scotland. On the opening day of the grouse season, they were Harriet Beauchamp's guests on the moors of the family estate. The earl was a stickler for correct form, and the ladies were not invited to shoot on the opening day. They were, however, allowed to pick up or join the line of beaters. The earl wasn't very keen on foreigners, either, especially those who shot 'under an dover' rather than 'side by side' and who favoured Italian guns over English.
On the first drive, he placed Ramsey out on the end of the line.
Unexpectedly three coveys came through on the right, sliding low over the tops of the heather, going like furies on a thirty-mile-an-hour tail-wind.
Isabella was loading for Ramsey. He killed four birds from each covey. He took a double out in front. Then as the covey swept overhead Isabella passed him the second gun. With it he took another double behind the line of butts. Twelve birds with twelve shots fired. Even the head keeper shook his grizzled old head. 'In thirty- three seasons, I've no' seen the likes,' he told the earl lugubriously. 'He kills his bird like de Grey or Walsingham - dead in the air with nary a flutter.' High praise to be compared to the best shots in English history.
The earl promptly abrogated custom, and on the second drive, Ramsey found himself in one of the favoured butts in the centre of the line. At the long dinner-table that evening, he was elevated to within conversational range of the earl who addressed most of his remarks to him over the heads of the bishop and the baronet between them. The weekend was off to a great start. Harriet had arranged for Ramsey and Isabella to occupy adjoining rooms at the furthest end of the huge rambling old country house.
'Papa suffers from insomnia,' she explained. 'And you and Ramsey in action sound like the Berlin Philharmonic performing Ravel's 'Bolero'.' 'You vulgar little slut,' Isabella protested.
'Talking of sluts, lovey. Have you sprung your little surprise on Ramsey yet?' Harriet asked sweetly.
'I'm waiting for the right moment.' Isabella was immediately defensive.
'In my vast experience, there ain't no right moment for that sort of news.' Harriet was right for once. No opportunity presented itself that weekend.
They were halfway back to London when Isabella abandoned any further attempt at subtlety. Fortunately, they had the first-class compartment to themselves.
'Darling, I went to see a doctor last Wednesday - not the embassy doctor, but a new one that Harriet recommended. He did a test, and we got the result on Friday...' She paused and watched his expression. There was no change; he regarded her with that remote green gaze, and she felt a sudden illogical dread. Surely nothing could tarnish their feelings for each other, nothing could spoil the perfection of their love, and yet she sensed a wariness in him, a spiritual drawing away from her. She found herself blurting it out in a rush.
'I'm almost two months pregnant. It must have been in Spain, probably that day in Granada, after the bullfight...' She felt breathless and shaky, and she hurried on. 'I just can't explain it. I mean, I've been taking the Pill religiously, I swear it, you've seen me. She 75 realized that she was beginning to gabble out her explanations in an undignified and uncontrolled rush. 'I know I've been an awful chump, darling, but you don't have to worry. It's all in hand. Harriet also made a little slip last year. She went to see a doctor in Amsterdam; he took care of it with absolutely no muss and no fuss. She caught the evening flight on a Friday and was back in London on Sunday - as good as new. She's given me the address, and she's even offered to come with me to hold my hand-' 'Isabellap he cut in sharply. 'Stop it. Stop talking. Listen to mev And she broke off and stared at him fearfully.
'You don't know what you are saying.' His voice cut her cruelly. 'What you suggest is monstrous!' 'I'm sorry, Ramsey.' She was confused. 'I shouldn't have bothered you with it. Harriet and I could have...' 'Harriet is a shallow asinine little tramp. When you place the life of my child in her hands, then you make yourself every bit as culpable as she is.' Isabella stared at him. This was not what she had expected from him at all.
'This is a miracle, Isabella, the greatest miracle and mystery of the universe. You talk of destroying it. This is our child, Isabella. This is life, new beautiful life, that you and I have created in love. Don't you understand that?' He leant across and took her hands, and she saw the coldness of his eyes fade. 'This is something that we have made together, our own wondrous creation. It belongs to both of us, to our love.' 'You aren't angry?' she asked hesitantly. 'I thought you would be angry.' 'I am proud and humble,' he whispered. 'I love you. You are infinitely precious to me.' He turned her hands, holding them by the wrists, and laid them on her own stomach. 'I love what you have here; it also is infinitely precious to me.' He had said it at last. 'I love you,' he had said.
'Oh, Ramsey,' her vision blurred, 'you are so wonderful, so tender, so kind.
The true miracle is that I was ever able to meet somebody like you.'
'You will give birth to our child, my darling Bella.' 'Oh, yes! Oh, a thousand times yes, my darling. You have made me so proud, so happy.' All her uncertainty was gone, replaced by an excitement and anticipation that seemed to drive all else into insignificance.
This euphoria buoyed her up over the days that followed. It laid a new rich texture on her love for Ramsey; something that up until that time had been engrossing but random now had direction and purpose. A dozen times she had been on the point of telling Nanny, and had only succeeded in preventing herself when she realized that the old woman's excitement would be so uncontained that the entire embassy, including her father, would know of the coming event
