Contents

       Cover

       Title Page

      Copyright

      Dedication

      Michaelmas Term

      Chapter One

      Chapter Two

      Chapter Three

      Chapter Four

       Chapter Five

       Christmas

       Chapter Six

       Hilary Term

       Chapter Seven

       Chapter Eight

       Chapter Nine

       Easter

       Chapter Ten

       Trinity Term

       Chapter Eleven

       Chapter Twelve

       Chapter Thirteen

       Chapter Fourteen

       Summer

       Chapter Fifteen

       If you enjoyed Follies, read on for a taste of Iris & Ruby

       Keep Reading …

       About the Author

       Also by Rosie Thomas

       About the Publisher

       ONE

      In a moment, she would see it.

      The train swayed around a long curve, and then rattled over the iron arches of a little viaduct. Helen pressed her face against the smeared window, waiting.

      Then, suddenly, it was ahead of her. The oblique sun of the autumn afternoon turned the spires and pinnacles to gold, and glowed on the rounded domes. The light made the stone look as soft and warm as honey, exactly as it had done for almost four hundred years.

      The brief glimpse lasted only a few seconds, then the train shuddered and clattered into an avenue of grimy buildings and advertisement hoardings. But when Helen closed her eyes she saw it again, a sharp memory that was painful as well as seductive. She loved the place as she had always done, but she was a different person now. She shouldn’t have come back. Home was where she was needed now, not here under these honey-gold spires. Yet her mother had insisted, her face still grey with strain. And Graham, with all the sudden maturity that had been forced upon his thirteen years, had told her that it would break their mother’s heart to see Helen give up now. So she had repacked her cheap suitcase with her few clothes, the paperbacked texts and the bulging folders of notes, and she had come back.

      Helen opened her eyes again as if she couldn’t bear to think any more.

      The train hissed grudgingly into the station and she stood up as the doors began to slam. Two foreign tourists, encumbered with nothing more than expensive cameras, reached to help her with her luggage. A deafening crackle overhead heralded the station announcement.

      ‘Oxford. Oxford. This is Oxford.’

      The tourists smiled at each other, pleased to have their destination confirmed. They bowed to Helen before they left her.

      Where else? she thought. Even the air was unmistakable, moist with the smell of rivers and the low mists that the autumn sun never shone strongly enough to dispel. The yellow and gold leaves in the roadway beyond the station entrance were wet, and furrowed by bicycle wheels.

      Helen picked up as much of her baggage as she could manage and went in search of a taxi. It was an unaccustomed luxury and uncertainty sounded in her voice as she told the driver, ‘Follies House, please.’

      The oak door was heavy, and studded with iron bolt heads. A drift of crisp, yellow-brown leaves had blown up across the threshold, giving the house an abandoned air.

      Helen stopped pulling at the iron ring that hung unyieldingly in place of a doorknob and stepped back to peer at the narrow windows set in the high wall. There was nothing to be seen, not even a curtain in the blackness behind the glass. The traffic, roaring close at hand over Folly Bridge, seemed miles away. It was the gush of running water that filled the air, the river racing between the mossed arches of the old bridge.

      Helen glanced down at her luggage, piled haphazardly in the pathway where the taxi driver had left it. Her mouth set in a firm line and she turned back to bang on the door with her clenched fist.

      ‘Anyone … at … home?’ she shouted over the hammering.

      From startlingly close at hand Helen heard footsteps, and then a rattle before the door swung smoothly open.

      ‘Always someone at home. Usually me,’ the fat woman answered. Helen remembered the facts of the loose grey