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As the months passed Amy’s life and work were taking monumental strides. She became an acting agent for several modern painters and was arranging a world tour of paintings and sculpture, ‘The New York School of Art After Abstract Expressionism’, sponsored by a Dutch publishing house and a Swiss and a Dutch museum. She
had worked hard and pulled out every stop even to get in the running for such a project. It was a coup to have been awarded the job which included writing the hardback book on the subject and the catalogue for the exhibition. It would make her reputation.

Though contracts had not yet been signed, the gossip was out on the streets that a relative unknown had been chosen to head the project, and a woman at that. Amy insisted on anonymity until she was ready to give a press release, and that included merely giving hints to Jarret about an interesting new project. Too many high-powered curators from the Whitney and the Museum of Modern Art would have their noses out of joint. And the art historians round town? They could be bitchy, and especially since they were for the most part divided about whether there was a rising new art movement after Abstract Expressionism or not. The New York contemporary art world of dealers, collectors, and museums was in a crisis of sorts – the ‘where does art go from here?’ syndrome. They needed a new impetus in American art to keep the market fresh and buoyant. That was part of the excitement of the New York art world as it readied itself for a new decade, the 1960s. Amy had three years before the first showing of the travelling exhibition was to open in Amsterdam.

Such a commission, and the reorganisation and escalation of Amy’s other work, were cause for a revaluation of her living and working arrangements. Amy had always been hard pressed to make ends meet. Like hundreds of millions round the world, she worked
to live, with no cushion of money to fall back on. The rented Easthampton house, her real home, the place she was happiest in, would have to go because she needed the money allotted to that for larger premises to live and work in in New York City, essential now to accommodate the changes in her life.

That was a tremendous wrench on several levels. Amy was a very private person who enjoyed her anonymity, and the lifestyle of a lazy and quiet community. The pace of Easthampton suited the private side of her nature. The other side, her passion for painting and the art world, the excitement of artists and galleries, dealers and academics and art history, enthralled her on all levels except the endless social and hustling side of that world.

She avoided it whenever possible, which was strange because when it was not possible and she was in the throes of it she handled it very well. It was the bitchiness she was unable to stomach. The clever, ruthless social climbing she was unable to do, finding it too much hard work, and unnatural, dishonest, ugly, soul-destroying. Several times, thanks to peer pressure, she made a feeble effort but Amy wasn’t able to sustain social hustling long enough for it to be effective. Too anxiety-making, working against her grain. She happily gave it up, got where she wanted to go with her career the hard way, by being true to herself. It was thanks to a few amusing people – and they could be very amusing – her friends and the artists, dealers and curators who knew her for her work and what and who she was, that she was able
to pick and choose the social events she attended. She gained a reputation for sincerity and a certain naïveté in the art world, a courageously good eye, a scholarly understanding of art.

At a large and crowded private party in a loft in Greenwich Village one evening, when everyone was very high on booze and laughter, jazz and art, a big handsome bear of a man, the sculptor David Smith, placed an arm round Amy’s shoulder and whispered in her ear, ‘A Dutch collector friend of mine has leaked the word. What a coup for you! I’ll say nothing of this to anyone but I want you to know: you’re too nice, not hard, ruthless or dishonest enough for the art world. Be careful, get tough, hop on the band wagon, deal dirty, or the sharks will get you. The Betty Parsons and Amy Rosses of this art world are few and far between. Take my word for it, I know what I’m talking about.’

Amy didn’t. David could see it clearly in her eyes: the passionate belief in art, that it could rise above the machinations of commerce and man. He stroked her hair and then kissed her and walked off to greet Barnet Newman.

Amy thought about that now while looking round her room. The second blow to her home life: her plan to give up this flat that had been a haven for her in the city. There had been many good times here, and still there would be many more, the best ever. Jarret was arriving in a matter of hours.

More than four months! Now that Amy’s separation from him was nearly over she allowed herself the luxury
of dropping her guard and gave in to thinking of nothing else but lying in his arms, their losing themselves in lust and love, just being together, allowing him to come forward and occupy totally her heart and mind. There was so much to talk about, so much to catch up on, not least of all to see his new work and what he had done in these last months.

She was nervous, filled with anxiety: would he feel again as he had felt about her in Venice and Paris? This was New York, the real world they would be walking into together. Jarret without his
palazzo
and his
yalis
on the Bosphorus, his Paris
pied à terre
and Fee – and hopefully with Savannah well and truly out of his system and not there like a ghost on a haunting.

It had been Fee and his postcards during these last months that had made her understand and sense Savannah’s continued presence: watching in the background of Jarret’s life. Amy had come to wait very nearly as anxiously for Fee’s postcards as she did for Jarret’s letters. It had been Fee not Jarret, with his snippets of information on those postcards, most of which she found disturbing in one way or another, who kept Amy informed about the side of his life Jarret never wrote about.

Thinking about them now, Amy went to the drawer where she kept Fee’s postcards and Jarret’s love letters. She removed them from their ivory box and went to sit facing the fireplace on the large French Empire
lit en bateau
in the middle of the room. The cherrywood bed had the look of an elegant, grand, old-fashioned sleigh
with its equally high curved head and foot board, and its claw feet. Enriched with occasional ormolu escutcheons, it held pride of place in the centre of Amy’s bedsit. A beautiful and rare object, it was impressive not only for its beauty but for acting as a bed for two at night and a sofa for herself and guests in the daytime.

Placing the letters in her lap, she leaned against some of the many embroidered cushions on the sofa-bed. She held out her hands to warm them before the heat of the fire blazing in the hearth, and listened to the sound of crackling logs break the silence of the room. There was a scent from the Regal lilies in a glass vase on the square walnut eighteenth-century French library table in the bay window overlooking the street, now set for dinner for two.

Amy’s mind was drifting back in time to her first meeting with Jarret. Before she had seen the
palazzo
, heard about the two-hundred-year-old thirty-room wooden house on the waters of the Bosphorus, the
yalis
, another sort of much sought-after palace, and all the things, the very many things, Jarret and Fee filled their homes with. Amy had not been daunted by any of it, it had meant little to her because in a matter of minutes Jarret had meant everything.

Only now, as she looked away from the flames and round her one room, did she realise how disappointing her lifestyle might be to Jarret. Sparsely but elegantly furnished, her room was comfortable for basic working and living in for one person, not so easy but possible and comfortable for two with no one working. Only now
did it enter her mind that it was not what Jarret was used to.

Amy had lovingly made room for his clothes in the wardrobe, allocated a drawer in the chest, a space for his things in the bathroom. As she looked round the room while fondling his letters lying on her lap, she came to understand that hanging on to love on paper your dreams grow bigger and brighter, while reality diminishes.

In a matter of two hours or less, Jarret could walk through that door, his ardour having cooled. Amy was no masochist in love. If that was to be the case she would know instantly. The very thought made her feel queasy. A knot formed in the pit of her stomach. She clutched the letters in her hand as if hanging on to them for dear life. She took several deep breaths, trying to calm herself and make that dreadful sick feeling go away.

She looked at her watch and felt chained to the ticking of every clock in the world. How could he do this to her, keep her waiting an extra two hours before setting eyes on him? How could she do this to herself, enslave herself to a watch and grow more impatient and unsure of herself with every glance at it? His insistence that she should not meet him at the airport had been a blow. His excuse had been he wanted their reunion in the privacy of her flat.

When his letter had arrived giving her the time and date of his arrival, she had called him. His very words had been: ‘No! I insist you don’t come to the airport. Too public for us. All this pent-up love and passion … can
you be so sure you can control it? I can’t.’

Those words had disarmed her. Remembering them now calmed Amy considerably. It also caused her concern, Jarret having to bus in from the airport and then bus again to get to her in the cold and sleety night that carried a bitter wind. He would never spend the money for a taxi, of that she was certain. And so once more she looked at her watch and waited. She decided to re-read his letters, those letters that had kept her going all the months they had been apart. Eight or nine letters – not very many for a man in love. But the contents gave her sufficient love and hope, enough for her to make excuses for there being so few of them.

Amy placed the letter back in its envelope and looked at her watch. They loved each other, a love that neither of them had been looking for, something different from and more intense than anything either of them had known before. Something Amy knew neither of them would ever find again in another partner. And yet she sensed that her love for Jarret was as forbidden to her as his love for her was forbidden to him. She could not shake from her mind that they were star-crossed lovers. The great mystery to her was why? Why should that be? The questions were there but Amy wasted no time trying to find an
answer. She knew that, like a good mystery, all would be revealed in time.

Amy had no desire to push herself into his life any further than he was prepared to take her. Jarret wasn’t prepared to give her a ‘they lived together happily ever after’ ending, that had been demonstrated by the lack of invitations for her to join him, not even one in all their months of separation.

She now believed that she had sensed forbidden love was the name of the game with Jarret when she had gone off to Greece and Egypt and tried to kill her feelings for him. To sense something is one thing, to love another.

She rose from the bed and placed the letters back in the ivory box, but before she did she looked through Fee’s postcards and read several of them aloud.